Necreavit

[melannen]

Bad idea number 1: When you are aware you've got the tickly start of a cold, and your immune system's down this week anyway, spend an entire day sitting in front of an open window during a hurricane. Then spend the next day wandering around outside by the swollen creek *in the rain*.

Bad idea number 2: When you finally have sense enough to come in, and, as the next step in your annual back-to-school cold, are beginning to develop a headache, spend an hour and a half staring at a computer screen trying to come up with an alternate, all-French anagram of Tom Marvolo Riddle.

When you suck at anagrams.

And can't speak French anyway.

(vol d'or de la mort is the closest vaguely grammatical one I came up with, but it leaves me with a mi I can't get rid of. Golden flight of semi-death? And dormi is tempting but I'm not convinced it's a real word.)

Bad idea number 3: As compensation, eat nothing all day but chocolate.

I think I shall make some tea. Yes. Tea is good.

Comments

[stellar-dust.livejournal.com]

dormi is the past participle of "dormir", "to sleep." And it should be "la morte;" yes, death is feminine. (:

Too sleepy to come up with anything right now. But you could maybe fit in "il m'adore," "he loves me," or "il t'adore," "he loves you." Or "il a vole," accent on the last 'e,' "he flew." And "le roi," "the king," looks promising too.

Then again, there aren't really enough vowels in there ..

[aelkiss.livejournal.com]

how is the 'Tom Marvelo Riddle / I am Lord Voldemort' meme translated in the French CoS?

(aside: tiny little ants seem to have an affinity for my laptop; i've seen them on my desk at umd, on my desk at hopkins, and now IN MY BED. grr. they must be traveling in my laptop bag.)

[tarimanveri.livejournal.com]

Tea is always a good idea.

[melannen.livejournal.com]

Ah. My doubts as to dormi came from the fact that babelfish wouldn't translate it back, and it's exactly the same as Spanish.

The not-enough-vowels is a problem. I always get stuck with m's and t's left over.

And she used 'mort' in the book. And babelfish likes it! :P

[melannen.livejournal.com]

Apparently Tom Elvis Jedusor (anagram of "Je suis Voldemort")

Hehe. His middle name is Elvis. *Now* I get that fanart of Elvis and the basilisk I saw last week.

[melannen.livejournal.com]

Indeed.

[aelkiss.livejournal.com]

Bleh. "jedusor" seems to just be nonsense and (although I don't know French) doesn't convey the same sense of "lower class" that a name like Tom Riddle does in English..

Might be fun to see if you could do anything with Tom [nonsense based on Merveille] Devinette...

[melannen.livejournal.com]

But "marvolo" is basically nonsense in English, and "Elvis" does convey meaning.

I never got the impression that Riddle was supposed to be lower class. Common, maybe, but they have that big old house with a caretaker and everything.

The translators were probabaly already stuck with "voldemort" for the other name, so they didn't have much choice.

[aelkiss.livejournal.com]

Marvolo isn't /quite/ nonsense, though. It sounds not entirely unlike marvelous, which is why I suggested making the French middle name nonsense similar to 'Merveille,' French for 'marvelous.' Admittedly, it might be pretty hard to get it to come out as "Je suis Seigneur Voldemort," but you might be able to fudge. Even if 'jedusor' has a sound-alike word in French, and we suppose for a moment that 'Elvis' sounds common, he probably wouldn't always go by his middle name it wouldn't matter so much. Tom Marvolo sounds a lot less common than Tom Riddle. I interpreted Tom's complaint that Riddle sounded common to mean that it sounded like a name a commoner would have, e.g. one of the lower classes. It doesn't really matter that much, the sentiment is fairly close if not quite the same in either case.

I think we both ought to learn French and read Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language by Douglas Hofstadter (of which my friend Kat has a signed copy;-) (Not necessarily in that order.)

[melannen.livejournal.com]

Jedusor sounds like "Jedi." Which is the same in french. :P

[stellar-dust.livejournal.com]

Actually, Jedusor sounds a little like jeux, game, which is kind of the same idea as Riddle. Eh?

[stellar-dust.livejournal.com]

Hmm, all right, my French dictionary agrees. Mort is apparently one of those exceptional nouns that is feminine without the 'e'. Eh well.