Originally Posted By: Rustyspoon#
Todd,
Came out beautiful! Very nice vocals and harmonica playing. The translitic process must be very fun. As FJ mentioned, would be interesting to see source text. Enjoyed it! Thank you for sharing.

Misha.

P.S. If you interested doing some translitic from Russian, let me know in PM, I might point you to a couple of things and help with transcription of challenging words.


Hi, Misha. Thanks so much. I'm happy you like it. Yes, the translitic process is a lot of fun. What's cool is that the less you know of the original language, the better it works. Here's a short bit I wrote for a workshop about this aspect of the translitic:

A translitic is a lyric "translated" from a foreign language by paying attention not to the meaning of the words but to their sounds. The lyricist uses as a guide whatever homonymic/homophonic associations come to mind.

For instance, if I ran across "сир" in Russian, I would see the word "cup" and use that in the first draft of my translitic. I would not try to translate "сир" into "sire" or "orphaned". As you can see, new and strange meanings are created. This allows you to find new words, new images, new phrases that you wouldn't normally. It forces you to go somewhere different with your lyrics.


I'd be happy to lead a translitic group here in the forums if you and others are interested. I could give a prompt poem every month, and at the end of the month, we could all share our translitic songs based on the poem.

SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/toddrussellhall
Twitter: https://twitter.com/toddrussellhall
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ToddRussellHall
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ToddRussellHall/
Website: https://ToddRussellHall.com