David's Latin rendering of his own work, and then Kait's Latin poem, spurred me to this effort. One hopes I haven't gotten too rusty--I had to look up a lot of words, some of which I should have known. :-P It certainly shows one how thoroughly we know our own language's grammatical structure without even having to think about it.
No solid guarantees of idiomatic correctness, absolute precision in inflection, etc. are given.
De Anglica:
But she had to run faster. Pelen was gaining on her. Almost without her knowing it, she put on a spurt of speed until her pace was nearly half again as fast as before. She really could go no swifter now: she was like a sprinter in the last straight, only this was not the last straight but a grueling contest of attrition for which nothing had prepared or could prepare her. It was a question of whether her lighter weight and the impulse of adrenaline could outlast his superior strength, fitness, and nearly invincible determination.
Those few who looked out curiously from their windows and saw them in that final sprint saw a thing rare to behold. Stephanie was in the flower of youth, light, nimble, and yet vulnerable, like a doe fleeing the hounds. And Pelen was the hound: powerful, savage, arrogant in his strength, and totally confident of ultimate victory. It was almost a thing of beauty, and yet dreadful, as in the myths when the god Apollo pursued the maiden Daphne to take her.
Ad Latinam:
Sed necesse est curre eum celerior. Pelen in eo increbrescebat. Paene sine ea id sciente, se incitat donec gradus eius erat prope dimidium iterum ut celer ut ante. Nunc vere non potest ire celerior: erat ut cursor in ultima directa, sed hic non erat ultima directa sed certamen difficilis attritus per quam nihil paraverat aut eam possit parere. Erat quaesitio utrum molis gravior eius impulsusque adrenalensis possint permanere potentem superiorem eius, valetudinem, et prope obstinationem invictam.
Illi parvi qui spectaverunt curiose de fenestris eis et eos viderunt in hoc cursu ultima viderunt rem infrequentem aspictu. Stefania erat in florem adulscentiae, levis, agilis, et tamen vulnerabilis, similis ad cervam fugentem canes. Et canis Pelen erat: potens, saevus, superbus in robore eius, omninoque confidens in victoria ultima. Prope res pulchritudinis erat, et tamen horribilis, sicut in fabulis cum deus Apollo virginem Daphne persequatur ut eam rapiat.
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1 comment:
Well done, sir. I marked no error, though I wasn't inspecting too closely, and besides you're the superior Latin scholar so it's doubtful that I'd catch anything you'd miss. It's an appropriate passage for translation, what with the classical references and all.
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