I would wear furs and create a mountain abode; I’d wear a kilt and pound on my chest. I’d be a bad-ass highlander and THIS would be my cow-friend! I want this cute fellow so hard.
Twenty years ago, the British psychologist John Sloboda conducted a simple experiment. He asked music lovers to identify passages of songs that reliably set off a physical reaction, such as tears or goose bumps. Participants identified 20 tear-triggering passages, and when Dr. Sloboda analyzed their properties, a trend emerged: 18 contained a musical device called an “appoggiatura.”
An appoggiatura is a type of ornamental note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound. “This generates tension in the listener,” said Martin Guhn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who co-wrote a 2007 study on the subject. “When the notes return to the anticipated melody, the tension resolves, and it feels good.”
(via Why Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ Makes Everyone Cry - WSJ.com)
Adele’s songs don’t make me cry (except in frustration that they keep playing her same two songs on the radio over and over and over), but identifying appoggiatura as a specific and consistent chill-inducer is pretty cool. This is something I’d noticed as a musician but never knew it’d actually been studied.
dcu:
The 3D glasses for the Avengers movie are quite bad ass. Quite bad ass indeed.
Those tickets are going to cost 30 dollars each if those are the glasses at theaters.
I love Captain America’s. They should make Young Avengers 3D glasses so I can get Wiccan.
“Caedmon, Sing Something for Me…Sing the First Creation for Me”
I generally don’t put my translations online for four reasons.
1. They suck really hard, oscillating between being bare bones literal or so creative it becomes “Brenden McCarthy’s Narcissus” and not Ovid’s “Narcissus” from Metamorphoses.
2. They are from Latin texts and have already been translated twenty times.
3. They are from Latin texts that are hardly ever translated and no one cares about reading them.
4. They are part of my Master’s thesis, are slated for publication, or have some sort of potential that a public domain release (though I firmly believe in them) would otherwise put me in a copywrong bind.
Anglo Saxon sticks me in a bit of a different place with translation. Most of the “interesting” things, besides Beowulf, which has been translated to DEATH, are fairly short. So here are two translations I did today of “Caedmon’s Hymn.” Composed in 658, it’s the earliest documented poem (on vellum, crosses and caskets don’t count :P) in the history of the English language.
“Moore” MS. (737), Cambridge, Kk.5.16, f. 128v, written in Northumbria
Transcription of Cædmon’s Hymn
Nū sculon heriġean heofonrīċes weard,
Meotodes meahte ond his mōdġeþanc,
weorc wuldorfæder, swā hē wundra ġehwæs,
ēċe Drihten, ōr onstealde.
Hē ǣrest sceōp eorðan bearnum
heofon tō hrōfe, hāliġ Scyppend;
þā middanġeard monncynnes weard,
ēċe Drihten, æfter tēode
fīrum foldan, Frēa ælmihtiġ.
This is my literal translation, which is god (pun only partially intended) awful, but it’s pretty much exactly what the Anglo Saxon says grammatically; the word choice is as close to the modern equivalent as possible. It’s an ugly chunk of prose, but it keeps just about every unnecessary article and is faithful to tenses and declensions.
B’s Literal Translation:
Caedmon’s Hymn
Now we must praise the guardian of the heavenly kingdom, the maker’s might and the contents of his mind, the work of the glorious father, how he of every manner of wonder, he the perpetual lord, established the beginning; he shaped the sons of men first then for them heaven as a roof, the holy maker, then this middle world he, guardian of mankind, [the] eternal lord, for men fashioned [temporal] firmament, [the] lord almighty.
Here’s my more artistic rendering of the hymn, which uses enjambment (whatever: sue me), phrases, and actual punctuation. Though Caedmon does praise God still, my translation seems to capture the horror and power of Jehovah which I think tends to get lost in a lot of Old English translations of this hymn. It’s not as devotional as some versions (you have to pick and choose your words) but maybe that’s the atheist in me going for fear and the sublime over pure praise. I intentionally used quite a few synonyms for “Lord” that aren’t too well worn. Oh, and I try to keep it the way it should look on the page. I did have to switch up the caesuras and word order a bit, but the line numbers are the same. Finally, this isn’t a “hymn” in whatever way one twists the word (yes, it is devotional and meant to be sung, but looks at the metrics in O.E.), so I have addressed that as well. Couldn’t keep it syllabic, and, oh yeah,— fuck rhyme schemes.
B’s Creative Translation:
