fiskesås av fiskesaker

yesterday the Norwegian and i had a longish discussion about the translation of "ulike" (swedish "olika"), an adjective meaning literally "unlike" which is used both to highlight difference (eg "they were so very unlike that...") and generally to indicate an assortment (eg "a few shirts in various colours"), and i wasn't sure if it should be something like "dissimilar" or something more like "various". it took a full minute before i realised that various actually means the same thing as different in english, too.

more problematically there were sections that were already in english, some because they'd been translated before but some because he'd composed them that way himself. and there were a fair number of passages that, as samuel r. delany once said, even fell apart semantically, and i couldn't figure out what he intended to say in order to rephrase them. after yesterday several of those passages still remain in that state because he was convinced that they did make sense and i had a hard time explaining why you couldn't say that in english. it probably would have been better if they'd been in norwegian to start with.

then there was this:

Norwegian: does anyone want some sauce? fish sauce?
his wife: what's in it?
Norwegian: fish things. [no further explanation]

i ate it. i only hope there weren't eyeballs.