happy?

Subject: happy?
From: Abby Sale
Date: 07 Nov 00 - 07:38 AM

 

happy?

In the largest amphibious assault of the Second World War, the US/UK landing on Sicily began July 9, 1943.  The town of Messina (the point on Sicily closest to the Italian mainland) was evacuated by the Germans on August 17.

The "Gordons," the 51st Highland Division, experienced particularly hard fighting with little relief.  They  finally  left Sicily on November 7th, 1943, traveled by sea, and returned to the UK on the 26th.  They were soon reposted, however and were a core group for the Normandy landing the next June.

Then fareweel ye banks o' Sicily,
Fare ye weel, ye valley an' shaw.
There's nae Jock will mourn the kyles o' ye,
Puir bliddy swaddies are weary.

"(The 51st Highland Division's) Farewell To Sicily"
© Hamish Henderson

At Gaughan's site
Some notes on the song printed in Arthur Argo's "Chapbook"
BANKS OF SICILY in Digital Tradition  or  BANKS OF SICILY (2) - that Anglicized version
(if you have your own copy of DT, it's filename[ BKSICILY and filename[ BKSICIL2)

(Glossary available on request.)
 

Note - the music you hear (if any) is just me playing about with some html coding
I just tried out.  It works ok at on my computer - no clue it it will work here.  (It is
nearly impossible to actually get Joe Offer mad at you, isn't it)

---

--- Embedded sound removed. It may have crashed a member's computer ---
--- body tag also removed ---
---Please don't do this stuff ---
-- PA --

Subject: RE: happy?
From: KingBrilliant
Date: 07 Nov 00 - 09:33 AM

That's pretty clever embedding the music - good thing I had my headphones plugged in, otherwise it might have attracted unwelcome attention in the office!! Interesting song too.

Kris

Subject: RE: happy?
From: sophocleese
Date: 07 Nov 00 - 09:57 AM

But I needed other software to hear the music which I don't want to download. What I want to know is why the colours on this thread came out purple and green instead of blue and dark red. Neat information too Abby.

Subject: RE: happy?
From: wysiwyg
Date: 07 Nov 00 - 11:22 AM

Hi, Abby.

~Susan

Subject: RE: happy?
From: Giac
Date: 07 Nov 00 - 11:25 AM

Oooooh, just too cool, Abby! It was nice surprise to hear the music, while enjoying the color "diversity," and history lesson. Thanks for the treat.

Subject: RE: happy?
From: Abby Sale
Date: 07 Nov 00 - 09:26 PM

:-) thanks. The colors (background & font) come as a default in your own browser. You can change them in your preferences. Generally, these are over-ridden if you insert appropriate commands - same idea as end-of-line 'br' or italic 'i'. You use a 'font'. With the greater than/less than characters. 'font color = "red"' and at the end '/font' turns it off. That's very standard stuff & you can easily get carried away with flashing text & different fonts. See the html threads for lots of examples.

It was supposed to be dark red font on a very pale (nearly white) red background. Can't imagine why it woould come out different. Conceivably your IE interprets colors differently from my Netscape but that doesn't seem right.

I don't see how the embed-tune command could have possibly "crashed a member's computer" but I am sorry if someone did have some problem. Simple HTML is just supposed to be simple html - it doesn't actually do anything. I'd be very interested to know what happened. The actual tune was not in my post, just a reference to the one already in the Database and anyone who can use that would hear it here. In theory it should only have Worked, Not worked, or politely asked if you wanted to download the plug-in for your browser.

Anyway,

Subject: RE: happy?
From: Jeri
Date: 08 Nov 00 - 08:23 AM

Abby, I think the problem may be that 1) Mudcat is running very slowly, and 2) When you embed the tune, the file has to be loaded from somewhere else on the site. It did do something - it told everyone's computer to "go get the sound file, open the program to play midis and play it."

In short, it takes longer to load a thread and requires more resources from a person's computer to do so

The colors - I'm not sure what happened with the font color. You used FF0000, which looks like standard red. A nice dark one is E60500. I don't think it's possible to change the background color because of the way the individual messages are compiled to form a web page. You could do a table with invisible borders.

In any case, I love the song and the tune. We do the Clancy Bro's anglicised version. I once mentioned this to a famous Scots singer, whereupon he said something like "Oh, I'm sorry." I do love Hamish Henderson's original words, even if I can't wrap my tongue around them.

