Subject: Re: [lojban] More Alice

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 04 Jun 2001 23:17:55

la pycyn cusku di'e

>Yes, getting better.

Thank you!

>How is "Laughing and Grief" going by the way.

I am very pleased with {clacmo} (long-moaning) for {latmo},
but not quite so satisfied with {geisto} (happy-permanence) for
{xelso}. In any case, the French translation Pierre gave
(patin et echec) or the Spanish one I looked at today (patin
y riego) are better at the sounds but awful at the meanings.

>What defeatism? Defeatism assumes that nothing will work.

Your defeatism about the Alice translation project. I'm enjoying
it very much, and I don't think that what we are producing is at
all crappy. Your judging it as a doomed project even before
you've read what we've done so far is unfair.

>I want to see
>some successes and that comes about by starting with things that can work,
>rather than (the Loglan/Lojban habit) "impossible" projects.

Alice is not an impossible project. Indeed, the most difficult parts
are not the puns, those are difficult in any language and necessarily
will not work as perfectly in Lojban as they do in the original, but
I don't see that as a problem specific to Lojban. Where I have most
difficulty is with the vocabulary. Deciding what to do with things
like "yelled the Gryphon at the top of its voice". This kind of thing
will appear in any ordinary translation.

>No one will be
>happier than I if one of those "impossible" projects comes off, but the 
>deck
>is tacked against it, and the price of chosing those as targets is losing
>people out of frustrration or disgust.

I promise you you won't lose me out of frustration over Alice. I doubt
very much that I would enjoy translating Oz in the same way. Alice is
a book that I like and find interesting, it is much more than a
children's book. Of Oz I know very little and never had much of an
interest to find out more. I might have contributed if it had
been chosen, but probably not so enthusiastically. Also, I think
someone who gets interested in Lojban, say two years from now, will
be much more pleased to know that Alice has been translated to Lojban
than it would be the case with Oz (pure speculation, I know).

>Dances are bad choices because they,
>unlike Lojban, have very tightly controlled rhythmic patterns.

I don't get the problem there. Lojban can do tightly controlled too.

>We can
>reporduce those patterns in Lojban but often at the cost of sense or even
>grammaticality.

No, that's not the idea.

BTW, I went into a bookstore today and looked at three different
translations of Alice into Spanish. None of them had a Lobster
Quadrille that matched the rhythmic pattern of the original,
even the rhymes were horrible. I think in Lojban we can do much
better than any of those translations.

>Eventually, we will work out a way of doing some of these
>thing, but we haven't yet.

We are in the process of doing it.

>Do try, but don't complain if we point out that
>you haven't made it.

There are ways and there are ways. You did not only point out
that we haven't made it. You asserted that it is not even
possible that we do, and you didn't even look at what's already
been done, imperfect as it is. You had already decided beforehand
that it would be bad.

>The Quadrille has four bars to the line, each bar four
>beats with the stress on the last beat. The chorus is slightly different,
>three iambs and a dactyl.

Thanks, I'll try to figure out what that means and see
how I can fix it so that it fits. I have no doubt it can be done.
(Does the Latin translation keep to that beat?)

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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