Bearing Witness

[pecunium]

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

            Robert Frost, 1920

Comments

And here's the same poem in Hebrew

[shunra.livejournal.com]

יש אומרים עולם יכלה בלהבה
ויש בכפור
מטעימת האהבה
אצדד בלהבה

אך אם על הכליון לחזור
אומר
הכפור כביר
ויעזור.

(I came here to respond that they see it as a sort of weird associations, with the line of thought being "birthday lists? in the bathroom? ick!" - the rest of the people see it as more practical, as in "the once place in the house EVERYONE looks at. But then I saw one of my favorite poems...)

Re: And here's the same poem in Hebrew

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I actually guessed that was the location.

We have two calendars in the bathroom, and one on the bedroom door, one behind Maia's desk, and another on the door of the snakeroom/her workspace.

Though I realise I need to attribute the poem.

TK

Re: And here's the same poem in Hebrew

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Robert Frost, Fire and Ice, with a tremendously apt link to it...

...and I should claim the translation: I translated it (with a translation partner who probably wouldn't want to be named as associating with me, but he can claim credit any time he wants) back in 1989. I am not sure if this translation ever made it to paper publication, but it was just the most fun thing to translate, ever.

Re: And here's the same poem in Hebrew

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Yes, originally published in Harper's. I was just too upset to tie up all the loose ends.

I wish I read Hebrew. Maybe someone will put it into latin.

I was trying to figure out how to explain my fury, and telling the world that I had a new list of people to go early to the wall when the revolution comes didn't make it.

Then I remembered that Frost wrote this.

TK

Re: And here's the same poem in Hebrew

[shunra.livejournal.com]

What would be a good place to put an MP3 of my reading it? It comes out lovely when read, and poetry (like the Quran) should be read and said, I think. (But maybe that's cheating - grew up in household where poetry was always and forever repeated, recited, restated respoken and retold.)

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Well, until I followed the link I kinda thought I was about as pissed-off at the world as I could get for today. I should have known, there's always one more bad thing.

Re: And here's the same poem in Hebrew

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I suppose I could figure out how to do a voice post (I get 20 a month, and use none of them), from an mp3.

Otherwise, I have no idea. Hearing it would be nice, but that, of course, won't make up for not knowing how it says what Frost said.

The pain, and joy of translation.

Just so you know, I am going to fight with putting it into my, mediocre, Russian (mediocre in that I don't think I will do the translation, into Russian, the sort of justice I can manage when I bring verse out of Russian), and it's all your fault!

Re: And here's the same poem in Hebrew

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Don't fight it! Post it. And ask for critique.

Surely you'll end up with a very good translation... (unless it isn't yours).

Antinous (Ronen Sonnis, blog here: http://antinous.livejournal.com/tag/poetry+(translated) ) is my favorite living poetry translator. He hates me (politics) but might be willing to put up with your attempt. Or improve it. (He translates Russian/English/Hebrew poetry in all directions and his use of words in the two of those that I read makes me want to cry. Or become a publisher.)

Re: And here's the same poem in Hebrew

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Am I correct in adducing you speak (or at least read) Russian?

TK

Re: And here's the same poem in Hebrew

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Alas, no.

I speak English and Hebrew at native level, and putter at equally low levels of quality in Dutch and French, Yiddish and Aramaic. Which means that I could probably find the bathroom and get the salt passed to me (or possibly find the salt and get the bathroom passed to me...). Russian - I curse in Russian. Especially my cats, who find an emphatic Dva Yo MAAAT reason enough to evacuate the office in a tearing hurry.

How, then, can I judge the quality of Russian translations? I knew you'd as. I've read several versions of into-Hebrew translations of Russian material. Sonnis excels beyond any other. (um, did we want to be emailng rahter than commenting back and forth? dena Spimmity at shunra spammity dot net. Remove the two extraneous words.)

Re: And here's the same poem in Hebrew

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I recall (and no, as in ML, I figure a good digression is a worthy thing; this is one of the best in ages. I don't get the same level of commentariat), before I learnt Russian, deciding not to get a side by side of poetry because it had a crappy translation of a Pushkin poem.

How did I know it was crappy? I'd read a couple of good versions of that poem (which colored my later translation of it).

I suspect what I shall do is go to the effort, toss it in an ML Open Thread, and then rework it and publish it here.

TK

Re: And here's the same poem in Hebrew

[shunra.livejournal.com]

The thing with poetry translation is that the more people peck at it, the better it gets.

Some poets broadcast on your wavelength to the point where translating them feels just like writing one of your own. I've had the pleasure of translating a few of those. Sami Shalom Chetrit is my current favorite (published or semi-published).

Others take a lot more craft to convey (Frost, bless him, carries over to Hebrew beautifully, and you can hardly see the bruises on the soul of the translating team nor the tooth shards scattered on the floor. A.A. Milne does, too. Alan Ginzburg and William Carlos Williams.)

Still others just. don't. carry. over. (Hebrew poetry of a certain generation and mood simply lose too much in the translation, being written in the dense allusion-heavy register of a made-up language fueled by the charred embers of two, three, seven, a million earlier layers. English, love it though and as I do, can't do that or anything like it.)

