Day: April 29, 2017

So you seek to translate:

Ich möchte aus meinem Herzen hinaus
Unter den großen Himmel treten.

“I would like to step out of my heart,
And go walking beneath the enormous sky.”

I’ll start by putting in the missing accent marks 🙂

ἐκ τῆς καρδίας βούλομαι ἐκβαίνειν
ὑπὸ τῷ μεγάλῳ οὐρανῷ βαδίζειν

I am so, so not going to have anything to say about metre: never got the hang of it.

The Greek matches the English, but not the German. Notice that the Greek repeats ek– : “step out, out of my heart”; the German repeats the aus: “out of my heart, away”, but the verb isn’t there at all: it’s literally “I would out of my heart, away, beneath the great heaven to tread”. So I’d get rid of ἐκβαίνειν: the Greek should be as taut as the German.

The other problem is that ἐκ τῆς καρδίας sounds like “from my heart” (which in German would be von Herzen); in fact Aristophanes uses it in that meaning in Clouds 86 ἀλλ’ εἴπερ ἐκ τῆς καρδίας μ’ ὄντως φιλεῖς “but if you truly love me from your heart”.

Homeric/Poetic Greek is not something I’m in any way comfortable, but maybe ἑκάς ‘far away from’?

And for the ‘great heaven’, I’m thinking ‘broad’—cf. the Orthodox icon caption of the Virgin Mary as πλατυτέρα τῶν οὐρανῶν.

τῆς καρδίας ἑκάς βούλομαι
ὑπὸ τῷ πλατεῖ οὐρανῷ ἐκβαδίζειν

“away from the heart I wish
under the broad heaven to step out”

Someone else do the metre.

See links in Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why does Quora permit foul language?

It used to, five years ago: What is the guideline on the use of profanity on Quora?

See Marc Bodnick’s answer to What is the guideline on the use of profanity on Quora? [Originally Answered: Is profanity a violation of the Be Nice rule?] (2011, incorporated into Answer Wiki)

Users should avoid unnecessary profanity.

Tracey Bryan’s answer to Why aren’t rules guiding the use of profanity enforced more on Quora? (2012)

Quora has a policy against profanity: What is the guideline on the use of profanity on Quora?

The reviewers and admins will thus edit questions, or collapse answers, which are in contravention to this policy, but they can’t be everywhere.

Quora appears not to any more. As witnessed by all the Top Writers since 2013 answering questions like this with variations of “FUCK no, ahahahahahaha!!!!11!!!11”. Starting with:

Dan Holliday’s answer to What is the guideline on the use of profanity on Quora? [Originally Answered: Is it appropriate to use curse words in your answers in Quora?] (2013)

If not, then I’m in big fucking trouble.

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Here’s an answer from seven years ago, on why using the Q&A format to publish Quora policy guarantees this kind of confusion when policy changes—or indeed policy at all:

Xianhang Zhang’s answer to What are some of the basic “Community Management 101” mistakes that Quora has made? (2010)

Dogfooding is all well and good but Quora deciding to put its charter documents in the same Q&A system as everything else means that they’re fragmented and may as well not exist for new users.

Do read the rest of that answer and weep, btw.

I am happy for one reason only:

I called it. Two months ago:

Nick Nicholas’ answer to What’s the next useful and perfectly good feature that Quora is going to do away with?

Wild speculation:

*touch wood* Blogs.

[…]

The current trend though, is away from social media functionality, and has been deemphasising your followers. So:

Less Wild speculation:

In the display of your followers, or the mouseover display of a user: the followers you have in common.

It’s the last piece of the puzzle: MVW badges and TW quills have already been taken away from the former.

EDIT: Yes, Quora has put the mutual followers field back.

For now.