There is a track on one of their albums (which many of you probably know) with no lyrics except the ominous prognostication “one of these days I’m going to cut you into little pieces!”
I checked in the Metamorphoses where Procne and Philomela cook up the former’s son Itys to feed to his father to see if that verb would work but they “dilaniant” him, “tearing” him apart, not cutting. I settled on concīdo:
“aliquando te ad parvas partes/mĭnūtē concīsurus sum”
Any comments/advice?
Perhaps Seneca may provide a model in Thyestes.
cecidi ad aras, caede votiva focos
placavi, et artus, corpora exanima amputans,
in parva carpsi frusta, et haec ferventibus
demersi aënis, illa lentis ignibus
stillare iussi; membra nervosque abscidi
viventibus, gracilique traiectas veru
mugire fibras vidi et aggessi manu
mea ipse flammas: omnia haec melius pater
fecisse potuit. cecidit in cassum
scidit ore natos impio, sed nesciens,
sed nescientes.
1058-1068
Thanks for that quotation, that’s definitely helpful!
Aliquando in parva te carpturus frusta sum!
Better?
I wouldn’t have got so worried about translating literally “cut” into Latin. What does this lyric actually mean? That the singer will literally “cut” someone into little pieces. Cut in sense of a butcher or doctor? Or is it a threat to dismember or somehow dissolve a body so that its unrecognisable? Utterly destroy?
I suppose it all depends on what you think is “correct”.
When I studied Senecan tragedy I found disiecti member poetae : The Rhetoric of Dismemberment in Neronian Poetry by Glenn W. Most helpful. Its in the collection “Innovations of Antiquity (New Ancient World S.), Routledge, 1993.”
I have come across this blog entry which takes Lucan Bellum Civile as a starting point, it also looks interesting. https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/pegasus/benni-rodewyk-dismemberment-in-neronian-literature/
I think one is always on safer ground when one references an ancient author in one’s composition. Why did you opt for a future participle rather a simple future?
Why did you opt for a future participle rather a simple future?
Because it seems to me (but I could easily be completely wrong) that the future participle makes it seem more imminent than the simple future. I see the future participle translated in the textbooks sometimes as “to be about to” do something. Do I have the wrong impression of the difference between them?
But I guess “one of these days” doesn’t sound imminent at all, does it? Maybe by my own assumption of how the grammar works I should be using the simple future in this situation regardless…I guess I was also influenced by the sub-phrase “I’m going to cut” which seems in concert with the idea of the participle.
I agree that the future participle has the idea of “about to do something”. Gildersleeve 247 says the “future participle is a verbal adjective denoting capability and tendency.”
He says that “the translation is very various” :
“scriptūrus sum I am about to write , I am to write, I purpose to write, I am likely to write.”
As you say one of these days does not suggest an imminent action. I would always try to work out what the sentence actually means and translate that rather than base your Latin on a word of word basis. Its always the thought that needs to be translated rather than the words.