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? ( Read more... ) And a paragraph from Akari’s visit to the local baths after Kanna demonstrates his prowess as romance hero. ( Read more... ) 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.

Be safe and well.

So A-Pei and I were talking about chocolate chip cookies, and I had cause to ask her for the Chinese word for “pecan.” She said 胡桃, which horrified me, since in Japanese that means “walnut.” Come to find out that (I think) in Taiwan 胡桃 is pecan and 核桃 is walnut, while on the mainland 胡桃 is walnut and 山核桃 is pecan…give me strength! [Then again, as long as neither of them ends up in my chocolate chip cookies I’m okay—cookies should be warm and melty and goopy, not crunchy.]

Reading Naomi Mitchison’s short autobiography You May Well Ask, which is all kinds of entertaining: a couple of things about her early writing that I found very relatable.
“The Conquered, my first book, came out at white heat and, what is more, I wrote all the best bits, the juicy bits, first, the bits that were most exciting and satisfying to write, like the very end. Then I filled in the rest, but I enjoyed that too.”
“I got a great many letters about The Conquered. This is something writers need, and a phone call isn’t the same; you can’t pick it up and look at it again years later, when you are exhausted and unhappy.”
Also, I know where I’ve heard of that book before! “She had time to…wonder what she would do if They said nothing could be done, her hand must come off, and produced block and chopper, and hacked—like Meromic in The Conquered--with dunking in hot tar to follow.” It delights me that Nicola Marlow has read Naomi Mitchison. [For the non-Forest readers, nobody chops Nicola’s hand off, she gets it stitched by the one character of color in the whole series, a cricket-loving Pakistani doctor, and recovers sufficiently to win a cricket match a few weeks later.]

Listening, not for the first time, to an old mixtape [now a mixCD] of my father the classical musician’s favorite pop songs. “Once upon a time I drank a little wine, was as happy as could be. Now I’m just like a cat on a hot tin roof, baby what do you think you’re doing to me,” to which my mind immediately appended “—Lan Wangji, probably.”
Also, on the Brazilian side, I don’t think I’ve posted Se todos fossem iguais a você before—another of my very favorite Jobim songs, very singable and very loving, with the irresistible Portuguese plural of iguais for igual. (Link goes straight to the song, but just listen to the whole album, it’s about the best full album ever recorded in any genre).

I’ve read Diana Wynne Jones’ Charmed Life so many times I can recite good chunks of it from memory, and even so—and reading it in Chinese yet!—the climactic scene still grabs me so hard I missed my stop on the train. Comical and thrilling and quietly numinous and upsetting, all at once.
The Chinese translation is terrible, even I can tell, flat and inconsistent and inaccurate, but you take what you can get. ”And he needs us like he needs two left legs,” Bernard remarked, jerking around in the hammock as he tried to eat a jelly comes out as “我们对他来说就像左膀右臂。“伯纳德从吊床上一跃而起，去拿冰淇淋, that is (I think) “And according to him we’re the staff he depends on,” Bernard said, sitting up in the hammock and going to get an ice cream.” [The ice cream, at least, is a source text difference.] And that’s just one thing. Between the “he needs us like…” and the stocks and shares and the name, it suddenly occurs to me that Bernard might be Jewish. Neat.. When Chrestomanci tells Gwendolen “Stay here and learn how to do it [use magic] properly,” it comes out as 留在这里学学怎么做人吧, stay here and learn to behave properly. I like 做人 as a phrase, though—be a mensch. Translation faults aside, I will say it cracked me up that when Cat yanks the silver handcuffs off, Chrestomanci’s “Ow!” comes out as 哎哟！.

Still rehearsing the Brahms violin concerto in orchestra—I love this piece so much, especially but not uniquely the first movement. Last week was our first time with the solo violinist.

interpersonal grumbling

I was low-key infuriated the whole time for reasons unrelated to the music—I’m sitting inside first stand this time around, meaning that the person on my left is the first chair = leading the cello section. At this rehearsal a younger guy was asked to substitute for the usual first chair, and IN SPITE OF not being totally sure of the music he didn’t refuse when he should have done, so I spent the whole rehearsal mentally snarling that’s a tricky entrance, if you don’t come in properly with confidence no one else can either! or pizzicato on the OFF-BEAT wtf is your PROBLEM and so on, on account of if he didn’t get it right, I had to be the one responsible for doing so. Which was not ideal at the first soloist rehearsal, when it really matters to be able to follow the conductor and get it right.

That aside, it was a wonderful experience anyway. The soloist (a professional violinist) was a smallish, mild-mannered, fortyish guy from Hiroshima with a big wide lush tone, very secure. Going through the concerto without stopping felt like setting off on a life-or-death adventure, exciting, knife-edge, important, heartwrenching. The best thing about rehearsing a piece for six months is that you get to know not just the parts you hear in concert or on a recording but also all kinds of little things in your own part and others—there’s a place in the violas near the end of the first movement (around 23:27 in this recording), for instance, just a little three-note motif under the solo line that absolutely moves me to tears every time.

Zhu Yilong doing his usual thing, behaving like one of his own frequently whumped characters (I wish somebody would explain to him that putting his health at risk also means putting his career/his work at risk, then he might listen?) and still somehow managing to look absurdly beautiful.

Photos: The beauty salon cat having a nice outdoor bath in the sun, another cat glaring at me, geometric creepers (?), a village lane in the middle of the city, a rose, a camellia (either tsubaki or sazanka but I can’t tell the two apart to save my life).