Via Leanne Martin’s Facebook post, I learn of one of the strangest translations ever made; Sam Jones reports for the Graun:
There is an adjective that all too invitingly describes the wildly optimistic endeavours of the American book collector, the Hungarian-British explorer and the two Kashmiri pandits who, almost a century ago, took it upon themselves to translate Don Quixote into Sanskrit for the first time. Today, the same word might equally be applied to the efforts of the Bulgarian-born Indologist and Tibetologist who has rescued their text from decades of oblivion.
In 1935, the wealthy American businessman and book collector Carl Tilden Keller – whose shelves already held Japanese, Mongolian and Icelandic translations of Cervantes’s masterpiece – embarked on a quest to have some of the book rendered into an Indian language. To do so, he enlisted the help of his friend, Sir Marc Aurel Stein, an eminent orientalist, archaeologist and explorer who knew India well. “I am frank enough to admit that while I recognise the childishness of this desire of mine I am still extremely interested in having it carried out,” Keller wrote to Stein in November 1935. […]
The collector knew that the learned and well-connected Stein would know the right men for the job – and indeed he did. On Keller’s behalf, he commissioned his friend the Kashmiri pandit – or Sanskrit scholar – Nityanand Shastri, to undertake the translation. Despite being paralysed by a stroke, Shastri agreed and recruited another pandit, Jagaddhar Zadoo, to be his co-translator. Having no Spanish, the two scholars worked from an 18th-century English translation of the Quixote by the Irish painter and translator Charles Jarvis.
Almost exactly two years after Keller first expressed his childish desire, the pandits’ labours were complete and Keller had eight chapters of the first part of Don Quixote in what Dimitrov describes as a “sweet and very precise Sanskrit”.
When Keller died in 1955 the Sanskrit Quixote joined the collector’s many other treasures in a bequest to Harvard University. It lay forgotten in the university library until 2012 when Dimitrov, spurred on by a 2002 article on the book written by Shastri’s grandson, hunted it out and began thinking of identifying the English version used for the translation. Then came plans for a bilingual, side-by-side edition of Sanskrit and 18th-century English, accompanied by a Sanskrit audiobook and music.
Shastri’s grandson, Surindar Nath Pandita, says:
“During the late 19th and the 20th century, there was a vibrant interface of scholarship between western scholars and Kashmiri Sanskrit scholars, when much of Kashmir’s classical literature was treated by the western hand […] However, translating Don Quixote was a singular exception in that league because here the west wanted to embellish western literature by the treatment of Kashmiri hands.”
As Leanne says: What a story!!
It should be renamed the Panzatantra.
(And Papageno is the best character in Die Zauberflöte, miles better than that boring Tamino, but I don’t think that’s been translated into Sanskrit yet.)
It should be renamed the Panzatantra.
Well done!
While the English translation they were working from is supposedly fairly good, if perhaps insufficiently playful, I cannot excuse, in this Internet age, getting the English translator’s name wrong. The painter* was actually named “Charles Jervas,” although almost all** printed editions (including the original, posthumous one) have erroneously used the more common spelling “Jarvis.”
* He was the court painter to Georg I of Great Britain, although I think he was only a middling artist. His faces, in particular, are pretty bland, and I suspect that he (or his studio) may have traced them from a model sheet, even when he was painting portraits. Maybe this is unfair though, since plenty of other artists from around the same period (early 1700s) painted similarly styled dull and undistinguished faces.
** “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” was playing while I was entering this on my phone, and at this point, I briefly started inputting the lyrics (“she was everybody’s darling”) instead of what I meant to type.
Tangentially relevant: a course in Spoken Kashmiri.
I briefly started inputting the lyrics (“she was everybody’s darling”) instead of what I meant to type.
The line is “In the back room she was everybody’s darling”. I’m sure a lot of people just like a nice ditty. They don’t bother to listen carefully to the lyrics, not even when they’re in their native language, and perhaps wouldn’t understand them all if they did (thieves’ Kant).
Often it doesn’t make any difference one way or the other:
Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elisium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken
Himmlische, dein Heiligthum.
The “Ode to Joy” is another thing, like “Walk on the Wild Side,” I reflexively sing along too, at least in bits. It’s certainly “cleaner” than Lou Reed’s paean to the Wahol “superstars” (in whatever language), but not necessarily as “authentic.”
Brett, you should practise what you preach! Georg? Wahol? How can you possibly forgive yourself?
*is tempted to claim that Wahol was the original family name, but fears starting another stream of fake news*
I like to substitute Freiheit when I sing it in the shower. (Or restore, if you believe the rumours).
@TonyG: “Georg” was intentional, c.f.
Surely ‘George’ is the translation in that case?
Oh, interesting. Not only is it spelled Elysium today, but all the sung renditions I’ve heard have accordingly pronounced it with [yː].
Andy Warhol’s Ruthenian-origin surname at birth was of course Warhola, which is perhaps not the only possible Americanized/Romanized form of Варгола, but it worked for his family. I don’t know if the Hapsburg authorities in power in the Old Country had a standard romanization system and if so whether “Warhola” is what that system would have produced.
