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After seeing this post (by daphne) about vulvic imagery in medieval Christian texts, I decided (due to a combination of puzzle-solving curiosity and ADHD) to try to translate the text. I’ll let you fill in the very apropos linguist joke on your own 🤭 Anyway, I won’t bury the lead, so here are my translations. Scroll down for more detail on the process!
Transcription: Nous monstre tres dous dier me tresguint largesce Quant vousistes pour nous souffrir tant de destresce
Literal translation (attempt!): (It [this image]/God) shows us (this) very soft/sweet door, (which) signals generosity to me When you (God) wanted us to suffer so much distress
Freeish translation: To present us such a pleasant portal is, to me, a grand gesture of generosity When you’ve willed us so much woe
——— Ok so here’s what I did. I speak French decently, and at first glance it looked like Old/Middle French. After eyeballing it a little, I needed to look up medieval script to see if I was reading the letters properly. As I was doing this I was cross-checking words in O/M French to see if things were lining up. For the most part it went well but I ran into a couple of real head-scratchers. First, dier. I thought this was probably related to French dire (to say/tell) but I wasn’t getting any hits. So then I thought, since I’d confirmed we’re in OF, could this be from eastern France / modern-day Belgium/Luxembourg/The Netherlands and be a dialect (like Walloon or Luxembourgish) that included some Germanic words? That led me to the Luxembourgish dier, meaning door, which made sense given the imagery. Then I ran into tresguint, which was extremely mysterious. It took me quite a while digging, and what I landed on is that it’s a combo of tres (very) and guint, a conjugation of the OF verb guignier (cognate with English wink), meaning to signal. So, that’s my best effort based on semi-educated guesses and instinct. If you’re still here, you get my final version of translation, the freest one. I guess it’s a poem. ✨ A glance, a wink, a glimmer a place of warmth, a glow beyond the gloom ✨
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Aug 2, 2024

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Incredible 🥲
Aug 3, 2024
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daphne thank you! and thanks for sharing 😊
Aug 3, 2024
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genuinely fantastic stuff. i'd read a whole book of your translations!!
Aug 3, 2024
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dontluqatme omg that’s so sweet! Thank you 😊
Aug 3, 2024
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this is so cool!! the art in translating is something i’ve only come to learn of and appreciate this past year. a friend of mine is a translator and i’ve learned how much of a process (and collaboration, if the author is alive) it is to translate one text into another language and have it preserve the same meaning etc
Aug 3, 2024
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marxinista yeah it’s one of those things that straddles both technological (and I mean this in the oldest/broadest sense of the word) and artistic practice. One interesting case that comes to mind is Coleman Barks, who is maybe the most famous poetry translator ever for his translations of Rumi. On their face, they’re quite beautiful, but he basically omitted all the overt references to Rumi’s Muslim faith 😬
Aug 3, 2024
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