Translating Virgil

Hey again I did a Cicero translation for Sam Hood last year, and a group translation of Thyestes for the Classics play, but it was with a teacher to help me/us in each case. A lot depends on what you're going for here - you say "interesting and exciting" so I'm guessing you mean 'literary and not literal'? You will still need to get the grammar right, though, as that would inform what you think about your text and want to get across in translation, I think.

This is the process I used, but I'm no Anne Carson so it may not be the best one!

Step 1: go for it! Perseus is your friend here. Make a 'crib' translation - so a very literal one where you've worked out what all the Latin means. This can be tricky with Virgil and having a commentary or teacher than can help and basically stop you doing something really stupid is always a shout (eg we used a book from this series https://www.amazon.co.uk/Virgil-Aeneid-VI-Latin-Texts/dp/185399653X/ref=pd_sbs_14_5/261-4250936-1854944?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=185399653X&pd_rd_r=6c3f8c76-6143-4eb7-b156-15b47d267f85&pd_rd_w=gJXzH&pd_rd_wg=Z6vHb&pf_rd_p=2773aa8e-42c5-4dbe-bda8-5cdf226aa078&pf_rd_r=553FAWCJXCFNXGKMWX4A&psc=1&refRID=553FAWCJXCFNXGKMWX4A at Pre-U, but you may well not want to buy one!)

Step 2: You are 100% confident with the Latin. This is where you can think about how you're going to translate: verse or prose? How will you render metaphors and other stylistic features? (eg, I had a big debate with my teacher about how to render mythological references, and decided to modernise) What do you want to bring out in your piece? (eg, I had Cicero invective, and I wanted to bring out some of the bathos with slang/swearing). What tone are you going for? The sooner you make these decisions, the sooner you can realise you made the wrong ones

Step 3: Try and write your exciting translation! Then sleep on your first draft, maybe show it to someone, and rinse and repeat until you're sick of it or you're happy with it.

Focusing on the spirit of the text rather than the literal meaning (if that is even possible, it seldom is with Sanskrit) is what swings it for me. Meaning is important, but it can be put across in cognate ways rather than in an identical way. This is what I have picked up over the past 7 years

Ah thank you! Also is sanskrit something you studied at school or uni? Because that is sooo cool haha

I had to do it as part of my doctoral training (and Pāli, too)

Ooh that is very cool. I would quite like to learn sanskrit, even if it was just a course for fun on the side. Is the alphabet similar to the modern hindi alphabet because I am kind of familiar with that one?

The script is devanagari, yes. It's similar enough to Hindi in form. Some grammatical differences (vowel numbers, inflection), and Hindi often removes half of the final syllable but if you can read Skt you can get by in Hindi. Maybe it works the other way around, too!

(Original post by spqr101)
Hiya again! Thanks so much for the help! My teacher recommended this website to help for analysis ( https://d.iogen.es/web/?ver=1.003&user=stud)- a sort if online database which I think operates in tandem with Perseus where you can click on individual Latin words and see definition entries for each one along with grammar info. I'm hoping that this will be helpful because I'm planning on relying pretty much solely on this...

I'm planning on translating the part where Aeneas meets Dido and she doesn't say anything and just turns away (really pulled on my heartstrings the first time I read it ), so I'll see what I'll try and focus on.

Also modernising the mythological features sounds so cool- can you maybe let me know which one you modernised and what you changed it to.
(If there ever were a historical reference to Nero in any passages and I was doing a modernised translation I can so see myself changing him to Trump bahaha)
Ooh that looks like a nice thing to use! Basically just Perseus but more accessible, seems like - very handy. Doesn't look like it offers any syntax/ context support, though?

That’s a lovely bit of book 6 and good luck with it if it doesn’t make you cry something is very wrong lol, although it’s also a moment of strength for Dido.

