This article is within the scope of WikiProject Germany, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Germany on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.GermanyWikipedia:WikiProject GermanyTemplate:WikiProject GermanyGermany
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Songs, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of songs on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.SongsWikipedia:WikiProject SongsTemplate:WikiProject Songssong
How on earth does "Sag: auf beiden Füßen." translate to "say: as ay, he's witty"? I don't understand what this is meant to mean as an English phrase. Furius (talk) 20:41, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well – there is a witticism in the German text, but that translation does not convey it. The translator took obvious delight in consulting a poetic thesaurus of oblique and obsolete words, possibly in an attempt to create a Middle English feel, which he thought appropriate for German folk songs from that period. But the line you quote defies any explanation. A {{Clarify}} tag might be called for. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 02:31, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
But "witty" means "clever, intelligent"; "in his right mind" would be "has his wits about him". Does "on his feet" mean "has his wits about him"? I think it just means alive (but perhaps only barely), which is why it prompts the lover to ask whether he is sick. "As ay" doesn't mean anything. Furius (talk) 13:41, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I assumed that "as ay" = "as aye" and was intended to mean "as always", although like the rest of the translation of this line, it corresponds to nothing in the German. And I agree that the sense "in his right mind" is completely different from auf beiden Füssen. When someone says "I'm still on my feet" in response to the question "How are you doing?", it's normally a joking comment about their physical health, not their sanity or mental state. The "poetic" translation misrepresents the original, and largely removes the element of humor that Goethe found in this poem. Other questions: In the translations of ich sei gestorben and ich käme morgen, why the gratuitous change from the first person of the German to third person in the English? And what is the point of the archaism "sterved" here? There is nothing particularly archaic about the German verb sterben and the language of the poem in general is not obscure or difficult for contemporary German readers to understand, so why suggest the opposite by placing unnecessary obstacles in the path of the readers of the English translation? Now that we have a more accurate translation, is the "poetic" translation really needed here? Does it improve the article in any way? Crawdad Blues (talk) 05:42, 4 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Dear Tamtam90, my edits at Lullaby (disambiguation) and my talk page remarks there are not disruptive and I reject your characterisation. Your creation of articles here is welcome, and I said so before. Your insistence on your idiosyncratic translations and your refusal to follow EN Wikipedia rules has generated a lot of hot air and created some friction. If you had used Wikipedia as it is intended, and confined publication of your translations to your website, we all could spend our time more productively.It may have escaped your attention, but I did expand the prose of the "Synopsis" section in Der Ritter und die Magd, and fixed some technical deficiencies. Cheers, Michael Bednarek (talk) 08:23, 4 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
In light of the discussion above, I propose to remove the poetic translation from this article. For a fuller explanation of my reasoning, see my comments at Talk:Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär (diff). I see a sufficient local consensus here to do this, but I will wait a few days, in order to allow any other editors who have not already commented to do so.
Tamtam90, we don't seem to have had any success in convincing you, here and elsewhere, that whatever other merits your translations may have, they are too free and too problematic in other respects to be well suited for use in encyclopedia articles. The fact that you created this article does not mean that your translation is the best choice for it, or that you are entitled to keep it in place over the objections of other editors who favor a more literal version. Please re-read WP:SELFCITE and take it to heart, especially the advice that authors who wish to insert their own work into Wikipedia should "defer to the community's opinion" and let others decide whether or not it belongs there. Crawdad Blues (talk) 23:10, 4 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
As I understand, the only "protest" or doubt had been caused by a single row, which I changed. Do you still insist on the deletion of the "poetic translation"? --Tamtam90 (talk) 08:23, 6 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Please re-read this duscussion – there a more objections. Regarding your most recent change of "As ay, he's witty" to "On both his feetes": in which dictionary did you find 'feetes'? -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 11:18, 6 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It's not just one line. There are other problems as well, some listed in the discussion above, some not. Among the latter, I will mention only your translation of German wenn as English "when", a misunderstanding that also appears in your version of Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär, and has already been pointed out to you in the comments on that article.
