Translation II

[rwan]

----- Original Message -----
From: David Morris <fqmorris at hotmail.com>
To: <r.wank at cable.a2000.nl>; <o.sell at telda.net>; <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 28, 2000 5:11 AM
Subject: Re: Translation II


>
> You are a brave soul.  I salute you.
> DM
>
> >From: "rwan" Here is the sentence in Hungarian. Not that GR has ever been
> >translated
> >there, but I make up a good one for your "First Sentence Archives":
> >
> >"Egy sikoly süvít át az égen. Ez már korábban is megtörtént, de a mostani
> >semmihez sem hasonlítható."
> >
> >Richard

But then, come the doubts:

"Sikoly" and "sikoltás" both mean a scream, but "sikoltás" comes closer to
screaming. Only it sounds rather shitty. "Comes" is a rather nice, solid,
everyday word. "Across" we know with hindsight means following the
trajectory, the ballistic course. In this sense the sky is spatial, but only
reading the first sentence it could be a layer that the screaming breaks
through from some other world into ours - well, into England in the 40's,
under the stress of the onslaught of those flying bombs you c-c-can't even
hear: That may make you prone to hearing voices. Anyway  ".át az égen."
solves that rather well, but what do you do with "comes": the literal
translation "jön", would be meaningless in this context. "Érkezik"
(=arrives) wouldn't be bad if it described the whole trajectory, the
rainbow, but it doesn't. It only describes that very last moment of movement
before it is "(t)here".  In the Dutch translation: "Een gil komt gierend
door de hemel. Dat is al eerder gebeurd, maar deze laat zich met niets
vergelijken." Is "komt", the Dutch equivalent of "comes" reduced to an
auxiliary role in combination with gierend, which is a kind of onomatopoeia:
it can for instance describe a car burning rubber by the sound while
implying movement: a very fast one at that. What it means is that the sound
(gil=screaming) becomes a solid object and its motion becomes a sound. And
that is what I did with "süvít", which also is a kind of half-hearted
onomatopoeia (I had to look up this word in "The Concise Oxford Dictionary"
just to be sure I spell it right and guess what, the first word I catch upon
opening this book is "Ouija" (also ~board). ) "Süvít" is definitely movement
of an object, described by the sound of the object/movement causing
turbulence in the air. I settled for that.
And then: "Ez már korábban is megtörtént" ... why "is" (meaning also, as
well or too)? Because without it one could get the idea that this very "
screaming" coming across the sky happened before rather then just now. Why "
korábban" (=earlier) instead of "elobb" or "elozoleg" meaning "before"?
Because these would imply that it has only happened only once before, which
is not exactly the idea here and , besides, the second form sounds terribly
bureaucratese."Már" means already. There is simply no way to leave it out,
so you are obligated to add these small portions of linguistic mortar.
Sometimes you can compress though without any loss: "A mostani" means "the
one of now", so you regain lost space. And it sounds good, too.
And all this about one sentence, by far not the most complex one in GR.
I hope I'm not boring you.
r.

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