up way too late composing Latin

cause some guy on ISCA bbs asked how to render into Latin the sentence “to truly live is to stare defiantly into the face of death.”

I started working on it and noticed that my sentence was about half hexameter, so I labored and obsessed until I put the whole thing into dactylic hexameter, or something close enough for government work. I had to ditch the “defiance” but I thought the epic meter made up for it:

intueri in vultum mortis, id vivere vere est.

Then I realized I had totally jumbled around the sense of his words to get that. It should be more like:

Vere vivere, id est fortiter intueri in vultum mortis.

No epic meter there, nor any easy way to cast it that way.

But “fortiter intueri in vultum…” — that’s a lovely little chunk of hexameter in the middle of it. Makes me sad not to be able to render it all that way.

Ah, Latin. What fun.

Here’s an awesome page giving English verses composed in Classical meters.