nnozomi

I’m in one of those Brahms things where I went and listened to the Second Symphony and now I have to keep listening to it over and over again because nothing else will do. It’s one of my all-time top five symphonies anyway, the happy-ending one as opposed to Brahms Four (also in my top five), the first and fourth movements are so joyous and the second movement is so painful and lovely, how am I supposed to move on to anything else?
(But I do listen to non-Brahms things occasionally. I’ve posted this one before, a double feature of “Meditação” and “Barato Total,” two totally different but both fabulous Brazilian songs; this version is a chorus of college kids recording (maybe during the pandemic) at home, so you can enjoy their faces and one girl’s cat into the bargain.)

Y and I went to a fancy cake shop the other day, partly for the cakes and partly because it’s in a beautiful old building (see photos below). Instead of giving you a menu, they bring you a tray of delicious cakes to select from, maybe twenty varieties, very hard to choose. The young man sitting alone at the table next to us had made it easier for himself by ordering FIVE cakes instead of one, and was eating his way peacefully through them, unhurried. I mean, there are obviously health-type reasons for not doing that on the regular, but damn would I like to have the nerve to say “I”ll have that one AND that one AND…”. I think the next time I’m afraid of what people might think, I’ll tell myself to remember the five-cakes guy.

Chinese: this week’s farmboy vocabulary (one is actually from a fic I was reading instead, but I suspect the farmboys use it too at some point):
夸人 to praise someone (potentially over and above the facts)
嘎嘎香 slang for “delicious”
晦气 unlucky, suffering from bad luck
插队 to cut in line
书签 a bookmark
~归～ similar to ~是~ (same word front and back in both cases), something like “for all ~ is the case…” (this one is so much easier to express in Japanese)

I saw somewhere—it must have been in one of the blessed Wenella’s interview videos, but I don’t remember which one—that the alien language in Zhu Yilong’s new film was made by modifying Chaozhouhua|Teochew|潮州话, on account of there were a bunch of Teochew speakers among the production staff? Somebody please find out more about this—I want to know what they did!

If you remember I posted a while back about the Miura Shion novel I’m translating, very slowly, for my own amusement, and boy am I amused; I’d forgotten what a fun book it is. Under a tight deadline, Akari keeps messing with the pseudo-medieval romance novel she’s translating into Japanese, giving the minor character she’s fallen for more to do and making the heroine less passive; meanwhile she’s dealing in real life with her grumpy father and laid-back boyfriend and…
Here's a scene (very rough draft) where her boyfriend is reading her translation-in-progress. Not really NSFW but kind of? Warwick could hardly look away from Alienor’s white skin, which all but glowed in the dimness. Thrust onward by solemnity and passion, he reached out and tore the silk chemise off her body. She gave a little cry, clutching at Warwick’s arm as if to stop him.
“Hey! Stop! Stop it!” Kanna’s reading was so unemotional that I was even more embarrassed.
“Why is she in a chemise, anyway?”
“It’s a historical romance, the heroines always wear chemises.”
“Why does he tear it, then?” Kanna rested his chin on my left shoulder.
“It’s a historical romance, the heroes always get carried away and tear the chemises off.” Were we Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, or what? “Probably the authors think it symbolizes the hero’s roughness and power and his heightened love and passion for the heroine.”
Kanna’s sigh tickled my earlobe. He had to be grinning.
“You try tearing my bra off and see what you get.”
“No worries, I don’t have the brute strength to tear an underwire push-up bra.” And a paragraph from Akari’s visit to the local baths after Kanna demonstrates his prowess as romance hero. I said hello to the generously built ladies chatting in front of the fan, all familiar faces, and went into the wash area. I’d used “the swell of her generous breasts” in my translation, but surely Alienor couldn’t be built like those ladies. Maybe I should have written “full breasts” instead? I showered off the sweat quickly, mind full of vocabulary and breasts. In which I find myself doing to Akari (just a little) what she’s doing to her romance novel; she just says “thinking about that kind of thing,” but I couldn’t resist making it “mind full of vocabulary and breasts.”

I have actually gotten a (perhaps temporary) position with a local amateur orchestra playing the bassoon; given that I’ve been practicing a couple years now, I am just amazingly terrible at it, but they’re very patient. It’s fun! My mouth gets tired and also my left wrist gets tired because playing sitting down is hard, and the number of wrong notes and not-there-at-all notes and fortissimo pianos and God knows what I’ve produced is appalling, but the view from the woodwind section is neat. The thing with the bassoon, unlike the string section, is that you’re either playing your own part with nobody else doing it or you’re in unison with one other person, both of which, as a bit of a closet exhibitionist, I find an interesting challenge. Let’s see if I can tame these damn C-sharps and pianissimo low notes by October.

Photos: assorted sarusuberi, assorted elegant old stairwells, some flowers that made me think of a grapefruit assortment, a hibiscus tree (?), and some sheet music created by power lines and an out-of-season weeping cherry.