you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed

Jan 06, 2010 13:58

I think this is starting to look like that :[

Also, I have a DreamWidth! And if I had the attention span of, say, a rhesus monkey, it would contain more than two posts! I am determined to do better with the tags, though. (I would have a job doing worse.)

And I love this:





So, in keeping with tradition, my Christmas reading list is:
1.) Little, Big by John Crowley and Neil Gaiman
2.) The Magicians: A Novel by Lev Grossman and Neil Gaiman
3.) Kono yo Ibun #3 by Tsuta Suzuki and Neil Gaiman
4.) Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception by Some Illiterate Doucheface and Neil Gaiman

Lament (or Ugh, as it’s known around here) particularly is sticking in my craw, but it was a gift! I must read it! It’s a hard life. (The book is more or less Twilight with faereyies instead of vampires.) (It’s always a very bad sign when an author starts adding extraneous vowels to the word "fairy;" as a reader, it feels like being forced to hang out with a woman who’s exclusively attracted to men with tattoos that are the Celtic word for things like 'rocknroll' or 'badass.')

Oh, and speaking of which! Remember when I said that Juné or DMP or whomever they are had mistranslated "kono yo ibun"? And then I suggested my own translation? Well, we were both wrong! The main difference being, of course, that I am an amateur in my second year of lexical study, and they are allegedly 'publishers,' so I think they have a bit more egg on their faces, ahahaha. Please stop giving these fucktards money? Please? If we stop giving them money, they will probably be forced go out of business, which will allow their employees to find new jobs in industries more suited to their level of intellectual development, such as tin-can stacking. Unless these manga-"translation" companies are somehow able to remain solvent in the complete absence of profit (this would not surprise me at all).

"Kono yo ibun," incidentally, means "a gothic romance for the modern era."* I know, right?

*NOTE: "Ibun" doesn’t really mean "a gothic romance," technically speaking. It means, like, "a weird story." With connotations of The Twilight Zone. But we don’t have a word that means the same thing as "ibun" in English - and as the story is, in fact, a gothic romance (with an ōkamimimi instead of a vampire or a faeray or something), I think this is a decent substitution.

ETA #1 "IT’S HARD OUT HERE FOR A WIMP": I assumed the "世" in "kono yo" was the same "世" as is found in "浮世絵," which translates directly as "pictures of the floating world." This is incorrect, Y/N?

ETA #2 "NO, REALLY": The components of "kono yo ibun" are: この世 and 異聞. The first means "this world" and the second means "a weird story." There are no other characters or terms. The comic is in the genre of Pride & Prejudice, but with only one suitor (who is a wolf fairy instead of a tragic imaginary Englishman) and lots of fucking. I am positive this can all be resolved. Suzuki is really crappy at naming her comics, incidentally. One of them is called Hand Which (in English), for example. IT’S ALL HER FAULT. Is she a guy? Guys are crappy at naming things.

mr. uskglass, books, gaiman, japanese, whining, imaginary men

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