Been super busy painting the last few weeks - there's a painting contest and I've been wanting to paint Lilith for about a year. I'm SO proud of this; worked pretty hard to step up my game this time, especially with that object-source lighting on her arms and horns.

"The familiar face ahead is no longer smiling."

Interesting thing with tenses happening here... do we think it's better to say "sinpin sona ona li jo kuntu ala" - the known face has no humor - and leave the "no longer" part out, since it's not hugely important...

"For a moment she's human again."
ona li kama jan lon tenpo lili.

Struggling with ways to discuss intervals of time - does "lon tenpo lili" work as 'for a moment'? Do I need an "e" in there to make the grammar coherent, like "ona li kama jan e lon tenpo lili"?

Okay this one was fun; the ability to frontload description by using a pi-phrase actually makes this sentence more coherent in toki pona than it is in English.

"Breath comes back into her lungs clotted with smoke and screams."

kon pi jaki e kon seli e kalama moli li wekama e sijelo ona.

Tweaked that last sentence just a tad. Some stuff is stylistic - the repetition of "tenpo lon" is echoing the same repetition in the original text, just as the repeated use of "pakala" is carrying that thread through the prologue - that I've left alone. But I've clarified the structure a bit...

I'm fascinated by the way people seem to work at cross-purposes with toki pona... someone says, "How would I say this?" and then people offer some ways to say it that grow more involved as they try to achieve "accuracy" and each new person interprets it differently...

Okay here's what I came up with:

inli: Now he's going, and now she’s following, and now he's falling and his blood’s on her face.

toki pona: tenpo lon la mije li tawa weka. tenpo lon la meli li tawa poka. tenpo lon la mije li pakala en telo loje li kule e sinpin ona.

Oof, this sentence is a real struggle. Two pronouns, no identifiers, and a subject change halfway through.

"Now he's going, and now she’s following, and now he's falling and his blood’s on her face."

My main question, though, is... how do y'all say "blood"? Is it just telo loje?

So yeah this is what we're listening to today

Okay well I got distracted tonight at work and ended up reading a great article by the guy who inspired Tech N9ne's "Fragile" and then had the balls to go face him and own up to the shit he talked. White boy confronts own racist fear and smallmindedness and grows thereby! It's a goddamn miracle!

Today's progress: one sentence!
"The man with the hammer was just passing, giving her a lively little tap for a hello."
"jan pi jo palisa li tawa poka kin li pana ona e toki."
Several interesting things here... had to nail down the important information in this sentence.

Hm. Considering replacing "monsi" in this sentence with "sijelo": "Palisa li luka monsi ona kin pana ona e jaki." I'm trying to say that the blow of a weapon against her back knocks her free of the muck she's standing in. "Monsi" is back or behind, but might map closer to "butt" than "back"...

I'm enjoying the way that toki pona forces me to isolate the subject of each sentence, and it's highlighting a particular quirk in the way I write - I often make OBJECTS or PARTS the subjects of a sentence, like talking about "what Keshena's boots do" instead of "what Keshena does with her boots."

Ona li tawa e pakala.

Taso tan ala ma. Noka ona li ante ma e ma telo loje. Ona li insa e ma telo sama kasi. Palisa li luka monsi ona kin pana ona e jaki. Ona li tawa e anpa. Ona li tawa e pakala. Taso tenpo lon ala. Li tawa e noka ona. Li luka e telo e linja weka e oko. Li lukin e poka.

Okay, so we've got the first paragraph down, and it only took me about four hours!

We're starting with "Open" (toki pona, not English 'open') - someone let me know if it's NOT appropriate to use this word as a substitute for "Prologue" or similar; I can think of a few reasons why it might not be.

Every opportunity to engage with Google reminds me that they removed the words "DON'T BE EVIL" from their corporate charter. On purpose. Why? Are those words legally enforceable? Probably not, right? So... why SOLICIT the bad PR of informing everyone about your evil intentions?

The first sentence took probably fifteen minutes, but was a great microcosm of the larger process - so you'll notice the Prologue starts off with "She's going to fall," and those words repeat throughout the Prologue until the end when she finally DOES fall. But... toki pona has no word for "fall."

Now let's be clear, I'm doing this both to help me simplify my incredibly wordy prose, AND as an exercise to learn toki pona myself, so I'm probably gonna screw it up a lot as I'm learning. Super interested in any input from people who already know the language!

So I WAS going to translate qntm's "Ra" into toki pona, because I'm obsessed with both and also profoundly masochistic, but instead I've decided to start with something considerably easier - "Shadowplay," my ongoing lesbian love story where cute girls get super high and raise gods from the dead.