Hi!

I stumbled across this homepage while looking for esperanto-translations of CAS on the web; I was indeed pleased to know that such existed.

But, I'm sorry to say that I do not recommend them – they're full of grammatical errors, mis-spellings, anglicisms and the general vocabulary is poor. If I was the editor of ED I would seriously consider to remove the two texts or demand a rewrite of them.

Does anyone have an other opinion, or similar opinions? Does the translations into other languages have similar problems?

/Robin

What's the point in doing them in the first place - one can translate a story, but rarely does the art of the writer survive this effort if the words are carefully selected - and the poetry (particularly Ashton's stuff) not at all - In poetry, "what" it means is maybe fifty percent of the equation; "how" it means is what makes it poetry, and able to cause the cervical vertebrae to awaken. Esperanto can never achieve that unless within its own context as fresh writing - but then, who will read it?

Quote:

calonlan
What's the point in doing them in the first place - one can translate a story, but rarely does the art of the writer survive this effort if the words are carefully selected - and the poetry (particularly Ashton's stuff) not at all - In poetry, "what" it means is maybe fifty percent of the equation; "how" it means is what makes it poetry, and able to cause the cervical vertebrae to awaken. Esperanto can never achieve that unless within its own context as fresh writing - but then, who will read it?

I must say that I don't fully understand what you are saying: Should the art of the writer survive "this effort" better if the words were'nt carefully selected? :-S Or, do you mean that a text with "words that are carefully selected" is harder to translate than a book with "words that are negligently selected"? I must disagree on both; the choice of words or phrases may be hard to translate if the second language lacks cognates, but that is seldom the case. The difficult part is to catch the style, atmosphere and hardest of all, shifts in both of the fomer.

The goal of translation is to:
Make the works of CAS known to the vast number of people who don't and never will speak (and certainly not read) English. Plus, the English of CAS is very rich, not to say ridiculously rich, and those who haven't aquired a very high level of education will never be able to grasp the more delicate nuances of his language, or (as in many cases) even the main plot of the story.

I agree that a translation can never fully represent the original, but to ignore or condemn translations just because of that fact is to spit on the art of translation.

I of all people do not condemn translations my young friend, I question the point of putting it into Esperanto, which is, so far as I am able to discern, as irrelevant to the larger audience as Ebonics. If I have missed something and there has been a huge move to universalize this strange experiment in language please enlighten me. I recall its emergence many years ago, but don't recall it getting anywhere - throughout my own travels in the Western Hemisphere, I find Pidgin English has become almost universal among the unlettered, and is readily understood by the mercantile clsses in say Brazil et al. I am not aware of any significant movement among third world schools to teach anything but standard English as the linqua franca.

Calonlan wrote:

Quote:

I am not aware of any significant movement among third world schools to teach anything but standard English as the linqua franca.

That's very interesting. I wasn't sure that standard English was being taught anywhere, any more. Does that mean that foreigners will soon, if they do not already, speak better English than most of today's native-borns? I can't say that that would astonish me.

Translation, especially of poetry, is certainly an interesting subject, by the way (although I am "hopeless" when it comes to Esperanto). Many have insisted that Poe's verse reads better in Mallarme's French translation than it does in the original English. I would not go that far, myself, but I have to admit that "la nuit vieillissait" sounds more evocative to me than "the night was senescent".

Translating is very tricky business - depends on where one is headed - for example - Puella pulchra illa gluteum maximum magnum bonum habet! if translated literally is rather dull and clinical, colloquially however: That cute chick has really great buns! is more to the point.
I am currently working on a fresh translation of "The Shepherd of Hermas", in which the Loeb classical library version doesn't quite catch what is going on as in the above reference - similarly I am working on Ogam inscriptions found in Oklahoma (actually from Murphy's Creek, Ark to Colorado Springs), and arguing with colleagues about inscriptions in Futhark found in various locations in Eastern OK -
For my money, among the best translations ever done in my view is John Ciardi's "Inferno", and the translations of the works of Nikos Kazantzakis - 2 translators involved whose names slip my mind, but whose work is so incredibly powerful, I cannot imagine the modern Greek being much better - could be wrong, but the difference can't be great enough to be worth the effort to add modern Greek (so different from the classical and Koine) to list of things yet to learn.

