Citat:
Ursprungligen postat av Pojken med guldbyxorna
Är det inte lille Hiawathas pappa Longfellow omsatt i svensk tunga?
Henry Wadsworth Longfellows ”Tegnér’s Drapa” ur
The Seaside and the Fireside (1850) på svenska som ”Tegnérs död”, enligt min antologi i översättning av A. Ly. – någon har glömt att sätta ut vem denne Ly. kan vara, men det tar väl Guldbyxan på returen.
Stephen Fry nämner i den läsvärda
The Ode Less Travelled. Unlocking the Poet Within att Longfellows insatser som Tegnéröversättare uppenbarligen inte var så uppskattade ens när de kom:
Citat:
Some poets however, in their admiration for Homer, attempted to construct quantitative English dactylic hexameters, ending them, as in common classical verse, with spondees. Edgar Allan Poe had this to say about Longfellow’s stab at translating the Swedish dactyls of a [sic] poet called Tegner:
In attempting (what never should be attempted) a literal version of both the words and the metre of this poem, Professor Longfellow has failed to do justice either to his author or himself. He has striven to do what no man ever did well and what, from the nature of the language itself, never can be well done. Unless, for example, we shall come to have an influx of spondees in our English tongue, it will always be impossible to construct an English hexameter. Our spondees, or we should say, our spondaic words, are rare. In Swedish they are nearly as abundant as in the Latin and Greek. We have only ’compound’, ’footfall’, and a few other similar ones.
Hela Poes artikel finns f.ö. här:
http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=l&p=c&a=p&ID=15610&c=129
Nästa!