#dreamofghosts

Hi Em!!

4. Did you discover any new authors that you love this year?

E. L. Massey!! Like Real People Do and Like You've Nothing Left To Prove were such comfort reads for me this year and I'd love to read more :)

I think you sent this to the wrong blog lmao, but I'll reblog it with the one it should be on!

21. If you couldn’t study the subject you study now, what would you study?

That a very hard question for me because when I was starting university, I wasn't sure whether to study history or languages. I got a degree in history and I absolutely loved it. I'm now studying historical linguistics and literature, basically combining my two life-long interests. I have thought about studying other things though, like heritage studies, archival studies or anthropology. So probably I'd be doing something like that, but I'm a humanities gal through and through lmao

Salut Em :D

12. Vocab or grammar?

Vocab 100%, if you slap enough words together it'll make sense eventually, but if you have all the grammar frameworks but no vocab to fill them with, can you really communicate?

14. Favourite book in target language

I haven't read enough 'books' in French to answer that so for now it's that jerejean one-shot I sent you the link to sldhlsgdkshdk

24. Why are you studying your target languages?

Well I started French because it was compulsory at school, but I chose to continue with it twice because I loved being able to express myself in another language and it clicked with me better than Spanish did? And now I kinda have a bet with myself to see if I can master it so that's a small reason why I'm hopefully doing it for my degree :)

And as for Irish, it really annoyed me that I was never given the opportunity to learn it just because I go to a protestant school, like there's so much heritage attached to the language and it's all around me in the place names and slang and occasional bilingual signage, the few sentences I'm able to string together in Irish really make me feel more like myself.

Thank you for asking 🥰

32. What is a line from a poem/novel/fanfic etc that you return to from time and time again? How did you find it? What does it mean to you?

Ouf, that is tough to pick one. I majored in French and Romance literatures so it was kind of my job to pay extra attention to texts and wording and I started writing quotes down etc. and I like to browse them regularly also because they're in a pretty notebook so I guess you could say I return to lots of lines again and again, each striking differently depending on my mood. But! I shall say that a line from the poem I edited in my masters' thesis (l'Inferno by Dante, in its most ancient known French version) live in my head rent-free: Fais memoire de moy, je te prie, en tes vers (from Canto VI). It would be translated in English as something along the line of "prithee, write memory of me in your verses". There's something so tragic in this line in French that it moves me more than the Italian original (priegoti ch’a la mente altrui mi rechi, Inferno VI-89). Also, best pun ever: memoire/mémoire in French means memory, but also master's thesis. So when I said to my best friend that it was my favourite line from the poem he begged me to make it my thesis' epigraph, so that in Modern French in could mean "make a master's thesis of me, I beg you". And I did!

Also there are lots of other lines from the poem that I still remember and adore, having read them a thousand time before submitting my thesis. But that's long enough an answer already, woops.

33. Do you practice any other art besides writing? Does that art ever tie into your writing, or is it entirely separate?

Not really? I enjoy photography a lot but I have no technique and I do not pretend the pictures I take are anything artsy, but I enjoy taking them anyway.

I love him <3