The Epigram Thread

"Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

But, I suppose one could change that if needed:

Discendi periit studio olim feles, ut aiunt;
Quare iterum vivit? Sic studio placuit.

Okay, this should scan. Hoping it works grammatically as well:

Pulvere es ortus; in ipsum est rursum ergo tibi eundum.

This famous exchange:

(The Times (newspaper): ) "What's wrong with the world?"
(Chesterton: ) "Dear Sir, I am. Yours, G.K. Chesterton.”

I could translate it into prose (I have an idea at any rate), but, after trying for some time, I gave up the idea to try and make it fit into an elegiac couplet. Aside from the part "what's wrong with the world?", nothing just seems to fit.

"People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones."

I think I have a solution. Spoilered for Dantius' sake:

Well, I was going through my email and I accidentally saw a tiny bit of Callaina's answer (email notifications fail to show spoilers), so I saw (I think) that she used a dative of possession but nothing else. :oops: I'll remember for next time not to check email notifications on this thread until after I've posted my version.
I had quite a hard time with this, and I'm not sure if this works, but it does seem to have a caesura in the right place. However the use of "reparce" seems to be attested in only one instance:

I'm also not sure whether the present imperative can be used or if I would need to use the future, since the sentence is more of a general command for all time rather than a specific instance in the present. But anyway:

Vitrea cui domus est, lapides iactare reparce.

Well, no one's done anything in Latin, so here's one:

fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt. (Caesar)

Too verbose and repetitive, but couldn't find anything better:

Cui fidem habere libet plerumque libenter id credas.

[Life] is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

All right, this should work:

Vita est nobis sic a stulto fabula dicta:
Plena soni, strepitans — atque volens sibi nil.

Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

"Vincit omnia pertinax virtus".

(taken from Livy)

Well, sort of boring, but:

Virtus quae cedit nil omnia vincere potest.

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!

Again, hexameters or elegaics are fine.

Ac numquam ex umbra quae infusa iacet tabulato
Heu, surrectura est amplius haec anima.

"And what delight to be by such extoll'd
Of whom to be dispraised were no small praise?"

Maybe et numquam would be a bit better (though still not worth nec umquam)—there are more hits for it.

Et numquam ex umbra quae infusa iacet tabulato
Heu, surrectura est amplius haec anima.

Ok, that was difficult, but I think this works:

Quaenam laetitia istorum tibi laudibus altis
Qui quos obiurgant gloriam eis ita dant?

Well, if Impy didn't understand mine right off, then it must not be quite as clear as I thought; so perhaps [USER=14585]Pacifica[/USER] had a point. But this should be much better:

Quid tibi laetitiae est istorum laudibus altis
Qui quos obiurgant gloriam eis ita dant?

That is much better — it has a more clear caesura (and the word order because of that is much easier to understand).

This should fix the meter, but I don't much like the phrasing.

Well, I don't much like this, but can't find anything better:

"But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth."

"Brevity is the soul of wit."

Paucis verbis uti anima est semper salis omnis.

Though I don't like that much, since I had to throw in extra words to fill up the line, thus contradicting the entire point of the saying.

Totus in brevitate sal.

"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

(The Tempest.)

A hexameter was too long for it, methinks.

Talis materies sumus
quali somnia sunt, et haec
nostra vita minutula
somno conficitur suo.

Suo doesn't really belong, but I couldn't find anything else to fill the gap...

"Pereat dies in qua natus sum et nox in qua dictum est 'Conceptus est homo'."

Hendecasyllables.

Natalis pereat dies mihi et nox
qua dictum est hominem esse concipi me.

Never mind, that doesn't quite work grammatically; I changed something and didn't fix it. Ignore.

Ok, this should finally work.

Natalis pereat dies mihi et nox
qua dictum est hominem pari abrogetur.

Forgot about that, so used to take "us" as short.

Quae per fenestram lux mihi nascitur?
Ortus plaga est, et sol mihi Iulia est.

Et dicunt montibus, et petris: Cadite super nos, et abscondite nos a facie sedentis super thronum, et ab ira Agni.

"Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon."

I think you know what this means. If not, a translation should be easy to find online.

Famam en Danorum hastatorum audivimus olim
qui dominati sunt populos, et quomodo magnae
res virtutis perfectae illis patriciis sint.

(Yes, I know the first line doesn't have a caesura. If someone else wants to try to fit Danorum hastatorum more effectively into a dactylic hexameter, be my guest. )

Well, it seems there's some precedent for an ablative or dative alone, so:

Famam en Danorum hastatorum audivimus olim
qui dominati sunt populis, et quomodo magnae
res virtutis perfectae illis patriciis sint.

