Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 19

[cahn]

Yuletide nominations:

18th Century CE Federician RPF
Maria Theresia | Maria Theresa of Austria
Voltaire
Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great
Ernst Ahasverus von Lehndorff
Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Preußen | Henry of Prussia (1726-1802)
Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709-1758)
Anna Amalie von Preußen | Anna Amalia of Prussia (1723-1787)
Catherine II of Russia
Hans Hermann von Katte
Peter Karl Christoph von Keith
Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf
August Wilhelm von Preußen | Augustus William of Prussia (1722-1758)

Circle of Voltaire RPF
Emilie du Chatelet
Jeanne Antoinette Poisson (Madame de Pompadour)
John Hervey (1696-1743)
Marie Louise Mignot Denis
Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu
Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis
Armand de Vignerot du Plessis de Richelieu (1696-1788)
Francesco Algarotti

Comments

Re: Good news

[cahn]

eeeeee! BTW Circle of Voltaire RPF is showing up in "Uncategorized Fandoms," if you were like me and were all "Wheeeeeere is it????" :)

Yeah, I can see that a whole metric ton of my attention is going to be on Yuletide for a while now, so I will... probably push Blanning off. Again. :P But if I have spare time I'm not spending on Yuletide-adjacent things (ha ha), would love to finally do Blanning.

Are we going to read the memoirs in French/translation? I can already see there is no way I'm keeping up with you in French, even though I have a head start, but I could probably do a mixture of French and English, and it would be my best bet at getting a crack at them.

Which also: there's no reason to prepare MT yet! We have a while to go :P

Re: Good news

[mildred_of_midgard]

eeeeee! BTW Circle of Voltaire RPF is showing up in "Uncategorized Fandoms," if you were like me and were all "Wheeeeeere is it????" :

Royal Detective found it immediately! :D Sorry for not saying so. Most of the historical RPF seems to be hanging out there for the time being.

Okay, no Blanning just yet! I'll just push ahead with Wilhelmine (45 pages today, so only...125 to go), and then we'll start Lehndorff.

Are we going to read the memoirs in French/translation?

Of course! I might even start there, because as we've found, I do better with reading things you want to read in the early stages, than with the things I most want to read. Plus I'll have read them relatively recently in German, which will help.

The other thing I'm thinking of starting with is Catt's diary, since we already have an interleaved translation with short paragraphs and short sentences, and the whole thing is only about a hundred pages, and I read sizable chunks of it when proofreading it without a translation. That was what made me start thinking about doing interleaved translations to beef up my French (and then I accidentally did German first, lol).

Then moving on to Wilhelmine--so maybe I'll do Catt on my own first (it might not be your thing?), and then there's a chance I won't need interleaved translations and can just do side-by-side of the professional translations. Possibly with German, since the English translation is so defective. :P

I can already see there is no way I'm keeping up with you in French, even though I have a head start

Do you mean you're starting them before me? Or just generally practicing your French? My French is probably nearly as good as my German at this point; I think I've only recently surpassed my French proficiency. So I'm hoping French will go faster (at the very least, I can skip the whole Duolingo short story stage!), but we'll see. :) I still have a looong way to go before I get through my German reading list.

Which also: there's no reason to prepare MT yet! We have a while to go :P

I know! But I've only got 100 some pages before Lehndorff, so I should get cracking as soon as my body lets me!

Re: Good news

[cahn]

Ha, yeah, as soon as I calmed down and read the yuletide_admin post I promptly found it and all the other RPF :) Interesting that this doesn't seem to have happened last year.

Lol, I may be forsworn on my promise to finish Oster by the time you finish the memoirs! Though mostly because the new Megan Whalen Turner is out, so I'm rereading all the previous ones, and they're really good but I keep just reading those instead of my Oster homework :P

Hmm, selenak, how is the Voltaire bio in terms of readability? Because that's what I really want to read that's in French :P (I'd rather read that than Wilhelmine's memoirs, honestly, which I wasn't even able to finish in English -- although of course this was sans fistulas :P )

I... have to say that I'm not at all interested in reading Catt :P

I was under the vague impression that my French reading was a bit better than yours, but that could very well be incorrect :) I have been doing a bit of Petit Prince to practice (it turns out I have the English translation all but memorized, so it's basically like proceeding with an interleaved translation) but it has fallen by the wayside lately due to all this other stuff :)

Re: Good news

[selenak]

The Voltaire bio by Orieux - it's stylishly written but also very of its time (would probably come across as mannered if encountering this style at first), and above all, really long (over 1000 pages at least in the German translation), so I'm not sure I'd recommend to you for French practice. If you want to read something Voltairian themed in French, have you considered the Fritz correspondance in the original? This has the advantage that Mildred already did the English translation alogorithms for you to counterchek if you get stuck.

Re: Good news

[cahn]

Yeah, this might be something I read in English (eventually?) - the correspondence does sound interesting!

