Now that I’ve FINALLY finished off the Trilingual Hobbit Reread, I’m going to do another one–and this time I’ll be doing Harry Potter! This has been inspired in no small part by the Harry Potter reread they’ve been doing on Tor.com, and how I never did actually get around to reading book 7. But before I read book 7, I need to reread 1-6. (Oh DARN whatever shall I do.)
Thanks to the ease with which I can get multiple language editions of the stories off of Pottermore, I have the English, French, and German editions of Book 1 of the series all in ebook form now. (I think it’s pretty neat, actually, that Pottermore sells ebook copies of the series in so many languages–they’ve got several others besides French and German, and I gotta say I’d be tempted by the Japanese if I had the first clue about how to read the characters!)
(However, important note of interest–Pottermore did NOT let me buy the UK English editions of the ebooks, even though it did let me get the French and German. The site has some sort of geoIP checking in place that saw I was in the US, and one presumes that Rowling’s publishers have territory agreements in place to dictate where the English editions are sold. Which is weird given that the ebooks aren’t being sold with DRM on them, but territory restrictions are NOT the same thing as DRM. So.)
And in the interests of seeing if I can whip through the posts faster, I’m going to change the format of them a bit. I’m going to include a general commentary section for overall reactions to the action, as I did with most of the latter Hobbit posts. But I’m going to prune down the language commentary and will keep it to a few general sections:
* The longest bit I’m able to read in both French and German, and a breakdown of what that bit means
* Five vocabulary words that leap out at me in both languages
* Anything that leaps out at me as unique to either translation, particularly in regards to character names or interesting handling of story events, and particularly if one edition handles it differently than the other
I have books 1-4 of the UK editions of the stories in print and will be using those as my English edition for purposes of this story–though I will be comparing them against the US editions to see where they differ, and because I want to see what the French and German editions key off of, too.
This’ll be fun, and I hope y’all will enjoy this as much as I will!
HOLY ILUVATAR, has it really been over a year since I originally drafted this post? Apparently! This is what happens when I’m so caught up in working on my own books, and then trying to finish up all the backlogged stuff that got shunted aside while I was writing the Rebels of Adalonia trilogy, that I wasn’t able to finish these Reread posts. But now with The Battle of the Five Armies having finally having come out and indeed now hitting digital home release, it’s about time I cleared my slate of the last of the Hobbit Reread posts!
It’s weird, after the longer chapters at the beginning of The Hobbit, to see how fast the final chapters go. Chapter 17 is not very long at all–and barely after the Battle of Five Armies has begun, you get into the aftermath, where Bilbo (and the reader through him) learns what he missed. And in which, finally, Thorin stands down from being an asshole.
I’m not going to get into comparing how this chapter ties into all the bits in the movie–because I talk about that in my movie review posts! But that said, there’s a lot here over which I must go *sniff*. This is the aftermath of the Battle of Five Armies, and it’s a hard aftermath for the survivors, with Bilbo front and center among them.
In-depth notes behind the fold!
Since I’ve had some cycles free up now that Bone Walker and Victory of the Hawk are done, I’ve turned my attention to playing with translating my own prose. Specifically, I’m amusing myself writing that story I threatened to write some time ago, “The Dragonslayer of Chimay”, based on Le Vent du Nord’s song “Le dragon de Chimay”–and hey, I figure if it’s based on a song in French, I should try to write the prose in French!
Playing around with this yesterday, though, finally let me figure out the answer to a question I had come up doing the Trilingual Hobbit Reread: i.e., how quoting dialogue in French prose actually works.
I’d noticed in Bilbo le hobbit that some dialogue was bracketed by the familiar angle quotes, « and ». Some dialogue also involved m-dashes, and some actually mixed them in ways that didn’t seem obvious to me. To further complicate the matter, I noticed as well that within the same paragraph, dialogue was not separated from dialogue tags by closing quotes the same way an English sentence would do it.
So for example, an English sentence might look like this:
“I love that band,” she said. “Their tunes are awesome!”
