Sinuhe 2011

[AldenG]

As jahasjahas suggested, I'm continuing a thread that ended up being about Sinuhe.

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Jahasjahas wrote:

If you didn't drop the "n" and add the "e" in typing, then your copy contains errors mine does not -- and possibly vice versa, though so far I've only noticed the mairi te liakseni that I mentioned earlier, plus some stuff in the ToC.

Also "memeisyydessä" should be "menneisyydessä". If they're not typos by Rob, they might be cases of bad OCR (optical character recognition). So many errors in a short passage seems a bit worrying.

I have nothing to add to the translation, except maybe for the use of "bored". I'd say he's "grown weary" or something similar. "Bored" sounds to me like "oh, how awfully boring those gods are".

Should you start a new thread for Sinuhe? Others might be interested too, now or later. I have to confess that the only Waltari novels I have finished are the Komisario Palmu detective stories, which are excellent, but sadly not translated into English.

[AldenG]

As I recall, the Walford translation also uses "weary," and all things considered, it seems the best choice for the context. As far as pure meaning, "fed up with" is probably the most accurate statement of Sinuhe's actual attitude toward such things, and it is a potential translation of kyllästynyt as well; but stylistically it doesn't really fit his authorial voice.

I think it would be great if we ended up discussing sentences, structures, and possibly other things about Sinuhe as well.

I started reading with a couple of Astrid Lindgren translations and a translation of some Tom-Swift-like space book I've apparently lost since then. But it turns out that children's books are not all that simple or all that great learning material in other respects, either. So I did one Komisario Palmu and then graduated to Sinuhe. Since there weren't simple readers or annotated versions of anything back then, I still think I lucked onto a good choice.

I also liked Waltari's Johannes Angelos, which seems to be available as "Dark Angel" in English. and I think I also read "Turms kuolematon." Lately I guess I've mostly read some Ilkka Remes books -- which for the thriller genre have really good Finnish. Or really by most any standard. They're good thrillers, too, and ought to appear on the international market in English. They're better than much that is already there. For learning to read Finnish, they'd probably be more difficult than Waltari to start out with, but it seems to me they are excellent models of use of the language.

[Rob A.]

The two additional "errors"...*ylistääkeseni and *memeisyydessä...were typos made by me... I typed out the Finnish version....gives a little more practice than simply copying and pasting.....

Thanks for the feedback...I suppose stylistic choices are always a bit difficult to debate.... The English version did have "weary for kyllästynyt but to me "weary" sounds kind of Victoria when applied in this way..... "weary" is what I feel after a long, hard bike ride or hike, not when I'm comtemplating the latest Papal Edict or the Royal Family.... those topics merely "bore" me ...

But I suppose what I do want to understand is the "Finnish mindset" with these Finnish words...the situations under which such and such a word would be used....

But such stylistic issues aside, this sort of ponderous, purposeful, "elevated" style, obviously intended by the author, is useful for seeing how words can be strung together in a meaningful way. It is also how I would expect, unfortunately, I'll be speaking Finnish for a long time to come ....

[kalmisto]

If anybody is interested here is the American movie version of "Sinuhe egyptiläinen" ( 24 clips ) :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGoAYTrNWTA

A friend of mine who has both read the book by Waltari and seen the movie told me that the movie has very little to do with the book.

[AldenG]

My parents were watching that movie the night I was born, went from the drive-in theater to the hospital in fact.

But I only learned of this and of the existence of the movie itself at 29, when I sent them the English version of the book as a present.

I've seen the movie and as the whole togas-and-wristwatches genre goes, it's OK. I don't remember if that's one of the ones with memorable quotes from antiquity such as "I kid you not."

[Rob A.]

