Re: Poetic translation (was: ULT)

BP Jonsson scripsit:

> The most horrible was when I tried my teeth on "The Tyger".  I asked my
> Blake-savvy boss if he could come up with a rime on 'bjaert' ("bright") an
> he snapped: 'fjaert', which means "(a) fart"!  So there I sat with the
> equiv of
> "Tyger, Tyger burning bright, nightly forests' silent fart" engraved int my
> cortex...  Tiel fartas la Shvedigho de Blake! :-)
ROTFLMAO!

> OTOH they say Schiller's translations of Shakespeare stand the test of time
> much better than his (Sch.) own plays, because he was at least as great a
> poet as Shakespeare, but Shakespeare was a much better dramaturgist than
> him.
Schiller?  The German version I know of is the Schlegel-Tieck translation,
which many bilinguals agree is better than the original.  From the
German viewpoint, Shakespeare is a 2nd-rank, but important, 19th
century German Romantic poet....

(of course, *here* we know he was actually a Klingon named nIq nIqolaS.)

> BTW I recently saw a modernization of "The merchant of Venice" where
> Shylock was a Swedish bank clerk and the Venetian merchants were
> shop-owning immigrants from the Middle East.  Very refreshing from the
> prejudices of the original!
Interesting.  I have also seen a version of "A Christmas Carol" with
a Japanese Scrooge, and heard of (but not seen) a version of
"Othello" where everyone except the title character was black.

--
John Cowan                                      cowan@ccil.org
                e'osai ko sarji la lojban.