#romanian > english

[translations-by-alexandra]

Toți dispăreau cu o sută douăzeci la oră

Și vara aceea tot așa s-a dus

Îmi explicai care sunt norii

Norii de vânt, de ploi

Și norii cumulus

Spuneai uită-te la mine

Spuneai și, uită-te, eu m-am uitat

Cu ochii în tavan mi-aduc aminte

Nu mai știu tot din vara aceea dar

Știu norii, știu la perfecțiune

Dac-o să plouă, dacă nu

Sau dacă-i vară iar

Spuneai cum te-ai uitat

Uitându-te la noi

Spuneai că te-ai uitat

Te uiți atât de bine-n amândoi

Uită-te dar să nu uiți

Uită-te  

TRANSLATION

They were all fading from view at 120km/h

And that summer went away just as quickly

You were explaining to me which clouds were which

The wind clouds, the rain clouds

And the cumulus clouds

You were saying look at me

You were saying this, and, look, I forgot myself

With my eyes fixed on the ceiling I reminisce

I don't remember everything from that summer

I know the clouds, I know them perfectly

If it's gonna rain or not

Or if it's summer again

You were saying how you forgot yourself

Looking at us

You were saying that you looked

You forget yourself so well in the two of us

Look but don't forget

Look

TRANSLATION NOTES

This is heavily adapted because the lyrics are huge on wordplay. I will try to explain my thought process line by line

1: lit: they were all disappearing with 120 per hour

2: lit: and that summer went away the same (poetic license: adding "just as quickly" for clarity)

3: you were explaining to me which were the clouds (but the obvious sense is that she was explaining the types of clouds, hence "which is which")

4: the wind clouds, the ones of the rains (for clarity: rain clouds)

Chorus:

Very important note! The main wordplay is on the verb "a se uita" which is a reflexive verb, but its so common in everyday use it rarely gets perceived as one. The most common meaning is to look. Its like a phrasal verb, if you will. However, if you take the individual words of the phrasal verb literally, you get the meaning of to forget oneself. "A uita" = to forget, "a se uita" = to look (in a phrasal verb sense), but if you take it literally, to forget oneself.

So literally:

You were saying look at me

You were saying, and, look, I looked

But it certainly has the double meaning of

You said this, and I forgot myself

In the "I lost myself in you" sense of forgetting

Verse 2

1: lit: with eyes in the ceiling I remind myself

2: I don't know anymore everything from that summer. "To not know anymore" is a common way of expressing "to forget" or "to not remember" in Romanian

3: I know the clouds, I know to perfection

4: if its gonna rain, if not

Chorus 2

The same pun but even more double meaning

You were saying how you looked

Looking at us

<- but that doesn't make sense so ofc the first one has the other meaning. Hence, you were saying how you forgot yourself, looking at us

You were saying that you looked

You look so well into the both of us

VS

You were saying you forgot yourself

You forget yourself so much in the both of us

VS

You were saying that you looked

You forget yourself so well into the both of us

VS

(The one I went with)

You were saying you forgot yourself

You look so well into the two of us

But honestly the ambiguity makes it such that all 4 are plausible enough interpretations.

End verse

Look but don't forget

Look

Or!

Look but don't forget

Forget yourself

[bubbarnes]

“... and I almost wish that we would have explored more because there's that whole situation where Bucky is having memory lapses, some of his old memories coming back. I thought it would have been interesting to go, you know, what it would have been like for him to wake up after that fall and missing the one arm, doesn't know where he is.”

[yvanspijk]

Wool & lana

The word lana (wool) in languages such as Spanish is etymologically related to English wool. For words to be related, they don't have to look like each other. Instead, you have to be able to trace them back to the same ancestor through regular sound changes - and that's what linguists managed to do with wool and lana. The infographic shows the Germanic and Romance family trees of these words.

[musicallisto]

im curious to know how airtight music in a foreign language is to the majority of people.

please reblog this for sample size and include where youre from if you feel comfortable!

[puppetmaster13u]

You know what I need? I need Batman to be minding his own business, y'know just taking part in a league meeting or being forced to (urgh) socialize. And just in the corner of his eye see one of the batkids start doing something they know they shouldn't, presumably something incredibly dangerous seeing as he gave up on stopping them from hanging from chandeliers and going out as vigilante children. .

And I need him to just suddenly having the thickest new jersey accent the other heroes have ever heard as he fusses over them when they do get hurt.

