sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: translated

I decided to read Dungeon Meshi because I kept seeing people on tumblr posting about the new anime adaptation, and it looked fun and cute. And although I don't watch much tv, there was an entire manga I could read instead! So I did.

The basic premise: in a world where adventuring parties going on dungeon crawls is a thing that happens, one guy has a dream: to be able to cook and eat all the different kinds of monsters in the dungeon, to be able to find out how they taste!

And because his party needs to be able to head deep into the dungeon to rescue a party member who was left behind, and they don't have the funds or the time to collect supplies, all of a sudden they have REASON to need to eat monsters. They're going to forage and hunt for all their meals as they make their way down.

So using that as the basis, the manga goes on to explore the worldbuilding, the interrelationships of the characters in the party, everyone's backstories and reasons for being there, a developing plot, and of course, the ingredients and nutritional composition and flavour of every meal they eat.

I absolutely adored every bit of this!!! The main characters are all a delight, and it's the kind of story where the author sees and shows you the inherent personness of all characters, including antagonists. And the world created to make sense of the dungeon's existence is fascinating, as are all the ways the ecosystems within the dungeon are expanded upon to make sense of the creatures living within it.

And it's a story that knows what its themes are, too, and is able to tie them all together in extremely satisfying ways in the climax of the narrative!

I had this moment leading up towards the ending where I was like:

cut for thematic spoilers I guess

ohhhh it's about....everyone being part of a balanced ecosystem of life and death where everything sustains everything else! the various human species included! and I was filled through my very soul with this feeling of connectedness myself.

Anyway it was amazing and I had a lot of feels.

And as well as enjoying all of that, I also just really loved our main characters! We start out seeing them all fairly shallowly but over the course of the story as more aspects of them are revealed they're all just.....I love every one of them.

I did struggle with a few aspects of the manga, but none of it significantly affected my ability to enjoy the read:

1. It kept adding more and more characters, and I got rather lost occasionally trying to keep track of them all. But ultimately it's not vital to remember every tertiary character to get a good read out of this, so it's not as bad as it could be.

2. In the mid to later parts, it became a lot more plot focused and actiony than I'd really been expecting, in a way that made it harder for me to follow, since fight scenes in sequential art are challenging for me. And occasionally it drew back more than I wanted from its focus on food. But it refocused eventually!

3. It turned out to be pro monarchy in the end, which isn't my fave, but it's not like a major theme of the manga or anything so I could overlook it.

4. I kept expecting it to have at least a little bit of textual queerness, and there wasn't any as far as I could see! Even various background relationships or depictions of people's attraction was m/f. But uh. Falin/Marcille, anyone? There are some powerful vibes there. (I'll also accept Laios/Kabru)

In conclusion, I highly recommend it, and if you want to read it, you can read the whole thing online for free in English translation here: https://dungeonmeshi.com/manga/dungeon-meshi-chapter-1/

I thought I had taken more detailed notes on these books to be able to write up a proper book review! These are three volumes in an ongoing manga series which I think is based on a webnovel? but I might be wrong about that. Many things are confusing to me.

Anyway! I saw this recced as a fun transmigration story that had similar vibes to moshang from svsss, and I was like, sold.

The premise:

Our main character, Kondou, gets accidentally sucked from our world into another realm along with a teen girl who is the special chosen one with amazing powers who's the only one who can save the world. Kondou, who isn't supposed to be there, is meanwhile like: "Welp. Better find some way to keep myself busy if I'm here." And volunteers to join the palace accountancy department.

The love interest, Aresh, is a handsome but taciturn captain who takes it on himself to save Kondou from his own self-destructive tendencies.

The first volume felt to me like it was mostly set-up, and it had promise but I didn't really feel like I had a good handle on the characters or their relationships.

The second volume started getting into the good stuff! However this is where my notes oh so helpfully stop, and I read the these multiple months ago so I remember approximately nothing of substance, lol. The relationship vibes are cute, I enjoy that Kondou and the chosen one do still feel a sort of friendship connection with each other since they transmigrated together even though they're very different and end up in very different spheres in this world, iirc the plot/worldbuilding development started to go somewhere in book 3, etc.

I like it and I'll be interested to keep reading! assuming I remember to keep on top of it as it comes out, lol. Which like. it's me. no guarantees.

Over on mastodon I'm participating in a group readalong of TGCF, one chapter per week, and a few weeks ago we finished the first volume of the official translation so I might as well crosspost all my thoughts over to here as like, my book review? Yeah okay here we go! Putting it all below a cut to save your reading page

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When I watched The Untamed (hereafter CQL) in 2021, my immediate thought upon finishing was that I HAD to read the book (hereafter MDZS) that it was based on. Now, more than two years later, I have finally done that.

