Talk:Os Pinos

This is my first serious effort at a translation from Galego to English, so I expect it will be revised by the next galegofalante to come across the page. I would note the following:

I've tried to keep the archaizing, bardic tone of Pondal in the translation (which is why I translate 'nazón' as 'folk' rather than nation, and 'fogar' as 'hearth' rather than 'home'). The quotation marks are to indicate that the first stanza represents questions asked of the seashore pines, and the remaining verses are their response on behalf of the land of Galicia to its slumbering people.

fledgist 03:32, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Home and Nation of Breogán
The translation of "Fogar de Breogán" and "Nazón de Breogán" is "Home of Breogán" and "Nation of Breogán". There are not other posibilities like heart or folk. I am galician, and that is not what our himne says.--193.144.48.15 17:30, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

I respectfully disagree. 'Fogar' is properly translated into English as 'hearth', as opposed to 'lar', 'home'. 'Nazón' is strictly speaking 'nation', but can also be translated 'folk'. Borh translations are to be preferred as indicating Pondal's archaizing tendencies.

Saudos. fledgist 01:17, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

I also think that fogar is not such an archaising word. "Hearth" is more the equivalent of "lar": a specific place in the kitchen that can be also a synonym of "home". But "fogar" is closer to "home", and it's "fogar" what we see in the song. And as for "folk", I think that if Pondal wanted to say "pobo" instead of "nación" he would have used that word, but he chose "nación". I have to agree with the first commenter as far as these words are concerned. Anyway, only the two first parts of the poem are sung on events normally. --Calítoe.:. 09:38, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

Fledgist is right and I am also Galician, but the influx of Spanish language is so great xD. "Fogar" is exactly "hearth", remember in Galician (and Portuguese of course) "fogar - fogão" (fogón if you prefer), the sense of "home" for "fogar" is secondary. The same respect of "Nation". It is more accurate "Folk", as in German "Volk". The proposals "home" and "nation" are nearest to the Spanish language than to the exact sense of Pondal's writings212.51.52.8 (talk) 14:38, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Partiture of the anthem
I leave here a link to the partiture of teh anthem. I don't have time now to learn to embedd pictures, if you want to do it before I learn, in onw week or so, feel free: http://breizhpartitions.free.fr/tf.php/1194_Hino_Galego.jpg Espigaymostaza (talk) 21:57, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Lyrics translation
I'd refrained so far from changing many wording choices in the translation, assuming they'd been made for a good reason. Now I've seen, however, that they're still being actively modified, sometimes in ways which depart from the literal meaning of the original with little or no apparent reason. I've tried to make the translation more faithful and perhaps a bit more poetic:

