This week the Nass delves into the world of international fandom, reflects on the bonds between body and earth, and strikes matches to make wishes come true.
The Nassau Weekly
Volume 44, Number 3 February 27, 2022
In Print since 1979 Online at nassauweekly.com
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February 27, 2022
Masthead Editors-in-Chief Juju Lane Mina Quesen
Publisher Abigail Glickman
Alumni Liasion Allie Matthias
Managing Editors
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Sam Bisno Sierra Stern
Translating an International Sensation: Norway’s SKAM and the Fan Translators Who Made It Happen
Design Editor Cathleen Weng
By Lucia Brown Designed by Emily Yang and Hannah Mittleman
6 8 10 11
Lauren Aung Lara Katz
Mud By Sabrina Kim Designed by Hazel Flaherty
Junior Editors Lucia Brown Kate Lee Anya Miller Zoey Nell Charlie Nuermberger Alexandra Orbuch
Dreams of Ghosts By Mina Quesen Designed by Cathleen Weng and Emma Mohrmann
Sylvia By Audrey Zhang Designed by Andrew White
Art Director Emma Mohrmann
Talk Birdy to Me: Nicknames for Your Sweetheart By Juju Lane Designed by Tong Dai
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Senior Editors
To Cleanse By Hiba Siddiki Designed by Eman Ali
Assistant Art Director Hannah Mittleman
Dreams of Ghosts
Read more on page 8.
Head Copy Editor Andrew White
Copy Editors Nico Campbell Katie Rohrbaugh Bethany Villaruz
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Through the Haze of My Mind
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Perfect Songs
David Chmielewski
By Peter Taylor Designed by Eman Ali
Audiovisual Editor
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By Alexandra Orbuch Designed by Tong Dai
Events Editor
Christian Ayers
Cartoons By Hannah Mittleman and Hazel Flaherty Designed by Andrew White
Web Editor Jane Castleman
Social Media Chair Mollika Jai Singh
Cover Attribution
Social Chair Kristiana Filipov Hannah Mittleman
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Volume 44, Number 3
This Week:
Mon
8:00a Chapel Being: Monday Morning Yoga
2:00p LCA The Writers Room: A Midterm Comedy Reading
Fri
SPRING BREAK
Tues
6:00p 185 Nassau Black Earth Film Series: The Need to GROW by Rob Herring
7:30p Richardson Atelier at Large — “Mythic Method”
Sat
SPRING BREAK
Wed
4:30p East Pyne The Next Chapter: Career Conversations with Princeton English Alumni
Sun
SPRING BREAK
Got Events?
Email David Chmielewski at dc70@princeton.edu with your event and why it should be featured.
Thurs
Verbatim:
5:30p ZOOM Facilitated Discussion: Memory
Overheard on Nassau Street Mom Visiting Princeton From Another Affluent Suburb: She’s smart. I mean, she went to Brooklyn College. But she’s smart. Overheard at Dinner Overly Conscious Junior: I remember my earliest memory is on my third birthday and I woke up and yelled. That was the day I came into consciousness.
About us:
5:00p Morrison AAS PostDoc Lecture: “U.S. Empire, Counterrevolution, and the Racial Bonds of Liberalism and Fascism” 7:00p ZOOM Ben Okri in Conversation with Chika Okeke-Agulu
For advertisements, contact Abigail Glickman at alg4@princeton.edu.
Overheard in RoMa Cynical Physicist: At some point when I was a kid, there was a zap, and I was like, “Why do I have to keep being nice? Screw this.” And I’m still like that today.
Overheard During Conversation About Club Meetings “I know I only show up once every five meetings, but that doesn’t mean you have to lose your personality around me.”
Overheard During a Study Group Elitist: My biggest flex is that I don’t have any hentai recommendations. Tasteful curator: I don’t know that I’d call that a flex.
Overheard at an Amateur Party Drink Server After a Disastrous Cork Removal: Here, you can’t see any cork in this cup.
Overheard in seminar Professor: You should be skeptical of me for giving you that kind of assignment. I mean, really ticked off.
Overheard During Nostalgic Debrief Philosopher: I would have dreams about my memories but I couldn’t remember them. So I’ve been trying to find my memories since I was four.
Overheard in Whitman Dining Hall Student: If your mom and your girlfriend switched bodies, which one would you fuck?
Overheard in Forbes Observant Sophomore: The thing about 2 Chainz is that he often wears more than two chains.
Overheard During an Insult Concerned Friend: You associate cum with shitty people? How is your sexual health?
Overheard Over Tea Inbox-Irritated Junior: I haven’t gotten a single good email all day.
Nassau Weekly is Princeton University’s weekly newsmagazine and features news, op-eds, reviews, fiction, poetry and art submitted by students. Nassau Weekly is part of Princeton Broadcasting Service, the student-run operator of WPRB FM, the oldest college FM station in the country. There is no formal membership of the Nassau Weekly and all are encouraged to attend meetings and submit their writing and art.
Overheard in German Seminar Black-clad Sophomore: Why do we have novels if not to check the validity of our critical theory? Overheard at Dinner Aspiring HBO writer: Wait, can we keep talking about me?
