Esperanto of Dune
In light of the Dune hype, and since it's my favourite science fiction series, I've picked out a few quotes for translation amusement.
"how often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him"
This one caught my eye because of that neat phrasing: "rages denial". You think about people raging (intransitively), and you think of them in a rage (noun-ly). But you don't often think of them direct-objectly.. or transitively... or basically "raging something". And then also, to be honest, "inner self" didn't feel so easy the more I thought about it either.
Firstly, furioza "furious" can be verbified as usual with a verb ending: furiozi "to rage, to be furious", as the dictionary at vortaro.net will tell you. It will also tell you that this verb is intransitive - i.e. it can't receive a direct object; you can't rage something; la viro furiozas neadon is apparently not to be.
Now, "rages denial" is weird in English too, so you may wonder why we can't just be weird in Esperanto. But the transitivity of verbs in Esperanto is particularly fixed - there are clear methods of altering words to achieve changes in transitivity and the meaning of words often include a definition that very obviously encodes whether or not the verb could apply to a direct object (an important reason for using a monolingual Esperanto dictionary). So if you tried to get away with the same shenanigans, it is more than likely going to look like a mistake.
For example, the definition of boli "to boil" includes the notion that the thing doing the boiling is itself increased in temperature to its boiling point. So you could never use it in a phrase like "she boiled the kettle", because it would still mean that her temperature has reached boiling point. For that, you'd instead use boligi "to cause to boil".
Even worse though, we can't even use -ig in our translation because "to cause to rage" isn't the meaning we're after - the man doesn't cause "denial" to rage - he's still raging himself - but it's characterised by denial.
A literal rendering, with none of the original's originality would be:
... la kolera viro furiozas kun neado...
... the angry man rages with denial...
The word for "denial" is admittedly cool in itself since it's literally made of ne "no, not" plus the -ad suffix (for showing ongoing or repeated action), i.e. prolonged no-ing!
But can we do better than such a flatly literal translation of the meaning? Can we capture that feeling that the denial is part of the raging action, rather than just something that is just hanging out "with" the rage?
The closest I've thought of so far is to adverbify the denial, neade "denially, denialedly"!
la dezerta muso furiozas neade
the desert mouse raged denial? denially? with denial?
Then despite all knowledge of how we use the pronoun si to refer back to the subject of the sentence (see previous post), or mem for emphasising an action is done by the self and no other, it occurred to me that when "self" is used as a common noun as in "his inner self", I had no idea what was an appropriate word. I think the best I found was memo a noun formed from mem using the -o noun ending:
memo
self, "persono, konscia pri sia individueco" (see dictionary)
And then by the magic of the -a adjective-making ending added onto en "in" to get "inner":
kiel ofte estas ke la kolera viro furiozas neade pri tio, kion lia ena memo diras al li
how often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him
Up next we have:
"no more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a hero"
There's a sort of galloping feel to it isn't there? And then the use of the archaic "befall" to which "fall" later calls back, helping the rhythmic quality.
Luckily, some of the rhythm, which I feel is contributed by the snappy short words and the longer words filled with short staccato syllables, is mostly reflected in the Esperanto too. E.g. terura katastrofo "terrible disaster" - lovely and bumpy. A little more can be added by choosing terms like popolo for people instead of some other construction (like homoj).
The most tricky though is retaining the complementary "befall" - "fall" pairing. The bland literal translation for "befall" might be okazi "to happen", though that does lose the hint in "befall" that the happening is a bad one "could happen to your people" - bleurgh. Okazaĉi? Misokazi?
How about instead we build something from fali to keep that rhythm?
surfali
befall, fall upon (from sur- "on" + fali "to fall")
The dictionary certainly has precedent for subfali "to succumb, to collapse beneath, to fall under" from sub- "under".
ne pli terura katastrofo povus surfali vian popolon ol ke ili falu en la manojn de heroo
no more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a hero
I stand completely and brazenly confident in my use of ol ke ili falu (literally: "than that they should fall")… And totally didn't keep trying to swap in a -us construction in self-doubt... Let me know if you think I should justify myself...
And lastly, we have something slightly puzzling on first glance:
"the day the flesh shapes and the flesh the day shapes"
The usual interpretation is that on one hand, what happens in a time can shape us (the flesh), but equally on the other hand, we may shape the times around us too.
But it's obvious that the original was meant to be a structural head-scratcher, so that you'd have to do the work of teasing apart the meaning on a second glance, rather than it being spelled out for you. Otherwise, Frank Herbert would have said, at the very least:
the flesh shapes the day and also the day shapes the flesh
A little lacklustre, right? So you wouldn't want to render the literal meaning with the clarity of a foghorn in Esperanto either:
la karno formas la tagon kaj ankaŭ la tago formas la karnon
And you may not even want to keep the identical structure as English either, since Esperanto's -n perhaps makes things a little obvious still:
la tagon la karno formas kaj la karnon la tago formas
But this -n does give us the power to reorder things such that they still have grammatical sense, but present a little extra head-stratch on account of the unusualness:
la tagon la karno formas kaj la tago la karnon formas
Now we have two phrases with the exact same structure, and the careful placement of the -n is the only thing that flips the meaning between the two, which in my opinion gives that second-glance-necessary feeling (dua-rigard-enda sento?).
la spico devas flui...
