My mind works in strange ways.

[katsaris]

"I haven't ever seen a sight so strange and so macabre:
a living beauty of such grace, thus dragged by the cadaver!"
She hears these words and frightened turns, and speaks unto her brother.
"My brother dear, you hear the birds, you hear what they chatter?
That a living beauty of such grace is dragged by a cadaver!"
"They're birds, my sis, so let them speak, they're birds so let them chatter."

My brain works in strange ways. Somehow in the bus this morning my mind had turned to *translation*. Possibly because the previous day I had read Tolkien's brief comments on his own translation of Gawain and the Green Knight -- but to tell the truth more probably because my mind sometimes *does* when it's idle. Many of those times it tries to translate difficult book passages from English *to* Greek.

This time my brain did the other way around, something rare, from Greek to English. It kept on thinking that I couldn't find a way to nicely translate "τέτοια πανώρια λυγερή, να σέρνει ο πεθαμένος", which I still remember from back in highschool as being described by our professor as one of the most powerful contrasts expressed in a single line. The translation problem mainly lay with "πεθαμένος" -- I kept on thinking that the two-word "dead man" is too clumsy (and the meter doesn't work), and "corpse" is even worse in that respect, and ofcourse "deceased" is out of the question -- too weak and official-sounding.

Then my mind leapt to "cadaver", and in the next five minutes I'd done the above translation of the following and previous lines as well, from memory.

*g* Now I'm not claiming the above is beautiful or elegant. I don't think it is. The "unto" is very clumsy, for starters. And when I checked the actual Greek verses over the Internet, I noted that I'd made an error -- at this point, which is the third and final hint that Arete's brother is now dead, she doesn't turn to him "frightened" (that comes earlier on), but rather "with heart breaking". But the fact still amuses me that I did the above translation in my head in just a few minutes, less than half a bus trip. So I'm saving this for posterity.

(P.S. the overall story, for the non-Greeks among you (I hope the others still remember it from school), is that there's a disagreement in a family over whether they should let the only daughter of the family get married in a far away land. Out of nine brothers, only one, Konstantis, argues in favour -- when his mother asks "and if something happens for good or for ill, who will bring her back?" Konstantis promises that he will go and bring her back himself. So she's married off, but soon a plague comes along wiping out all nine of the brothers. Over the grave of Konstantis, his mother curses him for the advice he gave and for the broken promise -- such a curse causes the very grave to rend asunder, Konstantis leaps out (horse and all), rides to his sister and tells her they must go back. In the journey back, various birds comment on the macabre miracle of a young beautiful woman riding on a horse with a dead man, and there are also various other hints to the fact that her brother is dead -- he smells of church fumes, he is pale, etc, etc. He brings her to their mother's house and promptly vanishes. When daughter and mother meet they embrace, and then they both instantly drop dead for some reason, probably because "they lived happily ever after" wouldn't fit the overall mood of the poem as an ending. Heh.)

Comments

Re: oh, that reminds me--

[katsaris.livejournal.com]

Heh. I'd never before read "Lenore" but it reminds me a bit of the story I'd written about Hathaldir and Aerlin...

Which ofcourse was in turn, and knowingly by the end (though not really deliberately in the beginning) inspired by the very same Greek folk-song above about the dead brother... The basic concept was the same: a promise unwillingly broken via the death of the one who made it, a person complaining in bitterness about this violated promise, the person coming briefly back in life in order to make good on his promise...

That was the basic structure -- but for the specifics I had to adapt it to *Tolkien's* moral universe and my own. For example in Konstantis' tale, the "maternal curse" is the most important compelling element. But really, though the mother can be excused in the context of suffering from intense emotional trauma after the death of nine out of ten of her children, judged objectively such a thing would be utterly utterly vile IMO. Not just the mother cursing her child, especially over something he had no control over, but even (seemingly) just seeing her son as a transport vehicle for her daughter. Ugh. Is that a reason for the dead to come back to life, I ask? In *my* moral universe such a curse, unjustly laid, would be an impotent thing indeed, damning the mother in its utterance instead of compelling the dead son.

So, in this aspect, I *very knowingly* altered the details, and refrained Aerlin from cursing either Hathaldir, or the world entire. Complain about it and him, sure, but not curse them. Such a thing would have made her (I felt) unworthy of the consolation she ends up deserving and receiving. Her request, longing and sense of loss are also all focused around Hathaldir himself, not around anything or anyone else he could provide (like e.g. the mother asking her dead son to bring her daughter back). That's another fundamental reason why I felt she could get her wish.

(PS: I think I could have her, in grief, curse their *choices*, but even then only if deep down she didn't mean it and would be corrected for it in the end. But when I truly decided that "my words are too weak to weave into verses the lore revealed" of that event, I also decided against inserting a "sin" of sorts in her words that I wouldn't be able to elaborate on, showing her repent of it by the end.)

---
The second fundamental alteration arises not so much from my own moral universe's needs, but from Tolkien's I think. The dead brother in the Greek song-poem is kind and dutiful enough, but he looks unhealthy, smells of the grave, etc. Hints of the *corpse*.

Dead Hathaldir, on the other hand, just like the reflection of herself that Aerlin sees in his eyes, hints of Arda Healed --- the Resurrection at the end of time, the freedom beyond the bounds of Ea, the idea that all Mortals were once meant to be sub-creators themselves, like the Powers, and will one day prove worthy to be so again. Dead, and in a good cause, dutiful to the end, he looks more glorious than anything Aerlin has yet seen.