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Last sim...for now.
May. 10th, 2001 11:11 pmToday's sim was the last one I'm scheduled to do for this trip. It's also the last sim that the folks that are part of the Russian Simulation Execution Team (RSET) were scheduled to participate in before they rotate back to Moscow on Saturday. If I got nothing else out of this sim, I think I've finally gotten used to the speech pattern of this one Russian flight controller who has a habit of speaking in a low voice while running his words together.
I got to thinking I probably was a bit harsh on Onegin in yesterday's post. In the cold, grey light of the morning commute, I got to thinking about this particular cinematic effort and concluded that it was nicely done, even if the penultimate scene with Evgeny and Tatiana was hard to watch. The strange thing is, I really cannot explain why it was hard to watch, either.
But, in further support of my observation that movies never live up to the books they are based on, there is something in the poem that can never be captured on film. Heck, it can hardly be captured in translation.
The problem, without getting into detail, is that Pushkin's work is a book-length poem. And not the free verse that allows contemporary writers to often write drivel and pass it off as inspired work. Each stanza of the poem has 14 lines, comprising three quatrains (each of which has a separate rhyming scheme) and a rhyming couplet. The verse is written in iambic tetrameter.
There are some other details of interest to philologists, but the point is that there is music in the verse, especially as Russian is very well suited for rhymes. I was, in fact, attracted to the poem by hearing one of my profs read a few stanzas (the fact that my semester grade depended on reading the thing also helped pique my curiosity, but still...)
Some very rare translators (alas, I am not of their number) can translate poetry. But not every poem can be translated, and in general, the longer the poem, the less effective the translation, because at some point, the translator has to make a decision: does he (or she) sacrifice the meaning to the music, or the music to the meaning?
Vladimir Nabokov undertook a translation of Evgeny Onegin that leaves many people cold, because although he stays true to the structure and meter of the poem, he completely abandons attempts to make the lines rhyme, preferring instead to render the translated meaning. (Note, this is not the same as a literal translation.) Nabokov's notes to his translation, published in a separate volume, are an education to read in themselves.
The translation I read of Johnston's, on the other hand, makes music in English, but as a consequence has to meander away from the meaning of the original from time to time.
Both The Prisoner and Onegin went back today, in exchange for some other movies, including Revenge of the Musketeers (which qualified by dint of being on the foreign film rack) and Billy Elliott.
Cheers...
I got to thinking I probably was a bit harsh on Onegin in yesterday's post. In the cold, grey light of the morning commute, I got to thinking about this particular cinematic effort and concluded that it was nicely done, even if the penultimate scene with Evgeny and Tatiana was hard to watch. The strange thing is, I really cannot explain why it was hard to watch, either.
But, in further support of my observation that movies never live up to the books they are based on, there is something in the poem that can never be captured on film. Heck, it can hardly be captured in translation.
The problem, without getting into detail, is that Pushkin's work is a book-length poem. And not the free verse that allows contemporary writers to often write drivel and pass it off as inspired work. Each stanza of the poem has 14 lines, comprising three quatrains (each of which has a separate rhyming scheme) and a rhyming couplet. The verse is written in iambic tetrameter.
There are some other details of interest to philologists, but the point is that there is music in the verse, especially as Russian is very well suited for rhymes. I was, in fact, attracted to the poem by hearing one of my profs read a few stanzas (the fact that my semester grade depended on reading the thing also helped pique my curiosity, but still...)
Some very rare translators (alas, I am not of their number) can translate poetry. But not every poem can be translated, and in general, the longer the poem, the less effective the translation, because at some point, the translator has to make a decision: does he (or she) sacrifice the meaning to the music, or the music to the meaning?
Vladimir Nabokov undertook a translation of Evgeny Onegin that leaves many people cold, because although he stays true to the structure and meter of the poem, he completely abandons attempts to make the lines rhyme, preferring instead to render the translated meaning. (Note, this is not the same as a literal translation.) Nabokov's notes to his translation, published in a separate volume, are an education to read in themselves.
The translation I read of Johnston's, on the other hand, makes music in English, but as a consequence has to meander away from the meaning of the original from time to time.
Both The Prisoner and Onegin went back today, in exchange for some other movies, including Revenge of the Musketeers (which qualified by dint of being on the foreign film rack) and Billy Elliott.
Cheers...
