Fellow Guardians, Fearlings and Dream Pirates

These are my kind of people -- every second person on the bus is busy reading ;-)

This second dozen of TV broadcasts for learners has a different host, a friendly young man rather than a bright young woman with the air of a primary-school teacher, and is undoubtedly but indefinably more difficult than the first set. ( Read more... )
It does come up with a couple of memorable observations, though: the lady at the lost-property office comments that the books in their possession represent the most popular books among readers, since they are the ones most often lost on public transport and hence the ones people most like to take with them :-) And the owner of the second-hand bookstall uses the sales slogan "Buy an old book, learn new things"!

More fun with auto-translations: French translated via Russian into English somehow ends up rendering the Club parisien de la chanson d'auteur into the Suicide Song Club, which had me doing a double-take :-D
(I still do not understand how the auto-translate managed to get it so wrong, given that the Russian (human) translation was simply "the club of do-it-yourself songs"; I can only assume that самодеятельный has some kind of slang connotations that even online dictionaries [amateur/self-employed] don't seem to know about...)

I went back to the market this morning and was accosted by one of the stallholders I had questioned fruitlessly about my missing luggage strap; he had a very grimy bungee cord in his hand. Apparently it had been there all along, exactly where I assumed I must have lost it -- they found it underneath their van, presumably when they came to pack up and drive off. (And very kindly hung onto it for me in the hopes of seeing me again.)( Read more... )

I managed to get mixed up in an English Pride demonstration while cycling up in Town -- my own fault since I hadn't grasped why the road was closed and just saw a large crowd of people on the pavement (they filled the carriageway further along). Fortunately for once I was not in a tearing hurry, having set off early in the expectation of having to stop and put on rain-gear at some point, and they were very nice about it and allowed me to cycle very cautiously through despite the fact that I was going completely against the flow of the 'traffic'. I suspect it helped that I was very respectably and conservatively dressed, and manifestly "English"( Read more... ) it's probably just as well they didn't know the very un-English thoughts behind *why* I was smiling so much...

I think this is about as good as my translation attempts at the Наша честь song ("Our Honour") are going to get; I haven't made any more changes for a week or so. So here it is.

It's a rather different challenge from Boyarsky's red horse song, partly because the metre (dactyl line endings) is just so beastly to write in English -- plus every single line is supposed to be either a rhyme or a half-rhyme -- and partly because it isn't even vaguely humorous. I need to try to get the elegaic but elevated and affirmative tone rather than sounding inadvertently like Byron's "Don Juan", and the metre really doesn't help in that respect. I have compromised and not attempted a full rhyme on any of the dactyl lines, but I have put a lot of effort into attempting at least an assonance on all of them; life would have been a good deal easier if I had not!

Original lyric (with very unsatisfactory translation): https://teksti-pesen.com/lyrics/12/Mushketery/tekst-pesni-Nasha-chest

My attempt at a literal translation:( Read more... )

My attempted 'singing translation':( Read more... )
I made a conscious choice, after much agonizing over the issue, to change the translated title from the literal "Our Honour", because the song isn't *about* 'our honour' (and moreover that reiterated phrase doesn't actually occur anywhere in my version of the lyric, because it doesn't fit the scansion...) It's not a song about the possession of honour, as such; it's a song about honour being the one thing within our control in a world where we have no influence over the events that happen to us. So I went for the phrase that I did use at that same point in the chorus, the repetition in my case being of "ours" rather than of "our honour".
I am *still* not happy with the translation of the chorus as a whole, but have consistently struggled to do any better :-(

(I have also, of course, deliberately chosen to translate the Russian 'soul' with the more English concept of the heart
in the context of such idioms!)

Edit: here is a better text (albeit without translation) for the ангел-хранитель song, minus the couple of transcription errors that are on the above-cited Наша честь page: https://lyricsonline.ru/36293-igor-nadzhiev-moy-angel.html