In August 1940 Montgomery on taking command of the 8th Army made a speech to the leading officers.
The following is loosely based on that speech.
φυλάξωμεν Αἴγυπτον ἐνθάδε ἐν Ἀλαμεινι. μὴ σταυρώσωμεν παρὰ Νειλῳ. κελεύσωμεν τοὺς λοχοῦς νῦν παρὰ Νειλῳ ὄντες προβῆναι πρὸς Ἀλαμεινα. στῶμεν καὶ μαχεσώμεθα ἐνθάδε. μὴ ἀναχωρήσωμεν. καύσωμεν τὰς γνώμας τὰς περὶ τοῦ ἀναχωρεῖν λεγούσας καὶ παραχρῆμα. ἐὰν οὐ οἶοι τ’ ὦμεν ἐνθάδε ζῆν, θάνωμεν ἐνθάδε.
The above is considerably shorter than the original and I have made jussive some bits that weren’t in the original. The final line of Montgomery’s speech was “Therefore we will hit him a crack and finish with him.” I wanted to make the “and finish with him” a jussive but it seemed to me that was to much of an English idiom to do that with so I settled with a purpose clause which is after all still a subjunctive.
Rommel was the German general who commanded the German forces in North Africa. I did listen to the original speech before I wrote this but it is inspired by that speech rather than a translation. For one thing I increased the use of the jussive subjunctive.
I was trying to write it in the way that a Ancient Greek might write it. There is something to be said for Markos’ approach of simple not translating such names but it doesn’t feel right for me.
Personally, I think failing to decline would be to deny a word a place in the sentence, since each word must be inflected to reflect its role in a sentence in the language. This partly explains my fascinations with third declension nouns, which permits the full stem to be retained, at the sacrifice of the nominative, in at least the oblique cases while not offending the rules of the language.
