Araaiþei aflaiþ

[llama_nom]

Hails Walhahrabn!

First, sorry to bring this all up again, but I'd just like to say that
I hope you've accepted Vladimir's appology in the spirit it was
offered.  I can appreciate that you were frustrated by the debate and
upset by comments which might have seemed to excuse Wernher von
Braun's work for the Nazis.  But nothing I've read on this message
board suggests to me that Vladimir intended any offence, still less to
condone the attrocities with which von Braun was involved.  I think
your comments of May 24 were unfair.

Please excuse my meddling, if this has already been sorted out...

Anyway, thanks for the compliments!  Yes, by all means criticise my
translation.  You make some interesting points.  With 'weggins
falþanans' I was thinking of Wright's "accusative of closer
definition" (Grammar of the Gothic Language, para. 426), e.g. standaiþ
nu ufgaurdanai hupins izwarans sunjai "stand therefore, your loins
girt with truth"; gabundans handuns jah fotuns faskjam "bound hand and
foot with bandages".  I wouldn't rule out the possibility of the
dative absolute, maybe preceded by 'at', but I get the impression that
it tends to be limited more to a scene-setting clause at the beginning
of the sentence.  Comparison with Old Norse suggests that the dative
absolute may have been used more widely in the bible than would
normally be the case in Gothic; I get the impression that it's also
more common than usual in Old Norse translations from Latin, where it
renders the Latin ablative.  There are indeed a few examples of a
Gothic accusative absolute used like the dative: þuk taujandan armaion
"when you perform acts of charirty"; atgaggandein inn dauhtar
Herodiadins "Herodias's daughter having come in".

I invented a causative 'swaibjan' in a probably forlorn attempt at
matching the ambiguity of Arthur's wordplay.  The English expression
"heart-stopping" has a literal meaning here (which could maybe be:
hairto sweibando, acc.), but also suggests the feelings of the
observer, like watching someone about to dive from a terrible height
might make you catch your breath because you imagine yourself in their
place.  It also seemed in keeping with the way Arthur expressed this
apparently passive event in such a dynamic way.

> ni muna taujan – ni man taujan? Or perhaps optative *ni munjau?

'muna' is here 1st pers. sg. indicative of 'munan', of the 3rd weak
conjugation, expressing an intention for the future: I will do / I
mean to do (rather than the preterite-present 'munan' "to think/believe").

What do you think to *weggs, mi, for "wing"?  The Modern English word
comes from Scandinavian; earlier, the ancestor of "feather" was used
for "wing" too.  As an alternative, I wondered about a cognate of
German Flügel, Go. *þlugils, ma?  Or a weak noun perhaps (-ila, -ilo)?

Llama Nom



--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "ualarauans" <ualarauans at ...> wrote:
>
> Hails!
> Your translation is on no account "clumsy", I like it very much. I'd 
> just have some questions if you don't mind?
> Weggins falthanans – is it an accusativus absolutus in the 
> sense "with folded wings"? Or you mean it be shortened from *weggins 
> falthanans [habandei], lit. "she having folded the wings"? I don't 
> remember exactly if there's some analogue of that absolute 
> accusative construction in the Bible.Couldn't it be dative as well, 
> e.g. *weggim falthanaim? Or maybe it's *izai weggins [izos] 
> falthanai? The next strophe could be grammatically paralleled in a 
> way like that: *weggim falthanaim, hairtin sweibandin. I don't 
> intend this to be a kind of "correction", the original variant is 
> very good, in particular I like the causative formation, nice way to 
> enlarge the vocabulary from the language's own sources.
> ni muna taujan – ni man taujan? Or perhaps optative *ni munjau?
> 
> Ualarauans
> 
> --- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "llama_nom" <600cell@> wrote:
> >
> > 
> > Arthur Jones wrote to me yesterday to tell me that his mother 
> passed
> > away peacefully the previous night, aged nearly 90.  He also sent 
> me
> > this poem which he wrote for her, with a request that I turn it 
> into
> > Gothic.  Whether I've managed to wrangle any of Arthur's inspired
> > wordplay into my favourite extinct language, I don't know; but 
> here's
> > my clumsy attempt for what it's worth, followed by the original in 
> all
> > its eloquence.
> > 
> > Araaiþei aflaiþ.
> > Uz-u-staig afþliugandei,
> > þau ga-u-dauf, weggins falþanans,
> >    hairto swaibjandei,
> > ni mag witan.
> > Iþ þata ik sahv:
> > faurþizei usliþi, si
> > in hrigga gawandida sik, jah insahv aftra, jah smarkoda;
> > jah þamma minnizo ni muna taujan.
> > 
> > The eagle-mother is gone.
> > Whether she soared away,
> > Or folded wings in plunge
> >      heart-stopping,
> > I cannot know.
> > But this I saw:
> > Before she left, she
> > Gyred, and turned, and smiled;
> > And I shall not do less.
> > 
> > Notes: the reconstructed words are all based on Old English roots,
> > except for *swaibjan, a causative for 'sweiban', and *weggs, 
> mi "wing"
> > (=ON vængr).
> >
>






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