CHAT: TAN/CHAT: stabat mater (was: Re: Universal Translation Language

[I hope I am right in thinking that "TAN/CHAT" counts as an
official Conlang indicator of going off on an off-topic tangent.]

Ray:

> No English version I've met comes close to retaining
> the simplicity of the Latin.
The mother was standing beside
the crossroads her son had just died
at. His body, she clasped
[in her arms. Her] sobs rasped
as she yammered, she cried.

   --from BOSM [my work of poesy], quoted from memory with the
   bracketed bits made up because I can't remember what went there.

I consider it to count as an English version, though it is what I
call a "transduction" (translation + traduction). Of course, these
words would not work for musical settings of the Stabat Mater (Emma
Kirkby's sublime rendition of Pergolesi's sublime rendition of
which I am hoping to audience in July).

> Irina's translation, of course, loses the simple rhythm & the rhymes of the
> original.  And even in the prose translation a choice has to be made right
> at the start: is it "The sorrowful mother stood..." or "There stood a
> mother, full of sorrow...".  The Latin can mean _both_ and the latter with
> the indefinite article, to me at least, would see Mary as a symbol of every
> mother through the ages who has had to witness the cruel death of her
> child.
The antecedent of the above poesy (which did preserve the trochaic
tetrameter of the original) began "Wretched stood the mother".

--And.