Absolutely Wonderful James, After struggling with Wittgenstein I wondered what he would have made of the two versions. I suspect the words were translated but the sense was lost. And the mistake is worthy of preservation. I swear that could have come directly from the pen of Bulgakov. Befitting Azazello's table manners as he picks at his fang. Dinner at the house of Titus Andronicus with a new twist. Vladimyr Ivan Burachynsky Ph.D.(Civil Eng.), M.Sc.(Mech.Eng.), M.Sc.(Biology) 120-1053 Beaverhill Blvd. Winnipeg, Manitoba CANADA R2J 3R2 (204) 2548321 Phone/Fax vbur...@shaw.ca
-----Original Message----- From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of James Steiner Sent: December 3, 2010 12:45 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Parsing the Bard The machine translation story I've heard is: "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak," after a round trip from English to Russian and back, became "The vodka is good, but the meat is spoiled." ~~James On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 1:16 AM, Robert Holmes <rob...@holmesacosta.com> wrote: > And Gamlet is available on Netflix I see. That's one for the queue. > Your comment about the mistranslation reminds me of the (almost certainly > apocryphal) anecdote about the early days of computerized translation. The > researcher types the phrase "out of sight, out of mind" and requests > English-Russian followed by Russian-English translation, only to get > "invisible lunatic". > Of course, I've also heard versions where the mediating language is Arabic, > Chinese etc. But a good anecdote (even a poor one) is always more truthy > than mere facts. > -- R > > On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 11:00 PM, <plissa...@comcast.net> wrote: >> >> Shakespeare versus Friam! Oh, My! Seems like a hugely mismatched >> intellectual exercise! Well, Will wrote words for that, too! Perhaps: A >> concatenation of cats. Or: What fools these mortals be! Its poetry, >> fellas! Didnt anyone tell you? Before penning ab initio, ab ignorantio >> analyses, just study a leetle of the overwhelming volume of criticism on the >> Melancholy Prince. A good modern one, of the tens of 1,000s of articles, >> is in Marjorie Garbers, Shakespeare after All (2004). Read, and then >> write. >> >> >> >> But, but, but, to the horror of literalists, in the To be, or not... >> soliloquy (III, i) our forgetful Prince describes death as The undiscovered >> country from whose bourn no traveler returns, when two acts earlier (I, ii, >> iii), on the battlements, hed actually been hearing some unpleasant >> revelations from his fathers ghost, sy pappie se spook, as the inelegant >> Afrikaans translation has it! Ah, consistency -- the hobgoblin of small >> minds -- but nevah the Bards! >> >> >> >> I view with delight all foreign versions of the play in tongues unknown >> and accents yet unheard that I can dig up. The Russian Gamlet (1964), >> with Smoktunovsky, and Shostakovichs score, is pretty good. A darkly grand >> gothic revenge horse-opera. Much cold steel and poisoned chalices!! The >> Russian dialog is very impressive, sonorous and sinister, but a particular >> delight are the English captions. They are good, and grammatical, but >> weirdly, unaccountably, contain none of Shakespeares lines!! I have a >> vision of some good, grey Apparatchik Soviet State Translator, in the >> editing room earnestly listening to the spoken words and transcribing same >> into nice twentieth century English dialog with not the slightest inkling >> that there had actually been an English script (First Quarto, 1603), that a >> lotta Capitalists, over the centuries, found pretty inspiring! >> >> Peter Lissaman, Da Vinci Ventures >> >> Expertise is not knowing everything, but knowing what to look for. >> >> 1454 Miracerros Loop South, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505,USA >> tel:(505)983-7728 >> >> >> ============================================================ >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College >> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
