Post by IgnotusSeneca evidently said 'Verberat nos et lacerat fortuna', which the book
translates as 'Fortune batters and torments us.'
This has me puzzling about word order in Latin ; I suspect I'll still be
puzzling about it when I fall off the perch, but it seems important to grasp
it as best I can, even this early .
I thought Seneca had switched from 'Fortuna nos verberat et lacerat' (the
everyday word order?), to 'Verberat nos et lacerat fortuna' so as to
emphasize the suffering. But, if that were so, the English translation of
the intended meaning would have to be more like 'Lashed and tormented by
fortune are we.'
Am I falling into the trap of thinking in English? Is it the case that, in
Latin, the part that the speaker wants to emphasize goes at the end of the
sentence, so Seneca is pointing out that we are mere pawns of fate: it's
blind chance that is plaguing us (or, as Charlie Drake used to say, 'You
can't help bad luck.'!) ?
Word order in Latin is rather poorly treated by the main grammars; it
deserves some more study I should think to work out properly.
All too often, people say something like 'Latin (or Greek or Sanskrit)
has no word order', which is a misunderstanding - word order simply
performs a different linguistic function in Latin than it does in
English and similar languages.
As it is, you seem to have a fair grasp of the main points (as
understood by most, at least). Most people think of Latin as having a
basic word order as follows, with the possibility of virtually any of
these parts as being left out (though not all at once of course!):
subject+attributes - object+attributes - other adverbial information -
verb
This is the unmarked pattern; deviations from this generally call
attention to the word in a deviant position. The most emphatic
positions are at the beginning and the end of the sentence; thus a
simple subject - verb sentence would call attention to itself if it
appeared verb - subject instead.
So you are absolutely right in your analysis of Seneca's sentence
above: 'verberat nos et lacerat fortuna' is a rather striking
transformation of what may have been more meekly expressed as 'fortuna
nos verberat et lacerat'. It's a version that really emphasises the
violence of the action.
As far as how to translate it into English, that depends on what you're
doing as a translator. If your aim is simply to convery the basic
meaning of the words or a crib, 'fortune batters and torments us' is
absolutely fine. If your aim is to try to reproduce for the reader of
the English the feelings that you think the Latin evoked for its
original audience, you'll try something more adventurous.
This is, of course, where subjectivity comes in. If we start by
admitting that a given text is a piece of art, then we are left to
wonder what right the translation has to that title. I think most
people here would agree that a translation at best conveys the artistry
of the translator, not the original author. The fact is that there are
so many veils to cloud our understanding: it is virtually impossible to
fully comprehend Seneca's instincts in his language or his expectation
of how his audience worked, so we essentially have to guess at what
'normal' word order is, what range of tolerance of deviations from this
'normality' (which is the product of our guess to begin with) exists,
what a given deviation might have meant, how significant any given
deviation would have felt within a text. At the end, all we can say is
that it is somehow something more 'emphatic'. On the other hand, there
are several ways of expressing things in English, that we as native
English speakers generally understand quite well, though not
necessarily consciously. These different expressions almost certainly
do not correspond in a one-to-one relationship with the Latin range of
variants - just like vocabulary - given the extremely different
cultural environments in which the two languages have developed. So in
the end, as a translator, you have to guess at what you think the Latin
meant to its author and audience, then select from a group of
approximations in your own language. To pass off the end product as the
artistry of the original author is, in my view, virtually always
dishonest. To ignore these problems and think that we have special
access to understanding the original fully is arrogant and foolhardy.
That's why I think of translations as reflecting the skills or artistry
of the translator only: I appreciate Melville, along with Pope and
Dryden, as poets of English and judge them by the standards I would use
for any other English poet. On the other hand, if I want to consider
the artistry of Ovid, I turn to my Latin text, admit that I'm not an
Augustan Roman and can never become one, and try my hardest to notice
what I think Ovid would have wanted his audience to and not notice what
I think he wouldn't have. Maybe I can get about a 60% - 80% success
rate - could hardly hope for anything higher - but that's enough to
enjoy the man and appreciate him as a great wordsmith.
Neeraj Mathur