While doing research for a project, I came across this 1997 review of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s novel Petrolio . It was amusing, and since I’m from the future, I can answer this question:
Is there any chance that, with the alleged collapse of Communism in the Western world, no one will ever again dismiss his or her adversary as being “bourgeois”?
And the answer is no, reviewer, there was and is no chance of that happening.
But my reason for sharing this particular review is its terse commentary on the Italian-to-English translation:
Translator Ann Goldstein was heroic in her herculean undertaking. But twice she has a character smelling the scent of “lime” trees. As once the owner of Italy’s only lime tree, (imported from Los Angeles) I think she meant “linden” (Tilia europea).
That’s all he says about the translation — basically, “She did a pretty good job, but I spotted an error!” Bear in mind, reader, that this book is 470 pages long and everyone makes mistakes. Also, many dictionaries offer “lime” as a translation for that tree. Here’s a German-English example:
And hey, the same thing happens in Italian-English dictionaries:
And to further complicate matters, Wikipedia says: “Note that the tree species known in Britain as lime trees (Tilia sp.), called linden in other dialects of English, are broadleaf temperate plants unrelated to the citrus fruits.” Seems like Ann Goldstein could make a solid argument in defense of “lime.”
The problem with reviewing translations is that nitpicking errors is easy. And it makes us feel smart. So we (myself included) tend to do a lot of it. (And sometimes they aren’t even errors!) It’s harder to articulate what, precisely, is good about a given translation. With that in mind, Katy Derbyshire, a well-known literary translator from German into English, solicited thoughts from colleagues around the world on what makes a translation great. Check out the resulting article here.
“Darmok,” episode 102 of Star Trek: The Next Generation
This episode has always been popular – it’s inspired fan merch and was discussed at length in The Atlantic in 2014 – but it’s getting more attention lately as the social media hive mind wrestles with certain issues.
The episode begins with the Enterprise receiving an invitation to establish relations with an alien race, the Children of Tama, aka Tamarians. However, attempts to communicate with the Tamarians have failed on seven previous occasions. Star Fleet deems them incomprehensible. The “universal translator” device helps little because so much of their speech consists of proper names: “Rai and Jiri at Lungha,” says their captain, Dathon, upon meeting the Enterprise crew. “Rai of Lowani. Lowani under two moons. Jiri of Umbaya. Umbaya of crossed roads. At Lungha. Lungha, her sky gray.” The crew are perplexed.
Having failed to communicate their Plan A for establishing relations with The Federation, the Tamarians switch to Plan B, which they call “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.” They beam Dathon and Picard down to the nearest planet, where the two captains end up fighting a monster with daggers. Meanwhile, Data and Deanna Troi google some proper names mentioned by the Tamarians and realize they are references to mytho-historical people and places. It turns out the Children of Tama communicate entirely through “narrative imagery,” so you have to learn their stories in order to talk to them.
Picard realizes the same thing while fighting alongside Dathon: the heroes Darmok and Jalad learned to understand each other by facing a common enemy at Tanagra, and that is what they are supposed to do now. Dathon is mortally wounded by the monster but spends some quality time by a campfire listening to Picard tell the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, before dying secure in the knowledge that he has made a communicative breakthrough. By the time Picard is beamed back up to the Enterprise, he’s learned enough narrative reference points to tell the Tamarian crew what happened down on the planet. Although saddened by the loss of their captain, the Tamarians are overjoyed that someone finally understands them. The episode ends with Picard reading Homer and reflecting that “More familiarity with our own mythology might help us relate to theirs.”
If you watch the episode more than once, you can come up with rough translations for the Tamarian dialogue. For example, after the humans fail to understand “Rai and Jiri at Lungha” (which was presumably a suggestion for a more conventional diplomatic meeting), the Tamarians argue amongst themselves: DATHON: Darmok. (“We’ll have to fight a monster together.”) FIRST OFFICER: Darmok? Rai and Jiri at Lungha. (“Fight a monster? No, do what Rai and Jiri did at Lungha.”) DATHON: Shaka. When the walls fell… (“That’s not working…”) FIRST OFFICER: Zima at Anzo. Zima and Bakor. (Alternate suggestions based on other stories.) DATHON: Darmok at Tanagra. FIRST OFFICER: Shaka! (“It won’t work!”) Mirab, his sails unfurled. (“Let’s go.”) DATHON: Darmok.