OK..I've gone through the next paragraph:

Paragraph 2:

Sillä mitä kaikkina aikoina on kirjoitettu, se on kirjoitettu joko jumalien tähden tai
ihmisten tähden. Tahdon näet myös faraot lukea ihmisiksi, sillä meidän kaltaisiamme he ovat,
vihassa ja pelossa, himossa ja pettymyksessä. Eikä heillä ole mitään eroa meidän kanssamme,
vaikka heidät tuhannesti kirjoitettaisiin jumalien joukkoon. Vaikka tuhannen tuhatta kertaa
heidät kirjoitettaisiin jumalien joukkoon, he ovat ihmisiä, muiden ihmisten kaltaisia. Heillä on
valta tyydyttää vihansa ja paeta pelkoaan, mutta himosta ja pettymyksestä ei valta heitä säästä.
Mutta mikä on kirjoitettu, se on kirjoitettu kuninkaiden käskystä tai jumalien mairittelemiseksi
tai ihmisten pettämiseksi uskomaan sellaista, mitä ei ole tapahtunut. Tai että kaikki on tapahtunut toisin, kuin todella on tapahtunut. Tai että yhden tai toisen osuus siinä, mikä on tapahtunut, on suurempi tai pienempi kuin on totta. Tätä tarkoitan sanoessani, että hamasta muinaisuudesta tähän päivään asti kaikki, mitä on kirjoitettu, on kirjoitettu jumalien tähden tai ihmisten tähden.


I won't laboriously "parse" this paragraph in the forum, as the objective is to understand the Finnish, not to translate it.... I didn't have too much trouble, and I see the original second paragraph is quite different from the English translation... I've picked out a few phrases to ask questions about:

1. Sillä mitä kaikkina aikoina on kirjoitettu,
= "For that which has been written at all times,..." Does this capture the sense of the expression, ...kaikkina aikoina...???....which is in the essive case, implying a state of being.

2. Tahdon näet myös faraot lukea ihmisiksi, sillä meidän kaltaisiamme...
="I want, you see, that pharaohs also be considered humans, therefore of the same kind as us... "

This phrase was a little tougher.... näet, I think, is an interjection meaning , "you see/know"..??? and lukea carries the sense of "count as" or "be considered as"...??

ihmisiksi ...the translative plural... implies an ongoing state"....which, somehow, differs from kaikkina aikoina which seems to be a static state... So I suppose my question is why "being human" is a "translative" situation, and "all times" an "essive" situation?

3. ...hamasta munaisuudesta.......I came up with "from fuzzy antiquity...". I suppose there might be a better way to interpret this expression...???

[AldenG]

1. Sillä mitä kaikkina aikoina on kirjoitettu,
= "For that which has been written at all times,..." Does this capture the sense of the expression, ...kaikkina aikoina...???....which is in the essive case, implying a state of being.

The three main meanings of essive are role and state (which are rather similar) and time.

So your translation is correct although your explanation is just a little off. Kaikkina aikoina is analogous to tänä iltana, meaning "this evening." It's just a routine statement of when things were written, nothing more exotic or philosophical than that, with no point thinking how or why it means time. It just means time. Now maybe it's a little unusual to see kaikki applied to aika, but that's part of the tone of this book.

2. Tahdon näet myös faraot lukea ihmisiksi, sillä meidän kaltaisiamme...
="I want, you see, that pharaohs also be considered humans, therefore of the same kind as us... "

This phrase was a little tougher.... näet, I think, is an interjection meaning , "you see/know"..??? and lukea carries the sense of "count as" or "be considered as"...??

You're correct about that. Good work putting the interjection into perspective. I suspected it might be a tad confusing this early in the game.

Although lukea is normally "to read," it does still maintain the mostly obsolescent meaning of "count as" in certain expressions. I don't know that I see lukea ____ksi elsewhere very often if at all, but ______ mukaan luettuna ("including") is not uncommon.

ihmisiksi ...the translative plural... implies an ongoing state"....which, somehow, differs from kaikkina aikoina which seems to be a static state... So I suppose my question is why "being human" is a "translative" situation, and "all times" an "essive" situation?

The two instances aren't linked that way. (It's not like all words in a sentence will be in one case.)

Kaikkina aikoina is self-contained because it is simply one of the standard ways to report a time. Of course time can be confusing, because we have ensi viikolla, ensi kuussa, and ensi vuonna. But the first two are exceptions and essive is the standard case for non-clock-related expressions of time.

