Le Pautrain wrote: ↑Fri Nov 04, 2022 2:23 am
Thank you so much Dragonoake for your support and detailed review!
No problem
It is a divination of sort. It is as the time was a gigantic animal in which we can see all that was, is and will be
So, you're personifying (for lack of a better word) time, itself, as an animal
I'm not sure I can imagine that, but that's your challenge as the writer
Oh! I didn't know the verb "to peer"; I'll keep it preciously.
Happy to help
That's the trick: the narrator is wandering (but how?) and is nicknamed "the Impassive". In French, we call this stylistic process "la tension".
OK, so another example would be "Roaring silence"
I suspect the translation is the problem here. I've seen some very literal translations of Chinese menus that were bizarre, to say the least
To me, the im- prefix suggests "not", for example, impossible = not possible, or in this case, not passive; so, I'm not getting your intended connotation here
Skulls embedded in the stone?
It can be. But, once more, you read this text in a very literal manner.
I was imagining the valley as a shrine to their ancestors (an open-air catacomb, if you want to think of it that way), with skulls embedded in the sides and a large carved skull, representing the collective, as a focal point from which the serpent would emerge
What if it was really their faces, not their skulls? Just stretched skin, flushing from the rock?
So it could be more like the faces that appear around 2:05 in this video
Not so much a literal face as the memories of them
In French, the word is "saccadé", "par saccades", "avec saccades". It is supposed to represent strange alterations in the rhythm of the chant.
So, it's more of a jerky delivery where the chanters might not all be perfectly in synch, that about a piece of dried meat... That's where I was having problems
Erratic is probably not the perfect word, disjointed works until we can come up with a better term
I'm imagining the ritual sounding something like this, but with more chanters
The first step in working miracles is realizing that you can.