one who embellishes is a blasphemer.
buluŋ sun iŧin ŧåder,
ak taskèlneŋ altènda,
ak talaineŋ kâzènda;
5ip sal-ŧåder
Ag oi at Altèn Kan
Altèn Ârèg îneilyx.
Bârennaŋ sèkkan balaze đôgol;
đâze toldera mâllex,
10ülgüzüđok đonôk.
Das Eckenland bewohnt er,
das Eckenwasser trinkt er
unter der weissen Bergkoppe,
an dem weissen Meere
5er errichtet seine Jurte
Alten Kan mit weissblauem Rosse
mit der Gattin Alten Âreg.
Ein aus ihrer Leber hervorgegangenes Kind ist nicht da;
die Steppe ist voll von Vieh,
10ohne Zahl (eig. ohne Sohle) auch das Volk.
This translation is fairly literal. Line 8, translated as “Ein aus ihrer Leber hervorgegangenes Kind ist nicht da” (there is no child that has come out from her liver), is literally correct; only a linguist could translate it with even closer attention to the original: “from-her-liver come-out her-child is-not.” When Schiefner later published only the German translation of this and other oral epic poems of Castrén’s collection in his Heldensagen der Minussinschen Tataren he added the subtitle “rhythmisch bearbeitet” (rhythmically adapted) to his book. Accordingly he signalled the poetic character of the originals by using regularly stressed lines of four trochees and smoothed the translation of possibly odd-sounding expressions. Line 8 reads here: “Ohne Kind blieb ihre Ehe” (their marriage was without child) (Schiefner 1859:1). This is clearly the meaning of the line, but should the liver really be sacrificed for the sake of easy reading?
As Hatto points out, literal translation can be of different degrees: literal in the sense of a linguistic gloss (of the kind illustrated above by “from-her-liver come-out her-child is-not”) or literal in the sense of adhering to the sense of the original as much as possible and yet producing an idiomatic and grammatically correct text in the translation language. Of course, the problem lies in the qualification “as much as possible.” It is on this point that a voluminous scholarly literature on the principles and methodology of translation, both from a linguistic and a literary point of view, has developed over the last half century, with venerable antecedents such as Matthew Arnold’s essay “On Translating Homer”, first published in 1861, and Francis W. Newman’s lengthy and learned reply. [6]