actually, i'm looking for something more along the lines of someone who speaks/knows a bit of old german. i just finished reading "the name of the rose" by umberto eco (good book), which was completely translated from the italian... except for the parts where the characters are speaking a foreign language (german, latin, french, spanish, etc.), which makes some bits of it a bit hard to understand. anyways, it's set in the early 1300s, and there's one line in old (possibly middle, not sure... but a friend of mine who's majoring in german didn't recognize many of the words) german that i want to figure out:
"Er muoz gelichesame die leiter abewerfen, so er an ir ufgestigen."
if anyone can tell me what that means, i would be much obliged. all i know is that it has something to do with a ladder.
I just finished Umberto Eco's book today and had the same question as you did. So Google led me here! I assume you've found an answer in the more than ten years that have passed since you posted this? A chap called Marco Tompitak has provided literal translations of all the foreign language passages in The Name of the Rose: http://www.rapiddiffusion.com/translations-name-rose-eco/ This particular phrase is apparently not drawn from a medieval text but is Eco's rendition in medieval German of a Wittgenstein metaphor (according to "The Literary Wittgenstein" by John Gibson & Wolfgang Huemer). The sentence translates as "He must, so to speak, cast off the ladder, as soon as he has ascended it."
ReplyDeleteI agree that it's a good book!