Overheard in a Conversation About Internships A Very Good Friend: I’ll hype you up. I’ll give you a dramatized reading of the rejection letter. Even if it’s just a two-line email, I’ll milk it. Submit to Verbatim Email thenassauweekly@gmail.com
Read us: nassauweekly.com Contact us:
thenassauweekly@gmail.com Instagram & Twitter: @nassauweekly
Join us:
We meet on Mondays and Thursdays at 5pm in Bloomberg 044
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Volume 44, Number 3
Translating An International Sensation: Norway’s SKAM and The Fan Translators Who Made It Happen An interview with the Québécois translator behind a francophone fan-base. By LUCIA BROWN
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he Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK) was losing viewers to Disney Channel—rapidly. So in 2014, when NRK’s producers were tasked with bringing young viewers back to Norwegian television, they needed to get creative. Håkon Moslet, the head of NRK’s Youth Department, explained in a 2017 TED Talk that their first responses were web series—Sara, MIA, and Jenter— aimed at girls 10-13 years old. These series, Moslet said, told fictional stories so “close to the kids’ lives that it doesn’t feel like fiction.” The development of this innovative format for television shows established the basis for what would later become the international hit SKAM, a character-driven, online drama with segments released in real-time
across media platforms. What’s more, SKAM achieved this global fame without ever being officially translated or made available in other languages. When Moslet asked Julie Andem, the producer of these previous hit series, to create a new series for an older audience, she knew that the production for her new series would have to be low budget. Knowing they could not compete with the kind of shows that a slightly older youth audience would already be watching, like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, Andem focused on making the show as honest to their audience’s lives as possible. The SKAM team spent months doing in-depth research on youth culture across Norway to pinpoint the needs of this audience, conducting interviews with teenagers, spending time in schools, scanning social media, and reading about youth identity. Andem emphasized to Drama Quarterly that the research gave their team “an advantage”
in catering to their audience. Knowing “who they are, the culture they grew up in, what they watched on television when they were children, where they go on holiday and what they eat for dinner,” SKAM could emerge with honesty, relevancy, and a respect that their target audience could not find in other television productions. Based on their research, the SKAM team established a mission statement: “to help 16-yearold girls strengthen their self-esteem through dismantling taboos, making them aware of interpersonal mechanisms, and showing them the benefits of confronting their fears.” SKAM’s production even reflected the target audience’s media habits, engaging them beyond the expectations of a normal series. As a web series that released clips of their characters in real-time, Moslet describes SKAM as putting “producers at eye-level with fans” and connecting with Norwegian teenagers on a daily, intimate basis. For
example, a clip about the characters at school on a Monday morning would be released to viewers at 8:03am on a Monday, and a clip of characters at a party on Friday evening at 11:17pm would be released to viewers at that same time. Viewers had the opportunity to watch the clips as they were released in real-time or to wait until the end of the week, when the week’s clips were combined into a full-length episode. Fans could interact with the SKAM universe across multiple platforms and over extended periods of time, interactions that blurred the show’s fictional universe with that of the day-to-day reality of its audience. Throughout the week, the “characters” would even post on Instagram and YouTube, on accounts that had tens of thousands of fan followers, and screenshots of text message threads between the characters would be uploaded to the SKAM website. The show became a massive success in Norway, constituting half of NRK’s traffic in
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Volume 44, Number 3 PAGE DESIGN BY EMILY YANG ILLUSTRATION BY HANNAH MITTLEMAN
June 2016. What surprised NRK and Norwegian audiences more than its national success, however, was how SKAM quickly grew to be an international sensation. With the release of its third season, SKAM broke Norwegian records for viewership. The show quickly attracted attention in neighboring Denmark and Sweden; Vilde Schanke Sundet, a media and communication professor at University of Oslo, notes that in its third season, “almost onethird of SKAM’s online viewers came from Denmark.” SKAM was then being fan-distributed and translated across the world and winning American media awards. In fact, starting in 2018 with the French SKAM France, other countries began to produce their own remakes of the hit show, and viewership for the original show continued to skyrocket as seven remakes were produced across the world.
But NRK never subtitled the Norwegian-language show or made it available to international audiences. After the release of the third season, NRK geoblocked their website, restricting access to those outside
of Norway. Legally, this move was necessary; while SKAM’s soundtrack was widely praised for its integration of both nationally and internationally popular music of the time—notably, “Ingeting” by Kamelen and “5 fine frøkner” by Gabrielle as well as Highasakite’s “Lover, Where Do You Live?” and Coldplay’s “Paradise”—NRK did not have distribution rights for this music beyond the country’s borders. In fact, SKAM was never formally distributed by international agents, instead being distributed by teenage viewers and fans around the world. Illegally, naturally. In beginning to watch SKAM, the difficulty of finding clips may actually be part of the appeal: there is something exciting about digging up the links to the show on one’s own. To even find clips of SKAM, a viewer has to click through various Tumblr, Google Drive, and Dailymotion links—and that is just for the original show. With the original and seven remakes, finding subtitled material in a target language is a challenge. The lack of official subtitles (with some exceptions—newer subtitled episodes of SKAM France are
currently being posted on YouTube) became a central issue in expanding the show’s popularity. The fan translator emerged as the central creator of this content, driving distribution that created the international sensation. Noticing that with the original, it was “already quite hard to find where to watch clips with subtitles,” and that with eight versions, “it was almost impossible to find everything without a lot of research,” Cath, a 21-year-old Québécois university student, started a SKAM website in January 2019 (as some of the translation activity is considered illegal, Cath’s full name has been redacted to protect her identity, and replaced, at her request, with the name she uses in her translation work). Modeled after a similar website, Skamsubita, that organizes episodes of the SKAM Italia remake, Cath’s All of Skam consolidates and organizes the English-subtitled clips for all of the show’s remakes in one place. CONTINUED ON PAGE 12
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“MUD”
Volume 44, Number 3
“There is no membrane between my body and the earth; it’s the kinship of mud on mud.”
can get. The days are long, always ending in a different place than the beginning. Last night, a friend sat on my bed talking about longing eyes, the kind that ask someone to kiss you. I know that gaze; I know how it feels coming from my two pebble eyes. The earth is my beloved, so I guess I’m staring at the concrete that way, or squinting at the sun that way, or looking at you that way if we happen to pass on the sidewalk.
