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Jem comments on REQ: Latin translation for HPMOR - Less Wrong
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Comments (52)
Okay, I'll stop lurking and register, if it will help get a new HPMOR out. Here is my translation:
non est salvatori salvator
neque victori Dominus
nec pater nec mater
modo nihilitas supera
I do have confidence in my translation, which I suppose is a tiny amount of evidence in its favor. The sense is very well preserved, and it has a rhythm that flows well (admittedly subjective). I did not fit it to a classical Latin poetic form such as a hexameter or elegaic couplet; I could do this as well but I doubt I could do it while leaving the sense strictly unchanged.
(note for fellow Latinists: the construction in the first two lines is the dative of possession, which I think is very nice for this metaphorical (as opposed to physical possession) sense of "hath")
Hmm..."victor" probably isn't a good choice here, though. I didn't recognize the ambiguity in the English at first, until I read Dallas' translation. "Champion" in English can mean "winner" or "defender/fighter for a cause", and I went with "winner", but I think Dallas is correct in thinking that Eliezer wanted the "defender" meaning. In that case, make the second line
"nec defensori Dominus"
(propugnatori, as Dallas has it, also has roughly the same meaning (shades up the "fighting" connotation), but ugh, five syllables with a glottal stop; I'd keep it to prose)
nec or neque?
Doesn't modo usually indicate a quantitative restriction? ("You're only allowed 10 of those", "he was only just alive", etc.) Note: I'm basing this on looking it up in Lewis&Short, not on genuine expertise of my own.
Where's the glottal stop in propugnatori? (Regardless, I like defensor.)
I went with nec because I liked the sound better with one syllable. Neque would work as well (as I understand it, the only difference is that neque slightly stresses that it is a conjuction).
As for modo/sola, I had sola but then changed it...both translations share the same issue, which is that the original English "only nothingness" doesn't quite work for me. "Only", to me, suggests that there's at least something. What do you think of the following sentences?
My opinion is that those are ill-formed in the same way as "Only nothingness above"; all three would be better off without "only". Similarly, neither modo nor sola seem right when applied to nihilitas, and for the same reason: the nothingness isn't alone, it just...isn't. I guess my real suggestion here is to modify the English.
Thank you for making me do the research on the phonetics. I reached for a term that meant "that sound that a g makes when it's right before an n", and incorrectly came up with "glottal stop". Now I know that it's a "velar nasal", so I learned something today!
Consider "I looked around me, and saw only empty space"; "I shouted and listened for an echo, but heard only silence"; "through one door I saw the familiar outside world; through the other, only the emptiness of space". "Nothingness" isn't quite the same as "nothing"; it means something more like "the appearance of nothing where you might have expected there to be something". (Perhaps that's why I thought inanitas (literally "emptiness") rather than nihilitas, but another reason is that I simply didn't think of nihilitas :-).)
If nec and neque are semantically equivalent, then I agree with you in preferring nec defensori and neque victori on metrical grounds. If soter is acceptable Latin for saviour/rescuer, and if its (dubious) ablative is something like soteri -- neither of which I'd be too sure of! -- then "non est soteri soter. nec defensori dominus" is an improvement rhythmically. I think. I was never any good with Latin poetry.
Modifying the English isn't unthinkable. What sounds right in Latin?
Here are some possibilities:
nulla res curans superna -> nothing above [i.e., in the heavens] that cares
nihil nisi stellae supernum -> nothing above but stars
nihil nisi inanitas supernum -> nothing above but the void (or, nothing above but emptiness)
nihilitas inanis superna -> an empty nothingness above (maybe too redundant?)
"Nihilitas superna"?
Yes, works great.
Maybe I'm pushing my luck, but "Nihil supernum"?
As a reader, I'm glad you pushed your luck. While I don't know Latin well enough to comment on correctness, this version sounds the coolest.
Yes, that's grammatical (as would be "nihilum supernum"). Those are closer to English "nothing" than "nothingness", and maybe too short to fit with the preceding lines, but I don't know if that's an issue.
Thanks! Here for comparison is Google's translation:
If "Soter" or "Sotehr" means "savior", as I seem to recall from Aristoi, that might suit the meaning well; and if the first line makes sense grammatically, of which no clue hath I, it has a good ring. "Defensori" does sound closer to the intended meaning than "victori" or "vindex". And whether "modo nihil est" means at all the same thing as "modo nihilitas supera", I've likewise no clue but it sounds like the "above" part was left out. If it actually does convey the same meaning, it is more compact.
If this version works, it would have a powerful ring to it:
But one suspects that what's actually needed is:
Yes, soter is a good word for savior. Google has the grammar wrong (it doesn't seem like it's even trying to decline, all the nouns were left as nominative). If you want to keep the parallelism you had in the English ("No X hath the X") it would need to be
Non est soteri soter
or
Non habet sotera soter
If you use the second, I guarantee you will get mail from well-meaning fans saying "You did that wrong! You need an accusative there, and Sotera isn't accusative!". Oddly, it is, though I would never have guessed without looking it up...apparently it was borrowed from Greek and didn't ever regularize; it kept on being declined as though it were Greek. I like the version with "est" way better anyway, and lines two and three would also need to be slightly different grammatically if you switch to "habet"
I would be tempted to go with just "Nullus soter soteri", a more poetic construction that in English would be closer to "no saviour for the saviour", leaving verb 'est / there is' as implicit. This would also line up nicely with the following lines.
edit: also "salvator" seems a better match to the "rescuer" meaning of "saviour" than "soter".
I vote for salvator, though I am not an expert in Mediaeval Latin. In classical Latin, at least, the Greek would be tacky. Both words sound rather Christian, but soter even more so than salvator.
I think modo is an improvement over solum.
Nihilitas sounds much weaker than nihil: I'd prefer the latter. We shouldn't think English: the -ness part doesn't need to be carried over. Then again, it is possible that nihilitas was a favourite word of 13th-century literature.
ehm , man: Soter is ancient greek and it was used by medieval erudite scholar, yes, but to refer, in a more or less cryptic way, only to Jchrist.
Would nemo also work in the first line instead of non?