What confused you about the last line?

I couldn't think of a better way to express æþelingas -- did you have another word in mind?

Next:

O thou pale orb that silent shines
While care-untroubled mortals sleep!
Thou seest a wretch who inly pines
And wanders here to wail and weep!

(Robert Burns.)

Orbis pallide qui silens
luces dum placidus tenet
somnus sollicitudinis
expertis homines, vides
miserum ecce aliquem et vagum
qui marcescit in intimis
erratque hac ideo via
ut plangat, fleat, eiulet.

Thanks.

"Men of few words are the best men."

Qui paucis modo verbis utitur, optimus ille est.

Nec vero probare soleo id, quod de Pythagoreis accepimus, quos ferunt, si quid adfirmarent in disputando, cum ex iis quaereretur, quare ita esset, respondere solitos "ipse dixit"; ipse autem erat Pythagoras.

Non mihi id placet asseclas quod aiunt
olim Pythagorae fuisse suetos
respondere ubi quis rogaret illos
quam ob causam sibi ita hoc vel illud esse
dicerent: "quia dixit ipse"; qui "ipse"
erat Pythagoras, ut est tenere.

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. [...]"

Antiqua ex terra peregrinus sic mihi fatus:
Stant duo magna carentia trunco crura in harenis.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Est nulli dubium quin caelebs praeditus amplis
divitiis quaerat ducere utique aliquam.

Not the best way to put it, of course, but the best way would be prose.

That's not a nice one to translate because I'm not really sure if I understood some of the words - or the context - correctly. I assumed that a boots is some kind of servant and that the 'goods' were stolen goods or spoils of some sort.
I also put it in the present, but I don't think that's a problem.

est completa manus: perhibetur adesse ministrum;
quique suat capiti tegmina filo et acu.
ne certetur, adest legum iurisque peritus,
nec deest mercator rapta libenter emens.

Would anyone be interested in reviving this thread?

Ok ... here it is ... let me just post the video and your task: Just write a comment on this video. It could be anything: A description of what can be seen there (or of some particular scene), a philosophical debate on the meaning of life that this video enticed you to or an invective verse insulting me for posting such dumb stuff

This man was one of my Latin teachers. I didn't really like him, but no one did. I suppose I still liked him a little bit more than others because I usually look for points I can appreciate even in the most annoying issues For instance, he would take marks off a test if you used a *slightly* unclassical expression in a German-Latin translation test with comments like "unclassical - check RHH (our grammar book) §216 2 b β footnote 2" For some reason, that's actually what I liked about him. What I disliked was that he didn't seem to have any interest in the success of his students - he didn't care much whether you did well or not.
Anyway, in 2010, he bought that house next to a river dam and somebody recorded and published that stupid video that I'm about to post on youtube. You can imagine how well that was received when one of my fellow students discovered that video and shared it with everyone
I remember how I posted some 6 or 8 lines of elegiac couplets underneath the video. However, some donkey must have deleted them and I don't have them anymore I still remember a few parts of my verses, but I can't reconstruct the whole thing. Hence my challenge.

For poetic reasons, I should mention that his first name is Markus (another extremely deterring factor!).
In the meantime, he managed to father 7 daughters and to teach all of them chess ... so he never fully vanished from my life He wanted to send his daughters to one of my chess courses once, and I had to tell him 5 times that his eldest daughter was too old for the course. He ended up bringing her anyway :/
One of his daughters even won the German (under 10 girls') championship last year.

heu! ubi Callaina est? ubinam es, Danti, sine vobis
nil, quodcumque facit, nostra Camena valet.

Tu quoque ades nobis, Etaoin doctissima Shrdlu.*
Pacificae exemplo iungite verba metris.

ne sit qui invisus compelli nostra negetur
cuivis versiculis nomina posse pedi.

*/ˈɛti**ɔɪn ˈʃɜːrdluː/ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etaoin_shrdlu

** /ɪ/ quia vocalis ante vocalem corripitur. metimur igitur nomen Etaoin / Shrdlu v v - / - -.

The underlined parts are all I can reconstruct from back then Gone is my Frühwerk.

At least I'm like 90% sure that those were my lines.
Obviously my realisation of them having 8 children came a bit later than 2010.

I more or less added the first stanza just to give it some context:

ad sua tecta tulit, delectam Markus amicam,
uxor uti fiat, talia verba refert:

"haec, quaecumque vides, arbusta et flumina et arva,
quae sol cumque tegit sunt mihi sintque tibi!"

