Der Struwwelpeter
von Heinrich Hoffmann
(1809 - 1894)
Sieh einmal, hier steht er,
Pfui! der Struwwelpeter
An den Händen beiden
Ließ er sich nicht schneiden
Seine Nägel fast ein Jahr;
Kämmen ließ er sich nicht sein Haar.
Pfui! ruft da ein Jeder:
Garst'ger Struwwelpeter!
~ ~ ~
See Shaggy Peter! Here he stands,
Dirty hair, disgusting hands.
Gross! His nails are never cut;
They're filthy and they're black as soot;
No water's touched his skin for weeks,
Not a drop's been near his cheeks;
And this slob, I do declare,
Not once this year has combed his hair!
That's so gross! Anything to me is sweeter
Than gazing upon Shaggy Peter.
7 comments:
Traduttore, traitore. Poetry is difficult to translate, in this case the translatior decided to continue with the rhyme form, adding a few bits and pieces of his own. You can argue about this practice, some things will get lost in the translation in any case.
Below you will find the 1:1 translation, not as poetic, but these are the actual words.
Just look, here (he) stands
Fie *! (it's) Scrubby Peter** !
On both hands
he had not let cut
His nails for almost a year !
He did not let comb his hair
Fie ! cries almost everyone
Nasty Scrubby Peter !
*archaic expression of disgust, Uhg or Tut may also apply. very mild form of cursing
**shabby does not work in this sence, the focus lies on the uncombed hair and not the general looks, therefore scrubby
blast, I should be hainging with Sweetiepie, but instead I am translating Nursery rhymes......
well, i found a fairly uninspired antique English translation, with the rhyming scheme, and jazzed it up and dragged it into the 21st century.
In the USA, I don't know about UK or any other English-speaking country, 10-year-old kids yell "Gross!" and " That's so gross!" at icky things, like public nose picking, or a frog that got run over by an SUV. It's not slang-of-the-moment but has had real, almost permanent staying power among little kids for at least 15 years. So I thought "Gross!" might express the Geist of Pfui! in this situation.
What was fascinating was Pfui! In the USA, Fooey! has been an innocent family-safe faux curse for around 80 years. You can say Fooey! in church. Now I finally know where it comes from -- deutschesprache immigrants brought it here. In the old cartoons, when Donald Duck has one of his psychotic meltdowns, he yells Fooey!
Wikipedia.en translated Struwwel as Shabby -- but that always depends on who the traditore was who wrote the Struwwelpeter wiki.
Maybe Uwe will see this post and draw us a postage stamp of Stuwwelpeter.
oh, you made the translation, sorry if I may have critzicized you. i bow and apologize.
Sweetiepie gave me this dictionnary of german etymology. Accordingt to this book kthe term pfui or fu or foey or any other distusted sound that can be made by exhaling air can be tracked down to about 1200 years in the various pre-german languages. the nasty words alre always the most interesting ones
Well, some old dead white guy made the skeleton of this translation. I just pumped it up with anabolic steroids and methamphetamines and high fructose corn syrup.
And you didn't hurt my feelings at all. I am the drunk driver of visual art, and the impaired airline pilot of poetic translation. But I always think it's fun to take a dead, stiff piece of English and try to bring it back to life again.
There is or used to be a scholarly journal called Maledicta ... wait a second ...
http://sonic.net/maledicta/journal.html
"The International Journal of Verbal Aggression" that Tells The Ultimate Ph.D. Thesis Truth about every filthy curse human beings have ever hurled at each other.
1200 years ... sure, a good interjection of disgust never dies.
Oh, pre-Germanic lingos ... my sweetie-pie can read (the only surviving written document in) Gothic, the Gutspeil / Gospel of Mark, the one with The Lord's Prayer in it.
From Wikipedia:
Ulfilas or Wulfila (meaning "little wolf") (ca. 310 – 383), bishop, missionary, and bible translator, was a Goth or half-Goth who had spent time inside the Roman Empire at the peak of the Arian controversy. Ulfilas was ordained a bishop by Eusebius of Nicomedia and returned to his people to work as a missionary. To escape religious persecution by Gothic chief Athanaric, he obtained permission from Constantius II to immigrate with his flock of converts to Moesia and settle near Nicopolis ad Istrum, in what is now northern Bulgaria. There, Ulfilas translated the Bible from Greek into the Gothic language. For this he devised the Gothic alphabet.
Fragments of his translation have survived, including the Codex Argenteus, in the University Library of Uppsala in Sweden.
Ulfilas converted many among the Goths, preaching an Arian Christianity, which, when they reached the western Mediterranean, set them apart from their overwhelmingly "orthodox" (i.e. Trinitarian) neighbors and subjects.
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So if you ever get an e-mail or a postcard in Gothic, send it to my sweetie-pie. She don't care if you're Ostrogoth oder Visigoth, she is not prejudiced. (But she really hates Vandals.)
The pump don't work 'cause the Vandals took the Handles.
hey this website with that journal kicks a ;)
MY sweetiepie (soon back, hopefully) said that the Vandals were not that bad actually. back in the old days the romans wrote history and since the romans hated everyone who was not roman they gave you a big diss. therefore we dont konw much about the celts in central Europe. My sweetieepie is into celts and runes and stuff. What an idiot i was when i gave her Tolkien, now she is plundering my medieval book collection,now she wants to read the Edda, Beowulf (I still have to get her the new movie)and the Nibelungen, Erec, Parzival instead of reading my heart
we are off-topic again, but medieval greetings to your missus anyway
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