Translation - Finnish-English - joskus pelkokin meitä kavahtaa

Hi hungi,

I don't understand what this line means. Could you explain that in different words?

Hi lilian canale and hungi_monsci,

I think there are two problems in hungi's translation:

1. the Finnish version does not read "_fear of us_ fears" but rather "(the) fear fears us".

2. "kavahtaa" does not precisely translate to "to fear" but rather "to cringe / to recoil" maybe (?). I am not aware of a precise translation, I'm grateful for any input.

I copy-pasted below my earlier comment/analysis on this sentence. If this was public already, I'm sorry for double-posting - I'm new to the cucumis system :-).

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There are two difficult aspects in the Finnish phrase:

1. Pelko-kin: Pelko = Fear, -kin ~ Even. The straightforward translation, I think, would be "even fear".

2. Kavahtaa: this one does not have a direct English equivalent. It means roughly "To recoil (in fear, from shock), To cringe, To be shocked by, To be startled by, To suddenly become upset by, ...".

My suggestion (I wasn't yet allowed to make the translation) for the Finnish-to-English translation would be: "Sometimes even fear us cringes" (or "Sometimes even fear us fears" for the double-fear). Reversed word order "us cringes" is per original form.

The content refers to dreadful avengers coming to dethrone the Winter King.

I think we'll have a problem here if we try to translate that word-by-word for it wouldn't make sense.
Let me see if I got what you, Harmattan tried to explain.
You say that the meaning is:

"Sometimes, the fear (we feel) makes us cringe."

lilian,

"we"/"us" refer to the terrifying avengers. The meaning of the phrase actually (and poetically) is that even the fear per se is shocked by the avengers.

hungi,

I still think that "to fear" is an inadequate translation for "kavahtaa". How would "flinch" sound like? I am not a native English speaker - the subtle nuances of "cringe" or "flinch" escape me.

Perhaps Maribel will help us here.

Could you please have a look at the thread and give us your opinion?

CC: Maribel

You are talking with words I am not familiar with

I could think of
Sometimes even the fear bewares us (?) or
Sometimes even the fear is afraid of us

But I admit that "kavahtaa" has nuances that are not in those....from my dictionary recoil and flinch seems to me to be the closest but as to their use I have no idea.

(The word order is more flexible in Finnish and need not to be followed rigidly. The meaning is the same in "pelko meitä kavahtaa" (more poetic perhaps) and "pelko kavahtaa meitä". We could also say "meitä pelko kavahtaa" and still the subject/object structure is clear because it is defined by the forms of the words.)

What about:
"Sometimes, the fear is afraid of us"?

CC: Maribel

That is fine too. The -kin thing can be a matter of style and has little meaning value, here I think it refers to the unexpected (fear fearing....). And all things (the physical effect of "kavahtaa", maybe step back or jump up a little) cannot always be translated.

Ok, if we ignore the flavors of kavahtaa, would "Sometimes even fear fears us" sound ok? I feel that the "even", albeit clumsy, is essential for the unexpectedness of the expression. The CMX-lyrics generally omit unnecessary (like "the", "is", and "of" would be) words to favor the flow.

So, if we are stuck with the double fear, which actually has a nice flow (!), the Latin translation could use that as well and have a shape of "interdum quoque metus metuo nobis". [...just an uneducated internet-dictionary-based guess]