Hey guys, so, sorry I literally never come on here. The last time I posted was... January of last year. Whoops.

I hopefully have a good reason. I've been kept busy with my job at the local library. In September of last year, after several years of dead ends and two disastrous attempts at running cash registers in two different places I finally found a job and wouldn't you know it it's back where I started in high school, our library. I'm really happy to be back.

I also achieved another of my goals from last year, getting a car. I am now the proud driver of a blue 2009 Toyota Matrix named 青 (Ao), Japanese for blue. It's pretty great getting to drive into work on my own.

In manuscript news, I'm still working on transcribing Harley MS 682, and updating my transcription online on my site. You can read it here: https://sites.google.com/site/charlesdukeoforleans/british-library-harley-ms-682-transcription (it still is very much a work in progress). I've been trying to focus on this project more when I have the energy, and to spend less time on stuff like tumblr (which I'm still more active on) and it definitely helps with my many annoying brain things. I need to update my blogspot (boolean-illogic.blogspot.com) and this more often. If only I wasn't so tired when I get home for work.

Hopefully I'll have a decent-sized update on the translation project soon, so stay tuned.

As promised, the Histories Ficathon is back and signups have opened! Check it out here on Ao3 for more information/to sign up. Signups will be open until September 11, at 11:59 PM.

I was going to post the full thing here but it ended up being too long for Dreamwidth. Anyway, here's a link to a story about me being part of meme history.

https://skeleton-richard.tumblr.com/post/625596054011789312/a-fact-about-me-that-sounds-fake

Okay so I neglected the Charles project all summer and kinda have been working on other stuff while kind of going back to school until I figure out grad school (long story short I wanted to go back to my old school for some classes while I could still be here, since I'm stuck here for the next year or so). ANYWAY. THE BIG NEWS.

The manuscript I'm translating of Charles's Middle English poetry, Harley MS 682, was just digitized by the British Library and is now viewable! Go check it out!  

I'm so happy. I've been waiting for two years for this. 

What does this mean for the project?

First, I can make my own transcription. I found it kind of difficult to work just based on someone else's transcription, I'm not sure what it is but I felt actually being able to see the original would be easier. This also has motivated me to get back into the project, since I took a break over the summer.

Second, with my own transcription, I can theoretically work on a secondary project I want to do someday, making a web version like the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive. I just need to learn the coding needed. And see if I need permission from the British Library. But someday!

 Major update! The Project as it stands for my honors thesis was completed in April, presented, and did well. This month I graduated and now have a BA in history!

 My class on Irish lit read Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's essay "Why I Choose To Write In Irish" last week, which I've actually already read under the same teacher in another class. It's an interesting look at a bilingual person's choices regarding the language of their writing and unsurprisingly made me think of Charles and his deliberate choices over what language to use. Ní Dhomhnaill only writes poetry in Irish, though other people have translated it (we also read two translations of "An Rás") so she's obviously taken a different route than Charles, who wrote bilingually (trilingual if you count Latin). I think they've both made ultimately the same choice in writing in a language that is not the "main" language if you will-- Irish instead of English, English instead of French. Charles really had no practical reason to write English since French was still a common language among the Eand there are plenty of people who'd question Ní Dhomhnaill how far she's going to get writing in a language with a little under 75,000 speakers. It comes down to the nuances possible in the language and what conveys the author's thoughts best. 

Which leads me to the old joke about how you can say anything in French and it'll sound nice, for example "Je pry Dieu qu'il les maudie" sounds a lot nicer than "I pray God curses them." 

The refrain of the French Ballade XXV is "Je pry Dieu qu'il les maudie," "I pray God curses them" as compared to the English of Ballade 25, "I biseche God, acursid mote they dy" -- I beseech God, accursed must they die!" Charles's English is unsurprisingly a little more rough around the edges grammatically and vocabulary-wise, but it's also more raw and unpolished in the emotional sense. While the lover still is in the same allegory-populated dream world, he's less abstract in general and more urgent. Things suck-- he's lonely, tired of being depressed and anxious, and needs to get some-- and he says so in English. 

But, I hear you saying, aren't these ballades versions of each other? Why do the French and English sound so different? Because, note that they're versions of each other, not strictly translations. They follow similar patterns and themes, same or similar rhyming, taking into account the different meters (octosyllabic for French and pentameter for English) but they convey the ideas differently. That's, I think, the reason he wrote in both English and French. Both languages have their poetic strengths-- French is easy to rhyme; English, while difficult to rhyme, works well for poetry that relies on meter-- and he saw different strengths in them for his own purpose. His English was raw and urgent, so was the poetic result. This may be in part why early commentators (I'm looking at you Robert Louis Stevenson) said his English poetry wasn't very good. Charles knew what he was doing though, allowing the two languages to express different feelings while still on the same theme.