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I won't claim it's more or less impressive, but Luis Antin van Rooten's Mots D'Heures is at first glance abstract (bordering on the nonsensical) French poetry
by kthejoker2 5y ago
I won't claim it's more or less impressive, but
Luis Antin van Rooten's Mots D'Heures is at first glance abstract (bordering on the nonsensical) French poetry ..
But is actually a homophonic translation of English nursery rhymes - that is, if you read the French aloud, it sounds as if you're reading the rhyme.
Example:
Un petit d'un petit
S'étonne aux Halles
Un petit d'un petit
Ah! degrés te fallent
Indolent qui ne sort cesse
Indolent qui ne se mène
Qu'importe un petit d'un petit
Tout Gai de Reguennes.
(If you read it aloud you will recognize a well-known scrambled egg...)
The effort is in making the French poetry make any sense, which van Rooten (a Hollywood character actor in his spare time) does admirably.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mots_d%27Heures?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mots_d%27Heures?wprov=sfla1
- projectileboy 5y agoWow!! I had to go to the Wikipedia page to fully appreciate it. Thank you for sharing that.
- barbs 5y agoThere was an old flash animation that did a similar thing with a Japanese rap using English words https://youtu.be/VCOEh_Dnkeg https://youtu.be/VCOEh_Dnkeg
- kortex 5y agoAh yes, animutation. This was peak meme culture back in the early aughts. Mmm, tasty nostalgia. What's interesting about internet meme culture (back then and to this day) is that it's quite Dadaist. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animutation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animutation
- baby 5y agoOh gosh, there's a all wiki full of that https://wiki.animutationportal.com/Super_Smash_Bros._Animutation https://wiki.animutationportal.com/Super_Smash_Bros._Animuta...
- tshaddox 5y agoApparently my knowledge of French pronunciation is nowhere near sufficient to figure this out. Based on the Wikipedia article, it seems the first line is supposed to sound like “Humpty Dumpty.”
- bshimmin 5y agoIf you read the English line first with a ridiculous French accent (like you might hear in Monty Python) and then read the French in an equally silly way, with a bit of imagination they sound broadly quite similar. Basically if you can make "Mots d'Heures" into "mother", you're well on your way!
- pedrosorio 5y agoYou need to imagine a French person speaking English with strong accent (e.g. Michelle in Gilmore Girls) to get “Humpty Dumpty” (which is obvious I guess, since the poem is in French, I suppose you couldn’t make it sound like an English or American accent)
- routerl 5y agoYou didn't fail, it's just that this supposed translation makes a lot of assumptions about how it will be read. I speak French, and did not immediately recognize "Un petit d'un petit" as "Humpty Dumpty"; the "correct" reading relies on knowing that a native French-speaker might pronounce "hump" as "ump". It is not simply a mapping of syllables to phonemes. In other words, it's an extremely targeted joke, intended at people who have specific expectations about how both French and English are read and spoken.
- ksaj 5y agoI know another French joke that is extremely targeted in exactly the same way. It's from Canada, and it pretty much only works when read aloud. Eh, did you notice there's no h in 'ere? It's 'cos they left it in h'Ottawa. For people who don't know the accent, French people don't typically pronounce the h initial in words like 'here', (or 'humpty' for that matter) and they add an h to vowel initial words like 'Ottawa'. Another joke we have refers to how the French pronounce the English word "happiness."
- FatalLogic 5y agoTo hear it read aloud: https://translate.google.com/?sl=fr&text=Un%20petit%20d%27un%20petit%0AS%27%C3%A9tonne%20aux%20Halles%2C%0AUn%20petit%20d%27un%20petit%0AAh%20degr%C3%A9s%20te%20fallent%2C%0A%0AIndolent%20qui%20ne%20sort%20cesse%2C%0AIndolent%20qui%20ne%20se%20m%C3%A8ne%2C%0AQu%27importe%20un%20petit%20d%27un%20petit%0ATout%20Gai%20de%20Reguennes&op=translate https://translate.google.com/?sl=fr&text=Un%20petit%20d%27un... Using the desktop browser version of Google Translate, click on the listen/speaker icon below the French text in the left side panel
- air7 5y agoAmazing! Also works on mobile on the actual website.
- dotancohen 5y agoI had to listen to it three times before I was able to make heads or tails out of it. But it was worth it.
- jjeaff 5y agoI'm thinking this must be something that has been manually tweaked by someone on the Google translate team. Otherwise, how in the world does it pronounce it with the cadence of the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme?
- ithkuil 5y agoBecause poetry is the mastery of meter, and meter is a thing
- dthul 5y agoThe commas give it the right rhythm I believe. I can only hear French though, maybe because I never heard the English version.
- FatalLogic 5y agoYes, I added commas at the ends of a few lines, which cues the speech engine to create more appropriate intonation and natural pauses. But parts of the second half of the poem are still not so intelligible in English
- Vivtek 5y agoThis reminds me of a similar homophonic rendition, in which the French actually makes some sense (https://www.blueridgejournal.com/poems/mots06-etquirit.htm https://www.blueridgejournal.com/poems/mots06-etquirit.htm) - I actually first saw this in the Whole Earth Catalog, of all places. Et qui rit des curés d'Oc? De Meuse raines, houp! de cloques. De quelles loques ce turque coin. Et ne d'ânes ni rennes, Écuries des curés d'Oc.
- ksaj 5y agoThat's pretty good. The translation notes are completely bonkers.