His desire is for me echoes Gen 3.16. In Hebrew the phrase for (or, toward) me appears at the beginning of the sentence and so may be emphasized. Bible en français courant catches this note when it says “and it’s me he desires.” Desire is a noun but it can be given a verbal form, “he yearns,” as in New American Bible. Whereas in Gen 3.16 it was the woman who longed for her husband, here it is the reverse.
For translation we can have:
• I belong to my lover; he longs to have me.
Or as in Good News Translation:
• … he desires me.
Quoted with permission from Ogden, Graham S. and Zogbo, Lynell. A Handbook on the Book of Song of Songs. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1998. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .
Click or tap here to see the rest of this insight.
Like a number of other East Asian languages, Japanese uses a complex system of honorifics, i.e. a system where a number of different levels of politeness are expressed in language via words, word forms or grammatical constructs. These can range from addressing someone or referring to someone with contempt (very informal) to expressing the highest level of reference (as used in addressing or referring to God) or any number of levels in-between.
One way Japanese shows different degree of politeness is through the choice of a third person singular and plural pronoun (“he,” “she,” “it” and their various forms) as shown here in the widely-used Japanese Shinkaiyaku (新改訳) Bible of 2017. While it’s not uncommon to avoid pronouns altogether in Japanese, there are is a range of third person pronouns that can be used. In these verses a number of them are used that pay particularly much respect to the referred person (or, in fact, God, as in Exodus 15:2), including kono kata (この方), sono kata (その方), and ano kata (あの方), meaning “this person,” “that person,” and “that person over there.”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.