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"The Hobbit" in Yiddish | ||
Tags: Yiddish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5219 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 9 of 17 26 December 2012 at 8:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
I read A couple of the Treebeard chapter and have the same feelings about the translation, so I ordered the book.
I read the extract you uploaded and it really seems to be a fun and intersting read. You definitely got me interested in reading it ! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5020 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 10 of 17 27 December 2012 at 4:04am | IP Logged | |||||
Glad you liked it. I've realized it's also available on Project Gutenberg. (Unfortunately only in English; but then you'll at least have the original to Goldstein's translated extract.) Edited by songlines on 27 December 2012 at 4:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6408 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 11 of 17 27 December 2012 at 9:26am | IP Logged | |||||
edit: the first link only showed up properly after i erased a line break Edited by Serpent on 27 December 2012 at 10:21am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4499 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 12 of 17 27 December 2012 at 1:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've been strictly in Safari for a while now, and on a single computer.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6720 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 17 27 December 2012 at 3:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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<slightly off-topic>
I know people have reported different results depending on if they manually typed [ U R L = ...] or clicked the URL icon above the text field (for me, the latter always works). The second link on your post didn't include http:// which made it part of the HTLAL domain.* At the other forum I'm moderating I think I explained a dozen times (to the same member!) how to embedd a Youtube clip. </slightly off-topic> *http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/www.yiddishbookcenter. org/audio/now-yiddish-der-hobit-hobbit 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4499 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 14 of 17 27 December 2012 at 3:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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When I posted that link twice, it worked only the second time. The only difference there was that instead of usnig
the paste-from-clipboard function to put the link into the post, I tried typing it one character at a time. I've found that once I try making a link and it doesn't work, editing it in place never fixes it, but I can do the exact same thing again in a new post or in a different area in the same post, and it might work. It seems like it's less likely to work with links to HTLAL pages, but sometimes it works. I know it strictly speaking is deterministic, but the causes are sufficiently obscure for me as to appear entirely random. Or all the suggestions I've seen so far, none work all the time, and none fail all the time. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4499 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 15 of 17 06 January 2013 at 9:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Update: I received my copy of the book and have had a chance to read a decent bit and get a good feel for the
translator's style. I saw that this past week's Yiddish Forverts had a short blurb on the back of section one that mentioned this book, but was utterly dismissive of it ("one wonders why you would bother making this translation in the first place"). There was a more balanced, but nevertheless negative review posted on amazon, as well. Here's the review that I wrote: I have to respectfully disagree with the overall verdict of the review entitled "An Antoyshung." Most of all, I'm unaware of any translation of a popular work into Yiddish on this scale in my lifetime, and that alone should have Yiddishists jumping for joy. Beggars can't be choosers. I can understand that the reviewer, and the Forverts, perhaps may not approve of the "quality" of the Yiddish--as the translator notes in a publicly available interview with the Yiddish Book Center, he is not exactly a native speaker of Yiddish, and one must expect that to show. A quick peek at the translator's website suggests that he may be a bit eccentric, as well. (You probably have to be to translate the Hobbit into Yiddish!) The crayon drawings on the cover and the fact that each book is printed only on demand also should be a sign that this is very much an amateur project. I doubt that he had a fluent Yiddish- speaking editor to work with on this project. Nevertheless, as one who has been learning Yiddish for about 2 years, I find this translation significantly easier to read than quite a few works in the canon of Yiddish literature. A key reason I believe, is because of the author's (admittedly interesting) choice of vocabulary. I use the Weinreich dictionary, and I have not yet encountered a single unknown word to me that I did find in Weinreich, spelled exactly as Weinreich spelled it (though I can follow the story well enough without the dictionary if need be). I doubt that is coincidence. Whether or not this is to be desired from a literary standpoint is open to debate, but it makes it infinitely easier to read than, e.g., Shalom Aleichem, who often seems to expect his readers to be fluent in both Yiddish AND Russian, or I. J. Singer, whose prose is unreadable for me without consulting a Polish dictionary every few words. I find especially bewildering the note regarding this translation being too difficult for a child to read. First of all, I reject the idea that nothing should be published in Yiddish unless it is so simple as to bore the Yiddishists. That the reviewer suggests two books written in roman letters says quite a lot about what is available today. But furthermore, halevai there should be thousands of Yiddish-speaking 11- and 12-year-olds complaining that "if only this translation had been slightly less awkward, I would be able to read it!" While there may be some, I sadly can't say as I know personally ANY children of that age who are in a position to be reading a relatively sophisticated 300-page novel in Yiddish (I would LOVE to hear that I'm wildly off-base here!). Furthermore, looking back at the first few pages in the English original, I see quite a bit of obscure vocabulary on the part of Tolkien himself, such as "laburnums," "confusticate," "depredations," and so on. I highly doubt that the ghost of I. B. Singer himself could translate these words in a non-awkward way, staying true to the original text, and yet not using obscure terms and not making it hard for a 21st-century child to understand. In sum, I believe that if you have reasonable expectations for this book, it will exceed them, in spite of whatever faults it may have. Perhaps I am one of the "heysse Chassidim for Tolkien" mentioned in the shockingly glib review by the Forverts, because I love this book. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Malek Groupie Christmas Island Joined 4154 days ago 60 posts - 76 votes | Message 16 of 17 08 January 2013 at 11:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I got my copy a few days ago, Geoff. Can't wait to get reading it... which will happen at some point.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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