between red Death and radiant Desire

There's also a passage in French in which the narrator wishes a woman would have had children, "who would have inherited her courage and her eyes", but decides that's a pointless regret because these decisions on how to populate the future are not ours to make ("ne nous appartiennent pas")—the English translation turns it into "Absurd, for who wants to people (...) the future?" That's different...!! And later on the narrator says that "all these misunderstandings" make him want to "steer clear of any conviction that isn't entirely personal". The English translation says "such misapprehensions were to cure me (...) of holding ready-made convictions." I'm sorry but, in this context you're saying a different thing. Again.

By this point I went looking for the name of the translator, in order to carry it in my soul in a pocket of indignation—and I found: "translated from the French by Grace Frick in collaboration with the author"! Grace Frick! Marguerite Yourcenar's life partner!

here's the poem in its entirety:

Tonight, the waking bella-donna moon has fixed me with her eyeless stare. Tonight her moonlit eyes grow wide in love. I know the cost of drinking such a wine Tonight, as red as blood and calcite white I know, I know the cost. I know, and drink.

the poem was originally published in the early 70s by a british-born irishman named James Burke, as a "translation" of an italian poem by the invented poet, Luigi Lussiano. (as far as I can tell, burke was unaware of borges, and while the poem was not published until the 70s, there's reason to believe that the poem was written in 60s or even earlier, so it's implausible to me that he would have been familiar with the argentine. but oddly enough, none of the sources I've found discuss this connection)

since its publication, and especially in recent years (presumably thanks to machine translation and the internet?) there have been a number of purported "original versions," which generally impose some kind of rhyme on the tercets, usually incorporating the name of Burke's second wife, Lola. (quite anachronistically, since he would not have met her until two years before the poem's earliest publication date, well after the first drafts are presumed to have been written)

of course the general consensus among historians (of which there aren't many - burke is a pretty minor literary figure) is that there is no "original italian version" of the poem, and that the incipit was likely created after the fact (many of the arguments for this rely heavily on the fact that the purported title is fairly unnatural italian)

that said, there do seem to be a few interesting details in the poem's history that, I would say, make it more than just a cheap hoax. first, the original publication feature the following note:

"Translated as faithfully as possible from the Italian, excepting the final line, which the dictates of taste would not allow us to publish unaltered in this forum."

it's easy enough to suppose that this is there to add verisimilitude to the poem's conceit, and perhaps stoke some publicity by way of implied controversy (unsuccessfully, as it happens—as far as I can tell this poem languished in relative obscurity until the 90s, when there was a renewed public interest in this sort of story. but by even by 1983 burke had stopped playing kayfabe, writing "I wanted to suggest the lyricism of the old Italian poets, Dante chief among them, and I believed, as I do still believe, that presenting the poem not as an invention but as an artifact would most effectively facilitate that invocation.")

a letter of burke's to his colleague and confidant, Benjamin Johnston, however, suggests a more complicated relationship to the poem (and perhaps dante):

"That italian poem of mine - the piece is a trifle. It must be a trifle, because the line would give it any significance at all, the line which would make it make more than the schoolhouse exercise of a bored child, I cannot write, I cannot write it, and so the whole poem is barren of that most necessary element to make it sincere."

hopefully I do not need to point out the echo between this excerpt and the "translator's note" in the published poem

This is going to be an attempt at expressing my feelings about my own gender and queerness, as a nonverbal autistic with language difficulties, low awareness of the world around me, barely any sense of self, and so many other things that affect my ability to understand and be aware of the concept of gender and sexuality to begin with.

I tried to write this like a properly structured essay, but because my thoughts are so disorganised in general (and I have so many thoughts on this topic), I couldn’t manage that. So, I have decided to present this as if it is a collection of journal entries; that is basically what this is, in truth! You will just have to experience the disorganisation in a similar way to how I experience my own mind. The most organising I was able to do was split it up into some categories, to make it slightly easier for you, reading this. Some things that I wrote could fit into more than one category, but this is how I chose to divide it up.

I have written a lot about the words I use to describe the way I feel, how I choose those words, and how that has changed over time. My delays in certain areas of development, and the other ways my various disabilities affect me, have a significant impact on the ways I have come to understand my gender identity and the internal (and partially external) process I went through to get to where I am now.

I have no doubt that things will continue to shift and change and as a result, the way I define myself in different contexts will also change. This is just my first attempt at getting a lot of this out of my brain and into words, for other people to read.

I wrote this is many fragments, so it doesn’t flow or connect, and there may be some repetition. Each paragraph may have been written at a completely different time, and therefore doesn’t relate to the last paragraph, or the next. Some of this is just stand-alone statements, some is longer examinations of my feelings. But all of it is true to my experience of the world and of queerness.

I have never been able to express the majority of this before, so I think it is pretty good for a first attempt!

**Note: I make a reference to having speech at a point in my life. I am nonverbal due to late autism regression, and grew up semiverbal with very unreliable speech, and language issues. I had very poor communication.**

Here we go!

