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Feedback’s been coming in for ‘Alpha and Omega’ – mostly positive and lovely - but someone wrote last night with that hoary old point that, in an historical AU you shouldn’t use modern slang:
‘What I found was Blair's "man" and Jim's "Chief" jarring because those slang words are so modern and so tied into the Blair and Jim of modern times’
Which, not meaning in any way to have a go at the feedbacker-person; she’d been good enough to praise every other aspect of the tale and I love her for it (o: - but this is an argument I’ve heard often, and completely disagree with, and I wondered what others thought?
It seems to me that, unless you’re willing to make the speech 100% accurate - which in this case, would mean writing the entire piece in 2nd century BC Latin and Greek – you have the choice to adapt their speech to an approximation of what you think they would have been saying in that time and in that language (which, since we’ve none of us ever heard a person from the 2nd C BC speaking, is, as far as I can see, about as inauthentic as you could be), or write Jim and Blair in exactly the same way as you would, if the piece was set in the Pacific NW in the late 20th century, minus the obvious cultural references, of course, but leaving the modern English intact.
My position is, that ancient Geminius and Blair would have sounded as natural and normal to each other as modern-day Jim and Blair do in TS. They might not be saying the actual words ‘chief’ and ‘man!’, but the equivalent slang words and pet names would have had the same meaning, the same connotations, the same ‘feel’ in their own tongue and time, and since the story’s written in modern English, and not ancient Greek, I see no reason to translate slang and pet names anymore than we’re translating ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘honey’ - or any of the other 38, 647 words in the story (with the exception of things like the names of the rooms in the villa, for which modern translations don’t really fit, modern homes not having the same layout, or rooms with the same specific purposes).
Cultural references are different; you shouldn’t have Romans eating tomatoes, or using modern drugs, or using phrases that refer specifically to modern events or customs. But the language could and should stay modern, imo, because ancient peoples weren’t ancient in their own time. Their times were modern times when they were living them. Their language was a modern language then, so it should sound modern and natural to us, too. Otherwise, I feel you run the risk of writing ‘ancientese’, and making the story sound like a Hollywood Biblical epic.
‘What I found was Blair's "man" and Jim's "Chief" jarring because those slang words are so modern and so tied into the Blair and Jim of modern times’
Which, not meaning in any way to have a go at the feedbacker-person; she’d been good enough to praise every other aspect of the tale and I love her for it (o: - but this is an argument I’ve heard often, and completely disagree with, and I wondered what others thought?
It seems to me that, unless you’re willing to make the speech 100% accurate - which in this case, would mean writing the entire piece in 2nd century BC Latin and Greek – you have the choice to adapt their speech to an approximation of what you think they would have been saying in that time and in that language (which, since we’ve none of us ever heard a person from the 2nd C BC speaking, is, as far as I can see, about as inauthentic as you could be), or write Jim and Blair in exactly the same way as you would, if the piece was set in the Pacific NW in the late 20th century, minus the obvious cultural references, of course, but leaving the modern English intact.
My position is, that ancient Geminius and Blair would have sounded as natural and normal to each other as modern-day Jim and Blair do in TS. They might not be saying the actual words ‘chief’ and ‘man!’, but the equivalent slang words and pet names would have had the same meaning, the same connotations, the same ‘feel’ in their own tongue and time, and since the story’s written in modern English, and not ancient Greek, I see no reason to translate slang and pet names anymore than we’re translating ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘honey’ - or any of the other 38, 647 words in the story (with the exception of things like the names of the rooms in the villa, for which modern translations don’t really fit, modern homes not having the same layout, or rooms with the same specific purposes).
Cultural references are different; you shouldn’t have Romans eating tomatoes, or using modern drugs, or using phrases that refer specifically to modern events or customs. But the language could and should stay modern, imo, because ancient peoples weren’t ancient in their own time. Their times were modern times when they were living them. Their language was a modern language then, so it should sound modern and natural to us, too. Otherwise, I feel you run the risk of writing ‘ancientese’, and making the story sound like a Hollywood Biblical epic.
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