ljodahått

A friend of a friend has asked me to do some translations of Norwegian poems for the liner notes of a CD. I don't speak Norwegian so am using French translations of the poems and then using a dictionary to compare my English versions with the Norwegian originals. What I am discovering is that English and Norwegian have many similarities in both vocabulary and word order. So in an odd way the process of translating is bringing me closer to the originals. For instance the word "vaste" in the French translation which I had originally translated as "vast" turned out in Norwegian to be "vide" so I changed it to "wide". It is almost as if I am translating from the Latinate to the Germanic sides of the English language's large vocabulary. If it were a Venn diagram then English and Norwegian would overlap on the left and English and French on the right with a very small zone in the middle (Normandy) where all three languages touch.

One word that I cannot find an equivalent for in either English or French is "emne". A Norwegian speaker tells me that this word refers to the piece of material from which something is produced and can be added as a suffix to pretty much any word - so you can have a spoon-emne or a screw-emne or a sword-emne. Does an equivalent exist in English? Perhaps in certain technical fields? The idea is a lovely one - it makes me think of those last, unfinished sculptures by Michelangelo where in a privileged glimpse of the creative process you can see the shapes emerging from/contained in the marble.

There is an essay by Italo Calvino where he speaks of the local dialect in San Remo, the town where he grew up; the houses in this town (as is often the case in Liguria) were built onto the sides of steep hills. This meant that there was often a space behind the house which was too steep and small to do much with. The dialect had a word for this space, "chintagna", which was also the word for the space between the bed and the wall. English is such a big language - both in terms of its global spread and also its vocabulary - that it is easy to get complacent and think we have everything we need in it but we don't have "chintagna" and unless I'm mistaken we don't have "emne".