I am glad to encounter someone else who likes Ciardi's version of the Inferno. My bass teacher, of all people, gave a copy of it to me when I was a teenager. That was the first version of the poem I ever read, and it remains my favorite.

I had the privilege of knowing "Uncle John" back in the heyday of the Saturday Review of Literature. He was best friends with my History prof and mentor, Dr. Wm Park Hotchkiss (grandfather invented the "Hotchkiss" so well used by Lawrence of Arabia") who had been a student at Chicago of William Henry Breasted and William Albright, founders of the Oriental Institute - Ciardi and Park would sit about the kitchen table during his visits to Syracuse and the three of us would make up limericks- One of Ciardi's finest:
As Mozart composed a Sonata,
His maid bent to straighten her garter,
He wrote down with sighs
As he glanced up her thighs,
"Un poco piu appassionata!"

As I may have mentioned elsewhere his "How does a poem mean" is a superb approach to poetry for the beginner -- He also published a lovely collection called "I marry you" - and a truly superb childrens' book (really remarkable what a fine writer can do in this genre) called "Scrappy the Pup" - I still have my inscribed copies of both.
His Italian ancestry was always important to him - He and Hotchkiss had been on the same faculty many years before in the midwest. Ciardi had not heard of Clark Ashton Smith when I introduced him to him, and never got around to including him in an issue of Sat. Review - I think he was overruled by the board, the literary world at that time was (and largely still is) enamoured of Cummings and Eliot et al, and was starting to fall for the early "beat" poets - so the earlier generation of poets who remained in the ancient and unbroken line of the "mythic" history of poetry, were out of fashion (see Graves - White Goddess - again.)

calonlan Wrote:
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> I of all people do not condemn translations my
> young friend, I question the point of putting it
> into Esperanto, which is, so far as I am able to
> discern, as irrelevant to the larger audience as
> Ebonics. If I have missed something and there has
> been a huge move to universalize this strange
> experiment in language please enlighten me.
Well, there has been a definite move, but to call it "huge" would be an overstatement. Less than 2 million people speak it fluently, at best, over a little more than 100 countries. Sheer coincidence, I've spent this very day with a group of Esperantists, and I must say they form quite a refreshing company. Esperanto is much more than an experiment. Hearing a 10 year old girl commenting fluently on a play in Esperanto is a very stimulating experience for a beginner like me. I think translating CAS in Esperanto is worth the effort.

calonlan Wrote:
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> I recall its emergence many years ago, but don't
> recall it getting anywhere
Esperanto was created in 1887 but because language is considered a vital matter by most governments (imposing one's own language in international relations saves literally fortunes in translation costs) most countries constantly rejected it, as did mine, France, I'm afraid to say, a long time ago.

calonlan Wrote:
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> I am not
> aware of any significant movement among third
> world schools to teach anything but standard
> English as the linqua franca.
This is certainly not "significant", but new Esperanto schools have been created here and there over the last years in many Emerging countries where learning a foreign language is sometimes considered, for historical, and political reasons, culturally inacceptable. In other words, instead of using as an interregional langua franca the language of another ethnic group, of the former colonial power, or of the current economical partner, they'd rather use Esperanto.

calonlan Wrote:
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>- throughout my own
> travels in the Western Hemisphere, I find Pidgin
> English has become almost universal among the
> unlettered, and is readily understood by the
> mercantile clsses in say Brazil et al.
Of course, but creating a Pidgin was certainly not what Zamenhof was aiming at. On the contrary, his language is meant to be as universal as possible (when a Pidgin keeps a close cultural relation to its mother tongue).
We, Westerners, think Esperanto sounds familiar because most lexical roots are indeed Indo-European and even largely Romanic, but when we start learning it, we find ourselves puzzled by it's essentially agglutinative nature, which makes it apparently easier for, say, Japanese speakers to speak it idiomatically. Learning Esperanto is indeed extremely disconcerting at first, especially for someone who interests oneself in languages, because one finds none of the exceptions or irregularities one ordinarily finds in natural languages. Besides, despite its apparent simplicity, it proves extremely resourceful. It makes you understand that there are many things you cannot say directly in your own language, when expressing them in Esperanto sounds logical and comes to your mind naturally (after, it must be said, several months of serious learning, of course).
I must say that I had all sorts of prejudices against Esperanto before I started learning it -- especially as a lexicologist I'm afraid to say -- but I found the practice of this language very stimulating. To quote Wikipedia, learning Esperanto may provide a good foundation for learning languages in general. As a linguist yourself, Dr Farmer, I'm sincerely convinced you should find it worthy of interest.


