#i wonder what that line from joyce is like in the original estonian

[queerdraws]

Disco Elysium & Language

Okay okay so a bit ago I (foolishly) decided to (poorly) translate all 200-something pages of A Sacred and Terrible Air, despite having zero experience with Estonian whatsoever (so, you know, take what I’m saying here with a huge grain of salt).

There’s a small thing that gets lost in the translation from Estonian to English, the object of my obsession: The Pale

Its original Estonian counterpart is ”halli” (which essentially functions as “the gray” [a part of a whole], as opposed to “hall”, which is just “gray” [a color]).  Hall and Pale are both used to describe the color of skin due to No Blood.  They have similar connotations & uses.

Easy-peasy.  Let’s look at the Chapter 15 title “Hallitus”.  Hey, that looks kinda familiar, I see a “halli” in there.

First we gotta backtrack.  Hallitus is just a noun derived from the verb hallitama.

Hallitama is built from “hall” (”gray”) plus -tama (suffix for making a noun in to a verb, generally means “to make”).  So, hallitama would (should?) literally mean “to make gray” or “graying”. BUT!  It actually means “to mold”.  Like an apple being coated in a gray fuzz, hallitama is “to mold / to go moldy”.  Oooh!

So “hallitus” means “moldy”.  But it also, sorta, means “grayed thing”/”pale’d thing”.

So, we have this word that’s used to describe all sorts of manner of withering, decaying, frail, or dead things.

I don’t know, it tickles the brain.

#not art #disco elysium #rambling #the pale #a sacred and terrible air #And fruit within the pale is described as being especially vulnerable to its affects they go moldy. #and joyce talks about like fungal spores floating around inside of porch collapse #i wonder what that line from joyce is like in the original estonian #it drives me crazy!!! #i wish this book series had been finished I want to know more about the pale #i'm rotating this in my brain over and over and over #i think the english localization was done really really well #pale was the best possible word they couldve chosen #anyway very very sidenote #nothing makes you hate the word 'on' like translating shit #that words means too many damn things