Hobbitus Ille: The Latin Hobbit [Hardcover]

It's really quite hard to know how to review a book like this: the intention is so excellent and the execution so jarring.

For some readers, the purpose of a book like this is simply to allow you to follow the story and say "Hey, look at me! I'm reading real live Latin, and enjoying it!" And it is indeed engaging: the slower pace of reading allows you to notice things which slip by when you are re-reading the English. On this level, it's just a bit of fun: no point in being pompous about it.

Unfortunately, such books are equally likely to be used as a learning aid by those actually studying Latin. In that case there is a serious purpose in these translations: to make the reading easy and enjoyable by using a familiar and much-loved story while at the same time painlessly giving you a feel for how Latin prose actually works. This is where it fails badly. It's not a question of not conforming to some Augustan canon of elegance: misunderstandings, often amounting to howlers, occur on almost every page. I'm not saying I could do better; but I can tell when a table wobbles even though I do not know how to make tables.

The trouble starts on the title page: where _do_ so many English people get the idea that "ille" can be used as the definite article? All right, it is the ancestor of the definite article in most Romance languages, and was legitimately used in "Winnie Ille Pu", but there the idea was to render the extra emphasis in "Winnie THER Pooh". "There and back again" is rendered as "Illuc et rursus retrorsum". "Back again" is an English idiom, which does not exist in Latin. "Rursus retrorsum" is an ugly duplication: etymologically it amounts to "reversus retroversum". The only sensible meaning is that he went back once, and is now going back a second time: not what the book means.

And so it goes on. I agree with all the points made by the previous reviewer (Johan Winge): my thirteen-year-old son, who has been learning Latin for less than a year, fell about laughing when I told him about "tange et i".

The main fault is insensitivity to shades of meaning. For example:

*"foramen" means a perforation in a surface, such as a hole in your sock. It cannot mean a hole in the ground. Even leaving that aside, "foramen-hobbitum" would mean a hole which is a hobbit, not a hole belonging to a hobbit. And there are many further awkward English-style hyphenations and italicizations, which could have been avoided by standard Latin idioms.

*"as your friends may tell you" is translated by "licet", meaning that it is lawful for your friends to tell you. (And "licet" is used this way in several other passages.) It should be "ut potes discere ab amicis" or something similar.

*"facinus" for "adventure" may be just about defensible, but its normal meaning is "crime". (Admittedly, "adventure" here is very hard to translate: a recurrent joke in the original turns on the ambiguity between "adventure" in the sense of a speculative enterprise and "adventure" in the sense of a dangerous thing that happens to you.)

*"rixantem" for "scuffling". Even apart from the participle question, "rixa" means a quarrel with raised voices, with or without a fight. "Scuffle" in English can sometimes mean a fight. But in the original passage, it has its other meaning, of a noise made by a lot of feet.

*"veri simile" for "probable" (several times): can be used for whether someone's account appears believable, but not for whether something is likely to happen in the future, which is how it is usually used here.

*recurrent use of "tempus" to mean "time" in phrases like "another time" and "this time" (should be "hac vice").

*"admirari" for "wonder". Yes it does mean to wonder, in the sense of being amazed. It cannot mean to wonder whether.

*"caput" for "head" in phrases like "lost his head" and "keeping a clear head". "Caput" has several metaphorical uses in Latin, apart from the literal meaning of a part of the body; but it is never used for "mind" or "mental processes".

In other cases there are outright mistakes:

*Bilbo at one point hopes that the dragon is not sitting on the mountain looking down at them. The Latin makes him hope that the dragon IS doing this.

*in that wonderful exchange "little time to lose" /"little food to use", the Latin uses "time" instead of "food"!

*several times a plural noun takes a singular verb, though this may be a proofreading error.

*several uses of a participle to translate an English gerund, and of infinitives to render phrases like "nowhere to be seen".

Literal rendering of idioms:

*"for many a year" and "many a fair elf" are translated by "multus" in the singular. This idiom simply doesn't exist in Latin.

*recurrent use of "unus" for "one" in the sense of a specimen of a previously mentioned class, as in "a burglar, but an honest one". Again, not a Latin usage.

Miscellaneous:

*some proper names are rendered by ridiculous Anglo-Latin compounds like "Mirksilva" and "Arkenlapis".

*the translator cannot decide whether to use "homines" for "human beings" or for "people" in general (including elves and dwarves): in the Tolkien world, a somewhat important distinction!

In short, it reads as if a student has ploughed through translating word for word with the help of a dictionary: of Latinity it has simply none. I can't quite make out how it happened, as the translator clearly knows a great deal of Latin and presumably has plenty of teaching experience, and some of the verses (for example the hendecasyllabic song about the barrels) are excellent.

But don't let me deter you from getting it. All said and done, it is a pleasant read, as nothing can destroy the charm of the original story; and one day it will have value as a collector's curiosity.

