Hi Virgil,
So it stands for "I will ever deem him for God"?
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Hi Virgil,
So it stands for "I will ever deem him for God"?
Yes I think so. Like I said they inverted word order to make it sound poetic. To be more exact, "a god." The ancients believed in many gods.
The "for" here means "because," so in conventional grammer the words would be rearranged to read "for I will ever deem him a god" which means "because I will always think of him as a god."Quote:
So it stands for "I will ever deem him for God"?
I have an addendum to the question if you all don't mine...and sorry for hijacking your thread, but is Virgil referring to Maecenas here or Octavian?
You know, I was trying real hard to ignore this translation, but its really crappy. Maybe you should consider either something more literal or something more modern. This translation is so middle of the road and convoluted. I'm assuming you're native language isn't English, and some translations try to accomplish too much. It seems that this translation, while trying to give an archaic feel to the language, has mucked it up and over complicated things, as is the tendency of most translators when trying to convey the incredibly simplistic beauty of Virgil's latin.
The phrase being translated here is:
Namque erit ille mihi semper deus.
Literally: Certainly will he for me be ever god.
This is a word for word translation. What I usually do, (and rarely, I just leave it in my brain in latin), is translate the latin to the spanish.
Cierto el sera para mi, siempre dios. Then translate it into English
Certainly he shall ever be, for me, god.
I believe that the person who translated this took the 'erit' as 'for'. However, where PL is using the 'for' as a conjunction, which in this phrase is a perfectly acceptable substitute for certainly, making it, "For he shall ever be, for me, god." The translator added to it and kinda bastardized it to fit his needs. "for him a god will I deem ever" I'm not sure why the translator did that. Whatever his reason, it certainly does confuse the ESL reader.
But I've seen worse. One translation went so far as to take the 'erit' and turn it into a prepostional phrase by saying: "He will ever be taken by me for god" or some such caca.
At any rate, that was working on my brain all night. How sad am I?
Hi,
Many thanks for you all.
Good news first-I've already finished translating eclogue Ⅰ into Chinese, and it's much better than the last translation in 1957 in my mind.
Our Eclogues' translation group will soon complete this new version, and I really appreciate your help!
Gibran