On 5/11/06, Paul Vigo <paulvigo@gmail.com> wrote:
Yanis Batura wrote: > On 11.05.2006, 3:36, Bob LeChevalier wrote: > > 1. Matt Arnold has once suggested to translate "The Prophet" in the > wiki. While this idea was fine, the style of the book itself, as > someone has put it in jboselkei, was "exhausting", and I hardly > believe any newbies will ever be reading it in Lojban. > > 2. However, several hard nuts (I mean difficult sentences) from the > "Prophet"'s text got to jboselkei and were successfully translated. > Very impressed with The Prophet. I would have thought it one of the most difficult (subtle) works to translate into any language. The way it is written is so deceptively simple that it is easy to overlook how dense the imagery is.
Thank you, but I disagree. Translating The Prophet is relatively easy because I translate this work as directly as I can, without regard for subtlety. The depth is an illusion typical of religious and inspirational texts, and even the reading of the Tarot. The reader is inspired to see deeper meanings drawn from his or her own insights, and attributes it to the author because of the hand-waving impressiveness of authority and traditional respect for the source material. I did not put sentences from The Prophet onto jboselkei because they were hard nuts to crack. They were no more difficult than any other sentence that I typically translate into Lojban. I only put them up to share the workload while I was busy with other projects. -epkat