The Great Lalula
|
Das große Lalula
Krokoklafzi? Semememi!
Hontraruru miromente
Simarar kos malzipempu |
Veliké Lalulá
Kraklakvakve? Koranere!
Chandraradar sísajádra
Sochoškrt sic kalcisumpa |
The poem on the left side was written by Christian Morgenstern. This version is the “German” original. The right side version is the “Czech” translation.
Well, anyone who writes poems only with words that have no sense probably suffers from serious brain damage. But maybe he was just making fun of people actually publishing and buying this crap…
But anyone who translates such a poem to another language must be a total moron. Yeah, go ahead and write your own bullshit poem, but please don’t call it a translation to sell better…
3 thoughts on “The Great Lalula”
Drc 2006-11-21
První němčina, které jsem rozuměl…
Roman 2007-01-10
Considering that Das Grosse Lalula encodes a chess endgame in German chess notation, it makes absolutely perfect sense to translate this “nonsense poem” into Czech.
And even if it did not, the original Lalula sounds like German nonsense and you want Czech nonsense, right? ;) There you go again, translation is logical and needed.
Moron.
Moron 2007-01-30
When Lewis Carroll wrote his Jabberwocky in Alice in Wonderland, he used words having more connotations than actual sense. Morgenstern went even further and just sounds have connotations in German. As you fail being a native German, these connotations are empty or blind for you. But not for Germans! And I see nothing wrong for a bilingual poet trying to transpose german sounds evokiíng certain feelings into sounds which would evoke the same feelings in a native Czech reader. This makes perfect sense to me. By the way, I am a translator myself.
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