I am inserting a “read more” here because this is very long. Really, very long.

happy 413 everyone!! 15 years felt like a significant number so i wanted to do push myself to do smthg over the top for this one haha

this comic has had me in a chokehold for over 10 years waow.. still lookin forward to see what comes from the new team! anyway happy anniversary sweethearts <333

this stuff is important to me for so many reasons and it makes it so much easier to talk about when i don't feel like i'm a burden or annoying or too angry about something that no one cares about. makes me feel safe in this space, makes me feel included, makes me feel respected.

justice of toren's eager collection of songs is part and parcel of its violent destruction of cultures: these songs are cultural artifacts that it only learns because of its presence on those worlds during their conquest, and in many cases breq is the only one to remember them because their people have died out due to that violence. JoT preserves cultural artifacts for its own use at the same time it directly contributes to the need for that preservation in the first place.

the matter-of-fact way in which this is narrated to us gives us information about JoT's stance on respect and imperialism - that is, contrasted with other characters who look down on the conquered cultures, JoT does actually seem to appreciate their value. and yet it communicates to us no sense of remorse over its role in their genocide.

singing can be a communal activity. this allows us to feel the difference between one esk's multiple bodies singing together in harmony/in a round vs. breq singing alone. this has emotional weight, is an evocative image, and illustrates quite nicely some of the logistic considerations of having one vs. multiple bodies.

the constant humming/singing is extremely notable and idiosyncratic according to other characters, which is a dangerous combination for someone who's supposed to be undercover, so it adds a lil bit of fun suspense for us.

the fact that no one ever figures out breq's identity despite this giveaway tells us something about the other characters' attitudes towards artificial intelligences (though see below about seivarden).

the fact that it's so idiosyncratic also tells us something about the ability of individual AIs to have personalities that distinguish them from other AIs, and the fact that one esk sings constantly but two esk doesn't tells us something about the ability of different ancillary decades that are all part of the same AI to have distinguishing characteristics. this is very relevant to, and illustrative of, the series' thematic throughlines around identity, personality, continuity, etc.

the fact that breq personally has a bad voice also serves multiple purposes. because breq and seivarden both believe that the medic could have chosen a body with a good voice if she had wanted to, we can infer something about how ancillary bodies work, how much the AI (and, by extension, its medics) knows about the individual capabilities of those bodies while they're in suspension, and what kinds of things the AI can and can't control once it has unfrozen and taken over a body.

we can also draw conclusions about the medic that chose that body and about intracrew relations on that ship.

breq's bad voice creates moments of humor and irony in the narrative, such as when breq's constant singing - aka the most obvious clue that she is one esk - is precisely what makes seivarden so sure that breq can't be one esk, because no esk medic would use a body with a bad voice for an ancillary.

constant singing/humming imposes itself on the shared soundscape, meaning other people can't easily avoid it and it has the potential to annoy them, especially if the voice itself has annoying qualities. the reactions of other characters to the frequency and/or quality of this verbal tic tells us something about the level of affection those characters have for one esk or breq.

because singing involves words, the meaning of the lyrics being sung can be used to advance the plot, communicate things about specific characters, create irony in juxtaposition with what's happening on the page, etc.

i especially like what's done with the lyric "it all goes around". it's woven throughout the story in such a way as to manifest its own meaning (the repetition of "it all goes around" is, itself, an example of something going around). by repeating the lyric, breq is the one making it true, and i would argue that her repetition of this particular lyric about things orbiting other things contributes to, and/or is a sign of, her growing understanding of the necessity/reality of interdependence and her place in that framework/her role in constructing it, or in other words, the extent of her own agency and the rights and obligations it confers upon her.

because the singing/humming is a constant, background, automatic action, it only ceases when breq is experiencing a strong emotion. from this we are able to infer things about the emotional state of our famously-omits-details-about-her-emotional-state narrator based on other characters' comments about whether or not she is currently doing this thing.

we also aren't even aware that breq is doing it constantly until another character says so. on a narrative level, this serves the dual purpose of making sure we know about how much she hums AND of reminding us that she's not telling us everything.

the humming is not mentioned constantly even though it is happening constantly - this helps us forget in between mentions that it's going on while also simultaneously reinforcing just how constant it must be, so constant that to mention it every time it happens would be like narrating every time she breathes in or out. whenever someone brings it up, we are reminded anew that something has been happening all along that we forgot about. this means that ann leckie is able, by leaving information out, to hammer home to us how much we are not being told.

It’s actually quite tricky to translate. Because it’s so short, each word and grammatical construction is carrying a lot of weight. It also, as people have noted, plays with registers. “Chintz” is a word with its own set of associations. Chintz is a type of fabric with its origins in India. The disparaging connotation is from chintz’s eventual commonality. Chintz was actually banned from England and France because the local textile mills couldn’t compete.

Keep it real” is tremendously difficult to translate – it’s a bit difficult to even define. It means to be authentic and genuine, but it also has connotations of staying true to one’s roots. Like many English slang words, it comes first from AAVE. From this article on the phrase:

“[K]eeping it real meant performing an individual’s experience of being Black in the United States. As such, it became a form of resistance. Insisting on a different reality, one that wasn’t recognized by the dominant culture, empowered Black people to ‘forge a parallel system of meaning,’ according to cultural critic Mich Nyawalo…The phrase’s roots in racialized resistance, however, were erased when it was adopted by the mostly-White film world of the 1970s and ’80s….Keeping it real in this context indicated a performance done so well that audiences could forget it was a performance.This version of keeping it real wasn’t about testifying to personal experience; it was about inventing it.”

One has to imagine that jjbang8 did not have the origins of these phrases in mind when composing the poem, but even if by coincidence, the etymological and cultural journeys of these two central lexemes perfectly reflect the themes of the poem. The two words have themselves traveled away from the authenticity they once represented, and, in a new context, have taken on new meanings – the hero of our poem, the unnamed “him”, is, presumably, in quite a similar situation.

