Seneca in Latin: translating the passage

It is early October and in Year 5 (the final year) of the classical high school (liceo classico) the Latin syllabus is entering the imperial age: Seneca arrives these days, with Lucan straight after. The first translation test on Seneca usually falls five to nine weeks from now, between November and December. This also applies to students at the science high school or any other track with Latin: in the last year Seneca is read in the original, with more than a few passages, and the written translation carries the same weight.

The problem is that Seneca seems easy. The sentences are short, the vocabulary is almost all familiar, there are none of the long periods of Cicero or Livy. Then the grade for the test arrives and the translation contains Italian sentences that sound good and say the opposite of the Latin. In this article I explain why it happens and how to translate a passage from the Epistulae morales without losing the sense. The general method for translating (versione, the Latin passage you translate into Italian), the one you learn in Year 2, is in Latin translations in Year 2: I don’t repeat it here, I start from what you need on top of it.

Why Seneca is difficult even though he is simple

In Year 2 the enemy is syntax: long periods, implicit constructions, ablative absolutes to unpick. In Seneca the syntax is almost always light. The difficulty is something else, and it consists of five things.

Brevitas. Seneca cuts. Where Cicero builds a period with the main clause at the end, he puts a sentence of six words and starts a new line. The verb is often missing and has to be understood (usually est or sunt), and the logical link between one sentence and the next is not written.

Asyndeton. Sentences are placed side by side without conjunctions. The relationship between them (cause, consequence, opposition) you have to decide yourself, by reading the sense.

Antithesis. Almost every sentence is built on a pair of opposites: mine/others’, time/things, difficult/daring. If you recognise the pair you already have half the sentence.

Sententiae. They are short maxims, almost slogans, that close an argument. The risk is translating them like any other sentence: they lose their force and, worse, sometimes their sense.

Philosophical vocabulary. Words that look like English or Italian and are not. I’ll come to that shortly.

The result is a translation in which the number of grammar mistakes is low and the number of mistakes of sense is high. Anyone used to judging a translation by its formal correctness doesn’t notice until they reread it in Italian.

Philosophical vocabulary: the false friends

In the dictionary Seneca puts in front of you entries with twenty senses. Choosing the right one is the real work. The words that recur most:

animus: the mind, the thought, the rational and volitional faculty. Always translating it as “soul” is a frequent mistake, because for “soul, breath of life” Latin has anima.
ratio: not only “reason”. It can be reasoning, method, calculation, criterion. In a moral context it is reason as the guide of conduct.
virtus: virtue in the moral sense, but also courage, excellence. In Stoic vocabulary it indicates the perfection of the mind.
otium: not “idleness” in the sense of laziness. It is time free from public duties, which in the Roman tradition can be devoted to study and reflection.
tempus: time, but also the occasion, the opportune moment. In Seneca time is almost a character, the most precious thing we have.
vitium: the defect, the fault, the vice. The semantic field is that of the illness of the mind.
res: thing, fact, reality, and sometimes “circumstance” or “affair”. It is the most generic word in Latin, and the one that requires the most attention to context.

You don’t have to learn them by heart as equivalences: you have to learn that when you meet them, the first dictionary translation must be checked against the context. I come back to it later, in the section on the role of the dictionary.

The method in eight steps

This is the procedure I use in lessons with a Seneca passage. It also works on Lucan’s texts, with some adaptation for the verse.

