The Problem
Students are often frustrated with the absence of certain participial forms in Latin. There is no present passive participle, so while they can easily write “the boys [who are] eating” as something like pueri consumentes, they can’t really write “the boys [who are] being eaten” with a participial construction. This is one of those qualities that perhaps inspired Roman authors like Lucretius and Cicero to bemoan the “poverty of the Latin language.” It just can’t do some things that other languages like Greek and English can do pretty easily.
But Latin does have some features that English lacks or at least imitates clumsily. One of those features is the gerundive. The gerundive is a verbal adjective, different from its close cousin the gerund, a verbal noun. Gerunds are everywhere in English: “Smoking is prohibited,” “Driving while drunk is a crime,” “Running five minutes a day extends your life by years.” In each of these cases, the gerund—ending with “-ing”—serves as a noun in the sentence.
The gerundive, by contrast, serves as an adjective and (to use the terminology of my introductory examples) can often be thought of as a future passive participle. It carries a sense of obligation or necessity. All this information is hard to convey in English concisely, so students are taught to translate gerundives using unnatural, almost incomprehensible formulas. For example, res agendae might be rendered as “things [that are] needing to be done.” Or libri legendi as “books [that are] deserving to be read.” Even when students have memorized these useful templates, they often have little sense of what their these English phrases really mean.
A Helpful but Imperfect Suggestion
Here I offer an alternative method for translating gerundives that, while not as pedantically precise as “deserving to be ________ed” or “needing to be ________ed,” is a little more elegant and more comprehensible for English-speaking students.
Let’s look at some examples from Allen and Greenough:
Here we see gerunds and gerundives used in more-or-less equivalent constructions. But the gerund constructions, we are told in a note, are rarer than those with gerundives, and they are generally frowned upon as a matter of Latin stylistics. This is unfortunate for English-speaking students since gerund constructions are so much easier and more sensible to the English ear! The example consilium urbem capiendi with its genitive gerund and accusative object parses very neatly in English: we would similarly talk about a plan of acting upon a direct object.
If we use the clunky formula for translating the gerundive construction (consilium urbis capiendae), we end up with an English phrase that lacks both style and sense: “a design of the city needing to be taken.” Students who are exerting all their brainpower to memorize forms won’t have much energy left to decode this kind of translationese. And the suggested translation in Allen and Greenough, “a design of taking the city,” doesn’t allow students to distinguish between gerund and gerundive constructions. In fact, it keeps students in the habit of thinking in English gerunds and accusative direct objects instead of grappling with this novel Latin participle.
So how about this? Instead of “of the city needing to be taken,” I like to create an English verbal compound in the form of ‘book-burning’—that is, the noun of the gerundive construction compounded with the action of the gerundive itself. To use Allen and Greenough‘s full example, I would translate consilium urbis capiendae like this: “a design of city-taking.”
This translation captures some important aspects of the gerundive. First, it keeps the passivity of the verb: the city is being taken, it is not doing the taking. With the English word “book-burning,” we know intuitively that the books are being burned, not that books themselves are pouring gasoline and striking matches. Allen and Greenough‘s suggestion of defaulting to the gerund in the English translation (“a design of taking the city”) loses this sense of the passive voice and even tempts students to use an accusative noun when other cases are called for.
Perhaps more importantly for beginning students, these English coinages are easy to form and immediately comprehensible: designs of donut-eating, ticket-purchasing, or even something unfamiliar like, say, rabbit-washing are much easier for students to understand than “a design of donuts needing to be eaten” or “a design of rabbits deserving to be washed.”
Some Caveats
In exchange for gains in concision and elegance, this “book-burning” construction takes on some imprecision. English does not use plural nouns in these hyphenated forms, so even though the second Allen and Greenough example (dat operam agris colendis) uses a agris instead of agro, English would use a singular noun: he attends to field-tilling, not fields-tilling. And these forms aren’t so explicit about the futurity or even the necessity of the participle.
It should also be noted that this trick doesn’t work for all gerundive constructions. It doesn’t work well for passive periphrastics or gerundives without nouns. It’s primarily helpful in constructions where normally English would use a gerund with an object (“a design for washing the rabbits”) but where Latin would prefer a noun modified by a gerundive. For these reasons, it’s still worthwhile to teach more verbose formulas like “needing to be whatever-ed.” And of course, students will encounter this cumbersome phrase elsewhere.
In practical terms, this formula of “book-burning” or “rabbit-washing” or “city-taking” is best used alongside other methods for translating. It’s a concise, intuitive, and imperfect way of rendering this elegant and often-perplexing element of Latin syntax. And at least in my limited experience, I’ve found it very helpful for class-teaching and grammar-clarifying.
