27/11/23, 11:34 Lorem ipsum translated: it remains Greek to me | Publishing | The Guardian

Books blog
Lorem ipsum translated: it remains Greek to me
The apparently random Latin placeholder text, used to help design
pages, has been translated. Despite the absence of meaning, it's
weirdly mesmerising

Alison Flood
Fri 21 Mar 2014 15.15 CET

My excitement over JRR Tolkien's forthcoming Beowulf translation had some calling
me, in no uncertain terms, a geek. Perhaps that's why I'm so taken with this valiant
attempt at translating Lorem Ipsum, the standard dummy text for printers which is a
mangling of Cicero, and which dates back to the 16th century.

Used to fill blank space on a page before the proper copy is ready, it starts: "Lorem
ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nam hendrerit nisi sed sollicitudin
pellentesque. Nunc posuere purus rhoncus pulvinar aliquam. Ut aliquet tristique
nisl vitae volutpat. Nulla aliquet porttitor venenatis. Donec a dui et dui fringilla
consectetur id nec massa. Aliquam erat volutpat. Sed ut dui ut lacus dictum
fermentum vel tincidunt neque. Sed sed lacinia lectus. Duis sit amet sodales felis.
Duis nunc eros, mattis at dui ac, convallis semper risus. In adipiscing ultrices tellus,
in suscipit massa vehicula eu."

Nick Richardson at the London Review of Books asked Cambridge academic

Jaspreet Singh Boparai to have a stab at translating it; he came up with the weirdly
compelling:

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27/11/23, 11:34 Lorem ipsum translated: it remains Greek to me | Publishing | The Guardian

"Rrow itself, let it be sorrow; let him love it; let him pursue it, ishing for its
acquisitiendum. Because he will ab hold, unless but through concer, and also of
those who resist. Now a pure snore disturbeded sum dust. He ejjnoyes, in order that
somewon, also with a severe one, unless of life. May a cusstums offficer somewon
nothing of a poison-filled. Until, from a twho, twho chaffinch may also pursue it, not
even a lump. But as twho, as a tank; a proverb, yeast; or else they tinscribe nor. Yet
yet dewlap bed. Twho may be, let him love fellows of a polecat. Now amour, the,
twhose being, drunk, yet twhitch and, an enclosed valley's always a laugh. In
acquisitiendum the Furies are Earth; in (he takes up) a lump vehicles bien."

"It's like extreme Mallarmé, or a Burroughsian cut-up, or a paragraph of Finnegans

Wake," muses Richardson. "Some of the new coinages are intriguingly ambiguous:
'concer', both cancer and conquer (and conker); 'somewon', a prize and a person;
'tinscribe', to engrave on tin?"

I asked Boparai how he came up with his version; he said his "basic challenge was to
make this text precisely as incoherent in English as it is in Latin - and to make it
incoherent in the same way".

So, "the Greek 'eu' in Latin became the French 'bien' in my translation, and the '-ing'
ending in 'lorem ipsum' seemed best rendered by an '-iendum' in English".

"I could only do this by steadfastly refusing to see the wood for the trees, and
faithfully reproducing every error, and every minute instance of 'what the fuck does
this mean?'," he said. " When you spend eight hours a day reading Renaissance Latin
texts you get used to elaborate Ciceronian syntax that makes no sense whatsoever,
and so the absurdity of this content left me serenely unperturbed."

Well, I love it, just as I love the fact Richardson also points his readers towards the
host of comedy Lorem ipsum generators that exist online – how did I not know of
the existence of Samuel L Ipsum, "motherfucking placeholder text motherfucker"?
This is important stuff to ponder, people, and what the internet is for, surely …

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