Ovid's Fasti III - Anna

A

Anonymous

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For a class project I have to translate 100 lines of Ovid. I chose to do the part about Anna, and of course once I got through 100 lines I had to keep going and finish the rest of it (I think it's about 250 lines total). I'm having a bit of trouble, maybe you can help.

Diffiguint Tyrii, quo quemque agit error agit, ut olim
amisso dubiae rege vagantur apes.

The bold part is giving me trouble. I know that error must be the subject of agit, and I want to make the quo a "to where", so is the whole thing "to where wandering drives each one?"

Fertilis est Melite sterili vicina Cosyrae
insula.


According to my text (which has VERY few notes), Melite is the island of Malta. Is vicina taking an ablative here? Does it usually? I took a guess and translated it as "The fertile island of Cosyra is near to barren Malta"

Iactatur tumidas exsul Phoenissa per undas
humidaque opposita lumina veste tegit

According to my scanasion, humida and lumina are nueter plural, and opposita and veste are sing ablatives. So my translation comes out "The Phoenician exile is tossed through the rough waves and she touches her wet eyes with the placed-against cloth." I feel like this is correct gramatically, but I'm not really sure what it means. My only guess is that she is crying and wiping away the tears with her clothing.

Multa tibi memores, nil non debemus Ellisae.
Nomine grata tuo, grata sororis, eris

This one is the hardest for me. It is Aeneas talking to Anna. The subject of debemus must be Aeneas+Anna (right?), so is memores agreeing with them? And what is the "multa" doing? Internal accustative? Does the tibi agree with Dido? My current shot is "We are very mindful of you, Dido, but we owe you nothing" The second line I really have no idea. No matter how I do it it comes out weird. Both gratas end in short a.

Thanks for any help.
 

Chamaeleo

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Location:
Melbourne
PiusAeneas dixit:
Diffiguint Tyrii, quo quemque agit error agit, ut olim
amisso dubiae rege vagantur apes.

The bold part is giving me trouble. I know that error must be the subject of agit, and I want to make the quo a "to where", so is the whole thing "to where wandering drives each one?"
That's exactly it, although it sounds funny in English.

PiusAeneas dixit:
Fertilis est Melite sterili vicina Cosyrae
insula.

According to my text (which has VERY few notes), Melite is the island of Malta. Is vicina taking an ablative here? Does it usually? I took a guess and translated it as "The fertile island of Cosyra is near to barren Malta"
The meaning and the metre here both require ‘vīcīnă’ in the nominative.

–⏑⏑|–⏑⏑|–⏑⏑|––|–⏑⏑|––

FERTILI | SEST MELI | TÉ STERI | LÍ VÍ | CÍNA CO | SÝRÆ
 
A

Anonymous

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CHAMÆLEO dixit:
PiusAeneas dixit:
That's exactly it, although it sounds funny in English.
Ok thanks for confirming.


The meaning and the metre here both require ‘vīcīnă’ in the nominative.

–⏑⏑|–⏑⏑|–⏑⏑|––|–⏑⏑|––

FERTILI | SEST MELI | TÉ STERI | LÍ VÍ | CÍNA CO | SÝRÆ
I did think vicina was nominative, but I didn't realize what it was modifying. I just looked up Melite in my OLD, and I realized that it is indeed nominative. My new translation for that line looks something like

"The fertile island Melite is near to barren Cosyra"

This works out much better. Thanks for your help.
 

Chamaeleo

New Member

Location:
Melbourne
PiusAeneas dixit:
I just looked up Melite in my OLD, and I realized that it is indeed nominative. My new translation for that line looks something like
My dictionary has ‘Melita’ for Malta, but I assumed this is a Greek form, echoing ‘Μελίτη’ with eta.
 

Chamaeleo

New Member

Location:
Melbourne
PiusAeneas dixit:
Iactatur tumidas exsul Phoenissa per undas
humidaque opposita lumina veste tegit

According to my scanasion, humida and lumina are nueter plural, and opposita and veste are sing ablatives. So my translation comes out "The Phoenician exile is tossed through the rough waves and she touches her wet eyes with the placed-against cloth." I feel like this is correct gramatically, but I'm not really sure what it means. My only guess is that she is crying and wiping away the tears with her clothing.
Your scansion seems right to me. The short vowel in ‘ūmĭdă’ also permits an interpretation as nominative singular feminine.

So, it looks like ‘she’ (possibly described as ‘damp’) ‘covers’ her ‘lights/eyes/lamps’ (possibly described as ‘damp’) with her ‘robe/clothes/raiment’, which is described (awkwardly, and probably just for the metre) as being ‘placed against’.

‘And she covers her damp eyes with her robe.’
 

Chamaeleo

New Member

Location:
Melbourne
PiusAeneas dixit:
Multa tibi memores, nil non debemus Ellisae.
Nomine grata tuo, grata sororis, eris

This one is the hardest for me. It is Aeneas talking to Anna. The subject of debemus must be Aeneas+Anna (right?), so is memores agreeing with them? And what is the "multa" doing? Internal accustative? Does the tibi agree with Dido? My current shot is "We are very mindful of you, Dido, but we owe you nothing" The second line I really have no idea. No matter how I do it it comes out weird. Both gratas end in short a.

Thanks for any help.
As far as I can make out here, there is a lot of ellipsis. I'll try to write it out in plainer lingo:


Dīxit Ænēās:
«Nōs, qvī memŏrēs sumus, tibī dēbēmus multās rēs. Et Dīdōnī dēbēmus nōnnullās rēs.
Ō Anna, tū nōbis eris grāta nōmĭne tuō, et grāta nōmĭne Dīdōnis.»
 

Imber Ranae

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PiusAeneas dixit:
For a class project I have to translate 100 lines of Ovid. I chose to do the part about Anna, and of course once I got through 100 lines I had to keep going and finish the rest of it (I think it's about 250 lines total). I'm having a bit of trouble, maybe you can help.

Diffiguint Tyrii, quo quemque agit error agit, ut olim
amisso dubiae rege vagantur apes.

The bold part is giving me trouble. I know that error must be the subject of agit, and I want to make the quo a "to where", so is the whole thing "to where wandering drives each one?"
Yes, you have it right, I think. It might sound better in English if we change it to passive voice: "Whither each is driven by his wandering, the Tyrians disperse."

Your reproduction of the first line isn't quite accurate, though. It should be diffugiunt Tyrii quo quemque agit error, ut olim

PiusAeneas dixit:
Fertilis est Melite sterili vicina Cosyrae
insula.

According to my text (which has VERY few notes), Melite is the island of Malta. Is vicina taking an ablative here? Does it usually? I took a guess and translated it as "The fertile island of Cosyra is near to barren Malta"
No, Melite is nominative. You can determine from the metre that the final 'e' is long. It's a Greek first declension feminine ending in eta, i.e. Μελίτη. Sterili is a 3rd declension adjective agreeing with Cosyrae, which the adjective vicina takes as its dative object. I think you were taking Cosyrae as a so-called "genitive of apposition" with insula, like we say in English "the island of Cossyra", but classical Latin rarely does this with names of places. Instead the name is put in the same case as the noun it refers to, e.g. urbs Roma "the city of Rome", not urbs Romae*. So insula is in apposition with Melite, not Cosyrae, though they are both islands.

"Fertile is the island of Melite, near barren Cosyra" or perhaps "There is a fertile island, Melite, near barren Cosyra"

PiusAeneas dixit:
Iactatur tumidas exsul Phoenissa per undas
humidaque opposita lumina veste tegit

According to my scanasion, humida and lumina are nueter plural, and opposita and veste are sing ablatives. So my translation comes out "The Phoenician exile is tossed through the rough waves and she touches her wet eyes with the placed-against cloth." I feel like this is correct gramatically, but I'm not really sure what it means. My only guess is that she is crying and wiping away the tears with her clothing.
Your understanding is correct, but you're right that it is somewhat difficult to render elegantly into English idiom. Maybe something like: "Along the billowing waves the Phoenician exile is tossed, and with her garment draped over her she conceals tearful eyes."