[crowtrobotx]

[leavescrown]

You are welcome to write them down or tag them too :) 🎧

(it's totally okay to add more languages first before voting 😂)

[anotherscrappile]

I HAVE MADE A DISCOVERY 🦀

[lucishell]

spent my silly little day making this about my silly little modern au i've spoken about once like a year ago

[grenade-maid]

Signalis, Authority, and History

There's a level of nuance to how Signalis presents the violence of the authority of the nation that doesn't call attention to itself but which I really appreciate. Which is basically just, all the officers and cops and spies who make life hell for people like the Gestalt mine workers, Ariane, and the Itou family--we get little glimpses into who they are in Adler and Kolibri's diaries and despite the propaganda and the authoritative tone they take in official communications, for the most part they don't seem to actually be particularly invested in the hard line of national ideology. They uphold it though, viciously, both because things were worse under imperial rule (we don't get hard details on what it was like but it's mentioned in passing enough that I believe it) and because they're scared that if they don't they will be decommissioned and easily replaced. They are literally stamped out of a production line after all. There's a subtext of well, if I don't do it my replacement will anyway and I'm not trying to die so what's the point of rocking the boat?

I think Kolibri stands out to me most clearly on this because in communications from the block warden regarding Ariane there is emphasis put on how it is unacceptable and suspicious that she should be so interested and invested in art and literature that does not serve the purpose of furthering the goals of the nation. But we know that Kolibris themselves are bookworms, Adlers are fiends for stimulating experiences, and both get miserable FAST when deprived of art and puzzles and entertainment and hobbies. Y'know, just like anyone. Far be it from being a paragon of The Nation only interested in productive labor, we are reminded that the block warden, too, hates this shitty town and wants to transfer but is denied. They're hypocrites, but not monsters, nor brainwashed puppets of the state.

The monstrousness at play is not contained within any particular subset of evil individuals, or even an inherent universal force of evil contained in the broad notion of The Nation. There is no cosmic evil force that makes them all do these things to each other. The monstrousness is within the social systems, the mechanisms of how authority perpetuates on a structural procedural level, held in place by fear and tangible threats of violence, each link in the chain restraining the next through those threats out of fear that if they don't, then they'll be next. Regardless how many, if any, of those people in this chain are true dogmatic hardliners, they must act as such because failing to do so opens them up to danger.

Here then I think of the quote that is so prominent, "Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl", from Lovecraft's The Festival. This is not just a chilling abstract visual that conveniently evokes a mineshaft-- in Lovecraft's story, this line refers to worms which ate the decomposing bodies of wizards whose wretched souls had remained after death, complete with the terrible powers they gained through contracts with demons. Those worms inherited both their power, and also the evil. The Nation, despite having overthrown the Empire, is built on imperial technology, in particular Replikas and bioresonance. So too, then, we can imply that The Nation inherited with those things some of the monstrousness of The Empire as well. There is no end of history, nor clean break with the past, no matter how violently it may seem to be rejected. That which remains from the past--and something inevitably always does--creates the present.

This is a game that is not shy about evoking East Germany. And I think all of this provides a sophisticated picture of repressive authority that we rarely see in fiction of the English speaking world, especially in games. The year the S23 incident takes place is notably 84, but, frankly, I find this to be more compelling and illustrative than 1984 (and I'm a librarian and have taught English classes so I get to say that). Orwell, let's be honest, presents a fairly one dimensional picture of authority, where people seize power and wield it against others out of seeming mustache twirling evil or malice.

Here though we get a more humanistic view. Authority did not come from nowhere and is not wielded arbitrarily out of gleeful cruelty or mindless brainwashed allegiance. People aren't "just following orders". Individuals have rich inner lives. They make decisions, and those decisions are based in the context they're in. Even the decision to carry repressive tools of the past into the present is a decision that was made strategically with the big picture in mind. Nobody woke up and decided to be evil that day. Everyone operates on self interest, and, we must assume, an earnest desire for things to get better. Even the [spoiler] program which served as an inspirational demonstration of The Nation's power, you can imagine the chain of officers and bureaucrats who genuinely wanted the people of the nation to believe in the future, to confidently trust that everyone was working together towards something great and beautiful. And, through a long chain of those people who couldn't say "No" without being decommissioned, we ended up with something unbelievably cruel.

We get to know Adler and Kolibri and the other officers not to say well they're human too, maybe it wasn't so bad that they condemned all those people to agonizing suffering, but to remember that if we keep looking for true monsters we will not find them. There are no monsters and there are no demons. There are only people making decisions. A better world is possible. A better world, where Adler is just a paper pusher who does puzzles after work instead of signing papers to authorize torture, where Kolibris are librarians instead of spies and cops, where EULEs can gossip and play piano and ARARs can do maintenance on facilities that don't contain torture rooms, is one that would not have led to the Ariane and Elster's tragic cycle and ultimate end.