By SABRINA KIM
“The body, made of the earth’s mud and breathed into, is the temple, and we need to learn to worship it as such…And the love for the body and for the earth are the same love.” — Linda Hogan, Department of the Interior
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very day is language and I cannot unsee the poetry. I am the tilled soil, the space between substance, pockets of earth to be filled: with words. My poetry professor said maybe I’m writing so much these days because of longing. Indeed, I long: I see how big this small body
When I write, everything comes back to the body. Body as in my body and soul and internality, body as in communities of artists, and body as the land that holds us—the land that humans have taken so much from and need to love. Writing is a means to engage with and
tend to these bodies. How can I serve my language, liberate it from the white supremacy embedded in our literary education? In an essay on poetry that engages with the archive, Philip Metres confronts a creative maxim I’d heard but never took the time to question: “The modernist notion that ‘good artists borrow, but great artists steal’ cannot but sound like rationalizing exploitation and colonizing, given the modernist backdrop of European empire. So many disciplined, disappeared, and dismembered bodies.” I never wanted to take. Like my mom rolling rice in sesame oil for my lunch box, I came here to give. Like unbaked bread sitting in the dark, I came to grow. Like stomata, eyes, the moon—I
wanted to open and close in time with everything else. I am so used to performing: academia asks me to engage in methods that are restricted by patriarchy and ableism. I identify more as an artist than an academic; I favor creation over criticism and expression over analysis. In a transactional world of production and consumption, I seek the depth and contradiction of the creation process. When I expand what I see in my writing, I write of my own expansiveness. When I honor animals or the sea, I honor the animal I am, the sea of my body. I honor language because it makes us resilient and loving in a world dominated by loveless systems. How do we deal with the grief of
a global pandemic and the climate crisis? How do we grapple with the toll of this loveless world? Poetry, primarily—I mean poetry as words, but also people and community—is the main thing I live for. I make offerings to language and feed myself at its altar. Do we go a day without mourning? Do we deserve to? I eat, sleep, and laugh on the grounds of genocide and learn at an institution built by slave labor. My poetry emerges from the urgent questions of how to still love, how to trust? How to live? As a Korean American woman, I wrestle with the people and places that reject and/or appropriate this body. In her theory of ornamentalism, scholar Anne Cheng talks about the
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February 27, 2022 PAGE DESIGN BY HAZEL FLAHERTY ILLUSTRATIONS BY HAZEL FLAHERTY
yellow woman’s body as a liminal space between human and object, body and machine, wilderness and civility. Interested in reclamation, I explore the liminality of my body—in desire, animality, autonomy. I am a passage. I am smaller and dumber than an orca. My words are one granule of rice, the smallest scale of sustenance. This is all I have right now. I am wringing it out of me, for you. How to say this? Everything hurts right now. Everything is beautiful. This is the kind of head spinning that makes a fifteen-minute walk across campus feel like fifteen hours. Time dances strangely, so pain from childhood crashes into me when I’m sitting in the backyard and I just wanted
to look at some trees. How to say this? I’m lonely in an exciting way. There is no membrane between my body and the earth; it’s the kinship of mud on mud. Yet sisterhood fails because we keep abusing the earth; we are a species of genocide and domination. I would have done better for the world as a rock, a body of grounding, a body that erodes cooperatively with the tide. With bigots and state violence and a pandemic and species annihilation, the world’s axis leans toward death. Within this body, love is always ending in some way, and I try to honor love but don’t know if I can keep up with all I have to mourn. Here are mud words
from this mud body. Mud, of course, being anything it wants to be: shit, or chocolate cake, or a clay pot before it’s fired. Everything of the earth has a memory of life, and energy flows between the elements. Words, too, transfer energy and attention between themselves. They model community and cohesion, friction and movement. In my words and in my life, I don’t want to leave anything behind. We eat everything on the plate. We hollow out wine bottles. We gather scraps of unused clay and wet them to be shaped again. Immigrants and their children save bags and containers and scallion roots because we see the life in everything—to be repurposed, revived. We do not get comfortable with the
sensation of wasteful power and disposal because we are not our colonizers. In the last months of 2020, I quarantined in suburban Delaware with a close friend from high school. The town was forestry and we shared the backyard with deer, only leaving the neighborhood to go on hikes. We cooked all our meals—breakfast burritos, kimchi fried rice, homemade whipped cream with berries—and delivered food to elderly neighbors. Both young women of color and writers, we created community within ourselves, and in the quiet living, we found energy and love. I keep coming back to that time, romanticizing it. You know I’m that way:
When a softness appears, I cling to it. I make it a thousand softnesses. Maybe it’s childish or deceptive, but I think that’s one of the least dangerous things we can do with words: Play. Find safety again. All this to say, I’m small. I’m young, I’m yellow. I think it’s important that I’m happy. I’m not asking for language to immortalize us, but to save us from ourselves. I don’t want my body carved into a marble statue because all I have is borrowed. Hold this body of mud. Next time the rain comes, I want to be close to earth. Everything of the earth has a memory of the Nassau Weekly, and Sabrina Kim flows between the elements.
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Volume 44, Number 3 PAGE DESIGN BY CATHLEEN WENG
DREAMS DREAMS OF OF GHOSTS GHOSTS ILLUSTRATIONS BY EMMA MOHRMANN
find scuttling around the platform. In the leaking faucet of the third sink of the women’s room which will never be fixed no matter how many faucets they try to replace it with. In the brown-skinned woman who sits on the By MINA QUESEN wood bench in the dark, three leather-bound Ghosts hosts linger in books tucked at her side. Crucias Station. Shadow Box Bells no longer rememEach time a train runs bers the name of the cemetery the station is through Crucias Station, built atop— “It changed the lights inside the train so many times across the cars flash across Bells eras,” she once told me— like the rapid-fire click but the ghosts creep of moving shadow boxabout in the oddest plac- es. The lights in Crucias es. In the strange blooms have never worked past that line the tracks and 10 PM, at least never in peek up from the gray my memory, but I alslate in bold defiance of most don’t mind. The industrialization. In the lights give me a reason names children pick for to watch. Gold strikes whatever creature they brown skin and Bells
“Below, the sea was moonlight, bright as commercial breakfast milk. The tide pulled forward and back, morse code telling me all the ways to escape the sleepy town.”
