I’ve returned to translating Firmicus Maternus. Part of the preparation for doing so was to get hold of the French editions and translations, and I ran one of these through a machine translator. Working through this, I came to the following remarkable output:
Si tu veux, libéré, suivre la lumière de l’époux, rejette tes erreurs et occupe-toi avec un zèle assidu de racheter par une religieuse dévotion les crimes de ta vie antérieure.
If you want, freely, to follow the light of the bridegroom, reject your errors and occupy yourselves with assiduous zeal to repurchase by a chocolate éclair devotion the crimes of your former life.
How “religieuse” became “chocolate eclair” I can’t imagine! But somehow, although inappropriate as a translation, isn’t the phrase “chocolate eclair devotion” rather an apt one?
Now, that’s a doctrinal development I think we all can approve.
Heh.
Most devotions are over in the time it takes to eat one, tho.
And so the saints counsel us to press on in our devotion. Have that second eclair.
Heh.
There’s a French cake called “une religieuse”, a sort of circular éclair which resembles a nun. See “Religieuse (pâtisserie)” at the French Wikipedia, which has a photograph.
Ah, so that’s the answer! Thank you for that.
But we haven’t wrangled yet over what order the pastry is supposed to represent! 🙂
That pastry looks really good. Is it lunchtime yet?
It’s always lunchtime somewhere, Maureen. Remember, catholic means universal. Declare your solidarity with Christians in distant lands, other time zones.
This reminds me of a translation project in which they tried to translate a source text to various English dialects. The proud first words of the American Declaration of Independence, “We, the people”, were rendered into Californian as “Us guys”.
I get it: there’s a chocolate éclair pastry that looks like a nun, hence, “une religieuse.” Sort of like some people taking President Kennedy’s declaration, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” to mean “I am a jelly doughnut.”
It is never too difficult to believe that a politician is saying “I am a jelly doughnut”. 🙂
Roger, si tu veux some help, souviens-toi que tu as a professional French translator in your occasional kennel. And this is topical for me as well, since the Teubner Firmicus falls into the public domain on January 1 and I’m preparing a transcription of the Latin for Lacus; so I’ll be in a Firmicus mode off and on for a few weeks.
That’s very kind, but I’m OK with the stuff I’m doing!