Setting aside the question of register, of the phonology, prosody, and meter of the original, of the information that is transmitted through bits of grammar that don’t necessarily exist in other languages – a gifted translator might be able to account for all of these – how do you translate the journey of the words themselves?

In my translations, I decided to go for the most evocative words, even if they don’t evoke the exact same things as in the original. The strength of these two lines is that they imply that there’s more than just what you see, whether that’s the details of the story – what’s happening in the marriage? how do the narrator and the husband know each other? – or the cultural background of the very words themselves. I wanted to try and replicate this effect.

Yiddish first:

זייַן ווייַב האָט אָנגעפֿילט זייַן הויז מיט הבלים

צו בלייַבן וויטיש, איך שטוף אים אופֿן דיל. zayn vayb hot ongefilt zayn hoyz mit havolim.

tsu blaybn vitish, ikh shtup im afn dil

This translation is pretty direct. There is a word for chintz in Yiddish – tsits – but, as far as I can tell, it refers only to the fabric; it doesn’t have the same derogatory connotation as in English. I chose, instead, havolim, a loshn-koydesh word that means “vanity, nothingness, nonsense, trifles”. In Hebrew, it can also mean breath or vapor. I chose this over the other competitors because it, too, is a word with a journey and with a secondary meaning. Rather than imagining the bright prints of chintz, we might imagine a more olfactory implication – his wife has filled his house with perfumes or cleaning fluids. It can carry the implication that something is being masked as well as the associations with vanity and gaudiness.

Vitish – Okay, this is a good one. Keep in mind, of course, that I’ve never heard or seen it used before today, so my understanding of its nuances is very limited, but I’ll explain to you exactly how I am sourcing its meaning. The Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary (CYED) gives this as “gone astray (esp. woman); slang correct, honest”. I used the Yiddish Book Center’s optical character recognition software, which allows you to search for strings in their corpus, to confirm that both usages are, in fact, attested. It’s a pretty rare word in text, though, as the CYED implies, it might have been more common in spoken speech. It appears in a glossary in “Bay unds yuden” (Among Us Jews) as a thieves cant word, where it’s definted as נאַריש, שרעקעוודיק, אונבעהאלפ. אויך נישט גנביש. אין דער דייַטשער גאַונער-שפראַך –  witsch – נאַריש, or “foolish, terrible, clumsy/pathetic. not of the thieves world. in the German thieves cant witsch means foolish”. A vitishe nekeyve (vitishe woman) is either a slacker or a prostitute. I can’t prove this for sure, but my sense is that it might come from the same root as vitz, joke (it’s used a couple of times in the corpus to mention laughing at a vitish remark – which makes it seem kind of similar to witty). I assume the German thieve’s cant that’s being referred to is Rotwelsch, which has its own fascinating history and, in fact, incorporates a lot of Yiddish. In fact, for this reason, some of the first Yiddish linguists were actually criminologists! What an excellent set of associations, no? It has the slangy sense of straightforward of honest; it has a sense of sexual non-normativity (we might use it to read into the relationship between the narrator and the husband) – and a feminized one at that; it was used by an underground subculture, and, again, the meaning there was quite different – like the “real” in “keeping it real” it was used to indicate whether or not someone was “in” on the life (tho “real” is used to mean that the person is in, while “vitish” is used to mean they’re not). It’s variety of meanings are more ambiguous than “keep it real”, which can pretty much only be read positively, and it also brings in a tinge of criminality. Though it doesn’t have the same exact connotations as “keep it real”, I think it’s about as ideal of a fit as we’ll get because it’s equally evocative of more below the surface. I also chose “tsu blaybn vitish”, which is “to stay vitish”, as opposed to something like “to make it vitish” to keep the slight ambiguity of time that “keep it real” has – keeping it real does< I think, imply that there is a pre-existing “real” to which one can adhere, so I wanted to imply the same.

The rest is straight-forward. “Shtup” is one of a few words the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (CEYD) gives for “fuck”, and I think it has a nice sound.

Ok, now Russian

женой твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками

чтоб не блудить с пути, ебемся на полу

zhenoy tvoy dom napolnin fintiflyushkami.

shtob ne bludit’ s puti’, yebyomsya na polu

In order to preserve, more or less, the iambic meter, I made a few more changes here – since Russian, unlike Yiddish, is not a Germanic language, it’s harder to keep the same structure + word order while also maintaining the rhythm. I would translate this back to English as:

“Your house is filled with trifles by your wife. To not stray off the path, we’re fucking on the floor”

So a few notes before we get into the choice of words for “chintz” and “keep it real”. To preserve the iamb, I changed “his” to “your”. This changes the lines from a narration of events to some outside party to a conversation between the two men at the center. Russian also has both formal and informal you (formal you is also the plural form, as is the case in a number of other languages). I went with informal you because I wanted to preserve the fact that his wife has filled his house not their house, as someone pointed out in the original chain (though I don’t think that differentiation is nearly as striking in the 2nd person) and because it’s unlikely you’d be on formal you with someone you’re fucking (unless it’s, like, a kink thing). I honestly didn’t even consider making it formal, but that would actually raise a lot of interesting implications about the relationship between the speaker and the husband, as well as with what that means about the “realness” of the situation. Is, in fact, the narrator only creating a mirage of a more real, more meaningful encounter, while the actual truth – that there is a woman the husband has made promises to that he’s betraying – is obscured? that this intimacy is just a facade? Is there perhaps some sort of power differential that the narrator wishes to point out? Or perhaps is the way that the narrator is keeping it real by pointing out the distance between the two of them? there is no pretense of intimacy, the narrator is calling this what it is – an encounter without deeper significance?

