Subject: very bad news from Yasna Polyana
ZazieZazie@hetnet.nl
Date: Tue Aug 07 2001 - 06:24:15 GMT
Scottie said:
<< I wonder if all Englished versions are to some extent personal &
capricious transliterations from the Cyrillic? >>
About capriciousness:
Apperently the King James bible has a faulty translation from hebrew, regarding the phrase
"thou shalt not allow a witch to live". This should have been 'poisener' but the translators
messed it up, so that witch became equivalent to 'old women which sell medicine etc'
So, a lot of old women in the middle ages (last witch burned in England in 1950!)
were killed because of a faulty translation. Or maybe because they were old women.
About the russians:
Have you heard that story about that woman who thought the Great Russians
were so boring and too heavy-handed in translation, so she decided to learn Russian to really appreciate them?
After two years of hard work and study, she finally re-read Tolstoj, Dostojevski
etc. .... only to discover that they were even more depressing heavy-handed in Russian!? :-)
Z.
-----Original Message-----
From: "owner-bananafish@roughdraft.org" <owner-bananafish@roughdraft.org> on behalf of "L. Manning Vines" <lmanningvines@hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, August 06, 2001 10:43 PM
To: "bananafish@roughdraft.org" <bananafish@roughdraft.org>
Subject: Re: bad news from Yasna Polyana
I don't know about Russian or Cyrillic, but the history of its translation
might be the cause of bizarre transliterations (and bizarre translations).
I know that Englished Greek texts are often plagued by weird
transliterations and even vocabulary that does not adequately render the
Greek because they borrow from Latinized terminology and long traditions of
translation. We get things like "Ajax" when Greek doesn't even have a
j-sound (the name ought to be "Aias") and "Oedipus Rex" when the Greek title
is "Oedipus Tyrannus." Aristotle is famously incomprehensible in large part
because he used common Greek words which were Latinized sufficiently, but
English cognates with the Latin were adopted by almost every English
translator despite the fact that these English words are plainly NOT
equivalent to Aristotle's Greek.
Dostoevsky hasn't had as many years of translation to corrode his words as
have had Sophocles and Aristotle, but a similar phenomenon might be at work,
I suppose.
-robbie
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Mon Sep 10 2001 - 15:42:12 GMT