Young Writers Society

Hi robertsoad,here is Dark to give review on your translate(Since you translated this poem written by Vahan Terian.

# Don’t you mistake us, with your wild and savage tribes,

Our country’s mangled, yet holy and refined, -->Why is it still holy and refined even the county is mangled?Well,giving translation to the poem will never be the easy thing to do.Sometimes it will gives a different meaning to the reader.

#Like a phoenix we’ll emerge from fire
With new elegance, a glorious pyre.

Be daring my heart with enduring hope
Stand proud like our Ararat mounts… -->But anyway,I like the last two stanzas here.I got the meanings and I think it was so nice and meaningful.Overall,I appreciate that you has made quite a good translation here.I enjoyed reading this poem too and I think you really admire this poem so much.Keep writing here in YWS.Hope to see your own poem soon here
Cheers
~Dark

Well lets just start by saying its a good poem, but this is a review so I do have to point out some mistakes. "Don't you mistake us, with your wild and savage tribes, our country's mangled, yet holy and refined, " the comma after "refined" should be a period or you just have to many commas it stops making sense. same goes for "We're debased not as serfs but as bruised eagles, aloft from the vile, honest towards evil," after evil should be a period.
This is an interesting piece, for the most part it is excellent but look it over again and see what can be changed and improved, writers are always improving! Great job!!

Hey -- are you a translator? That's wickedly awesome. I hope to study more and eventually be able to at least practice translating Korean literature.

The first thing I want to mention is your punctuation. Yes, this entire poem is full of sentences that seem to run into one another in terms of meaning, but including proper punctuation would definitely help your reader be more comfortable with your content and thus be more inclined to read all the way through. My advice is that unless you're specifically trying to play games with the punctuation, just take out all the line breaks, punctuate the sentence as you would punctuate prose (period at the end of each sentence, commas in the proper places), then put the line breaks back in as you had them. It's pretty fool proof. If, perhaps, you kept the same punctuation as the original, remember that languages don't generally translate word for word into English, so you have to adjust the punctuation accordingly.

Since this is a translation and not the original work, I can't very well critique the underlying material -- that's not what you created. But I can point out some places where you might want to go look at the original text and consider a different translation, especially with regards to rhyme. Here are some places where you could potentially do so:

Inasmuch not new to us are suffering and droop.

Babylon has been our enemy, you eye

Long has our country faced fire and ailing
Howl’s there every book and grief each ditty…

Knight Dragon, here to review!

"Inasmuch not new to us are suffering and droop."
That line makes no sense at all. What does it mean?

"Howl’s there every book and grief each ditty… ", shouldn't the "there" be "their"?

Content:
I didn't realize this was a translated poem until the very end. It might help other readers to have a context for this poem if you put that at the top instead of the bottom.

You say the poem speaks for itself, but I have no idea what the poem's actually trying to say. It's pretty confusing. I truly wish I could help more, but I have no idea what you're trying to do with this poem.