Inspirational Accept what is necessary, enjoy what is possible, burn for the impossible
- Thread starter Sven
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Hi,
That isn't quite correct.
I would offer two options, one that's more concise but less classical, and one less concise but more classical. By classical I mean the sort of Latin that might have been used around Cicero's time. The "less classical" option uses words that didn't occur until a couple of centuries later.
Necessaria patere, possibilibus fruere, in impossibilia arde.
Quae necesse est fieri, ea patere; quae possunt fieri, iis fruere; quae non possunt fieri, in ea arde.
That isn't quite correct.
I would offer two options, one that's more concise but less classical, and one less concise but more classical. By classical I mean the sort of Latin that might have been used around Cicero's time. The "less classical" option uses words that didn't occur until a couple of centuries later.
Necessaria patere, possibilibus fruere, in impossibilia arde.
Quae necesse est fieri, ea patere; quae possunt fieri, iis fruere; quae non possunt fieri, in ea arde.
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"The things that must be done/happen, accept them; the things that can be done/happen, enjoy them; the things that cannot be done/happen, burn for them."
Ah, really?That looks quite Ciceronian indeed
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Ah, really?
I tried to imagine for a second how your arrived at that translation. Obviously, I can't really be sure, but there are some interesting thoughts you might have somehow gone through.
- obviously the "less classical" translation you provided worked as well ... maybe, I underestimate it a bit, but it sounds like a tiny bit obvious when translating from English to Latin (which, I'm sure, didn't escape you, either) [or maybe, just like me, you dislike some of those very-many-syllables words]
- so you went for classical prose as an alternative, but realised how all (or actually just some?) of those things would have to be expressed in relative clauses, which might make a large part of the translation bulky
- you solved the problem of things sounding bulky by creating a tri-coloned parallelism both in the relative clause (quae <...> fieri) as well as in the main clause (form of is + imperative)
- the in in the last clause seems to break that symmetry a bit, as does the sudden use of an active imperative ... but for some reason (at least to me), it sounds like a welcome change. You also go from 2 imperatives that consist of 3 short syllables to a sudden imperative that consist of 2 long syllables (it all feels like you suddently want to underline the punchline a bit, like the heroic couplet in a sonnet).
- I was wondering if the end also lived up to a Ciceronian clausula, but I'm not a great expert on that actually ... I still haven't really *truly* found whether 2 shorts are, even there, allowed to make up for a length (beyond my personal interest, I never had any reason to find out about that either)... but I noticed that he used things like esse videatur relatively often. If you allow for a hiat between fieri and in, as the nature of your preceding words would actually suggest you could do, then your line would finish in the same way.
I didn't think about syllables or clausulae.
However, I did change necessaria, which, per se, worked well in classical Latin, into a relative clause to make the first part more parallel with the two other parts which couldn't be expressed in classical Latin otherwise than with relative clauses.
However, I did change necessaria, which, per se, worked well in classical Latin, into a relative clause to make the first part more parallel with the two other parts which couldn't be expressed in classical Latin otherwise than with relative clauses.