Authority and its attendant cruelty is not contained, radiating forth from The Great Revolutionary and Her Daughter, it is within the social systems of control. When those two women die, that cruelty will continue so long as those social systems continue. Like Lovecraft's worms, no matter how long dead the evil of the past is, so long as it continues to be fed upon, that evil will not only remain, but evolve into something new in the present. A better world can't be achieved through the death of the old world alone, even if violent overthrow is warranted. There is no end of history. There is no clean break from the past.

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

[prigorie]

ok but the anglerfish would've definitely got my ass because i'm chronically unobservant when it comes to faces and also believe in the natural cigarette cycle

[translations-by-alexandra]

Tot ce-am vrut să-ţi spun odată

Intr-o scrisoare a-ncăput.

Era albă închisoare, c-un sfârşit şi-un început.

Rânduri rupte, puse-n foaie

Dungi de gheaţă peste tot.

Nu aveam un plic cu timbru

Mi-era frig şi i-am dat foc.

Vreau să ştiu ce te apasă.

Spune-mi tot, ori nu-ţi mai pasă

Ce-a mai rămas mă-ntreb în scuze.

Ce gând îţi tremură pe buze?

Scăparea-i noaptea-n nepăsare,

Am scris o albă închisoare

Am dat de frig, nebun sub piele

Am dat de plumb ascuns sub gene.

Oare nu-ţi mai pasă?.

Am cerşit la cer prea multe,

Mi-am dorit ce n-am avut.

Ce credeam că nu voi pierde,

Ieri, deja era pierdut.

Prea mult timp am stat sub uşă.

Mă temeam să trec de prag.

Am muţit văzând cum nordul

Suflă-n tine-n lung şi-n lat.

Vreau să ştiu ce te apasă.

Spune-mi tot, ori nu-ţi mai pasă?

Ce-a mai rămas mă-ntreb în scuze.

Ce gând îţi tremură pe buze?

Scăparea-i noaptea-n nepăsare,

Am scris o albă închisoare.

Am dat de frig, nebun sub piele.

Am dat de fum ascuns sub gene.

Oare nu-ţi mai pasă?.

Vreau să ştiu ce te apasă.

Spune-mi tot, ori nu-ţi mai pasă?

Ce-a mai rămas mă-ntreb în scuze.

Ce gând îţi tremură pe buze?

Scăparea-i noaptea-n nepăsare,

Am scris o albă închisoare.

Am dat de frig, nebun sub piele.

Am dat de fum ascuns sub gene.

Spune-mi, chiar nu-ţi mai pasă?

Spune-mi, chiar nu-ţi mai pasă??.

Spune-mi, chiar nu-ţi mai pasă?

Spune-mi, chiar nu-ţi mai pasă?

Spune-mi, chiar nu-ţi mai pasă?

_______

TRANSLATION

The White Prison

Everything I've ever wanted to tell you

Fit into one letter.

It was a white prison, with an ending and a beginning.

Torn lines, placed on the sheet

Icy stripes all over.

I didn't have an envelope with a stamp

I was cold and I had set it on fire.

Chorus:

I want to know what troubles you

Tell me everything, or do you not care anymore

What's left anymore, I ask myself in apologies

What thought trembles on your lips?

The only escape is the night, in carelessness,

I wrote a white prison.

I stumbled upon the cold, insane under my skin

I happened upon the lead hidden under eyelids.

Do you not care anymore?

I've begged too much from Heaven

I desired what I never had.

What I thought I'd never lose,

Yesterday, was already lost.

For too long I've lied under the door

I was afraid to go over the the frame.

I went mute as I saw the North

Howling inside you all over.

Chorus: x2

Tell me, do you really not care anymore? x3

[duine-aiteach]

I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m Irish and used to seeing all sorts of haha jokes about how weird our names are etc but yet I’m always surprised how surprised people are when I say that I find Welsh a pretty easy language to get the gist of. It makes sense! Welsh is something I know very little of but yet I find it easy enough to parse out the pronunciation of. I don’t always know what things mean but I’m not usually that far off in how they should be said.

[yvanspijk]

Sí, oui, òc!

Italian sì, Spanish sí, Portuguese sim and many more Romance words for 'yes' come from Latin sīc, which meant 'so; thus; like that'. In Popular Latin it got an extra meaning: 'yes', born out of the sense 'like that', i.e. 'like you said'.

French oui has a completely different origin. It comes from Old French oïl, a univerbation of o il, literally 'yes, it (is/does/has etc.)'.

O stemmed from Latin hoc (this), which became òc (yes) in Occitan, a group of languages whose name was derived from this very word.

[outlying-hyppocrate]

fuck. languages are so beautiful

[shizunitis]

Why do you talk like what a Gen Z believes a victorian poet to sound like? /j

don’t harrass the bereft jester and thought peddler, measks. mebegs, even. he cries easily and there is no shizun to comfort him.