This is a very pretty book, which would sit nicely on the bookshelf of any Latinist or fan of Tolkien. However, if anyone actually opens it with the intention of reading it, for pleasure and/or to learn something, they are up for a disappointing experience. It is a huge task to translate such a classic novel, and the translator should be commended for attempting it. Unfortunately, however, he is clearly not up to it, seeing that literally every page contains basic grammatical errors, such as

* erroneous usage of words; consider, for example, the sentence "paene in aliquo loco paene ex aliquo, cum uento aut nullo, nani ignem accendere possunt". (In the original: "Dwarves can make a fire almost anywhere out of almost anything, wind or no wind.") The main problem is that "aliquis" simply does not mean "any" in this sense; it means "some". So the Latin translates to "Dwarves can make a fire almost in some place, almost out of some thing..." (or even "... from some place"; the meaning is unclear.) Poor dwarves!

Another example: "crebro dixit se excusari" (in the original "said he was sorry so many times...") However, that can only, as far as I understand, be translated as "he said he was being excused", or possibly "said that he declared himself free from blame/liability", which is a quite different thing. (Better, though not perfect, would have been "petebat" in place of "dixit".)

* faulty morphology: "utamus" instead of "utamur", "ulterias" in place of "ulteriores", "eum" once when it should be "id", "arboris suis" instead of "arboris suae", "reficeri" for "refici", to name just a few examples. (To be fair, note that these are isolated mistakes, and that the forms are not consistently faulty throughout.)

* non-Latin constructions and syntax: for example, "epistolium tuum non accepi quoad decem atque quinque quadraginta, exactum esse." (Original: "I didn't get your note until after 10.45 to be precise.") That is not the way to indicate the time in Latin, and "to be precise" can not be rendered with an infinitive in Latin when the meaning is "in order for me to be precise."

* the hallmark of a bad translation, literally translated English idioms, such as "tange et i!" as a translation of "touch and go!" (an idiom meaning "precarious"), and "hoc non prorsum bene facit!" for "This won't do at all!"

These are just a few examples; many more can be supplied. All in all, the book throughout reads as the work of an ambitious student, yet one with little experience of writing in Latin, and indeed with little insight in what it entails to make an idiomatic translation into any language at all. A huge disappointment, to say the least. In short, avoid this book.

I have never been so eager to acquire a book. Mark Walker was bold enough to announce that he was marketing his Latin Hobbit at people who like to read Latin just because they can - kudos to him for being so perceptive, at least in my case! Unfortunately, he seems to completely miss the fact that his target audience, people who read Latin just because they can, DOES generally expect it to be good Latin that might be spoken by a Roman. What concerns me most is not the presence of mistakes in the Latin, already more than adequately illustrated by other reviewers. That's forgiveable - who could check it? - although the quantity IS somewhat worrying. I am more alarmed by the reason they were made, which to me is transparent, and as galling as it is baffling.

Walker declares in his preface that he decided to translate the book literally, rather than imitating Roman authors. Aside from the fury I felt personally, having spent 8 years slavishly imitating Roman authors, I would have thought that Tolkien's pages of description were just begging for a potential translator to plunder Vergil's Georgics. I felt as though Walker had proudly announced he'd thrown away the Sibylline books. Nonetheless I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. One good thing that did come of his approach was that, despite not having read 'The Hobbit' in English, I got the impression that I was indeed reading Tolkien - the tone and syntax were very close. I should also point out that the songs have all been translated into varied Latin metres, which was very gratifying.

However, leaving aside instances where the Latin is sound but 'the Romans just wouldn't have said that' - along with the overpowering sense of a wasted opportunity - most of the grammatical errors could have been avoided by imitating Roman authors. No one emulating Vergil would have written such elementary gibberish as 'solis oriens' ('the rising thing of the sun') for 'sunrise'. More importantly, for me, this approach renders the book unintelligible to anyone other than native English speakers - let alone hypothetical Romans! If it took me quite some time to work out that 'ei maledic' did not actually have an addressee, imagine the difficulty faced by a non-English speaker, for whom 'curse him' does not share its form with the imperative... And that's a minor example. It goes against every translation principle I have ever learned.

A literal translation of often idiomatic English is not only an insult to thousands of international fans, it also seems the complete opposite of what *Tolkien*, a renowned linguist, would have wanted; I am sure he would have been aghast merely at the failure to translate the characters' names, after all the effort he put into giving them meaning. But worst of all, it is a total affront to Latin itself - an incomprehensible disregard for its outstanding literary heritage, and shameful waste of the power it holds NOW as a language that can be equally understood all over the world. Coming from anyone at all, such oversight betrays what could at best be described as colossal ignorance, at worst as supreme arrogance (both of the kind that I suspect, sadly, would not ensnare a European translator). From a Latin *teacher*, which Walker apparently is, the failure to recognise the endeavour's potential simply defies belief.

Don't get me wrong, this was a charming read. It's an excellent book, of course, and it's wonderful to have the opportunity to read it in largely decent Latin that mirrors the tone very well. Perhaps the exclusivity of the translation will be of less concern to many people. However, even reading it solely as a native English speaker, it is rather unwieldy at times (to put it mildly), and the experience is marred by the knowledge that it COULD have been a linguistic masterpiece of which Tolkien would have been proud.

On a positive note... it left me with a very strong urge to re-translate it myself.