English Translation
I am a stranger.
Is the translation right?
I would have translated “I am another person”, or “I am someone else”.
Uh… Tatoeba has a different translation again, but it is even worse… “I is an other”, which is not even English.
The Japanese sentence is a translation from French, but that sentence too appears to be broken (“Je est un autre.” uses the first person pronoun and the third person conjugation for the verb).
Edit: I found out it is a citation by Arthur Rimbaud, and the sentence is purposefully twisted.
I don’t think it is a useful sentence for someone trying to learn a language, but that’s how it is.
Still, all I care is understanding the Japanese sentence, correctly, not the other versions.
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@mike-lima
Agreed. As far as I know, Tatoeba official guidelines recommend contributors to post sentences written in a standard language. Poetries, especially in 19th or earlier centuries, are not helpful and not recommended.
If the French sentence is quoted from Arthur Rimbaud’s “Lettres du Voyant” (May 1871), I found several translations:
私とは一個の他人なのです。(“The Great Collection of Rimbaud”, translated in Japanese and published by Chikuma Shobou in 1996)
ぼくというのは他の人です。(source)
Rimbaud also said like this: “that’s nonsense if a piece of wood believes in itself as a violin.” I guess Rimbaud tried to separate himself as a human being from what he thinks/expresses (or separate body from soul.) He also talked about observations and a way of thinking (maybe objective vs. subjective.)
So, I’m not an expert in French, but “Je est un autre” (lit. = “I” is another) probably implies that “I am detached from my ego, and I as a poet see everything perfectly from objective perspectives.”
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