Sinuhe 2011

[jahasjahas]

So it seems the following sentence would make sense in Finnish and would be interpreted in a metaphorical sense...not literally: ??

Minä on väsynyt elämisestä tämän valheen/valeen.

How's the grammar? I'm sure it's not quite right ...

"Minä olen väsynyt elämään (tässä) valheessa."

I think the original "kyllästynyt valheeseen" should be interpreted as an abstract concept. So maybe "tired of dishonesty" in English?

[Rob A.]

So it seems the following sentence would make sense in Finnish and would be interpreted in a metaphorical sense...not literally: ??

Minä on väsynyt elämisestä tämän valheen/valeen.

How's the grammar? I'm sure it's not quite right ...

"Minä olen väsynyt elämään (tässä) valheessa."

I think the original "kyllästynyt valheeseen" should be interpreted as an abstract concept. So maybe "tired of dishonesty" in English?

So it's "tired to" ...illative...??? Or, is this an agent participle ... "I am tired in this lived-by- me lie." ...???

[jahasjahas]

So it's "tired to" ...illative...??? Or, is this an agent participle ... "I am tired in this lived-by- me lie." ...???

It's the illative of the MA-infinitive (not sure what the old term was, third infinitive?). "Olen väsynyt juoksemaan alennusmyynneissä." (Although a Finn might be more likely to express the same thought as "En jaksa enää juosta alennusmyynneissä".)

Your "I am tired in this lived-by-me lie." would be "Olen kyllästynyt elämääni valheeseen."* (Like "Olen kyllästynyt valitsemaani vaimoon."? )

*You'd probably want to say "Olen kyllästynyt valheeseen, jota olen elänyt." to avoid a garden path sentence.

[Rob A.]

The dismal saga continues.... I've dealt with two paragraphs this time:

A. Sillä ihminen pahuudessaan on julmempi ja paatuneempi kuin virran krokotiili. Hänen sydämensä on kovempi kiveä. Hänen turhuutensa on tomua köykäisempi. Upota hänet virtaan, niin hän vaatteittensa kuivuttua on sama kuin ennen. Upota hänet suruun ja pettymykseen, ja jos hän nousee, hän nousee samana kuin ennen. Paljon muutoksia olen minä, Sinuhe, nähnyt elämäni päivinä, mutta kaikki on jälleen samalla tavoin kuin ennen eikä ihminen ole muuttunut. Myös on niitä, jotka sanovat, ettei sellaista, mikä on tapahtunut, ole milloinkaan ennen tapahtunut, mutta tämä on turhaa puhetta.


Literally...

"For human in his wickedness/nastiness is more cruel and more callous than a river crocodile. His heart is harder than stone. His futility is lighter than dust. Sink him in the river, then after his clothing having dried he is the same as before. Sink him in sorry and disappointment, and if he rises, he rises as the same as before. Many changes have I, Sinuhe, seen during the days of my life, but all is again the same way as before and human hasn't changed. Also are those who say that such as has happened, has never happened before, but this is useless talk."

Well...not too much difficulty for me here...a few things though:

1. pahuudessaan ...wiktionary says this is an obsolete word....what would be a typical modern word which would have the appropriate meaning?

2. kovempi kiveä...I believe this is a "poetic" arrangment...I think the standard language would use... kiveä kovempi or kovempi kuin kivi Right???

3. Hänen turhuutensa on tomua köykäisempi....I'm not so sure I have this right....is this an idiomatic expression? It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me.....


B. Minä, Sinuhe, näin pojan kolhivan isänsä hengiltä kadun kulmassa. Näin köyhien nousevan rikkaita vastaan ja jumalien jumalia vastaan. Näin miehen, joka oli juonut viininsä kultaisista maljoista, kumartavan kurjuudessaan ammentamaan kämmenellään virran vettä. Ne, jotka olivat punninneet kultaa, kerjäsivät katujen kulmissa ja heidän vaimonsa myivät itsensä kuparirenkaan hinnasta maalatuille neekereille ostaakseen leipää lapsilleen.

"I, Sinuhe, saw a son beat his father to death on a street corner. I saw the poor rising against the rich, gods against gods. I saw a man, who drank his wine from gold goblets, stoop in his misery to his hand by scooping river water. They, who have weighed gold, begged on the street corners and their wives have sold themselves for the price of a copper ring to painted ( well...I won't translate this word ...and I'll only say that in Waltari's day this word did not have the same resonance as it does today...) in order to buy bread for their children."

The only phrase that was problematic here is:

1. ...kumartavan kurjuudessaan ammentamaan kämmenellään... "stooping in his misery to his hand by scooping..." I'm not sure about this ....I kumartava is a simple present participle with a genitive suffix and ammentama is an agent participle, with a third person possessive suffix...???