Although I’m old enough to remember the Saturday Night Live skit where William Shatner yells at Trekkies to get a life, I’m still going to ask some serious questions about this language:
Is the language made up of separate words? What we hear is filtered through Star Trek’s “universal translator,” a convenient piece of de facto magic that suffers from none of the characteristic weaknesses of machine translation. (Contrast this with Eifelheim, where the machine translator is conspicuous and quirky.) So we can’t be sure about the structure of the language, but the characters do seem to be saying a series of words. And in addition to proper names, they have many other words in various parts of speech. This should allow them to mix the words up to form new sentences. But instead they’re stuck repeating set phrases. I don’t think there could be a language like this in real life. A culture that values myth, yes, but something this rigid, no.
How do they say anything specific? This seems to be the most common objection — how did these people build a spaceship if they can’t give instructions like “The confinement resolution should be .527” or “Press that button if there’s a power surge in the plasma reactor”? The best answer is probably Ian Bogost’s assertion in his Atlantic article that each mythological reference communicates “a strategy” or “a logic,” which is carried out with no need for “explicit, low-level discourse.” Given how much ants and bees accomplish without explicit, low-level discourse, I’m prepared to believe there could be an alien species operating along similar lines. In fact, The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion notes that this episode was originally conceived as “a complex and confusing ‘ant farm’ visit,” so insect societies may indeed have served as a model for the Tamarians.
How do they learn their own stories? If they can’t mix and match words to form new sentences, how does anyone tell a story to a child who’s never heard it before? Maybe they attend mystery plays where the stories are acted out with minimal speaking.
When Dathon asks Picard to tell him a story by the campfire, why does Picard say, “But you wouldn’t understand?” They have the translator. It’s a story, and the Tamarians are all about stories. This seems connected to my points 1 and 3 – can they not understand novel combinations of words? Do they not learn their own stories by hearing them told, as we do? We don’t know. Anyway, Dathon does appreciate the tale of Gilgamesh, although it’s not clear what his comprehension level is.
The best answer to these questions is probably “shut up,” because the episode has a value that transcends quibbles.
To understand its recent resurgence, let’s consider how discourse has changed over the past decade. Some of the people who used to produce meticulous, link-filled arguments in response to other people who were Wrong on the Internet have moved on to quietism. Others have adopted a posture of being “so tired of having to explain these things.” The most savvy have gone Tamarian and committed to meme culture. Our awareness of the role memes now play in our communication called forth the image of Dathon describing well-known memes in his characteristic style:
I particularly like the last one because it refers to a real-world event that achieved mytho-historic status almost instantly.
And it’s not just Internet memes per se that summoned Dathon to Twitter and Tumblr in 2020. It’s also a sense that as our fractured media environment renders reasoned argument ineffectual, at least between different memetic tribes, archetypal stories begin to shine more brightly.
Americans can’t currently agree on any of what constitutes “the news.” But we can agree that you shouldn’t fly too close to the sun. We can agree that certain things will turn you to stone if you look straight at them. And that sometimes there’s a thing you need to leave behind, and you mustn’t look back at that thing, not even once. Closer to home, perhaps we can agree it’s right to walk six miles to return three cents to a customer you overcharged, or fess up to chopping down your Dad’s cherry tree.
The Tamarians communicate through “narrative imagery,” and so do we all, now. The distracted boyfriend meme isn’t a myth per se, but it’s a kind of microstory that everyone understands. Like the Children of Tama, we know how to express our thoughts according to its logic. And as they circulate, memes acquire layers and shades of meaning that add to their communicative power. Unfortunately, they also have the power to spread propaganda and stoke groupthink and enmity. Use them wisely.
Yesterday, November 11, 2020, was the twentieth anniversary of the Kaprun disaster, where 155 people died in a train fire in a mountain tunnel. Journalists Hannes Uhl and Hubertus Godeysen investigated the accident and its aftermath and wrote a book – 155: Kriminalfall Kaprun – in 2014. They asked me to translate it into English and that translation is now available as an e-book. It came out a few days ago, just in time for the anniversary. I hope it will be of some benefit to people who lost relatives in the accident.
