a nondescript "nondescript"?
Apr. 6th, 2011 09:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ricardienneSo obviously a 1919 Loeb of Martial, as I checked my reading against a translation, is going to engage in creative translation; in fact, I had been being rather impressed with how well you can read between the lines of "commits debaucheries" or "has relations with" -- but maybe that's just an index of how often one comes across translations like that!
But then I got to this poem, a not very nice epigram against Bassa, because she prefers women:
I.XC
Quod numquam maribus iunctam te, Bassa, videbam
Quodque tibi moechum fabula nulla dabat,
Omne sed officium circa te semper obibat
Turba tui sexus, non adeunte viro,
Esse videbaris, fateor, Lucretia nobis:
At tu, pro facinus, Bassa, fututor eras.
Inter se geminos audes committere cunnos
Mentiturque virum prodigiosa Venus.
Commenta es dignum Thebano aenigmate monstrum,
Hic ubi vir non est, ut sit adulterium.
Here is Walter C.A. Ker's version:
"In that I never saw you, Bassa, intimate with men,/ and that no scandal assigned you a lover,/ but every office a throng of your own sex round you performed without the approach of man—/you seemed to me, I confess, a Lucretia;/ yet, Bassa—oh, monstrous ! you are, it seems, a nondescript./ You dare things unspeakable/, and your portentous lust imitates man. /You have invented a prodigy worthy of the Theban riddle,/ that here, where no man is, should be adultery!"
First of all, there's the rather hilarious translation speech act of line 7, because what Ker calls "things unspeakable" that Bassa dares are actually very very explicit (cunnus is cognate with what you think it is, you non-Latinists).
But what the fututum (pardon my vulgar Latin) is going on with "nondescript" in line 6? In my language, "nondescript" means "plain, ordinary, not worth being described." Again, the opposite of what Martial is getting at! But there was something so strange and quaint about it, that I resorted to that wonderful last resort. No surprise but it turns out that "nondescript" originally means "not previously described," so, "anomalous, unusual." Which makes Ker's "you are, it seems, a nondescript" a pretty acceptable, if rather -- dare I bring modern usage back into it and say -- "nondescript" way of anticipating Martial's "unnatural" theme. Which Martial himself does, because "fututor" (again, cognate) is a masculine noun.
Do I need a tag for "anxiously edgy posts about ancient obscenity"?
But then I got to this poem, a not very nice epigram against Bassa, because she prefers women:
I.XC
Quod numquam maribus iunctam te, Bassa, videbam
Quodque tibi moechum fabula nulla dabat,
Omne sed officium circa te semper obibat
Turba tui sexus, non adeunte viro,
Esse videbaris, fateor, Lucretia nobis:
At tu, pro facinus, Bassa, fututor eras.
Inter se geminos audes committere cunnos
Mentiturque virum prodigiosa Venus.
Commenta es dignum Thebano aenigmate monstrum,
Hic ubi vir non est, ut sit adulterium.
Here is Walter C.A. Ker's version:
"In that I never saw you, Bassa, intimate with men,/ and that no scandal assigned you a lover,/ but every office a throng of your own sex round you performed without the approach of man—/you seemed to me, I confess, a Lucretia;/ yet, Bassa—oh, monstrous ! you are, it seems, a nondescript./ You dare things unspeakable/, and your portentous lust imitates man. /You have invented a prodigy worthy of the Theban riddle,/ that here, where no man is, should be adultery!"
First of all, there's the rather hilarious translation speech act of line 7, because what Ker calls "things unspeakable" that Bassa dares are actually very very explicit (cunnus is cognate with what you think it is, you non-Latinists).
But what the fututum (pardon my vulgar Latin) is going on with "nondescript" in line 6? In my language, "nondescript" means "plain, ordinary, not worth being described." Again, the opposite of what Martial is getting at! But there was something so strange and quaint about it, that I resorted to that wonderful last resort. No surprise but it turns out that "nondescript" originally means "not previously described," so, "anomalous, unusual." Which makes Ker's "you are, it seems, a nondescript" a pretty acceptable, if rather -- dare I bring modern usage back into it and say -- "nondescript" way of anticipating Martial's "unnatural" theme. Which Martial himself does, because "fututor" (again, cognate) is a masculine noun.
Do I need a tag for "anxiously edgy posts about ancient obscenity"?