Philippe Gindre

The central premise of Esperantism is ridiculous, and involves a serious misunderstanding of how language works and is used. If Esperanto were ever to become widely spoken, it would immediately start developing local dialects which would eventually diverge considerably from original Esperanto---entirely defeating its purpose as a "world language." Ask yourself why it is we no longer all speak Proto-Indo-European. It is not possible to establish a centrally planned, inflexible language by fiat, as people use language for their own private purposes, changing it in the process.

Jojo Lapin X Wrote:
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> The central premise of Esperantism is ridiculous,
> and involves a serious misunderstanding of how
> language works and is used. If Esperanto were ever
> to become widely spoken, it would immediately
> start developing local dialects which would
> eventually diverge considerably from original
> Esperanto---entirely defeating its purpose as a
> "world language." Ask yourself why it is we no
> longer all speak Proto-Indo-European. It is not
> possible to establish a centrally planned,
> inflexible language by fiat, as people use
> language for their own private purposes, changing
> it in the process.

I have no idea why you sound so aggressive, but well... You are comparing things that cannot be compared. Esperanto is not a natural language and is not meant to be used "for one's own private purpose" but for very specific communication situations, as a second language. As a matter of fact Esperanto has already developed what could be considered as dialects, or to be more specific, a fluent speaker can tell what the mother tongue of one given Esperantophone is, by the way he/she chooses the way he expresses things. But Esperanto offers so many different ways to express one given thing that it cannot become a problem. Just as French speakers tend to use Romanic roots or structures in English, when Germans preferably use Germanic. Yet they all speak the "same" English. Esperanto was conceived by someone for whom the very problems you raise were a daily challenge. And he spent a lifetime on it. Just try to learn the language. Or at least, try to learn a few basic things about it.

Sorry old friend, I am patently amazed that any gives a damn about it at all -

Far more useful to spend one's time learning German in order to read Goethe, or French to read Proust or Moliere, or Italian to read Dante, or Russian to read Turgenev, or Greek to read Homer, or Latin to read Vergil, or Ogam to read the Mabinogion, or Bantu so you can talk to your guides while on Safari, or Hindi, Urdu, Pushto, so you can read some REALLLY old stuff, or Sheng chinese so you can help decipher Toltec, or Basque(Euskara) so you can have access to almost as much creative profanity as Arabic. Heavens! - English speakers have enough trouble with each other as it is with the absurd vocabulary of so many today.
Dylan Thomas on tour found himself up against "the barrier of a common language" -- check lexfiles.com, go to the "basic 14" for a little fun - there you find the 14 words whose roots and prefixes combine to generate 144,000 words - a main of Ashton's writing, for which many of us admire him is his penchant for precision - you can tell the story in any language, but can you capture CAS? I think not --

Quote:

Calonlan
Sorry old friend, I am patently amazed that any gives a damn about it at all -
Far more useful to spend one's time learning German in order to read Goethe, or French to read Proust or Moliere, or Italian to read Dante, or Russian to read Turgenev, or Greek to read Homer, or Latin to read Vergil, or Ogam to read the Mabinogion, or Bantu so you can talk to your guides while on Safari, or Hindi, Urdu, Pushto, so you can read some REALLLY old stuff, or Sheng chinese so you can help decipher Toltec, or Basque(Euskara) so you can have access to almost as much creative profanity as Arabic. Heavens! - English speakers have enough trouble with each other as it is with the absurd vocabulary of so many today.

(I assume by your use of words that you are of Central-North American (I'd rather not say just American) orgin, pardon me if I be wrong)

I'm surprised, everywhere I turn in the anglophone world I meet this idea: that Esperanto is folly, ridiculous or pointless; I seldom encounter stirred feelings, anger or fear (I'm quite sure that fear is part of the problem) in other cultural spheres.

