Tumgik
circe-stardust · 2 years
Photo
Tumblr media
Hieronymus Bosch c. 1503-1504
Garden of Earthly Delights (details)
22K notes · View notes
circe-stardust · 2 years
Text
Tumblr media
Anton Peschka (Egon Schiele, 1909)
1K notes · View notes
circe-stardust · 2 years
Text
“It’s spring, you’re young, you’re lovely, you have a right to be happy. Come back into the world.”
— Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (via luthienne)
31K notes · View notes
circe-stardust · 2 years
Text
Tumblr media
The sleeping lady, Alaska
53K notes · View notes
circe-stardust · 2 years
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
alex turner's love letter to alexa chung and forgotten letter #68 by james andrew crosby.
18K notes · View notes
circe-stardust · 2 years
Text
the feminine urge to fall in love with the villain.
12K notes · View notes
circe-stardust · 2 years
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
the art of books
5K notes · View notes
circe-stardust · 2 years
Text
having to come to terms with the fact that love is not an everlasting performance in which you attempt to retain the attention of your significant other but rather a release of control and putting faith into them and trusting them to choose to stay with you no matter what you have to offer
211K notes · View notes
circe-stardust · 2 years
Photo
Tumblr media
Miguel Hernández, tr. by Don Share, from Poems of War (1936–1939); “Hunger,”
6K notes · View notes
circe-stardust · 2 years
Photo
Tumblr media
Baroque Sun 
San Giorgio a Cremano,  Campania, Italy
Photography by Vittorio Pandolfi, January 2020
21K notes · View notes
circe-stardust · 2 years
Photo
Tumblr media
@honeiee
“A mother is clothed with strength and dignity, laughs without fear of the future. When she speaks her words are wise and she gives instructions with kindness.” —Proverbs
8K notes · View notes
circe-stardust · 2 years
Text
being insanely obsessive will not get u anywhere but it sure do pass the time
49K notes · View notes
circe-stardust · 2 years
Note
wait can you please explain to me why a french book has more words than an english book? they say the same thing, yeah? why 400 more pages in french version? does it just take more words to speak in french, or is the actual content more…. descriptive in a way that takes more words to understand? i’m not as stupid as it sounds like i am. thank you
That's not a stupid question! You do literally use more words to express an idea in French (generally speaking). Translators call this the expansion / contraction ratio of languages. Translating a text from English to Romance languages like Spanish, French, Italian typically makes it 20-30% longer. Other languages like Chinese or Korean will result in a contraction. Appropriately enough, the French term for "expansion ratio" is "taux de foisonnement" which has an expansion ratio of +33%.
It's a combination of factors:
word length: English uses so many monosyllabic words, unlike languages with mainly Graeco-Latin roots. It can be a headache for translators who translate online stuff because apps designed with English in mind have tiny frames and buttons meant for tiny English words and if you can't modify the layout, your language might just not fit... Same problem when you translate subtitles, or small signs in public places (“Please wait here” is 16 characters in English, vs. you need 15 characters in French just to say ‘please’ / s’il vous plaît...)
rigid syntax: in French you can't use shortcuts like "word length". You've got to say "the length of the word". We don’t have concise adjectival structures like X-friendly, X-based, X-prone, and often need to use an entire clause (“which is prone to...”) to translate them. Articles are mandatory (e.g. you would need to start this sentence with "the articles" rather than "articles"), the possessive form can’t just be a quick apostrophe (not “Mary’s friend” but “the friend of Mary”) etc.
a general preference for simple, active, direct and pared-down writing in English vs. a preference for 'diluted', passive, indirect, embellished phrasings in French. French adores grammatical emphasis / redundancy while English hates it (I saw a translation recently where the English phrasing was “This explains—”; the French one was: “C’est donc ce qui explique”, I.e. “It is therefore that which explains—”) Someone very accurately commented on my last ask “French goes on and on enjoying itself.” English style guides are absolutely obsessed with advising writers to prune their sentences, use straightforward syntax, remove 'unnecessary' words, while this really isn't perceived as evidence of good writing in French. Writing talent rather lies in “savoir manier la langue” / knowing how to wield the French language, and keeping your sentences direct and to the point doesn’t demonstrate your ability to do that...
English prefers connecting ideas implicitly rather than explicitly, which is easy to do with short, straightforward sentences. I was translating a text the other day that was full of logically-linked sentences, e.g. “This is part of a larger problem. We won’t solve it without tackling [other thing].” English doesn’t mind this staccato style but French finds it ugly and much prefers to use one long, flowy sentence, eg “Seeing as it is part of a larger problem, we won’t be able to solve it without—” or “This is part of a larger problem, and consequently it won’t be solved unless—” I remember reading a bilingual edition of a novel in which the original French went “Il s’acquitta du montant puis, après avoir froidement salué, il sortit.” The English translation was “He paid the fee, coldly bowed, and went out.” The French version says “He did X, then, after doing Y, he did Z,” while in English the ‘then’ and ‘after’ are implied by placing actions one after the other (in the first example, the ‘consequently’ is similarly implied.) French likes to add tool-words everywhere in order to keep its more convoluted sentences clear, by making all the logical connectors visible.
So this mixture of etymology, grammatical differences and just plain cultural preferences (which of course stem from the nature of the language) is how you end up with a 700-page book in English becoming a 1000-page book in French...
25K notes · View notes
circe-stardust · 2 years
Photo
Tumblr media
Head of a Woman, 1520, Raphael
Medium: chalk
42 notes · View notes
circe-stardust · 2 years
Text
Not to sound like a sap but I think we as a society would be so much better off if we stopped constantly assuming the worst of each other.
41K notes · View notes
circe-stardust · 2 years
Photo
Tumblr media
Flesh & More https://www.instagram.com/flesh.and.more/
11K notes · View notes
circe-stardust · 2 years
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
triple dog dare - lucy dacus // lynchpin - forrister
34 notes · View notes