Insta-rec

[luzula]

So hey, go read the Porn Battle snippet Goldengrove Unleaving, by vulgarweed. I clicked on it for the title (having titled two stories myself from Gerard Manley Hopkins poems, of course I couldn't resist someone else doing it), but stayed for the beautifully written (and explicit!) Galadriel/Gandalf. I admire how grounded the story feels in canon.

I am (so far successfully) resisting the urge to translate it to Quenya. Arrgh, I really don't have time for that.

Comments

[seascribble]

Oh man but that would be so cool. It will never not be my favourite thing that you know Quenya. :D

[luzula]

Ha ha no, too busy. Although I may have just been browsing my Quenya books to just translate the title... *facepalm*

ETA: Aaaaah, no, I couldn't resist. Here's what I just pasted into my comment on the fic:

It is kind of frustrating me that "Goldengrove Unleaving", which is so beautiful a phrase in English, is hard to translate well to Quenya. I mean, golden=laurëa and grove=taurë (or that's forest, really, but I can't find a word for a smaller grove). "Laurëa taurë" just has too much rhyming going on and does not sound pretty. : / I'd be tempted to not translate it literally and go for Laurenor = Goldenland instead, in parallell with Valinor. It sounds great, but OTOH there are all those tree/leaf/forest references in the poem that would be lost. Or I guess you could go with "Laurëa aldar" for golden trees, but that doesn't sound very good either.

And for "unleaving" I might go with "alautië", from "auta" = leave, with the negative prefix "al-", and the verbal noun ending "-ië". Although "auta" is such an irregular verb that I couldn't be sure that's actually how Tolkien thought you should do it.

Anyway: "Laurenor alautië". That's my best guess for the title in Quenya. : )

[seascribble]

Oh man. *rolls around in the fictional linguistic goodness* I quite like "Laurëa aldar", but maybe I am saying it wrong? This is fantastic. :D

[luzula]

...and then I started translating the poem into Quenya (because really, the fic would take forever, not going to do that). I can't believe how absorbing it is to me--like, I'll look up blinking and two hours have passed, and I'll think "juuust one more phrase!" More addictive than computer games. *facepalm*

[king_touchy]

That was a delight. Thanks for the link. And you know Quenya? Kudos! That's some amazing greek cred right there.

[luzula]

Glad you liked it! Er, "know" is too strong a word-- nowadays I can only read/write it with the help of a dictionary and a grammar cheatsheet. But yeah, I once spent a summer learning it, about ten years ago.