The Host Desecration Project 2: Thinking about the Latin

The hardest skill to develop in the course of becoming some sort of medieval scholar has been a facility with Latin. Before embarking on this journey in 2007, the last time I had studied Latin in any systematic way was in 1988, when I took a semester of it in eleventh grade. At various times since, I had undertaken a small study of the language and had managed to learn a bit about how it works. But this kind of knowledge and actually working with the language are two different things.

One could go on and on about Latin grammar and morphology- and for someone used to English, it is a bear- but for me the hardest thing about Latin is its lack of word order. There are few rules that dictate where a word, say the subject, needs to appear in the sentence. Meaning is determined by the morphology of the word, which means any word can be pretty much anywhere. Inflection is everything.

And while we're on the topic of sentences, there is also the problem that for most of the time Latin was in any kind of common use there were no sentences per se. Punctuation didn't come into vogue until the 13th or 14th century, and before the seventh or eighth there were commonly no spaces in written texts. Which means that Latin "sentences," as we understand sentences, are the creation of later editors.

Fortunately, I am working from an edited text which can be found here and here. As you can see, some kind editor has inserted punctuation, in an attempt to make it readable to "modern" readers. Of course, some of the sentences the editor has created are extremely long, again owing to the exigencies of Latin grammar.

Usually when I approach something like this, I am not necessarily interested in a full translation. I just want to know what's going on in the text and I may need to translate a portion of it at some point for quotes, in which case I need to be as faithful to the text as possible. For this project, though, I need to get across what the author of the text was trying to get across, which requires, I think, something different.

Since no one has really shown me how to do this, I have tried to work out my own approach for this project. The first thing I do is try to sort out the grammar explicitly on the page. I do this by rearranging the original Latin into something resembling modern English syntax. This does not work 100 percent, since there are often implied subjects and prepositions tied into the noun forms. Don't even get me started on participles. Still, I find that if I bracket in these implied pieces and make little notes as I go along, it works out well. I'll show more of this process in later posts, but here is an example using the first sentence.

As rendered by the editor:

"Magna quidem fuerunt beneficia quae populo suo Deus olim contulit, sed immensa sunt quae nobis Christianis divina largitas exhibuit, et in dies exhibet."

Leaving aside the meaning for the moment, I have found it convenient to break this into two sentences, rendered as follows:

"Beneficia quae Deus contulit populo suo olim fuerunt magna quidem. Sed quae divina largitas exhibuit, et in dies exhibet, nobis Christianis sunt immensa."

While this still renders an odd-sounding sentence in English, it becomes easier for me to deal with using my patchwork of Latin skills, leading to this:

"The benefits which God conferred on his people a long time ago were impressive. But those which divine largess showed, and in these days shows, to us Christians are immeasurable."

Once I'm at this point, I need to clarify what's happening here. Since this is an account of Host desecration, it seems obvious that "suo populo" refers to the Jews. I haven't decided how to handle that in the final translation as "his people" seems important theologically- it shows the then prevalent notion that the Christians superseded the Jews as the objects of God's affection. I'll probably put in a footnote.

Next: The Host Desecration Project 3: De Miraculo Hostiae: The Saga Begins