Not many people in the English-speaking world have heard of the Kaprun disaster but there were British and American tourists among the casualties. An entire American family was wiped out. There is a National Geographic documentary about it, although please note that it contains some inaccuracies about the cause of the fire that are corrected by the book.
Notes on the translation:
The original book is written in the historic present, which is much more common in German than in English. Usually, I change it to the past tense for English translations, but in this case the present seemed appropriate for the style and subject matter.
I translated it into British English the first time around and was then asked to Americanize it, so if you come across any stray British terms, that’s why.
I am aware of one error: in chapter 37, I translated the German word Feder as “spring,” when it should have been “tongue.” I realized my mistake after translating the book’s website, but by then it was too late. I am sorry! It’s only one word out of 51,724, but unfortunately it was a rather important one.
If you are an expert on funicular railways or the Austrian legal system and you find other important errors, please write to me through my contact form on this website and let me know so it can be corrected in a future edition.
I hope people find the book readable and informative. It certainly was a privilege for me to work on it.
Machine translation systems still have trouble recognizing proper names. Recently I was proofreading English texts for an Austrian museum and came across a line that went something like this:
The project was directed by Thomas Schmidt and Elderberry Hot.
Now, a lot of the texts I work with are about artists and some of them have unusual names like Friedensreich Hundertwasser or VALIE EXPORT, so on the first read-through I thought, “Elderberry Hot? OK, sure, whatever!”
Then it hit me: whoever submitted this to the museum may have written it in German, used a machine translator like DeepL or Google Translate, and passed it along without checking for errors.
I translated the name “Elderberry Hot” into German and searched the Internet for it. And indeed, there was a person with that name at the relevant institution. So I corrected the English document accordingly.
I won’t tell you Elderberry Hot’s real name here, because I don’t want to affect his Internet search results. But you can figure it out with a dictionary.
I like to test DeepL’s handling of names. Analyzing passages from a book I worked on this summer, it decided a man with the surname Kicherer should be called “Giggles” (“Local politicians attended the opening ceremony and Giggles was honored”) and described a scientific report on plastics written by one Mr. Keim as “the germination report.”
Yet more evidence that machine translation must always be supervised by humans with real expertise. If you wouldn’t leave a two-year-old alone in your office, you shouldn’t trust MT to handle your documents on its own, either.
While helping my mom clean out her basement, I found this 1976 newspaper clipping about the notorious SS officer Otto Skorzeny, who apparently used to boast that he would be willing and able to spring Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer, and Baldur von Schirach out of Spandau prison for a tidy sum.
The columnist, Don Lewis, consulted my father, James Spires (1933-2012), about this issue because he had been a guard at Spandau with the US Army in the late 1950s. The entire column appears below as a jpeg, but in case it’s hard for anyone to enlarge and read, I’ve typed out my Dad’s impressively detailed tips for how to break into the prison. Given that the place has been demolished and the Nazi war criminals in question are dead, it seems safe to put this out there:
Col. Spires said he believes that if Skorzeny decided to come out of retirement and attack Spandau, the aging pirate would have found the prison “a pretty tough nut to crack.”
Spires said while rescuers could have flown a helicopter into the courtyard, the open space was small and dominated by soldiers in the four guard towers at each corner of the compound.
“Even if they did get one in, with a small courtyard like this, they would have had to have some way of knocking out all these towers because the guards all had a clear shot,” Spires recalled. “They could have shot the prisoners,” he said. “They could have shot the helicopter up. So it would have been tough to get out.”
“To get them out of the prison itself, the logical way to attack it would have been to go into the civilian housing around the prison and set up snipers there. Then, on a prearranged signal, which would probably be geared to the movement of a roving two-man patrol outside on the perimeter of the electrified fence – when these guys got to where they could be hit from these houses, you would attack the gate with 12 to 15 men.”
Col. Spires said the attackers, using some sort of explosive device, would blow up the main gate – a heavy oak barrier reinforced with iron bands – kill the guard at the peephole, the officer of the guard and the warden.