And it's so good you guys!

And also, really very different from CQL.

I knew that already, because on top of the way that inevitably at least some things get changed in any adaptation process, I understand that the complex system of chinese censorship has standards for a wide variety of different things not being allowed to be shown on tv. And several of those things are integral to the version of the story in MDZS.

Being now familiar with the versions of the story told in both tv and book, I think the difference that's the biggest is the moral universe being presented by the themes of each story. CQL is the story of a person who always tries his best to do what's right, and is treated poorly by society because of it, but eventually is able to triumph. MDZS is the story of a person who makes some huge mistakes and then has to (gets to?) learn how to live with them.

Both are wonderful stories worth telling! And they have a lot in common. But they are not, in the end, the same story. Going forward I will definitely be paying more attention to which version is being tagged as the fandom when I open fic!

I do feel like I'm not quite up to writing a coherent review of the book right now though. I read the first two-thirds or so back in April, and then accidentally took a multi-month break from reading it, and then read through the remainder over the course of the last few weeks. So the beginning portions of the book are fuzzy in my head and easy to confuse with everything else I have read about CQL/MDZS and the fanfic of both, and it's hard to hold the shape of the entire narrative in my head.

But I do have a few more notes! Most of which are varyingly spoilery for either or both of CQL & MDZS

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idk I feel like I'm spending most of this review talking about MDZS only as relates to CQL which feels a bit unfair to MDZS as the originator, like I'm not respecting it as its own thing! But it's hard for me to talk about it in any other way after having spent the last two years so much in the fandom. If I'd come to MDZS before I ever knew anything about CQL this would be reading very differently!

At some point I do want to do a closer reading of MDZS to appreciate it better for what it specifically is doing, like the way I'm currently doing a TGCF close read on mastodon. There's so much fruitful stuff to pay attention to in any work by MXTX.

Anyway please rec me fic that is particularly good at being based in MDZS canon! I want to spend more time exploring it!

Whew, I'm done reading TGCF!!! I read the first half in the officially published translation, and the second half in a fan translation since the official one isn't all published yet, but let me tell you I am ABSOLUTELY going to be rereading the whole dang thing once the official tl is all out.

Anyway! What a book! What a lot of book in which a lot of things happened! I've been reading this thing for over a month, fairly consistently, and it took me this long because I gather the english translation is something like 750,000 words long?!? That is Long.

But what this means is that I feel like I do NOT remember everything that happened well enough to feel like I have a good grasp on the Things that the book is trying to do as a whole. How do all the themes tie into each other? What ARE the themes? This is hard to say when I had trouble even keeping track of who was who amongst all the different secondary characters, because a book this size can fit SO many secondary characters in it, and most of them have at least two completely different names if not more.

(Mu Qing and Feng Xin were particularly bad for this because they go by those names, and also by Nan Yang and Xuan Zhen, and ALSO by pseudonyms where they're pretending to be their own underlings. I absolutely 100% could not keep track of them by all these different names and as a result have very little sense of which is which between them, which I can tell is Problems!)

Anyway anyway! This is a chinese danmei webnovel about a guy who becomes a god (and then stops being a god, and then goes through that cycle a few more times...), and about heavenly politics between all the different gods, and also about the ghost who loves him. And I LOVED it.

There were some parts that got a bit tedious (some of the fight scenes went on a bit long, I will not lie, but then I think this about MOST fight scenes, lol) but overall it was remarkably moreish for the entire very long length.

It's a book about how choices make you who you are, I think, and about the importance of having people in your life whom you can love and trust and rely on. And the way these themes are intertwined with the love story between our hero Xie Lian and the ghost king Hua Cheng is just completely delightful. I adore Xie Lian as a main character and a viewpoint character. He's so endlessly fascinating! He's 800 years old by the time of the main events of the novel, and he's been through a lot (understatement), and he's made very definite and deliberate choices about what kind of person he wants to be. But at the same time, he's spent most of those 800 years living a life where he prioritizes the well-being of pretty much everyone except himself, because he sees that as his job - and in his relationship with Hua Cheng, he finally is introduced to the idea that it doesn't have to be selfish for him to allow happiness into his life, and to have someone prioritize him. I love them both very very much.

I feel like there's a whole enormous thread of another theme I cannot comment on though because I do not know enough about either a) Chinese cosmology or b) cultivation novels as a genre. Which is that although it seems to be the goal of all cultivators to cultivate successfully enough to ascend into godhood, in this book godhood does not uhhhhhhhh seem to be that great. Heaven is full of petty squabbles, a lot of the gods kinda suck in an exciting variety of ways, and you still have jobs to do and paperwork to complete and roles to live up to and asshole coworkers to try to get along with, and so on and so forth. Basically: it doesn't seem to be any better than ordinary human life, except that you get fancy palaces and exclusive access to Brain Twitter (dubious prize). There definitely seems to be questioning of like, why is this the goal? Is this worthwhile? Should we be aiming for something else instead? But again! I do not have enough context for this entire thread of questions to be sure of WHAT it's saying with all this!

