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Can you start a new thread for your project - it would be confusing to have the other aspects also on this thread
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Quite right David, I’ll calm down and see about ‘editing’ this little exchange for a bespoke thread for the general chat forum, right?
Back to business:
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O night divine, the night when christ was born; Lā niht godcund, sēo niht þe crist awōc
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Have you caught the lack of a capital C on crist yet? Also, shouldn’t Lā niht godcund be Lā niht godcundu granted that a) it’s rare but possible to use a lone adjective postnominally in Old English but, b) when you do, it should always take the strong declension? But there’s lots of things I don’t know or misunderstand about Old English so by all means put me straight, if not.
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For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn. For ġeond niwe and wuldorful morgen bricð
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Shouldn’t that be For ġeond niwe morgen and wuldorfulum bricð ( granted I’ve got the strong masculine declension right for this postnominal adjective)? I’m under the impression it’s not strictly true that second and third etc. adjectives always follow the noun as in “good men and true”, but it’s more characteristic of Old English and has a certain poetic power in this context, I’d say.
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Now come the wisemen from out of the Orient land. Nū cumaþ þā witan of ūt þǣm Ēastum lande.
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This sort of thing niggles me. In this context, certainly, I would not bother with the ūt and I feel one ought not to do, generally. As you may well know better than I, Western languages become less terse and inflectional over the centuries and more ‘bitty’, as I have developed the habit of calling the growing tendency towards phrasal verbs, cobbling together prepositions and just plain tautology as one gets towards the present. In our own day we’ve heard ‘drain’ become ‘drain off’ as if draining went anywhere else, but it’s all of a piece with ‘fall down’ or ‘lift up’ so ‘from out of’ is a pretty typically modern circumlocution that I don’t think is characteristic of the Old English. Also, since you are syllable conscious, why not Nú cumaþ þá witan of þǽm Éastlande? My Sweet lists éastland and éastdǽl as if proper nouns, with capital Es in the definition, as synonyms for “the East” ( only, in the case of éastland which is why I prefer it here to éastdǽl which may also mean just “the eastern quarter”) the former of which I’ve used in my translation of In the House of Tom Bombadil because it’s an improvement on John Cleese’s line “We have come from the East” from the opening scene from Life of Brian that I posted on this forum two Christmases ago, that anyhow should have been éastdǽle:
Wítega 2: Wé sind steorwigleras.
Wítega 3: Wé ǽr cómon of þǽm Eástdǽl.
Mandí: Is þes sume ġecynd gamene?
Wítega 1: Wé willaþ tó herianne þone lýtling.
Wítega 2: Wé sculon áġiefan hine mannrǽden.
Mandí: Mannrǽden!! Ġé sind eallan ondruncod, ġé sind. Hit is fúl. Út!
However, I’d be grateful to read your own ‘take’ on this sort of thing because my nerve has been known to slip when terse and highly inflected Old English is on a collision course with an author’s or lyricist’s choice of words. In another excerpt from The Lord of the Rings I’m practising on Haldir says: “‘You feel the power of the Lady of the Galadhrim,’ he said. ‘Would it please you to climb with me up Cerin Amroth?’” Since I don’t worry about word-order before I’ve got the meaning right, this still clunks along as “Ðú félest þæt ríce þǽre Hláfdiġan þǽm Galaþrim,’ hé cwæþ. ‘Ġeweorþen inc mid mé tó climbanne [ up] Cerin Amroþ?’ because were this just about any writer but Professor Tolkien I’d drop the ‘up’ faster than you can say ‘pleonasm’. Haldir hasn’t opened a manhole and they aren’t inveigling themselves into the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, so where else could the bleedin’ “climb” be going?
Only in this instance, I suppose, it goes against the grain to make free with the choice of word of the Author of the Century, who forgot more about Old English than I’ll ever learn! FTLOG somebody tell me I’m getting lost in a quibble, here...
