Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Incensed and Insensibility

For good reason the title of this blog is a nod to Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. A couple of years ago I bought a copy of Tom Cotton's translation of Pride and Prejudice. After reading it, I began having thoughts of doing my own Latin translation of one of Austen's works. I consulted my wife, who immediately suggested Sense and Sensibility. Part of the fun, she said, would be that we could work on the translation together. By this she meant that we could discuss what Miss Austen meant in the more difficult passages so that I could turn Austenese into Latin.

Below is my rough draft of the first four chapters of Austen's Sense and Sensibility. I hope that one of you out there will read it and perhaps make suggestions, corrections, emendations of my Latin. To facilitate the comparison of the translation with the original, I have made an interlinear translation.

Once the translation is complete and revised, I hope to publish it. My go-to "publisher" had been CreateSpace. Unfortunately, Amazon turned CreateSpace into Kindle Publishing Direct and with that came unwanted changes, chief of which was the edict that they will allow no book to be published in Latin!

I was incensed! Why? Because Latin is not an approved and accepted language. What are the accepted tongues, you ask? Most every known language, including ones you may never have heard of: dead ones like Manx and Cornish (which are spoken as a second language by a few in England).

There are certainly more people who know Latin than Manx and Cornish. Certainly there are not a few at the Vatican who can battle their way through any Latin text. Certainly some of the centuries of books in Latin bear republishing. But no. Apparently not. As insensible as this is, Latin, itself has been put on the INDEX.  Did some nun rap the hell out of the knuckles of some exec at Amazon? Did some priest do the unspeakable? I don't know, but someone in the chain of command has it in for Latin.

What can be done about this? Dunno. I see on the internet that Latin teachers have tried to reason with Amazon. Maybe someone has even written to the pope. But the fact is: the knife has been inserted and all we can do is say, "Et tu, Amazon?"

So, until things change or settle down, here is my first draft. Please, amabo te, let me know what you think. Here is the link you will need to view the pdf:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zvauS57pDp9x7oUS-05VHTYmz5MQzhGX/view?usp=sharing

Maximas ago tibi gratias!



3 comments:

  1. Thank you. I am looking forward enormously to reading your translation and to buying the final version once available. I trust that you can find a way of publishing the book. One thing that hit me right between the eyes was "Forward" instead of "foreword" unless this was a bit of intended irony.

    Sincere thanks,

    Neil Mitchell

    Bundanoon, NSW, Australia

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  2. Aloha, e Neil,

    Glad to get your comment! And thank you for spotting the typo in ‘foreword.’ I can just about see my fifth-grade spelling teacher just shaking her head.

    Since that posting, I have revised my translation several times. I have just now changed the link to the latest translation of the first four chapters. Use this translation instead of what was posted several months ago.

    Also I have discovered that I can still publish my Latin translations through Amazon’s Kindle Publishing Direct, if I make the book bilingual. A couple of months ago I published a Latin translation of Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit as a bilingual:

    The Velveteen Rabbit: or how toys become real: Margery Williams, James Rumford: 9781891839207: Amazon.com: Gateway

    Sometime this summer, I will send Sense and Sensibility to the Amazon censors. I hope that it will get through.

    S. v. b., v. (Si vales bene, valeo.)

    Aloha,

    Jim

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  3. The rule covers new work in Latin, which comes to much the same thing. Presumably it's because they can't check the content, but in this day and age it makes no sense.

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