Ozymandias in Aramaic

For fun, I translated the poem Ozymandias into the Jewish Babylonian dialect of Aramaic, one of the languages of the Talmud. My knowledge of this dialect is mostly passive, picked up from studying the Talmud (and supplemented by the amazing Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon!), so I’d be highly surprised if there are not several grammatical mistakes and unidiomatic phrasings.

The original

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Translation

אשכחי לארחא מן ארעא עתיקתא

דאמר: תרי רגלי רבי דאבנא

,קאי במדברא, וקריבא להו בחלא

פלגיה איטבע, איכא אפא תבירא

דחזינן מן חזותיה דמפקדנא וסיפתא כמישא דידיה

דטב ידע פסליה למדיא דידיה

אכתי חיי בהא דלית להו חיא

ידא דתחתיא וליבא דזנא

ותחתיה איכתב הני מילי

אנא אוזימנדיא מלך מלכיא

!חזו בעבידאי, אדירי ,ומתייאשו

השתא לאו שייר מידי ומן חורבנא

עד רוחקא לית מידי בר מחלא

A romanisation

An ad-hoc romanisation. Some limitations are that this does not distinguish between the two /a/ vowels that may have been distinguished by quality or length. As far as I know, the exact vowels used to pronounce Jewish Babylonian Aramaic are unkown, although some educated guesses can be made from the Yemenite reading tradition, Syriac, and modern Assyrian dialects. Here, begad-kefat spirantisation and schwas are left implicit.

aškaḥi l-arḥa min arʿa ʿatiqta (This is very literally rendered. arḥa, like its Hebrew cognate oreḥ, is used for both “guest” and “traveller” in different dialects)

d-amar: tre ragli rabbi d-abna (I didn’t translate “trunkless” because I couldn’t find a less clunky way to express this than to say “lacking a body”. Tre is a fun false friend for most Indo-European languages, meaning two rather than three.)

qay b-midbara, u-qriba l-hu b-ḥala,

palge iṭbʿa, ika afa tbira

d-ḥazinan men ḥazute d-mfaqdana u-sipta kmiša dide (I couldn’t find words for “frown” and “sneer”, so opted to translate them simply as “look”)

d-ṭav yadʿa pasle l-midaya dide

akati ḥayi b-hai d-let l-hu ḥaya

yada d-taḥtaya w-liba d-zana

w-taḥte iktab hani mili

ana uzimandia melek malkaya

ḥazu b-ʿbidai, adiri, u-mityaišu!

hašata lo šayar midi, u-min ḥurbana

ʿad ruḥqa let midi bar m-ḥala