Other characters in this book I had strenuous feelings about:

- Ling Wen! I find her FASCINATING. A civil god who is really really really good at administrative work, such that when she rebels, the entirety of heaven is kind of lost without her! It was sooooo funny that when she and Xie Lian are fighting at one point, Xie Lian automatically goes to update Ling Wen about the situation because as the administrative manager of heaven she needs to know, and then is like. Uh. Right. She knows because she's HERE. FIGHTING ME. But we get remarkably little of her internal life and I want to know more about what's going on with her!

- He Xuan and Shi Qingxuan. Obviously! Beefleaf!!!!! God their story is so deliciously painful. One of those things where there is no way for there to be a happy ending but you can't help hoping anyway.

- Guzi - the poor kid! I spent so much of the book being like, auuuughhhhhhh this is so horrible that he's so attached to his dad but that asshole qi rong is possessing his dad and so he's running around after QI RONG endlessly, and then you get just this tiny info drop near the end that actually his dad was the worst and he's so attached to qi rong as his father because qi rong is actually the best dad he's ever had? (low, low bar) Anyway I still hate qi rong but. I want guzi to be able to have a better experience of family :(

This isn't exactly a book review, since it is kind of hard to review just volume 1 of an 8 volume novel, but I just wanted to check in to register how much I love Xie Lian already! There's clearly A Lot that we don't know about him yet, but from everything we see of him he's just....I love him. I'm looking forward to finding out more, both about him and about Hua Cheng (even more of a mystery so far!!!!) and also about all the other characters beloved by fandom who haven't had a huge showing just yet.

The last volume of scum villain!!!! Can't believe it's actually over. The first three volumes contained the entirety of the main story, so this one is a collection of all the extras. I hadn't read all the extras before, only the ones that were posted as additional chapters to the story, so I got to read new-to-me content, not just a new translation!

I had a variety of reactions to the various stories in this collection. There were plenty of great details and fun character stuff, and I was delighted to get to reread the Airplane extras! I love the Airplane extras. But not all the stories were of particular interest to me, as is kind of inevitable in short story collections. And also.....one of the stories, the succubus extra, contained an unpleasant slur for trans people, and that kind of threw me off.

My understanding is that in the original text, a slur is also used, so the translation is accurate in that respect. But I do think that there are other ways the translation could have handled this, to make it clear what the narrative is doing without just confronting the reader with a word like that unexpectedly.

Anyway my other main response to that is to be even more interested in sqq being weird about his own gender and also lbh's, lol. (will never be over

acernor's wife life!!!)

Overall I do still definitely recommend this book, but just, like, be prepared. (also: be prepared for bingqiu sex to um...not be a shining example of healthy communication about their needs and desires. it's very them! and also dear lord.)

This is a pretty elderly collection of folk tales, published nearly 60 years ago, and and it is hugely invested in Aarne-Thompson tale types and Thompson's motif index, which is a highly european system and not....ideal as a framework for investigating stories outside the bounds of the areas the types and index were based on. When you're choosing which stories are worth studying, and what elements of a story are the important elements for what the story is doing, if you do this based mainly on stories from a different background, it's going to affect how the folklore of the culture you're studying is represented!

Anyway, so there's that, and then I also actually have a concern about how accurately the stories are translated. Of course I have not read the originals in Japanese because I am monolingual, but there was a word choice at one point that just stopped me in my tracks.

At one point a character is referred to as having been "crucified". My understanding of Japan is that Christianity is an extremely minor presence there, and even more so historically -- and none of the other stories in the collection show the slightest hint of Christian influence as far as I could tell. So either in the original the character really was crucified and the (generally fairly comprehensive) annotations did not bother discussing the highly unusual presence of this element in the story, or the translator was so laissez-faire about his translation that he paid no attention to the connotations of his word choices. This does not fill me with confidence about the things I DON'T know enough to question in the rest of the collection!

I did appreciate that in the story introductions there were often explanations about elements of Japanese culture that underpin a story, as it helps contextualize aspects of the story that would otherwise be confusing to the outsider reader. And it was very readable as a whole, and included both stories I knew already and stories that were new to me.

So.....a decent collection for its era, but not one I can unambiguously recommend.

I've read the Odyssey once before, over a decade ago, in the Fagles translation. And I really enjoyed it! Then when I heard about the Wilson translation, and the kinds of things she was doing, I was very curious and interested to see how different it would be.

