"In the beginning, the kami bestowed the creation of heaven and earth."

[larryhammer]

$5 at our pusher (also known as the local used book store chain) yields this amusing find: a slipcased copy of 舊新約聖書 (Kyûshinyakuseisho), being the Bible, Old* and New Testament, in a bungo translation so formal it's halfway to classical Japanese. Every word possible is kanji, even ones ordinarily written with kana, and every single one has furigana to help even the basic modern reader along. Not that the last necessarily helps as this is, oddly, the sloppiest printing I've met in Japanese book, with ink thick enough on the type that it can be hard to make out -- like an Nth generation photostat. Not to mention, this is one of those texts where the rubi-gloss doesn't necessarily match the pronunciation of the word as written, but instead sometimes translates it to a common modern word. Still, this ought to be amusing material to practice on.

It begins 元始(はじめ)に神(かみ)天地(てんち)を創造(つくり)たまへり

......

Right -- time to actually study those archaic honorific verbs I've been avoiding.


* It took me a while to work out that 舊 is the pre-spelling-reform version of 旧.

---L.

Comments

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Oo, major points to the translator for the honorifics! Though I suspect they're not going for full-on classical usages, just because it's so hard to understand, let alone replicate them.

[larryhammer]

That's why I put it as "halfway to classical" -- I think this will be my introduction to the bungo of formal pre-modern prose style. This translation seems to date back to at least the Taisho era, if not Meiji, though the text (if not the title) uses post-reform kanji.

I'm either amused or startled, I'm not sure which, that it's not 神様.

---L.

[(Anonymous)]

I put it to you that you have a copy of the "Meiji translation" (first version in 1887, being printed at least into the 1950s), described and onlinified here (http://bible.salterrae.net/).

The quality of the printing doesn't surprise me that much -- no doubt the goal was just to get as many bibles out there as possible. In any case it's not as though anyone was going to actually read it, ho ho. (Little did they imagine that, in early 2012...)

Coincidentally, I am working my way through "Christ I" from the Exeter Book, so I will take this opportunity to offer a high-five of solidarity. Judeo-Christian texts written in now-superseded forms of off-continental languages 4 LIFE! --Matt

[larryhammer]

That does indeed look like the 1910 text, at least for the OT -- I'll have to check the NT against that site's version, but I bet it'll be the Taisho recension. This printing claims to be 1969, FWIW. (And, heh, interesting to compare against the modern kôgo edition.)

Exeter Book is indeed some serious linguistic cred. (I studied OE for only a couple months, just long enough to determine that yeah, it's a lot like Icelandic.)

---L.

[galeni.livejournal.com]

You could make a story that that edition is a fine insult, beautiful on the outside and formal with too much ink on the inside such that any complaint looks impolite.

Wow.

[larryhammer]

:-)