PiusAeneas dixit:
Multa tibi memores, nil non debemus Ellisae.
Nomine grata tuo, grata sororis, eris

This one is the hardest for me. It is Aeneas talking to Anna. The subject of debemus must be Aeneas+Anna (right?), so is memores agreeing with them? And what is the "multa" doing? Internal accustative? Does the tibi agree with Dido? My current shot is "We are very mindful of you, Dido, but we owe you nothing" The second line I really have no idea. No matter how I do it it comes out weird. Both gratas end in short a.
This is tricky. He's speaking to Anna, correct? He can't be speaking to Dido, since she's in Tartarus, and he refers to her in the third person anyway (Dido is also called Ellisa). So unless I'm missing something, I think Aeneas must be using the pluralis maiestatis. Both nil and multa are what he's saying he owes to Anna and Dido, respectively. Nil non is litotes, and I believe the negation makes a universal positive, i.e. "there is nothing we do not owe to Elissa" (non nil would mean "we owe not nothing [i.e. something] to Elissa"). I'm having a harder time figuring out what to do with memores. Most likely it agrees with the subject, an implied nos, and thus it is Aeneas referring to himself as one who remembers her and Dido. Taken together I would translate it: "We, remembering you both, owe much to thee, and to Elissa everything."

For the next line, grata obviously refers to Anna again, and it is the predicate adjective of eris. The most likely meaning here is "welcome". Grata is repeated in order to indicate the two situations under which she is welcome, which are described by the ablative nomine. With a possessive pronoun or genitive in agreement nomine often means "in the name of" or "for the sake of". So nomine tuo goes with the first grata, and nomine must be inferred again with the second, but this time it's modified by the genitive sororis. If we were to fill in the gaps caused by the ellipsis and regularize the word order a bit, the line would read Nomine tuo grata et nomine sororis grata eris: "You shall be welcome for your own sake, and welcome for the sake of your sister." It might sound better in English to translate it active and personally: "I [or "we"] will welcome you in your own name, and in the name of your sister".

PiusAeneas dixit:
Thanks for any help.
No problem.
 

Chamaeleo

New Member

Location:
Melbourne
Imber Ranae dixit:
You can determine from the metre that the final 'e' is long.
I don't think so. The s- of ‘sterilī’ would make the final syllable of ‘Melĭtē’ heavy in any case. Only the fact that it must be a Greek-derived feminine in tells us that it's long.

Imber Ranae dixit:
So unless I'm missing something, I think Aeneas must be using the pluralis maiestatis. Both nil and multa are what he's saying he owes to Anna and Dido, respectively. Nil non is litotes, and I believe the negation makes a universal positive, i.e. "there is nothing we do not owe to Elissa" (non nil would mean "we owe not nothing [i.e. something] to Elissa").
Looking online at some English translations, it seems that most people interpret it as being the same as ‘nōnnil’. I suppose the only way to be sure is to evaluate the relative contributions of Anna and her sister. Then we can decide whether Æneas owes Dido ‘everything’ or just ‘quite a lot’, versus the ‘great deal’ that he owes to Anna.
 

Chamaeleo

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Location:
Melbourne
I've just realised that this is in the wrong forum.
 
 

cinefactus

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Easily fixed
 

Imber Ranae

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Location:
Grand Rapids, Michigan
CHAMÆLEO dixit:
I don't think so. The s- of ‘sterilī’ would make the final syllable of ‘Melĭtē’ heavy in any case. Only the fact that it must be a Greek-derived feminine in tells us that it's long.
You are right. I wasn't paying very close attention, it would seem.

CHAMÆLEO dixit:
Looking online at some English translations, it seems that most people interpret it as being the same as ‘nōnnil’. I suppose the only way to be sure is to evaluate the relative contributions of Anna and her sister. Then we can decide whether Æneas owes Dido ‘everything’ or just ‘quite a lot’, versus the ‘great deal’ that he owes to Anna.
From what I remember of the Aeneid it was Dido who offered Aeneas a great deal, as she was the ruling monarch who gave him succor in Carthage. Anna was just her younger sister.
 
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