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leans into the light like she can catch it if she reaches far enough. Like it will suck her up and take her anywhere. I’d believe it if she told me that’s how she traveled. She never has a train to catch. Patience I never win the waiting game. I could watch the train lights run over Bells for hours and she wouldn’t say a word, just stare forward for a train that will never arrive. With strangers, she always makes the first move, but once she knows your name, it’s as if she never met you. At least, until you speak first. I have another dream, I say. Tell me, Bells says.
Ylang Ylang On Moon Beach, the palm trees rose so high their leaves are swaddled by clouds. I stood at the top of one, the palm leaf my diving board, nearly unbending despite my weight. Below, the sea was moonlight, bright as commercial breakfast milk. The tide pulled forward and back, morse code telling me all the ways to escape the sleepy town. They said jump and I will find freedom. Sometimes, I dove into the light, deep, deep, deep. It was cold, but I didn’t mind, white light slipping between fingers and sinking into my eyes. If I resurfaced, I would see nothing but white. I would remember that I am a poor swimmer and
drown in the white. I would forget how to float. But in the moonlight, the white was every color, every texture, every vision. I was divine in its attention. Free. I heard bells in the sea, and they told me I was getting closer. Sometimes, the light was just light and the sea was just the marble-sized grains of hateful sand and when I leapt my head cracked against the deceit. Red confetti burst from my head. Surprise, it said, there was nowhere else to go in the first place. Five years ago, I told my friend about this recurring dream. The dream was its own wraith that haunted the rare occasion I could actually sleep. But talking about what few dreams
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February 27, 2022
I had was better than griping about contracts and deadlines. We sat on the other side of Bells’ bench. I spoke quietly, but we were close enough for her to hear every word. When I finished, she tapped my shoulder and offered me a match. A wish for a dream, she said. One of the books laid open in her lap. I could catch snippets of my dream written in it. I took the match, and my friend was quick to pull us away to another area to wait for our train. Crazy woman, she mumbled, but I could only hear the bells from the dream ring, ring, ring.
and stared at the ceiling. I stared until the silence was unbearable. I got up, got my coat, but got a match instead of my headphone cure. I wasn’t going to light it. I tossed it aside, found what I wanted, and laid awake for another two hours. Insomnia has no friends. What harm is there in wishes you don’t believe in? When it’s 3 AM and there’s nothing better to do, there is no harm at all. I wish for sleep.
Trades Bells was on her bench again the next morning, just as she had been for years. As she would for years to come. I will learn Insomnia people don’t notice her, I forgot about the don’t see her unless they match. I put it in my coat know to look for her. I pocket, went on my train sat beside her, waited to to work, went on my train see if she would look at home, readied for bed, me and know. She didn’t
look, but she did know. It could have been a fluke. It could have been a lucky chance, or maybe I just wanted the wish to work so it did. Placebo effect. But I’d never slept so well in recent memory. And desperate people have little to lose. I don’t believe in wishes, I said. Then why come back? she said. My mother believed in spirits. Not in a god or single figure. She didn’t believe in religion. But she believed in her spirits. Used to talk about them as guiding hands, advisors of the unseen. I wanted to believe, but schools are cruel and teach unforgiving lessons about believing in anything different than the norm. Alongside their othering, I learned other things, too. I
learned about the good jobs, the normal jobs, the one that lead to success. I learned to play a numbers game and rely on proven fact. I learned how to succeed, however they defined that. Scientific method, I said. Repeat and experiment to see if you get the same results. Placebo or not, sleep was sleep. A dream for a wish. We take nothing else. We? Bells smiled, something ancient and pitying. She pulled up one of her books. What did you wish for? A good nap, I said with a smile, like I knew it was a stupid waste of wishes. Will you tell me your dream? Crazy woman. Crazy women.
White Tea I stood in a classroom. Women who looked like me but I refused to believe were me moved rapidly, at 3x speed like the audiobooks I once played for class. And just like those audiobooks, while the story moved quickly, I was trapped at 1x. I was frozen and forced to watch as the world moved on without me. They spoke in numbers. They piled papers with more numbers on my desk. I drowned in their numbers. My heart caught the rhythm and threatened to grow nails and claw through my ribs, leaving me trapped and heartless and alone. It’s not the dream I had the night before, but it was one I could remember clearly. Bells put down her pen and gave me a match. Essential
CONTINUED ON PAGE 16
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Volume 44, Number 3 PAGE DESIGN BY ANDREW WHITE
Pen and Marker on Paper, 11” x 14”, 2018 Books, dragons, and forests have always fascinated me: I feel that they each possess an eternal sort of magic that makes all dreams possible. As I have grown older, I have had less time to spend with these friends of mine, so I live vicariously through Sylvia, who invites everyone to join her for storytime under the moonlight.