Much to think about, but I actually think the two men do have history –  i think the narrator remembers the house back when it was actually only “his house” and was as yet unfilled with chintz. We also don’t know what they were calling each other prior to this moment. This could be the first time they switched to the informal you. 

Ok moving on, I originally translated it as “твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками жены”. Honestly, this sounds more elegant than what I have now, but I ultimately though removing the wife from either a subject or agent position (grammatically, I mean) was too big a betrayal of the original. The original judges the wife. She took an active role in filling the house. If she were made passive, that read is certainly a possible one – perhaps even the dominant one – but it could also read more like “we are doing this in a space filled with reminders of his wife and the life they share” – the action of filling is no longer what’s being focused on. Why do I say the current translation is inelegant? I feel you stumble over it a little, because it’s almost a garden path sentence. This is also an assset though. “Zhenoy tvoy dom napolnen” is a fully grammatical sentence on its own, and it means “Your house is filled by your wife” – as in English, the primary read is that the wife is what the house is full of. If the sentence makes you stumble, perhaps that’s even good – we focus, for good reason, on the relationship between the two men, but in a translation, the wife is able to draw more attention to herself.

Ok, chintz: I chose the word “финтифлюшки” (fintiflyushki), meaning trifle/bobble/tchotchke, because it, allegedly, comes from the german phrase finten und flausen, meaning illusions and vanity/nonsense. Once again, I like that the word has a journey, specifically a cross-linguistic one.

Keep it real: this one, frankly, fails to capture the impact of the original, in my opinion, but allow me to explain the reasoning. “Stray off the path” implies, again, that there is some sort of path that both the narrator and the husband were on before the wife and the chintz – and one they intend to continue taking, one that this act is a maintenance of. It brings in a little irony, since the husband very much is straying from the path of his marriage. “Bludit’“ can also mean to be unfaithful in a marriage (as, in fact, can “stray”). The proto-slavic word it comes from can mean to delude or debauch – they want to do the latter but not the former.

As for register – “shtob” is a bit informal. I would write the full version (shto by) in an email, for example. The word for fuck, yebyomsa, is from one of the “mat” words, the extra special top tier of russian swears, definitely not to be said in polite company (and, if you are a man of a certain generation or background, not in front of women; it’s not that the use of mat automatically invokes a male-only environment, but if we’re already thinking that deeply about it. But while we’re on the topic, i will say that in my circles in the US, women use mat much more actively than men (at least in front of me, who was, up until recently, a woman and also a child).)

French is my first language but I kinda hate it, it’s complicated and annoying. This took me hours and I’m sure it would’ve been better/easier if I didn’t live my life in English 75% of the time.

Sa femme envahit son chez-lui. Je le mets à l'aise et le baise par terre.

I kept the number of syllables of the original. Apparently French is an unstressed language! Cool.

I chose to use “envahit”, meaning invaded, because “filled his house” really struck me. The speaker emphasizes the (in his eyes) overbearing nature of the wife. I couldn’t work chintz in there because it busted the syllable count.

I wanted to keep the husband in a passive role, so the only reference to him in the first line is “sa” ans “son”, or his, and “chez-lui”, meaning his place.

Keep it real was a pain in the ass. I went with “je le mets à l'aise”, or to put at ease. I like the idea that the speaker makes the husband comfortable and reveals his true self. Se mettre à l'aise can also mean to undress oneself (cheeky) which I liked. I feel like it also implies the narrator seducing the husband, and I liked that too.

Baise is, I think, the perfect equivalent to fuck. It’s vulgar and implies casual and/or rough, quick sex. And it’s only one syllable and every other synonym was like, a whole phrase.

Sa femme lui remplit de meubles la maison. C'est donc sur le tapis que j'encule le mari.

His wife fills his house with furniture. That's why it's on the rug that I fuck the husband in the ass.

I want to use alexandrines to translate the iambic meter of the English poem, since alexandrines are the most prestigious and classical form, analogous to blank verse in English. Therefore, the first line is a very symmetrical, literary form, divided neatly into halves which are themselves divided into halves. Furthermore, the silent "e" in "femme" must be pronounced for the scansion to work. The second line is also an alexandrine, but only if the silent "e" in "encule" is not pronounced.

I use "enculer" here because English "fuck him" implies that the narrator is penetrating him, and because it's a very vulgar word. "niquer" and "foutre" were other options, but "enculer" restricts the sense to gay adultery. However, because "enculer" begins with a vowel, it would be ambiguous to say "l'encule" here, so I rephrased the sentence to explicitly say that it's the husband who is getting fucked.

I chose not to directly translate "keep it real" here, partly because my vocabulary is not very modern and I'm not sure of the correct translation into colloquial French, partly because I think I can convey the contrast between chintz and keeping it real solely through rhythm and grammar, and partly because I read the original poem as related to the idea that the house is too full of objects for there to be any space to fuck vigorously that isn't the floor.

