Equine Comedy, Asterix Books, and Latin Jokes · 2:39pm Jan 10th, 2016
Last week Seattle’s Angels did a nice review of The Equine Comedy—a story I wrote nearly three years ago. Thank you to Archonix and Themaskedferret for this. It must be time to revisit this one.
This story feels like it belongs to another era in more than one way. When I wrote it, I didn’t really engage with Fimfiction beyond reading and occasionally commenting on stories, so I wasn’t really thinking about how it would be received. I wrote this one for my own amusement and partly as a present (of sorts) for my good friend and brother twoSteamponies. Therefore it’s full of private jokes and references to our mutual favourite books.
This simple story is about the further adventures of the Hearth’s Warming Eve characters. At the time I saw this as a tale from the distant Equestria past, long before Celestia and Luna. The Journal of the Two Sisters has since changed that and established that they were contemporaries. I noted other writers who have explored these characters, had generally gone for epic world-building—putting together a History of Equestria with tales of battles between rival unicorn kingdoms and such like. That’s all very good, but I wanted to take a slightly different approach. What I loved about this episode was the comedy—I wanted to write something as hilarious as the original episode—making full use of these comic characters.
It's such a relief to me that you're in charge of this map...
And as I am generally more interested in quirky bits of social history, than the rise and fall of empires, I decided to give a story of the origin of some Equestrian traditions.
Inspiration came from the Asterix books—the pun-filled French cartoons about the adventures of the Gauls battling Roman invaders seemed to fit the cast of Hurricane, Puddinghead and Platinum well.
Like MLP, this series appeals to both children and adults—for different reasons. Young children like the slapstick and the jokes about menhirs and wild boar. Older readers like the word play, historical references, and the caricatures of national stereotypes. These are the sort of books you can reread many times and still spot new details.
And, if you are so inclined, you can have a lot of fun trying to decipher the Latin jokes. The first Asterix books were written at a time when Latin was a standard school subject, and French school children would have been forced to work their way through Julius Caesar’s interminably dry Commentaries on the Gallic War. So it is perfectly natural to have the centurions, legionaries (and pirates) quoting Latin, accompanied by grammatical jokes.
In our modern time of course, studying math and science takes priority over dead languages. But, with a bit of effort, those of us without a classical education can still appreciate this linguistic humour thanks to Google. It’s all explained in detail on this blog.
In my story, I couldn’t resist throwing Latin tags into the pegasi dialogue in the same way. This was a fun game: trawling through lists of quotations searching for something that would fit a particular scene, then putting it into Google Translate and Wiktionary to get a word by word translation, and (if possible) looking for something which would have some sort of double meaning. As an example, Commander Hurricane’s exclamation on viewing her cloud sculpture: “Exegi monumentum aere perennius” is a boast by the Roman poet Horace. It translates as “I have erected a monument more lasting than bronze”. A suitably immodest self-assessment for Commander Hurricane, and it seemed especially apt when I noticed that aere was a declension of both aes (copper/bronze/brass) and aer (air/mist).
So how many readers spotted this? Probably (I am taking a guess) none. In a recent blog post, Admiral Biscuit wisely says that you need one joke for yourself, and you don't care if the audience misses it. I totally agree. But in this story, I went for rather more than one. Did I mention that I wrote this one for my own amusement? I was actually surprised how many of the references people did spot. I did originally have the idea of having the Earth ponies quote Shakespeare, and the Unicorns French. That didn’t work, but the Shakespeare quotes did stay in the final version, some more obvious than others.
If all this stuff sounds off-putting, don’t let it discourage you from reading the story. At its heart, this is just a simple fun story about friendship and you can enjoy it without spotting any of the references.
I haven't actually read it yet; having fallen into the bad habit of using my "tracking" folder as a "to read later" list.
It just jumped to the top of my list; though my latin probably isn't good enough to catch everything now.
I think if I'd had the courage to try writing something like that, I might have had the unicorns quoting Shakespeare, and the earth ponies preferring Old English poets and bards (though that's quite a small field to choose from if you want it to be recognised).
I'll second the notion of authors benefiting from private jokes. Not only does it make writing the thing more fun, it feels amazing when someone somehow finally gets it. I thought nobody would ever get the Doon reference I snuck into Tastes Like Heresy...
Woo-hoo! Mentioned in a Pineta blog post! Scratch one thing off my bucket list
I personally think that you should write stories for yourself. If other people want to read them, that's great. I've had my share of stories which I thought were really good that slipped under nearly everybody's radar, and I've had stuff which wasn't so good get featured. I'm sure that there are authors who get the audience, but I ain't one of them. I do what I want, and I guess some other people like it, too.
Actually, all that sounds quite encouraging!
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That's a fine philosophy. I follow it for some of my stories, but for others - especially my science-themed stories - I do care what the readers think. The game in science communication is to find a way to talk about technical topics in a way which non-experts will still understand and enjoy. So if the readers don't understand it, or just think 'boring!' and go off to read some clop instead, then I've failed.
Of course, one of the downsides of using a Latin quote is 98% of the readers miss it totally.
The other downside is the 2% who do get it, and promptly proceed to correct it.
(Currently working on a Mount Olympus fic. There will be no Greek quotes. Perhaps a few geeks, but no Greek. And maybe a creek or two. Let me know if you want to peek.)
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The advantage of using dead languages is that there aren't any native speakers who could correct you with authority. So, with a certain amount of self-confidence, you can always claim that it wasn't really a mistake, you were using a non-standard dialect of vernacular Latin - which perhaps they were not familiar with - to reflect your characters individuality...
I don't know any Greek, but your fic I will seek, if the language is unique, and the jokes not to meek, then my interest it will pique.