“Then you could get into the cellblocks and possibly get these guys out,” Col. Spires said. “In the meantime, you’d have to keep the tower guards pinned down by fire. But you would only have a maximum of five minutes before other soldiers arrived on the scene from our guardhouse. And then, in another 10 minutes or so, you’d have had people coming from the British barracks a block and a half away. So it would have been a split second operation. It would have been very difficult.”
So there you go: a “very difficult” job and quite bloody. Good thing no one ever tried it, or I might not be here.
Since I wrote about English pet peeves last week, I thought it would be a good idea to highlight some German ones this week and try to explain them to readers who don’t speak German. Why? Because this blog is supposed to be about English and German, and because I deserve to suffer for my manifold sins and wickedness.
Grammar:
Let’s look at wegen + the dative case. This is such a classic pet peeve that I had no trouble finding two video clips to illustrate it.
German has four cases: nominative (the subject, e.g. “he lives here”), accusative (basically the direct object, e.g. “I saw him“), dative (basically the indirect object, e.g. “I gave him a piece of my mind”), and genitive (basically possessive, e.g. “and he gave me a piece of his“) but unlike English, which has gotten lazy, it applies them all over the place – not just to pronouns but to tables, meatballs, birds, planets, whatever.
Traditionally, “wegen” (“because of”) is allied with the genitive case. Look at the English phrase “because of a meatball” and you can kind of see the possessive element. It’s a meatball’s because, so to speak. But some decades ago, “wegen” started losing the genitive in casual speech and taking the dative instead, so that insisting on the genitive now marks you out as an insufferable pedant.
This clip from Pastewka illustrates the point perfectly. Pastewka is basically the German equivalent of Curb your Enthusiasm. Below we have the main character, who just can’t stop making everyone hate him, arguing with a cafeteria lady about whether she only gave him 14 meatballs instead the regulation 15. German has many words for meatball, but in the clip below they are Swedish meatballs, or “köttbullar” — and please note that although in Swedish a singular meatball is a “köttbulle,” the German speakers here are using the plural “köttbullar” as if it were singular (why am I doing this again? oh yeah, my sins) — so when the lady rebukes him at about 1:00 for causing so much trouble because of a meatball (“wegen einem Köttbullar” – dative), he makes sure to say “wegen eines Köttbullars” (genitive) in his reply, which tells us a lot about the kind of person he is.
Incidentally, if you had to put English subtitles on this, that exchange would be a challenge to translate. Suggestions welcome.
Similarly, in this next clip about the fictional childhood adventures of Jan Böhmermann, we see him correcting the school principal at about 0:30 over another dative/genitive issue (“vom Unterricht verwiesen” vs. “des Unterrichts verwiesen”), which causes her to pause mid-sentence at about 0:50 when she’s asking the secretary to send in another student “because of the bullying incident” and change her initial dative “wegen dem” to a genitive “wegen des,” to young Jan’s evident satisfaction.
Denglisch
The use and abuse of English loan words and the importation of English grammatical tendencies into German is known as Denglisch (cf. franglais). People are always claiming to hate it — Marcel Reich-Ranicki called it “lächerlich und abscheulich” (“ludicrous and despicable”) and he’d seen enough atrocities in his life to have a sense of what was worth complaining about — but some people must love it because it’s everywhere.
Sometimes Denglisch is just plain old English loan words like “download”, or “cool,” or “management” (pr. “menechment”) with meanings that are familiar to us.
Sometimes it’s words that exist in English but have taken on new meaning in German, like “Handy” (for cellphone/mobile) or “Bodybag” (for messenger bag/sling bag). Yikes.
Sometimes it’s whole sentences. Why are these words displayed on a store front in Vienna? And what — dare I ask? — is a meat baby?
Commas are a problem, but thanks for using “it’s” correctly, guys
A grammatical example that springs to mind is the use of “in” with years. In German, things don’t “happen in 1905” — they “happen 1905” or “in the year 1905” but not “in 1905” (“my grandmother moved 1905 to Berlin,” you might say). There’s a creeping tendency to use “in” with years as it’s done in English, which people sometimes remark on.
