Every now and then I get this unaccountable urge to mention anime that is actually still airing, so here’s a remark on the unremarkable Asura Cryin’. (more…)
Entries from April 2009
Landscape With Anti-AT Rifle
Sunday 5th April, 2009 · 10 Comments
Armour Hunter Mellowlink arranges lots of fighting around a simple, sturdy story, leavened with drama and mystery in just the right (minimal) amounts. I owe it a certain debt for being my introduction to the VOTOMS franchise. It has, therefore, always pained me that the only available subtitled version is a set of rips from some kind of well-worn VHS fansub. Recently, however, I discovered that some inspired /m/en had got together to release Armour Hunter Mellowlink in higher quality. It’s still the old, amusingly unreliable translation but — well, I did say this was mostly fighting, didn’t I?
Anyway, to celebrate, I thought I’d write another post about it. (more…)
Categories: commentary
Tagged: armour hunter mellowlink, armoured trooper votoms, landscape, notes, pathetic fallacy, scene, topography in the european sense
Is That Really You, Father Virgil?
Sunday 12th April, 2009 · 16 Comments
Scanlators have been working on a manga adaption of the Divine Comedy (I seem to recall that Lelouch was a fan). However! Rather than simply translating the dialogue they’ve decided to admix it with appropriate lines from existing translations — not translations of the manga, but of the Comedy itself:
[W]hat we are doing with this as of now is 1. translating the manga, 2. comparing to the original divine comedy/history (when the mangaka leaves the context of the Divine Comedy), 3. mixing it all together and 4. re-writing it in a decasyllabic meter to match with the Divine Comedy’s poetry style. We used mostly H.F. Cary’s translation of the original Divine Comedy as reference, but if the translation was to archaic to be applicable, we used Longfellow’s.
While there’s obviously a lot of potential for a mismatch of tastes here — one person’s archaism is another’s ornament, and not all of us enjoy Longfellow — I instinctively approve of this. A translation is a new text, and so it’s perfectly permissible (though not always advisable) for a translator to throw accuracy out of the window and try something creative. (more…)
Categories: commentary · dead tree format
Tagged: a kentucky barmaid in the court of king louis xiii, adaption, dante alighieri, divine comedy, literature, prosody, translation