Subject: RE: happy?
From: Abby Sale
Date: 08 Nov 00 - 01:23 PM

Jeri: that makes sense. Yes, of course it would have to do stuff, not just passive like colors & font as I was thinking. I know about limits on resources. Even slightly unexpected reduced resources in some cases might cause an annoying freeze-up - not crash. OK. Leson learned: when you're setting out to be very, very clever you should also be very, very careful.

Subject: RE: happy?
From: Abby Sale
Date: 08 Nov 00 - 01:42 PM

Jeri: I should go to the HTML thread but anyway here's an html experiment --- purish blue (medium luminosity) background & light red font. Just to see. It's very ugly on my computer but the font should be visible whether background is blue or the standard white.
 

Subject: RE: happy?
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 08 Nov 00 - 02:09 PM

Abby, it's going to sound like we are all ganging up on you! You should not use Body tags in these posts. These are set in thier correct place by Mudcat and the usage of Body tags elsewhere is undefined and could cause problems for certain browsers. I am viewing this thread using IE5 and the way seems to handle it is to act on the first occurence of a property being set and to ignore subsequent changes. In this instance, this means that your attempt to change the backround colour has no effect as it was already set to white but your changes to the links do take effect as this is the first time they have been changed.

Jon

Subject: RE: happy?
From: Abby Sale
Date: 08 Nov 00 - 03:47 PM

Jeri:

Lastly, and the only important thing - re the song. It's a very tough call & nobody yet has solved the problem to my satisfaction. I love & sing a large number of Scottish songs. Unfortunately, where I sing not a single word gets understood by anybody. That includes whether I translate all dialect words to standard English. All conspire - the literary vocabulary (even translated) the meter, the accent, the narative type and even etc. Certainly it is the job of the communicator to do the communicating but in this case I fail. There are many excellent rendered-in-English Scots trad songs (say, Fairport's "Tam Lin" or any Martin Carthy effort) but something is still lost, I believe. In Ballad Scots it's much easier as the vocabulary and context and subtilties (if not the story) have become simplified. It hardly matters & hurts the story not at all whether you sing 'kirk' or 'church.'

But the more dialectical songs - those that play with the language, itself or 'rustic' songs such as most bothy songs - there's a difference. They don't easily translate. The context & humor & puns are just too different. Here the saw that for a translation to work, the translator must be at least as good a writer (or poet) as the original. How else can the context or subtilties come across?

For "Farewell to Sicily" I'd likely tend to agree with your Scottish friend. I think the words in DT are from (or also from) the Chad Mitchell Trio stuff. It's an honest enough attempt at a singable rendering of the song. It's certainly nothing close to literal and I believe it overlooks too much of the meaning.

Hamish isn't a "folk" - source singer - he's a great poet and an amazing savant of Scottish material. The article from Chapbook cited by Gaughan is very worth reading - even if I'd disagree with a few points and some of its polemicism. Hamish tried to combine a feeling of Scots language but he does not pick a particular local & stick to any local word usage - he carefully chooses his words from all over the country. He conveys a subtle love/hate of Sicily - Whaur kind signorinas were cheerie and Nae hame can smoor the wiles o' ye - the landscape is as fine as home and also, BTW, the people are very similar to the Scots in life, poverty, humor & discrimination by a controlling "foreign" (ie, Italy) government. And where also the Gordons experienced months-on death, exhaustion, frustration.

But that language is intended to convey how the Scots felt about it - not how any others would have felt in similar circumstances.

Do I mean that one shouldn't be 'allowed' to sing such a song outside Scotland except in the (generally incomprehensible) original? or that one must first hire the world's greatest poets to render it? (Well, maybe ys - Thompson hired Beethovan & Haydn to render the tunes, after all.) or what do I mean would be the best & most honest way to communicate such foreign-language song to an audience? - translate? half-translate? translate text but not accent? stick to the original (assuming your tongue will allow it)? explain in detail? or even explain line by line?

Hell, I'm not smart enough to answer that one & I've been trying 45 years.

Subject: RE: happy?
From: Abby Sale
Date: 08 Nov 00 - 03:49 PM

Jon: ok. no prob. I've actually always used body tags when Composing any piece with a lot of italics / underline / indent / end-of-line, etc using Netscape Composer. Composer saves a whole lot of time. Whole lot. It puts body tags in at top & bottom and I kept them as they seemed to indicate the actual start & stop of my text. It never affected any for ordinary posts.