Read the whole passage in Latin, twice, without a dictionary. Not to understand it, but to recognise the sentences: where they end, which are short, which have a verb.
Mark the verbs. Every Seneca sentence has its verb, except when it is missing and has to be understood. If it is missing, write est or sunt in the margin and check whether it works.
Find the pairs of opposites. Underline the words that are opposed (mine/others’, time/things, difficult/daring). Often the sentence is all there.
Identify the connectives, and when there are none, decide them. Between two sentences placed side by side with no conjunction ask yourself: is it a cause? A consequence? A clarification? Write in pencil the word you would put in your translation (“in fact”, “but”, “therefore”).
Analyse each sentence as a period in its own right. Subject, verb, complements. If there is a subordinate clause, recognise the construction (causal, purpose, indirect statement).
Look up in the dictionary only the words you don’t know or the philosophical ones. And choose the sense by reading the example the dictionary gives, not the first one.
Write the literal translation. An ugly but faithful translation, which serves as your base. Respect the logical order, not the order of the words.
Render the translation into proper Italian. Here you rewrite: the sentence must work on its own, with a rhythm reminiscent of Seneca’s (short sentences, sharp contrasts) without being a copy of the Latin words.

Step 7 and step 8 are separate on purpose. Anyone who skips step 7 ends up inventing. Anyone who skips step 8 hands in an Italian that doesn’t exist.

Sententiae: how to render them without translating word for word

A sententia has two levels: the content (what it says) and the form (how it says it). In the target language you must keep both.

You find the content with the literal translation. The form is in the antithesis, the parallelism, sometimes a play on words. When you render the sentence, keep the structure: if the Latin puts two elements in opposition, the translation must show two elements in opposition, even if you have to change words, order or grammatical category (a verb that becomes a noun, an adjective that becomes a clause). In the two examples below you see how. (I give the renderings in English; in the test the target language is Italian, but the choices are the same.)

First worked passage: time is the only thing that is ours

The text, from the first letter to Lucilius (Ep. 1,3):

Omnia, Lucili, aliena sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est.

Analysis.

Omnia: neuter plural adjective, nominative, used as a noun (“all things”). It is the subject of the first sentence.
Lucili: vocative of Lucilius, the recipient of the letter. It sits in the middle of the sentence like a pause in direct speech.
aliena: neuter plural nominative, nominal part of the predicate. It comes from alienus, “belonging to others”, from alius.
sunt: verb of the first sentence. Note that the sentence is complete.
Comma: here is the asyndeton. Between the two sentences there is no conjunction. The relationship is an opposition (“but”, “whereas”).
tempus: nominative singular neuter, subject of the second sentence.
tantum: here an adverb, “only”. It is not the adjective “so much”. It is the most common trap in this sentence.
nostrum: neuter singular nominative, nominal part. It agrees with tempus.
est: verb of the second sentence.

The antithesis is sharp: aliena against nostrum, omnia against tempus. The whole sentence is there.

Literal translation. All things, Lucilius, are of others; time only is ours.

Rendered translation. Everything else, Lucilius, belongs to others: only time is ours.

Note the choices. “All things” is correct but heavy, and “everything else” picks up the contrast with time. “Are of others” becomes “belongs to others”, more natural. The colon in place of the comma renders the opposition that in Latin lies in the asyndeton. And “only” in front of “time” rebuilds the emphasis that Latin gives with tantum.

A typical mistake: translating tempus tantum nostrum est as “time is so much ours”. It works grammatically only if you ignore the sense of the previous sentence.

Halfway: practise on real translations

Before moving on to the second passage, something practical. Understanding the method is one thing, applying it in two hours on a text you have never seen is another. On the site there is a Latin second-paper practice test for the classical high school: it consists of two complete practice tests with translations from different authors (Cicero, Seneca, Sallust, Livy), with timing and worked solutions. The best way to use it is to do the translation with a stopwatch, at home, without looking at the solution, and only afterwards compare.

Second worked passage: daring and difficulty

From letter 104 (Ep. 104,26):

Non quia difficilia sunt non audemus, sed quia non audemus difficilia sunt.

It is a sententia built on a chiasmus of cause and effect. If you read it in order without structuring it you get lost.

Analysis. I divide the sentence into two blocks, separated by sed.

