Re: Another little translation exercise
| From: | Sally Caves <scaves@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Saturday, April 3, 1999, 18:02 |
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Irina Rempt wrote:
> A motto occurred to me that I read on a seventeenth-century house in
> Haarlem (my native town) and that I've more or less adopted as my
> own:
>
> Beginnen can ick, volherden wil ick, volbringhen sal ick
>
> In English:
>
> I can begin, I want to persevere, I will succeed.
Well I would try my Teonaht at this, Irina, but it's a proverbthat
highlights the Dutch modal... it's perfect for Germanic
languages like English that have auxiliaries with distinct meanings
for "can," "want to" and "will"--which form the parallelism and the
sense of empowerment that this proverb turns on. Let's see:
Teonaht has two modals that match this:
ry tal immep, ry dihs lommad, "I can begin, I want to "stay the
course,"
but then the future tense changes the syntactical pattern that all three
elements
in the Dutch version share: esry tazzanda--"I will succeed."
In order to bring it into conformity with the Dutch, I would have to
have
an auxiliary that says "I plan to" because the future in Teonaht is not
so
much a statement of intention that I think still underscores the use of
will in English (and maybe even _sal_ in Dutch). I don't know.
Anyhoo, what makes this proverb distinctive in Dutch is that it
has a parallelism in its use of the modal that expresses empowerment
of the speaker, and that I can't reproduce in Teonaht.
Sally Caves