great(ish) pt 27: magic flowers, Spanish Destiel, Powerpoint
Happy Friday! I managed to cut my fingers twice today. Today, TV and translation, a Forster adaptation, a novel about transformation, and how I party now. I know you were expecting a cheesy rhyme there... fooled again!
Article: Why ‘Supernatural‘ fans are freaking out about the show's Spanish dub by Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, published by the Daily Dot in November 2020
Hold on to your hats, pals: once again, very separate spheres of my personal interests have congealed in new and interesting ways. To keep it extremely brief, the mediocre television show Supernatural which I was a very late convert too (have you ever started watching a TV show 13 years in because you're grappling with imminent life changes?) recently ended and the fallout has been exactly as weird as expected. One of the most delightful subplots involves the dub for the Latin American TV market, which departs from the American original in a small, but crucial manner. Tumblr conspiracy theories! Talk of "rogue translators"! Memes! Not to be too online, but I have never felt more like this Tyler, The Creator tweet. Incredibly, there have been several updates to this story since it was published two days ago... I expect translators and SPN fans to unionise any day now and become the most vengeful and powerful group on the internet. And to quote a Twitter user about this whole mess: "tbh it’s kind of nice to be let down by something with NO stakes". God. Same.
Film: Where Angels Fear To Tread, directed by Charles Sturridge (1991)
Of the many films I watched in the spring, this adaptation of E.M. Forster's first novel weirdly stuck with me despite the fact that it's apparently regarded as one of the lesser adaptations of his work (and as far as I can tell the only non-Merchant Ivory one). I have a soft spot for Forster's writing partly because of how he writes about tourists in Italy (xenophobia meets sanitised escapism meets projecting random stuff on a place without being interested in the actual place; any of his characters could take a picture of a glass of wine and two plums and call it "so simple and chic").
This film stars a babyfaced Helena Bonham Carter, Helen Mirren and Rupert Graves, and it somehow manages to be both very straightforward (read: less artistic) and very strange. What stuck with me was a scene in a church. "To come out of a thing as well as you can – is that all that you're after?" "Why yes... what else is there?" Ouch.
Book: Girls Lost by Jessica Schiefauer, translated by Saskia Vogel (2020)
I read this novel in Swedish a couple of years ago because I knew that Saskia Vogel wanted to translate it. It was exactly as good as she said it would be. Three girls go through puberty. Male aggression is everywhere. Then they find magic flowers that make them look like boys for a night. What Schiefauer does with this plot device is much more layered than you'd assume from the premise. She really digs into the experience of gendered violence and the oppressive nature of being a teenager, with exquisite attention to bodies, microaggressions, moods. Saskia's beautiful translation was published in March and you can read an extract here.
Other: Powerpoint parties
One of the things I miss the most is talking to friends about stuff – mutual interests, popculture obsessions, whatever semi-academic rabbit hole we've fallen into. For the past two weekends, three of the most interesting people I know and I have been doing PowerPoint parties via videoconference. It's pretty much exactly what you'd expect: everyone presents five slides on a topic that they're interested in and know too much about (maps; mathematicians; Napoleon). You learn something; you see your friends' brains and creativity in action; you don't have to talk about painful topics like "how you are". And if you're lucky your friend will do a primer on a TV show that is so good that you immediately demand a follow-up for the next week.
That's all! Bye!