#How to understand English

[meenah]

im so sad the guy making the 6+ language minecraft server sucks so bad because that is a perfect study for a linguistic anthropology person like me but knowing the person running it it will be a mess and people will be bummed with it in like 20 seconds

[gunsatthaphan]

#a lost cause.

[hedgehog-moss]

Inspired by your last ask! What are the best French books you’ve read that have no English translation yet? I read Play Boy and Qui a tué mon père (really loved the latter) last year and it feels so fun to read something that other Americans can’t access yet

I'm too nervous to make any list of the Best XYZ Books because I don't want to raise your expectations too high! But okay, here's my No English Translation-themed list of books I've enjoyed in recent years. I tried to make it eclectic in terms of genre as I don't know what you prefer :)

Biographies

• Le dernier inventeur, Héloïse Guay de Bellissen: I just love prehistory and unusual narrators so I enjoyed this one; it's about the kids who discovered the cave of Lascaux, and some of the narration is written from the perspective of the cave <3 I posted a little excerpt here (in English).

• Ces femmes du Grand Siècle, Juliette Benzoni: Just a fun collection of portraits of notable noblewomen during the reign of Louis XIV, I really liked it. For people who like the 17th century. I think it was Emil Cioran who said his favourite historical periods were the Stone Age and the 17th century but tragically the age of salons led to the Reign of Terror and Prehistory led to History.

• La Comtesse Greffulhe, Laure Hillerin: I've mentioned this one before, it's about the fascinating Belle Époque French socialite who was (among other things) the inspiration for Proust's Duchess of Guermantes. I initially picked it up because I will read anything that's even vaguely about Proust but it was also a nice aperçu of the Belle Époque which I didn't know much about.

• Nous les filles, Marie Rouanet: I've also recommended this one before but it's such a sweet little viennoiserie of a book. The author talks about her 1950s childhood in a town in the South of France in the most detailed, colourful, earnest way—she mentions everything, describes all the daft little games children invent like she wants ageless aliens to grasp the concept of human childhood, it's great.

I'll add Trésors d'enfance by Christian SIgnol and La Maison by Madeleine Chapsal which are slightly less great but also sweet short nostalgic books about childhood that I enjoyed.

Fantasy

• Mers mortes, Aurélie Wellenstein: I read this one last year and I found the characters a bit underwhelming / underexplored but I always enjoy SFF books that do interesting things with oceans (like Solaris with its sentient ocean-planet), so I liked the atmosphere here, with the characters trying to navigate a ghost ship in ghost seas...

• Janua Vera, Jean-Philippe Jaworski: Not much to say about it other than they're short stories set in a mediaeval fantasy world and no part of this description is usually my cup of tea, but I really enjoyed this read!

Essays / literary criticism / philosophy

• Eloge du temps perdu, Frank Lanot: I thought this was going to be about idleness, as the title suggests, and I love books about idleness. But it's actually a collection of short essays about (French) literature and some of them made me appreciate new things about authors and books I thought I knew by heart, so I enjoyed it

• Le Pont flottant des rêves, Corinne Atlan: Poetic musings about translation <3 that's all

• Sisyphe est une femme, Geneviève Brisac: Reflections about the works of female writers (Natalia Ginzburg, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, etc) that systematically made me want to go read the author in question, even when I'd already read & disliked said author. That's how you know it's good literary criticism

Let's add L'Esprit de solitude by Jacqueline Kelen which as the title suggests, ponders the notion of solitude, and Le Roman du monde by Henri Peña-Ruiz which was so lovely to read in terms of literary style I don't even care what it was about (it's philosophy of foundational myths & stories) (probably difficult to read if you're not fully fluent in French though)

Did not fit in the above categories:

• Entre deux mondes by Olivier Norek—it's been translated in half a dozen languages, I was surprised to find no English translation! It's a crime novel and a pretty bleak read on account of the setting (the Calais migrant camp) but I'd recommend it

• Saga, Tonino Benacquista: Also seems to have been translated in a whole bunch of languages but not English? :( I read it ages ago but I remember it as a really fun read. It's a group of loser screenwriters who get hired to write a TV series, their budget is 15 francs and a stale croissant and it's going to air at 4am so they can do whatever they want seeing as no one will watch it. So they start writing this intentionally ridiculous unhinged show, and of course it acquires Devoted Fans