Similarly Luen faaraot ihmisiksi is self-contained and routine and analogous to sanoin heitä julmiksi (I called them cruel) or kutsuin häntä Pelleksi (I called him Pelle) or katsoimme heitä hulluiksi. There are no philosophical subtleties here, just standard usage. (Except I'm not sure about partitive versus accusative here. It's probably not a good idea for me to differ from Waltari, but maybe faaraot are special.)

Translative is the standard case -- or in keeping with my principles I should say that -ksi is the standard ending -- for attributing a characteristic with verbs like lukea, sanoa, kutsua, katsoa, etc. This "family" of attributions is what makes gives away the meaning of lukea ihmisiksi even if one isn't familiar with lukea as "count."

As this endeavor progresses, you may find yourself paying inreasing attention to active vs. passive, though when translating one often jumps back and forth over that fence just to make it sound better in English. He actually says "I want to count Pharaohs as human(s), see, because they are like us -- in hatred and in fear,in passion and in disillusionment." There are still some ways I would quibble with this translation of mine, which is one reason I don't like translating from Finnish. But it'll do for now.

3. ...hamasta munaisuudesta.......I came up with "from fuzzy antiquity...". I suppose there might be a better way to interpret this expression...???

Hama seems to be a rare word used only in a few combinations such as this one. It's a word I didn't remember on revisiting Sinuhe, but the combination of my not knowing it and its combination with muinaisuudesta made me almost certain what it was even before checking. Fuzzy (or obscure) is a good translation here, I think, though the actual connotation is more of distance. Alanne's dictionary has some other puzzling examples to gnaw on, but I think at this point it's probably best not to dwell on hama.

As you know, I've processed the text into a variety of lists and sortings and spent quite a few hours perusing them. One of the surprising things for me has been how very few I've had to look up when seeing them in isolation (less than a dozen so far), but hama was one of them.

I'm also concluding (VERY preliminarily) that while the number of unique distinctly inflected words in Sinuhe is a bit more than 37,500, the underlying vocabulary may be as little as about 1/10th that number. Of course it's almost impossible to decide how to count those things when there are so many compounds and various types of derivative words.

[jahasjahas]

You corrected your "kutsuin hänet" to "kutsuin häntä" before I managed to quote you

To me hama muinaisuus is simply "the distant past" or something similar. If hama has carried a more specific meaning earlier, it's lost to a modern speaker like me.

Edit: And now I realised you added the sentence about partitive vs. accusative. I'd say it's simply this sense of "luen" which requires the accusative.

[AldenG]

You corrected your "kutsuin hänet" to "kutsuin häntä" before I managed to quote you

For once, intuition led me right even when it meant I had to ignore a seemingly contrary example.

[jahasjahas]

Does the book contain the line "Eat !"#¤%, Sinuhe, and taste my blade."?

A guy in my dream used that as a meditative chant to ease his chronic pain.

[kalmisto]

hamasta-hamaan-hamassa : http://fi.w3dictionary.org/index.php?q=hamasta

and Urbaani sanakirja : http://urbaanisanakirja.com/word/hama/33633

[Rob A.]

More Sinuhe...

Kaikki palaa ennalleen eikä mitään utta ole auringon alla eikä ihminen muutu, vaikka hänen vaatteensa muutuvat ja myös hänen kielensä sanat muuttuvat. Siksi uskon, ettei tulevinakaan aikoina kirjoittaminen muutu siitä mitä tähän asti on kirjoitettu, koska ihminen itse ei muutu. Valheen ympärillä parveilevat näet ihmiset kuin kärpäset hunajakakun kimpussa ja sadunkertojan sanat tuoksuvat suitsutukselta hänen istuessaan karjanlannassa kadunkulmassa, mutta totuutta ihmiset pakenevat.

..."All returns to the same nothing is new under the sun the human does not change, even though one's clothes change and also the words of one's language change. Therefore I believe that neither during the coming times will writing change from what has been written until now, because the human him/herself does not change. Humans swarm around lies like flies attack a honeycake and story teller's words smell like incense while he is sitting in manure on the street corner, but humans run away from the truth."

