And I’ve met lots of people who actively discourage anyone around them from singing. I’ve met way more people who claim they can’t sing than actually can’t. It’s such a personal kind of music, one nearly anyone can make, but there’s often a feeling that only certain people are allowed to do it. I think it’s a shame that so many people I meet have such an ambivalent, fraught relationship with singing.
I love singing! I especially love singing with other people-choral singing is a blast. You can imagine that this song has been translated by someone from a different language with no awareness of the French song, without trying to make it scan as a song (or at least not the same song) in English.Īt least a few of these songs are based on Ann Leckie’s experience as a shape note singer, as she discusses here.
The basic meaning of the song is the same, and the lines can be matched up, but the grammar has been changed in each sentence - and because this is Radchaai, the armed man has become an armed person. You should be afraid.Īll around the cry goes out, put on armor made of iron. You should be afraid of the person with weapons. The person, the person, the person with weapons. This fits the original tune of the song and the English sentences are pretty similarily structured to the French ones. Wikipeda offers this English translation: Three of the songs used in the book are based on real songs, but rewritten as if ‘translated’ from the Radchaai language rather than using the original words.įor example, l’homme armé (’the armed man’) is a French song which goes like this ( choral performance here): This is most obvious through the way the book uses ‘she’ pronouns and ‘person’ throughout except when Breq is speaking to someone in a language with gendered grammar.īut one thing I didn’t initially realise is how it affects the songs. Like many SF works, the need to develop a complete conlang is avoided by the convention that the work is a ‘translation’ from an original story in Radchaai. One thing I really like about the Imperial Radch books is the way they use language.
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