Splibubay (talk) 15:06, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't know why the strange grammar of What say the murmurers [...]? was used to begin with, but I respected it in case it was a deliberate choice to sound archaic. Xabier Cid changed it to What's said by the murmurers [...]?, which is correct in modern English, but switches the sentence to the passive voice. I made it active again, just like the original is: What do the murmurers say [...]?
 * The pines aren't addressing the moonlight; they're just being illuminated by it, and their buzzing can be heard by anyone around. Ó raio transparente do prácido luar is a similar structure to á luz da lúa chea or ó sol da mañá, where the—contracted here—preposition a doesn't introduce an indirect object, but fills the rôle of an adverb meaning that something or someone is exposed to the light cast or reflected by the relevant celestial object. The second half of the stanza reinforces the absence of an indirect object, being the target of the pines' buzzing, since it'd be weird in such a case to ask Que din as altas copas [...]? instead of Que lle din as altas copas [...]?. Since translating the contracted preposition a as to converts the group it introduces into an indirect object, I changed that to under, meaning the trees are simply receiving the moonlight from above.
 * The anthem calls Galicia confín dos verdes castros e valeroso chan ("bound of the green hill forts and worthy land"). I therefore use the translation of that phrase as part of the vocative; it makes no sense to imply that something is headed to the bounds of the green hill forts [...], or to turn that into an indirect object.
 * Chan can mean "flat" as an adjective, but in the poem it's used as a noun, and as such it means "soil", "floor" or "land", the last of which I find the most fitting here. Interpreting it as "plains" seems out of place, since there's a related noun for that, chaira, and it's feminine, while chan is masculine, agreeing with the adjective valeroso, rather than valerosa.
 * I think valuable doesn't sound very well in this translation; perhaps because it's too Latinate, perhaps because of its lenght or the rhythm it imposes on its line, perhaps because it sounds too modern. I think worthy fits better.
 * Non deas a esquecemento uses a noun, rather than a verb, to mention the event of forgetting something, and compares it to the yielding of something one should keep to the abstract concept meant by esquecemento. I think this structure can be preserved by translating esquecemento as oblivion.
 * Inxuria doesn't mean the same as English injury or wound, but "insult", "offence" or "affront".
 * Similarly, I see no reason to translate the third stanza with the future tense, while the original is in the present, used to state a general rule (the contrast between the behavior of "the good and generous" and "those foolish and dark") which works both in English and Galician. I've tried to adapt the word order, to the small extent allowed by English, to follow more closely the chain of ideas shown in the original.
 * I've changed the foolish and those in darkness to those foolish and dark, since the original doesn't present those two kinds of people as necessarily different from each other, and depicts their—figurative—darkness as an inherent quality of theirs, rather than a place where they are.
 * The second stanza refers to Galicia as ti/tu, poetically translated here as thou, but the fourth uses the plural (perhaps with its value of a polite form) in que as vosas vaguidades, so I translated this line as when all your wanderings, rather than when all thy wanderings, since the latter, in English, is etymologically singular, and in order to keep the contrast with the second verse. Perhaps it could be changed to when all yer wanderings, or something like that...
 * I think shall promptly meet their end is a better translation of cumprido fin terán than shall have achieved their end: the wanderings themselves can't be assumed to have the purpose of disappearing.
 * The fifth line in the fourth stanza actually reads "pois, onde quer, xigante," (http://www.xunta.es/o-himno-de-galicia); pois is causal, so I translated it as for (= "because"), rather than and.
 * I don't see a reason to translate boa ("good") as noble. The last line could be left as Breoghan's Nation, but this breaks the similarity to the way we translated the second verse, so I think Nation of Breoghan is better in this case.

Simplifying the translation
I have modified the English translation of the anthem, which seemed to be excessively arcaic and convoluted. I understand the intention was to create some sort of "poetic" translation that adjusted to a formal style considered equivalent in English literature, but I don't think wikipedia is the place to do this. Most translations here are practical, that is, their main object is to provide meaning of the text as faithfully as possible. In fact, the Spanish translation provided in this very article is undeniably practical and not poetic ("Ya llegaron los tiempos" is clearly not as poetic as "Os tempos son chegados"). As such, adding additional, unnecessary archaisms makes the English translation stand out, and not in a good way. I have tried to rewrite the translation using only those words necessary to communicate the meaning of the text to English speakers in a simple manner.

Furthermore, it seems like, in the process of constructing such a convoluted translation, some took too many artistic liberties. For example, translating "arume" as "pine twigs" is inaccurate, since "arume" refers to the leaves of the pine tree; this is particularly inappropriate considering that, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, a twig refers especially to those branches of a tree that have been stripped of leaves. I thus decided that it would be better translated as "foliage".

I also decided to change the translation of "duro". Generally speaking, wherever a text is vague its translation should try to be vague to the same extent. It's not the job of the translation to give its own interpretation of the text; whenever possible the translation should allow as much room for interpretation as the original. In the case of "duro" this task is complicated, since it could be interpreted as "stubborn" or "crude and cruel", and the second interpretation doesn't seem to have any single equivalent term in English. The previous translation used the term "acerbic", but I found this inappropriate, since "acerbic" implies wittiness and could be perceived as a positive trait, while in the original it's clearly derogatory and no such element of wittiness is found (if anything it's implied to be the opposite, IMO). I finally decided to translate it as "cruel", which, even if not a perfect choice, is vaguer and thus doesn't add any meaning that isn't already there.

There are many other changes in the translation but most of them respond one of the three explanations provided above. Sir. Paulord (talk) 02:54, 2 December 2023 (UTC)