Translation talk:Catullus 1

This translation is very poor.

1. 'Delightful new little book' violates English rules for order of adjectives. (Since we have two adjectives modifying libellum already, it should probably be rendered 'booklet' anyway, avoiding the problem entirely.)

2. There is no legitimate reason to leave the macron on 'pūmice'. Leaving it on 'Cornēlīus' is highly problematic; but 'pumice' is a perfectly good English word, and there is simply no excuse for the macron here.

3. 'Cornelius to you' is a very poor expression of 'Cornēlī, tibi'; one cannot preserve word order slavishly going from Latin to English, and 'to you, Cornelius' is practically required to render the force of the vocative into English.

4. 'Ītalians'? Again, 'Italians' is an English word - it needs no macron.

5. 'Iuppiter'? The standard English form of the name is 'Jupiter'.

6. 'involving much work'? Using a three-word phrase here for 'labōriōsīs', and simply 'learned' for 'doctis', breaks the parallelism. Why can we not use the perfectly good English cognate 'laborious' to render 'labōriōsīs'?

7. 'oh patron muse'? Here the translation leapfrogs from the overscrupulous literalism that gave us Cornēlīus-with-macrons and Iuppiter, and unaccountably translates 'virgo' as 'muse'. 'patrōna virgō' is perfectly straightforwardly 'virgin/maiden patroness'.

I fixed these. The English of the last three lines is quite unnatural, but that will require more thought than these simple fixes. Dioskolos (talk) 19:41, 6 December 2010 (UTC)