Saturday, 2 April 2016

Interesting in translation vol. 4: Smarter than me

Something i came up a few days ago, originally in italian. Let see if it works in english too... you tell me.


Smarter than me

It was said it would be updated
but it wasn't. On the contrary, I lose it.
We are speaking about Facebook,
something worth a withdrawal crisis!
But maybe it's just that:
my cellphone is,
really, a smartphone.


The original italian:


Lui e' piu' furbo di me

Dice che lo aggiorna,
ma poi non lo fa, anzi resto senza.
Parliamo di Facebook,
roba da crisi d'astinenza!
O forse semplicemente
il mio cellulare lo e',
smartphone veramente.

And now some observation:
The biggest issue was the gender. A phone, being an inanimate object require neutral gender pronouns in english, immediately giving away that we are speaking about an object while in italian, not having a formal neutral gender, the inanimate nature of the subject can't be noticed until the final reveal).
In italian there are a couple rhymes too (senza/astinenza and semplicemente/veramente), something i will not touch in english as my pronunciation is something horrible, practically it is only a written language to me... and it seems there are no good rules to sort out how a written world should be spoken in english ;-)

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