LotR using a translation framing device to get out of having to drown the reader in constructed languages for characters that are supposed to be mundane to the viewpoint, but also being written when it was from the perspective of someone who was genuinely handling translation at the time, leads me to the admittedly silly sentiment of "you couldn't write lord of the rings today -- because that's not how modern literature approaches the translation of proper nouns"
if tolkien wrote his books today, he couldn't have called him gandalf the grey!*
*: because it was obviously important to him that the books represent a translation of authentic texts from another world and another time, and while it would have been perfectly conventional in his time as an academic for books translated into english to find a way to represent the meaningful components of their names with equivalents that were likely to be more familiar to the reader, this convention has been largely phased out and replaced with a preference for transliteration. assuming he wrote the books today and pursued this same reflection of his academic interests in his creative ones, it would ring inauthentic to not represent the languages he describes in this way
You mean we would have the adventures of Razanur, Kalimac, Maura, and Zilbirâpha?
an adventure prompted by dear old G[no further components of gandalf's adûni name were ever confirmed] [see also: G is for Garden]
