In my previous post on bread and circuses, I used a translation by Kline. I admire very much Kline’s work making contemporary translations of Latin poetry available on the internet for non commercial use. Poetry translations suffers perhaps most of all when we default to works that have aged into the public domain. Open source is the ethic way forward. All that said as I thought about using it in my chapter I found myself concerned about pieces of the Latin not reflected in that translation. Translation is very much interpretation, especially with such a value laden text as Juvenal’s 10th Satire! Here are parallel sections of Kline and a much earlier translator Ramsey:
But what of the Roman Mob? They follow Fortune, as always, and hate whoever she condemns. … They shed their sense of responsibility long ago, when they lost their votes, and the bribes; the mob that used to grant power, high office, the legions, everything, curtails its desires, and reveals its anxiety for two things only, Bread and circuses. ‘I hear that many will perish.’ ‘No doubt, The furnace is huge.’
And what does the mob of Remus say? It follows fortune, as it always does, and rails against the condemned. … Now that no one buys our votes, the public has long since cast off its cares; the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things—-Bread and Games! “I hear that many are to perish.”—-“No doubt of it; there is a big furnace ready.”
I’ve decided there are a few places I can’t really live with either translation given my sense of the key portions of the Latin. Here’s the Latin:
… sed quid
turba Remi? sequitur fortunam, ut semper, et odit
damnatos. idem populus, si Nortia Tusco
fauisset, si oppressa foret secura senectus
principis, hac ipsa Seianum diceret hora
Augustum. iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli
uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim
imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se
continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat,
panem et circenses. ‘perituros audio multos.’
‘nil dubium, magna est fornacula.’
So right now my own version is looking something like this:
But what of the mob of Remus? It follows fortune, as always, and hates the damned … No longer do we sell votes. Responsibilities drain away. Those who used to grant imperium, fasces, legions, everything, now restrain themselves, hoping all the more anxiously for two things: bread and circuses. ‘Many will perish, I hear.’ ‘No doubt, the furnace is huge.’ (Sat. 10.73-82)
The crowd being associated with Remus the murdered brother of Romulus needs to be preserved. But perhaps most critical is the 1st person personal plural active verb “to sell”. Juvenal gives agency to the sellers of their votes and includes himself and his reader in that group. I shy away from reiterating ‘mob’ or ‘crowd’ as the subject of the later 3rd person singular verbs because in the sentence I’m cutting Juvenal uses idem populus ‘the same people’ to gloss turba; populus is a much less negative terms and might as easily be rendered ‘citizen body’. Notice especially how the past concerns of “imperium, fasces, legions and everything” are contrasted with “bread and circuses”. The former evokes not just magisterial offices but particularly foreign policy, the later is standing for domestic affairs, the internal condition of the state. I particularly like the word order of the last two snippets of direct discourse, but see no fluid way to reflect that in the translation.
Obviously, in places my rending is no more literally reflective of vocabulary and grammar than the other two, but few readable translations are.
Liv Mariah Yarrow 
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