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Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Biting off way more than I can chew -- and loving it!
Gearhead Shem Tov wrote:
I can't think of a better way -- for *me* -- to learn lojban than
trying to discover what the "natural" voice for lojban narrative might
be. Reading existing texts would give me some flavour, but I'd be
stuck in Dick and Jane level for too long to hold my interest. Better
to butcher a translation on my first go, then read the more elegant
stuff written by others to figure out where I went wrong, I reckon.
I think you'll find that there isn't a lot of elegance in Lojban writing
so far. I thought I was doing some interesting stuff translating the
beginning of Burton's Thousand Nights and a Night, and trying to carry
across his stylistics into Lojban, but that sort of thing takes a
knowledge of the bells and whistles.
The two major works in Lojban now are the translation of Alice in
Wonderland, which has the virtue that it's source text is easily
accessible, and you can thus compare how someone with good skill in the
language translated certain passages. The other in Robin Powell's
incomplete lojban-original novel, which is probably the longest single
Lojban work (Robin says 42K words).
A more conversational or stream of
consciousness style adding in lots of attitudinal and discursive forms
(selma'o UI) (with the nature and style of expression of these forms
being key to showing a character or POV person's personality).
This is a fascinating idea. Does there seem to be a voice and POV
folks have found to work well?
I'm not sure many have done enough writing in multiple styles to comment.
In older text archives, you will find translations of a variety of
things from different source languages. Nick Nicholas did some Aesop
from the original Greek and some modern Greek pieces. Ivan Derzhanski
did a short story from Bulgarian. Aethelstan did Saki's "The Open
Window", and John Cowan translated a short-short from Hakku Chinese.
There was also a short joint-authorship project called ckafybarja, where
people wrote original stuff in a common setting - but the pieces were
generally only a few paragraphs.
Nick is conveniently in Melbourne by the way, and may be the most
skilled Lojbanist to have broadly considered stylistics - and he has the
professional experiences as a corpus analyst to talk knowledgeably about
voice and POV and such things.
> Would I be best served trying to
discover the lojban equivalent of the 3rd person limited POV that's my
default in English? Or would, say, something goofy such as second
person present tense be more natural?
I would try writing a paragraph or two in a variety of voices, and post
them on Lojban List (probably better than the beginners list for such
questions, and see what others think.
And no one would fault the ego of a real author writing his own story in
Lojban %^)
Hmm. Well, I do have a 700 word short-short that might be just the
ticket. I'll have a think about it.
People can help you with the mechanics of the language, but only an
author can really understand questions of expressive style. And we
don't have many who are Lojban authors (I should qualify that I've been
largely inactive for several years until the last few days, and there
are some pretty good new Lojbanists out there, whose authorial nature
and skill I am unaware of.)
lojbab
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