I use "de meubles sa maison" instead of the normal word order "sa maison de meubles" in a deliberate archaism / poetic license that emphasizes the symmetry of the first line, in direct contrast to the rather colloquial, humorous tone of the second line.

The first line repeats "sa", "lui", in order to convey the narrator's focus on the husband, and "lui remplit" implies that the wife has deliberately filled the house with objects in order to get to the husband -- the filling is something that the husband is undergoing personally, as if the house were part of his body. This also carries the veiled connotation that the wife's decorating habits are, in their own way, fucking the husband.

The narrator's matter-of-fact tone in the second line implies that it's obvious that the husband is going to get fucked, and that he is going to fuck the husband no matter what, on top of any and all furniture the wife has bought.

It’s actually quite tricky to translate. Because it’s so short, each word and grammatical construction is carrying a lot of weight. It also, as people have noted, plays with registers. “Chintz” is a word with its own set of associations. Chintz is a type of fabric with its origins in India. The disparaging connotation is from chintz’s eventual commonality. Chintz was actually banned from England and France because the local textile mills couldn’t compete.

Keep it real” is tremendously difficult to translate – it’s a bit difficult to even define. It means to be authentic and genuine, but it also has connotations of staying true to one’s roots. Like many English slang words, it comes first from AAVE. From this article on the phrase:

“[K]eeping it real meant performing an individual’s experience of being Black in the United States. As such, it became a form of resistance. Insisting on a different reality, one that wasn’t recognized by the dominant culture, empowered Black people to ‘forge a parallel system of meaning,’ according to cultural critic Mich Nyawalo…The phrase’s roots in racialized resistance, however, were erased when it was adopted by the mostly-White film world of the 1970s and ’80s….Keeping it real in this context indicated a performance done so well that audiences could forget it was a performance.This version of keeping it real wasn’t about testifying to personal experience; it was about inventing it.”

One has to imagine that jjbang8 did not have the origins of these phrases in mind when composing the poem, but even if by coincidence, the etymological and cultural journeys of these two central lexemes perfectly reflect the themes of the poem. The two words have themselves traveled away from the authenticity they once represented, and, in a new context, have taken on new meanings – the hero of our poem, the unnamed “him”, is, presumably, in quite a similar situation.

Setting aside the question of register, of the phonology, prosody, and meter of the original, of the information that is transmitted through bits of grammar that don’t necessarily exist in other languages – a gifted translator might be able to account for all of these – how do you translate the journey of the words themselves?

In my translations, I decided to go for the most evocative words, even if they don’t evoke the exact same things as in the original. The strength of these two lines is that they imply that there’s more than just what you see, whether that’s the details of the story – what’s happening in the marriage? how do the narrator and the husband know each other? – or the cultural background of the very words themselves. I wanted to try and replicate this effect.

Yiddish first:

זייַן ווייַב האָט אָנגעפֿילט זייַן הויז מיט הבלים

צו בלייַבן וויטיש, איך שטוף אים אופֿן דיל. zayn vayb hot ongefilt zayn hoyz mit havolim.

tsu blaybn vitish, ikh shtup im afn dil

This translation is pretty direct. There is a word for chintz in Yiddish – tsits – but, as far as I can tell, it refers only to the fabric; it doesn’t have the same derogatory connotation as in English. I chose, instead, havolim, a loshn-koydesh word that means “vanity, nothingness, nonsense, trifles”. In Hebrew, it can also mean breath or vapor. I chose this over the other competitors because it, too, is a word with a journey and with a secondary meaning. Rather than imagining the bright prints of chintz, we might imagine a more olfactory implication – his wife has filled his house with perfumes or cleaning fluids. It can carry the implication that something is being masked as well as the associations with vanity and gaudiness.

Vitish – Okay, this is a good one. Keep in mind, of course, that I’ve never heard or seen it used before today, so my understanding of its nuances is very limited, but I’ll explain to you exactly how I am sourcing its meaning. The Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary (CYED) gives this as “gone astray (esp. woman); slang correct, honest”. I used the Yiddish Book Center’s optical character recognition software, which allows you to search for strings in their corpus, to confirm that both usages are, in fact, attested. It’s a pretty rare word in text, though, as the CYED implies, it might have been more common in spoken speech. It appears in a glossary in “Bay unds yuden” (Among Us Jews) as a thieves cant word, where it’s definted as נאַריש, שרעקעוודיק, אונבעהאלפ. אויך נישט גנביש. אין דער דייַטשער גאַונער-שפראַך –  witsch – נאַריש, or “foolish, terrible, clumsy/pathetic. not of the thieves world. in the German thieves cant witsch means foolish”. A vitishe nekeyve (vitishe woman) is either a slacker or a prostitute. I can’t prove this for sure, but my sense is that it might come from the same root as vitz, joke (it’s used a couple of times in the corpus to mention laughing at a vitish remark – which makes it seem kind of similar to witty). I assume the German thieve’s cant that’s being referred to is Rotwelsch, which has its own fascinating history and, in fact, incorporates a lot of Yiddish. In fact, for this reason, some of the first Yiddish linguists were actually criminologists! What an excellent set of associations, no? It has the slangy sense of straightforward of honest; it has a sense of sexual non-normativity (we might use it to read into the relationship between the narrator and the husband) – and a feminized one at that; it was used by an underground subculture, and, again, the meaning there was quite different – like the “real” in “keeping it real” it was used to indicate whether or not someone was “in” on the life (tho “real” is used to mean that the person is in, while “vitish” is used to mean they’re not). It’s variety of meanings are more ambiguous than “keep it real”, which can pretty much only be read positively, and it also brings in a tinge of criminality. Though it doesn’t have the same exact connotations as “keep it real”, I think it’s about as ideal of a fit as we’ll get because it’s equally evocative of more below the surface. I also chose “tsu blaybn vitish”, which is “to stay vitish”, as opposed to something like “to make it vitish” to keep the slight ambiguity of time that “keep it real” has – keeping it real does< I think, imply that there is a pre-existing “real” to which one can adhere, so I wanted to imply the same.

