It's clever, but is it art?

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On another topic: last night I finally sat down and watched an episode (on YouTube) of the Russian "Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson" series. :) It took forever for the videos to load, which turned out to be kind of neat, because I'd just keep watching the beginning over and over while waiting for the end to load, and I picked up more of the Russian each time. I was rather surprised, actually, how many of the words I recognized, given that we never exactly studied police/crime-related vocabulary in my Russian classes. I really ought to get my hands on some Russian movies/shows to watch. Except that first I need to get my hands on a Region 5 compatible DVD player. :P

I've got to ask, though... is it just me, or is it kind of strange that Holmes and Watson use the formal mode of address with each other? Maybe I have the wrong idea about how these things work, but I would have imagined Holmes and Watson would be close enough to talk to one another на ты, if not at the beginning of the series then at least by the time of, say, "Hound of the Baskervilles." But it looks like they never switch over. Strange? Not strange?

So I've decided to drop my Precalculus class. I really can't see any way that I can possibly pass at this point. So either I'll try again over the summer at Mesa Community College, or I guess I need to start looking at changing my major. :/

( Collapse ) at least I'm getting A's in the classes I'm not failing...

Also! My sister and I were looking into buying a better camera, because we still weren't happy with the photographs we were getting. Unfortunately, the camera we want (a Canon Powershot G10) runs about $500, which is more than we have to spare at the moment. So we dedided to try improving our lighting instead. I got a set of professional studio lights with shoot-through umbrellas for $130, and the photos look so much better.

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:D

In my Russian Lit book, we've reached the section on Tyutchev, which is quite short -- just a handful of poems. After reading the first poem I thought, my god, this is stunning. And after every other poem I thought the same thing. They were far too wonderful to be translations.

At first I said to myself, hell, these must be translated by Nabokov. But I quickly decided, no, that's awful -- as if Nabokov were the only person capable of translating Russian literature! Surely there are other translators with this kind of talent. There's no reason to imagine Nabokov is the only one.

But I flipped back to the front of the book where the translators are credited, and sure enough -- Nabokov.

God damn you, Nabokov.

Anyway, I notice that almost none of these translations seem to exist online, so I'm posting a few of them (a bit early for April Poetry Month, but whatever). Some of you, no doubt, have read these in Russian, and I have no idea how the translations actually compare to Tyutchev's originals, or whether Nabokov took preposterous liberties in order to make them work so well in English, but I'm impressed either way.

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I need to find some Nabokov translations of Pushkin so that I'll stop thinking Tyutchev was a better poet. :/ The Pushkin poems in the book are nowhere near this good.

Unrelatedly, tomorrow there's an open lecture on Oscar Wilde in the Lang & Lit building. I may try to go, since I don't have classes. It's at 3:15, in room 316, on 3/17, which should be easy enough to remember...