27 July 2008

What will be, will be; what was was, was was.

There's a lot to tell about and my connection to the internet is tenuous. So I'll skip right past Zichron, Tzfat, Beit Yanai, the babies toddling underfoot, the waves that knocked us over, the explanations and translations and pronunciations and the stories -- sad, romantic, old and new -- and say just this: the family is on its way home to the US, and I'm staying here. Which means that ma shehaya haya ve'ma shehiyeh hiyeh (traslated brilliantly by my father in the title of this post.)

Also, it takes FOREVER to type on an iPod....

3 comments:

  1. Should it not be:
    "[same as original]; what was, was."
    Or alternatively:
    "What will be will be, will be will be; [same as original]."

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  2. Uh, ah, I don't have the requisite grammar vocabulary to express myself explicitly but your original construction is something like:
    "What [to be verb], [to be verb]; what [to be verb] [object], [to be verb] [object]."
    Parallelism should be kept by either adding [object] to first part or removing it from the second part.

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  3. My dad's translaton is designed to preserve the prosodic structure of the original saying. I think the best translation for that purpose is "what has been has been; what will be will be." But I think this version lacks some je ne sais qua that can only come from repeating the word "was" four times consecutively.

    Ooh, I hear a baby crying. Maybe my cousin Alma is here? Time to get out of bed!

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