Conversation about Melke'a Himamat:
This week I have been listening to Melke’a Himamat during church services. Similar to the first work we translated this semester Melke’a Si’il, it is poetry that is sung. It is under the same genre: “melk” or “image/portrait”. This particular one is called the Image of the Sufferings (of Christ). It is recited in hymn and is very beautiful. One particular line caught my eye one afternoon and I decided to think about how to word the translation in English. I sent it to my language partner to get a second eye on it and this is how our conversation went.
There are a couple of things I want to note here. I generally like writing my translations better because that is the mode that I have practiced the most. Also, you can give different options in a written format. I often need to do this because I don’t know exactly how certain words are being used (even commonly seen ones). Often words have different renderings in different contexts (this is concerning semantics). I have two examples of this. One example is of “ኀበ..ኀበ..” where ኀበ (pronounced ha-be) usually means towards, to, where. However, when used in this construction it means “the more...the more” and such is used to make a comparison. The other example is the use of the words በስመ ብእሲት (be-sime bi’isīt) which literally is in/by the name of a woman. Better put for the context is the feminine name in English.
The idea is that the Holy Trinity is so compassionate, and since women are known for compassion they are known by the feminine form of holy in Ge’ez-- that is Qidist instead of Qidus. It’s quite an interesting phenomena in the Orthodox faith since many times God is considered in the masculine. The faith shows that God doesn’t fit into a gender and that the masculine label is just a default. You would never hear someone say Qidus Silassie (Holy Trinity in the masculine).
The language itself also lends to this kind of flexibility as well I suppose since it offers the option of having gender attached to adjectives. Overall, I think this is a good example of learning as you go. I have been loving the fact that I get to have this kind of interaction with my language partner as well. I can work through things and have him there to help where needed.
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