The ones without DT slang succeed the best for me, I think. I like the first best, and the second second-best (although I'm not sure about the lords of todash -- I don't think that works with the sense of the lords in the original verse). The slang in the third and fourth breaks my suspension of disbelief. I can't articulate what about it bothers me, but it just feels wrong, like, I don't know, false notes in a chord.
(I am following your d_k thread, and I loved the way the first verse showed up.)
Interesting! And fair. My rationale for the slang and the way it messes with scansion/alters meaning is that both the DT stuff and the L'Engle stuff are getting filtered through at least one world; things get lost and changed in translation.
Some of the DT slang is itself a regionalism, of course; not all of it, but a good bit of what you're using there shows up only in the Callas so far as we see. (Maybe only in the Calla Bryn Sturgis area; we don't know how much dialect variation there is along that whole arc, after all.)
And the Callas are a long, long way from Gilead, even if that slang got picked up to varying degrees by all the gunslingers at Milliways thanks to the way the later ka-tet members and Ted Brautigan used it. Since they were all mid- or post-DT5, and had spent a while in the Callas themselves; the ones who had picked it up most solidly, of course, were the ones who weren't from Mid-World originally at all.
This isn't a reason not to use the slang, of course. It's just a thing to consider -- where the poetry's being filtered through, and for and by whom. I kind of like it, but it does definitely say to me "this is how the rhymes are said in Calla Bryn Sturgis," which is very different from how they're presumably said (if indeed they are) in Gilead. (Which is actually a criticism I'd make of the third verse: the charyou tree stuff is quite possibly said on the borders of End-world as well, since Reap Night seems to be a wide-ranging holiday. But for a DT reader it of course suggests All-World in general and Mejis/Hamry in particular, and then the "say ya" is jarring right next to that.)
Clearly I have not read DT in too long, because I didn't even realize "say ya" was endemic to End-world, and wouldn't be appropriate to something that yeah, is intended to invoke Mejis. I'd have to refamiliarize myself with each regions specific patois, I think.
Yeah, any of the "say ____", "do ya," that kind of stuff -- that's all the Callas. (I'm not sure if the Callas technically count as End-world or not; they're the border between Mid-World and End-World, basically, to use Mid-World in the more specific sense. End-World proper is all the stuff that's Thunderclap, Algul Siento, and points beyond.) "Yar" is Calla-speak too, but I have a vague idea that that's one that ranges farther afield.
Mejis is "ye" and "thee," and "do'ee ken" and "do'ee not," and not so much with the "say ____." And "aye," rather than "yar." ("Thee" is a thing you hear around Gilead as well, but is seems to be pretty much a Friendly Folk thing when it's not used for kids or very close loved ones? That's my impression, anyway. There's a certain amount of contradiction/inconsistency there, IIRC, but I'm not sure if that's Stephen King being sloppy or if it's a deliberate choice, given that colloquial pronoun usage is not necessarily all tidy and clearcut.)
I'm looking over that third stanza again, and no immediate Mejis equivalent to "say ya charyou" springs to mind, but you could definitely rephrase that verse to fit the region better without too much trouble. (Also, while we're on that verse, I will say that "red o'er white to light to pyre" is a bit of a tongue-twister for something that's supposed to be oral tradition. Also I can't remember if "o'er" is Mejis-y either. It might be! That one I'd have to check.)
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branchandroot
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Date: 2008-04-07 06:32 am (UTC)(I am following your d_k thread, and I loved the way the first verse showed up.)
no subject
Date: 2008-04-07 01:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 09:10 pm (UTC)And the Callas are a long, long way from Gilead, even if that slang got picked up to varying degrees by all the gunslingers at Milliways thanks to the way the later ka-tet members and Ted Brautigan used it. Since they were all mid- or post-DT5, and had spent a while in the Callas themselves; the ones who had picked it up most solidly, of course, were the ones who weren't from Mid-World originally at all.
This isn't a reason not to use the slang, of course. It's just a thing to consider -- where the poetry's being filtered through, and for and by whom. I kind of like it, but it does definitely say to me "this is how the rhymes are said in Calla Bryn Sturgis," which is very different from how they're presumably said (if indeed they are) in Gilead. (Which is actually a criticism I'd make of the third verse: the charyou tree stuff is quite possibly said on the borders of End-world as well, since Reap Night seems to be a wide-ranging holiday. But for a DT reader it of course suggests All-World in general and Mejis/Hamry in particular, and then the "say ya" is jarring right next to that.)
no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 09:18 pm (UTC)Clearly I have not read DT in too long, because I didn't even realize "say ya" was endemic to End-world, and wouldn't be appropriate to something that yeah, is intended to invoke Mejis. I'd have to refamiliarize myself with each regions specific patois, I think.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 09:37 pm (UTC)Mejis is "ye" and "thee," and "do'ee ken" and "do'ee not," and not so much with the "say ____." And "aye," rather than "yar." ("Thee" is a thing you hear around Gilead as well, but is seems to be pretty much a Friendly Folk thing when it's not used for kids or very close loved ones? That's my impression, anyway. There's a certain amount of contradiction/inconsistency there, IIRC, but I'm not sure if that's Stephen King being sloppy or if it's a deliberate choice, given that colloquial pronoun usage is not necessarily all tidy and clearcut.)
I'm looking over that third stanza again, and no immediate Mejis equivalent to "say ya charyou" springs to mind, but you could definitely rephrase that verse to fit the region better without too much trouble. (Also, while we're on that verse, I will say that "red o'er white to light to pyre" is a bit of a tongue-twister for something that's supposed to be oral tradition. Also I can't remember if "o'er" is Mejis-y either. It might be! That one I'd have to check.)
*does the dance of sociolinguistic dorkery*