The rest is straight-forward. “Shtup” is one of a few words the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (CEYD) gives for “fuck”, and I think it has a nice sound.

Ok, now Russian

женой твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками

чтоб не блудить с пути, ебемся на полу

zhenoy tvoy dom napolnin fintiflyushkami.

shtob ne bludit’ s puti’, yebyomsya na polu

In order to preserve, more or less, the iambic meter, I made a few more changes here – since Russian, unlike Yiddish, is not a Germanic language, it’s harder to keep the same structure + word order while also maintaining the rhythm. I would translate this back to English as:

“Your house is filled with trifles by your wife. To not stray off the path, we’re fucking on the floor”

So a few notes before we get into the choice of words for “chintz” and “keep it real”. To preserve the iamb, I changed “his” to “your”. This changes the lines from a narration of events to some outside party to a conversation between the two men at the center. Russian also has both formal and informal you (formal you is also the plural form, as is the case in a number of other languages). I went with informal you because I wanted to preserve the fact that his wife has filled his house not their house, as someone pointed out in the original chain (though I don’t think that differentiation is nearly as striking in the 2nd person) and because it’s unlikely you’d be on formal you with someone you’re fucking (unless it’s, like, a kink thing). I honestly didn’t even consider making it formal, but that would actually raise a lot of interesting implications about the relationship between the speaker and the husband, as well as with what that means about the “realness” of the situation. Is, in fact, the narrator only creating a mirage of a more real, more meaningful encounter, while the actual truth – that there is a woman the husband has made promises to that he’s betraying – is obscured? that this intimacy is just a facade? Is there perhaps some sort of power differential that the narrator wishes to point out? Or perhaps is the way that the narrator is keeping it real by pointing out the distance between the two of them? there is no pretense of intimacy, the narrator is calling this what it is – an encounter without deeper significance?

Much to think about, but I actually think the two men do have history –  i think the narrator remembers the house back when it was actually only “his house” and was as yet unfilled with chintz. We also don’t know what they were calling each other prior to this moment. This could be the first time they switched to the informal you. 

Ok moving on, I originally translated it as “твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками жены”. Honestly, this sounds more elegant than what I have now, but I ultimately though removing the wife from either a subject or agent position (grammatically, I mean) was too big a betrayal of the original. The original judges the wife. She took an active role in filling the house. If she were made passive, that read is certainly a possible one – perhaps even the dominant one – but it could also read more like “we are doing this in a space filled with reminders of his wife and the life they share” – the action of filling is no longer what’s being focused on. Why do I say the current translation is inelegant? I feel you stumble over it a little, because it’s almost a garden path sentence. This is also an assset though. “Zhenoy tvoy dom napolnen” is a fully grammatical sentence on its own, and it means “Your house is filled by your wife” – as in English, the primary read is that the wife is what the house is full of. If the sentence makes you stumble, perhaps that’s even good – we focus, for good reason, on the relationship between the two men, but in a translation, the wife is able to draw more attention to herself.

Ok, chintz: I chose the word “финтифлюшки” (fintiflyushki), meaning trifle/bobble/tchotchke, because it, allegedly, comes from the german phrase finten und flausen, meaning illusions and vanity/nonsense. Once again, I like that the word has a journey, specifically a cross-linguistic one.

Keep it real: this one, frankly, fails to capture the impact of the original, in my opinion, but allow me to explain the reasoning. “Stray off the path” implies, again, that there is some sort of path that both the narrator and the husband were on before the wife and the chintz – and one they intend to continue taking, one that this act is a maintenance of. It brings in a little irony, since the husband very much is straying from the path of his marriage. “Bludit’“ can also mean to be unfaithful in a marriage (as, in fact, can “stray”). The proto-slavic word it comes from can mean to delude or debauch – they want to do the latter but not the former.

As for register – “shtob” is a bit informal. I would write the full version (shto by) in an email, for example. The word for fuck, yebyomsa, is from one of the “mat” words, the extra special top tier of russian swears, definitely not to be said in polite company (and, if you are a man of a certain generation or background, not in front of women; it’s not that the use of mat automatically invokes a male-only environment, but if we’re already thinking that deeply about it. But while we’re on the topic, i will say that in my circles in the US, women use mat much more actively than men (at least in front of me, who was, up until recently, a woman and also a child).)

French is my first language but I kinda hate it, it’s complicated and annoying. This took me hours and I’m sure it would’ve been better/easier if I didn’t live my life in English 75% of the time.

Sa femme envahit son chez-lui. Je le mets à l'aise et le baise par terre.

I kept the number of syllables of the original. Apparently French is an unstressed language! Cool.

