In praise of the goddess of pleasure.
In praise of Great Bastet
We offer these sayings of wisdom
In praise of the disciples of subtleties
And all the kittens of the gods.
From The Gospel of Bastet
Welcome to the Conlang Translation Relay Game of May 2001. This was conducted in the Fall of 1999, but--given her demanding "day job"--it took Sally a year and a half to translate all the posted messages and interlinear glosses into HTML. We are participants on a listserv called "CONLANG," and we are inventors of languages. The first translation relay game (1999) was the inspiration of Irina Rempt, one of our contributors, who conceived the idea as a kind of constructed language "telephone": one writes a poem or a short passage, and sends it to another with linguistic instructions. That person sends a translation in his or her language to the next, and on and on until it returns full circle, altered, transformed, as it were, by the gods, and containing new wisdom. You can see the results of her Starling Song Relay here. Another excellent relay translation game was directed by Nicole Perrin in July 2000 and you can see it here; she got her website up earlier than Sally did hers. Clearly Sally needs "Dreamweaver"!
The Rules of the Relay Game:
No "smooth" translations are allowed in the Game. A glossary is allowed, and/or an interlinear analysis. A participant may query the preceding conlanger about his or her text and instructions, if there are difficulties or misunderstandings, but may not receive a sustained translation. Participants are expected to stick to a certain number of hours or days or they will be passed over. The original text should be manageably short.
For more detailed instructions in conducting a relay game, click here.
This second relay game was inspired by a series of devotional and gnomic poems in Teonaht called "The Gospel of Bastet."
What contact the Teonaht may have with Egypt is not entirely known; Teonaht is not a Semitic language, but Bast and Ra are borrowed gods, the former becoming a god of household, health, and women's wisdom, and a cult in her own right. If you want to see a larger collection of the Bastet proverbs, then here's the link. But the variant poem that Sally and Issytra sent into the ring is the first link in the list of contributors below.
The Line-Up: