Aeneid - Book V
- Thread starter AoM
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Well, it all depends on the purpose of a translation. If the purpose is to help students understand the construction of the original, a literal translation is desirable. But if the purpose is to produce a self-sufficient work that can be read on its own by an audience other than students of the source language, then excessively literal translations can be quite ugly and even confusing.
However, if a literal translation of a certain line is not ugly or confusing, I think it's perfectly fine and even preferrable to translate it literally. Recently in class we had to translate this line literally, which was a bit awkward:
Nam fere quem quisque vivos pugnando locum ceperat, eum amissa anima corpore tegebat.
Nam fere quem quisque vivos pugnando locum ceperat, eum amissa anima corpore tegebat.
Yes, I agree. You shouldn't be un-literal for the sake of being un-literal on principle, when there's no reason to depart from the original...
"For, generally, which place each had taken by fighting alive, he, life lost, covered it with [his] body."
That's about as literal as I can get.
You also wonder where to put "alive". It doesn't feel quite right where I've put it, because it looks like it goes with "fighting", which it doesn't in the Latin. But if you put it after "taken", it sounds as if the place was taken alive, and if you put it after "each", "each alive" sounds like "each person who was alive", which isn't what the Latin means either. Adding "when" would clarify things, and perhaps it's acceptable in a literal translation if it's put in brackets, but I was trying to use as few of those as possible.
That's basically how I translated it in class.
Definitely. I think one of the issues with literal translations (and their reception) is that the majority of those producing them are novice Latinists. So when one thinks literal, one immediately conjures up the inevitable word salad. But as Dantius mentioned, if it works in English, why not try to stay closer to your source?
I think it may be a matter of consistency as well. It's a very small one, but this example comes to mind: in Kline's translation of book 4, he translates dixerat at line 238 as "He finished speaking." But then, at line 331, he translates dixerat as "She had spoken" (and again at 663). It's as if he forgot how he'd translated the first instance by the time he got to the second and third. And it doesn't help that trying to maintain this kind of consistency (both within books and between books) makes matters more laborious than they already are.
Picked up the Brill 5 recently.
As with their Brill 8, you can tell they wanted to drag this thing out so they could boast as lengthy a commentary as possible (in this case, 621 pages). Things repeated again and again (and again), unnecessary information, notes like:
"gravibus: That the oars are weighty emphasizes the size of these ships. The size of the vessels is important chiefly because it creates in the reader’s mind a clear visual image..."
But of course, for the value you get here, it's definitely worth it for the citations, general information, thoroughness, and scholarship overall. Just wish they didn't feel the need to include some of those things above.
As with their Brill 8, you can tell they wanted to drag this thing out so they could boast as lengthy a commentary as possible (in this case, 621 pages). Things repeated again and again (and again), unnecessary information, notes like:
"gravibus: That the oars are weighty emphasizes the size of these ships. The size of the vessels is important chiefly because it creates in the reader’s mind a clear visual image..."
But of course, for the value you get here, it's definitely worth it for the citations, general information, thoroughness, and scholarship overall. Just wish they didn't feel the need to include some of those things above.
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Etaoin Shrdlu
Guest
To judge from the price they charge for it, the writers were presumably paid rather well by the word. Can anybody apart from libraries afford this sort of thing?
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Etaoin Shrdlu
Guest
In my day I'd have considered that a hefty price for an actual book.
Maybe iter isn't cognate with whatever verb is used in the passage in question.
For instance, vita is cognate with vivere so you can call vitam in vitam vivere a cognate accusative; but I don't think the same can be said of aetatem in the similar phrase aetatem vivere, since aetas isn't, I think, cognate with vivere. Both are internal accusatives, though, and "accusative of kindred meaning" makes some sense to me as well, even though the term is new to me.
For instance, vita is cognate with vivere so you can call vitam in vitam vivere a cognate accusative; but I don't think the same can be said of aetatem in the similar phrase aetatem vivere, since aetas isn't, I think, cognate with vivere. Both are internal accusatives, though, and "accusative of kindred meaning" makes some sense to me as well, even though the term is new to me.
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Bitmap
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I don't know what passage you are talking about ... does it have something like "iter ire"? Because if it does, it would be a perfectly acceptable figura etymologica. If it says something like "iter incedere", then well, I can kind of understand what he is getting at: Like "aetatem vivere" it would be some sort of constructio ad sensum where the dependent word is identified as a synonym for the etymologically corresponding word ... I hope that makes sense.
I don't know either. That's why I said "Maybe iter isn't cognate with whatever verb is used in the passage in question."
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Bitmap
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I think I basically repeated what you said.