[AldenG]

Before getting into my own thoughts on your new material, I would just say that my belief is that Waltari's perspective and intent with Sinuhe was much larger than just WWII. As all-consuming as that war was for a particular handful of human generations, it was still but a moment in the historical perspective. And so it is startling to me that a critic or interpreter would try interpret the allegory through such a narrow prism. To me the very essence of Sinuhe, as stated already in its first paragraphs, is that it is written, sometimes slyly or impishly, to apply to all times and to appear to be speaking of ancient times when he is equally speaking of the present and vice versa. Of course the war was an enormous part of Waltari's own present, but I think he deliberately tried to transcend any given present time just as he tried to transcend any given past time. The writing is topical of everything and of nothing specific, and I have a hard time remembering anything in the book that particularly suggests WWII more than other wars or periods. And I suspect that if it did, he would regard that as a short-falling on his part

[AldenG]

Näin miehen kumartavan is the core of the first part of the sentence. You can think of it in possessive as "I saw a man's bowing/hunching" if that makes it easier to rationalize or remember that particular construct, though the meaning is that he saw a man doing it. There are other verbs he could have used that might be a little more literally realistic (or conform to English conceptualizations of the action) but this one sounds good.

kumartavan ammentamaan... bowing to ladle... Not necessarily a construct you hear each and every day but not remarkable, either. It is similar to lähden syömään, I'm going to eat, but then you can extend it to Joku näki minun lähtevän syömään. Someone saw me [my] leaving to eat. One could temporarily think of lähtevän syömään as leaving "into eating" but I doubt that is more helpful than just rehearsing a handful of syömään syömässä syömästä examples. And in a real translation we'd probably talk about lapping river water from his palm, shifting the focus from the scooping to the tongue action.

kurjuudessaan in his misery/wretchedness (kurjuus). Les Misérables is Kurjat in Finnish.

Näin miehen kumartavan ammentamaan virran vettä. I saw a man bowing to ladle river water kämmenellään with his palm.

I'm going to bed now and will leave the rest for others. But you are really starting to move along in this, with some apparent ease. After a few pages, Sinuhe will get off the universal observations for a while, write somewhat less pompously, and start talking about details of his life. Remember to re-read paragraphs, too, so that you can practice the flow of the structures in your mind -- or even out loud.

[onkko]

1. pahuudessaan ...wiktionary says this is an obsolete word....what would be a typical modern word which would have the appropriate meaning?

I dont think Paha(Evil) is obsolete, maybe that form (in his evilness) is bit old.

2. kovempi kiveä...I believe this is a "poetic" arrangment...I think the standard language would use... kiveä kovempi or kovempi kuin kivi Right???

Right.

3. Hänen turhuutensa on tomua köykäisempi....I'm not so sure I have this right....is this an idiomatic expression? It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me.....

To me it does have exact meaning and sense Sounds old and one what priest would say but still.
That is PC way to say to "he is ar_rogant as_shole and irrelevant bastard""
"his unworthiness is less than dust"

[AldenG]

*You'd probably want to say "Olen kyllästynyt valheeseen, jota olen elänyt." to avoid a garden path sentence.

That's a really interesting link about a term I hadn't heard before. It incidentally reminds us that the most difficult thing about English is one not often discussed specifically, namely what the article calls prosody -- rhythm, stress, and intonation.

To take examples from the article, nobody ever teaches us native speakers how to pronounce the first parts of these sentences differently:

The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi.
versus
The cotton clothing is made of remarkably soft thread.

and

The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.
versus
The complex houses were designed by foreign architects.

Yet almost all of us know how to do it (even though we can't necessarily explain it) and even excellent non-native speakers very often do not. The need to make such distinctions understood also explains why evolution has not yet eroded away the differences in pronunciation among samely spelled nouns, adjectives, and verbs. For instance, the first complex above is COMplex and the second one is comPLEX. (Or there's a different way to do it in which both "complex" are pronounced the same but the relationship between "complex" and "houses" is different in the two sentences.)

But the sentences about cotton are even more complicated to differentiate by pronunciation, requiring stress and rhythm and intonation.

[Rob A.]

