Trying to catch on.
As usual, I've been quite busy with lots of stuff:
Our choir was busy with rehearsing for the Christmas concerts. We have a bunch of new songs and a bunch of new singers, so learning those songs took some time. However, the newbies progressed steadily. Singing Einojuhani Rautavaara's weird songs is always such fun. Yay for modernism! I also contacted various organizations and banks in order to get funding for our choir.
We eventually had our Christmas concert on December 4th. I think it went well for the most part, and we had quite a few people listening to the concert. It seems our fan base is growing slowly but surely. We had a few new songs, and the audience really digged the Rautavaara songs which had some lovely tonal structures and sounded magnificent when sung by a choir. We also recorded the concert, and the clarity and vibrance of the recording was surprisingly clear (then again, we did sing in a church). Our other, smaller concerts (well, more like gigs) went well too, even though I suddenly was asked to talk about our choir during an important university meeting. I think I did relatively well even though it was really ex tempore speech, and it was nice hearing all those applauds. ^_^
To my surprise I got a 5 from my first stylistics essay (poetry analysis) which I rushed out. Anyway, I still have two essays I still need to write for the stylistics course, and I hope I'll fare well with those too. It'd be nice to get a good grade from the course even though it deals with issues I'm not particularly fond of (I was horrified when I realized that we'd go through parcing and some phonetics during the course; I was hoping that I'd never have to do that again). The one good thing about this course is that it made me see the nuances of various text types better, and it'll also be quite useful once I start writing more (it's never a bad thing to be aware of deviations and author styles, after all).
I've been reading a bunch of novels (Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, Harper's To Kill a Mockingbird, Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, Orwell's 1984, and wa Thiong'o's The River Between for our novel reading course. I liked wa Thiong'o's book, but Ondaatje's was boring as hell even though it partially dealt with Finns in Canada. Achebe's political satire has been interesting, however. I hope that the rest of the books will be up to to wa Thiong'o's level, but time will tell. I still need to find a few more novels before I can write things down to my study diary. Busy times. xP
Christmas went by without much of a fuss. Met lots of relatives, had a good time. It was nice seeing my cousin's son older; time really does fly, and I'm feeling old already. Same old, as the saying goes. New Year's eve went by quite well; aunt and uncle came to visit us, and we spent the time together, although in the end they got quite drunk so I just decided to go upstairs and do some homework. xD
Anyway, these are the Christmas presents that I got:
- DVDs (Kung Fu Panda, Röllin sydän)
- 100 euros
- Three new shirts
- A DVD drive
- A webcam + a headset (maybe now I can try those webcam chats with better success xD)
- A few books (Mikko Karppi's "The Hungarian Song", Mika Waltari's deluxe edition of "The Egyptian", Neal Gabler's "Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination")
- The seventh set of the Collected Works of Carl Barks
- 80th Anniversary Hardcover Comic about Mickey Mouse
- Candy and chocolate
I've also attended various lectures. A recent one was about audio-visual translation (subbing and dubbing films, series etc.). We watched some funny Disney examples and surprisingly enough a bit with the frogs from Dreamworks's Flushed Away.
The next guest lecture that I attended was about translating poetry. The poem I picked up was really weird, and at first I had no idea how to translate it properly, because it deals with alliteration and uses really weird Finnish words). It was interesting to hear how translators solved that particular problem, because I originally didn't see any other way than either abandondoning the alliteration for the most part or just rewriting the poem from scratch and using words that rely the same meaning with the needed alliteration.
Urgh, stuff like this can be quite annoying, but the lecture itself turned out to be interesting, and not only did we translate and analyze Lauri Viita's "Kökkö" (the weird poem I was talking about in an earlier entry), but also e.e. cummings's weird, almost dadaistic poetry. Let me give you an example of cummings's weird form:
THE ORIGINAL:
l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
Yeah, that's the original. The spacing is weird, the way it's structured overall is weird, but it's simple if you look at it as a continuous line: l(a leaf falls)oneliness.
