a translation of a choral passage from Seneca's Medea
CHORUS:
Flagrant genae rubentes,
pallor fugat ruborem.
nullum uagante forma
seruat diu colorem.
huc fert pedes et illuc,
ut tigris orba natis
cursu furente lustrat
Gangeticum nemus.
Frenare nescit iras
Medea, non amores;
nunc ira amorque causam
iunxere: quid sequetur?
Her cheeks blaze red,
pallor makes the redness flee.
She keeps no color long
while her body is wandering.
She brings her feet here and there,
like a tigress deprived of her young
who circles on a delirious course
the grove of the Ganges.
Medea does not know how to check
her anger, nor her passions.
Now that anger and passion have joined
in the cause, what will follow?
[Seneca, Medea, lines 858-69]
Explanation:
This is rather strict. There isn't much that I changed syntax-wise. The first four lines are basically equivalent. That does mean that the first couplet is a bit clunky because of the lack of a conjunction, but the absence of one in the Latin felt intentional, so I left it out.
The simile gave me a bit of trouble. I knew what was happening in the Latin, but it took me a bit to bring it into English in a satisfactory way. I'm still not sure I like it, which is a pity because the simile is my favorite part of the passage. I'm not sure it's supposed to, but it reminds me of Homer.
I made a couple small adjustments in the last two lines: adding in a 'that' and altering iunxere causam to be less verb direct object and more verb prepositional phrase. Both choices made the translation flow more smoothly in English. I'm not sure they are deeply necessary though.
~nan
I'll probably come back to this eventually. I definitely didn't sit with it as long as I might have hoped for. But the voice of the chorus is a bit difficult to communicate. They're an odd convention.