Translating Unseen Latin Verse
What is different about verse
Verse compresses: fewer conjunctions, more participles, hyperbaton (words wrenched apart for emphasis or metre), and poetic plurals. You must first restore prose order, then translate, then check the meaning against the metre's emphases.
Concepts to command: the common metres (dactylic hexameter, elegiac couplet, hendecasyllables, Sapphic stanza); elision and synizesis; poetic vocabulary and Grecisms; tmesis and hyperbaton; the historic present; genitive plurals in -um; and the habit of addressing gods, patrons, or abstractions in the vocative.
Traps
- Assuming line ends are sentence ends. Enjambment carries the sense across the break; a full stop may fall mid-line.
- Reading a participle as a finite verb, which wrecks the tense sequence.
- Missing a vocative because it looks like a nominative.
- Translating literally into English and losing the image: vela dare means 'to set sail', not 'to give sails'.
- Ignoring the metre when a question asks why a word sits where it does.
Rule of thumb
Scan first. Mark the main verb and its subject, then attach every genitive, dative, and ablative to a head noun. If a word seems to belong nowhere, suspect hyperbaton: look for a noun in the same case several lines away.
Worked example: Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris / Italiam fato profugus Laviniaque venit / litora. Restore: cano arma virumque, qui profugus fato venit primus ab oris Troiae ad Italiam et litora Lavinia. Now: cano (present, 'I sing'); arma virumque (objects, 'arms and the man'); qui ... venit (relative clause, 'who ... came'); profugus fato ('an exile by fate'); primus ('first'). Translate: 'I sing of arms and the man who, an exile by fate, came first from the shores of Troy to Italy and the Lavinian shores.' Note how the delayed litora enacts the journey's length.