Before getting into my own thoughts on your new material, I would just say that my belief is that Waltari's perspective and intent with Sinuhe was much larger than just WWII. As all-consuming as that war was for a particular handful of human generations, it was still but a moment in the historical perspective. And so it is startling to me that a critic or interpreter would try interpret the allegory through such a narrow prism. To me the very essence of Sinuhe, as stated already in its first paragraphs, is that it is written, sometimes slyly or impishly, to apply to all times and to appear to be speaking of ancient times when he is equally speaking of the present and vice versa. Of course the war was an enormous part of Waltari's own present, but I think he deliberately tried to transcend any given present time just as he tried to transcend any given past time. The writing is topical of everything and of nothing specific, and I have a hard time remembering anything in the book that particularly suggests WWII more than other wars or periods. And I suspect that if it did, he would regard that as a short-falling on his part

OK...perhaps it was too early in my reading of this material for me to be offering up opinions about the author's intent. But, yes, he does seem to make it clear that he thinks humans are a "nasty piece of work"....always have been and always will be.... Ihmiset eivät ole koskaan yhtään erilainen.... Now how would a native speaker say this?

[Edit: Oh yes...and I see that ammentamaan is not an agent participle, but rather a third infinitive form with an illative case suffix...not always easy for me to distinguish... It looks like it could be an agent participle with a third person possessive suffix...but now I seem to be remembering that the "agent", which I think has to be animate, is put in front of the agent participle...which is not the situation here....]

[Rob A.]

3. Hänen turhuutensa on tomua köykäisempi....I'm not so sure I have this right....is this an idiomatic expression? It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me.....

To me it does have exact meaning and sense Sounds old and one what priest would say but still.
That is PC way to say to "he is ar_rogant as_shole and irrelevant bastard""
"his unworthiness is less than dust"

Hmmm...you mean:

Hän on röyhkeä perse ja epäoleellinen äpärä....

[jahasjahas]

1. pahuudessaan ...wiktionary says this is an obsolete word

Could you show me this? All I found was the third definition of "pahuus", "(archaic) Alternative spelling of pahus.", but that's very irrelevant.

Ihmiset eivät ole koskaan yhtään erilainen.

Grammatically correct: "Ihmiset eivät ole koskaan (yhtään) erilaisia.", but that would mean "People are never different (at all)." So let's say "Ihmiset eivät koskaan muutu.", "People never change."

"he is ar_rogant as_shole and irrelevant bastard" -- Hän on röyhkeä perse ja epäoleellinen äpärä.

Maybe "Hän on röyhkeä kusipää ja turha äpärä." Äpärä isn't as common as "bastard" by a long shot, but it has a nice perkele-like R.

[Rob A.]

1. pahuudessaan ...wiktionary says this is an obsolete word

Could you show me this? All I found was the third definition of "pahuus", "(archaic) Alternative spelling of pahus.", but that's very irrelevant.

OK...maybe I was reading too much into it....

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pahus

So I assume the "normal", modern word for "evil" would be, as an adjective, paha, [pahassaan] or as a noun, pahe, [paheessaan]..??

Ihmiset eivät ole koskaan yhtään erilainen.

Grammatically correct: "Ihmiset eivät ole koskaan (yhtään) erilaisia.", but that would mean "People are never different (at all)." So let's say "Ihmiset eivät koskaan muutu.", "People never change."

"he is ar_rogant as_shole and irrelevant bastard" -- Hän on röyhkeä perse ja epäoleellinen äpärä.

Maybe "Hän on röyhkeä kusipää ja turha äpärä." Äpärä isn't as common as "bastard" by a long shot, but it has a nice perkele-like R.

Thanks

[AldenG]

Pahuus (Evil, evilness, badness) is not in itself an outdated word, in my opinion, only its use as an alternative spelling of pahus (devil). I didn't know it could be used that way until I went to see what you you had been looking at in Wiktionary.

Pahe (vice) is the opposite of hyve (virtue). The usual use of these words is to refer to a specific habit or facet of character. I don't think they can be used they way we might say "Vice will always be with us, or Every person should aspire to Virtue." Well, at least not in singular. I suppose in plural they may start to reference something less specific, but still not the same kind of generality as pahuus or hyvyys.

Paha is just an adjective, though like most adjectives, in isolation it can refer to a person or thing that is paha. I think that on some occasion we've talked somewhere in FF about Hyvät, pahat ja rumat.

[AldenG]

Another word that comes to mind for bastard as a pejorative is paskahousu. You might expect it to be in plural like smarty-pants, but in Finnish such words are in singular. The other -housu that springs to mind is hätähousu. Although hätä is emergency, a hätähousu is a person in an impatient rush about anything (especially if it's a chronic state), similar to hair on fire or pants on fire but not as dramatic.

Paskahousu might come from Swedish skitstövel, although stövel is a boot rather than pants. Or hätähousu may have arisen much like vihoviimeinen, upouusi, and typötyhjä, then been adapted for paskahousu. I'm not sure and I suppose both routes could have contributed.

[Upphew]

Paskahousu might come from Swedish skitstövel, although stövel is a boot rather than pants.

Maybe the !"#¤% had fallen from the pants to the boots when Swedes saw the fleeing soldiers during the Thirty Years war