Latin Jokes

[inthegobi]

Here are some i've come across in my translating. Maybe they are interesting exercises for translating. Please add more - one life-goal is to be able to make people groan in more than one language.

(Although, I think all of these count as puns, not exactly jokes.)

(1) The following comes from Barbara Tuchman's book The March of Folly 'The Renaissance Popes Provoke the Protestant Secession'. It seems there was an old Roman wall upon which citizens could write graffiti, to blow off a little steam. Olympia was a niece of a Pope, and rumored to live too well:

Olim pia, nunc impia

Here are three (pretty weak) scholar-type puns from my stuff on Christopher Clavius (1538-1612) an astronomer. (He's proving that the planets have to be approaching and receding from the earth, and therefore cannot be in perfectly concentric paths around it. Each piece of evidence is called an apparentia. So the vision that the Sun periodically changes size through a year is one apparentia):

(2) A pun on apparentia that works the same when Englished:

Eadem haec apparentia tantum habuit robur apud Averroem, ut coegerit illum fateri . . . 'necesse esse, ut Sol moveatur regulariter in orbe eccentrico, quandoquidem circa centrum terrae ita irregulariter movetur.' Ut etiam ex hoc loco eius inconstantia appareat, quia alibi eccentricos omnino e medio sustulit.

(3) A sly pun on light and the clear shadows cast by it, and 'illuminating' evidence:

Quod idcirco dixerim, ut studiosus lector videat, tam illustrem esse hanc apparentiam de magnitudine Planetarum, quae sine Eccentricis et Epicyclis defendi non potest, ut sponte sese oculis nostris interdum obiiciat sine ministerio instrumentorum.

(4) My favorite one (I've got my choice already, and it's pretty dreadful, but none of these puns are knee-slappers):

[M]erito decreverunt Astronomi, Planetas in orbibus eccentricis, atque Epicyclis vehi, non autem in concentricis, cum per hos tueri non possimus tam multiplicem varietatem in motibus Planetarum.

Happy translating.

Chris Kirk

[Iohannes Aurum]

This one is found in many introductory Latin textbooks, including Wheelock's Latin: Semper ubi sub ubi