For the elderly, for the sick and for children, winter
is as if it were a mossy rock, half buried in the grass,
a predatory beast, with ruthless incisive teeth and claws.To it is said "In spring, are you clement?Notes on the translation.
And you now about your realm are roaming
And warmly clasp in greeting the hand of the Spring
sprite who makes green footprints."1. I forget why I mentioned the rock before the beast. If I had had the time, I might have change the translation here.
2. Mossy. The source has "on which moss can grow". Presumably the relevance of "can grow" is that it is so still for so long a time that moss can grow. But I decided not to be too finicky here about translating "can grow", since it is in the nature of rocks that they are still for a long time, especially if it is a "sgen", half buried in the ground. I considered rendering "moss(y)" literally, with "ddhenqgwor", which, if placed at the end of the line, would provide a further sound echo with "vehrvor" and "osqror". But I settled on "dthoddhe", because it could describe not only moss on a rock but bristly hair on the hide of a beast; I take the rock to be what the beast is like - still, waiting, half-hidden.
3. I took "big hunting cat" to mean felix panthera, so initially rendered it as "ghaaghgha", which has that meaning. But it didn't seem that the felinity was crucial: what was crucial is that it is a predatory beast. So I used the more general term "kkhadsro", whose meaning also explicitly has an element of predatoriness.
6. I took the "we" of the source text ("we ask") to be a generic "we", so left it implicit in the translation.
7. "it": I added the explicit "it" ("To it is said") in order to help the next translator. But in an ordinary text I'd have left it implicit.
8. "warmly clasp the hand in greeting". The word in the source text means "greeting, handshake". I went for the less bland and more particular option in translating it.
9. "sprite": "khnqyvva" means a naiad/dryad/nereid-like being, rather than a god; a khnqyvva is the spirit or soul of a thing, not a god that controls it and is external to it. "khnqyvva" fits the context much better than god, since in the text one is implicitly greeting the Spring, not only the god of Spring. Furthermore, the version with "khnqyvva" would make perfect sense to a Livagian weltanschauung, whereas a version with a more exact translation of "god" would immediately transpose the text into some alien mythology, rather than reflecting a universal experience of winter.
11. I forgot to translate "dear" in the source text ("dear god"), but perhaps the "warmly clasp the hand" gets across the dearness of the greetee.
10. The brevity of the Livagian and the alterations to word order made it hard to preserve with fidelity the lineation pattern of the original.