A year ago, I undertook to write a screenplay, purely as a personal
project, with no expectation the result produced; just a way to
stretch my writing skills and to learn about this very specialized
and demanding type of composition.
Rather than composing an original story, I chose to dramatize the
famous fantasy novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, "A Princess of Mars". I
knew the book well, and all Burroughs's books are in the public
domain. At the time various studios were rumored to be producing a
film, but such speculation has since died (see the Wikipedia entry at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Princess_of_Mars).
Writing a screenplay proved challenging but I have nearly completed
it, and I am pleased that the result is of near-professional quality.
I will eventually "publish" it on my own website for the world to
read. (Any notion of it ever being produced is as unrealistic as
expecting to win the PowerBall lottery.)
One phase of the screenplay is not complete. In the first 20 minutes
there are about 70 lines of dialog spoken by Barsoomians (Martian
natives) before our hero John Carter has learned to speak that
language. After we have seen him learning Barsoomian, all the
characters can speak English. Before that, it would be laughable for
characters to say, in English, things that Carter can't understand.
The Martians have to speak their native tongue. Subtitles (called
"supers" in the business, for "superimposed") will be shown to
translate their speech for the audience. (n.b. conventional advice to
would-be screenwriters is to avoid supers. However, LOTR and Mel
Gibson's recent movies have used them with great success, and most
reality-TV shows use supers when dialog recorded live is muffled.
Hence supers are more respectable today.)
What language is Barsoomian? At first I was going to try to cobble up
some jargon based on the scanty nouns that Burroughs invented, with
syntax of my own. But this proved to be very difficult. It seems a
much better idea to use a real language that will sound "alien" to
almost all viewers: to use, in fact, Lojban.
Using a real language for Barsoomian has several practical virtues.
If the director wants more or different lines, they can be prepared
easily by any Lojban student, and will sound consistent with other
dialog. And I think actors will find it much less stressful to speak
very strange and foreign words if they know that those words are not
arbitrary gibberish but "really mean" what they are supposed to mean.
At the moment my screenplay contains only the supers, the English
translation. I have begun translating those supers into dialog in
Lojban. I'm sure I am making grammatical mistakes. More, I'm aiming
at spoken dialog: Lojban as excited people would speak it; and Lojban
that can be pronounced easily and confidently by an actor; as opposed
to writing an essay or poem. I'm sure my translations could be
livelier, more terse, and more expressive.
I'm hoping to use this list to get help with the project. If nobody
objects, I will post passages of dialog here, with questions, and
hope for help from you-all. In order not to keep repeating this
explanation, I'm putting it, and the translated lines as they are
completed, on my personal website at http://www.tassos-oak.com/tempp/
barsoomian.html
I will try to keep track of who contributes, so that in the
{la'anaicai} event of it being produced, everyone can be properly
credited.
Thanks to all in advance. Reply to the list with comments about the
above, or privately to dcortesi@mindspring.com if you prefer.
Thanks again,
Dave Cortesi
Problem One: "Princess"
Problem one is what to call the Princess in a vocative. At more than
one point someone addresses her formally, {coi [Princess]}... My best
shot so far is a simple tanru,
noble type-of ruler type-of daughter
nobli turni tixnu
coi noltruti'u...
I got all tangled up in whether she's a {nobli je turni} type of
daughter or possibly a daughter OF a ruler {nobli tixnu pe la turni}.
But any such complication makes the lujvo longer and less easy to
rattle off in dialog.
I'm unhappy that the tanru doesn't carry any of the connotations of
the English word--the sense of unearned privilege; the high social
value; the expectation of future power, etc. But hey, that's the
translation game.
Thanks,
Dave Cortesi