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Volume 44, Number 3 PAGE DESIGN BY TONG DAI ILLUSTRATIONS BY EMMA MOHRMANN
talk birdy to me: nicknames for your sweetheart A listicle of bird-inspired sweet talk. By JUJU LANE
For ornithologists and lovebirds alike — please enjoy this curated list of nicknames for your significant other, selected from the Audubon Guide to North American Birds: 1. Tufted Titmouse 2. Emperor Goose 3. Starling 4. Magnificent Frigatebird 5. Golden-crowned Kinglet 6. Glossy Ibis 7. American Bushtit
And, lest we fail to consider the inevitability of heartbreak, here are a few cutting insults that may prove useful after your separation: 1. Parasitic Jaeger 2. Limpkin 3. Bristle-thighed Curlew 4. Bufflehead 5. Flammulated Owl 6. Lesser Prairie-Chicken 7. Ruddy Duck 8. Loggerhead Shrike 9. Dickcissel 10. Common Loon
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February 27, 2022 PAGE DESIGN BY EMILY YANG
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5
When I interviewed Cath in December 2021, she explained that while she originally created All of Skam for her own ease in rewatching the show, after the few weeks it took to build the site, she realized that it could help others in the fandom access material. Cath never expected All of Skam to turn into “one of the biggest SKAM references” in the world. Cath herself translates SKAM subtitles, starting when she noticed that there “were no French subtitles” for SKAM episodes, and if they existed, “they were done pretty poorly.” Just as English-speaking fans experienced during SKAM’s rise, the accessibility of the show was restricted by available translations. Cath found that French audiences were usually “only
watching the French remake because of the language barrier” (rather than watching the original or other versions), and her goal was to “make SKAM more accessible for the Frenchspeaking community.” Cath is a completely selftaught translator. Though she has never formally studied translation, she taught herself from blogs and tutorials online. In fact, she has “pretty much spent all [her] free time doing subtitles” for the last three years. Cath is a central part of a community that made the show and continues to make its remakes available around the world, constantly expanding SKAM’s audience. Princeton translation scholar and professor David Bellos notes in his book Is that a Fish
in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything that
for
film
subtitling,
“collaborative translation is the norm,” a trend that continues into SKAM fan translation. To recruit assistance for the translation of SKAM remake subtitles into French, Cath advertises translation tasks on her website and Instagram page (she finds her translators “by asking for volunteers, as simply as that”). Traditionally, at least two translators are needed, with both needing competency in a shared language (for SKAM translators, this language is usually English), one ideally a native speaker of the sourcetext language (for the original, Norwegian), and another of the target language (like Cath with French). In their analysis of Anglocentered cultural hegemony in SKAM, Jennifer Duggan and Anne Dahl introduce the concept of “translations as free ‘gifts,’” the service aspect of
which is deeply ingrained in the attitude and actions of fan translators. Subtitle translation is a labor of love and collaboration, and Cath underlines that most translators are kind, a result of understanding “each other’s work” and “how hard it is,” as well sharing the goal of providing as many people access to SKAM as possible. Cath and her team SKAM’s the translations from SKAM’s remakes into French and from SKAM France into English (in consolidating translations, All of Skam credits the teams that work on other remakes). Her team for the English translation of SKAM France is well-established, with different people running social media, clip translation, and publishing. While “translation and subtitling are long and hard tasks” that drive much potential assistance away, Cath has
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Volume 44, Number 3
managed to build a strong team of “trust-worthy fellows” for her projects. Even though the collaborative environment helps share SKAM and build community within the fandom, translation remains a largely solitary endeavor. The process of translating one twenty-minute episode takes Cath, on her own, between two and three hours. For example, to translate the subtitles of a DRUCK episode, the German SKAM remake currently being released, Cath must download the English subtitles file and the full episode without subtitles, create a raw French translation of between 200 and 400 lines of dialogue, fix the timing of the subtitles with each clip, and hardcode the subtitles into the video. Subtitling is one of the most taxing and mind-bending kinds of translation. Bellos points out that in traditional film subtitling, “the subtitler has around sixty-four characters, including
spaces, that can be displayed for a few seconds at most to express the key meanings of a shot or sequence in which characters may speak many more words than that.” Cath approaches this challenge with Aegisub, a subtitling software she taught herself to use that allows fan subtitlers to orchestrate fonts, timing, and placement of subtitles over a video. (In an interview with Forbes, Neil Nadelman, a translator of Japanese anime says that “almost everyone uses [Aegisub], even professionals. A lot of times, professional software isn’t even as good.”) “It’s a full-time job,” Cath explains. “You have to be ready for anything, and the ‘live’ format of SKAM can be pretty stressful. We never know when a clip will drop and unfortunately, some people still don’t understand that translators are fans just like them and that they aren’t always available, or that translating takes time.”
Cath’s efforts and the efforts of her co-translators, however, have not gone unnoticed. While All of Skam will always be free, in summer 2020 Cath started a page on Ko-fi, a website advertised as “The Friendly Way to Fund Your Passions,” that allows creators to solicit donations of about the price of a cup of coffee. Cath posted that any donations would help her with school costs and “would be the biggest recognition for [her] work.” Even so, Cath feels that the money she earns from Ko-fi is not all hers, and that rather it belongs to the “Skamverse,” a term fans use to describe the world created by SKAM, its remakes, and its fans. With the money raised through Ko-fi, Cath has bought translation software and supported fundraisers run by actors from across SKAM and its remakes, such as the top surgery fund for SKAM France actor Alex Bécue. An anonymous Ko-fi donor posted
with their donation in August 2021 that “SKAM is life-changing, and your beautiful website is making it more accessible to people all over the world.” Cath’s work exemplifies the power of fan translators to transcend national borders and make content available beyond the official reach of a show. The act of donating time, energy, and skill to the distribution of quality fan-made SKAM subtitling allows viewers international access to content designed to help them understand themselves and their world. As one donor put it in 2020, “the work you do is the epitome of what it means to do something good with no expectation of a reward...just because you want to share art and bring people together. We need more of that, so thank you!!!” SKAM’s international success, largely facilitated by its fans’ “gift translations,” spread the Norwegian phenomenon far beyond its borders,
empowering audiences around the world to embrace their identities and know that they are not alone in their experiences. Through the fan translator, these worlds are accessible. In emphasizing the importance of their role, Cath reminded me that “we could all be watching our own stuff in the languages we know, and that’s it. But thanks to amazing people who aren’t even paid to do that, we can enjoy so many other movies and shows, and discuss them with people from all around the world.”
Even though the collaborative environment helps share the Nassau Weekly and build community within the fandom, Lucia Brown remains a largely solitary endeavor.
Volume 44, Number 3
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PAGE DESIGN BY EMAN ALI
TO CLEANSE “I consider cleaning it / But a marble pattern of the last remnants of you is reassuring to stare down at” By HIBA SIDDIKI
I think I have almost succeeded in washing the feeling of you from my hands Nerve cells that I have disintegrated through religious rituals of scalding hot water and a bar of soap Cleaning every memory of you that is stained into the crevices and folds of my palms My raw red hands crack from dead skin that peels and stays in my bathroom sink I stare I finally turn the cold silver handle to rinse it all away It’s taking me more time to scrub the taste of you from my lips I gaze into the mirror watching each of the bristles of my toothbrush aggressively moving back and forth on my soft pink mouth until For the seventh time this week Blood spills into the sink and it stains the white porcelain I consider cleaning it But a marble pattern of the last remnants of you is reassuring to stare down at So long as I am purging those remains from me I do not care where they go I do not know how to cleanse you from my eyes How can I rid them of images that are burned under the folds of my lids I see you each time they close I do not know how to cleanse you from my ears Which still ring with false promises and fictitious professions of love I hear you just as much in silence as I do in loud noise My solace is that I don’t need to cleanse you from my heart A place that is constructed and abundant with purity Your filth has come close And I can’t lie when I say it has even touched But never did it permeate through the chambers Or pollute my bloodstream I won’t spend my life forcing my hands through my chest to drown the organ in water My heart is not tainted by you
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Volume 44, Number 3 PAGE DESIGN BY TONG DAI
One writer searches for clarity and finds mindfulness. By ALEXANDRA ORBUCH
I
blink open my eyes, slowly adjusting to the glow of early morning filtering through my glass windows. Sitting up, I check my clock: 7:30 AM. My mind immediately jumps to my extensive morning checklist—I have an interview in an hour to prepare for and a host of readings to do. Needing to push the flood of thoughts out of my mind, I stretch out my arm, feeling gently for my phone on my nightstand. Squinting at the glare of the display, I locate the app I am looking for and press the icon. The screen turns blank except for the thin tangerine print in the center: HEADSPACE. Just taking a moment to get comfortable. We’re going to begin with the eyes open. When you’re ready, just taking a big, deep breath.
I breathe in, wading through the haze of tasks clouding my mind. As I sigh out, I give myself the space to let them go and find myself attuned to the gentle sound of the birds outside my window and the dull footsteps in the hallway. I lean deeper into myself, allowing the soothing voice to wash over me. I feel a sense of being especially grounded in the current moment, unconcerned with the stresses and responsibilities that await me. The far-off bird songs and footsteps begin to melt away. Eyes closed, my mind goes blank, the background noise, once in sharp focus, now a blur. *** When I blink open my eyes after meditation sessions each morning, I feel a renewed sense of patience and calm. A common thread in quite a few of the Headspace meditations is the imperative to approach thoughts through the lens of an impartial observer. I note the thoughts that flit by rather than trying to change them. I attempt to bring that
objective awareness into how I think about challenges I face. Snapping into an emotional response is not the only way. I am able to better weather the turbulence of my days without getting overwhelmed and negatively impacting others.
something, although I was too consumed with what I had to do to realize it at the time. My day began the moment I woke up; as soon as my alarm blared, a flurry of reminders burst into my head. And there they would remain until I slipped under I used to silently scoff when- my covers at the day’s end. ever my mother brought up the idea of balancing the mind, Before I began meditatbody, and soul. As a child, I ing, poetry was my sole rewould wake up each morning lease; I counted on the breeze to find her gone, scrubbing and sun-drenched patch of up before surgery by the time grass in my backyard to help I brushed my teeth. When I me get lost within myself, to asked how she managed to focus creatively. But I started come home after a grueling day to find myself faced with writwith a content look on her face, er’s block. Instead of mulling mindfulness was always her re- over ideas for a villanelle, my sponse; yoga, my mother would mind wandered, thinking tell me, made all the difference about the next test or deadfor her. She urged me to find my line. Although I didn’t know escape. I was resistant at first. it at the time, I realize now But as my work piled up, and I that it was because I was forcnoticed my mind taking a toll, ing one practice to do two I knew I had to make a change. things. How could I write if I was simultaneously trying to I first dove into the practice find a respite from the hectic of meditation at the start of my day? By practicing meditajunior year of high school. If tion, I have discovered a way I’m being honest, before then, I to clear out the noise, and my found myself hurriedly rushing thoughts flow in a way they through each day; I was missing never had before. When I sit
down to write, I don’t think about my readings or internship interviews—I just lean into exploring my creative ideas. Some days, I meditate and feel nothing but penetrating uneasiness, my mind wandering so far off that I forget to count my breaths. At other moments, a flood of anxieties inundates the recesses of my brain to the point of overflow. When I began my meditation journey, I was perturbed when my unruly mind didn’t do what I asked of it. I have come to understand that I can’t always eliminate my internal noise on command, nor should I try to. Meditation is a human practice. Its beauty lies in its imperfection.
Alexandra Orbuch notes the thoughts that flit by rather than trying to change the Nassau Weekly.
Through the Haze of My Mind
___________________ __________
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Volume 44, Number 3 PAGE DESIGN BY CATHLEEN WENG ILLUSTRATIONS BY EMMA MOHRMANN
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9
oils in a diffuser win a make the dreams easier. Pyro The match worked. So did the next. And the next. And the next. At some point, I stopped telling myself this was crazy, that I was making it up. I wished for sleep. I bought the diffuser. I dropped seven drops of floral oils into still water. I dreamed. I lit more matches. Work The kids at school said my mother made potions because she made traditional medicines as her job. They said the cloth charms stuffed with the herbs I found familiar smelled weird. Kids are cruel, but parents could be, too. For career day, many parents came in to volunteer. As we filled out worksheets, one volunteer asked what my father did. I gave my mother’s answer: Something boring. The volunteer smiled and asked what my mother did. When I
answered, the volunteer smiled and nodded, but a pharmacist muttered, The crazy woman’s kid. I heard the father walked out. I left my mother’s charms at home after that. Dark Tea Smoke so thick you could bottle it like ink spilled into me from my nose and mouth. It painted me black inside out. A fire alarm blared, but it soon turned to ringing bells. When I told Bells, she told me about the cemetery. She gave me a match and a piece of history. Mother How’s work? It’s fine. You’re unhappy. I’m sleeping better these days. I wish you would find somewhere else. I think I might start looking. Silence. Do you still believe in spirits? Chamomile October. I climbed a tree so high until I was in the heart of its canopy. I sat in its cradle, seeing nothing but gold, crimson, and orange, like I was really in the heart of the sun. The leaves told me not to go, to make wings out of them and fly. I would not be Icarus. Could not be Icarus.
