Translating Messalina: Adultery, Denunciation and Death

Two texts, two difficulties

Component 03 prescribes **two unrelated passages**, and they are difficult in completely different ways. **Tacitus, on Messalina.** The narrative concerns Valeria Messalina, the third wife of the emperor Claudius: her relationship with another man, the denunciation that followed, and her death. Tacitus was writing decades afterwards. **This module is about translating him, not about judging his account** - that belongs to the literary analysis module. **Pliny the Younger, "Avunculus meus".** A letter describing his uncle's extraordinary working habits: rising early, never wasting a moment, being read to while he ate and bathed. **The difficulty is opposite in each.** Tacitus leaves words out and you have to supply them. Pliny leaves nothing out and you have to keep his order straight. Learn one method and adapt it, rather than learning two.

Compression and enumeration

What each author does to a sentence, and what it costs you as a translator.

Which difficulty is this?

You meet a sentence with three verbs in a row and no connecting words between them, and no verb "to be" anywhere although the sense clearly needs one. Which author's difficulty is this, and what do you do?

• Tacitus: the connectives and the verb "to be" have been left out deliberately, so supply them in your English before worrying about anything else
• Pliny: the list of activities has to be kept in order
• Neither: the passage has been printed with a misprint
• Neither: leave the sentence and move on

What Tacitus leaves out

Four things that are regularly missing, and what to supply in each case. These are construing problems, not stylistic judgements.

Match each difficulty to what to do

Translate the practice passage

Practice Latin in Pliny's manner, built from words you have already met: **dominus noster semper laborabat. saepe diu laborabat et libros portabat. de rebus cogitabat; nemo eum sine libro invenit. tandem epistulam ad fratrem portavit.** Now complete the English. Our _____ was always working. He often worked for a _____ time and carried _____. He used to think about things; nobody found him _____ a book. Finally he carried a _____ to his brother.

Supplying what is missing

Select the TWO statements that describe supplying an omitted word correctly.

• Adding "was" where a form of esse has been left out is rendering the Latin, not adding to it, because the omission is deliberate and the reader is expected to supply it
• The tense you supply should match the tense the surrounding narrative is using
• You may add any words that make the English flow better, whether or not the Latin implies them
• It is safer to leave a gap in the English than to supply the missing word

Practice Latin, and a word about the subject

Two things to be clear about before you go on. **The Latin in this module is not your set text.** It was written for these exercises from vocabulary you have already met, to show the method. Your prescribed passages are in your own printed edition, the set text rotates every two years, and **on a set-text paper the marks are for rendering THOSE words.** **The practice passage is deliberately in Pliny's manner rather than Tacitus's.** The Messalina narrative deals with serious matters, and it is better met in your own edition with a teacher than in a version invented for a practice exercise. **And on Tacitus himself**: he wrote decades after the events, in a work with a view of the imperial household. That matters a great deal for how his account should be read, but reading it is the literary analysis module's work. **Here he matters because his compression makes him hard to construe**, and that is a translation problem with a translation solution.

Find the missing word

An English rendering laid out to show where a compressed Latin original had left something out. Tap the TWO places where a word has had to be supplied.

• The freedman came to the emperor at once.
• The news [was] grave
• , and he reported everything he had heard.
• The emperor said nothing [;] he returned to the city that night
• . The household waited.

Supply the verb

A compressed Latin clause has no verb, and the surrounding narrative is in the past. Build the rule you should follow.

A worked translation

**The practice passage again: dominus noster semper laborabat. saepe diu laborabat et libros portabat. de rebus cogitabat; nemo eum sine libro invenit. tandem epistulam ad fratrem portavit.** "Our master was always working. He often worked for a long time and used to carry books about. He would think about things; nobody ever found him without a book. Finally he carried a letter to his brother." **Four decisions worth naming, because each is a place marks are lost.** - **laborabat** is imperfect, so "was working" or "used to work", never "worked" - **nemo** is the subject and takes a singular verb: "nobody found", not "they did not find" - **sine libro** is ablative after sine, and English needs "without a book" with the article supplied - **portavit** is perfect against the imperfects around it, and that shift is the point of the last sentence: the habit ends in a single completed action **That last decision is the one that separates a good translation from a competent one.** Every verb before it describes a habit; the final one describes something that happened once, and an English version that renders them all the same way has lost what the Latin was doing.

Working through a compressed sentence

Put these steps into the order that gets a compressed sentence translated accurately.

• Find the main verb, or work out where one has been left out
• Identify the subject, using the person and number of the verb if it is not named
• Supply anything omitted: a form of "to be", a connective, a repeated subject
• Work out how the clauses relate to each other now that the connectives are back
• Write the English, then read it back against the Latin to check nothing supplied has gone beyond what the Latin implies

Keeping Pliny's sequence straight

A long Pliny sentence lists several activities, each introduced by an expression of time. What is the safest way to translate it?

• Note each time expression as you meet it and keep the activities in that order, since the order is the sentence's structure and it is easy to reverse two similar items
• Reorder the activities so the English reads more naturally
• Summarise the list, since the activities are similar
• Look for the omitted words first, as with Tacitus

The set text on the day

Both passages could appear. Work through how to handle the paper.

• The printed passage is compressed, with clauses running together and no verb in one of them. What is your first move?
• The passage is one you know well and you can remember a translation you were given in class. Do you use it?
• You have supplied several omitted words. How do you check you have not gone too far?

Your turn: translate both

Take one sentence from each of your two prescribed passages and work them through the method.

• Quote a sentence from the Tacitus passage and name anything that has been left out of it
• Give your English for that sentence, and say which words you supplied and why the Latin implies each one
• Quote a sentence from the Pliny passage and list its expressions of time in order
• Explain, using your own two examples, why the same translation method has to be applied differently to each author