Translating English-to-Latin along with my students.

My high school Latin III students have come to the end of their extremely beat-up Henle Latin grammar books, the green ones, and we aren't sorry to see them go. There remain a few weeks in the year; and though I have focused the course on Latin-to-English translation, I wanted to spend a little bit of time doing English-to-Latin translation. I am not very practiced at this, but I thought it would be fun, and anyway, the teenaged boys I work with know very well that I am an amateur, so why not jump in together?

There are a few "continuous passages for translation" in the books as English-to-Latin exercises, accompanied by an answer key. They are certainly written at the correct level for the Latin III students to parse, steeped as theyare in an adaptation of De bello gallico, but they are not very much fun to work with. First of all, they're about nothing but English colonialism: the Boer War and Cecil Rhodes; and the vocabulary (and the age of the book) doesn't admit a, shall we say, nuanced treatment of this subject. Second of all, the English they're written is ghastly boring.

So I used a couple of those passages in class only, as a teaching tool for a process of going about rendering the English into Latin. I put them up on the board and talked to them a little about the kinds of things to keep in mind and the way to go about translating, one clause at a time.

Much of this lesson I drew from my experience -- I do have a little -- putting English into practical, nonacademic French and Spanish, i.e., a target language of which I'm a non-native and halting speaker. I am no expert in the theory of translation, only an amateur, but I believe a lot of those skills transfer, and of those many would transfer even for non-Romance, maybe even non-Indo-European languages. I know enough to know, for example, that you don't just get your dictionary and plod from left to right translating one word after another (a habit I had to break them of in Latin-to-English translation). You can start off that way if you want, but it isn't always the most efficient approach.

For example, first you have to read and understand the text itself: make sure that you know the definition of every word and idiom, that you've identified ambiguities of meaning, that you know each word's job in its sentence (does that "for" act as a conjunction or a preposition? and if it's a preposition does it mean "intended to be received by" or does it mean "on behalf of"?), that you know the antecedents of all the pronouns, and so forth.

And then it's helpful to deconstruct the sentences, to set aside all the modifiers and all the appositives and all the subordinate clauses, and write out simply the subjects-verbs-objects. It isn't necessary to diagram the sentences, but if you enjoy that sort of thing you can do it.

And another thing you can do, especially if you have a limited vocabulary or a limited sentence structure, is to think how you might rewrite the English text in English: an English that might or might not be simpler, but that in any case is an English that you know how to say in the target language. For example, to go on a search-and-destroy mission for all idioms whose target-language equivalent you don't possess.

For example: I have read enough French to know that if I translate an English fairy tale into French, I know to render that opening phrase "Once upon a time", characteristic of the genre, into "Il y avait une fois..." But off the top of my head I do not know whether Italian, Spanish, Latin, Polish, Somali, Mandarin, Tagalog, or any other languages use any such catchphrase to alert the reader that they have commenced to read a fairy tale. (Let's acknowledge that I could search for examples of fairy tales in these languages and find out how they begin -- but for now set aside the wonders of Google.) I recognize "Once upon a time" as idiomatic -- do we ever say we are "upon" any measure of duration? -- so I know not to trust a word-for-word translation ("a single occurrence -- located atop -- a point in history"). I begin my translation by rewriting the idiom's sense -- an indefinite place, an indefinite time in the past, a tale which may or may not be historical -- in a more straightforward English: "I have heard of a story from long ago, in a distant land...."

And finally you can recast the English into a form that, while remaining English, is more characteristic of the thought-patterns of the target language, at least in the ones you know how to use. One example of this that comes to mind from going into French is to break up all the compound nouns and reverse them: instead of going home, because it's time for the game, to get my hockey stick and my old woolen hat and my ice skates, I go home, because the game will soon begin, to get my stick of hockey and my old hat in wool and my skates for ice. If I am about to translate into Latin, from what I can tell, this often means making explicit in my preliminary English the meanings that we often gloss over, such as purpose: I won't go home "to get" my equipment. Instead, the game being about to start, in order that I might get my equipment, I will go home.

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So I walked the boys through a couple of paragraphs, mostly not going into Latin at all, spending most of our time rearranging the English into phrases that they knew how to render in Latin. That was just the practice. What did I give them to translate?

Well, I felt that poetry would just be mean, so it had to be prose, and it was going to be good prose. I also wanted it to have a lot of vocabulary and, shall we say, purpose overlap with the Latin they had been translating all year. This having been Caesar's Gallic Wars, I searched for a passage that would recount something military in nature. Furthermore, because I know my own limitations, I wanted something for which a Latin version already existed, so that I might check my own efforts against something more masterly.