You can’t fly too close to something you are. After this dream, Bells told me about wandering librarians who carried shelves on their backs. They traveled town to town carrying stories. She once traded books for matches, but when her favorite librarian died, she switched to dreams. The librarian is one of her ghosts. Cherry Blossom I’m on the phone with him. We sit in silence, but one of us is crying. Because one of us is crying, the other one starts too. It terrifies me how in rhythm we are. But it feels good to cry. To put the fears in the open. To carry it in the net between us instead of in the sagging, wet box of my heart. This dream earned me the secret about the wishes. The ghosts grant the wishes. They follow the matches, wait for the signal, then cast their spells to make it come true. They have limits. No overnight millionaires or people raised from the dead, but sleep they can grant. A free drink, an extra day off, healing a mild cold, extra courage to make a big decision. I’ve used wishes for them all Candor The truth is, he wasn’t
the one to leave. My mother said he’d lost his spirit. My mother knew the life she wanted. My mother packed everything up and pulled us out. He stayed in his city, in his stable desk job, in his all too neat apartment. We spent nights traveling across the country. I learned to stay up at night and watch out the window. In one of my mother’s stories, a wolf would come and swallow a bad soul. I didn’t know how to tell if a soul was good or bad. Even when we settled down, I waited for a wolf. Freesia The pit before me was endless. Rings and rings of stairs carved out of the earth ran down and around along the walls of the pit until I could see nothing more. She stood on the first step. Looking
at me expectantly, she asked what I was looking for. I opened my mouth and answered, but my voice was just the chime of a bell. She nodded in understanding, took my hand, and ran. We ran down and around down and around down and around. The moon stood vigil, our guardian in our descent. Night by night, we went down. We ran always, but between bell chimes and her melody of a voice we learned. We laughed, we cried, we screamed. Even while raging at each other, we ran down and around. My feet were bare. The bottom of her white skirt turned brown from the dust we kicked up. She pointed out the moment when we could no longer see our guardian. We wept as we continued. Weeks, months, maybe years we ran. My
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heart beat to the drum of her feet. We reached the bottom, but my heart didn’t realize it and still it drummed her song. At the bottom, in the dark, there was a door. This is it. I cannot remember if I said it in relief or despair, just as I can no longer remember when my voice turned from bells to words. The sign over the door said Welcome. Welcome, but I knew the other side of the door would be exactly the same as this side. The only difference was that the Welcome should make me feel prouder to be on the other side. You’re Welcome. She looked at me in that defiant way of hers. There is no doubt in her eyes as she said, This is
February 27, 2022
not what you’re looking apartment. I could hardfor. ly show up for a daily match. Flight You’ve earned the When I finish retelling flight you dreamt of, the dream, Bells looks up Bells says. expectantly. The dream Earned seems is not all you have. debatable. I had considered not You wish for courage, telling her, deluded my- not a promotion. You self into thinking I might wish for a break, not be able to slip away like a free money. You have the fleeting dream, but Bells skills. The matches proalways knows. I say, I got vide safety nets; they do accepted. I’m going back not build something out to school. Learn some- of nothing. thing else. Maybe travel. Maybe it’s not the Dreams are matches I’ll miss, then. telling things. Bells smiles. I have Congratulations. been in this spot long I think about dis- before the station, and tance. I think about I will be here long after. wishes. I think about ev- That’s the thing about erything that could go ghosts. We never know wrong without matches. when to move on. Crucias Station is a fiveI must not look conhour drive from my new vinced. She continues,
Do you know why I trade in dreams? Ghosts can’t dream. Dreams are for those who want change, who want growth, who know how to move. You’re a dreamer, not a ghost. Not even the matches can make a dreamer from a ghost. Neroli Two weeks after I leave Crucias, I cannot escape one of my dreams: I stand in an orange orchard. These trees are entirely white, not a leaf in sight, although I know this is not how orange blossoms work. When the wind comes, the petals fall like snow, layer the ground in a similarly fragile fashion. Smaller than my thumbnail, they dance as they
tumble into my hair, as they crown me as one of them. As they stay as permanent fixtures in my thick brown curls. They follow me everywhere I go and remind me that I was grown from their roots. And, when the time comes, they catch on the wind and dance me back to the orchard we left. I write it down. Pen to paper in a script not nearly as elegant as Bells’. To Bells, Crucias Station, 4th bench on Platform 8 Two weeks later, an envelope comes with a slip of paper. Spend it well. A single match falls out. Mina Quesen didn’t believe in religion. But she believed in the Nassau Weekly.
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Volume 44, Number 3 PAGE DESIGN BY EMAN ALI
“The dead linger after their passing in the memories of those who knew them; this poem, however, lingers only on my hard drive, contextless and adrift in the sea of my thoughts and memories.”