Die Prinzen, a pop band whose work was once ubiquitous in American high-school German classes, have a funny song about Denglisch. It starts out:
Ich wollte mit der Bahn Ganz spontan in Urlaub fahr’n Und der Typ sagt: “Stell’n Sie sich mit der BahnCard am Ticket counter an Woll’n Sie InterCity, RailMail oder Metropolitan?” “Oh ja, gern. Aber was ist das denn?” “Damit fahr’n Sie stress-free zu Ihrem Meeting im First-class-business-Zug Danach chillen Sie in der Lounge.” “Oh, das klingt ja gut. Und gibt’s an Board denn auch einen Wurstwagen, mein Freund?” “Nee, aber ‘n Servicepoint. Da kriegen Sie ‘n Snackpack for Wellness!”
I wanted to take a spur-of-the-moment train trip and the guy says: “Go to the ticket counter with your BahnCard. Do you want InterCity, RailMail, or Metropolitan?” “Oh, sure. What is that, though?” “It’ll take you stress-free to your meeting in the first-class business train. Then you can chill in the lounge. “Oh, that sounds good. And is there a Wurstwagen (‘sausage car’) on board too, my friend?” “No, there’s a servicepoint. You can get a Snackpack for Wellness!”
Folksy posturing
A correspondent in Switzerland says she dislikes it when certain politicians and media figures import sentence structures from the Swiss-German dialect into high German, with results that sound “more awkward than down-to-earth.” She mentions:
Das ist der Claudia ihre Wohnung (lit. “That’s to the Claudia her apartment”) instead of “das ist Claudias Wohnung” (“That’s Claudia’s apartment”).
Hier ist dem Jürg sein Artikel (same construction as above – “Here’s to the Jürg his article” Here’s an interesting blog post about that construction in Swiss German.)
Der Musiker, wo ich gestern gesehen habe. (“The musician where I saw yesterday”) instead of Der Musiker, den ich gestern gesehen habe (“The musician whom I saw yesterday”).
So that’s a taste of the things that annoy German speakers. And if it seems weird to you that anyone gets mad about whether it’s “wegen dem Regen” or “wegen des Regens,” now you know how significant your English pet peeves really are.
Lexicon Valley is a great podcast by the linguist John McWhorter, who manages to be fun while also being right about everything.
The latest episode is about linguistic pet peeves, something linguists aren’t really supposed to have – it’s unseemly, like communists having brand preferences. But even people who know most linguistic pet peeves are irrational can’t help having some. I certainly do, and while fully acknowledging their irrationality and pointlessness, I still want to kick people in the head when they say “I’ve never stepped foot in Russia” or “We need to examine our own biaseez.” Arrgh, shut up, morons!
Anyway…here are my takes on the pet peeves mentioned in the podcast:
“You just can’t…” As in, “You just can’t lie around the house all day” instead of “You can’t just lie around the house all day.” I think he’s actually too hard on himself for disliking this one, because it’s still the case that many people perceive a difference in meaning between “just can’t” and “can’t just”: “Lying around used to be Bob’s favorite pastime, but now that all his furniture’s been repo’d he just can’t lie around the house!” (poor him) vs. “When are you going to get a job? You can’t just lie around the house,” (you lazy bum). So they’re not interchangeable and it’s fair to be annoyed when the words get out of order.
“Aren’t I?” – Putting a construction promoted by grammar mavens on a list of your pet peeves is a real power move. This particular one also makes me very happy, because I dislike it as well. It seemed vaguely wrong to me when I was child, and there were a couple of times when I said something like “Ain’t I good at swimming?” and got a smackdown from teachers or even other children who were of the “aren’t” party, so I gave up finding an alternative. I still think “ain’t” makes a whole lot more sense, though. Pro tip: avoid the whole problem by asking, “am I not?”
“Shrimps” (or deers, or sheeps). This would have annoyed me in my early youth but I got over it, as our podcast host apparently also did.
Re “Billy and me are going to the store” (not a pet peeve but something he mentions in passing), I disagree with McWhorter about whether that actually makes sense. IMHO if you want “me” in there instead of “I,” it’s got to be “Billy and me, we’re going to the store.” (Cf. the entire French language.) “Billy and me are going…” feels wrong to me in an instinctive way, not a schoolhouse way. (And yes, I know I said before that he’s always right. He’s probably right about this, too…but I still disagree.)