So, it contains both "loneliness" which is cut by "a leaf falls". Not only that, but the verb "fall" itself also refers to autumn i.e. fall, and the structure of the poem does sort of resemble a tree if you think about it. So, the leaf is falling, and loneliness becomes more pervasive as autumn gets here. And then there's also the word "one" which can give yet another meaning to the entire poem. Nice, isn't it? xP
However, figuring out the original intent (and that short analysis is just one way to look at the poem) is just the beginning, because a translator then has to figure out how to convey the form, meaning and other allusions in the translation. This is how I approached it, and I was glad to find out that the lecturer had a similar idea in mind:
MY TRANSLATION:
yk(l
eh
ti
pu
to
aa)
sinä
i
syys
What it says is this: yk(lehti putoaa)sinäisyys. The translation is accurate, because the meaning is exactly the same: "yksinäisyys" = "loneliness", "lehti putoaa" = "a leaf falls".
Well, a translator could've even emphasized the word "a" and use the Finnish word "eräs", but that's not really necessary. As you probably remember, the English original also had certain words that had other meanings in the context of the poem, such as "fall" referring to autumn, and "one" can also be spotted. Would it be possible to splice Finnish words to have such distinct meanings?
Luckily for me it did work in this case, and here's how it works: "yksinäisyys" (loneliness) actually has certain words within it that mean different things if they aren't part of the main word. Just as there was "one" in "loneliness", the Finnish word "yksinäisyys" can be hyphenated so that one can discover other words: "sinä" (you) and "syys" (a sort of poetic form of autumn). Thus it's easy to keep those separate, and a Finnish reader can figure out those meanings as well if he or she wishes to do so.
However, meaning is just one part of a poem. Even if it turned out relatively easy to split things and figure out new meanings for spliced words, what about the form? After all, cummings does utilize a weird structure. I decided to keep the form mostly intact.
If you compare my translation to cummings's original, you'll notice that the form looks almost the same. The sort of tree pattern is there, and words are divided in a weird way into clusters of one or a few letters at a time. The only bigger difference is that there's an extra letter in the first line of my translation when compared to the original: "yk(l" vs. "l(a".
However, the letter 'y' or 'k' can't be dropped, and one can't really put them to another line, because it would disturb the flow of the poem and also cloud the meaning of "sinä" (you), because few readers would guess that intent if it was "ksinä" (which doesn't mean anything) instead.
Sure, there are some other minor quirks because not all letters are as they should be, but I still think this version is a good, compensated version which manages to keep the original poem's intent and also adds some extra to it (whether that's a good thing or not is up to readers and critics to decide).
I thought I'd share this quick climpse to the stuff we were talking about during the translation of poetry lesson. It was very interesting and it gave me confidence as far as poetry translation goes, although I don't think I'll be translating poetry (especially modernist poetry) anytime soon. I prefer Auden's interesting poetry than cummings's weird stuff, to be honest. xD
tGA's been okay as well. The RP's stayed alive for about four months in a row (*knocks on wood*) and we've had a few new members. Oddly enough even HOOTERS has been posting occasionally, which I never thought would happen because of his busy schedule and everything. Now if only Ashi and Lynx would have time to stop by...
However, the biggest thing at tGA is that we finally have our very own wiki! It'd be nice if past and present members could go and contribute stuff to the wiki. It doesn't have to be anything big; just writing something general about your characters is enough, and it can just be plain text with no complex formatting.
If wiki editing sounds weird, feel free to consult this post which has basic info about the wiki and editing. I and other members are around as well if you need any help. =)
The funny thing about a wiki is that writing stuff to it is easy but can become time-consuming. I've realized that I have quite a few characters to chronicle, so that should keep me busy for these next few months. And I like the wiki as a place where one can obtain information easily; the wiki is still a work in progress, but it's getting more and more articles and looks more and more professional. Thanks a lot to people like Bleys, Nic and Spatvark for helping out with a bunch of things as well as for writing and editing articles.
I hope I'll be able to write about various book/film/music/series reviews later in another post. Until then, take care.
