Here's a first draft of a Latin translation of the well known story "The Three Little Pigs".
The original English version was made available through Project Gutenberg.
You can download the first draft from Lulu, here.
I sized it for printing, which I'll enable after (hopefully) all the errors get corrected.
I hope to produce lots of these stories. We'll see.
If you can look over the draft and point out any errors, I'll greatly appreciate it!
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2 comments:
Hi Scott! I didn't have a lot of time this morning, but I read through the first part of the story and made notes below. This is such a great project, and the pictures are ADORABLE. Writing in Latin for public consumption is a really time-consuming task, but well worth it - you might want to find a forum where it is easier for you to solicit comments? I tried to copy-and-paste from the PDF but it didn't recognize all the text (for some reason it dropped out all your -fl- letters; I'm not sure what's up with that - I tried to type them in where it dropped out). Anyway, finding the right Latin idioms and checking on gender, etc., benefits from as many eyes as possible - if you put this somewhere where it is easier for people to comment sentence by sentence, I think you will get more useful feedback. Anyway, my notes are below - my comments are marked with ==>
I'm so glad you are doing this! I'll do some more comments later, but if you can get a text version rather than PDF up somewhere, and a forum to submit comments sentence by sentence, it will be a lot easier! :-)
Laura
FABULA TRES PORCULORUM
==> fabula de tribus porcellis [porcellus is a more "standard" diminutive for the little piggies, as in the famous Testamentum Porcelli: http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/testamentum.html ]
a L. Leslie Brooke illustrata
Frederick Warne & Co.
et in sermonem Latinum
a J. Scoto Olsson conversa.
Olim erat porca vetus quae tres porculos habebat.
==> cui erant tres porculi. - Latin uses habeo so much more rarely than English; we are obsessed with having in English! :-)
Quoniam tempum non habebat
==> "tempus non habebat" (tempus is neuter) is an English idiom; maybe something like "tempus ei non sufficit"...? also, you don't need to feel a need to narrate in past tense; in Latin storytelling, there is a continual back-and-forth between present and past tense forms; the idea of consistent use of tense is an English stylistic thing, not a Latin one -
ad eos nutriendum,
==> for the use of ad + gerundive, remember that the gerundive is an adjective; it does not take an object; rather, it agrees with then noun which is the object of the preposition: it is really "ad+noun+adjective-agreeingwithnoun" - ad eos nutriendos (ad ludos videndos, ad urbem capiendam, etc.)
porca missit eos
==> misit eos (or: mittit eos - in some ways, narrating the whole story in present tense might be better for Latin beginners)
ut fortunam quaererent.
Primus egrediens hominem fasces
straminis habentem convenit,
==> occurrit in hominem would be a better idiom I think; also, habeo is not a very expressive verb in Latin and isn't used all that much - maybe fasces portantem? ferentem?
et
"quaeso", ait ei, "da mihi hoc stra-
men
ut casam mihi aedificem."
==> casula might be good here, rather than casa - and for building, I would guess conficiam might be better
Hoc homo fecit,
==> Hoc facto,
et porculus casam stramine aedificavit.
==> I would guess "de stramine"
Tunc lupus venit et ostium pulsans ait "porcule, porcule, permitte me intrare!"
Cui porculus respondit, "ne ne, crine
menti mei!"
==> ne ne used without a verb makes it look like the exclamatory "ne" which means "yes" - maybe, "ne hoc facias, pro saetulis in mento meo"
"Perflabo", ait lupus, "ergo et deflabo et casam tuam exsufflabo!"
==> Respondit lupus, "Perflabo ergo, et deflabo, et denique casulam istam exsufflabo."
Ita perflat et deflat et casam eius exsuflat.
==> et denique casam illam exsufflat
Et lupus porculum est.
==> porculum comedit.
Way to go, Scott! Are you familiar with Victor Barocas's Fabulae Mirabiles? He also did The Three Little Pigs. A comparison could be instructive!
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