The bigger problem with those “[someone] and I” constructions is that because teachers insist on making everyone put “I” second, it causes people to say stupid things like “Why are you being mean to Candace and I?” So I fully support the right of pronouns to migrate closer to verbs so speakers can remember what case they’re supposed to be in.
“There’s books on the table.” This used to bother me too, but I got over it by studying other languages where there’s no distinction between “there is” and “there are” and yet their speakers appear to be living normal lives. He mentions German (“es gibt”) and Finnish (?) but there’s also Spanish “hay” and French “il y a” and probably a ton of other examples. Shout-out to Italian, though, which still insists on this distinction (c’è una donna vs. ci sono molte donne).
“Can I get [a Coke]?” – Why would that bother anyone? You’re just asking permission to receive something, which he admits. McWhorter’s very good at critiquing his own pet peeves so I don’t have to. Instead, I’ll just say this one reminds me of people who hate “No problem” as a response to “Thank you.” Why? In so many languages, the standard response to “thank you” is essentially “for nothing” or “please [don’t thank me].” “No problem” is firmly rooted in that tradition; it says, “This wasn’t any extra effort, don’t worry about it, you don’t owe me anything, it’s cool.” Whereas “you’re welcome” has always seemed a little smug to me. I know that’s not the intention, but it seems to entail an acknowledgement that you (the person being thanked) actually did something to earn it, when in fact the general consensus (at least among Indo-Europeans) is that you’re supposed to pretend you didn’t. So I support “No problem.”
Everyone hates something about the way other people are using language. My mother hates any new phrase that gains sudden popularity; she used to hate “sea-change” and now she hates “that’s in your wheelhouse.” My sister once spent a good half hour of her life patiently explaining and re-explaining to a mall survey lady why her questions about a product being “very unique, somewhat unique, or not at all unique” didn’t make any sense because things are either unique or not and you can’t modify it (survey lady: “Oh, OK….So, would you say this product was very unique, somewhat unique…”). My kids’ pet peeves are mostly about pronunciation, e.g. expecially. Some people can’t stand to see “fun” used as an adjective, as it was in my first paragraph. How about you? Tell me in the comments.
Well,
that was fast. After expressing a wish that A. S. Kline would live to complete
his new verse translation of Wolfram’s Parzival, (as Chrétien de Troyes
failed to do with his own Perceval), I got an email from him with a link
to the finished product on April 14th.
And I’m enjoying it very much. I haven’t been trawling it for minor errors, but I can report that it conveys Wolfram’s tale of Parzival in well-written rhyming couplets. If that sounds good to you, read it here.
My other post on Parzivalonly covers prose translations. Those are in a different world from verse translations. They’re more academic, produced for scholars who want to know precisely what Wolfram said and—insofar as this is possible for a translator to convey—how he said it. Certainly you can read them for fun, but…not a lot of people do.
In a sense, verse translations are less accurate than prose translations because of all the juggling and refashioning that must be done to make them rhyme and scan. However, in another sense they are more accurate because, as poems, they give you an experience that is closer to that of the original audience. The prose translations are interesting and informative, but because they’ve changed both the language and the literary genre, the poetic experience is quite disrupted. Compare a prose version of this passage from Parzival to a rhyming one:
This
flying image is far too fleet for fools. They can’t think it through, for it
knows how to dart from side to side before them, just like a startled hare. Tin
coated with glass on the other side, and the blind man’s dream—these yield a
countenance’s shimmer, but that dull light’s sheen cannot keep company with
constancy. It makes for brief joy, in all truth. [Cyril Edwards]
Or
Now, such a winged metaphor,
Flies all too fast for the unsure,
Slower minds will grasp it not.
It will speed past, and be forgot,
Gone flying like a startled hare.
Thus with a dark mirror we fare,
Or a blind’s man’s dream, all dim
Do features seem, to us and him;
They shine not with a steady light,
Grant but a momentary delight. [A. S. Kline]
Feel the difference? Edwards gets points for
precision, Kline for sensibility.