Yours,
Mikko
Our choir was busy with rehearsing for the Christmas concerts. We have a bunch of new songs and a bunch of new singers, so learning those songs took some time. However, the newbies progressed steadily. Singing Einojuhani Rautavaara's weird songs is always such fun. Yay for modernism! I also contacted various organizations and banks in order to get funding for our choir.
We eventually had our Christmas concert on December 4th. I think it went well for the most part, and we had quite a few people listening to the concert. It seems our fan base is growing slowly but surely. We had a few new songs, and the audience really digged the Rautavaara songs which had some lovely tonal structures and sounded magnificent when sung by a choir. We also recorded the concert, and the clarity and vibrance of the recording was surprisingly clear (then again, we did sing in a church). Our other, smaller concerts (well, more like gigs) went well too, even though I suddenly was asked to talk about our choir during an important university meeting. I think I did relatively well even though it was really ex tempore speech, and it was nice hearing all those applauds. ^_^
To my surprise I got a 5 from my first stylistics essay (poetry analysis) which I rushed out. Anyway, I still have two essays I still need to write for the stylistics course, and I hope I'll fare well with those too. It'd be nice to get a good grade from the course even though it deals with issues I'm not particularly fond of (I was horrified when I realized that we'd go through parcing and some phonetics during the course; I was hoping that I'd never have to do that again). The one good thing about this course is that it made me see the nuances of various text types better, and it'll also be quite useful once I start writing more (it's never a bad thing to be aware of deviations and author styles, after all).
I've been reading a bunch of novels (Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, Harper's To Kill a Mockingbird, Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, Orwell's 1984, and wa Thiong'o's The River Between for our novel reading course. I liked wa Thiong'o's book, but Ondaatje's was boring as hell even though it partially dealt with Finns in Canada. Achebe's political satire has been interesting, however. I hope that the rest of the books will be up to to wa Thiong'o's level, but time will tell. I still need to find a few more novels before I can write things down to my study diary. Busy times. xP
Christmas went by without much of a fuss. Met lots of relatives, had a good time. It was nice seeing my cousin's son older; time really does fly, and I'm feeling old already. Same old, as the saying goes. New Year's eve went by quite well; aunt and uncle came to visit us, and we spent the time together, although in the end they got quite drunk so I just decided to go upstairs and do some homework. xD
Anyway, these are the Christmas presents that I got:
- DVDs (Kung Fu Panda, Röllin sydän)
- 100 euros
- Three new shirts
- A DVD drive
- A webcam + a headset (maybe now I can try those webcam chats with better success xD)
- A few books (Mikko Karppi's "The Hungarian Song", Mika Waltari's deluxe edition of "The Egyptian", Neal Gabler's "Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination")
- The seventh set of the Collected Works of Carl Barks
- 80th Anniversary Hardcover Comic about Mickey Mouse
- Candy and chocolate
I've also attended various lectures. A recent one was about audio-visual translation (subbing and dubbing films, series etc.). We watched some funny Disney examples and surprisingly enough a bit with the frogs from Dreamworks's Flushed Away.
The next guest lecture that I attended was about translating poetry. The poem I picked up was really weird, and at first I had no idea how to translate it properly, because it deals with alliteration and uses really weird Finnish words). It was interesting to hear how translators solved that particular problem, because I originally didn't see any other way than either abandondoning the alliteration for the most part or just rewriting the poem from scratch and using words that rely the same meaning with the needed alliteration.
Urgh, stuff like this can be quite annoying, but the lecture itself turned out to be interesting, and not only did we translate and analyze Lauri Viita's "Kökkö" (the weird poem I was talking about in an earlier entry), but also e.e. cummings's weird, almost dadaistic poetry. Let me give you an example of cummings's weird form:
THE ORIGINAL:
l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
Yeah, that's the original. The spacing is weird, the way it's structured overall is weird, but it's simple if you look at it as a continuous line: l(a leaf falls)oneliness.
