पहाड़ों

[raven]

I never do have enough hours in the day. I'm very, very lazy - when I work it's in very intense bursts, so as to get it over - but I've reached that point of the year where the intense bursts are lasting days rather than hours. I am still ill, but haven't stopped moving yet - today I got up, went back to bed, got up again, gritted my teeth, went to work at lunchtime and hit my targets, but through kind of a haze (the other trainee, who has known me for two weeks, said, "You are really ridiculous", in a loving manner that reminded me deeply of gavagai and hathy_col and makes me think she may be getting to know me rather well) - and I was going to drive to Leeds tomorrow, but was thinking better of it, what with a) general haze in head and b) so much work to do this weekend on various things. I am making the first steps towards my post-training-contract life, as well as taking evening classes at Hills Road. (I went to the first one on Tuesday and it was a delight: the teacher is wonderful, the class engaged and enthusiastic, and I think I might make friends who aren't lawyers! And also, isn't it amazing to be in a classroom? To put your hand up? To make notes? To not have to be responsible for anything other than your notes? I think I would recommend adult education to everyone, it's such a joy.)

So, yes, there are good and worthy reasons for me to have lots of homework this weekend, but the fact remains I do. But, genius idea: take the train! So I am taking the nice smooth East Coast main line up to Leeds tomorrow, and I won't have to drive, and I'll get some work done, and I get to see tau_sigma and hathy_col.

What else, what else? I am still writing trope ficlets, in around sleeping, working and working - it's a treat.

And courtesy of elb, I am listening to a lot of songs by Niraj Chag, of which my favourite by far is "Ur Jaa". It's a lovely, haunting, wistful love song, and I've listened to it a couple of dozen times today thinking all the time, this reminds me of something. Not even that - not even a reminding of something so much as, somewhere in my mind there is something aligning like a tectonic plate.

I just figured it out. A while ago I recced a beautiful Vorkosigan fic called "L'oiseau qui vole", which is a delicate love story with a central theme evoked by a single line from a (fictional, I believe) old French ballad: "l'oiseau qui vole n'a pas de maître", and it wasn't until I remembered that, that I understood it. Ur jaa, tu jaa paharon ke pichhe - yes. Yes, yes. Such a deeply lovely piece.

As for why the resonance - partly just the dovetailing of themes. But I was thinking about this the other day, about languages and what they feel like, to write in. I don't write in any language other than English, but I have enough grasp of the others to know, dimly, what it might be like to write in them, what it might feel like. When I was writing the trope ficlets, the first one I wrote was called "something in the autumn that is native to your blood" - it was a little thing that I wrote while terribly, terribly sleep-deprived, for philomytha who wanted something about Aral Vorkosigan, Simon Illyan and telepathy. I wrote it and then spent ages trying to find a title for it - the title it does have comes from a Canadian poem that thingswithwings introduced me to originally, and it's a perfectly good title - but, initially, I wanted to call it "tu jaa". I couldn't think of a reason to title it in Hindi, in the end: neither thematic, nor, well, Barrayar Has No Brown People, as we all know.

But... I wanted to call it "tu jaa". Not "tum jao", nor "aap jaiye". It means, "you go", an imperative. But so do all those three. Only "tu jaa" is something you can say to someone you love, to someone you despise, to someone you'd protect and adore and own utterly. You can say that, and I just wrote 17,000 words trying to explain that sort of relationship in a language that stands back from that sort of feeling. One day, maybe, when I'm old, I'll be able to write in languages other than English, and it will feel different. And perhaps - if I feel that resonance, deep below- Hindi and French have a texture like each other. I hope so.

So much nonsense. Right. Productivity. Why do I always pick such convenient times to be ill.

Comments

[philomytha]

Well, my entirely selfish view is that you should write more Aral & Simon & Cordelia fic for the express purpose of titling it 'tu jaa', because that sounds absolutely right and true. Besides, if the Orthodox church survives on Barrayar, maybe some Hindi has too.

Also, that's a lovely song, thank you!

[thingswithwings]

<3 I loved reading this post, and feeling that feeling with you.

also, I was a bit startled to see you'd titled something after that Bliss Carman poem! how lovely.

[raven]

<3 Something about it has just stuck with me, and I always did want to name something using that line. Perhaps I still will, it was a deliberate misquotation this time around!