The thing is, dear Calonlan, that I, in order just to have this interesting debate, had to study English intensively for nine years (plus semi-intensive hobby-studying), whereas I only needed two low-intensive years to acquire enough knowledge in Esperanto to a corresponding level.
I am no linguist, and I don't regard my linguistical skills to be more developed than those of my fellow compatriots, but my English is better than average here in Sweden. Should we non-anglophones be forced to study even more (More than nine years! Imagine the costs!) in order to able to climb the ladder? Swedish is fairly similar to English, we get a lot for free, but for a Spaniard, or better: a Japanese, it's a far more time-consuming affair. And on the other side of the Canal/Ocean, what are you doing for us? How's your countrymen's French, Polish or Arabic? Still trying to roll that 'r'?
Why should we adapt ourselves to that order and not get anything in return? One could argue that we would gain culture, but I think that we also lose our own at the same time.

"Learn German to read Göthe", that's what I call folly. I spent five years learning German* and I can hardly read newspapers... Five years of wasted tax-money. Imagine if the time was to be used on something that actually gave results.

To return to the discussion: Esperanto is not to be used as a substitute for a national language, but as an introduction to other cultures and their tongues without losing one's own. Therefore I think that it's vital to translate CAS into Esperanto – imagine a person, who has never, ever heard of CAS and his writing, stumbling upon an Esperanto translation of let's say "Ubbo Sathla". Maybe he will read it, like it and later decide to read it in it's original language. That's not an unbelievable case to me, since that is the case of my own (but insert "Swedish" instead of Espeanto). What have we lost?

Quote:

Calonlan
(...) go to the "basic 14" for a little fun - there you find the 14 words whose roots and prefixes combine to generate 144,000 words - a main of Ashton's writing (...)

Pardon me, but that sounds strikingly like Esperanto.



*Second-to closest language-relative to Swedish, which has 60% of its vocabulary borrowed from low-German.

I am not into picking a fight over this subject, if you love esperanto go for it - I could care less - However, I should tell you, I am from the deep south - North Carolina - but began travel very young due to the War - I studied voice with a view to a career in opera from a young age, and consequently learned to sing in Italian, French, German, and russian - subsequently after studying those languages briefly (every body has a subject, verb, and object located somewhere in the string of words and some sort of gender usage-quite simple really) became rather fluent, particularly in German - I am somewhat astounded that you studied English for 9 years, and German for 5 - your English seems OK but really, why so long - it is not that difficult, and German and English are very close -- and German has tons of Greek and Latin snuck into it - Later at University I strove to become a competent philologist, and worked as part of a graduate student team with my professor on the New English Bible (Dr. CH Dodd senior Ed), and have subsequently done extensive work translating fragments and epigrapha.
As a natural adjunct to my theatrical work, I managed to become able to duplicate nearly 50 of the more than 430 dialects of English spoken in the US. Having earned 2 PhDs, plus years of theatre, determining where I am from could be tricky - to the main point, it would seem that the standards of teaching languages needs to be addressed in Sweden - 5 years and unable to read Goethe? sounds like a failure of teaching technique to me, unless the education system is still spending all its time on grammar, conjugating verbs, declining nouns and adjectives etc = brrrrr - as to being introduced to other cultures - that can be done easily - but you never know a people without getting inside their idioms. And that can be done through their literature and music, rarely through their scholarly works. English has a huge vocabulary, for various historic reasons it has an enormous component of Latin and Greek, the words in the "basic 14" are all Latin based prefixes and roots - and the secret of studying language this way is not to look for precise meanings but for the "thrust" of the meaning - example - how does "de-" affect "capis", "fero-", "mand-", "teneo-", etc. How does "capis" migrate from "head" to "capitulate", "capacity", "receive" etc.

brrr -

Komponisto Wrote:
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> I seldom encounter
> stirred feelings, anger or fear (I'm quite sure
> that fear is part of the problem) in other
> cultural spheres.

It is true that when I grew up there was a community of Esperantists nearby and we were sternly warned by our parents not to go near their hovels lest we be kidnapped and eaten. But this, of course, in no way informs my mature view of the matter.