Leaving aside for a moment the "poetic" translation, which I still believe should be removed from the article altogether, I'd like to turn back to the more literal translation, because I think we're still not quite catching the wordplay of the German in the first stanza. It's hard for English speakers to get the implied joke in the reply Auf beiden Fussen when we translate the question Wenn sie fraget: wie mir's geht as "If she asks how I am", because part of the joke depends on the use of the verb gehen in the German. What she literally asks is "How is it going with you?", and the answer is "(It's going) on both feet." Cf. the translation of Richard Stokes, who writes "If she asks: how goes it? / Tell her: on both feet." This seems to me to catch the sense nicely, and in good idiomatic English. I've changed our collaborative translation to something along the same lines (although my version is clunkier because I wanted the translation to explicitly include mir, which Stokes leaves to be understood from the context).
The Stokes translation is actually cited in the article (currently note 7), and frankly, if we're going to quote a published translation at all, I think it should be Stokes version, not the Pavlov version. If anyone thinks that the best way forward is to remove both the literal translation and the poetic translation and replace them both with the Stokes translation, properly credited, I'd support that. If not, we can stick with the current literal translation. But either way, I think the clock has run out on the Pavlov translation. Crawdad Blues (talk) 04:07, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think we can put the Stokes translation as a quote into the article, even attributed, because of copyright concerns. As for Pavlov: I agree. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 06:21, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That's not a wonder, for (as I understand), you all agreed to remove all my translations long before. Go for — better to mark any of "Wunderhorn's" articles with some template , say, "don't change, allocated for M. Bednarek & Co". --Tamtam90 (talk) 07:44, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Forbidding me to translate these songs "in the spirit of their times", with "anachronisms" and "obsolete phrases", you mislead all our readers (Wikipedia readers) much more than any of my "shortages". But what is the goal of all your work, without some "spirits of the time", "rhymes and metres"? --Tamtam90 (talk) 07:59, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
No one here is forbidding you from translating anything. You have already translated some of these poems, and published your translations on line. Feel free to keep doing so. Translate them, post them on your web site, submit them to literary magazines, nominate them for poetry prizes, collect them in a handsome printed volume, paint them on the side of a barn – you don't need our permission to do any of these things. But what you cannot do is insert your poetry into English Wikipedia articles against the consensus of other editors.
I take the point about "wie mir's geht," but "If she asks how it's going with me" seems a bit clunky. How about "If she asks how I'm going"? A reader is perhaps more likely to supply "(I'm going) on both feet" than "(It's going) on both feet."
I agree about removing the poetic translations. Tamtam90, you're not forbidden to translate these songs however you like on your own website and on wikisource, but you don't get to demand that material both be included in Wikipedia and not be edited. This is the encyclopedia "that anyone can edit." As I see it, the goal is to provide a translation that allows the reader to understand what the lyrics say. If they want to understand the rhyme and meter they can get that from reading the German text, even if they have no German. Furius (talk) 13:41, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Furius: Yes, it's definitely clunky! My problem with your suggested revision ("how I'm going") is that it doesn't seem very idiomatic to me. I don't think I've ever heard a native English speaker say "How are you going?". The expression "How's it going?", on the other hand, is very common, and it also matches the syntax of the German. If a change is needed, I think I'd rather just omit "with you" and allow that to be understood from the context, as Stokes does. But if you want to change it, I won't fight about it. Crawdad Blues (talk) 13:55, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting! Turns out that this is dialectical! See [1]. If it sounds odd/incomprehensible to a British/American/whatever ear, then we shouldn't use it. Furius (talk) 21:54, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, that is interesting! I gather you're in NZ? It does sound distinctly odd to my American ears, but my exposure to NZ dialect is mostly limited to what I've picked up from Flight of the Conchords. I'll squirrel this away for future reference. Crawdad Blues (talk) 03:15, 9 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Michael, I'm confident that there's no copyright issue with the Stokes translation. Reproducing a single eight-line poem from a book containing over 700 pages and 1000 poems is textbook Fair Use, as long as it is properly credited. But if you prefer to stick with our own translation, I have absolutely no problem with that. Crawdad Blues (talk) 13:58, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't express myself clearly enough. I don't care about copyright issues; I just wanted to point out that that others might see a problem. But then again, I suspect that apart from us four not many people watch this page. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 14:20, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
