Moving Labels Around

[Will Oram]

I'm reading the 1.8 manual after upgrading to an unstable. Text 
movement is still a problem for me, even with simplified Scheme markup. 
I have a short string ("sim.") that overlaps with a beamed note, so 
naturally I want to move it down. The original, unmoved one works fine:

e'4_\markup { \italic { sim. } }

but anything to modify its position *doesn't* produce any change at all:

e'4_\markup { \italic \raise #1.0 { sim. } }

...I tried both +/- values for #. This didn't do anything either:

e'4_\markup { \italic \translate #(cons X Y) { sim. } }

...where X and Y were various values. None of these changed its 
position any. Am I missing something?

Thanks.