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Old March 27, 2014, 11:06 AM
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wrholt wrholt is offline
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I think that your translation is fine.

And no, intonation in speech and punctuation in writing is all that distinguishes the question from the statement in this case; the perception of whether it's a question or a statement would normally be supported by the context in which the sentence is uttered.

As you say, though, in a song intonation is lost in favor of melody, leaving the context of the sentence as the only source of clues regarding whether it's a statement or a question, and some contexts may not offer sufficient clues to do that. Of course, ambiguity and the potential for multiple interpretations is relatively common in poetry...

Last edited by wrholt; March 27, 2014 at 11:15 AM.
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