a hard passage

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hlawson38
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a hard passage

Post by hlawson38 »

I was stumped by the passage below, until I read the translation. I will show how many ways I went wrong, and I request any advice on reading such passages. Can anything general be said at all? Or, does one just keep trying, and analyzing mistakes, one after another?
Otium divos rogat in patenti
prensus Aegaeo, simul atra nubes
condidit lunam neque certa fulgent
sidera nautis,
Horace, Odes, 2, 16, first stanza.

Otium divos rogat: I missed the double accusative: [somebody] asks the gods for-rest.

prensus: I failed to read this perfect passive participle substantively as "the one taken", and thus could not relate it properly to the verb rogat.

patenti . . . Aegaeo: I tried to read this as a dative, and and didn't see it as object of the preposition in, the complement of prensus.

atra nubes: I misread nubes as nominative plural, and missed the agreement with atra.
Hugh Lawson

Qimmik
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Re: a hard passage

Post by Qimmik »

Horace is difficult. Extreme hyperbaton and radical compression are his trademarks. And I think he deliberately tries to surprise or even mislead the reader by scrambling the word order in unexpected ways, so that the idea of a sentence unfolds gradually, not all at once. There's a certain sense of satisfaction or pleasure like the unexpected resolution of a dissonance in music, as the syntax falls into place and the meaning becomes evident.

Sometimes you just have to resort to "decoding" by the hated "grammar-translation" method. Eventually, it becomes easier to pick up the syntax without having to think about it.

It helps to first figure out the subject and the main verb. Here, in the first clause, prensus can only be nominative singular, so that must be the subject (in any case, you wouldn't expect otium to ask for something--otium is something someone asks for--and diuuos must be accusative plural, so it can't be the subject), and rogat is the verb. in patenti should alert you to look for a noun modified by patenti, and you have it in Aegaeo. If you look up rogo in Lewis and Short,

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/phi ... isandshort

you'll see that it can take a double accusative, meaning "to ask someone for something":
II Transf., to ask, beg, request, solicit one for a thing (so predominantly in the class. per.; syn.: posco, oro, obsecro, ambio, capto); constr. aliquem (rarely ab aliquo) aliquid, aliquem, aliquid, with ut, ne, or absol.
atra nubes condidit -- you need a noun to agree with atra and a subject for condidit; here only nubes can fill those functions. Look up nub- in a dictionary that isn't on-line, so that you can find words that begin with nub-, and you'll see that nubes is nominative singular.

This can be a tedious and time-consuming process at first, but as you read more, you'll start to see the syntax of new material without having to resort to "decoding".

By the way, you should definitely try to read this metrically. These Sapphic stanzas are easier than hexameter, I think, because the meter doesn't allow substitutions of two shorts for a long--the verses are isosyllabic--and the rhythm is ingratiating.

mwh
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Re: a hard passage

Post by mwh »

[Here’s what I wrote earlier, before Qimmik posted. No real difference between us, except I wouldn’t start by hunting for the (possibly non-existent) subject but just take it as it comes.]

Well this is high poetry, so it’s not going to be like reading prose.

Your difficulties were all understandable. prensus in particular could be puzzling, especially when there’s no noun to go with it if it’s a participle and not a noun. You might have been able to guess at the double accusative construction with rogat, though, and in patenti … Aegaeo would present a problem only if you thought patenti could not be ablative; in should have tipped you off.

Taking nubes as nom.pl. was an avoidable error. Once you reached condidit you should have realised it couldn’t be that (but it could still be acc.pl.), and once you reached lunam it should have occurred to you to think of nom.sing.

Here’s how I’d approach
Otium divos rogat in patenti
prensus Aegaeo,

otium: subject?, object?
divos: acc.pl., unless archaic spelling of divus.
rogat: the verb. "otium asks the gods" (or asks for gods)? Seems unlikely, so is otium divos double acc.? Potential construction, potential sitution: someone asks the gods for otium (leisure?).
in patenti: in the open — I see Aegaeo coming up, in the open Aegean. Situation: storm(?) at sea, subject a sailor?
prensus sandwiched inbetween. Not a noun that I know, presumably perf.pass.pple, “taken”, “caught.” This confirms scenario suggested by the rest: someone caught on the open seas prays for otium. Nauta perhaps?
comma: oh, there’s to be no noun, unless we get one later, but I guess there’s no real need for one, given the clarity of the image. So let’s go on.

— I wouldn’t consciously go through this process. I’d just read through and take in the meaning, but this is an attempt to break down the mental processing involved, to give an idea of how I'd advise you to proceed with anything you read.

The only “general” thing that emerges from your mistakes, it seems to me, is this: Don’t lock in to the first thing you think of (patenti dative, nubes nom.plural) but stay open to alternatives. Beyond that, your procedure is good: yes, one just keeps trying, and keeps analyzing one’s mistakes. The last is very important. You will find you get better, as progressively fewer things throw you off. But reading Horace’s odes is never a trouble-free process. It’s not meant to be.

hlawson38
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Re: a hard passage

Post by hlawson38 »

Thanks to mwh and Qimmik for the careful replies. Horace is difficult, but out of say six odes, I can usually dope out one fairly easily. Most of the stanzas don't give me this much trouble.
Hugh Lawson

hlawson38
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Re: a hard passage

Post by hlawson38 »

A second reply. There exist at least two downloadable Lewis & Short dictionaries that can be used offline.