Turns out the two translations have VERY different feels. The Fagles is far wordier and more consciously poetic sounding to the English ear, the Wilson is more plainspoken and direct. I don't know what the experience is like of reading it in Homeric Greek so I don't know which better captures the feel of the original, and trying to google for information on the homeric style gets me a lot of not-very-trustworthy sources saying very different things. But I do appreciate that the Wilson starts with a note on translation choices, so you understand what she's trying to do and her thoughts about her approach as compared to other ways it has been done. The Fagles says nothing about its translation. And because of Wilson's explanation I knew what to look for and appreciate in her version!

I had a very different experience reading the two translations as well, but that could just as easily be the changes in me in the decade between so it's not exactly a rigorous comparison, lol. The first time I read the Odyssey I was newly graduated from university, had a recent concussion, and was on an extremely long flight across half the globe; this time I'm living a settled life in my thirties. Also when I first read it I honestly had very little idea what to expect, because the things I thought I knew about it from popular culture don't actually closely reflect the actual experience of reading the work itself, so I found it constantly surprising.

So the first time I read it, in the Fagles, I engaged with it mostly just as fun story to feel fannish about. And I found it lots of fun! This time, with the Wilson, I read it more as a piece of insight into the culture and values of a very different time and place; plenty interesting, but a bit less fun. Is that me, is that the translation, is that both? Who knows.

So I guess I don't have a lot useful to say about comparative translations here, unfortunately! At any rate, the Odyssey is definitely a poem worth reading, and I'm glad I came back to it, and I'm glad I got some of Wilson's perspective on it too.

Omg this is so funny it's like an Andy Weir novel except the Exciting Cutting-Edge Science Things it's about are....electricity, the mysteries of ocean life, and the classification of species. Because those were new and exciting at the time Verne was writing! I get easily bored with the kinds of modern scifi novels that have merely a vague trapping of plot and character from which to hang lengthy scientific exposition, but when it's from over 150 years ago, the vibes are entirely changed, and I am here for it, lol. I mean, it's still boring and I still skimmed over a not-insignificant amount of the lists of sea creatures and their classification, but I am charmed by it instead of irritated by it?

Anyway, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is from the perspective of a gentleman scientist who is on a mission to help kill an enormous and destructive sea monster, but that monster turns out to instead be a technologically advanced submarine, and the pov character, along with his trusty servant Conseil, and also the harpooner Ned Land who struck the submarine, are captured by the captain of the submarine and are told they will never be allowed to leave again, so that the secrets of captain and ship will not be revealed.

Then the rest of the book is rapturous descriptions of scientific marvels as they travel around the world -- the 20,000 leagues of the title is the distance they travel around the globe, for the record, not the depth beneath the ocean they reach, which was a surprise to me as that's not how I'd interpreted the title.

Throughout, there are hints given of Captain Nemo's tragic past that has led him to reject the world of land-dwellers entirely and desire some sort of unspecified revenge for the unspecified tragedies of his past. But it's a noble revenge and a noble rejection by a thoroughly admirable scientific man, of course.

There are many very funny elements to the book that are definitely not intended as funny, mostly due to incongruity which my modern perspective discerns. Like the way the book is simultaneously like, "oh no it's bad to hunt the black whales, the cruel whale industry is soon going to wipe them out, what a tragedy; BUT those mean nasty sperm whales deserve to die in a complete massacre." Or some of the particularly outlandish scientific errors that the author didn't know enough to avoid. (The bends? What are the bends? We don't know her.) Or the way it sometimes feels the need to make it clear how COOL and VALUABLE an experience is by talking about how much money something they see would be worth if it was sold, despite the otherwise prevalent viewpoint that the important thing is the scientific knowledge gained. The narrative just can't help itself about making it clear that it's also CAPITALISTICALLY worthwhile to engage in scientific discovery.

Be ready for some racism if you read this book; it's about educated white Victorian-era men being world travellers so of course there are "savages" encountered at one point and other stuff like that. Unfortunate, since this is ostensibly a book about people who have entirely cut themselves off from the world of the people on land, and it STILL managed to insert this stuff.

It's also subtly classist in a way where it's not even aware enough to notice that it has any opinions about class, but just these little hints Ned Land and Conseil are not the pov character's peers and thus not really company the way Captain Nemo can be. And Ned Land and Conseil are both just entirely composed of a one-note stereotype each, with no dimension. I mean, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed both of them! But the treatment of their characters as compared to Nemo is obvious. (It's also very funny that the narrative keeps on referring to Ned by the epithet "the Canadian" as if that's the most important thing about him!)