Books that I didn't think existed in English translation but they do! but you can still read them in French if you want

• Scrabble: A Chadian Childhood, Michaël Ferrier: What it says on the tin! It's a short and well-written account of the author's childhood in Chad just before the civil war. I read it a few days ago and it was a good read, but then again I just love bittersweet stories of childhood

• On the Line, Joseph Ponthus: A short diary-like account of the author's assembly line work in a fish factory. I liked the contrast between the robotic aspect of the job and the poetic nature of the text; how the author used free verse / repetition / scansion to give a very immediate sense of the monotony and rhythm of his work (I don't know if it's good in English)

• The End of Eddy, Edouard Louis: The memoir of a gay man growing up in a poor industrial town in Northern France—pretty brutal but really good

• And There Was Light, Jacques Lusseyran: Yet another memoir sorry, I love people's lives! Jacques Lusseyran lost his sight as a child, and was in the Resistance during WWII despite being blind. It's a great story, both for the historical aspects and for the descriptions of how the author experiences his blindness

• The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception, Emmanuel Carrère: an account of the Jean-Claude Romand case—a French man who murdered his whole family to avoid being discovered as a fraud, after spending his entire adult life pretending to be a doctor working at the WHO and fooling everyone he knew. Just morbidly fascinating, if you like true crime stuff

[ioannushka]

Good morning and good evening 🌅🌆

[aquanutart]

Nyaha~! Caught in my electroweb! ♡

[evie-doesnt-write]

“Why doesn’t Toshiro just tell Laios that’s not his name??” He’s an immigrant, next question

[cubedmango]

「30歳の童貞に片想いすると魔法使いになれるらしい」 (from cherry magic volume 11 special edition) — english translation

[princess-an]

Merman Bakugou - *yelling dolphin noises*

You - *holding a finger to your ear because he's so loud*

Marman Bakugou - *somehow knowing you can't understand him starts yelling in whale*

You- “just because you yell in a different way doesn't mean I'm going to understand you this is beyond a language barrier my dude you have a tail.”



[moerusai]

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Man Suang is a movie to watch multiple times to unpack all the lies and twists and unreliable narratives, to appreciate the performances and choices that each actor makes to stay true to their character among such a big ensemble cast.

Even then, there are still nuances to catch with every rewatch (trust me, I'm on my fifth).

The lackluster English subtitle (partly due to the translator's negligence, but mostly due to the subtlety being lost in translation) certainly doesn't do the dialogues and the storyline justice.

So I think some of us, especially those from Western cultures, could do to sit down and contemplate a movie so rooted in a specific culture before sharing, frankly, insensible opinions on it.

[karamazovanon]

controversial opinion maybe but it BEWILDERS me when people (mostly americans ime) genuinely seriously with their whole chest complain about how impossibly hard russian names are. like. do a single google search. i don't see how you can comprehend that charles = chuck and margaret = peggy but can't fathom that rodion = rodya. how is this such a huge barrier of entry for people

[tepli-mravenci]

I find it funny how English speaking people use he/she pronouns for objects/animals as a way of showing endearment when there's multiple languages - including mine - that just gender objects and animal species in general

Table? Guy shaped.

Shoe? Girl shaped.

Door? They/them that bitch.

Cat? Girl until proven otherwise.

Dog? Boy until proven otherwise.

Pig? Let's not even bother, it's an it/its.

And that's just Czech. German has completely different genders for most of these things. And that goes for every other heavily gendered language. It's a curse really :)

[raccoonwxrks]

He's a creepy little shit, I want to shake him like a frappè

[briarrolfe]

Our 78 year old Italian neighbour Josie might not remember my name, and may never get my pronouns right, but the thing is: We Are Besties and I am totally obsessed with her. She blasts disco music 24 hours a day. She chain smokes. She is so obsessed with Vegemite that she cut a holiday visiting family back home short because she was seized by Cravings. She took her first ever selfie with me. She flirts with my fiancé. Once I had to rescue her from her finding a lizard in her toaster. She drinks her first coffee of the day at like 4 am. Recently she told me “if anyone tries to take you away from me… I will kill them” with total seriousness and I fully reciprocate it. She is a constant source of chaos in our lives. I would do anything for her and I love her with all my heart

