Mundo menteve?
I was recently studying and translating a letter by Seneca (Epistulae Morales 28) as required for a course, and it evokes some thoughts about this blog… I’ll post some pieces of my Finnish translation separately, but here are some general comments in English. The complete original Latin text is available at the Classics Library (you have to scroll down a bit until XXVIII) and an English (old-fashioned) translation by Richard M. Gummere in the stoics.com The letter begins:
At first, I was afraid the letter contained criticism to me, but reading further just confirmed that Seneca is channelling my own thoughts, a feeling not unusual to me when reading his works:
Valete!
Hoc tibi soli putas accidisse et admiraris quasi rem novam quod peregrinatione tam longa et tot locorum varietatibus non discussisti tristitiam gravitatemque mentis? Animum debes mutare, non caelum.
Translation:
Do you suppose that this has happened to you alone, and are you surprised, as if it were a novelty, that after such long travel and so many changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? Your must change your soul, not the climate.
At first, I was afraid the letter contained criticism to me, but reading further just confirmed that Seneca is channelling my own thoughts, a feeling not unusual to me when reading his works:
Magis quis veneris quam quo interest, et ideo nulli loco addicere debemus animum. Cum hac persuasione vivendum est: ‘non sum uni angulo natus, patria mea totus hic mundus est’.
Translation:
More important is as who than where you go; for that reason we should not make the mind a bondsman to any one place. One has to live in this belief: ‘I am not born for any one corner; my fatherland is this whole world.’
Valete!
Labels: Blogging, English, Latin, Lingua latina, Literature, Seneca, Translating