When I reached the end of the book though, I was outraged to discover that we DON'T ACTUALLY GET TO LEARN ANY OF CAPTAIN NEMO'S SECRETS. We learn that his family is all dead, and that he wanted revenge against a particular ship, but that is the extent of the information we learn. No further details about any of the rest of the context that was alluded to exist. And NOTHING about why the rest of his crew also chose to abandon the world to live in the submarine full-time, or about where the language they all speak with each other originated, or what the crew think of these additional passengers who Nemo took on board, or any other context about any of the actually interesting plot elements. No, it was far more important to dedicate page time to fish lists.

Anyway now I want fanfic because surely SOMEONE out there has taken it upon themselves to write more about the characters Verne created!

The third volume! It is here! And my main reaction is: aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!! I actually had to take a break partway through reading because it was so much and I needed to calm down. But now I am finished and I am a mass of emotions.

Shen Qingqiu and Luo Binghe spend this whole volume trying genuinely to reach out to each other, to understand each other, and doing a lot of failing but eventually they get there and I AM OVERCOME. God. I can't believe that the first time I read svsss (in the online fan translation) I genuinely believed that there was no evidence that sqq was genuinely happy with how things ended up between him and lbh and that he was basically just like "this might as well happen." Sure he's not very outwardly expressive but it is So Obvious how much sqq loves lbh and ahhhhhh. And lbh! Trying so so so hard to be a good boy for his shizun!! Until xin mo warps his obsession and trauma and leads him to follow his worst impulses, and it's SO UPSETTING but sqq is THERE for him no matter what, now that he finally understands what's driving lbh!

Anyway, this volume also contained a whole bunch of absolutely wild plot stuff that I had 100% forgotten had happened from last time I read it and it was a time and a half to re-experience it. Also I now understand Tianlang-Jun and Zhuzhi-Lang far better too. (and airplane's explanation for why he cut tlj is SO FUNNY. Tlj is like binghe but MORE SO and the readers wouldn't stand for someone stealing lbh's spotlight!!)

I also love this bit about sj!sqq:

"When written within the bounds of the original genre, this kind of character was extremely difficult to handle. You could say he was scum, but he was also pitiful. But if you tried to acknowledge his pathos, his ruthlessness was real too. Characters that were both scummy and tragic always drew aggro, and they were a hotbed for wank, leading comment sections to devolve into massive flame wars."

Hot damn. This is so accurate, to how parts of fandom treat characters who are both scummy and tragic at the same time; it seems like many people struggle to acknowledge that both aspects exist simultaneously, or are only interested in exploring one side. And there are characters like this in so many fandoms! I mean, I spent my youth in the depths of HGSS fandom, and like. Severus Snape. Oh boy.

And the statement at the end that the way svsss goes is what airplane's original outline had INTENDED for pidw, like, ALL of it?? Including the lbh/sqq ship?!?? INCREDIBLE. Real curious how that would have gone with sj!sqq instead of sy!sqq! How would a happy ending have still been reached? AIRPLANE TELL ME MORE about the lost non-harem version of pidw!!!!

Also every single illustration in this volume is an artistic masterpiece, I don't even know which one is my favourite because there are SO MANY perfect illustrations of important scenes.

This volume takes us to the end of the main story of svsss, which means that volume 4 will be entirely the extras, and I am PUMPED. I don't think I successfully managed to find translations of all the extras when I read svsss the first time, given how I've definitely heard references to things that happen that I haven't read, so I cannot wait for NEW BINGQIU CONTENT for me, and also to get to wallow in the airplane extras some more because MOSHANG.

As far as I've seen the publishing date for volume 4 hasn't been announced yet, and I want them to take the time they need to finish making it, and also I am on tenterhooks for more. I am made of nothing but svsss feels!!

My aunt J is a person who cycles through a lot of different hobbies (relatable), and one of her recent ones has been translation. This book is a collection of folktales which she translated into English from German - some of them are originally German tales, and some of them are stories from other sources for which she found German translations and then she translated the German into English. I can't speak to the quality of the translation, especially for the stories that went through multiple levels of translation, but Aunt J's writing style is clear and a pleasure to read.

It's a lovely collection of stories; Aunt J has good taste, or perhaps I should say similar taste to me :P She focused largely on stories that feature women and girls who play an active role in the story, which is a subset that often has not gotten a lot of attention from the (mostly snooty academic male) folklorists of the past.

The collection includes many stories I already knew, but also some stories that weren't familiar to me, which is truly impressive! Though often there were still elements that were familiar even in those stories, because there are often thematic patterns you'll find in traditional stories.

It's a self-published book that was self-edited, so there are a couple small proofreading errors, but honestly it's doing great by the standards of self-publishing, and even by the standards of some professionally published books, lol. As I would expect from Aunt J and her perfectionist tendencies! (you should see the CORNERS and the PERFECTLY DYED COLOURS on the art quilts she made in a previous hobby!)

