The first Helsem Exercise

[<veion@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi>]

Here is one of the poems by Michael Helsem called 'skadji' or
'Color-Desire'. I have tried to fix the Lojban and I did my
own English translation corresponding to my understanding of
the corrected original.


le rozgu .a lo zgike be sekai     The rose, or all music like it
leri kamyxunre ba lunra           in redness, will turn moonlike
xarnu nundunra ri'a .ia           stubborn winter because of, so I believe,
do .e ledo darno logji            you and the aloof logic of yours.

.icu'u le pu me do [ku]           As said by the you of past
ko fi mi ca cusku fe leiva        say now to me those
smaji valsi noi mi ke'a           soft words, which I
pujeca .iecai na natfe            then and now - Oh yes - do not deny
na'e mu'i rolei jitfycipra        in spite of all the proofs against...

Comments:

  (Setting aside the concrete nature of lojban and accepting the
   unmarked figurative usage)

  le rozgu ba nundunra      the rose will be an event-of-winter,
                            the rose will turn winter

    Took me a while to find an English expression for this. I rather
    like this - and stating that all rosa music turns into winter...
    I vacillated here between a and all but finally chose all.
    The original was missing the {be}.

  kamyxunre                 replaced the obviously outdated rafsi {kaz}

  lunra xarnu               something moving with the inevitability
                            of the Moon in its orbit

  .icu'u                    the original had {.isecu'u}

  le pu me do [ku]          the {me} was missing, {ku} is elidable

  na(bo) natfe              removed the unparseable {bo}

  na'e mu'i                 replaced the erroneous {na} with {na'e}

    The second verse is an example of a sentence where {fi/fe} seem to
    be almost unavoidable. I might, however, consider

         caku tecu'u mi ko cusku leiva ...

    as an alternative to avoid the mental juggling which distracts
    the reader from the flow of the poem.

    The structure {cu'u le pu me do ko cusku...} is quite clever and
    nicely ambiguous. The past you and the imperative you are
    speaking/ougth to speak simultaneously in a sense very difficult
    to convey satisfactorily in English. Whether the speaking of the
    past you is in the past at all is a separate question as this frase
    can be simplified to {le pu me do fa ko cusku}.

 ------------

It will take a while to get the hang of these poems (and to learn
to find the English expressions for the Lojban). Judging from this
poem and the preface which I went through I think there is really
something in Michael's Lojban in spite of the imperfections. It
isn't very orthodox but the departures from the Anglic way of
seeing things will open us another way to tackle Lojban, pe'i.    

  Veijo