Hahaha so just off the top of my head, I remember that we changed the chorus in Thyestes into a group of royal correspondents reporting on the general disaster, and wrote in an extra scene to get all the Tantalid backstory across. Seneca has a tendency to write these long speeches with lots of mythological references and we decided that we wanted to cut those and instead of have 20 random references to myths the audience wouldn’t know, we’d have one myth that we actually described (so instead of ‘Shall I suffer that fate of Prometheus’ more ‘will I be left to be devoured by eagles’ sort of thing). We were going for timeless more than ‘modern day’ so we weren’t really trying to map anything on to modern references instead like some translations (eg Eyre’s translation of Horace’s ‘Soracte Ode’, which uses modern pompous wine references and is great) - although we did make a couple of jokes like having one character refer to Atreus as ‘worse than Trump’ and calling his attendant ‘Dominic’ (it was very lazy, I know). I think we also changed a Fury into a Conscience and had to put up with a big lecture from the teacher helping us about why that was not Classically appropriate!
And yes hahaha Nero as Trump would be amusing and I await the next university Classics play which does that with baited breath

Ah thank you! Also is sanskrit something you studied at school or uni? Because that is sooo cool haha

Hello! I'm a student studying Latin (and Ancient Greek) GCSE going into Y11 in September.

I really want to try and translate a small section of Aeneid 6 by myself for the school Classics magazine. The thing is that, yes, in class we have been working on translating our set text from Aeneid 2, but we have been doing this as a class (not individually) and with the aid of our teacher, and of course the translation is rather literal and dry.

This means that I do know the grammar and how to translate, it's just that I've never really done a REAL translation (when you add a little nuance and flair to it).

Since i'm in Y10 we haven't been offered the chance to participate in external competitions like translation prizes, so I'm not familiar at all with what actually makes an interesting and exciting translation.

If anyone here takes Latin in the sixth form, or has done any translation prizes, some advice would be great.

Thanks!

Aeneid book 6 was something we tackled at school - try searching for a phrase in Latin and there is lots of support online. The section we did was from line 628.

Thanks. I do want to try and tackle it myself first (I suppose it'll be good practice if not anything else) and see how it goes.

Aeneid 6 is so cool to study as a set text though! I mean we do book 2 with the death of Priam and Aeneas fleeing from Troy which is really cool and I'm not complaining, but there are just so many other cool bits that I want to look at! Like book 6, or book 11 with the death of Nisus and Euryalus which I think quite a few people do. I haven't personally heard of anyone looking at Book 4 with the death of Dido but I thought that would also be really fun to look at.

Poetry is harder than prose - we were encouraged to chant it get the rhythm. We also did Gallic War book 2 which I found a lot easier.

We haven't started our prose set text yet so I don't really have an idea of this quite yet...

... but yh i can imagine that scansion probably isn't easy. We haven't learnt about it yet formally in lessons (though I thought it seemed kind of fun and I watched a video on how it works with all the dactyls and spondees haha), so I'm assuming we don't need to know it for GCSE, though Virgil's word order is all over the place, and I'm dearly hoping that Pliny and Tacitus are a little less bonkers on that front...

Even if poetry is harder than prose, I think I'd enjoy poetry much more just because the plot is so interesting and I really love analysing Virgil's stylistic features, however I do think my teacher has a large role to play with my appreciation of that kind of thing because he is SUPER passionate about the aeneid and literally will give lectures on each line it's quite funny. Most of my class hates him for it but I love it haha.

We have been doing prose in Greek though and it's a little dull. I can't wait to get on to the Iliad!!

@becausethenight Hey! I just have some (maybe stupid) questions... sorry about how many there are...

1) If I do a verse translation, does the English verse also have to be in dactylic hexameter?

2) I've done half of my 'crib' translation, but unfortunately I did struggle a bit at parts and may have looked at an actual translation to help me... ahhh! I know this isn't for a competition, but if it were would that be cheating (maybe it could count as a 'substitute' for teacher aid? I don't know I'm just making up excuses now haha)??

3) Ok now I suddenly am very confused about something else... I feel like this is going to sound very stupid...

So, I always considered that a translation that looked something like the pic underneath is a verse translation:
but when I scrolled to the front page it said that it was actually a 'prose' translation

But I thought that something that looked like the following pic was a prose translation?




4) Last question (I'm so sorry!)- It's a translation one though

So the first two lines are:

infelix Dido, verus mihi nuntius ergo

venerat exstinctam, ferroque extrema secutam?

So my crib translation was:
Unlucky Dido, therefore the news that had come to me of you, having been killed, and by a sword, was true?

-I'm kind of assuming that the perfect passive participle 'extinctam' is agreeing with Dido, just because I can't see any other feminine nouns.
And so I'm a little confused by where 'secutam' (having followed) is meant to go in? Is it something like 'having followed you, having been killed, and by a sword...'

