flemmings | (no subject)

I admit the hanging black clouds, tattered at the hemline, that scuttled across the just-post-sundown sky ahead of the storm were eerie and wonderful, like pantomime assassins hastening to do the dire deed. (ETA or Ringwraiths, or something even nastier in black cloaks.) The two hours of NOISE and DELUGE that followed were totally unnecessary, in my ever so very humble opinion.

And since I couldn't be online, and since I have a hard time concentrating on things like plot and dialogue when there's NOISE and DELUGE happening, I rousted out one of my ancient White Hart Japanese novels (the one where the silver-haired amethyst-eyed magic-wielding biseinen is called 'ill'-- lower casing it because ariel font makes it look like a Roman 3-- and read fifty pages of it. Read fast, I stopped being bothered that the author informs me every three lines that ill has (clear, cold, fathomless) amethyst eyes and that the quondem Dragon Prince (never got far enough in the series to find out does he turn into a dragon) has (sparkling, mischievous, teasing) onyx eyes, and concentrated instead on remembering the Japanese words for rowan, elm, yew, and mistletoe. My pleasures are recherche indeed.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Downloaded some english translated yaoi novels -- is it always like that? I mean, it might also be because of the translator. They also like word delicate a lot.

I think it's always like that. Foreign language bumpf is always more glaring than familiar language bumpf; it's probably no worse than Sidney Sheldon but you're not used to disregarding the bumpfy bits, which translation makes more glaring. My experience with translating middle-brow Japanese is that a lot of smoothing and eliding is necessary to make the thing sound even passable in English. The great Seidensticker used to rewrite his translations completely from the first literal draft and then go back to check that the readable English sentence didn't deviate *too* far from the Japanese original. And bits of Kawabata and Mishima still clunk in his English. (shrugs) Japanese is like that.

I think I'm a little relieved then, all those onyx eyes and delicate porcelain skin was beginning to alarm me a bit. I-I mean at least pretend they really are guys, this is a yaoi novel! ^^;

Nah, they really are guys. They have asokos that stand up. And, yanno, if it's a yaoi novel about biseinen (if not actually bishounen) they probably *do* have onyx eyes and porcelain skin.