As one of my favorite poets Anna Achmatova said once :" If you only knew from what garbage poems grows..." Hard to translate, she is not translatable, once I wanted to buy her in English translation for my daughter, I looked through the book and almost puked with horror. I decide I either have to read it to her in Russian or she'll grow up without knowing Achmatova.
Anyway, this drawing grew from yellowish greasy spot right in middle of the paper, now gently blending with the sky. I started with ink, but decided to add some color and end up using all my colorful brush pens Kuretake, Faber Castell and few Bienfang pens. Outlined with Uranus Multipen. Took way too long, but I am glad I did it.
8 comments:
I think the colour finishes it off nicely. Enough but not too much?
Lovely piece IMHO.
Dave
Thank you very much Dave, usually inking takes less time, but here because of greasy spot on the paper ink was skipping and I turned to color. :-)
Nice piece but very sad to hear that Anna Akhmatova's poetry is not well translated. She is a poet I've read in English (my Russian is niet) but I do know from other translations, other languages, nuance is what often gets lost.
Thank you Ontheroad, translation is very tricky thing, sometimes we just don't know what we missing, sometimes translators write their own masterpiece. :-)
Wow I am impressed by your drawing skills. You've got crazy skills. Beautiful work.
Thank you very much Shelley for your kind words. All we have to do, I think, keep learning and reading and solve problems and experiment. Then we good and have hope. :-)
Marvelous! Just perfect. :D
Indeed, sad to hear the translations from russian are that bad... I wish I could learn russian easier... wish my grandma was still alive and lucid to teach me. It's a pity she didn't teach me yidish and russian when I was younger. The difference between generations were too big by then..... =P Miss her so much...
Here in Brazil there's an nice writer named Tatiana Belinsky that used to translate from russian to portuguese. She's an author of many children's books and also wrote about her coming to Brazil in the war period, without speaking portuguese at that time (just like my family's personal history, for coincidence). She's very lovely, I think you would like her. I think she's 80 somethings years old by now, but still very enthusiastic and working. And she's also a cat lover. ;)
I think her translations are good, but since I don't know russian it's very hard to know... *sigh*
One more skill to my learning wish list. LOL
At least english was easy... Haha!
How old is your daughter? Saw her pictures at your Flickr/Facebook, she's so gorgeous!
xoxo,
Fabiana :)
Hi Fabiana! Not all Russian translation is bad, just Achmatova was. Her poetry is so pure and close to simply speaking, that any other way loosing the beauty and become stupid and weird. I use to read a lot of poetry when was a young girl, so wanted my daughter to know my favorite poets, but it is not easy unless I will read it to her aloud. I read a lot of books in translation and it was wonderful. Nabokov use to write easily on Russian and English and to read him on both languages is a pleasure. Bulghakov also translated wonderfully. My daughter can't read in Russian, but can speak. Was not my teaching that much, but her tennis coach. She is 22. I would love to learn Japanese, seems so attractive. May be one day I will. I will look for her books, Belinski, sounds interesting, thank you.
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