-And where the hell is the 'extrema' meant to go? It's annoying enough that it can have so many meanings, either as an adjective:
exter, extera -um, exterior -or -us, extremus -a -um ADJ
outer/external; outward; on outside, far; of another country, foreign; strange;

Or as a noun
extremum, extremi N (2nd) N
limit, outside; end;

So yh more confusion about what that's meant to agree with if it's a superlative adjective.

Though, if it's a noun, maybe it's something like
'therefore the news that had come to me of your end, having been killed, and by a sword...'

I mean at this rate this is now my translation:
'Unlucky Dido, therefore the news that had come to me, having followed your end, having been killed, and by a sword, was true?'

That really doesn't seem right...

Hey, no, don’t worry! And did no teacher ever tell you “there are no stupid questions” I did book 6 for GCSE so hopefully I can help lol.

1) No, of course not! Hexameters and other Latin/Greek meters actually aren’t very common in English verse (because...word stress patterns) so you often see translations into iambic pentameter or more ‘English’ verses. Have a look on Wikipedia here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexameter - the TLDR is ‘lots of poets tried to do English hexameter and failed’ If you’re not a poet, I would either go for a very simple meter or just do prose, but equally if you want to go for it, do!

2) If looking at someone else’s translation is cheating, then the Classical/literary world is full of cheaters! Seriously, I’ve done it, I’ve read several translations of my set texts to get a feel for them, and when we were translating Thyestes on a weekly basis everyone was cribbing from the Loeb like hell. Please don’t beat yourself up about it! Without wishing to be really mean, being able to do Virgil off the cuff is achievable for Classics grads who’ve, like, read it before. It’s not a failure at all; if you were studying French you would not expect to read and fully understand, say, Rabelais at this point. If it were for a competition I would read the rules, but unless it was a timed Olympiad-style paper, I don’t see how they could reasonably prevent you - all they’ll ask, AFAIK, is that it’s your own work, so you can’t lift from other translations verbatim.

3) Verse and prose =/= just how the text is laid out. [Also, verse doesn’t necessarily just mean “poetry” - in a Classics context it usually means something has meter, so follows a certain stress pattern, but there are some English poets like ee cummings who write in free verse, so their poems by definition have no verse.] The first prose translation you have is laid out in lines, like poetry, but doesn’t follow any poetic scheme or meter, so it’s prose (it’s probably in lines to make it easier to map onto the Latin). Try reading it out loud, you’ll see there’s no stress pattern. This is technical stuff and it’s taken me really up to the end of Y13 to actually get a handle on meter in poetry (it was Catullus wot did it, as he uses such varied meter and we read a lot out loud). Have a look here which looks like a good intro: https://implicatedisorder.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/a-guide-to-poetry-1-on-metrics-4/ or ask your teacher (in my experience, Classics teachers adore talking about meter)

4) Yup, this is hard grammar. If I’d not done it before I’d be super confused. TLDR: it’s reported speech, Vergil can elide the se and esse because poetry.

Basically, you’re right: ‘extinctam’ and ‘secutam’ agree with Dido. Secutam is a PAP as sequor is dependent, so it can take an object, which in this case is ‘extrema’ (ends, technically, but I’d put money on it being a poetic plural). Why you’re confused is because Virgil has elided the ‘esse’ and a ‘se’ - the participles are part of reported speech (so the news that). If I rewrite the couplet in more basic prose Latin “o infelix Dido, ergo nuntius verus mihi venerat, se extinctam
esse ferroque extremum secutam esse” (O ill fated Dido, so true news that you had killed yourself and had sought (lit: followed) an end with a sword had come to me! in awful Latin-y English, maybe in better English “O ill-fated Dido, so the news that came to me was true, the news telling me that you had killed yourself, that you sought to end everything by the sword!”)

I want to stress that it seems like you’ve completely gone about trying to translate this right, and that this is the sort of thing you pick up on by reading hundreds of lines of Latin. I cannot fault you in your translation technique

I hope that sort of answers all your questions, and I’ve not made any mistakes! Do let me know if this just leads to more questions lol

Ah thank you very much! That translation explanation makes a lot more sense... I felt like maybe he was doing some weird indirect statement thing but I just couldn't find an infinitive, so I guess he elided it.

And also the verse vs prose translation thing makes a lot of sense now too, thank you. I feel like I'd kind of want to do a prose translation, but set out like the first picture because I guess that way you can get across things like promoted and demoted words in the English translation, no?

And I'll definitely interrogate my teacher on meter when we get back- it seems really cool and I'd definitely love to learn a bit more about it

Thanks again