So, it contains both "loneliness" which is cut by "a leaf falls". Not only that, but the verb "fall" itself also refers to autumn i.e. fall, and the structure of the poem does sort of resemble a tree if you think about it. So, the leaf is falling, and loneliness becomes more pervasive as autumn gets here. And then there's also the word "one" which can give yet another meaning to the entire poem. Nice, isn't it? xP
However, figuring out the original intent (and that short analysis is just one way to look at the poem) is just the beginning, because a translator then has to figure out how to convey the form, meaning and other allusions in the translation. This is how I approached it, and I was glad to find out that the lecturer had a similar idea in mind:
MY TRANSLATION:
yk(l
eh
ti
pu
to
aa)
sinä
i
syys
What it says is this: yk(lehti putoaa)sinäisyys. The translation is accurate, because the meaning is exactly the same: "yksinäisyys" = "loneliness", "lehti putoaa" = "a leaf falls".
Well, a translator could've even emphasized the word "a" and use the Finnish word "eräs", but that's not really necessary. As you probably remember, the English original also had certain words that had other meanings in the context of the poem, such as "fall" referring to autumn, and "one" can also be spotted. Would it be possible to splice Finnish words to have such distinct meanings?
Luckily for me it did work in this case, and here's how it works: "yksinäisyys" (loneliness) actually has certain words within it that mean different things if they aren't part of the main word. Just as there was "one" in "loneliness", the Finnish word "yksinäisyys" can be hyphenated so that one can discover other words: "sinä" (you) and "syys" (a sort of poetic form of autumn). Thus it's easy to keep those separate, and a Finnish reader can figure out those meanings as well if he or she wishes to do so.
However, meaning is just one part of a poem. Even if it turned out relatively easy to split things and figure out new meanings for spliced words, what about the form? After all, cummings does utilize a weird structure. I decided to keep the form mostly intact.
If you compare my translation to cummings's original, you'll notice that the form looks almost the same. The sort of tree pattern is there, and words are divided in a weird way into clusters of one or a few letters at a time. The only bigger difference is that there's an extra letter in the first line of my translation when compared to the original: "yk(l" vs. "l(a".
However, the letter 'y' or 'k' can't be dropped, and one can't really put them to another line, because it would disturb the flow of the poem and also cloud the meaning of "sinä" (you), because few readers would guess that intent if it was "ksinä" (which doesn't mean anything) instead.
Sure, there are some other minor quirks because not all letters are as they should be, but I still think this version is a good, compensated version which manages to keep the original poem's intent and also adds some extra to it (whether that's a good thing or not is up to readers and critics to decide).
I thought I'd share this quick climpse to the stuff we were talking about during the translation of poetry lesson. It was very interesting and it gave me confidence as far as poetry translation goes, although I don't think I'll be translating poetry (especially modernist poetry) anytime soon. I prefer Auden's interesting poetry than cummings's weird stuff, to be honest. xD
tGA's been okay as well. The RP's stayed alive for about four months in a row (*knocks on wood*) and we've had a few new members. Oddly enough even HOOTERS has been posting occasionally, which I never thought would happen because of his busy schedule and everything. Now if only Ashi and Lynx would have time to stop by...
However, the biggest thing at tGA is that we finally have our very own wiki! It'd be nice if past and present members could go and contribute stuff to the wiki. It doesn't have to be anything big; just writing something general about your characters is enough, and it can just be plain text with no complex formatting.
If wiki editing sounds weird, feel free to consult this post which has basic info about the wiki and editing. I and other members are around as well if you need any help. =)
The funny thing about a wiki is that writing stuff to it is easy but can become time-consuming. I've realized that I have quite a few characters to chronicle, so that should keep me busy for these next few months. And I like the wiki as a place where one can obtain information easily; the wiki is still a work in progress, but it's getting more and more articles and looks more and more professional. Thanks a lot to people like Bleys, Nic and Spatvark for helping out with a bunch of things as well as for writing and editing articles.
I hope I'll be able to write about various book/film/music/series reviews later in another post. Until then, take care.
Yours,
Mikko