"haec tibi cuncta dabo - mihi fi, carissima, coniunx"
dixerat et posito supplicat ille genu.

"bisque, venusta, quater facies me prole parentem!
visne mihi" quaerit "nubere?" - "Marke volo!"

I'm not very good at making up challenges ... how about this one?

"He begged for mercy, but, alas, to no avail:
She split his head with her battleaxe
and covered his cheeks in the warm remnants of his brain."

Be as free as you like, I have no idea how to translate this, either!

Apparently, it has some allusion to a Camilla scene from the Aeneid, even though I don't remember the full wording.

Here's how I would do it:

Illa ferox eheu frustra "miserere" precato
Impete diffindit caput irridente securis
Foveruntque genas effusa fluenta cerebri.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

What about the second part of your signature?

Sir, I admit your general rule,
That every poet is a fool,
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.

(Coleridge)

Not sure how to say "Sir" in Latin ... usually you would just find some vocative of the person to whom the poem is dedicated in Latin, I think. I'll just dedicate it to Brutus
Btw. in some sources it says that the epigram is from Alexander Pope. I don't know where it comes from.

When Callaina started this thread, she usually seemed to have proverbs in mind. Maybe that's a good choice because they aren't too long and somehow meaningful.
Although ... I'm looking through a list of proverbs right now and a lot of them don't seem too inspiring ... or too short.

I've got another idea:

"Punish your criminals, but spare their lives. A human has no right to kill another human."

Qui scelus admisit, punite, ast parcite vitae:
Nam paris actu hominem non decet occidere.

You came up with that pretty fast

I took the lines from an epigram that the Austrian writer Zythophilus wrote many years ago:

et punite reos et eorum parcite vitis;
nam non est homini iure necandus homo.

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

I'm rather tired today, don't expect much

nunc tandem duro maestissima frigore bruma
aestas facta nova est nitido sub sole Brigantum.
nubila, quae nostros presserunt ante penates,
extulit Oceanus penitusque sub aequore condit.

How about writing a riddle?

There is a German forum where they play some kind of riddle game. You have to describe a person or a thing (often some kind of sight, but it can be anything) in Latin and the others have to guess (or find out) what it is. Google is allowed.
You can either describe the person or thing you have in mind, or you can let him, her or it speak themself. I'm not very active there, but I accidentally guessed riddle correctly once and they told me that I had to come up with one myself

This is what I came up with:

quis sum? me genuit curvis sinuosa Mosella;
doctrix Saxonia est; mihi munera prima Viriles
mandavere Aedes; ad Agrippae deinde profectus
urbem construxi currus, quos pelleret ignis.

denique nos, o sors, Cygnea ad tecta tulisti!
curribus hic geminis ita feci nomina: primo
imposui titulos proprios, quos ipse gerebam.
non iterum licuit - caperet quid nomen at alter,
altercabamur frustra, pluresque per horas
desperabamus, subito "et" puer "altera" dixit
"pars! quidni inde trahis titulum? sic diceris ipse!"

- cuius vitam imitari conatus sum?
- quarum urbium mentionem feci?
- quos currus (seu nomina curruum) descripsi?

(The puzzle is probably a bit easier to solve if you're German ... one of the towns mentioned is a bit of pun and the other one mentioned is something a German would immediately recognise. If you want, you can still try to find out whom I was talking about ... if you don't, I'll just tell you; that is - if you even care to know)

N.B.: It doesn't have to be as long as I did it ... some people also just wrote 2 lines. But if you want, you can make it as long or even longer
So as it's my turn, this is the challenge. Don't rush it, take your time

[USER=14585]Pacifica[/USER] bono sis animo! in mente tene quid Naso optimus omnium poeta scripserit: carmina proveniunt animo deducta sereno!

Ok ... nobody seemed to be able to solve my riddle ... I suppose nobody really cared, anyway

I'll still resolve it: What the boy said was "et altera pars" ... this comes from the well-known Roman legal phrase "audiatur et altera pars", which should have pointed your attention towards the car brand "Audi" and its founder August Horch.

He was born in Winningen (a village on the river Mosel, hence curvis sinuosa Mosella), became a smith, then proceeded to study engineering in Mittweida, Saxony (hence Saxonia doctrix), got one of his first jobs as an engineer at Carl Benz's enterprise (cf. Mercedes Benz) in Mannheim (hence Viriles Aedes, more or less a stupid interlingual pun that only makes sense to Germans ), then went on to found a company in Cologne in 1899 (Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium) and moved his company from there to Reichenbach (Saxony) in 1902 and eventually to Zwickau (Cygnea) in 1904.