First I considered something from a literary translation of the Bible, a passage somewhere detailing a battle. After all, I have the Latin Vulgate to compare it to I thought perhaps to draw from 1 Maccabees, which starts out rather auspiciously for the Latin teacher used to dealing with battles and slaying and strongholds and kings:

Now it came to pass, after that Alexander the son of Philip the Macedonian, who first reigned in Greece, coming out of the land of Cethim, had overthrown Darius, king of the Persians and Medes: he fought many battles, and took the strongholds of all, and slew the kings of the earth; and he went through even to the ends of the earth: and took the spoils of many nations: and the earth was quiet before him.

et factum est postquam percussit Alexander Philippi Macedo qui primus regnavit in Graecia egressus de terra Cetthim Darium regem Persarum et Medorum: constituit proelia multa et omnium obtinuit munitiones et interfecit reges terrae et pertransiit usque ad fines terrae et accepit spolia multitudinis gentium et siluit terra in conspectu eius.

Besides the subject matter, I thought another advantage of 1 Maccabees (compared to other Bible texts I might choose) is that it was only composed (although originally in Hebrew, that version being lost and only a Greek translation surviving) about a hundred years before Caesar was writing. So it would have, I thought. a more modern and historical style to it, closer to the kind of writing Caesar was trying to produce, than a selection from more ancient texts.

The second thing I considered was an English rendering of the Latin news broadcasts Nuntii Latini put out by Finnish state radio. I would use the Latin transcript as my "answer key," and I would give the boys my best English translation of the Latin (rendered in a journalistic style) to use as their source text. I would find a story about some military action somewhere, so that their battle-hardened vocabulary would be put to good use.

But in the end, knowing that a Latin version was available, I settled for this:

The Clouds Burst

So began a battle that none had expected; and it was called the Battle of Five Armies, and it was very terrible. Upon one side were the Goblins and the wild Wolves, and upon the other were Elves and Men and Dwarves. This is how it fell out.... Messengers had passed to and fro between all the Goblins' cities, colonies, and strongholds... Tidings they had gathered in secret ways; and in all the mountains there was a forging and an arming. Then they marched and gathered by hill and valley... until.... a vast host was assembled... they hastened night after night through the mountains...

How much Gandalf knew cannot be said, but it is plain that he had not expected this sudden assault. This is the plan that he made in council with the Elven-king and with Bard; and with Dain, for the dwarf-lord now joined them: the Goblins were the foes of all, and at their coming all other quarrels were forgotten. Their only hope was to lure the goblins into the valley between the arms of the Mountain; and themselves to man the great spurs that struck south and east. Yet this would be perilous, if the goblins were in sufficient numbers to overrun the mountain itself, and so to attack them also from behind and above; but there was no time to make any other plan, or to summon help.

It's high-interest (one of my charges let slip a "Cool!" before he recollected himself), military in scope, contains sentences that are complex yet amenable to being rearranged or recast into simpler language, and -- best of all -- it's good English writing.

I do have Mark Walker's Hobbitus Ille to refer to, but I have already tried my hand at recasting the English and setting up the Latin on my own, and I don't intend to peek until I have made a stab at the Latin.

If you would like to try along with me, let me supply you with some of Walker's vocabulary and proper nouns, the same that I provided for my high school juniors:

• hobbitus, -i, hobbit
  
• gobelinus, -i, goblin
• dryas, dryadis, elf
• nanus, -i, dwarf
• Gandalphus, -i, Gandalf
• Vates, -is, Bard
• Dainus, -i, Dain
• jugum, -i, ridge, for "spur"

Have fun! I know I will.

 

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Comments

[Melanie B]

What a fun exercise. Bella and I have been dipping into Hobbitus Ille more or less at random. She likes to find her favorite passages and then try to pick out words. We looked at the Attercop poem together yesterday.

Also, the Latin equivalent to "Once Upon a Time" is "Olim."

[Tabitha]

I'm not very learned in Latin AT ALL, so this may be a dumb question--why would Walker render Gandalf as Gandalphus? I thought the ph as f phonogram was distinctively Greek. Just curious about it.
I love this post, though. I miss messing around with languages, though I haven't done much!

[bearing]

I'm not sure, Tabitha -- I searched for a while. My best guess right now is that there aren't many Latin stems ending in f?