What's all this fuss about?

Latin lyrics in Heavy Metal music are a common phenomenon. The darker the music, the more evil the band wanna be. What's better than using an old, mysterious, hardly understandable, cryptic, medieval and therefore almost satanic language? Unfortunately bands seldom know how to use this language properly. So, instead of evoking the demons of the realm of evil, they just evoke a hop-frog. Clatu verata nicto! - The most of you know what happened after this wrongly spoken spell.

Normally, two questions are the result of the fact that you've just read a latin phrase:
- What does it mean? (almost everybody)
- Is it correct? (just a few latin aficionados)

This page doesn't want to make fun of mistakes in latin lyrics. I wanna answer the first question to everybody who is interested. The second question is just for myself or for the two or three weird guys out there or for bands which are thinking about using a latin phrase as well. You can contact me if you want.

Samstag, 12. Dezember 2009

Swallow the Sun - New Moon

Swallow the Sun - New Moon (2009)

Swallow the Sun, Finnish gods of Doom and hopeless melancholy, have just released their fourth album "New Moon" - excellent black ans slow lava - on CD as well as live.
The CD's inlay has a blazon on it's back side, which contains a latin saying:
Unusquisque amoris damnatus ipse ut famulus miseriae genuflectet

Finest classical latin, grammatically perfect and well balanced written.
(The genitive form amoris belongs to damnatus. Words with juridical meanings use the genitive to express the reason of charge. It's also possible that the genitive expresses the punishment (which would be condemned to love), but this is just the case with capitis and adjective forms. That's why I've translated it as written above.)

Everyone condemned because of love himself will kneel like a servant of misery.

Finally, perfect music, perfect latin, what more do you want?