From Troilus & Criseyde

[mirrorshard]

To go with my current research obsession, a little bit of free translation (original):

Go, little book! Go, my little tragedy! Before I die,
God grant thy maker might to make a comedy.
But, little book--don't envy other work,
but bow down and kiss the ground
where Virgil, Ovid, Omer, Lucan, and Stace walk.

I fear there's such diversity in English,
pray God that none miscopy thee!
- or worse, mismeasure your lines aloud.
And wherever you're read, or even sung,
I beseech God you're understood!

Comments

[mirabehn.livejournal.com]

Darling, your talent is showing. ;-)

*adores and admires so much*

I *love* this. I think I need to get you to translate more Middle English. :-)

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

I'm not entirely sure how much I approve of translating Middle English in bulk, any more than I do of translating Lallans, but I shall consider it!

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

Nice, especially considering that it's not the easiest job and quite a weird one too (the job, not the text). It has charm and the scansion feels right. Could I make a couple of suggestions? "Might make" instead of "might to make", and I'm not convinced by using "thee" as a) this is meant to be modern English, b) it looks odd mixed with "you". Although it does look nice and rhymes with "comedy" and "diversity", so I'm not sure about that one.

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Hm, I see what you mean on both. If I avoid "thee", though, I'll need to change the order of the line around to avoid having the soft falling sound of "you" at the end - "pray God you're not miscopied!" perhaps.

"God grant thy maker might make" I'd rather avoid I think - that gives a lot of close alliteration, whereas "thy maker the might to make" sets up a repeating ababab, with the punch of the th->t shift in the third. It might work with a line split, and putting one in there anyway wouldn't hurt. Hm.

Edit: Oh, I hadn't used "the might" anyway. Maybe I should change that and stick a line split in.

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

As you'll have realised by now, I took "might" as "would be possible", and I think this may confuse an audience. The line break could work for that.