In David Bowie’s song about him (recorded the year before he produced the Lou Reed album containing “Walk on the Wild Side”) there’s a deliberate bit of comic business where he pronounced the second syllable of Warhol with a GOAT rather than LOT vowel to make it homophonous with “hole.”
Of the five different personalities who each get a verse in “Walk on the Wild Side,” Candy (who was everybody’s darling, at least in the back room) was the first to die (+1974), but now a half-century on from the song’s recording only one of the five (Little Joe) is still alive. On the other hand, Candy was the only one of the five to be the inspiration/topic of an entire other song (“Candy Says,” recorded 1969 and IMHO an objectively better song).
@David Marjanović: This site appears to have a good breakdown of the differences between early editions of Schiller’s verse. Besides the older spellings “Elisium” and “Heiligthum,” there are some improved word choices over time and changes to some of the original adjective declension. I wonder whether the earliest version of the lyrics was slightly more dialectical than the version Beethoven used?
What is the adjective? “Crazy,” when Dimitrov says “Keller was aware it was quite crazy.”?
It would be kind of a dumb lede anyway, but the writer doesn’t being it home well either.
The named protagonists may have mostly passed away, but my understanding is that the colored girls are still going doot dedoot doot doot dedoot doot doot doot dedoo wah.
What is the adjective?
“Quixotic.” British papers, like British crosswords, do not value straightforwardness as highly as US ones.
I think the feeling is that it is very rude to spell out what your readers are clever enough to work out for themselves. Bad as explaining a joke, which is hardly forgiveable, unless the perpetrator is a foreigner, and cannot really be expected to know any better. It is, of course, unpardonably rude to imply to a Brit that he has no sense of humour (however strong the objective evidence to this effect may appear to be.)
Quixotry was in the news once, for garnering a near-record number of points for a single move in Scrabble.
As far as I’ve noticed, Polish spelling, plus h for г, was standard (for some definition of “standard”); in particular, it’s noteworthy that Canadian surnames of Ukrainian origin always seem to be spelled that way. My colleague Matt Szostakiwskyj comes to mind.
Oh yes. Friederich? WTF. He seems to have stolen his extra e from his publisher Leb[e]recht…
Also Simpathie and (in the suppressed stanza) Tirannen-, today both with y and universally with [ʏ].
Dialectal? In some sense, sure; Standard German was less standardized back then – and it has also changed as a whole, e.g. Goethe did things with adjective declension that are flat-out ungrammatical today and had different genders for some nouns.
However, schwerem Leiden and schweren Leiden (footnote 12) are both grammatical today; the first is (dative) singular, the second is plural.
For Goethe, take an unmodernized parallel text edition of the so-called Urfaust and the final text of Faust I (for example, the Reclam Studienausgabe): there is a huge difference in spelling and grammar even in those places where the text remained more or less the same. It’s similar with the first and second edition of Werther: for the revised edition Goethe apparently stipulated that the printer should use the spelling of Adelung’s recent German dictionary. It seems Adelung had a huge stabilizing influence on German orthography.
>>What is the adjective?
>“Quixotic.”
Face-palm. I didn’t even consider that he might be avoiding giving away a joke. Oy.
The word quixotry was one of the highest-scoring words ever recorded in a Scrabble game; see the breathless (perhaps Cosellish) narration here.
Ah, that’s likely.
huge stabilizing influence
Na ja, the German and English WiPe articles on him give different assessments.
