I'm always torn over exactly what to name this film, time and time again I go back to the word "Lapsena" which means "as a child" but I'm uncertain that naming it as such will have the same impact without knowing the meaning of the word and, yet, simply naming it "as a child" doesn't have the same impact. What do you think? anyway, here is some more work for my film
love this.
ReplyDeleteThank you Janessa :)
ReplyDeletebeautiful work!
ReplyDeleteKevin Axe would be so proud. But ummmmm, not sure either. Other than 5,400,000 some Finns, most people would probably be confused/find it arbitrate/not memorable. Also, I think that using a foreign language as a title for something not related that language/culture has some inherent risks. I think it CAN be done successfully, but also runs the risk of just seeming pretentious or incongruous, or worse, like you're relying on the cache of the foreign to compensate for an inability to come up with an artful title in your own language. In other words, it runs the risk of being like Engrish XD "Childhood" would, of course, be the closest one-word equivalent in English which has similar emotional flavor, and really I don't think it'd be BAD as a a title, but it wouldn't be amazing either...this is tricky....
ReplyDeleteAnother thought, as far as the not-English route. I looked up 1st Corinthians 13:11 ("When I was a child, I spake as a child..." etc., etc.) thinking that the Latin might collapse some of that into less words. It doesn't do it as well as good old agglutinative Finnish (but then it doesn't have 15 grammatical cases), but the entire line, in the Latin Vulgate Bible is, "cum essem parvulus loquebar ut parvulus sapiebam ut parvulus cogitabam ut parvulus quando factus sum vir evacuavi quae erant parvuli." "Cum essem parvulus" is "when I was a child" (Latvian composer Rytis Mazulis has an album also called 'Cum Essem Parvulus,' for the sake of the same poetic reference, apparently), "quae erant parvuli" would, I take it, be "that which is of a child," 'parvulus' is simply 'little child,' and 'parvula' would be the feminine. Given the more acceptable practice in Western society of using Latin words to refer to something not necessarily Latin (whereas our great art and literature doesn't often allude to the Kalevala, though maybe it should), this could be a viable option.
ReplyDeleteMaking the allusion to 1st Corinthians 13, it turns out, has many other nice resonances, thematically. It's also the part of the Bible where we get, for example, "13:4 Charity/Love suffereth long, [and] is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up" (usually quoted as the more familiar "love is patient, love is kind...."), "[charity/love] Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things," and "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity/love," and also good old "through a glass darkly." (King James uses 'charity', American Standard uses 'love', an interesting wrinkle especially in this context. All of 1st Corinthians 13 in several incarnations is here: http://www.greeknewtestament.com/B46C013.htm)
But anyway, Parvulus/la.