This book has been my bedtime reading for the last few weeks and it was a lovely read. So glad Aunt J gave me a copy of this collection at Christmas, and that I finally got round to reading it.

This is a collection of short stories translated from Japanese, and inspired by traditional Japanese ghost stories, from what I understand, so I am absolutely confident I'm missing nuance and implications since I don't know any of the stories it's based on -- but you know what, this was an entirely charming book even coming in cold as an outsider.

The stories feature an exuberant mixing together of living people and ghosts, of people who have supernatural talents and people who don't, all just living their lives (or their deaths, lol) and being themselves. Some of the stories intertwine with each other, with characters who are minor background characters in one becoming the main character in another, giving you different perspectives on things in a fun way, but each story is complete in itself. The overall impression one gets is that the author just likes people, even the ones who are irritating or who make bad choices or who don't like other people themselves, and it's a very cheering sort of impression to come away with.

Thanks to

skygiants for the recommendation!

The second volume of the official version of scum villain is finally out!! obviously I read the whole thing the very day I got my hands on it.

This volume starts at the point where Luo Binghe returns from the endless abyss, though, and wowwww had I ever forgotten the degree to which Shen Qingqiu acts against his own interests in this part of the story. He's SO convinced he understands lbh due to having read the original PIDW that he makes no efforts to actually communicate, and his silences and dismissive statements are guaranteed to make sure lbh can't see the truth of what's in sqq's heart!

I spent a lot of time slamming this volume shut because I couldn't bear to read about sqq's latest bad choices, lol. My heart panged to see how much lbh was clearly hurt by sqq's treatment of him! And sqq couldn't even see how much he was hurting lbh, despite how much sqq cares about him!!

I mean, don't get me wrong, lbh makes some bad choices too (....the implications of necrophilia are definitely stronger than I remembered, among other things!!), but sqq is the worst (affectionate).

This book was a lot easier to read back when I didn't actually care about sqq or lbh :P

Anyway, a lot of the actual events of this part of the story had kind of flowed by me without registering when I first read the fan translation, so I found myself generally surprised by a number of plot developments, oops. Also I was much worse at keeping track of secondary characters, and now I'm charmed by a lot of them. (yang yixuan, for example!)

Many things in this volume to delight and infuriate and now we all have to wait for MONTHS before the next volume is released and I am already dying!

Finished reading volume 1 of the official published edition of The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System and oh dang I was so into it. I think that the translation flowed more smoothly in terms of readability than what I read online last time, which was one thing that helped. But also this time I'm coming into it with a greater understanding of who sqq is as a person and an appreciation for both him and lbh. So I was able to better follow like, what's actually going on, instead of just how sqq chooses to interpret things through the lens of his absolutely enormous unwillingness to recognize anyone's feelings -- especially his own. What a guy!

Other things I love about the official published edition are: the ILLUSTRATIONS hot damn I loved every single one of these, both the cover and all the internal ones; the various delightful indexes at the back; how nice the physical book feels in the hand.

I cannot wait for the rest of the volumes to come out so I can read them (and also maybe avariciously hold all of them close to my chest with joy). I really want to finish rereading the whole of svsss now, but I pulled up the copy I'd saved of the online translation, and it really is harder going, so I'm not sure whether I will bow to temptation and keep forging forward, or wait for the rest of the official volumes to be published. (No shade intended on what was posted online originally for free, the absolutely enormous amount of work that fans put into these translations on their own time is hugely appreciated!)

I never would have thought to nominate a translation of Beowulf for the Best Related Work hugo award, so to all the galaxy-brained folks out there who did: THANK YOU. It means I actually got around to prioritizing reading this book, which I might not otherwise have done for years! And it's SO GOOD.

Maria Dahvana Headley is the translator of this latest version, and as she says in her introduction, it's not meant to be the One True Translation, it's one among MANY; and that perspective, I think, gives a translator more freedom to do interesting things with a translation, because you don't have the burden of trying to capture e v e r y t h i n g about the original work in your translation (which is impossible). And Headley is definitely doing interesting things with it it!!

My immediate and overwhelming reaction to reading the poem as translated by Headley is that it is delicious. It's satisfying! Delightful! Fun to say! Feels good in the mouth! It is a GOOD POEM. I love the wild swings between archaic and modern, formal and informal, all in the same line, the same phrase. And the way the words fit together, with random pieces of alliteration or internal rhyme or just words that work with each other, and all with a great sense of timing, it's just great. Delicious!

Here's an example from within the opening section:

The war-band flew a golden flag over their main man;
the salt sea saluted him, so too the storms,
and Scyld’s soldiers got drunk instead of crying.
They mourned the way men do. No man knows,
not me, not you, who hauled Scyld’s hoard to shore,
but the poor are plentiful, and somebody got lucky.