Perfect Songs
By PETER TAYLOR
B
ack when I still used Twitter, I came across a picture of a poem entitled “Perfect Song.” I have no idea the identity of the poet, much less that of the person who ushered it into my feed—perhaps they are the same—and numerous Google searches have yet to contribute any clarity. But the poem remains in my mind, and I have returned to it often, long after my departure from the social media network where I made my discovery. The sixteen-line poem recounts the story of a young person “walking through the morning / after a night of heavy snow and drink / with my headphones on and they played / me the most perfect song.” The narrator proceeds to describe the way the combination of song and state of mind gave them the feeling of being “woven into the electric / cold bright air,” gave them the feeling that “at any moment / someone might fall in love with me.” Since the morning in question, the narrator has searched in vain for this apparently glorious tune only to realize “that what I had taken to be the song / was in fact the joyous concordance of / a moment that would not come again.” I quickly saved the poem’s image to my desktop
but, in my continuous quest for the dopamine injection that ensues with every click of “refresh,” neglected to record any other details. Its origin, at least in my mind, has now met a fate more complete than death, having been erased almost entirely from my purview with the deletion of my Twitter account. The dead linger after their passing in the memories of those who knew them; this poem, however, lingers only on my hard drive, contextless and adrift in the sea of my thoughts and memories. I can’t help but note the poetic symmetry that seems to define my discovery. I found a poem, just happened on it, because it poked its head out of the dark abyss that was my now-defunct Twitter feed, otherwise defined by hopeless college kids bemoaning their individual anxieties or their collective political fears. Amid the seemingly unconquerable chaos, not unlike the zeugmatic “night of heavy snow and drink” the poet establishes, I came across a perfect song of my own, only one that happened to be a poem, to forestall my continued descent into the internet’s ether. The poem forced me to stop my scrolling, if only for a moment, to luxuriate in the present in the same way as the poem’s narrator. To cap it all off, I imitated the narrator in their search for their life’s momentary artistic accompaniment, which ended in the same verdict of fruitlessness. The kind of moment the poem describes manifested itself in my own life--how poetic! More importantly, however, I recognized my own life in this poem. I’m sure you do too.
Remember? You heard that song in an airport lounge, where the singer crooned about her lost love mere days after your own heartbreak. Or once, when you were driving home after a long day, you turned on the radio to discover your new anthem, blaring and proud like you always imagined Gabriel’s trumpet might sound, only instead of ringing from now until eternity, the approximation of heaven was curtailed in favor of a song you already knew, replacing grand wonderment with mere recognition. What about a couple weeks ago, when you were at the record store and one of the employees put on a song of such muscular grace that you felt your soul expanding as you clenched your fist in joy, the only impediment to its identification stemming from your shyness (cross the store to ask what it is? More like cross the River Styx!) Or how about the song your best friend put on in his dorm last weekend? The rest of you were too drunk or stoned to recognize it, let alone inquire after its name, but you languished in it, comforted by the dark paleness of his painted walls and the sloshy comfort of
his beer-stained bean bags. In moments like these, when the artistic and the temporal overlap into a synthesis of life, all the pieces are already there, independent of the song. Otherwise, every time we discovered a new song would be tantamount to the ingestion of a wonder drug, clearing away all the sadness and pain that obscures our ability to see the beauty and joy that might surround us. No, the song is not the catalyst but the connector, the singular thread tying together all the otherwise disparate pieces of the moment into a blanket for your soul. The music doesn’t create everything; it also tunes you into what is already there, alerting you to the moment’s inherent splendor. For evidence, we need only look to our favorite songs and the way their structures might mirror this phenomenon they seem to
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Volume 44, Number 3
create. Take “Thirteen” by Big Star, a quintessentially flawless pop song in its elegant compression. The melody is infectious without being irritating, the instrumentals simple without being simplistic, the lyrics nostalgic without being sentimental: musically, the song works. But what takes it over the line from good to perfect? You could say it’s just one of those songs where all the individual elements are so good that they work well together, and I would agree: the whole ends up greater than even the sum of
its parts. You could also say that the lyrics and music reflect one another in their tone and mood, and I would again agree. I think there’s something more, though, something in the way the song’s structure and compression (it’s only 2:34 long) emulate the kind of moment our unknown poet describes in “Perfect Song.” Practically over before it’s begun, the song draws attention to its finitude with its brevity. The song’s elements all work together because they are packaged into a terminable whole. In fact, “Thirteen” is just one example, one that happens (miraculously) to be an entire song rather than a portion of one. The mid-piece swell of the Tannhäuser overture, the shift from solo to duet in “O soave fanciulla” from La Bohème, the first distorted chords in Car Seat Headrest’s “Drugs with Friends,” the modulation in George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord”—they all work not just because they’re individually well-constructed musical elements. They work because of their singularity, because of the attention such containment draws to itself. They work because they replicate those moments in our life when we put in our headphones, look up at the stars, and find everything falling into
place. I have had many moments like the one described in the poem that have enhanced my life over the past twenty-three years. One I frequently recall occurred many years ago, on a plane whose origin and destination I have long since forgotten. I was listening to “Sleeping Lessons” by the Shins, which begins with quiet arpeggios before a gradual crescendo. The plane was sitting on the tarmac, and just as a layer of electrics guitars superimposed itself on top of the gentler piano and acoustics, the plane’s engine roared into a higher gear, and we began to take off, the roar of the engines aligning with the boom of the song’s orchestration. I think about that flight every time I listen to the song and every time I’m on a plane. I’ve tried to replicate the experience but have never been successful—I imagine it would be nearly impossible to sync a musical moment to a physical moment whose arrival is impossible to predict from the passenger’s seats. But no matter. The moment lives on in my memory. We’ve all had moments—numerous, surely—like the one our unknown poet encapsulates in “Perfect Song.” But if music teaches us anything, it teaches us that we cannot force these moments any more than an artist can force their melodies and rhythms to move their
listeners out of sheer force of their artistic will. They must create musical structures that elicit these reactions, drawing us out from ourselves and into the world and back again. It’s the same, then, with our lives. We cannot will moments like those described in “Perfect Song” into existence, moments where it seems as though love is lurking in every corner and our fate rests in the palm of our hands. We can, however, look to music as our connecting agent, a catalyst to synthesize the disparate elements of life that surround us into something unassailably, unbearably grand.
The unidentified poet has been determined to be Heather Christle, whom we have identified here to make sure she gets credit for composing the wonderful poem that inspired this reflection.
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February 27, 2022
HAZEL FLAHERTY HANNAH MITTLEMAN
PAGE DESIGN BY ANDREW WHITE
cartoons;
WINNING CAPTION:
“How do you do it? Nair? Laser?” Amélie Lemay ’24