In the past couple of years, I have translated a number of medieval Scots ballads into modern standard English. In the past year or so, I've uploaded a couple of said ballads, Tam Lin and Thomas The Rhymer, to my blog. Here, I would to talk about the process of translating these pieces.
Concerning these pieces, I thought that it was highly necessary to preserve the rhyme-scheme in translation, and thus preserve the overall 'flow' of them. With Thomas The Rhymer, for instance, the end-rhymes of 'brae' and 'gae' I left intact.
With regards to the process, I believe that it was rather easy. This is because Scots is less of a language, and more of a dialect so strong and archaic in its construction that it almost becomes a language in its own right. Because it's more of a dialect than a language, therefore, it takes a relatively light amount of work to translate them. Certain passages remain practically the same. For example, in Thomas The Rhymer, there's the stanza 'For forty days and forty nights, / He wade thro red blude to the knee, / And he saw neither sun nor moon, / But heard the roaring of the sea.'
Outside of a couple of spelling alterations-- 'blood' for 'blude' and 'through' for 'thro', converted to standard English, the stanza remains completely the same. In my version, though, I altered the line 'He wade through red blude to the knee' to 'They rode through red blood up to the knee', because the following stanza begins with the line 'They rode on, and further on,' which implies that The Queen of Elfland and Thomas passed through the blood on horseback, as opposed to what the line itself suggests, as it portrays Thomas wading knee-high through the blood. So, in short, I altered the line for continuity reasons.
There are certain other stanzas which I altered, in order to make the statement contained in them more clear. For instance, the second stanza of Tam Lin, in its original form, reads 'There's nane that gaes by Carterhaugh, / But they leave him a wad, / Either their rings, or green mantles, / Or else their maidenhead.' This stanza implies that very few enter the woods at Carterhaugh, but those who do, typically young women, either leave Tam Lin a gift, or let him take their virginity, in exchange for being allowed to pass through the wood. This stanza I paraphrased as follows: 'Those that go by Carterhaugh, / Leave him a reward, you see, / Either their rings, or green mantles, / Or else their virginity.' It is paraphrased in order to I. make things slightly clearer (the wording of the original stanza is somewhat vague), and II. make it rhyme slightly better ('wad' and 'maidenhead' obviously don't rhyme, but 'see' and 'virginity' do).
These are not the only pieces of poetry which I've translated from a foreign language. I have also produced a Modern English translation of the prologue to Alexander Pushkin's Ruslan and Ludmilla. To explain the process of translating that, I will have to explain my use of social media. I use little social media, but one of the few platforms which I do use is the voice-chat app Discord. It was the summer of 2018, and I'd been on Discord for about a year or so now, because my best friend was on it. I'd recently joined a political server on this app, expressly dedicated to free expression. It was here, in the midst of discoursing and debating issues with users from all over the globe that I encountered and became friends with Mr Alexei Sukhilov, a Russian gentleman in his mid-twenties, who is a university student. Alex goes by the username Alexfree009, and one afternoon, when we were discussing poetry, mythology and folklore, among other things, we turned to the subject of Pushkin.
Alex brought up to me the subject of the opening to Ruslan and Ludmilla by sending me a link to a website which featured both the original Russian text of Pushkin's prologue, and a line-by-line translation of it into English. The translation was, to put it bluntly, terrible. Grammatically, it made no sense, and Alex was quite annoyed by how poorly-written it was, and how low-quality the translation was. So I put to him the following-- what if we translate it ourselves?
He liked the idea, and during that summer afternoon, we produced a line-by-line translation of Pushkin's prologue. The method we formulated was as follows:
I. Alex would read the line in the original Russian,
II. He would give me a direct translation of what that line meant,
III. I would copy the line into the word document which I had on my laptop,
IV. I would suggest certain words-- certain nouns, verbs and adjectives which I thought would have a certain kind of effect on the reader, would emphasise certain elements in the piece, and would better express certain ideas conveyed in the piece,
V. Alex would agree to the words which I'd suggested to him,
VI. I would rewrite the line translated, to include the words which I'd suggested.
The piece produced did not rhyme, but did have a kind of beauty to it which is hard to describe in words, but which may be concisely described using the phrase 'the beauty of poetic form'. The 'Beauty of Poetic Form' as I put it, is hard to describe, and I think that the only way of putting it would be to describe it as 'that ecstatic, transcendental feeling which one gets after reading The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock'. It's a kind of beauty dependent on the resonances and stylistic form of poetry for its existence, which produces the kind of feeling which I've just described. My translations, I believe, capture that spirit as well as any other work of poetry might, by means of my own careful considerations which I made during the writing process.
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