Re: Good news

[mildred_of_midgard]

Lol, I may be forsworn on my promise to finish Oster by the time you finish the memoirs

Hee, weeelll, I'm still not caught up on Oster comments! I'm also so far behind on salon comments that idk when I'm going to finish Wilhelmine. Selena continues to be a firehose of information and entertainment to read and respond to, and now that my concentration is coming back, I've been reading in English some more, which means I have way more things I want to share with you guys, and also German studies and detective findings and Lehndorff formatting/translation and Yuletide coming up and felis leaving comments on my fics that I want to reply to and tigers and bears oh my!

Lehndorff! Speaking of Lehndorff, I'm hoping to finish Wilhelmine this week, so I've started work on converting it, in hopes of having it ready this weekend. cahn, do you want shorter paragraphs? Because if so, given my computer limitations this week, the sheer number of comments I'm behind on, and the fact that I don't need shorter paragraphs any more (woot!), this is going to have to count as a translation favor, sorry. :/

I... have to say that I'm not at all interested in reading Catt :P

Didn't think you were!

I need to go meet my German quota before bed, and I'm waaaaay behind on things I want to say *weep* and it's going to be worse when I wake up, and I'm nowhere near being read to start French readalongs (2021 at this rate), so let us plan our French campaign some other time! But I'm looking forward to it!

Re: Good news

[cahn]

...yeah, there's no way I'd be ready to do French before 2021. November and December are historically just really really busy times for me, even laying aside that I plan to do a loooooot less for Yuletide than I did last year (and just enjoy all the fic that other people in our fandom write) :P :)

Re: Good news

[mildred_of_midgard]

Very important question buried in that wall of text: do you want shorter Lehndorff paragraphs, and are you willing to have that count as your translation favor?

Re: Good news

[cahn]

Lol, whoops, I started that comment meaning to reply to it, too :P No, that's OK, I'm not going to be reading it in German anyway so longer paragraphs are fine.

Re: Good news

[mildred_of_midgard]

Update: Lehndorff on Friday, if all goes well tomorrow. :D

Where "all" means both "I finish reading the last 20 or so pages of Wilhelmine's memoirs" (woot) and "I finish formatting the Lehndorff volume, which I'm about halfway done with."

ETA: And I'm also successfully chipping away at comments, but if you read a bunch of books recently and did lengthy write-ups and left me questions involving detective work (you know who you are ;)), I might not get to them until this weekend, just be warned.

And if you replied to my comment on reading pedagogy in a non-Fritz post (you know who you are), I have a reply in my head, but don't hold your breath waiting for it. ;)

Re: Good news

[cahn]

Yeah, and meanwhile I'm getting farther and farther behind :P And I won't get caught up tonight as I have to do some work this evening, though I'll try to at least make a start. Maybe this weekend :)

(On the other hand, I have finished all the Thief books now, so I will be able to read other things :PP )

Re: Good news

[mildred_of_midgard]

Lehndorff is in the library! I'm going to try to read some before bed, but as you can see, I didn't get the files created until late, so I might not meet my quota. ;)

I also did my Yuletide signup!

ETA: Also, since I programmatically inserted the year at the beginning of each paragraph, and since some entries have more than one paragraph, there are many paragraphs that only have the year indicated, and you have to scroll back to figure out the day and/or month. (Those are written in various ways, and much harder to programmatically manipulate.) But at least you always know what year it is! (Bar the last 6 years, in which there are only a few entries for the whole 6 years.)

Re: Good news

[cahn]

I will give you a one-time pass for not meeting your quota because I want to keep up with you too :P I have still not finished Oster, but now that I have finished my epic Thief readthrough I am planning on it, though now that you're starting Lehndorff I am really wanting to read along there.

Re: Good news

[mildred_of_midgard]

I kind of spent the last 3.5 hours giving Royal Patron stories from our fandom in return for some articles. :D But after I eat, I shall do more Lehndorff!

Oh, and, I do totally intend to read the prefatory material (I promise, Selena!), but I admit I skipped straight to the diaries last night, because I'm so excited about reading Lehndorff, so you should totally do the same, and at some point we will calm down and go back to the prefaces. (Although, it occurs to me you can skim, at least; I have to work for every sentence. :P)

Btw, Royal Patron development: I was telling him about AW, and had to explain who he was. Then later on in the conversation, I referred again to AW, and to check that he understood who I was talking about, Royal Patron said, "The one Fritz treated as the family stud?" and from then on we just called AW the Stud, and we laughed every time. :D

Also, I emailed RP 7 maps during our conversation, and we sat down and went over them together. He's getting an education out of his patronage! (I'm taking him to Sanssouci someday, and, since I do not drive, making him drive me from there to Küstrin and Wust and probably Rheinsberg, we've already agreed on that. :P Although we do not know WHEN, grr.)