[Lexicog] When Semantics Doesn't Matter

[bolstar1]

Bill: Now I'm chuckling over your point about Shakespeare reading 
better in German than in English(I know it wasn't your own statement, 
but it was just so darn cute.) This would be an example of the use of, 
for lack of a better term, hyperbolic hyperbole. I have always thought 
it a waste of time, personally, to have read through all of 'War and 
Peace' -- you know, that tidbit of a book by Leo-the-Sparse -- without 
enjoying Leo's rhetorical genius (Oh, what I must have missed in the 
translation.) Leo T.quaintly once said of Shakespeare, ""The works of 
Shakespeare, borrowed as they are, and externally, like mosaics, 
artificially fitted together piecemeal from bits invented for the 
occasion, have nothing whatever in common with art and poetry." 
    Granted, Tolstoy may have been in a temporary stupor, or maybe his 
wife had spilled hot coffee on his pants that morning, or perhaps he 
didn't read a German translation of Shakespeare......but whatever the 
reason, he may be in on the theory that Shakespeare wasn't such a hot 
literary number as he is purported to be. I'd like to see more proof of 
this though. 

Scott Nelson
 

--- In lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com, billposer at ... wrote:
>
> I have been told by people whose knowledge of both
> Shakespeare and German is better than my own that
> Shakespeare is better in German translation.
> It seems odd that anything would be better in translation,
> but I suppose that the English of Shakespeare is sufficiently
> different from Modern English that this may be like saying
> that Shakespeare is better in Modern German translation than
> in Modern English translation, which is not so implausible.
> 
> Bill
>




 
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