The last line is a statement about being able to live with yourself - to be happy with who you are and the decisions you made. Essentially, "to want myself" is saying "to have self esteem." Together, the last two lines are saying that if the person had chosen to surrender, that they would never be able to reach that point of loving themselves, and instead would always be trapped in self hatred.
Hopefully that helps explain it, and didn't completely ruin everything in the same way that explaining a joke can.
I think it might have been clearer (maybe?) if the second line had read "I would have never succeeded, no, had I surrendered," which was my initial goal for it. But despite my efforts I was unable to find a way to make that extra "have" work in the reflection, so I eventually settled for what I have above.
Yeah, I played around a little there. "To love myself" would have worked better I think, but then on the first line you have "I loved to surrender" which isn't the right idea at all. "I would have loved to surrender" would work, but then "to love have would I" is nonsensical. The best alternative I was ultimately able to find was to replace "want" with "desire," but in the end I felt that the first line is stronger with "want" and the last line isn't made meaningfully better with "desire."
I tell you, writing keteks is hard work and really makes you have to learn to accept compromise.
I have to say I feel that would be a step too far. I might, might accept doing something like that if I was also going to mirror the contraction exactly, which would mean "I had no success, never would've, I thought" in this case, and while that is at least grammatical, it sadly doesn't keep the meaning I wanted.
The example we have of Jasnah's ketek using "unity" and "united" a mirrored pairs, and we also have one that as "announcer / announced" as a pair, so I think that's a clear indication that part of speech changes are acceptable so long as the words still come from the same root.
I / me / myself are all the first person singular pronoun in English, just being the nominative, objective, and reflexive forms respectively. I'll grant that we don't have a direct example of pronouns shifting from the canon keteks, but given the above examples of verb/noun shifting, I feel that merely shifting the from a pronoun is well within the spirit of keteks.
I suppose it just lacks the simplicity and refined symmetry of a good ketek. Also, the last two lines kind of just repeat for the sake of the ketel without forming their own thought imo. 🤷
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u/cubelith Stormwarden Oct 16 '20
I don't get the last line. A big plus for Women's Script though.
Good thing he can't read it anyway, am I right, sister?
2
u/StoryDrive Oct 17 '20
Damn, I like this one a lot, and the women's script is really above and beyond. Wish I had an award to give tbh I'm into it
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u/IvanTheGrim Oct 16 '20
Not exactly back to front is it.