Hammer-Purgstall’s translators fabricated content by guessing from a few words

Evidence

His Arabic seems to have been worse than his Persian and the twentieth-century Arabist, R. A. Nicholson, remarked of Hammer-Purgstall’s rendering of a mystical poem by Ibn al-Farid that ‘“translation” of a literary work usually implies that some attempt has been made to understand it, I prefer to say that Hammer rendered the poem into German rhymed verse by a method peculiar to himself, which appears to have consisted in picking out two or three words in each couplet and filling the void with any ideas which might strike his fancy’. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 269

Categorization

• CANDY: The portrait of a careless translator filling every couplet with whatever struck his fancy is genuinely funny and tweetable.
• XREF: connects to: Translators deformed the same text for opposite ideological purposes

Related

• Translators deformed the same text for opposite ideological purposes (similarity 0.82)