If we want the rewards of speaking and understanding Spanish we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of the subjunctive tense
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I love translations, and I love translations of translations, and I love translations of translations of nonsense. That makes "Upward, behind the onstreaming, it mooned" from Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius one of my favorite little lines in Borges' work.
The relevant excerpt explaining it is here -- English translation by James Irby (I think) and Spanish is of course by Borges.
There are no nouns in Tlön’s conjectural Ursprache, from which the “present” languages and the dialects are derived: there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no word corresponding to the word “moon,”, but there is a verb which in English would be “to moon” or “to moonate.” “The moon rose above the river” is hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö, or literally: “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned.” | No hay sustantivos en la conjetural Ursprache de Tlön, de la que proceden los idiomas "actuales" y los dialectos: hay verbos impersonales, calificados por sufijos (o prefijos) monosilábicos de valor adverbial. Por ejemplo: no hay palabra que corresponda a la palabra luna, pero hay un verbo que sería en español lunecer o lunar. Surgió la luna sobre el río se dice hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö o sea en su orden: hacia arriba (upward) detrás duradero-fluir luneció. (Xul Solar traduce con brevedad: upa tras perfluyue lunó. Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned.) |
You may notice some extra stuff at the end there, specifically this part in the Spanish which isn't in the English:
(Xul Solar traduce con brevedad: upa tras perfluyue lunó. Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned.