(Apologies for X-posting from reddit.com/r/latin, if Textkit shares their readership).
I’ve been literally translating George Herbert’s ‘Virtue’ into Sapphics, but got a little stuck finding an appropriate translation for the following lines:
Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie;
Did the Romans have any food approximate to Jacobean-era English lollies? My version attempts to render it as the conveniently monosyllabic frux, but fruit crammed in a medicine chest isn’t quite what Herbet had in mind, I imagine:
suave ver, solesque rosaeque te explent
pyxidem ut qua frux posita est refertam.
“Sweet spring, days and roses fill you,
like a crammed medicine chest where fruit has been placed.”
Another grammar question: can I put ut after pyxidem like this? I think so, unless my Latinitas senses mislead me.
(For any that might be interested, the rest of my translation runs as follows:)
o dies dulcis gelide atque clare
qui iugas caelum super atque terram,
ros tuum flebit, periture, lapsum
nocte cadente.
grate flos, cui trux color atque fortis
imperat tergere oculos videntem,
vestra radix semper inest sepulchro
morsque debetur.
suave ver, solesque rosaeque te explent
pyxidem ut qua frux posita est refertam.
te cano fines proprios habere et
cuncta perire.
spiritus suavisque bonusque tantum,
ut vetus robur, dare se recusat,
cumque tellus fit mage tota carbo,
tum quoque vivat.
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky;
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night,
For thou must die.
Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye;
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.
Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie;
My music shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.
Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like season’d timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.