![]() ![]() It’s a trick Jidi pulls to great effect throughout the collection. We know that there is not much time left” In “I, Snow Leopard”, or “Snaw Ghaist” in Stuart Patterson’s Lowland Scots, he focuses on a single snow leopard, taking stock of the natural world around him, simple yet rendered in epic strokes: “I am the true son of the snowy mountains / Watching over solitude, persisting” / “Ah’m the verra chiel o the snaw-croont bens / Haudin gaird owre lanesomeness, ayebidin”.īy sticking to this eyeline, Jidi presents a creature who is the victim of great machinations far beyond his control, while still fully, terrifyingly aware of them. The specific Scots dialect changes as you carry through the narrative, totalling three (Shetlandic, Doric and Lowland Scots) – so really six languages then, and no longer parallel translation, nor a triangular one, but a maddening, beautiful pentagonal one.Īcross the three sections, Jidi pairs the epic with the slight, the fragile. Jidi’s original at the back, English on the left by Denis Mair, and a dialect of Scots on the right. Perhaps it’s better named triangular translation, three versions of the same poem dancing across the page. The musicality of poetry is obvious when you have the two parts of a poem – sound and meaning – separated onto two sides of a page.Įnter Mither Tongue, a collection of translations of the Chinese poet Jidi Majia, and one that I would struggle to call parallel. Feeling out the Spanish sounds out loud with no understanding, then checking the following page and finding that sweet intersection, where sound precedes meaning and then adds to it. I have fond memories of reading Pablo Neruda for the first time, original text on the left, English translation on the right. Parallel translations always bring a certain kind of joy. Mither Tongue – A love letter to translation ![]()
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