One here:

http://athirdway.com/glossa/download.html

and one here:

http://www.inrebus.com/latindictionary.php

Both of these give contextual hints; i.e. typing in "nub" will show several choices.

If online, you can find the Latin text at perseus, and from there you can see the Lewis & Short definition. Besides these, I fine Wm Whitaker's Words helpful.
Hugh Lawson

mwh
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Re: a hard passage

Post by mwh »

I come back to stress what I said about taking the text as it comes, in the order in which it comes, and not searching for subject and verb first, as if English word order were normative. (Qimmik’s contrary advice is no doubt meant as an interim strategy for dealing with a difficult text, but I don’t hold with it even as such.) I think it’s an extremely important habit to develop, from the very first stages of reading Latin. Whether in prose or verse, the author puts the words in a certain order, the first word up front, and so on from there, and we ought to respect that in our reading, and simply work our way through from beginning to end.

Here for instance otium is the opening word. As such it has salience, prominence. We don’t yet know whether it will be nominative or accusative, or anything about how it will fit into the sentence, but we know it’s important, and we proceed from that starting point. (Its importance will become clearer and more pronounced in the next stanza.)

And so on all the way through. The word order here is in fact fairly prosaic. There’s only the very mild hyperbaton of in patenti prensus Aegaeo, the participle intervening between adjective and noun (or quasi-noun), the specificity of Aegaeo rounding off the participial phrase. (Adjectives routinely precede their nouns, which we can be kept waiting for.) At this point we might be expecting a noun to go with prensus, but when we find there isn’t one we can recognize that the utterance is sufficiently complete as it stands. (The expected nauta will eventually come, but not until the stanza’s final word, in oblique form. So otium and sailors will bracket the stanza.)

However convoluted Horace’s word order may sometimes seem (though not here), it would be a big mistake to think that he’s just shuffling the words around to fit the meter. Every word is carefully placed in relation to every other, sequentially. If we want to develop good reading skills we won’t go dismantling it and rearranging it, or picking out particular bits of it.

In the continuation, simul atra nubes etc., we find atra nubes sitting together as in prose, but mildly contrasting with this is certa fulgent sidera in the parallel clause (the same pattern as in patenti prensus Aegaeo but with different syntax; it’s a very common and satisfying word order, adjective and noun distributed either side of a controlling vb/pple/adj. in the center).[In prose too, e.g. virgines longam indutae vestem, Livy.] We are made to wait for the concluding nautis, which not only completes this particular clause and its preceding partner (which end with “moon” and “stars” respectively, and are each potentially complete) but neatly bundles up the whole stanza. Final words carry weight too. Looking through the rest of bk.2 I see what I’ve never noticed before, that all but two of the poems end with a noun. The two exceptions end with a verb. Nouns and verbs are heavy items.

The meter is important, an integral component of the poem. Verse is the match between words and meter, after all. Echoing one another are
|otium divos
|prensus Aegaeo
|condidit lunam
‒⏑‒‒‒, with the word accents falling on the first and 4th syllables.
Then we hit the double-short (between two longs) which typifies meters such as this, then ‒⏑‒‒|, which in the 3rd line is continued to the closing ‒⏑⏑‒‒ (sidera nautis, both nouns) resolving the whole thing. So the metrical scheme is a single line twice repeated, the last iteration extended by the short closing cadence. This final cadence, the same ending as the epic hexameter, makes for a strongly marked close (note how the meter is reinforced by the word-accents, sidera nautis). And stanzas are regularly end-stopped, i.e. the end of a stanza tends to coincide with the end of a sentence or major sense-break. So syntax and meter march in step.

But not always. Occasionally the syntax runs over from one stanza to the next (“enjambment”), markedly breaking the self-containedness of each successive stanza. In this ode that happens with the final two stanzas, where the repeated “you”s spill over into the final “me” stanza, binding them together. (Compare e.g. Odes 1.2, where the penultimate stanza runs over to the final one by a single word; likewise 2.8.18, again the critical verb.) The interrelation between meter and syntax controls the movement of the poem.

This particular stanzaic form is known as the Sapphic, because Sappho made much use of it. But so did Alcaeus, her contemporary. They shared the same metrical repertoire but tended to write on different themes, and Horace models himself more on Alcaeus than on Sappho.

Horace prided himself on being the first to introduce the “Aeolian” meters (i.e. the meters of Alcaeus and Sappho) into Latin, but he had a predecessor in Catullus, who wrote one ode in Sapphics (#51)—the final stanza of which (if in fact it does belong to the same poem) begins Otium—as also do the other lines of the stanza. Maybe this ode of Horace’s Is a kind of hommage to that?

Sorry to go on so. But I hope you (and anyone else who may read this) will get something out of it. Hopefully it willl enrich your reading.

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