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From | To | Subject | Date/Time | |||
Anton Shepelev | All | An exercise in transation |
July 4, 2019 2:00 AM * |
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Since it is much easier to indicate motes in others' eyes than to notice beams in one's own, I will now try to translate a piece of artistic prose. Prepare your brushes, for motes are going to come aplenty. Besides the general clumsiness of my rendition, I am lost in tenses, weak in vocabulary, and often have a hard time linking a couple of words into a phrase, let alone composing a sentence. Translating an accomplished writer is more difficult than expressing one's own simple thoughts. I will be greateful if you indicate, and help me correct, my errors and stylistic blunders and screamers: Lying on wet snow in wait of a near death, Bianca suddenly remembered the smell of her mother woven from weak, barely recalled odours: of her warm thick milk, of dry hay with patches of withered bluebottles, of smokily smoldering folliage that people burned at their summer houses that very first autumn of her commencing life. The odour of smoldering leaves was one of the very first, and therefore special: pungent, thick, comprising all that the brief earthly life of any leaf can have imbided: from a sticky button shooting towards warmth unto a doomed descent to the cold body of the earth. Late September was pining away, and the trees were shedding leaves all around. The mapple covered the still green grass with a lush mandarine blanket. Lazily yet somehow in concert, the poplars shaked off their last ashen fluff. The old willow, whose bole only three men could embrace, littered the ground with its tiny leaves inelegantly and widely (? -- too wide around?). But in sunny places rowan trees were still posing daintily, clothed in dim purple, the heavy bunches of their berries slightly touched by nightly colds, whereas a light yolkish yellow entwined the tremulous aspens. The short train of lucid days would pass all too soon, cloudy mirk for long would cover the azure of the sky, frequent rains would soak the trees to their very cores and the gusty northern wind would tear off the last leaves and carry them off into the dirt, the puddles, the decay. Then winter would come. Endless. Cold. But Binca had not known winter, nor had she seen summer. Having come into the world in the beginning of September, she perceived autumn as the eternal state of the world around her. The sun caressed her shut eyes with its warm beams, filling with pink light the thin films of the (or her?) eyelids. She felt the kindness of that light, and her commencing life promised her -- a small God's creature -- love great and interminable. Her mother she did not know either. By touch and strong smell she found her rough nipples and fell to them, sucking the milk greedily, choking, and without an idea of its source. She felt constant hunger and hurried to satiate it. In the first days, she slept a lot biside her mother, partaking in her warmth. Whenever her mother left, she wouild call for her in weak, barely audible squeals. Then her brothers and sisters would follow suit and whine plaintively. And the mother would return. Carefully, lest she should harm the puppies, she would lay herself beside them. --- * Origin: nntps://fidonews.mine.nu - Lake Ylo - Finland (2:221/6.0) |
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