shimobaatar wrote: ↑13 Jan 2020 14:07
I'm wondering if this phrase/concept is actually a lot more obscure than I thought.
It's a 19th century misquotation from Hamlet (Shakespeare's actual line was 'the very witching time of night'). There seems to have been a general belief, or at least dramatic conceit, at that time in England that there was a particular time of night when supernatural things tended to happen (in Shakespeare, it's midnight, though occultists in the last few decades have decided it should be 3AM instead). But so far as I know, the association with witches specifically, and the idea of it being specifically an hour, are from Hamlet (Shakespeare uses the same conceit in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but without the terminology). And I think the modern occultism is all a Shakespeare homage (unknowingly or knowingly) rather than a genuine folkoric tradition. So whether a language has a native translation for it may depend on how Shakespeare-obsessed they are...
[Wiktionary gives a few translations, but I don't know how modern or how widespread they are, and they don't seem to be literal. Swedish has "spook time", German has "ghost hour" (or "spirit hour"), French just has "hour of crime", apparently, but that might be from modern urban legends (and/or statistics) about crime that happens to coincide with the Shakespearian time, rather than anything occult in origin.]
Also worth pointing out that even in Hamlet, although he uses the term 'witching', there's no overt mention of actual witches. "Tis now the very witching time of night, / When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out / Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood / And do such bitter business as the bitter day / Would quake to look on". Midsummer Night's Dream calls it "fairy time", and mostly talks about the natural world (wolves, owls) and psychology (tiredness, thoughts of death), but does also say that in fairy time "the graves all gaping wide / Every one lets forth his sprite / In the churchway paths to glide".