"Darkness lies one step ahead"

A

Anonymous

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"Darkness lies one step ahead"

I'd really like to know what the Latin for this Japanese proverb is... I can't even find that many references to it on the web let alone Latin translations of it!

Cheers.
 

Iynx

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Well, this is a tough one. "Darkness lies ahead" we might well render as:

Tenebrae ante insidiantur

And "one step" might be unus passus, or unus gradus. The hard part is how to qualify the ante by the "one step" (or so it seems to me). I think it should be an ablative (? of degree of difference?), and I find in Cornelius Nepos (Pausanius v: 2) the phrase paucis ante gradibus, which I take to mean "a few steps ahead".

Putting this all together I will stick my neck out by proposing:

Tenebrae uno ante passu insidiantur.

I don't feel a lot of confidence in this, and I hope some of our colleagues will jump in here.
 

deudeditus

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I'm no scholar, but I'd say that unum ante gradum would be acceptable if the venerable Grandson used such a construction.

is the ante even necessary, though? with verbs like movere can't the naked acc. be used to express distance? me unum pedem moui. Is that construction bollocks? If it's not completely trash, can it be used with our proverb? but still, the acc. in me unum pedem moui implies motion, no? aaarrrgh! :brickwall:

confusedly yours,
:D -Jon
 
A

Anonymous

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Glad I could provide a little challenge :D

My own (English) interpretation of the proverb tends toward a reading along the lines of "The unknown lies ahead"...

I find that the phrase "Obscuris vera involvens" ("Truth is enveloped by obscurity") is kind of heading in the right direction but not quite there.

:?
 

Cato

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This is an interesting problem. Tenebrae uno ante passu insidiantur is a pretty good translation; Insidiantur is an inspired choice, as it implies the darkness "lies in wait" just a short distance away.

However I'm not sure about passu; this word really means a "pace", and in Roman terms a pace was two steps (e.g. you start a new pace when you put down your left foot). We know this because the term for a Roman mile--fairly close to our own 5,280-foot mile from the markers that have been found along Roman roads--was mille passus - "a thousand paces". Not many folks even today (unless they play in the NBA) take five-foot long steps. So I'm inclined toward uno ante gradu here.

Ante paulum - "a little ahead" is another possibility (I personally don't like it). And if the OP wants to emphasize just how close the darkness is, I'd suggest dropping uno and adding vix - "barely, just" (this one I do like, but given the original English am not sure it's justified).

To summarize, I'd go with:

Tenebrae uno ante gradu insidiantur

and change the uno to vix if you prefer the interpretation "just ahead".
 

Cato

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deudeditus dixit:
is the ante even necessary, though? with verbs like movere can't the naked acc. be used to express distance? me unum pedem moui. Is that construction bollocks? If it's not completely trash, can it be used with our proverb? but still, the acc. in me unum pedem moui implies motion, no?
I think the ante is necessary. You may be thinking of the use of the bare accusative to give the extent in space of something, e.g. Via erat quinque milia passus (longa) - "The road was five miles (long)".

For use of distance with a verb like moveo (e.g."I moved five miles"), you are really expressing the amount by which you moved (i.e. you didn't literally pick up five miles worth of road and move it). Hence you need the ablative (technically this is, I think, an ablative of attendant circumstance).
 

deudeditus

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is ante being used adverbially? sorry for the stupid question, but I noticed that everyone else was using the abl. with ante which i seem to remember taking the acc.

I like the suggestion to use uix.

-Jon
 

Iynx

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Yes, my ante is an adverb, not a preposition; the uno passu (or uno gradu) is an ablative (possibly of degree of difference, possibly of attendant cirumstance, but certainly of Cornelius-Nepos-did-it-that-way).

And I don't think that's a stupid question at all; I'd hate to tell you the time I've spent puzzling over similar constructions.
 

Iynx

Consularis

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I mentioned gradus as a possibility in my first post in this thread. But I chose passus because it seems to me that gradus is here too broad a term, with too many potential meanings. I prefer passus as meaning more specifically and concretely "footstep". That the Romans reckoned their pace as two of ours seems to me a less important consideration.

I can see Cato's argument though, and I can also see that someone else might prefer gradus precisely because of its more varied potential signification.

De gustibus non disputandum.
 
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