omfg, buried in Saint-Merry stuff up to my eyeballs. There's the translation of the public-domain portions of À cinq heures nous serons tous morts, the trial transcripts (which fortunately are just a matter of picking over Google's versions for weird OCR errors, but dude, I'M NOT TRANSLATING THEM SOMEBODY ELSE DO A HIGHLIGHTS VERSION OR SOMETHING, ( Read more... )

Fourth part of the prostitution digression! Which apparently is on Wikisource because it got included in some philosophical compilaton and is called "Les Fleurs." Well, I had it first. *sticks tongue out*
In this thrilling new installment, Hugo has a little too much fun with his imagery, hurls pageagraphs at his readers, and comes so very close ( Read more... )

Here we have a Friends of the People pamphlet from October 1831, decrying the French government's refusal to give the Polish insurrection material aid instead of empty words. Equal parts principle (it is our duty to help patriots resist oppression!) and enlightened self-interest (...because if Poland falls to Russia, we'll be next, and ain't ( Read more... )

AKA "Okay, Victor, we got the point the first twenty-seven times you repeated it!" This is Hugo on a bender of classical allusions and repetition for rhetorical effect. Fortunately the Pléiade edition is well-annotated and there's a huge stack of footnotes, which is good because otherwise, even with Google and Wikipedia at my side, I wouldn't ( Read more... )

I am not even going to get on the subject of passages that made me want to shake him and go "Really, Hugo? Really?!" So instead I will just say the little story about the lilac branch is cute, as cute as something with that subject matter can be.
( The whole thing is... um... very, very Hugo, really. )

One of the quirks of translating Hugo: I have four Firefox tabs permanently open. One is for LJ/Abaissé/other distractions. One is for the text. One is WordReference. And one is a thesaurus entry for 'gloomy' so that I can translate all his funèbres, lugubres, sinistres, sombres, ombres, and ténèbres.

Victor, we get the point already.

This will come as a head-exploding shock to everyone, but Hugo actually had an editor! Who actually made him cut digressions out of Les Mis! Or maybe Hugo himself decided to strike this one, but jesus God, why do you write a forty-page digression and then just decide to ditch it?

And that is exactly what he did. He wrote a forty-page digression ( Read more... )

I know in my summary of the OFC soundboard I mentioned Marius and Eponine's cracktastic reprise of 'L'Air de la misère.' But it is just so cracktastic that I feel the need to transcribe it in full ( Read more... )

Follow-up to this post. Because I flailed a lot about how Coelio and Octave are totally Enjolras and Grantaire, if you take the interpretation that Marianne is an allegory, but I did not provide a whole lot of backup. But tonight I was flailing over IM to mmejavert, dug the play up on Wikisource, and did some on-the-fly translations. They are crappy and ( Read more... )

So I decided it was silly that I had all the Les Mis Paris revival lyrics translated except three of the most difficult songs, and still hadn't put most of it on the internet. I mean, there were translation threads running on a couple forums, but they're long-since buried, and I haven't been keeping up with putting new translations on LJ ( Read more... )