tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jul 03 22:33:51 1994
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Re: poetry subject
>On Fri, 1 Jul 1994 09:43:18 -0600, "Paul E. Black" <[email protected]> said:
> A challenging subject for Klingon poetry would be Lewis Carroll's
> "Jabberwocky." I saw marvelous translations into French and Germany.
> (Well, I don't speak either of those languages, but the person
> citing them points out how the "synthetic words" were similar in
> derivation to those in English.)
I saw the German translation, and I didn't like it at all. It just
didn't sound right. I haven't found any satisfactory German
translation of "Alice in Wonderlang" so far. Maybe it's some
specifically English kind of humour. Maybe the puns just cannot be
translated. The sounded heavy and dumb in German. And I don't know if,
given the Klingon cultural background, Carroll can be translated into
Klingon. I wouldn't normally say that this or that text "just cannot
be rendered in this language", but translating poetry is real
difficult, and translating Carroll is next to impossible, I'd think.
> How about it? What would
> 'Twas brillg and the slithy toves
> did gyre and gimbal in the wabe, ...
> be in Klingon?
> -paul-
Katrin