Re: Can anyone translate English to Aramaic?

From: Fr. O'Malley (omalley_at_priest.com)
Date: 08/24/04 

Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2004 08:02:43 -0400

Paul J Kriha wrote in message ...
>
>Fr. O'Malley <omalley@priest.com> wrote in message
news:2oumlvFel31sU1@uni-berlin.de...
>
>[...]
>
>> Fr. O'Malley
>> (feeling "New Agey" despite incipient old age)
>>
>> Appropinquante enim die meo renascetur electus ex corpore spirituque.
>> Eperchomene:s de te:s he:meras emou, au gene:setai tis eklectos ex
>> somatos te kai pneumatos.
>> Kogda moj den' priblizitsja, izbrannyj yroditsja bnov' ot tela i dukha.
>> Wenn mein Tag nahe ist, wird ein Auserwählte aus Körper und Geist
>> wieder geboren werden.
>> Quand mon jour sera proche, un élu renaîtra du corps et de l'esprit.
>
>The Russian and German translations (and perhaps the others too)
>show that one has to extract the gist of the sentiment and then
>express it in the target language. The literal translations would have
>resulted in nonsensical word goulas.

Yes. "my day is upon us" does not travel well. The translations I used
were essentially paraphrases of well-known passages in the NT.
"born again of water and the spirit", "the Chosen One", "my time is
at hand". I ignored the original poster's later explanations as they
seemed at odds with the original. Like Jerome I strove for both
literalness and fidelity.

>
>BTW, I take it "yroditsja bnov' " is meant to mean "reborn".
>What is that "bnov' " business? I can't make it out.
>All I can think of is "opjat' " (again) or even better "snova"
>(anew).

Sorry about the typo. "vnov' ". I often hit the "b" for "v" and the
"c" for "s" when transliterating. "vnov'" has an OCS flavour and
is more archaic in Russian.

My OCS is so rusty that I decided to use Russian instead. But it
has that wonderfully curious construct of the dative absolute modeled
on the genitive absolute in Greek and invented by Cyril and Methodius.

Fr. O'Malley

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