Ut fāma est, uxōrem dēsīderat dīves cælebs.

Pride Prejudice cover
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Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in Latin


The Romans often complained about the difficulty of translating a foreigner’s works into Latin. Perhaps in their lament, they had a word to describe the particular torture attending anyone who attempted such folly. If they did, I haven’t found such an adjective. Nor do I know of a word to describe one who is foolhardy enough to translate an author such as Jane Austen, whose labyrinthine English replete with dangling modifiers is a challenge to any translator. I suppose the lack of a specific word only means that such torture self-inflicted is pleasure self-consumed, for there is the odd moment of personal joy that one’s choice of words might have gratified a Roman, that one’s string of indicatives and subjunctives might have, like some necklace of pearls, made a Roman’s eyes gleam.¶This search for the right word, the right turn of phrase should tell you what kind of translation this is. It is not AI-ed. Rather it has been a search not only for the right Latin word but for the right Latin style. Such a search leads one far beyond the dictionary to a place where definitions collide with usage and intent, where sociolinguistic rules take over, where the edge of what I know lies.¶So, it is at this precipice I lived. Using the internet kept me from the abyss. I checked the phrases I came up with by searching for them amongst the thousands of Latin texts online. More often than not I found, if not the exact phrase, something similar.¶I also referred to a French translation, L’Orgueil et Prévention, done in 1822 by Eloise Perks [1790-1850]. Her translation showed me how to get through the most difficult passages where English clashes so strikingly with French usuage and that of its ancestor Latin. ¶Here I should mention Tom Cotton’s translation Superbia et Odium done in 2015. Although I rarely referred to it for what I have done here, his translation was the first one I acquired and read and one that inspired me to do my own translations of various literary works. For this I am grateful to him.


Chapter One

two dandies
Jane Austen wrote in an intricate and elegant style wrought by years of studying the ancient classics. Her sentences were long and bristled with punctuation. They gleamed with Latinate words, mirroring the sense and sensibilities of a society in awe of the classics. In short, her sentences were as formidible as any Cicero might have written. With this in mind, linguist and award-winning author James Rumford undertook to translate her words into the very language she (and others of her class) sought so much to emulate.
(from the back cover)

woman dancing
Superbī et Iniquī
Publisher: Mānoa Press
Paperback, in black & white.
2024





woman walking

The illustrations were inspired by European fashion engravings of the early nineteenth century.