And a political call to arms, so to speak, from the same source

[shunra.livejournal.com]

The Armful/Robert Frost

For every parcel I stoop down to seize
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns --
Extremes too hard to comprehend at once,
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load.

---

The old rebel, Robert Permafrost... ...that thinking (which had always seemed terribly personal to me) suddenly sounds like the blueprint for a revolution. Taking arms to stack things up better... ...revolting thought.

Re: And here's the same poem in Hebrew

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I recall reading an account of someone who was studying Hebrew, and the difference which overwhelmed him at seeing a phrase he knew from the King James (to chase after nothing) in the original (to shepherd the wind).

I think that was when I really got the difference between languages ways of seeing things.

Last week really hurt, I was reminded; painfully, of how my ASL has atrophied.

TK

Re: And a political call to arms, so to speak, from the same source

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Yep, and wonderful wordplay (mine got better from learning other languages).

One of my favorite lines, out of it's greater context, though it doesn't lose the meaning, "only where love and need are one/and the work is play, for mortal stakes/only then is the deed ever really done/ for Heaven, and the future's, sakes.

I really like Frost, though his stuff can be cross-grained and fractious; easily read in a facile manner. I was having a conversation over MLK about the common misreading of "The Road Less Taken".

TK

Shepherding wind

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Allow me to coat this with a further layer of difference and meaning (which will illustrate the problem with translations from Hebrew).

Hebrew nouns and verbs (and to a certain extent, adjectives) are formed using a three word stem (referred to as P/A/L/) which indicates a general sense or field of the word, which is poured into a mold (described as, for example, KaTaL for past simple in the male format and yiKTol for future simple in the male format, and tiKToL) where all of the vowels and some 'service letters' that shape the form are all supplied by the mold and the consonants, by the stem.

For example, the stem Sh.M.T. has to do with dropping stuff. So "shamat" means "he dropped" something and "yishmot" (or yishmat) means he will drop something and "tishmot" means she will. Other forms using the same stem will all have something to do with that dropping-stuff behavior.

I have to say, thought, that if vowel sounds are included, the form changes slightly.

Now, shepherding is R/glottal A/H, where all the words have to do with making friends and walking behind herds. But there is a similar stem, R/A/H/, with a non-glottal A, where all the words have to do with vision and seeing. They sound very similar (identical, for most speakers of modern Hebrew, unless they have an Arabic background, because modern Hebrew barely differentiates the glottal and non-glottal A consonant sounds.). So shepherding sounds a lot like “seeing”.

Wind, meanwhile, is a synonym for spirit (as in, what makes people alive, what God gets to breathe into people to animate them in earlier chapters of the same book).

So shepherding he wind alludes to the sounds of “seeing the spirit” (or chasing after animation, or chasing after divinity, which was looked upon askance - those divinity chasers were usually up to no good. Still aren't, often enough).

The King James folks didn’t stand a chance…

Which?

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Which common misreading?

I just ran across an Israeli politician who insisted that Frost's position was that "Good fences make good neighbors", and used that to excuse (?) the notion of a border wall along the border with Gaza. (Which makes no sense to me because you can throw things over a wall, a fact amply demonstrated by Qassam rockets.)

"For heaven, and the future's, sakes" - what a lovely statement, only slightly marred by a quirk of my vision ("lazy eye" means my left eye sees nearly nothing, and all the work is done by my right.) (But I had to go back to the poem to note the eye-ronny.)

Re: Which?

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Ok.... Most people (as did the fellow I was speaking with), see the poem as a praise/reccomendation to take the road less travelled.

Frost, however, doesn't actually say that. The poem is more ironic; and slightly cynical, than that.

To support this, of course we have to go to the text.

Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.

So we have the wo roads, each, in fact, about the same; so far as the people who travel them.

Skip to the end.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,

Somewhere in the future, he will while looking back say he took the road less travelled (futher he wil go on to say that has made all the difference), but he knows, now that they aren't so different as all that.

So the poem isn't so much about bucking trends, and going one's own way, but rather about seeintg how one shall views one's choices in the future.

It's still about how one does things, and the choices one makes, but it's also a cautionary about self-delusion.

TK

Re: Shepherding wind

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I'd heard that before (as well as the similar problems, for similar reasons, which live in Arabic).

I think, for all it's griefs, quirks and semi-sensical oddities (I recall trying to absorb the concept of the plural form of the singular "one", which I've had great headaches to try explaining the idea to English speaker, because they see it as a grouping of unique objects, and that's not it. Is the number one, and it's plural), I'm glad I was attacking Russian, much as I'd like to put Hebrew in roster of things I understand.

I saw a horrid piece of language in use the other night. It was a tote-bag, with the word "Shoah" on it. Before each of the letters was a Hebrew letter. Knowing just enough of the alphabet to see the Sh was where it "ought" to be for the word to properly read (i.e. right to left), but to those who don't know that, the impression was that the letters mapped to the one's they immediately preceded.

Better to have put the one word, over the other, if you ask me. The person who had the bag, didn't see the problem. She spoke Hebrew, and anyone who didn't was just gonna have to accept being confused. She didn't see it that way, she just didn't see (actually) that it could be confusing.

Sadly, she's studying teaching.

TK