I've sung this song before without it being rhymed. That line was "angels hover ever nearer, looking on your smiling face." I messed around with a Welsh - English translator as well, which came up with "They smile quiet crookedly me breast Signs he drives angels ll be doubting yonder" for what you provided. (I removed the apostrophe in gwen'an to get that result, but they makes more sense than white cowardly, which was what I got at first.)
So, roughly, the line might be something like:
Angels smile quietly, a sign for my heart to drive doubts away.
But basicly, you're looking for something with fears being driven away (yonder) and angels smiling.
Thanks for the research! I didn't know there was a Welsh-English translator program. That may come in handy in general (I like the thought of learning Welsh...)
"ofni" appears further up in the verse, which confirms to me that the Wikipedia translation is a complete translation of the sense and content, not a line-for-line. Thanks so much, "the yonder white angels" serves my purposes very well!
Just as a note, because it did confuse me at first, you're looking for a literal translation, not a transliteration, I think. A transliteration is what you get when you write, say, "shalom" instead of the Hebrew characters for it - you're changing the letters used to represent the original sounds, but you're not translating it. As Welsh is already written in the same characters as English, I'm not sure what you'd transliterate.
Well, "literal + translation" seems like it could collapse into "transliteration" as a portmanteau ;) At least it was a clever mistake.
(And that's why your second search resulted in Chinese pages -- transliterating Chinese ideogrammatic characters into English is a big headache with several schema, sensitive to whether the speaker's Mandarin or Cantonese -- it's a big deal for business, compared to, say, transliterating Hindi into Urdu or Welsh into Russian or what-not. :))
On a hunch, I tried "Suo Gan" "literal translation" in Google, but no joy. This post has two different versions (different from the one you cite), and one is supposed to be "almost literal", but it rhymes, so I doubt it.
Now, a lot of the results say "from a literal translation by J. Mark Sugars", so I searched for that next: "J. Mark Sugars" +Welsh. No luck either. He seems to have translated up a storm of Welsh songs. But I can't find this one.
Youtube has english versions. "Suo=Gan (sung by Colin in English) and Sleep My Baby (Suo-Gan) (Ukulele) seem to be the better version, both having the same lyrics. Enjoy....
Comments 14
So, roughly, the line might be something like:
Angels smile quietly, a sign for my heart to drive doubts away.
But basicly, you're looking for something with fears being driven away (yonder) and angels smiling.
Reply
Reply
Reply
(The comment has been removed)
Reply
Reply
Reply
(And that's why your second search resulted in Chinese pages -- transliterating Chinese ideogrammatic characters into English is a big headache with several schema, sensitive to whether the speaker's Mandarin or Cantonese -- it's a big deal for business, compared to, say, transliterating Hindi into Urdu or Welsh into Russian or what-not. :))
Reply
https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9604&L=WELSH-L&D=1&P=17597
Now, a lot of the results say "from a literal translation by J. Mark Sugars", so I searched for that next: "J. Mark Sugars" +Welsh. No luck either. He seems to have translated up a storm of Welsh songs. But I can't find this one.
Reply
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment