Translating the Not Quite

[sheenaghpugh]

Just put a new article on translation up on my website. Translating the Not Quite is about my efforts to translate a German poem that wasn't quite in German, since it was by the Swiss German poet Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826), who wrote in the Alemannic dialect. I've included the original and translation in an appendix; for a poem written about 200 years ago it contains some strangely contemporary end-of-the-world forebodings. The article was originally written for a university but ironically enough they said it wouldn't do because it wasn't in the dialect they favoured, namely academic-speak.