Welcome
Who is Catullus?  Links
Catullus Forum   Search Translations
 

  Available Welsh translations:  
 
1 2 2b 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 14b 15 16 17 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41
42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51
52 53 54 55 56 57 58 58b 59 60
61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70
71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 78b 79
80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89
90 91 92 93 94 95 95b 96 97 98
99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108
109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116
 

  Available languages:  
 
Latin
Afrikaans   Albanian   Arabic
Brazilian Port.   Bulgarian   Castellano
Catalan   Chinese   Croatian
Czech   Danish   Dutch
English   Esperanto   Estonian
Finnish   French   Frisian
German   Greek   Gronings
Hebrew   Hindi   Hungarian
Interlingua   Irish   Italian
Japanese   Korean   Limburgs
Norwegian   Persian   Polish
Portuguese   Rioplatense   Romanian
Russian   Scanned   Serbian
Spanish   Swedish   Telugu
Turkish   Ukrainian   Vercellese
Welsh  
 

  Gaius Valerius Catullus     
About Me
Send a Reaction
Read Reactions
 

 
Catullus Forum

Main  ::  Translations - all  ::  tenuis flamma or tenuis artus (Carmen 51)

<<  •  >>

AuthorMessage
Guest
Posted on Thu Apr 02, 2009 03:14:29  
In line 9 the 'i' in tenuis scans as long which makes me thing it is an older form of the 3rd declension accusative plural that must agree with artus. But every translation I've found takes it with flamma. Why is this? The imitated Sapphic poem (Sappho 31) has "lepton pur" in the Greek which translates something like a "thin fire." But just because Catullus is imitating Sappho doesn't mean that he has to do it exactly like her all the way to where we find his "new" stanza does it? Is there a prosody rule that I'm missing here? Everyone seems to agree with scanning gemina as ablative going with nocte rather than lumina in the lines before this based on the meter... why are we changing the rules here? or are we? help!!!
Guest
Posted at Sun Apr 05, 2009 00:41:06  Quote
Hmm, you are making the Classic mistake of confusing a syllable with a foot, the "is" of "tenuis" is only long because it is followed by another s in sub making it a long foot.
Guest
Posted at Sat May 16, 2009 05:39:23  Quote
You are quite right. The "tenuis" does modify "artus." By the way, it doesn't matter whether the "is" is long by nature or position, it still has to modify "artus." Besides, who has heard of a gentle flame? Common sense it seems to me.
Cambrinus
Posted at Sun Jan 10, 2010 20:48:24  Quote
Quote:
  You are quite right. The "tenuis" does modify "artus." By the way, it doesn't matter whether the "is" is long by nature or position, it still has to modify "artus." Besides, who has heard of a gentle flame? Common sense it seems to me.


Ignorance is bliss, it seems. 'tenuis' is genuinely ambiguous and the scansion is no clue here - '-is' is long, of course. If you have a poetic bone in your body, then you will see that it has to agree with 'flamma'; the Sappho original just confirms it.
'gemina' is ablative and agrees with 'nocte'; 'gemina ... lumina' would be a bit obvious and poetically redundant. However, as 'gemina' refers to 'lumina', it is an instance of hypallage.
 


  � copyright 1995-2010 by Rudy Negenborn
   Nedstat