| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: all living languages, yet I doubt if it can furnish any word
capable by itself of calling up the complex images here suggested
by smarrita.[37] And this is but one example, out of many that
might be cited, in which the lack of exact parallelism between
the two languages employed causes every translation to suffer.
[35] See Diez, Romance Dictionary, s. v. "Marrir."
[36] On literally retranslating lost into Italian, we should get
the quite different word perduta.
[37] The more flexible method of Dr. Parsons leads to a more
satisfactory but still inadequate result:--
"Half-way on our life's Journey, in a wood,
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde: So he crept downstairs and opened the front door quite softly, and
went out into the garden. But when the children saw him they were
so frightened that they all ran away, and the garden became winter
again. Only the little boy did not run, for his eyes were so full
of tears that he did not see the Giant coming. And the Giant stole
up behind him and took him gently in his hand, and put him up into
the tree. And the tree broke at once into blossom, and the birds
came and sang on it, and the little boy stretched out his two arms
and flung them round the Giant's neck, and kissed him. And the
other children, when they saw that the Giant was not wicked any
longer, came running back, and with them came the Spring. "It is
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber: checks were the thing in gents' suitings. When the baseball season
opened the girls swarmed on it. Those that didn't understand
baseball pretended they did. When the team was out of town our
form of greeting was changed from, "Good-morning!" or "Howdy-do!"
to "What's the score?" Every night the results of the games
throughout the league were posted up on the blackboard in front of
Schlager's hardware store, and to see the way in which the crowd
stood around it, and streamed across the street toward it, you'd
have thought they were giving away gas stoves and hammock couches.
Going home in the street car after the game the girls used to
gaze adoringly at the dirty faces of their sweat-begrimed heroes,
Buttered Side Down |
