He asked me to do a translation into Fith, and given all the help he has provided me by helping edit Langmaker.com submissions, I can't refuse him! But this is a sad, sad poem for a race of alien herbivores to recite.
Teng limnh mwu
a breengh lo somnh nlienm vreemh e
ku bluunh shen zlumnh lo skingh byom lo vo dyem e
a ke spoem stum dzheen ronh lo sthingh kweemnh e.
limb-stump mast tree-stump
*plural shank of midair andante cut .
*singular container *swap without of rock ocean of it absorb .
*plural the predator horn brown *rotate of marketplace remove .
Fith poems, like Fith speeches, introduce words sentences before they are used. This poem begins ominously, "stump, mast, stump", where teng is the stump of a limb or tooth and mwu is the stump of a tree. These three stark images of truncated objects color the rest of the poem.
Speaking of color, I had to translate "red" as "brown", because in my interpretation of David's poem the red is the red of blood, but in that context Fiths refer instead to brown, the color of dried blood.
Of course, Fith, as the language of aliens, divides its lexicon in odd ways. For instance, there's no general word for "leg" or "limb", but there is one for "shank" (the part of the leg from the knee to the ankle); there's no general word analogous to "glide", as in "glide through the ocean" in David's original, so I reached for "absorb" as an ironic alternative; there's no general word for "boat" either, let alone "barge", which led to the need to translate "barge" as "container without a mast", which was a fortunate circumlocution, since it provided me the initial image of the poem.
The words used:
a - plural marker
bluunh - container: something that holds things, especially for transport or storage
breengh - shank: the part of the human leg between the knee and the ankle
byom - ocean: a large body of water constituting a principal part of the hydrosphere
dyem - absorb, suck, imbibe, soak up, sop up, suck up, draw, take in, take up: be able to take in, as of liquids
dzheen - brown
e - sentence marker
ke - definite article
ku - singular marker
kweemnh - remove, take, take away: remove something concrete, as by lifting, pushing, taking off, etc.; or remove something abstract
limnh - mast: a vertical spar for supporting sails
lo - of
mwu - stump, tree stump: the base part of a tree that remains standing after the tree has been felled
nlienm - andante: a moderately slow tempo (a walking pace)
ronh - *rotate (stack conjunction)
shen - *swap (stack conjunction)
skingh - rock, stone: a lump of hard consolidated mineral matter
somnh - midair: some point in the air; above ground level
spoem - predator, predatory animal: any animal that lives by preying on other animals
sthingh - market, marketplace: the world of commercial activity where goods and services are bought and sold
stum - horn, tusk
teng - stump: the part of a limb or tooth that remains after the rest is removed
vo - it (argument placeholder)
vreemh - cut: make an incision or separation
zlumnh - without, with no ..., lacking
A rough translation into English:
"Tree stumps of shanks cut midair andante. A container without a mast absorbs a rock of the ocean. Predators take the brown horns from the stumps to the marketplaces."
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