[astranauticus]

one really interesting thing about the Sui siblings is that their sibling age order isn’t so much about biological age but more about when they first managed to separate themselves from Sui and therefore how comfortable they are in their own individual identity (i’m far from the first person to point out that the Sui siblings are basically the opposite of the seaborne/We Many) - Shuo, the oldest brother is so secure in himself that he’s able to create a whole identity entirely separate from Sui, which is how we get Chongyue The Very Human Guy. Ling is able to defeat the Sui Xiang in invitation to wine with ease simply because she sees it as a shadow of herself, as opposed to Nian who sees the siblings as shadows and dreams of Sui. Dusk, the second youngest of the siblings, is so scared of the existential threat that is Sui that she has hid herself in her paintings and refused to sleep for centuries just to hide from it

… which makes me really want to meet the 12th brother (the cook) because if that is where Dusk, the 11th’s head is at i cannot imagine he’s having a good time either

[brookheimer]

the one thing i feel pretty certain about for this episode is that america will not decide the election. a decision will be made, a president will be elected, but america will not be the deciding factor.

succession can’t mimic 2016 or 2020 point blank, that would be boring and have nothing to say. it can’t try to outdo trump because it’ll go too whacky and fall flat like veep’s last season (sorry conheads, no way he’s winning). but what it CAN do is illustrate the immensely corrupt, often arbitrary, and hugely influential nature of news media and conglomerations on political processes. i think probably jimenez will be in the lead, then atn/waystar does something to, i don’t know, discount votes or cast suspicion on jimenez or call the election for mencken early, and the tide will shift, even though the votes are already in. the votes don’t actually matter. the actual result doesn’t actually matter. that’s the power logan (and as an extension, billionaires and CEOs in general) hold. shiv says it herself to logan in s4e2: “just cause you say it’s true doesn’t make it true. everyone just fucking agrees with you and believes you, so it becomes true and then you can turn around and say like, 'oh, you see? see? i was right.'” but it doesn’t matter that logan’s “a human fucking gaslight,” everything he says comes true anyways. not because he was right, but because that’s how it works. he says things and then they happen, regardless of what the truth is or what should actually come to pass. that’s been one of the key throughlines since the very first episode of the entire show when, in response to kendall calling logan out of touch because times are changing and logan isn't changing with them, logan hisses that everyone always says you’re wrong until you do it and prove you were right: “you make your own reality.” you can't miss the bus if you're the one driving it. the election, the votes, the political process? none of that matters. it was always going to come down to the roys and their ilk (allies or enemies, just the top 1%) — that was the whole point of “what it takes” (the mencken episode) last season, after all.

i’ve seen lots of theories about what america will choose and how the candidates will respond and all that and i just don’t think that’s the show’s focus; i think the whole point is to demonstrate the lack of agency, the illusion of democracy. because, i mean, we’ve already seen the fall of democracy via fascist election and fascist election-denial, both in real life and in the countless (usually mid) satires created afterwards. it would be disappointing to see succession use the election to reiterate that same point of 'ohhh alt-right ahhhhh!!!' i don’t think it’ll be about ‘fascism’ at all — at least, not ‘trump-y’ fascism. it’ll be about fascism in the broader sense, the kind that doesn't sport a KKK hood (even when it keeps one tucked away in the attic). it's the fascism that every single roy (very much including shiv and kendall) aid and abet -- the fascism that so many succession fans don't seem to regard as fascism, despite it quite literally being the definition of fascism. trump wasn’t the entrance of fascism into our political process. he wasn’t the lone sign of the failing of american democracy. democracy in america has long been illusory, trump just made it more blatantly evident with his particular brand of hate-speech-ridden masculinist in-your-face fascism.

so i think that’s what this episode will hopefully focus on — america will not decide. corporations, news media, and the roys will. thus, the president will most likely become president not because the country supports his policies the most, but because he’s likely to agree to help block a business deal for a major media empire, and the other candidate is unlikely to. and this will likely come to pass due to said major media empire's interference and influence: they create their own reality. they say it, and everyone agrees with them and believes them, so it becomes true.

[stuckinapril]

i love anthologies. anthologies are so sexy