@JoonasIlmavirta @SebastianKoppehel One thing I found interesting about that Nietzsche quote is that he didn't translate it to Latin himself. I don't know that he translated whole works, but he did coin some Latin phrases like amor fati.

@Adam That actually sounds like a good question: How much of his works did Nietzsche translate to Latin? It could be anything from just a few phrases to most of it for all I know.

Speaking of that question, it occurs to me that you might not have meant the type of collapsed star but just a lightless hole when you spoke of a black hole. I've accumulated a bias that makes me interpret the word always in the sense of physics.

Nonetheless, I think that question is yet another good example of what translation means. You have to add tone and meaning to the words before you can express the idea in another language. Is the abyss a raging hell or a silent depth?

@JoonasIlmavirta I think it's really up to the individual to interpret it since the word can be taken any number of ways. I was glad to include the original German because I thought it would help give an idea what Nietzsche himself may have intended.

@Adam Including the original quote is always a good idea. I don't know much German, but I could still go and dig German dictionaries for details of the nuance.

@Adam my favourite quote of Nietzsche's (not that I am all too familar with his works) is the rhymed verse, with the title "Seneca et hoc genus omne": Das schreibt und schreibt sein unausstehlich weises Larifari / als gält es primum scribere, deinde philosophari. (They write and write their unsufferably wise blah-blah, as if the motto was primum, etc.) ... the actual motto being primum vivere, deinde philosophari.

@Adam "Ecce Homo" too

@SebastianKoppehel Clever

@SebastianKoppehel Gay Science, right? I haven't read it, but I like it.

@cmw The Gay Science indeed :)

@SebastianKoppehel It's hard not to read that title through the lens of the 21st century meaning of "gay".

@Adam It does sound like something you might find in the syllabus for gender studies or some such field.

Euphemisms always mess up phemisms.

@Adam Interestingly the English title "Gay Science" only became popular in the 1960s due to Walter Kaufmann's translation, before it was "The Joyful Wisdom" etc. Or so says Wikipedia. But it makes sense, because the expression originally came from Romance languages, and Nietzsche himself called it "gaia scienza".

I'm not familiar with that translation, but the name Walter Kaufmann rings a bell. I know his English translation of Goethe's "Faust," and it is the most perfect translation of anything I have ever read. Absolutely faithful to every word, to the metre, everything, rhyming, and reads like perfectly natural English, simply preternatural.

@SebastianKoppehel Then it sounds like that would be a good way to read Faust for someone like me who doesn't read German. There must be Finnish translations, but their faithfulness to the original is unclear unless the translator strikes me as particularly trustworthy.

In other news, I feel the established terminology around gerunds/gerundives is a hot mess. When a gerund would take a direct object, we use a gerundive instead, which is outwardly indistinguishable from a gerund, and by the way, we also translate it like a gerund, but it definitely isn't one. Haud mirandum that TylerDurden is confused.

@SebastianKoppehel I agree!

I've come to think of the gerund as a substantivized gerundive, essentially a neuter noun derived from an adjective and used in limited cases. Substantivization is not always very significant, so this makes the gerund a branch of the various uses of the gerundive.

I don't know whether this is accurate in some technical sense, but this approach sure helps me put useful structure to all of this mess.

The traditional division into gerunds and gerundives is artificially rigid to my taste. I don't know why we'd need to be able to tell which one mirandum is in haud mirandum...

@JoonasIlmavirta I have this edition (let's see if SE allows Amazon links), which has the English and German text side by side, highly recommended if you're interested in the play. (It contains both parts, but the second part is only for hard-boiled readers.)

@JoonasIlmavirta The distinction between gerunds and gerundives confused me when I was first introduced to it, and I haven't much warmed up to it...

@SebastianKoppehel That looks promising! While I don't know much German, it could be fun to see how things look on that side and maybe pick something up along the way.

But admittedly the "dominant gerundive" so to speak (like in ad conventus agendos) is one of the stranger parts of Latin in general.

@SebastianKoppehel That's similar to how urbs capta can be "captured city" or "capture of the city", a kind of inversion that isn't really possible in other languages I know without serious poetic licence.

So I fully agree that it's confusing. It's just that the confusion is in no way restricted to gerundives. :)

Cenandumst. Vale!

@JoonasIlmavirta Bene sapiat!