First block: Non quia difficilia sunt non audemus.

quia difficilia sunt: causal clause with quia and the indicative (sunt). Difficilia is neuter plural, nominal part: “(things) are difficult”.
non audemus: main verb. Audeo is a semi-deponent verb: it has the active present (audemus, “we dare”) and the perfect in passive form (ausus sum). Here it is in the present, so no problem.
The initial Non: negates the cause, not the verb. It is the difference between “it is not because…” and “we do not dare because…”. In the sentence the first non governs quia, the second governs audemus.

Second block: sed quia non audemus difficilia sunt.

sed: adversative conjunction that corrects the previous block.
quia non audemus: second causal clause, with quia and the indicative. Here the cause is the lack of courage.
difficilia sunt: the main clause. The predicate is the same as in the first block, but now it is the effect.

The structure is this: in the first block difficulty is the cause and not daring the effect (and it is denied), in the second block the roles swap. The heart of the sentence is that the two elements, difficilia and audemus, swap places.

Literal translation. Not because things are difficult do we not dare, but because we do not dare things are difficult.

Rendered translation. It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare: they are difficult because we do not dare.

Here the rendering has to make two choices. The first is “it is not because… that…”, a cleft sentence that keeps the effect of negation on the cause and not on the verb. The second is shortening the second block (“they are difficult because we do not dare”), because the target language doesn’t need to repeat “but”: the colon is enough and the chiasmus is still visible.

A typical mistake: translating the first non as a negation of the verb and reading “because things are difficult, we do not dare”. It is a sensible sentence, but it says the opposite of what Seneca says. The position of non in front of quia is everything.

The role of the dictionary

In a Seneca translation the dictionary is needed less than you might think, and in a different way. For everyday words (tempus, res, animus) the entry has many senses and the first is not always the right one. What I ask students to do is read the examples, find the one most like the context and check with a question: does the sentence I wrote say something sensible on a topic of moral philosophy? If the answer is no, I chose the wrong sense.

For rare words, just look them up. But note down the senses you discarded: you will meet them again in other passages by the same author.

One last note. If in the text there is a philosophical word you translated with its direct calque (“ratio” → “reason”, “virtus” → “virtue”), reread the sentence: if the sense is oddly moralising or oddly empty, almost always the right sense was another.

The mistakes that cost the most

I sum up the ones I see coming back every year in Seneca tests:

Translating a sententia word for word, losing the antithesis.
Not supplying the missing verb, and leaving a sentence with no predicate.
Choosing the sense of a philosophical term from the first line of the dictionary.
Misreading the position of the negation (non quia against quia non).
Inserting a connective (“so”, “therefore”) that is not in the text and that changes the relationship between the sentences.
Handing in a translation that holds up sentence by sentence but has no logical thread from one sentence to the next.

These mistakes can be avoided with the method above, and the quickest way to notice them is to go over each translated sentence asking yourself what Seneca would have answered if you had asked him: is this what you meant?

How we work in lessons

In lessons we start from one of your recent translations, usually the last class test, and go through it sentence by sentence: where you lost the sense, which step of the method you skipped. Then we move to a new Seneca passage, which you translate yourself against the clock, and we correct it together. The aim is not to learn a translation by heart but to get you used to reading a text you don’t know and deciding quickly where the verbs, the oppositions and the words that deserve the dictionary are. For Latin in general you will find the page /materie/latino/, and for the rest of the humanities area /materie/materie-umanistiche/. For those starting from zero with a declension that doesn’t add up, the useful starting point is the third declension in three groups.

Before the test: two hours of practice

If you want to arrive at November with a clear idea of where you stand, do one of the Latin second-paper practice tests now, with real timing and the dictionary. The text doesn’t need to be by Seneca: you need to see how long each step of the method takes you and where it gets stuck. Then compare your result with the worked solution and note where you lost most.

If you want to understand where you are losing marks on Year 5 translations, you can ask for a free 30-minute introductory call on the contact page: we talk about your last test, look together at how you translated and decide whether it makes sense to work on it. For the arrangements for lessons and packages there is the pricing page.

Seneca in Latin: how to translate a passage in Year 5