- Pronouns
- he/him
Discuss this interview with @YBahjatt here
Our first novel HWJN was an immediate hit, the week it was release was the same week Dan Brown’s Arabic translation of Inferno was release, we hit the #1 selling book in Arabic that week while Inferno was #2.
Although the Assyrians were fond of shepherding metaphors themselves, so you could argue that it's in the spirit of that as well - though Byron might not have known that given the state of archaeology at the time.Ooh, some very interesting developments there.
Translation- particularly of idioms- is something I find quite fascinating. Not least because it can be so malleable across both time and distance.
Like if you take the opening to The Destruction of Sennacherib from Byron:
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
That whole concept of 'the wolf on the fold' - I'm aware that 'fold' here is referring to a sheepfold, but we're probably getting to the point where most people in Britain today would need an annotation there to explain it's about wolves attacking sheep (and thereby an analogy to Christian iconography), let alone any foreign culture who might not have a word for 'sheepfold' or even the concept of 'a permanent enclosure for domesticated animals.'
Bloody hell, that's an achievemtn