Subject: Re: [lojban] More Alice

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 22:48:01 EDT

In a message dated 6/4/2001 6:20:05 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> >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.
> 

The disasters of other translations (excepting fairly often the Vulgate) is 
one of my reasons for pessimism, the other is the four partial translations 
(out of what I remember as six) that I have turned up. You are one of about 
three people who might over come several of the problems that have been 
traditional in Loglan/Lojban translations, but so far you have only done soa 
couple of times.  
As for not reading them, I have read what is available, but the bulk is on a 
site aol says does not exist and requires a program (apparently) that my 
Windows ME will not run (in fact shorts out on). My Wizard is on his way 
over to look into these matters now.
<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.>

I didn't mean that Lojban has peculiar problems with Alice -- other than the 
total lack of a culture to play off, of course; any translation into any 
language is going to be iffy at best and likely to be awful (the only one I 
know that rises to iffy is the Vulgate and that is because it takes the 
appropriately loose attitude toward the text). Actually, Lojban has some 
advantages in doing Alice, courtesy of their mutual connection to logic, but 
those spots are few and far between.

<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).> 

I didn't imagine we would, you are in too deep to get out so easily. All of 
the perpetrators of the specimen I have, though, disappeared without a trace 
within a year of their sending the specimens in and in at least one case the 
reason for dropping out was simply that Loglan was much too hard (Alice being 
the only bit tried). Oz is less of a challenge and so less of a triumph if 
completed, but also more likely to be completed by some of the folk who are 
always saying they want to translate something or that there ought to be more 
translated but who are not really very good yet. Some people love Oz, though 
I think for different reasons than they love Alice or even Wind in the 
Willows or Pooh

<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>

I would expect a Spanish version to match a Spanish dance. The Vulgate is 
vaguely Virgilian -- not one of its most successful moments, I think. Since 
(the old problem again) there are no Lojbanic dances, it is hard to see what 
the Lojban ought to be. But it should be something believable and that 
requires a tight rhythm, which yours does not yet have.

<>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.>

Well, I generalized from experience and the samples I had, which tended to 
cohere with that experience. As I have said, I'll be delighted to be proven 
wrong (once I get over the shock in this particular case). And if I am not, 
I shall claim the right to complain about the wasted effort again (or, in 
short, "I told you so") without a lot of carping about it.

<>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.>

My wife (who hates Alice, I'm not sure why) insists that the second beat of 
each measure is stronger than the odd-numbered ones though weaker than the 
fourth. I'm not sure I hear it, nor that it is relevant to your version, so 
I give it for information only.