Please help me to construe "tumida ex ira tum corda residunt". Does "tumida" agree with "ira" (ablative feminine singular) or "corda" (nominative neuter plural)? The English versions I have to hand that are closest to the Latin in their wording disagree:
Phaer (1557): "than [sc. then] angry wrath his swelling hart forsooke" Lonsdale & Lee (1871): "Then from its surging wrath his heart subsides" [an iambic pentameter, as it happens, though it's a prose translation!] West (1990): "At this the swelling anger subsided in his heart" My preference is strongly for Phaer (because it seems to me that a heart can swell with anger but it doesn't make much sense to say anger itself swells up), but the modern translators appear to offer him no support. However, Butler in his 1920 commentary notes that "the metaphor is of a swollen sea changing to a calm" and cites Cicero's "tumor animi residit" as an analogue. It doesn't help that the final a of "tumida", whether long or short, is elided. I remember my Latin teacher at school many years ago saying that elided vowels were actually pronounced in reading, though not included in the metrical reckoning. "All sorts of things would go dreadfully wrong if you left the vowels out," he declared. I've never read or heard of anyone else saying the same thing. Was he right? Or -- another possibility -- perhaps we have a syntactical vagueness here such as that in some passages of Shakespeare and other English writers. Might a Roman reader have happily left it unresolved which noun the adjective qualifies? (By the way, I ask all this merely out of idle curiosity. Please don't go to great efforts to settle the question, but I'd be interested in your thoughts.) Simon Cauchi, Hamilton, New Zealand <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