His first company was named after him, "Horch", a well-known producer of German luxury cars before the 2nd WW. He was thrown out of his own company in 1909 and founded a new one in Zwickau. He was not allowed to use his own name, "Horch", anymore, so he and some of his sponsors tried really hard to come up with a new name until some school boy in the background (sitting over some kind of homework concerning the legal phrase above) suggested to translate the German name "Horch!" into Latin. Hence "Audi" was born.

Thanks to August Horch's foundation of Audi in Zwickau in 1909, Audi was one of the few companies that celebrated their 100 year anniverary only 10 years after celebrating 50 years of existence.

I'll try to keep this long story as short as possible: In the wake of the economic crisis in the early 1930s, Horch, Audi and 2 other companies from Chemnitz, Wanderer and DKW, merged into a company called Auto Union (hence the 4 rings). This company was dissolved in East Germany after the war in 1947, but they refounded themselves in Ingolstadt, Bavaria (West Germany) in 1949 under the name "Auto Union" and re-adopted the name "Audi" in the early 1980s (or late 70s, not sure). That's why they celebrated their 50th anniversary in Ingolstadt in 1999 ... a short time later, they discovered that they actually came from East Germany and went there to celebrate 100 years of Audi in 2009

The former Horch and Audi plants were where the Trabants were constructed in the times of the GDR (not sure how well those cars are known among other states).

OK, here's a phrase to turn into an epigram:

"Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out."

(falsely attributed to Livy)

I could have said this better in prose, but:

Plerumque optime eis res vertunt qui omnibus uti
quaecumque eveniunt optima ad acta sciunt.

I couldn't find any way to use the same verb (vertunt/vertit or eveniunt/evenit) twice, though it would have been better.

Anyway, let's turn it into solent. I should probably leave this thread alone, like academia, but it drives me just a bit less nuts than the latter.

Plerumque optime eis res vertunt qui omnibus uti
quaecumque eveniunt optima ad acta solent.

I have a better prose translation, though — better because the parallelism is better preserved and there are no unnecessary meter-filling words:

Eis optime evenit qui evenientibus optime utuntur.

"I am no Job; I will curse God and die", he said while slipping the noose around his neck.

Ah, well, whatever ... here it comes

Write a happy ending for that story

Ast ubi propulsa desperato pede sella
dependit, non longa illo sed littera facta est
perbrevis: heu restis decepit pondera: rupta est.
Ille solo iacuit neque post suspendia visum
temptare est: ut non Iob, Cato nec fuit ille.

That heu is ridiculous, but I can't find anything better.

Because I could not stop for Death —
He kindly stopped for me —
The Carriage held but just Ourselves —
And Immortality.

Emily Dickinson.

The first line has a hiatus, but I don't care much. I'm a battle helicopter, and if Vergil can do it, so can I.

This is a text from a German textbook for school children. It's about gladiators fighting in an arena.
I wanted to renarrate this in hexametres. Obviously, quite a few things would have to be changed.

retiarius would either have to be used with a semi-vowel rather than the i; You can also call him iaculator; and for "Callimorphus", I would suggest something like Lȳdius or Lȳdus*.

- Your task: Take some scene out of the whole text (I don't want you to translate everything of course!) and put it into verse (preferably hexametres, but you can choose whatever metre you like of course). You can choose however much or little you like

Avus: „Vidē, Aule! Secūtor per illam portam venit. Rētiārius arēnam per hanc portam intrat. Ille gladiātor est Alumnus; adhūc īgnōtus est.
Hic gladiātor est Callimorphus; eum spectātōrēs valdē amant.
Huius arma sunt rēte et tridēns. Illīus arma sunt scūtum et gladius.“
Paulō post Aulus tubās canere audit. Arbiter sīgnum dat; gladiātōrēs pūgnāre incipiunt. Statim Callimorphus Alumnum petit. Spectātōrēs nōmen Callimorphī vocant eumque incitant. Alumnus autem gladiō sē dēfendit. Iterum atque iterum Callimorphus tridente Alumnum petit. Tum Alumnus cadit, sed statim surgit.
Alumnus nunc Callimorphum petit. Aulus: „Ecce! Callimorphus cadit et humī iacet.“
Alumnus Callimorphum humī iacēre gaudet. At spectātōrēs clāmant: „Surge, Callimorphe!“ Profectō surgit, Alumnum rūrsus petit: Rēte iactat, eum capit, tridentem in Alumnum intendit. Nunc Alumnus humī iacet neque surgit.
Aulus: „Estne haec pūgna fīnīta?“ Avus: „Callimorphus et Alumnus nunc iūdicium imperātōris exspectant.“
Callimorphus imperātōrem aspicit, hic spectātōrēs aspicit. Avus cum aliīs spectātōribus māgnā vōce „Mitte, mitte!“ clāmat. Etiam Aulus imperātōrem Alumnum ex arēnā mittere cupit. Tum avus: „Nōnne imperātōrem pollice sīgnum dare vidēs? Hōc sīgnō imperātor Alumnum ex arēnā mittit.“ Spectātōrēs gaudent Callimorphum victōrem esse. Aulus gaudet Alumnum adhūc vīvere.