Are there occasional word/phrase choices that threw me a bit? Yeah, sure, not every single thing worked perfectly for me, but when you're deliberately aiming at audacious, you're going to have some occasional misses.

The last time I read Beowulf was at least a dozen years ago, the verse translation by Seamus Heaney, and I remember being fascinated and amazed by it at the time, and even memorized the first few pages of it with the intention of eventually memorizing the whole thing (....I know!).

But mostly I was fascinated by looking through the poem to see the worldview of a very different culture than mine, rather than fascinated by the poem/translation as a quality work of art worth appreciating for itself. And that fascinatingly different worldview is still present no matter the translation.

Heaney's poetry was perfectly good. But Headley's speaks to me far more!!

If you want a bigger taste of what this translation's like, you can read an excerpt on tor dot com. The whole thing's like that!

A graphic novel aimed at approximately a middle-grade crowd, this book tells the story of a Jewish teenager in WWII France who was a "hidden child" kept safe by being sheltered by various people. It's inspired in part by the author's mother's experiences as a hidden child herself.

Rachel Cohen is a thriving student at a really interesting and unusual school just outside of Paris. But when the teachers realise that she and other Jewish students are unsafe in occupied France, the students take on false, un-Jewish-sounding names (like the titular Catherine), and are sent elsewhere to go into hiding. Rachel loves photography, and the photography teacher at school lets her take a good-quality camera with her when she goes. She then spends the rest of the war documenting her experiences with her camera, as she moves from place to place and meets many people.

Apparently this book is based on a full-length novel the author wrote, but as far as I can tell only this graphic novel has been translated into English, so doing a comparison-read is not an option for me, alas. But it's an excellent book, and one that's well suited to the medium of graphic novel; the art really adds to the experience, especially since it's a story about a character who specifically is interested in documenting the visuals of the experiences she has. So I can see why this is the version of the story that was chosen to be translated!

I have been ignoring the existence of the Chinese web novel The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System for QUITE a while now. I kept hearing about it but it just didn't seem to work for me when I tried the fic, and when I attempted to read the novel I bounced off the first chapter fairly hard. But it turns out I just needed the right introduction!!

You know how it goes, you accidentally get really into the fic for a minor pairing (thanks B!), read all the extant decent fic for the ship, read the relevant canon extras, start daydreaming about writing fic, and decide you had better actually read the full canon if you're going to even make the attempt at writing anything.

So here we are! It took me a bit to get into the novel, since the main characters are in fact not Shang Qinghua and Mobei-Jun, but I found it a surprisingly fun read.

The premise: Shen Yuan is the hate-reader of a bad Chinese web novel, who finds himself transmigrated into the world of that novel! Unfortunately, he's transmigrated into the character of a villain in the novel, and there's a System controlling his actions, assigning him missions and keeping him from being able to act too OOC.

Shen Yuan's goal in the character of Shen Qingqiu, the scum villain: change the story enough so that he can make sure the protagonist Luo Binghe doesn't murder him!

The System's goal: get Shen Qingqiu to fix all the plot holes and missing characterization from the original novel to make a better story.

Luo Binghe's goal: to get his shizun (Shen Qingqiu) to pay attention to him!!

There are a lot of extremely charming things in reading this. The novel as a whole is a fun and funny parody, written lovingly by the author, with lots of great details and jokes.

And the main character Shen Qingqiu is an endearing nerd who, in his previous life as Shen Yuan, read this extremely bad extremely long and extremely porny webnovel for the worldbuilding, and once he's in the world of the novel, he's a veritable encyclopedia of all the interesting monsters the world has to offer. And at one point when he's off on an errand to pick a rare and special magical plant that only grows in one place, he actually worries about the implications on the ecosystem if he picks the plant! I love him.

Also, he spends a lot of time internally raging against a) the System and b) the author who wrote the piece of crap narrative he's currently trying to live through, but he hides everything behind a great deal of fussiness over his appearance and a stern facial expression and an unwillingness to say anything of substance, so everyone thinks he's so cool and elegant and impressive. Maintaining this outward appearance is helped by his inability to admit even to himself that he might have Feelings about anything that's going on, of course. And the contrast between these sides of him is a delight.

It is frustrating that his inability to admit his feelings to himself continues right to the very end of his romance arc, which makes for a very unromantic conclusion to it. It's hard to feel invested in a relationship as a reader when one of the romantic leads spends all of his time thinking about his partner in very distancing terms!

