Six Minutes Left in the Unseen Prose
Mock exam, Section A: unseen prose, 40 marks, 35 minutes allocated. Niamh has six minutes left and two sentences still untranslated. Her draft of the first reads: 'With these things having been known, the envoys, lest the state take any of damage, persuaded the consuls that they should lead out the army as quickly as possible from the city.' The Latin is: His rebus cognitis, legati, ne quid detrimenti res publica caperet, consulibus persuaserunt ut exercitum quam celerrime ex urbe educerent. Her teacher's last comment was 'accurate in patches, but literal where it matters and the sense units break down'. She has already rubbed out 'persuaded to the consuls for to lead'. The two remaining sentences contain a relative clause with a subjunctive verb and a historic infinitive. The mark scheme awards marks per sense unit rather than per sentence, and leaves no penalty for an unfinished clause if the rest of it is right.
1. Diagnose the two real weaknesses in her rendering of the first sentence and give a corrected translation, explaining which of her choices were actually acceptable.
Read the worked answer
What is being tested. Three constructions, each carrying its own sense-unit credit: the ablative absolute his rebus cognitis; the negative purpose clause ne ... caperet with the partitive genitive quid detrimenti; and persuadere + dative + ut, plus the idiom quam celerrime.
Diagnosis.
- 'With these things having been known' is not a grammatical error. The participle is perfect passive and res is not the subject of the main verb, so it is a true ablative absolute. It is merely unidiomatic. English wants 'when this became known', 'on learning this', or 'since these things were known'. Because the phrase opens a sentence and points backwards, 'when this news arrived' is often best.
- 'take any of damage' is a genuine error. quid is the noun ('anything') and detrimenti is a partitive genitive depending on it, so the phrase is 'any harm'. 'Lest the state take any of damage' should be 'to prevent the state from suffering any harm' or 'so that the state should suffer no harm'.
- 'persuaded the consuls that they should lead out' is defensible but stilted; 'persuaded the consuls to lead out' is the standard equivalent of persuadere + ut.
- 'as quickly as possible' for quam celerrime is correct: quam + superlative adverb. Keep it.
- 'from the city' should stay attached to its noun: 'lead the army out of the city'.
Corrected version. 'When this became known, the envoys, to prevent the state from suffering any harm, persuaded the consuls to lead the army out of the city as quickly as possible.'
Marking lesson. The examiner is not asking whether every English word has a Latin twin, but whether every Latin clause has been recognised. 'With these things having been known' and 'when this became known' earn the same credit; 'any of damage' does not, because the genitive has not been understood.
2. With six minutes and two sentences left, how should she allocate the remaining time, and why?
Read the worked answer
The arithmetic. Six minutes for two sentences is roughly three minutes each: enough for a rough pass, not for polish. Sense-unit marking spreads marks across clauses, so a half-finished sentence with four correct clauses can outscore a polished sentence with two.
Order of operations.
- Sixty seconds on the drafted sentence only: fix 'any of damage' and 'persuaded ... that they should'. Nothing else. It is already earning most of its marks and needs no rewriting.
- Two minutes on the historic infinitive. Historic infinitives normally become a simple past in English ('they shouted', 'they began to shout'), not an infinitive hanging in the air. Writing 'the soldiers to shout' usually loses the clause.
- Two minutes on the relative clause with the subjunctive. Find the antecedent, decide why the subjunctive is there (purpose, cause, generic description, reported circumstance), and commit to the likeliest. Purpose and generic description are far commoner in narrative than anything exotic. Even a slightly wrong 'who might ...' keeps most of the sense unit.
- Last thirty seconds: check that every finite Latin verb has a finite English verb, and that no proper name has been left as a subject when it should be an object.
What not to do. Do not reread the passage for pleasure, and do not leave a clause blank to avoid error. A blank scores zero; a defensible guess usually scores half. Marks are lost far more often by leaving gaps than by translating clumsily.
3. A classmate tells her that 'with these things having been known' is wrong because you should never translate an ablative absolute literally. Is that advice sound?
Read the worked answer
Partly sound, badly stated. The ablative absolute has no single English equivalent, so a translator chooses among 'when', 'since', 'after', 'because', or a bare participial phrase, depending on the relation between the phrase and the main clause. Here the relation is temporal or causal, so 'when this became known' or 'since this was known' is the natural choice. A literal 'these things having been known' is grammatically defensible but reads like translationese, and persistent translationese is a symptom: candidates who write it often have not decided what the participle is doing.
The genuine rules are these.
- The ablative absolute's noun must not be the subject of the main verb. Here res is not legati, so the construction is genuine.
- The tense of the participle matters: a perfect passive participle normally marks an action completed before the main verb ('when this had become known'), a present participle an action simultaneous with it.
- The connective relative at the start of a sentence (quibus rebus cognitis, quo audito) is best rendered 'this news', 'on hearing this', because English dislikes a dangling participial opener.
So: her phrase is not an error the examiner will penalise as a mistranslation, but it is the sort of thing that makes an otherwise accurate script read as though it were produced word by word. The advice should be 'decide what the phrase does in the sentence', not 'never translate it literally'.