[raven]

*smiles* It is so relieving to know that no one minds I write the SAME STORY over and over and over! :) I hope some Hindi does survive on Barrayar - I've always hoped that some brown people will turn up in the books and prove me wrong.

[hedda62]

I hope so too, though if they don't, I will believe they're there anyway, and you can always write them for us. The same story over and over: I remember a meme to that effect, years ago, and I decided that I am always writing Alice in Wonderland, which I suppose by a stretch and a twist "L'oiseau" could be, if you consider the state in which Simon discovers Duval's true worth to be Wonderland. And of course no one minds.

And so cool to visualize shifting tectonic plates of your mind. I know that sense of resonance between stories and states of being and other forms of art; I know no other languages (including French) well enough to quite grasp how words and states alter between them, but I do think that I'm influenced by the remembrance of grasping the intent of writers who thought in a different language. The Song of My People section of my brain probably speaks Ibsen (though I know no Norwegian and those people of mine were Swedish).

[raven]

*smiles* That makes perfect sense to me. In the broader sense, I'm not sure exactly what story it is I write over and over: I think it's perhaps, not the song of my people in particular, but the song of everyone's people - how people are made into who they are, through languages and space Indians and feudalism. :)

[khalinche.livejournal.com]

Oh, this lovely post. The medium of Vorkosigan fic for discussing the different nuances of loving declarations in different languages is surely what the internet is made for.

Apologies in advance for making this all about me, but my head is full of this right now.

I use different languages a lot to express affection, because they feel...better for it than English, somehow. I make up endearments a lot (hello, short-face! how are you, loveysocks?) but they always have a little bit of General Melchitt to them, a little bit of performance and wordplay. In Spanish, though, things feel a lot more natural, like the explicit affection belongs in the phrase rather than being shoehorned in, and it's much easier to write things which combine the romantic and the erotic without either seeming out of place. I actually find it actively hard to speak Spanish without slipping into endearments. It could be that the culture I learned Spanish in, and fell in love in, has much more incidence of people expressing romantic and other kinds of affection verbally, maybe it's that that degree of detachment, with it not being my native language, makes it easier to own up to soppiness.

Gaelic again, much better for cheeky remarks to close friends and family-type people, maybe because I've never been in love with a Gaelic speaker but have childhood friends with whom our close, joking-relationships happen in Gaelic. But it is so beautiful for love poetry too. If I'm really, really head over heels about somebody I want to write to them in Gaelic, because it feels so intimate and the poetry so beautiful. Like I want them to see how the beauty of the words themselves is like the beauty of my love for them. If I had a relationship with the depth of loyalty that there is between, say, Aral and Simon, it would be all in Gaelic. Simon and Alys, English. Formal, you see, and correct. Aral and Cordelia, Spanish - loving and practical and erotic. Miles and Ekaterin, Gaelic. Ivan and anyone, Spanish. Cordelia and Bothari and Miles and Bothari, Gaelic. This sounds pretentious as hell, I'm sorry.

Writing in Spanish is different again though. I realised there was something really special about the chap I've been seeing when I would sit on the bus home composing little text message poems in Spanish.

My head's a bit messy just now from doing intense ethnography-writing and having to submerge myself back into the years when I was very, very in love with someone with whom I only ever spoke in Spanish. Probably that great love had something to do with all of this, too.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Ah, thank you. I hope you like Niraj Chag!

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

This was lovely to read. It's something I've not read much about, and maybe there isn't writing about it to read, but yes, this. When I'm home, I try to speak to my parents in Hindi, and always if it's the small, intimate things of the household: you can't express familial love in English. (Hindi, after all, has a different word for every blood-relative depending on whether they're your father's or your mother's relatives, and if they're older or younger or by marriage or not.) But oddly Hindi doesn't have anything with the clarity and simplicity of "I love you" - that's where it gets coy. :)

Gaelic reminds me of Hindi in many, many ways. It has a superficial similarity in its lack of an indefinite article, but that goes deeper, I think, because what little I've learnt of how Gaelic sentences are constructed makes me think of how Hindi speakers go at their sentences. It's almost... anecdotal, if that makes sense? Hindi is a very good language for telling jokes in, and I get that feeling about Gaelic too.

[littlered2.livejournal.com]

You don't seem at all lazy to me!

This is a really interesting post. You're so lucky to have multiple languages. I did French up to A Level, and am reasonable at it, but nowhere near good to approach fluency, or be able to hear the different feelings behind the words. Thank you for writing about this.