And speaking of his romantic partner......( is the identity of the romantic interest a spoiler? I mean it is to sqq! )

Apparently this is author MXTX's first novel, and in some respects it reminds me of some of Jane Austen's earlier works, where the focus is more on Being A Funny Parody than on making sure the emotional heart of the story gets appropriate attention and a full conclusion. (I'd put it somewhere between Love and Freindship [sic] and Northanger Abbey in that respect.) But there's still enough heart in there to make it something I can enjoy reading.

( cut for spoilers for a background plot point )

Now let's talk about my ship! Shang Qinghua and Mobei-Jun, who I mentioned above, are a popular secondary character ship, and I love them very very much. Shang Qinghua is also a person transmigrated from our world into the world of the novel, but instead of being a reader, he's the author, who feels very defensive about the quality of the narrative he wrote. (He just wrote what the readers wanted! He had bills to pay! Writing lots of terrible sex and no character development is what got him paying readers!) And Mobei-Jun is the minor character he wrote for his own pleasure, to fulfill his ideals of attractive masculinity, even while everything else he wrote was according to his readers' whims. Mobei-Jun also happens to be an ice demon lord. In this ship you get: cross-cultural communication problems! Competency mixed with obliviousness! Hijinks! Questions of identity and power! Loyalty!

Okay yes this is a list of things that are also all present to varying degrees in the Luo Binghe/Shen Qingqiu ship, but it's a lot more charming in the context of Shang Qinghua/Mobei-Jun, at least in this reader's humble opinion. Possibly due to the lack of Luo Binghe. Also you get fun ice-themed aesthetics and a character who actually talks about things (badly)! It's great. I want to reread all the moshang fic again now.

Though I also now want to read fic about Yue Qingyuan? Yeah fine I guess that checks out.

In conclusion, do I recommend this novel? Yeah! Can I recommend my way as a good way to approach it if you're someone who has never read cnovels before? Ehhhhh, it was more than a little roundabout.......But I have fic recs if you're interested!

An Anthology of Russian Folk Epics, Translated with an Introduction and Commentary by James Bailey and Tatyana Ivanova

This is possibly one of my favourite folk collections I have read in years! I loved it. Apparently in Russia there is a folk tradition of oral epic poems/songs, called bylina, which I previously knew nothing about. But they form their own sort of....canon of characters, and expectation of form and subject, and even borrow bits from one bylina into another if it's gonna fit. So any individual bylina stands on its own, but when you read (or, I suppose, listen to performances of!) a whole bunch of them, you get a fuller sense of the characters and of the setting and expectations and all that.

As well as bylina themselves being new to me, this particular collection is excellent. Each translated bylina has a multi-page introduction providing interesting context to the bylina in question, and discussing the differences between all the variants of that particular bylina.

Then the translated bylina is a direct translation of one specific performance by one specific person, including the singer's errors and asides and all. And the singers are all named and the date of their performance given.

It's GREAT.

Also, you can totally see differences between the styles of different singers this way! Some of them are better than others, imo, but that's going to be the case in any art-form. My biggest annoyance was the singers who overuse repetition of whole sections, over and over again, I guess to stretch the performance out longer? IDK. The bylina for Mikhailo Potyk was one egregious example of this. Poetic repetition is a thing that has value, and it's used to great effect in many bylina in this book, but you can really take it too far!

One poetic framing device that I was fascinated to see in a number of the bylina in this collection is something that's.....kind of a simile in reverse? It's a juxtaposition of a piece of imagery with what's actually happening, by negating the imagery. And it works really well, once I got my head around it! Here's an example:

"A white birch wasn't bending to the ground,
Pale leaves weren't spreading out,
Vasily was bowing to his mother"

It's not a method of presenting imagery I've ever seen before, but it's clearly a thing in this genre, and I love it.

Something else I noticed was the degree to which there are these like....agreed-upon poetic phrases. In a bylina you never refer to someone's head, only to someone's "reckless head." Even in contexts where that makes no sense. Wine is always "green wine" and it's always served in a drinking vessel that can hold a bucket or a bucket and a half of the green wine. Heroes of bylina and their companions are "daring good youths." And so on.

Anyway I was genuinely riveted by many of the bylina in this book, and even the ones I didn't like for themselves were genuinely interesting to read in the context of the genre. I liked that the collection even includes a few parodies/humorous variations at the end. They weren't funny to me at all, because I don't have nearly enough familiarity with bylina to get all the jokes, but it's cool to see that the genre even had its performers poking loving fun at it!

A very satisfying collection. I just really enjoyed reading through it! Tales of varying lengths and narrative-ness (some come across more like summaries), indicating teller, location, and dates told. An interesting variety of types of story, and I found the stories themselves to be mostly compelling. Interesting how integrated Christianity is with a lot of these folk stories. There were nonfiction introduction essays to each section of the book but honestly I didn't find them to give me much in the way of use, so I started just skipping them. All in all a worthwhile book though!