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.
תר×× ×× ×§×¨×
×תעפפת פר×
××ת×× ×× ×× ××× ×ר
×××£ ×קער×
×××ר×× ×סער×
××× ××× ×§×פץ ××× ×©××ר
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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