The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #112101   Message #2383561
Posted By: Jack Blandiver
08-Jul-08 - 05:00 AM
Thread Name: Tempus Est Iocundum
Subject: RE: Tempus Est Iocundum
David Parlett produced a comprehensive selection of translations of the Carmina Burara poems for Penguin Classics, with a section of translations of the poems used by Orff intended for singing in place of the Latin. There is a website for these Orff translations Here. I might add that none of this works for me at all as the metrical nature of the Latin verse comes across as unpoetic in the extreme when put into English, hence my own free-verse translations, which aren't actually translations at all, rather attempts at writing a new poetry based on a number of other translations, as I don't speak Latin.

Of course in this day and age, I might stick a verse into an online auto-translator and see if anything inspires me. For example 0 Fortuna, velut luna statu variabilis, semper crescis aut decrescis; vita detestabilis comes out as: 0 Fortune, just as moon statue variabilis, always to grow either to wane, life execrable, which, to my ears, is a lot more poetic than Parlett's O how Fortune, inopportune, apes the moon's inconstancy: waxing, waning, losing, gaining, life treats us detestably. In such a random approach something of the meme of the thing emerges by way of a filter though which we might gain a clearer appreciation of what the intention of the original lyric might have been in terms of pure poetic image, and in any case such an interpretation is always subjective, unless straight-jacketed by a more scholarly consensus, which, as a non-scholar, isn't much use to me at all.