...observation...

[duckrabbit]

My friends page is full of turning-around-list-words! "Adam," "cellist," "Washington University," and "St. Louis" in devils_interval's entry made me sit up and pay attention, but then there's also "Mississippi River" in elenlin's entry and "חלכן היה נמזר" in rivkonet' s... (if you don't get the last one, google it!)

Comments

[maiabee8]

I always sort of wondered how one would translate that poem to Hebrew... I don't really get it though

[duckrabbit]

oh, it's just that "All Mimsy were the Borogoves" is a turning-around-list-word because mimsy_borogoves used to be my username.

[maiabee8]

Yeah, that part I got :). It's the Hebrew that confuses me!

[duckrabbit]

Yeah, I don't get it either.

I've read it in Hebrew and I don't like it at all. Which makes me sad- I wonder if I just don't have enough of an ear for Hebrew to get the wordplay.

On the other hand, I usually do understand (and enjoy) Hebrew wordplay, so maybe it's just that Jabberwocky doesn't translate well into Hebrew. In the English version, the first/last verse plays a lot of jokes with syntax and morphology and uses a lot of nonsense words that (according to Humpty Dumpty) are actually portmanteaus. Hebrew is a portmanteau-friendly language (rakevel, chavlaz, etc) and its words carry tons of morphology, but it's really different from English in both of those respects. Maybe the standard translation just isn't very good.

[_swallow]

turning-around-list-words

you are so crazy, I love you.