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Translating Poetry

Posted Sunday, August 26, 2007 by Charlie Trimm


I finished reading the Lord of the Rings in Modern Hebrew this summer (it took a very long time!) and one of the additions to the Hebrew addition at the end of the book (after the innumberable appendices which Tolkien added) was an essay on translating the Lord of the Rings. It turned out that the first translation of the book (into Dutch, I think) was done while Tolkien was still alive, and he hated it. So he wrote an article to guide future translators in their work. How great it would be to have an appendix like that in the Bible!

The appendix (in Hebrew, not the one from Tolkien) had an example of the difficulties of translating poetry (of which there is plenty in the Lord of the Rings).  He gave the modern Hebrew version of the following classic English poem. Here are both versions. If you can read Hebrew, have a shot at the poem. I've attached a literal translation below, but it looks very little like the original, which brings up lots of interesting questions. Is this a good translation into Hebrew? Should we translate Psalms like this? 

 

Hey diddle, diddle,

The cat and the fiddle,

The cow jumped over the moon;

The little dog laughed

To see such sport,

And the dish ran away with the spoon.

 

תראו מה קרה

מתעפפת פרה

וחתול מנגן בכנור

וכף וקערה

דוהרים בסערה

וגם כלנ קופץ כמו שכור

See what happened:

A cow flies about

And a cat plays on a fiddle

And a spoon and a bowl

Gallop in a storm

And also a dog jumps like a drunk

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