For another instance, there’s a line in a Rock lyric I’m having fun with, “Fall back down to where you’re from”. As one would expect of the Rock world, this is a pretty typical example of those cobbled-together circumlocutions I mention. Now Old English fram-cynn can mean ‘origin’ amongst other things so I’m fairly sure they would have put it Eftfiel þé fram-cynne and maybe so should I. Yet pleonasm is a legitimate means of achieving stylistic or artistic effect, and in the case of verse may be used to fit the metre or to fit syllables to notes. I count seven syllables in both “Fall back down to where you’re from” and Eftfiel þé fram-cynne so maybe I’m sorted, but what do other ġesíþas make of the cost to artistic effect and the likely intentions of the lyricist? Does the Old English give you any ‘feel’ of the original, still?
Are there any guidelines for disentangling tautology and pointless pleonasm from those intended by the wordsmith, I wonder, or must we always be at the mercy of our common sense, personal taste and what our gut tells us for where the tipping point lies?
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I had expected you to complain that I translated Bethlehem but not Emmanuel.
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Well, strictly speaking of course proper nouns should usually, and many say always, be left alone. Yet if there is some special reason for monkeying about with them then consistency rules would dictate that they should all be treated alike. By lucky chance I’m reading Matthew Polly’s American Shaolin at the moment* which well exemplifies good, standard editorial practice in this. As a rule he transcribes all the Chinese vocabulary using pinyin, “the approved system of the People’s Republic of China” for “the romanization of the Chinese language” and puts them all in italics, makes exceptions for familiar and therefore naturalised words of Chinese origin such as Confucius, Canton and Hong Kong that go upright, then uses his discretion to spell ‘kung fu’ as ‘kungfu’ partly because that too is a naturalized English word and Polly knows it’s a nonsense to spell it as two words but not ‘Shaolin’ as ‘Shao Lin’, partly because his darling spellchecker kept trying to turn the ‘fu’ into the f-word. ( Companies come all the way from Canary Wharf for silly old me to dig them out of the poo that spellcheckers can drop you in, or otherwise rescue copy mangled by God’s Wonderful Computer or by some witless prick from IT, one of whom did a runner before I entered the building).
Yet it’s really a question of making our minds up what we’re trying to achieve, here, and how seriously we’re taking ourselves. If we’re just having fun rather than doing a job of work, the bottom line is we can please ourselves.
My purely personal answer is that I don’t take myself wholly seriously when translating Old English ( or most of the rest of the time, come to think of it) because I know my abilities are not at the professional level. Only as or if I seriously feel I’m hitting the professional mark do I see if I can’t ‘shape up’ and make a wholly professional job of work of it; whereupon I would start getting picky about consistency rules and whether, in all poker-faced sobriety, I had any honest-to-goodness grounds for making exceptions to them. None include being privately pleased with my little self for a purely etymological ‘translation’ of a proper name, so it’s purely for fun that I translated “Heathcliff” as Heideklippe when using Kate Bush’s lyrics to practise my German ( too, so auf Deutsche the celebrated refrain goes Heideklippe, es gibt mich, Cathy, komm zu Haus und mir so kalt ist*).
Yet at the opposite end of the scale ( can’t find the ruddy thing now!) I have, somewhere or other, an Old English rendition of Kate’s lyric to The Infant Kiss of which I’m a bit proud, because I’ve kept coming back to it over the years so I think it’s a rather polished performance. At any rate it once impressed a lady professor of Old English at the State University of California who asked for a sample of my work, and not just because she turned out to be an old Kate fan, too! Yet if we are trying to achieve a translation as near as can be to how the Old English, themselves, would have done it then ‘opportunistic etymologizing’ ( if you’ll pardon the expression) would appear to be what the Old English did, viz using etymological translations available to them when it suited them, but not otherwise, would seem to be thoroughly in character.
Or in layman’s terms, we can do as we &*£!ing like.
---oo0oo---
* Did anyone catch that Rowan Atkinson film Johnny English II? You’d think that scene where the Shaolin monk pulled a rock along with his scrotum had to be comedy, right? Well it’s all true. Scrotally propelled rocks are the least of it. The photographs in this book are not for the squeamish. There’s a whole style called “iron crotch kungfu” whose honoulable masters get up in the morning and pummel their willies for half an hour before breakfast. You could not make this up.
Shudder to think what the nuns do.
** And not Heideklippe, es gibt mich, Cathy, komm zu Haus und ich so kalt bin. I’ll let Ædmund have fun explaining why that old gaffe has kept native German speakers choking on their chuckles since forever.
