"Flash Sentry and the Terrible Nightmare Tower." · 4:44am Dec 19th, 2018
My dad once told me a joke about Russian literature:
"As Ivan Ivanov watched the rain fall against the window, a thousand thoughts went through his head. Thought number one ... "
Why do I bring this up? Well, one GrandCat has unexpectedly translated The Prisoner of Zebra into Russian! They've also translated Letters from an Irradiated Princess as well. And, y'know, somebody went and translated What do you do With a Drunken Unicorn? to Korean a year or two back, which means I'm an INTERNATIONAL best at ponies author. Go figure.
Honestly, the whole phenomenon seems a bit ... odd. Like, I guess there are Russian bronies, as well as bronies of other nationalities, but it's just not something you think about much, right? And if nothing else, I presume the most of them would content themselves with just browsing porn pictures on Derpibooru, since Luna's butt cute pony pictures are inherently visual, and thus don't require translation. But ... presumably, there are non-English-speakers watching the show (whether through subtitles or dubbing), so it follows that these non-English-speakers would produce their own fanfic, which ... as far as I know, none of which has been translated to English? It's all weird and meta.
I guess I'm just curious as to how other fandoms work. Or the same fandom in different countries-- whatever. Like, I vaguely recall reading about tabletop RPG's in Japan-- in which the 'typical' session is scheduled a bit differently. Like, things tend more towards one-shots instead of ongoing campaigns since everyone's so busy, and the system has anime-ish 'Limit Break' attacks that kill everything built in ... which means the big boss fights at the end have bad guys who can soak the Limit Breaks, and ... yeah. Also things are really railroady? Go figure.
Still, it's kind of funny, as reading the Russian Bronies' comments (via Google Translate) has shown me they're comparing Flash to a Russian archetype character by the name of Lieutenant Rzhevsky, from a flick called Hussar's Ballad. Which has got me curious enough to actually want to sit down and watch it sometime ... aaaaand maybe steal a couple of jokes from it in the process. Apparently there's a whole series of Russian jokes in which Lt. Rzhevsky blunders his way through Tolstoy's War & Peace.
... which is a very Flashman Sentry thing to do, now that I think of it.
Russian to English fic translations exist, they just don't catch much attention. Someone asked me to do an editing pass on this pony cyberpunk thing and... it didn't make much emotional or narrative sense.
Someone else asked to translate Good Trooper Gilda into Russian, and I told them they were welcome, but it was an incomplete story with no plans to wrap up in a neat complete package any time soon. It's sort of rambly and ongoing by design. But I gather Good Soldier Svejk is a big deal in the Slavic world, so I guess that's that.
I've had a few of my fics translated. Solar Wind into Russian and Anything and Everything into Polish. Also, someone's made translating my pony-based Magic cards into German an ongoing project.
It really is a flattering but bizarre feeling.
Dude, the Russian branch of the brony fandom is huge. And has always produced fantastic content, be it original or otherwise.
For some inexpressible reason, the farce of Flash seems perfect for Russian
If You intrested, there is Russian brony author on this site -
ChudoJogurt
. He introduced me with MLP G4.
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Everything is perfect in Russian. Nearly. Except of some puns. I am already thinking how to translate the butt-jokes from Carrot and Stick.
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From the (very, very little) Russian literature I've read, I can see the, uh, Russian-ness of a hapless hero blundering from one ironic disaster to another. Though Flash's misadventures tend to have a bit more optimism to them.
Lt. Kije, anyone?
(Especially since the "sleigh ride" motif gets played a lot around the holidays).