Re: Two real, honest-to-goodness Xy questions

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

peregrine@xxxxxxxx wrote:
>  Like any art, writing is of its own time. Why shouldn't a translation
> be of the same period to convey that?
But isn't some writing for ALL time? On the other hand, if
translation is to be of the same period, we should translate,
say, Racine, into the kind of English his English-speaking
contemporary poets used. Actually, when C. S. Lewis was writing
his _English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama_
for the Oxford History of Eng. Lit series, he carefully
translated all quotations from 16th-century authors who wrote in
Latin (as many of them did) into 16th-cent. English (a tour de
force only he and E. R. Eddison, I'd hazard, could manage). I
believe that paraphrase I used a while back (Call you them
editors?) was a snippet of that.
"There is naught but..." would be fine with me, but I suspect
some would disparage _naught_ as an instance of what someone once
called "Godwottery"--ootsey-cutesey archaism. I agree with Lewis
that archaism has its place among the resources of the language
(just as regional and class dialects and terms of art do). But
one must get it right--and precious few do. I don't know how
often I've seen _thou_ followed by a modern verb form or, worse,
the archaic 3d-person form ("thou doth"). Or even _thee_ used as
subject (which indeed it was done by Quakers, but not in
authentic archaism).
Flash--goose blimps? But Yeats in Italian sounds interesting, to
say the least. As for _whither_ and _whence_ you might be
surprised at how often I've had to explain that if you use
_whence_ the idea of "from" is included, and one needn't--and
shouldn't--say "from whence."
Lynn--The reports aren't for the Council, they're of the council
meetings, to be published in the town weekly (though of course
the council members read them, and try to claim they've been
misquoted when you say what they meant, instead of the illiterate
drivel they said).
Glad to hear someone reads Shakespeare. And thanks for the
compliment--being compared to Dorothy L. Sayers is one of a high
order.
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx