As of late, I was thinking about how literary translation is absolutely fascinating. It has the opportunity to become a complete disaster at every other sentence but when it is done well it is absolute delight to read and to compare with the original. Like, have you ever thought about how hard it is to translate puns? It is practically a god tier of literary translation.
So, I’ve been thinking about this and I know what my most favorite instance of wonderfully translated pun is: it is the gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide one, from Good Omens.
I’ve read three different fan translations of Good Omens in Russian (when it was published officially I picked it up in a library specifically to look up how had they translated this phrase) and some of them were better and some of them were worse but all of them were centered on the fact that in russian language word blue can mean both color and ‘a gay man’. My favorite vertion of this phrase was something like bluer than the sky on a booklet advertising a tropical island vacation, and others were some kind of generic like a sky in the spring or something.
I’m not really sure where I was going with this except that I’m really curious now how it was translated into other languages. So pls, tell me?
Reblogging because I want to know too…
Dutch has a word similar in connotation to English’s ‘sissy’ (when it also describes a gay man) , which is ‘nicht’. ‘Nicht’ also means ‘female cousin’, so the phrase in Dutch was ‘meer nicht dan de dochter van je tante’ – more of a cousin than your aunt’s daughter.
Murder’s a game my college does every year where everyone’s given a plastic knife with someone’s name on it. The knives are shoved under your door at midnight and for the next week you have to try and ‘kill’ the person on your knife. If you kill them, you get their knife and have to kill that person, and so on, until there is one lone survivor. You can’t kill someone in the dining hall or in their room, or if they’re naked. I’m pretty sure the prize is a bottle of vodka.
It gets super intense; some floors unscrew most of their lights to make it harder to find the right person, or keep the fire emergency doors closed with black garbage bags taped up so you can’t even see into the floor. Some people walk around in nothing but a towel so that if someone comes at them they can just drop it and be immune. People walk in groups. Everyone’s suspicious of everyone. Friends are no longer trusted. No one and nowhere is safe.
i know this isn’t really original but im obsessed with how english words that refer to the bodily, the tangible, the elemental etc are so often of anglo-saxon/germanic origin e.g. (heart, blood, jaw, flesh) or observable phenomena, like adjectives describing light (glisten, gloaming, glitter, gleam, gloom, glow, dark, fire) or places (hearth, hall, hill), and the most stark, primal emotions or states (hate, love, life, lust, death) and of course fuck, shit, bitch, cunt etc– these often monosyllabic, consonant heavy words…and then you have the lilting, limpid romance/latinate, words like acquiesce and exacerbate and agrarian and pellucid and clemency and lucidity…and how maybe the secret of all great english language poetry is a textural balancing of the push-pull of the germanic and the romantic/latinate, a balancing of these two energies. like some of the most powerful moments in shakespeare are where the verbosity falls away and you have these plain utterances (“to be or not to be” or lear’s dying “look there look there”– all anglo saxon words) that are so powerful precisely because the language is so ornate elsewhere. i once came up with an elaborate wildly incoherent theory about this in the pub with some drunk american masters student who was dressed like harry styles
De Gene Zijde 