This is the page btw.:
www.klett.de/sixcms/media.php/185/pontes_lehrerausgabe.pdf

* because I found the name Kallimorphos here: amphi-theatrum.de/2606.html -- on a gravestone of someone from Thyateira, which seems to be in Lydia.

This is how I would do the first few lines:

Avus: „Vidē, Aule! Secūtor per illam portam venit. Rētiārius arēnam per hanc portam intrat.


Ille gladiātor est Alumnus; adhūc īgnōtus est.
Hic gladiātor est Callimorphus; eum spectātōrēs valdē amant.


Huius arma sunt rēte et tridēns. Illīus arma sunt scūtum et gladius.

Ok, that's a pity

Some parts may sound a bit stupid because I still tried to render what was in the textbook text, which, as I came to realise, was pretty dumb actually
The text tried to introduce hic and ille as well as the AcI, so I tried to retain parts of that somehow.
I've given it a small introduction:

Avus: „Vidē, Aule! Secūtor per illam portam venit. Rētiārius arēnam per hanc portam intrat. Ille gladiātor est Alumnus; adhūc īgnōtus est.
Hic gladiātor est Callimorphus; eum spectātōrēs valdē amant.
Huius arma sunt rēte et tridēns. Illīus arma sunt scūtum et gladius.“

Ok, that was what I had already posted (with the addition of the intro).
The next part (I managed to get a golden line in ):

Paulō post Aulus tubās canere audit. Arbiter sīgnum dat; gladiātōrēs pūgnāre incipiunt. Statim Callimorphus Alumnum petit. Spectātōrēs nōmen Callimorphī vocant eumque incitant. Alumnus autem gladiō sē dēfendit. Iterum atque iterum Callimorphus tridente Alumnum petit. Tum Alumnus cadit, sed statim surgit.
Alumnus nunc Callimorphum petit. Aulus: „Ecce! Callimorphus cadit et humī iacet.“

Awesome!

This is very nice:

Alumnus Callimorphum humī iacēre gaudet. At spectātōrēs clāmant: „Surge, Callimorphe!“ Profectō surgit, Alumnum rūrsus petit: Rēte iactat, eum capit, tridentem in Alumnum intendit. Nunc Alumnus humī iacet neque surgit.

Aulus: „Estne haec pūgna fīnīta?“ Avus: „Callimorphus et Alumnus nunc iūdicium imperātōris exspectant.“

I managed to get a zeugma in here:

Callimorphus imperātōrem aspicit, hic spectātōrēs aspicit. Avus cum aliīs spectātōribus māgnā vōce „Mitte, mitte!“ clāmat. Etiam Aulus imperātōrem Alumnum ex arēnā mittere cupit. Tum avus: „Nōnne imperātōrem pollice sīgnum dare vidēs? Hōc sīgnō imperātor Alumnum ex arēnā mittit.“

Thank you!
I might a slight adjustment to the ending of the story:

Spectātōrēs gaudent Callimorphum victōrem esse. Aulus gaudet Alumnum adhūc vīvere.

For [USER=14585]Pacifica[/USER]

Spectātōrēs gaudent Callimorphum victōrem esse. Aulus gaudet Alumnum adhūc vīvere.

How about going back to the orignal purpose of this thread of translating 1-liners (or maybe 2-liners).

Does anyone feel able to put this statement into metres: "Family is my reason to rise; Family is my (only) reason to fall".

I allow for a lot of freedom with regard to the term "family". I'm fine with translations such as "close ones" or even just "friends" (or whatever you can describe in a relative clause).

Ego surgo propter meos;
Cadam solos propter eos.

I'm sure you'll like this, Bitmap. :hysteric:

Lol, I really do

I'm fine with medieval accentual rhyming verse... as long as it doesn't feature rhymes like mortis <> hortis...