I chose to use “envahit”, meaning invaded, because “filled his house” really struck me. The speaker emphasizes the (in his eyes) overbearing nature of the wife. I couldn’t work chintz in there because it busted the syllable count.

I wanted to keep the husband in a passive role, so the only reference to him in the first line is “sa” ans “son”, or his, and “chez-lui”, meaning his place.

Keep it real was a pain in the ass. I went with “je le mets à l'aise”, or to put at ease. I like the idea that the speaker makes the husband comfortable and reveals his true self. Se mettre à l'aise can also mean to undress oneself (cheeky) which I liked. I feel like it also implies the narrator seducing the husband, and I liked that too.

Baise is, I think, the perfect equivalent to fuck. It’s vulgar and implies casual and/or rough, quick sex. And it’s only one syllable and every other synonym was like, a whole phrase.

Das Frauchen füllt sein Haus mit Tand

Um der Sache treu zu bleiben, fick ich ihn am Boden.

Thankfully the jump from one germanic language to another means I can keep the sentence structure practically as is. Now for the word choices:

Das Frauchen: a diminutive of “Frau”, which can both mean simply “woman” as well as “wife”. I thought a diminutive nicely expresses what the narrator thinks of her (aka not much, he doesn’t consider her a serious rival because altho he might not have the vows and the rings and the marriage, the husband clearly prefers (fucking) him). I was thinking of using “Fräulein” first, which is also a diminutive but nowadays used chiefly derogatively, but this gets tricky because Fräulein historically referred to unmarried (usually young) women, making it ambiguous enough that it could instead be talking about a young daughter that has taken over leading the household or something. Further points: I chose “das” instead of “sein” because I would have to choose one or the other AGAIN in front of “Haus”, and I wanted to avoid the repetition, and emphasizing that it’s HIS house but “the woman” (derogative) felt more poignant than HIS woman but “the house” (neutral). Final point: “Frauchen” is also commonly used to refer to the female owner of a dog! Which could imply that the narrator thinks the wife has her husband “on a leash”, since it’s his house but he’s clearly not putting his foot down regarding what she does with it

Tand: one of the many, many german words for “useless worthless pretty little things that are a waste of money”. There’s nothing innately exotic about it and maybe “Kitsch” would be a better translation for the cultural context of chintz, but I just liked it better :P Tand also has a bit of a more elevated feel to it because it’s quite an archaic word. Whether you use Kitsch or Tand doesn’t change the syllable count either, but I think I just like the harder consonants of Tand to end the first line with

Um der Sache treu zu bleiben: definitely a tricky one!! “to keep it real” is a crazy difficult concept to translate (as others have mentioned), so this phrase is maybe closer to “to stay true to the spirit of things”, which brings up a whole barrage of bew questions - what “spirit of things”, the chintz? The Fakeness that the wife injects in every facet of her marriage? I think I like that idea best - her husband fucking other men in their shared home is CERTAINLY not the spirit that the wife is TRYING to embody, after all she’s trying to keep up appearances of a wealthy and “everything’s good and fine” kinda life. The narrator however sees how she invests in this lifestyle by buying an overflowing amount of cheap imitations and goes “alright, you want fake? I can give you fake. Fake fucking marriage, watch how faithless and debauched I can make your husband”. And another fun thing: You can “stay true” to the spirit of things, but “treu bleiben” is also the phrase you would use to express that you are, for example, staying true to your partner. Which, you know. Precisely not what is happening here.

The rest of the the line (“fick ich ihn am Boden”) is basically just a word for word translation of “I fuck him on the floor” - english “fucking” and german “ficken” stem from the same roots etymologically and are similarly crass words for sex. I used the contracted “fick ich ihn” instead of the proper “ficke ich ihn” both for a more colloquial, vulgar tone and for the syllable count, and “on the floor” is maybe more properly rendered as “auf dem Boden”, but again, “am Boden” fits better vis-a-vis syllables.

Lastly: meter! The original is of course an almost perfect, even iambic pentameter. My version isn’t, but I still love how it ended up - the first line is just four nice little iambs, but the second line consists of SEVEN trochees.

I don’t think I was quite able to translate the extreme tonal shift between the two lines as it exists in English, and the consonantal alliterations didn’t entirely carry over either, but now thanks to the shift in length AND meter, it’s still JARRING to read this and try to jump from one line to the next.

Ok Russian first ok..

мишурной дрянью его баба дом набила.

во вкусе лучшем мы ебемся на полу.

(his woman’s stuffed his house with glitzy rubbish.

in better taste, we fuck on the floor.)

I do love and respect that everyone’s instinct in translation is to give agency to the wife or cast light on the violation of the act, but I think that this is a poem about and by a guy fucking someone’s husband (whose wife he clearly disrespects) – this marriage means less than nothing to the speaker specifically, and as a consequence of that I chose to make him as direct and even misogynistic as I could.

Translating across cultural contexts, I don’t think it’s that abnormal for a Russian-speaking (thus plausibly stealth) gay man to be much more abrasive and derisive of women than gay men usually are in English; the stereotypes and context are different. Of course there are flowery and sensitive gay poets and gymnasts, but what if the speaker is exaggeratedly macho instead? There’s no particularly strong implication about his presentational aesthetic in the poem in English (except that he cares about chintz, which I suppose does imply art gay), so translations can take it in all sorts of directions.

