Colours

[Eric]

When translating, you sometimes come across colours. It is said that there are no distinct words for green and blue in Welsh. And Homer is said to have talked about "the wine-dark sea". That sort of thing.

How the Welsh tackle the distinction, and whether Homer was in fact drinking turgid retsina, is something I don't know. But is the sea "green"? When translating Estonian it often is. The sea I've seen in the Bay of Tallinn looks like the North Sea and any other north European sea. But maybe the cut-off points of colours vary between languages.

Apart from the primary colours (yellow, magenta red, cyan blue), plus green, brown, black and white, there are lots of more nuanced colours, such as turquoise, lilac, even orange. The cut-off points appear to vary here between languages. One man's orange is another man's "fire red", which is the term sometimes used in Dutch (vuurrood).

Have any of you come across such difficulties when reading novels or poems and trying to visualise the colours described?

[Igu Soni]

Generally, the colour tone, among other things, of my reading of a book is defined by the cover. This leads to there being three types of covers: ones that fit the colours in the book, ones that are wrong and too strong for the book and end up making the book a bad experience, and ones that are wrong but weaker than the book (which is a trstament to the quality of the book).

With that qualification, I do find colours wrong very often. For example, in Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country, indoors was supposed to be in emerald green (I remember only this one because later - much later - we find out that that's because of the colour of the curtains).