Victor Hugo’s complete works, for Kindle, on Amazon for $ 2.99

Re: Adam Reed’s post 104351 of 10/5/24

As this link is broken, I suspect that it was one of their short-lived deals.   I recently read about a site called “BookBub” that will find these kinds of deals and send you an email when they pop up:

Bookbub – Deals on eBooks

Later Edit:  Now Adam’s link is working – not sure why it had an error when I first looked at it.  But I’ll leave this up for the BookBub link.

Re: Adam Reed’s post 104351 of 10/5/24

[Hugo’s] untranslatable poetry

Many poems have been translated from one language to another.

What’s special about Hugo?

*sb

Re: Stephen Grossman’s post 150807 of 10/6/24

Many poems have been translated from one language to another.

What’s special about Hugo?

It’s special about poetry.

Even song lyrics can’t be translated easily (due to rhythmic shifts). For instance, this from Kalman:

Wiener musik,

Wiener musik,

[If that short audio clip won’t play for you, try using this link instead.]

Translated literally into English, it is the bloated, stumbling:

Viennese music,

Viennese music.

Now, the same is true of poetry.

Take one of my favorites, “Ulalume” by Poe. Here’s the first stanza:

The skies they were ashen and sober;               
      The leaves they were crisp’ed and sere—
      The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
      Of my most immemorial year;
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
      In the misty mid region of Weir—
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
      In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

Makes you shiver. That’s due to the integration of the sounds of the words chosen with the meaning. But other languages have different words and difference pronunciations. 

Here’s that stanza from Ulalume for a line-by line comparison with Google’s Spanish translation of it:

Maybe it’s an artifact of the Google translation, but this confirms an impression that I already had: English has a much richer vocabulary than Spanish (or German or French or . . .). Poe writes “sere” and the Spanish is “dry.”

Poe writes “misty mid region” and the Spanish is . . . wait, I or Senor Google left it out! When I seek a translation of just that, it comes back with “en la brumosa region central de Weir.” So prosaic. So literal (“central” for “mid region”).

Poe’s best line here is “dank tarn”–the sound of it carries all sorts of meaning. But the Spanish is just “humid lake.” And the sound of “humedo lago” is almost playful—the opposite of the eerie klang of “dank tarn.”

On the other hand, the German poem “Die Lorelei” falls flat in a literal translation into English:

Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten,
Dass ich so traurig bin;
Ein Marchen aus alten Zeiten,
Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.

Literally:

I don’t know what it might mean
That I’m so sad;
A fable from old times
It comes to me not from my mind.

So a poem can be untranslatable qua poem, and it will be such when the words used carry the wrong sound-connotations.

/sb