Poetry In Translation
I really hate poetry in translation, to be honest. A lot of people might think that that's an overreaction, and frankly I wouldn't blame them. Yes, it's always so much nicer to be able to read in the original language, but if you can't do that a translation will suffice. Right? Wrong. I don't know how many people reading this appreciate the differences between languages - but they can be huge. I can understand English, Latin, French and Hebrew and each of them has a different way of describing an experience. Latin will quite happily mess around with syntax and uses tense and mood to powerful, precise effect; French has concepts that are difficult to translate into English, as does German; Hebrew is highly inflected, in some cases even more so than Latin as it uses a stupid amount of different forms for the second person singular pronoun depending on gender and context and uses this to great effect - for example, at times it can distinguish between concept an...