Simon Cauchi said, in a response to my posting: > May I raise a pedantic objection? Patrick's phrase "the idea of the living > earth sleeping" is brilliantly evocative, but it seems to me that the > Virgilian line conveys something different. The earth's living creatures > are sleeping, not the earth itself. Patrick has transferred the epithet > (which is implicit in Latin, explicit only in the translation). His > transferred epithet is legitimate enough, no doubt, because the phrase > exactly conveys the feeling of a poetic nightpiece---which, by > the way, I'm > sure must be a form antedating Virgil, but I can't cite examples.
I don't for one moment regard this as pedantic and I must confess that I often have doubts (as many must) if I have the sense of the Latin quite right. I hope it gets righter as time goes by! I usually use the Loeb Classical 'pony' edition of the Aeneid and the translation given there is "It was night and on earth sleep held the living world." The phrase "the living world" can, clearly, be understood as either the biosphere or the world itself being animate, and perhaps this catches the sense implicit in the Latin rather well. For someone reading alone, away from the scholarly world, some of these issues are problematic. Aeneid Book IV, line 539 reads "Nox ruit etc." Fairclough and Goold in my Loeb translate this as "Night is coming" but, a few lines earlier, dawn seems to be appearing so shouldn't it read "Night is going" or similar? But who am I to argue with such eminent Latinists? Perhaps someone can tell me if I have missed some obvious point. Having said that, I always try to understand the Latin text direct so that I can re-read it comfortably without a crib and I do agree with those who say that it is better not to have a crib at all, though this can result, in my case, in some fairly dramatic mistranslations! I must also say that I often find lines totally impenetrable and sometimes translators don't seem to have made much headway either, but at least I have the satisfaction of knowing I can return to them at a later date. > And it's singular habebat. Sleep has (possesses) the living creatures of > the earth. But habebant was no doubt a mere fumble on the keyboard. Apolgies for this - it was, indeed, a typo. While on this topic of poetic nightpieces, I was intrigued by the lines from Ovid "Nox erat, et somnus lassos submissit ocellos;/terruerunt animum talia vias meum" with its obvious congruencies with Virgil's "Nox erat et terris animalia somnus habebat". Is this simply coincidence? Patrick Roper ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