So then: мишура isn’t exactly kitsch or chintz, it wasn’t Once In Style and then stopped being for arbitrary reasons of taste – it means “tinsel” but it’s so specifically now a word for gaudy tasteless expensive-looking cheap trash (by analogy to tinsel not being gold, for example) that people mostly call actual tinsel дождик (rain).

Мишурная дрянь then is “glitzy rubbish”, but, obviously, much stronger (дрянь is a quite strong derisive) and much more suggestive of the wife’s womanhood being a cause of the chintz (I’m not sure how else to phrase this, but I think in a spiritually faithful Russian rendering of the poem it should be implied).

Баба is sometimes just a dialect word for “woman”, not particularly derisive, but in urban contexts it’s an explicit contrast with more polite and respectable ways to be a woman. People (even other women) in cities use it almost like a slur. You can’t go very much farther down from here without spending cognitive effort on thinking of an insult, and notably it avoids respecting anything like a bond between the lover and the lover’s wife – it’s a one-way possessive relation, the wife here is reduced to an annoying possession of the lover, so deeply a non-threat that it’s even doing the lover a completely non-objectionable taste-developing favour to introduce some “good taste” into the equation.

Of course you can’t necessarily fuck someone on the floor in objectively good taste, but our speaker now explicitly values the aesthetic of his coupling with the lover (as something realer, more important, aesthetically more valuable?) above the wife’s contribution to the house. Misogyny, ladies and gentlemen! Can’t translate gay poetry about gay adultery into Russian without it.

Or well you can, probably you should, certainly it’s the moral thing to do, but this angle has now also been done, and I think with reference to at least a certain subset of angry stealth gay man it can be taken as ~representational~. :^)

Also I think I did pretty good making the metre flow less jarring than in the original – to better convey that this person doesn’t think anything is wrong with this.

And now we swerve into Yiddish, where I am so sorry my loves I don’t have a phone keyboard that can do this properly, we have to do it in english letters :) I am also sorry if it is not very literary and maybe even betrays my origins as an icky little Galitzianer, but in my defense I don’t think the original is either :)

Well like, I think you probably can’t achieve as strong and clear an image of that type of thing in Yiddish that we wrote about above. I’m not going to make the adultery heterosexual and the speaker a woman here as is my instinct, because although easier (I have been aware of the scenario described playing out in Hasidland; this type of thing is all a certain type of aunt talks about) it’s just not going to be as fun for people to read about on here. If everyone else is doing this as if it were about specifically gay adultery, nu, then it’s about gay adultery.

What kind of gay adultery? Well let’s see:

zayn vayb hot mit ir tamlozkeyt zayn hoyz gefilt.

(his wife has filled his house with her lack of taste )

We don’t have a directly translating expression for chintz that sounds good here and i didn’t feel quite at home with @mashkaroom ’s “havolim” (which does fuck conceptually i’ve just never heard it either) because it’s not in my idiom. but tamlozkeyt! that in the right rickety old woman’s mouth is a deadly indictment of everything about you. The speaker is implicitly a tactful sort of fellow about his scorn for the wife here, tamlozkeyt is a very general term, he doesn’t specify that it’s cheap or anything.

It could be here that the wife fills the house with tacky objects, or it could be that she “fills the house…” as the saying goes of women creating living space by their presence… except she doesn’t make it livable, she occupies the entire space with her presence, which here we may read as actually without good taste or as distasteful to the speaker personally, which the speaker doesn’t know is personal and universalizes)

tsu zayn basheydn, ikh tren im afn dol

admittedly in my dinky little Yiddish floor is podloge and dol sounds a dot archaic but that doesnt quite scan as forcefully so we will let the literarism stay :) I think it adds something, a little, combined with the preserved original’s thing of the metre being jarring

“to be decent [modest, fitting, i’m doing a wordplay ma are you proud - by implication to spare him the shame of me seeing his ugly tacky wifeguy house, or to do the noble thing and draw attention away from it ], i fuck him on the floor”

basheydn means modest but also has a connotation of decency in the social sense, and then of course there’s whatever you want to read into “sheyd” (demon) being in it

I think the intent of to keep it real in the original is like to cast doubt on the correctness and taste and even the normalcy/rightfulness of the wife’s life with the lover, so here rather than “to keep it..” anything we are rescuing it from its earlier state and making it new :) making it correct and implicitly the normal way to do it, so we can read some like good old fashioned “went to mikdash melech to have repressed gay sex and think about his old chavrusa” type of longing into the speaker here, like babyboy it is cosmically right and totally not even a bit a sin if it’s us)

trenen is a more current Yiddish slang for fucking, shtup is like… People still use it but for its own particular effect you understand, it has a yikhes a history a patina of age … nowadays many people use it for “to stuff” (deep American Yiddish) or “to sew/fix/do halfassedly” (otherwise), it’s lost the air of power it had in the glubinka (though you will still be understood elsewhere where the old slang is still passed down from people’s grandmothers) :^)

you are much more likely to intimidate and impress an enormous hulking balabos who wants to have a word about your parking if you tell him gey tren zikh, rather than shtup zikh, all things considered ! it also has a more forceful sound, and i like it for the immediate contrast with the way the speaker speaks in the rest of this translation

YES EXACTLY the context of the affair is inherently going to include strong (and denied) feelings on the part of the speaker about the wife because she represents the heteronormative social order to him SORRY LONGPOST I’M JUST THRILLED THIS LOCALIZATION WORKED IN TWO LINES here’s a cut

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Commission pieceeee