The English article is short but rides high in the saddle, like a senior high school essay:
# The writings of Adelung are voluminous. By means of his excellent grammars, dictionary, and various works on German style, he contributed greatly towards rectifying the orthography, refining the idiom, and fixing the standard of his native tongue. His German dictionary Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart (1774–1786) bears witness to the patient spirit of investigation which Adelung possessed in so remarkable a degree, and to his intimate knowledge of the different dialects on which modern German is based. #
The German article has instructive doses of doubt and carping, aka information:
# Bezüglich der Etymologie sind ihm heutige Grundsätze fremd; er wusste nichts von der germanischen und der hochdeutschen Lautverschiebung, kennt keine neuhochdeutsche Diphthongierung und keine Monophthongierung; gesetzmäßiger Lautwandel, Ablaut und die heute rekonstruierten indogermanische Wortbildungssuffixe sind ihm ebenfalls unbekannt. Es finden sich jedoch manchmal durchaus richtige Etymologien. Ein vollständiger etymologischer Kommentar – so vorhanden – ist jeweils dreiteilig: Erstens kommen Angaben „gleichartiger“ Wortformen aus anderen Sprachstadien, dann ein Überblick über die Etymologie seiner Vorgänger, die er gut kennt, und schließlich seine eigene Etymologie. Sie scheinen Herders Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772) im Einzelwort zu dokumentieren.[9]
Adelungs Wörterbuch hatte einen großen Einfluss auf die deutsche Lexikographie, das genaue Ausmaß ist jedoch relativ wenig bekannt. Bezüglich des genauen Wörterbuchgegenstandes (Was ist Hochdeutsch? Was hat Adelung tatsächlich lexikographisch bearbeitet?) herrscht in der Forschung „eine pluralistische Orientierungslosigkeit“. Mindestens das Oberdeutsche kann man trotz negativer Kommentare zum Wörterbuchgegenstand hinzurechnen. Ähnlich sieht es bei der Frage aus, ob seine Arbeit normativ oder deskriptiv (oder beides) war.[9] Besonders auf Grund der umfassenden Vergleiche hatte das Wörterbuch normenden Einfluss auf die Entwicklung der deutschen Sprache.[10] Laut Kühn und Püschel „darf dennoch angezweifelt werden, dass er die Sprachnorm festlegt, denn in den 50er Jahren des 18. Jhs. existierte bereits eine vielgelesene, poetische Nationalliteratur, die bereits weitgehend einer einheitlichen Sprachnorm folgte“.[11] #
The English article contains a strange claim that doesn’t seem to fit in with the rest, although some Serbs have run with it:
# He believed strongly that the orthography of the written language should match that of the spoken language. He declared, “Write as you speak and read as it is written”.[citation needed] This principle has later been accepted as the key point of the reform of the Serbian literary language initiated by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić.[citation needed] #
Addendum: “pluralistische Orientierungslosigkeit” is a neat expression. It accurately describes the current state of IT.
Stu: Addendum +1! I’m just trying to percolate to where the money is. But I have a 5 year horizon, young people entering the market have 50 years to worry about…
a strange claim that doesn’t seem to fit in with the rest — reminds me of the way that details of how a crop or dish is used in India will often be in the lead of an article, even if other cultures are neatly arranged in a section designed for local usages. (But of course you wouldn’t suspect WP editors of political or nationalistic motives innit, which means that only ineptitude or lack of reading comprehension remain as explanations).
As I expected, the essay is an article in the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1911.
I’m just trying to percolate to where the money is.
Duminil-Copin just won a Fields medal for his work on percolation theory. It all fits together, I tell you !
As E. M. Forster wrote: “Only percolate!”.
the essay is an article in the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1911
I rarely look at the “references”, you’ve now brought my attention to them. However, it says “incorporates text from”. I wonder whether the Serbs snuck themselves into that edition.
To be fair, I should quote from the Wipe article on Vuk Karadžić:
# At about the same period, Vuk Karadžić reformed the Serbian literary language and standardized the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet by following strict phonemic principles on the Johann Christoph Adelung’ model and Jan Hus’ Czech alphabet. #
instructive doses of doubt and carping
When I read this phrase out of context (while scrolling through the page to find the first comment I hadn’t read) I said to myself “Ah, that comment is by Stu.” And so it was.
It all fits together, I tell you !
On the other hand, this one is a marker of David E, but no, in this case it’s Stu again.
(I wonder what my own diagnostic markers might be.)
(I wonder what my own diagnostic markers might be.)
Ineffable, yet unmistakable.
I instinctively sing my primary school music teacher’s improvised translation. (Of the Ode of Joy, in Bulgarian) when I hear the melody.
I don’t what Orwell intended (e.g. whether they were supposed to match “The Internationale”), but the lyrics to “Beasts of England” from Animal Farm fit Beethoven’s melody perfectly.
Not with a space in front of the exclamation mark !
Exactly. JC overlooks my markiest marker.
Of course I didn’t mention that on purpose: you fell into my evil trap, mwahahahahahaha.
No, Stu’s markiest marker is using hashes around quotes.
Speaking of markers, this is full of the markers of 1911 Britannica text when found in Wikipedia:
> By means of his excellent grammars, dictionary, and various works on German style, he contributed greatly towards rectifying the orthography, refining the idiom, and fixing the standard of his native tongue. His German dictionary […] bears witness to the patient spirit of investigation which Adelung possessed in so remarkable a degree, and to his intimate knowledge of the different dialects on which modern German is based.
Perhaps the most salient is how it’s soaked through with explicit value judgements. Not that more-modern text doesn’t carry value judgements, but people writing today tend to try to at least hide it.
The bit about one Vuk Karadžić reads differently to me. Aha, and in fact: looking at the article’s history, that line was added in 2012, long after the 1911 Britannica text was… and from a Serbian IP address. (No link, in hopes of my comment not getting eaten; but it’s not hard to find.) So I think Stu’s suspicion is confirmed.
Perhaps the most salient is how it’s soaked through with explicit value judgements.
Which is fine with me. The more I read ostentatiously “objective” and generally unspeakably tedious modern text (which, as you say, simply hides the value judgments), the more I appreciate the writing of that good old Britannica, whose authors generally both knew their subjects and wrote well about them.
I forgot if 5 or 6 is the number of links at which the jaws snap shut.
Yeah, a single link should be no problem.