Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” is perhaps the world’s most famous nonsense poem. It’s been translated into many different languages, which is no small feat considering that the nonsense words need to be translated as well. These words aren’t just random strings of characters, but rather plausibly English-sounding words which, due to their resemblance to other bona fide words, evoke certain meanings. So, for example, one translator rendered the nonsense word “slithy” from the original into “lubricilleux” in French.
The Middle Earth works of J.R.R. Tolkien pose a similar challenge for translators. Tolkien used a lot of made-up proper names seemingly derived from English words. In the German translation of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the protagonist’s surname is “Beutlin”, which recalls “Beutel” (lit. “bag”) the same way that “Baggins” evokes the English “bag”.
I’m trying to collect a list of other famous works of literature which make heavy use of this sort of made-up or nonsense vocabulary, and which have already been professionally translated into another language. Can anyone help me think of other translated stories and poems?
Maybe not exactly what you’re after, but a book in a similar vein is “The Meaning of Liff” by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, in which they took existing names of geographical places and defined them as words for concepts for which no words existed before. Very funny. I own the German version “Der tiefere Sinn des Labenz”. Since this version predominantly uses German place names instead of the English original, you cannot exactly call it a translation. But this version has the original text as an appendix, and many of the definitions are equivalent to the English original, but with a German name instead, very clever sometimes.
Yes, I’ve read The Meaning of Liff, though I had no idea there was a German version as well!
If you like fantasy dictionaries like these, then you might be interested in Ben Schott’s Schottenfreude: German Words for the Human Condition (Blue Rider Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-399-16670-9), in which the author takes everyday concepts and names them with sesquipedalian German compounds. Example coinages are Mahlneid (coveting your dining partner’s restaurant order), Traumneustartversuch (attempting to resume a dream after being roused), and Kühlschrankblockade (staring hungrily but irresolutely at your open refrigerator).
The book is also available in a German edition (Schottenfreude: Meisterwerke der deutschen Sprache, transl. Rainer Wieland, 2013, Albrecht Knaus Verlag, ISBN 978-3-813-50602-0) though it’s only the definitions and footnotes which have been translated.
Rather than a story or poem, there is the partial nonsense lyrics of the song “Mairzy Doats”. Not sure if this has been translated and therefore meets your criteria.
Intereresting. Though I’ve read some of Schott’s almanacs (in the German translation), I didn’t know about this dictionary. Sounds funny. But one small quibble: Schott may think that he invented the concept for Mahlneid, but there’s already a perfectly cromulent German word for this phenomen: Futterneid.
I found it interesting when I first connected Cinderella with the German Aschenbrödel. (i.e. connecting “cinder” - rock formed from lava - with the German word for “ash”).
Yeah, there are actually a number of oversights of this sort. His shtick is that he’s “borrowing” German compounds for concepts which are reasonably common but until now lacked their own English words. But there do already exist English words for a few of his definitions—for instance, he invents Pissoirzurückhaltung for the “inability to urinate when other people are present”, perhaps unaware that “paruresis” (and the more vulgar “piss-shyness”) have already been around for decades. Of course, this doesn’t significantly dampen one’s overall enjoyment of the book, which comes just as much from the meticulously researched footnotes and commentary as it does the neologisms.
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, the protagonist’s surname is “Beutlin”, which recalls “Beutel” (lit. “bag”) the same way that “Baggins” evokes the English “bag”
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Similarly, he’s ‘Saquet’ in France.
Would you count the punning names in the Asterix comics? They’re usually changed according to the language of the translation.
A note with regard to Joyce: there are, apparently, two Chinese translations of Ulysses out there- one literal and one attempting to preserve the word play. I cannot imagine doing the Wake. Though plenty have: Forthcoming Book on Translating Finnegans Wake | BLT
Interesting. My French edition of Bilbo le Hobbit leaves his name as “Baggins.” My Spanish edition El Hobbit has him as Bolsón which seems to mean “school bag” or “knapsack.” German, as someone said, he’s Beutlin. In Norwegian, Lommelun and in Hungarian Zsakos. He remains Baggins (or Bagins) in Romanian, Serbian, and Hebrew.
I can’t tell you the Russian, Japanese, or Korean. (I have the books, but no way of reading their alphabets/hieroglyphs. I have a collection based on my travels)
The problem here (I presume) is the rhyming joke of Baggins of Bag-End, and translators always have trouble with puns and rhymes.
How’s the name translated in The Lord of the Rings? IIRC Tolkien included some extensive instructions for translators in the appendix. It’s possible your French, Romanian, Serbian, and Hebrew versions of The Hobbit were translated before LOTR was published.
Yep, though in the professional literature a lot has been written on strategies for coping with wordplay. Traductio: Essays on Punning and Translation, an edited volume by Dirk Delabastita, comes to mind. The problem also gets occasional coverage in The Translator, an academic journal for translation studies.
No clue, I don’t have a collection of Lord of the Rings books – it’s expensive enough to get The Hobbit, and often difficult. (I was only in Korea for a short time, I had to run to a bookstore while the tour group was seeing some temple.)
One of the more amusing examples is that in Danish (and probably other Scandinavian languages), the word for king is kong. So how do you translate King Kong? Answer: Kong King. Donald Duck becomes Anders And (and being the word for duck and Anders a common first name).
