janKipo wrote:Yes, 'ma pi kasi suli' is pretty standard for "forest", leaving 'ma kasi' for lawns and meadows and fields. It doesn't seem too long after a few rounds of fairly tales, where it turns up all the time.
Speaking of fairy tales, I'm translating "Hänsel und Gretel". So I'll change 'ma kasi' there. However, in a poem, repeating "kasi suli" just two lines apart, doesn't sound so nice. So maybe, I'm thinking of still keeping 'ma kasi', though it might not be literally correct, it doesn't seem to destroy the message.
janKipo wrote:For a purported language of positivity, tp has a large number of negative terms for which it offers no positives: death but no life, war but no peace, noise but no quiet, and so on. So there is no handy term of "calm" or "still". 'awen' is used occasionally for "calm" (a pond, for example), but two such different uses of it in the same short poem would be jarring, I think.
Agreed.
janKipo wrote:The polar opposite use of 'ala' is also helpful, but not very reliable without context -- more than the poem give, perhaps. But 'lape' seems out of place here -- again because of the more usual sense a couple of lines later.
So, I begin to like my first idea 'kalama ala' then. Repeating the word might be less important here. Anyway, the translation into Japanese and even the first English version on Wikipedia don't repeat the same words as does the German version. However, if we change the last line to 'sina kin lape.' (see below), then the poem would start and end with the same word, which also has something to it.
janKipo wrote:The question about 'kin' is, as usual, whether it really attaches to the word it is next to or whether it is just dropped there lazily (a habit in English; I'm not sure how widespread it is). The reading I got was that the world was at peace and soon you too would be i.e., the 'kin' belongs next to 'sina'. As it stand, it looks like you are in some state but soon you will be at peace, but the early state is not specified, except it is presumably wakeful.
I'm not exactly sure if I understand correctly. Are you saying it would be better (for the meaning 'the world is at peace already, you're not yet, but will be soon') to place it after 'sina'?
As it looks to me (given your translation back to English): The main idea seems to work, and now I'd like it to sound nice as a poem in tp.