On Wed, 30 May 2001, Aidan Grey wrote:
>--- bjm10@CORNELL.EDU wrote:
>> The thing about poetry is that it is much more
>> likely to be deeply
>> entrenched in a set of assumptions than might a
>> prose selection. Part of
>> the problem is that poetry is an extreme in
>> metaphor, which would
>> probably get lost on the first translation.
>
> That's part of the point, isn't it? Each translation
>would have to modify the metaphors into a new
>mind-set, as represented by a language.
Right. And there's no reason why a 100% correspondance
has to be made. The job of translator isn't to plug
words from Language A into words of Language B. It's
to take the ideas that are expressed in the words of
Langauge A and render them comprehensibly into ideas
expressed by words of Language B.
Sometimes this is easy. The job of every translator on
Earth is made easy by the simple fact that we're all
human and have certain things in common. Take a world
with more than one race; or, in this game, translating
from species to species and you get interesting problems.
>Even prose
>will do this. Unless it's very boring prose.
A technical treatise on the energy levels of electrons in
hydrogen should be approximately the same in any human or
alien language. A treatise on how to capture a mate can
get tricky.
> I'm personally all for poetry, as long as we don't
>have to match meter and such. It'll really allow me a
>chance to get into the "head" of a speaker of Aelya.
>And it will highlight all the interesting differences
>between our langs.
And more importantly, how that Aelya speaker is trying to
cope with this strange text with its weird and alien
notions!
> And finally, I would LOVE doing a piece from the
>Silmarillion. He's been such an influence on so many
>of us, I think it would be neat to honor him this way.
Padraic.
> Aidan