DiagonallyStripedRat

DiagonallyStripedRat t1_jegmoqg wrote

Reply to comment by mitkah16 in Just finished The Sword of Destiny (The Witcher #2) by No_Cockroach_5048

Or rusalka.... In English you could either just keep rusalka as in ,,The rusalka came from the water" or translate it as ,,water nymph" because that's ultimately what a rusalka is. Same with vila. You could keep vila (,,At noon in summer, vilas appear in the fields") or translate vila as ,,sun demon" or ,,wheat witch" or something. Do you understand what I mean? In original it's Wiedzmin, in English Witcher, in some other Slavic languages it's Vedmak. Still it's the same creature, but if You google Wiedzmin you'll get Polish result, if you google Witcher you'll get just the books :D

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DiagonallyStripedRat OP t1_jegenx6 wrote

Reply to comment by NekoCatSidhe in Do you think it's still possible to create new genres? by DiagonallyStripedRat

This is a different topic but I can't help the feeling that ancient people didn't take their myths as literally as we think they did. Ever heard modern religious people say ,,oh the Bible/Quoran/Tora isn't to be taken literally, God isn't an old guy with a beard sitring on a cloud, these are all metaphores and paralels and parables that speak of an idea etc"?

What if ancient Greeks were like ,,oh the myth of Persephone isn't to be taken literally, I mean, she didn't ACTUALLY collapse beneath the crust of the earth! It simply meant, that..."

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DiagonallyStripedRat t1_jegd433 wrote

Reply to comment by mitkah16 in Just finished The Sword of Destiny (The Witcher #2) by No_Cockroach_5048

Oh well, I take it You read in English, so it was a very direct translation from original (Polish) to English. So a lot of the words that don't have the counterpart in English may have been Polish. Other Slavic languages do have their own words for those creatures, so in translations those were used. In short, You googled the untranslated into English Polish names, so got results in Polish.

But I don't know. I read the books in a Slavic language and it all seemed familiar and well translated, never had my hands on the English localisation (:

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DiagonallyStripedRat t1_jed71fb wrote

Reply to comment by mitkah16 in Just finished The Sword of Destiny (The Witcher #2) by No_Cockroach_5048

It's not doing justice to say it's inspired by Poland solely.... The author is Polish and Redania is an alegory for Polish-Lithuanian Republic of the 16th and 17th century, but there it ends (and some minor references).

The fantasy is inspired by Celtic, Nordic, Germanic and Slavic mythology, Slavic including other Slavic nations, mostly Czechia, Belarus, Ukraine and the Balkans. This is why the games are so praised in Poland, because they capture that the story is universal for so many people from different regions of Europe. For example the soundtrack are legit folk songs sung in Bulgarian, Slovenian (Witcher 3), Ukrainian (Witcher 2), Belarussian (Witcher 1). The name Novigrad is an existing city in Croatia and so on.

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