palma, apgs
On Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 5:15 PM, Luigi Speranza <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
wrote:
Thanks to Helm and McEvoy for their (+> respective) comments on Warrness's
"Dear prayer."
Helm mentions three approaches to translation, which is interesting.
McEvoy: "[Helm] makes an important point here. Might I add, by way of
confirming it, that my own poems are ... first-rate when translated WELL
[emphasis mine -- Speranza] into all other human languages, except Breton."
The 'well' seems to turn McEvoy's claim into a (horror!) tautology. But
this may be corrected, yielding the possibility of well-translated Breton
version of a poem by McEvoy -- this Breton version NOT yet being "first
rate".
Mutatis mutandis, McEvoy may be implicating that Breton "utterers" lack
the ability to (conversationally) implicate in a "first rate" fashion --
as Waerness and Fjeld seem to do in respectively Norwegian and English.
Does this come as a wonder?
A few examples should suffice:
The English words dolmen and menhir have been borrowed from French, which
took them from Breton.
However, this is uncertain.
For instance, *menhir* is *peulvan* or *maen hir* ("long stone"), *maen
sav*("straight stone") (two words: noun + adjective) in Breton.
*Dolmen* is a misconstructed word (it should be *taol-**v**aen*) -- as in
the translation of the McEvoy line, "dear dolmen."
Some studies state that these words were borrowed from Cornish.
*Maen hir c*an be directly translated from Welsh as "long stone" (which
is exactly what a *menhir* or *maen hir* is) -- as in the oxymoron in
McEvoy's line: "his short menhir."
The Cornish surnames Mennear, Minear and Manhire all derive from the
Cornish men hyr ("long stone"), as does Tremenheere "settlement by the
long stone".
On the other hand, the French word baragouiner ("to jabber in a foreign
language" -- which is how McEvoy's Breton poetic translations have been
described in Le Figaro) is derived from Breton bara ("bread")
and gwin ("wine") -- "But I used 'RED wine' in the original!," McEvoy
complains).
On top, the French word Goéland ("large seagull") is derived from Breton
gwelan, which shares the same root as English "gull" (Welsh gwylan,
Cornish goelann). "But I used 'chicken' in the original!" McEvoy remarks,
implicating that yet another crucial implicature was lost in his Breton
poems.
Cheers
Speranza
Sent from my iPhone