You might wonder whether a poem can ever really be translated. According to the venerable linguist Roman Jakobson, “The pun, or to use a more erudite, and perhaps more precise term—paronomasia, reigns over poetic art, and whether its rule is absolute or limited, poetry by definition is untranslatable. Only creative transposition is possible: either intralingual transposition—from one poetic shape into another, or interlingual transposition—from one language into another, or finally intersemiotic transposition—from one system of signs into another, e.g., from verbal art into music, dance, cinema, or painting.” That may be so, but a good interlingual transposition is worth something, right?
Market forces have decreed that Jessie Weston’s transposition from 1894 is worth $0.99 as a digital download, so I got it to compare with Kline’s. Here are their versions of the two passages presented as samples in my post on prose translations:
Kline
Weston
For I shall now retell a story, That doth speak of great loyalty, Womanly womanhood, anew, And a manly manhood, so true, In every trial, his steel prevailed, His heart within him never failed, While his hand, in battle, likewise Seized on many a glorious prize; Honour-seeking, in nature slow, (For thus do I hail my hero) A sweet sight to woman’s eye, Yet a bane to the heart, thereby; Yet one, indeed, that shunned all wrong. Is yet unborn to this fine tale, Yet shall be born here, without fail, The lad of whom this story’s told, With all its wonders that I unfold.
A tale I anew will tell ye, That speaks of a mighty love; Of the womanhood of true women; How a man did his manhood prove; Of one that endured all hardness, Whose heart never failed in fight, Steel he in the face of conflict: With victorious hand of might Did he win him fair meed of honour; A brave man yet slowly wise Is he whom I hail my hero! The delight he of woman’s eyes. Yet of woman’s heart the sorrow! ‘Gainst all evil his face he set; Yet he whom I thus have chosen my song knoweth not as yet, For not yet is he born of whom this wondrous tale shall tell, And many and great the marvels that unto this knight befell.
‘OPEN!’ To whom? Who goes there? ‘To enter your heart thus, I would dare.’ ‘Then you try too narrow a space.’ ‘How so? Can I not seek a place? I promise not to jostle and press, I would tell you wonders, no less.’ ‘Is’t you, Lady Adventure? Pray How does he fare, your knight, this day?
‘Ope the portal!’ ‘To whom? Who art thou? ‘In thine heart would I find a place!’ ‘Nay! If such be thy prayer, methinketh, too narrow shall I be the space!’ ‘What of that? If it do but hold me, none too close shall my presence be, Nor shalt thou bewail my coming, such marvels I’ll tell to thee!’ Is it thou, then, O Dame Adventure? Ah! Tell me of Parzival, What doeth he now my hero?
As you can see, Weston’s style is solidly Victorian, which is fine for people who like that kind of thing. But I’m happy to have a fresh version.
Regarding the bold lines above, it’s always interesting to see how translators handle the key description of Parzival, “er küene, traecliche wis.” Members of the prose gang render it variously as “A brave man slowly wise” (Mustard & Passage), “Dauntless man, though laggard in discretion!” (Hatto), and “Bold was he, laggardly wise” (Edwards), while the modern German prose side of the Reclam edition says “Kühn war er, und nur langsam gewann er die rechte Lebenserfahrung” (“He was bold, and only slowly did he gain the right life experience”).
Reclam edition, 1997
Kline’s “Honour-seeking, in nature slow” may seem an outlier, but how do knights seek honor in chivalric tales? Through deeds of valor, of course, i.e. by being brave and bold, so I’m cool with that. Wolfram doesn’t say anything about “nature,” but “in nature slow” gives me the same impression as “he’s a slow boy,” which feels right for Parzival, although it does raise the question of whether it was his own nature or his isolated upbringing that made him “slow”—a question that would require its own blog post, essay, or tome.
Edwards’ “laggardly” is a good reflection of Wolfram’s eccentric diction (and the same goes for his “storywise, yet unborn” – see the other bold lines above about being “unborn to this fine tale”); this is an aspect of Wolfram’s style that doesn’t come through very strongly in either Kline or Weston.
