Talk:Jón Leifs

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Untitled

Links:
- Tár úr steini (1996) film about Jon Leifs

book

This article mentions that Leifs was a writer, but doesn't mention his 1951 book, _Islands Künstlerische Anregung_. I don't know if the book was originally published in German so I'm not going to add anything now.

Also, I believe that Arni Ingolfsson has completed his Ph.D. at Harvard and is now a professor at the Iceland Academy of the Arts.

74.12.73.203 02:09, 18 November 2006 (UTC)Anthony[reply]

As someone who knows Icelandic, which English title for Op. 11 do you prefer?

The article as created in 2003 by David Martland includes listings of some of the works of Leifs, including Íslensk rímnadanslög (the one that I, in the earlier edit summary, promised to discuss). Because I am interested in exploring the music of Leifs and want to help other music aficionados identify the overall compositions to which certain freely available movements belong, I chose to add some original Icelandic titles that I found on AllMusic, and decided against a certain change that would possibly have been an improvement.

See, the English title for Íslensk rímnadanslög that has presumably been here since the article’s 2003 creation, "Icelandic Folk Dances", has also been unverified throughout these years, I assume. (No one has the time to go through all the edits since the article’s creation and know for sure!) And as someone who does not know Icelandic but has long found AllMusic to be a good source, I was going to change the English translation to the briefer one given by their page on The Complete Piano Music: "Icelandic Dances".

However, I am not completely sure that they are correct here. For example, I tried to guess the superior translation myself by plugging into Google Translate not only the original title of Op. 11, but also the misspelling of Íslensk Þjóðlög which is given on the AllMusic page linked above (and translated there as "Icelandic Folk-Songs"), since I didn't then recognize that as a misspelling of the title of the composition in question. Right when I was about to add "Íslensk þjólðög" to the encyclopedia as part of the edit made earlier, I had Google Translate recommend a change of "þjólðög" to the correct term, "Þjóðlög", since the latter term is the Icelandic equivalent of "folk songs" and thematically resembles "rímnadanslög" more. (“þjólðög”, on the other hand, is translated there as "drinking days".) A book by an Icelandic then further confirmed that it is "Íslensk Þjóðlög" that is correct.

Now, to return to the issue about Op. 11, if you are an Icelandic native and you actually consider the briefer title given by AllMusic to be better, then feel free to ~~respond here~~ e-mail me. Accuracy is what I value the most, despite the benefits of other approaches. (For example, going ahead and changing the title to "Icelandic Dances" would actually make clearer that the composition played here is from Íslensk Þjóðlög rather than Op. 11, preventing a budding Leifs fan from having to look up the title and learn this by seeing it listed on the AllMusic page as a work from Op. 6.) I had assumed the briefer English translation of Op. 11 to come from deeper knowledge of Icelandic-to-English translation. But due to the problem discussed in the previous paragraph, as well as to the dearth of evidence that the article's creator knew the Icelandic language when creating it, I lost my confidence that the briefer title is the one that should be there from now on. So, again, feel free to ~~respond here~~ e-mail me. AndrewOne (talk) 21:40, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]