Given Seuss’s penchant for nonsense words and rare poetic meters (anapestic tetrameter, anyone?), converting his writing into a dead language, with its smaller vocabulary for describing certain modern concepts, wasn’t easy. As Tunberg explains, the real trick to a good translation isn’t always in the word-for-word conversion, but in maintaining the meaning and the voice of the original work. In Latin, that’s Virent Ova! Viret Perna!! BY 2.0īut the books, especially those of Seuss, presented a number of unique translation problems. They caught on to the idea that if they have very young children’s stories in Latin along with the regular books by Caesar and Cicero and all these other people, it would be a draw. “As a textbook publisher, they’re out to make money. Of course, the real reasons for the project didn’t escape him. Given his background with the language, and his interest in how Latin evolved after Rome, the prospect of translating these modern works was right up his alley. Tunberg, who specializes in neo-Latin, or the use of Latin after the Romans were dead and gone, never planned on translating kids’ books, but was contacted by prominent Classics textbook publisher Bolchazy-Carducci, who had purchased the rights to some of Dr.
“We tried to translate it the best we could given the resources of the Latin language without dumbing it down.” We did not try to write simple Latin,” says Tunberg. “ a good teaching tool, there’s no doubt about that. Seuss classics How the Grinch Stole Christmas ( Quomodo Invidiosulus nomine Grinchus Christi natalem Abrogaverit) and The Cat in the Hat ( Cattus Petasatus), as well as Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree ( Arbor Alma). In addition to Green Eggs and Ham (Latin title: Virent Ova! Viret Perna!!), the Tunbergs have also translated Dr. Along with his wife, Jennifer, he has translated a number of children’s books into Latin. “ Green Eggs and Ham was very difficult,” says Terence Tunberg, who has been teaching Latin for over 30 years. But this doesn’t mean that turning these books into Latin in the first place is any small feat. Children’s books make good candidates for such translation work due to their simplified language and short length, and in turn can give the study of Latin a more contemporary feel. Even its study is becoming increasingly rare, but there are still some publishers and scholars who are taking modern works, mainly kids’ books, and translating them from modern English into what can best be described as a kind of modern Latin.įrom picture books such as Walter the Farting Dog, to longer works such as Winnie the Pooh, and the first two books in the “Harry Potter” series, a wide variety of titles have made the jump to Latin over the years.
But a simple Amazon search shows that it still has a surprisingly active life-not just in medical and law terminology, but also in children’s books.Īfter serving as the chief language of ancient Rome, and then as the language of scholars and holy men, Latin mostly faded out of modern usage. Not all of these have been translated into Latin, but more than you’d think! EvelynGiggles/CC BY 2.0Īccording to conventional wisdom, Latin is a dead language.
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