In the intro to his prose edition, Edwards specifies aspects of Wolfram’s Parzival he wished to preserve in his translation: richness of imagery, neologisms and nonce words, personification, the “frequent grammatical leaps and bounds” of its syntax, a sense of “playful arrogance,” and unusual constructions such as double or triple genitives (e.g. “woman’s eyes’ sweetness”). Some of these considerations will inevitably fall by the wayside if you set out to translate the work as rhyming couplets—you can’t do everything.
This
is why I said in my previous post that “no one in our time has been insane
enough publish a rhyming-couplets version. Jessie Weston did it in 1894, but
translation standards were looser then.” What I meant was that with our current
standards for literary translation, anyone who puts a rhyming version out there
and dares to call it a “translation of Wolfram’s Parzival” will be
swarmed by nitpickers with endless quibbles about the lack of double genitive
constructions or whatever.
In contrast to Edwards’ warning that his translation imitates Wolfram by giving the reader “a rough ride,” Kline says he decided to “tidy Wolfram up” so the text could be “one to enjoy for the general reader.” Weston described her verse translation as both “faithful to the original text and easy to read,” which is kind of hilarious considering that the original text is notoriously hard to read. But by “faithful,” she probably meant “tells the same story.” Pan out a bit and you’ll see this approach is in tune with medieval literature. Someone handed Wolfram an incomplete and rather basic French tale of Perceval and the Grail and asked him for a German translation, and he responded by producing this unbelievably elaborate shroom trip. If he could see how many pains scholarly translators are taking with his work today, I think he’d be perplexed. He’d punch them in the arm and say, “Bro, just make up your own version! And make it rhyme!” Then he’d gallop off after a startled hare.
Here’s a website I can recommend very highly: A.S. Kline’s collection of poetry in translation. I perused the German section and was favorably impressed. But many languages are represented – check it out if you’re looking for more reading material to keep you busy at home.
Kline is working on a new verse translation of Wolfram’s Parzival. What a gloriously insane undertaking. Let us hope the Plague does not cut him down ere he completes it.
Today I ran across an example of a category most people don’t know about: extremely close translations for opera singers.
I say “close” rather than “literal” because it’s not just about communicating the exact meaning, but also keeping words in mostly the same order so that you could basically nail the target sentence on top of the source sentence and they’d match up nicely. Here’s one from my own sheet music collection:
By conventional standards, this is the worst translation ever. But it’s just what singers need if they aren’t fluent in the language of the song (which many of them aren’t, especially if they’re just starting out). They have to know what each word means so they can sing them with appropriate emphasis and expression.
I unexpectedly ran across one of these today. I was searching for the libretto of The Merry Widow online to see how previous translators had handled a pun in the spoken dialogue. The first result was this.
Opening lines:
Verehrteste Damen und Herren | Most honorable ladies and gentlemen Ich halt es für Gastespflicht, | I hold it as duty of a guest Den Hausherrn dankend zu feiern, | The host of the house thankfully to fete Doch Redner – das bin ich nicht! | Yet, a speaker – that I am not!
At first I thought it was just a terrible translation, because most of the libretto translations available online are intended for listeners and readers, rather than singers – in other words, they’re mostly “good” translations for people who want to read along with a recording or study the libretto as literature. I wondered if it was an MT (e.g. Google Translate) job but that didn’t seem quite right. The translator’s name appeared at the end and I looked her up – it turns out she was a language coach at Opera San Jose, which explains everything. She was not (as I initially suspected) a crazy person, but rather someone with the very specific job of helping opera singers understand their lines with maximum accuracy.
The reason I thought it probably wasn’t MT is that machine translators never follow source-language word order that closely. So you actually can’t get an MT to do a job like that. It’s programmed to translate into normal English word order, not the very close word order needed for these learning aids.
Here’s how 1. Google Translate and 2. DeepL render the opening lines:
1. Dearest ladies and gentlemen, I consider it a guest obligation To thank the host, But speakers – I am not!
2. Dear Sirs, I consider it a guest duty, To celebrate the landlord with thanks, But I’m not a talker!
I like how DeepL assumed it was a letter.
Anyway, both of those are terrible. But – happily for language coaches at the opera – neither of them is terrible in the right way.