Not too difficult... The problem areas:

1. ennalleen...for some reason I had trouble with this word. Is it a fixed form adverb? Is there a more common modern equivalent? Maybe another way to say this phrase?

2. tulevinakaan.... This is one of those pesky instructive case words (a time expression which requires the use of the instructive case... ) ...with a negative suffix added.... Have I understood this properly???

3. ....muutu siitä mitä tähän asti on kirjoitettu...this was hard to unscramble...Literally, "....changed from it what until here was written." How's that??

4. ...hänen istuessaan karjanlannassa...this is an example of a second infinitive in the instructive case ..."while ___ing" . I understand why hänen is there ...to make it clear that the storyteller is sitting in manure, not the observer....but I've forgotten why it has to be in the genitive...???

[AldenG]

Good work and good questions. Before I get to your questions I have only a couple of nits to pick.

It is "...his clothes change, and the words of his language change, too." There is probably some detail in there that is making it seem like "one's" to you, but hänen vaatteensa is simply "his clothes."

Then you chose "neither...nor" for tulevinakaan aikoina and as translations go, that's not fatally flawed. But as close rendering of intent, it doesn't quite get there. (Hence the question you asked about it.) In English we have some intuitive restrictions on piling too much negation on top of itself, which makes the sentence exactly as written tricky to translate closely (and end up with a good English sentence). But the key concept is "not/nor in future times, either." I can't quite get that to go in English with the other elements of the sentence, but once you sharpen your understanding of tulevinakaan aikoina, it's obvious from the rest of your translation that you understand what he is saying.

Then there is ihmiset parveilevat valheen ympäri and here again a change (to plural) works for translation. But he actually says "swarm around a lie like flies around a honeycake." I happen to think the singular also reads better than "around lies" but it's a matter of preference, really. And naturally one can always quibble about the most faithful or literal translation of kimpussa, kimppuun, etc., but this is a case where it's probably easy to agree that the phrase I wrote is the most idiomatic translation.

So to your questions:

1) Ennalleen is a fixed form adverb meaning "to how it was before", "to how things were before", "to the former status." I guess if you were going to explain it as literally as possible (but what does "literal" even mean in many of these situations?), you'd come up with "to its before." But being a common adverb, it's no longer tied meaning the sum of its parts.

2) We took care of that already.

3) Finnish has a problem saying something like "Don't think about what happened." It prefers to say something like "...about that which happened. (I started explaining here the alternative of using a adjectival past participle but it gets too diverting.) So Sinuhe is saying "..change from that which has been written up until now." I suspect the reason that se, mikä has persisted so stubbornly in Finnish is that it is a convenient case-adapter that make pieces of the sentence having incongruent cases fit nicely together. Call it Finnish duct tape if you will.

4) Because the storyteller is not the subject of the sentence. (The swarming people are.) As to why genitive is used to connect the two pieces, I'm not even sure what "why" would mean in this context. But if se, mikä is the duct tape, genitive must be the instant-stick glue of the Finnish language. It holds so many different constructs together that you stop wondering after a while. Many verbs want a genitive subject even in finite forms: Sinun täytyy, sinun pitää, sinun tulee, sinun on määrä... Of course one can start dividing such examples into different bins and zeroing in on precisely what distinguishes each from the other. But what they have in common is obvious: a genitive subject or other genitive complementary piece.

[AldenG]

You know, one could also ask how "be" and "fore" became "before" and how exactly it means before.

[jahasjahas]

Valheen ympärillä parveilevat näet ihmiset kuin kärpäset hunajakakun kimpussa ja sadunkertojan sanat tuoksuvat suitsutukselta hänen istuessaan karjanlannassa kadunkulmassa, mutta totuutta ihmiset pakenevat.

..."Humans swarm around lies like flies attack a honeycake and story teller's words smell like incense while he is sitting in manure on the street corner, but humans run away from the truth."

An extremely minor detail: "kertoa satuja" can also be interpreted as "to lie", so "sadunkertoja" (as opposed to the more neutral "tarinankertoja") might have the double meaning of storyteller and liar in this context.