But in French you’d get this:
« J’aime ce groupe, dit-elle. Leurs tounes sont fantastique! »
See how there’s no closing quote after “dit-elle”–which is “she said” here, what gets called a dialogue tag in writing–and no quote to reopen the spoken words after it?
BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE. The m-dash comes into play, it seems, to signify if there’s a change in speaker. And furthermore, the angle quotes are used less to signify “here is something a person says”, and more “a general area of conversation that can involve one or more people”–and so the starting and closing quotes bracket an entire section of dialogue, as large as possible in the context of the narrative.
Which suddenly makes large bits of Bilbo le hobbit make more sense to me!
Here’s an example:
« J’aime ce groupe, dit-elle. Leurs tounes sont fantastique!
— Qu’est-que tu penses de leur violoneux? demande son ami. Il joue bien, oui?
— Absolument! Il est merveilleux! Je veux apprendre toutes ses chansons! »
So that’s fun, and something I look forward to practicing as I slowly work my way through not only writing “The Dragonslayer of Chimay”, but also translating it as I go!
Relatedly: I have also discovered that if you’re dealing with those angle quotes in French prose, you’re going to want to make non-breaking spaces to go between them and the words they’re surrounding–otherwise the text will wrap weirdly and that’s no fun. And there’s an easy way to do this on the Mac: Option + Space.
Not as easy to do if I’m on one of my iOS devices, but this is a problem that can be solved by my Bluetooth keyboard!
What fun things do you all know about in non-English prose? What tricks do you know to make non-English characters when you’re typing?
Busman’s Honeymoon
There is a side effect of being an author that I’ve seen other authors mention before, and which has started to affect me: i.e., I often am less inclined to read things in genres I’m actively writing. Which is to say, urban fantasy and epic fantasy. I haven’t ditched those genres completely, mind you; I did just do a sprint through the last of the Greywalker series, as well as the Dresden Files.
But every so often I specifically have to go read something in a genre I am not likely to write any time in the foreseeable future. And my current read is a long overdue visit to one of my favorite literary detectives, Lord Peter Wimsey! The title in question: Busman’s Honeymoon.
Which I mention in part partly because of the aforementioned need to visit other genres, but mostly because of the delightful and unexpected outbursts of French Peter keeps having in this book. French which, I note, is not translated in any way, as if Sayer clearly expected her readers to either a) know what the hell Wimsey said, or b) be in a position to look it up. Either way I approve.
What really tickled me outright about Wimsey’s French in this book, though, was a thing I recognized from Quebec French–i.e., the use of the word “blonde” in what I’m pretty damn sure is the context of “girlfriend/lover”. Moreover, unless I miss my guess, it’s in a saucy song!
Here’s the first bit of it that appears in the book:
La caill’, la tourterelle
Et la joli perdrix–
Auprès de ma blonde
Qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon
Auprès de ma blonde–
And here’s the second bit:
Et ma joli colombe
Qui chante jour et nuit
Et ma joli colombe
Qui chante jour et nuit
Qui chante pour les filles
Qui n’ont pas de mari–
Auprès de ma blonde
Qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon
Auprès de ma blonde
Qu’il fait bon dormi.
BUT WAIT the amusement does not actually stop there. Because I just looked this song up, googling what looks like the chorus, and discovered that it is in fact this song. “Auprès de ma blonde”. Which had English lyrics written to the tune for an Elvis song. I.e., “I Love Only One Girl”, from the movie Double Trouble. A song that I filked in Pern fanfic.
Between this and this book ALSO teaching me that the phrase “embarrassment of riches” comes from a translation of a French play, I’m getting all sorts of fun French mileage out of this read!
It has taken me ages to get through my edits for Victory of the Hawk, you guys. But now that the end is in sight, I’ve had some cycles free up finally. Which means I can get back to the last few bits of my Trilingual Hobbit Reread!
And Chapter 17 of The Hobbit, “The Clouds Burst”, is pretty much where the Battle of Five Armies gets down to Serious Business. Which is a good place to be, given the movie that’s about to come out next month, yes?