More Movie Latin

Les rivières pourpres is the title of a 1997 crime novel by French author Jean-Christophe Grangé.   The book incorporates a pair of engagingly iconoclastic cops, some villainous academic types plotting world domination by eugenics and the fast pace of a typical pot-boiler.  The author teamed up with Mathieu Kassovits (who played Nino Quincampoix in Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain) to write a screen-play, and the movie (English title - The Crimson Rivers) directed by Kassovits, became a big hit upon its release in 2000, according to Wikipedia "grossing $60 million in worldwide theatrical release."

The novel doesn't have a word of Latin in it, the movie otherwise.  The headquarters of the villainous academic types is the Pôle Universitaire et Sportif de Guernon - somewhere in the French Alps.  The logo for the place looks like this:

This appears on walls, shirts, jackets, etc.  The Latin is, of course, the very familiar quote excerpted from Juvenal's Satires (10.356: orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano.)

Besides this reference to the Silver Age satirist, a reference to one of the premier Golden Age poets shows up in a plaque that appears on a wall shortly after the arrival of Commissaire Niemans in Guernon:

Here we have a rendering in French of Vergil's line, Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, from the Georgics (Book II, line 490), and kind of a subtle, clever little thing equally apt for the detectives who will get to the bottom of things and for the Dr. Frankenstein imitators who think they have thought up a way to re-engineer the race.  There is a reasonable possibility this is an intentional allusion on the part of the filmmakers since the phrase had shown up in an Astérix et Obélix story - Astérix en Corse (1973) - when the pirates experienced an explosion brought on by a Corsican cheese (Explosion provoquée par un fromage Corse), and since the line fetches over a hundred thousand French hits when googled in quotes.

So far so good.  However, things start breaking down when the Latin gets carved in stone, or what passes for stone in a film.  This appears above the entrance to one of the main buildings:

It looks like this is a Latin rendering of what Grangé has one of the murdered villains (victim #2) write in his notebook (from page 199 of the novel), with the addition of the word "Scientia" (knowledge) above it: 

NOUS SOMMES LES MAÎTRES, NOUS SOMMES LES ESCLAVES.

NOUS SOMMES PARTOUT, NOUS SOMMES NULLE PART.

NOUS SOMMES LES ARPENTEURS.

NOUS MAÎTRISONS LES RIVIÈRES POURPRES.

Note that the reference to surveyors has been omitted and the word "sumus" (we are) both prominently and ambiguously (but fittingly for a lapidary style) placed so as to seem to apply, one surmises, not only to "scientia" (which may possibly be in the ablative case - though that possibility may be no more than a happy accident and in which case the verb might more appropriately be "fimus" or possibly "facti sumus") but also to the other nominal and adverbial predicates in the French.  The problem is "purpereis rivis".  The case is right, since "imperare" governs the dative, but the spelling of "crimson" is amiss; it should be "purpureis." As a color adjective it should follow its noun.  The other troubling thing is that the word "rivis" is off as a translation for "rivières" -  "cours d'eau naturel de moyenne importance ou qui se jette dans un autre cours d'eau (opposé à fleuve)" (Le Robert Micro).  Better would have been any of the usual Latin synonyms for river: "flumen" or "fluvius" or "amnis."  A "rivus" on the other hand is a "small stream of water, a brook" (Lewis and Short).

When we get to the first murdered villain's notebook, things take a decided turn for the worse.  This is apparently the poor fellow's doctoral thesis and has a leather cover with another translation of the manifesto embossed on it, like this (sorry for the drastic cropping; couldn't get a good (legible) shot of the whole thing):

As best I can tell this reads:

DOMINI SUMUS. SUMUS SERVI.

UBICUMQUE. NUSQUAMQUE.

VERSAMUR PURPUREIS.

LUMINIBUS IMPERAMUS.

There are three problems with the Latin.  There seem to be way too many periods (why would we be dwelling, staying, living, remaining or abiding in or with crimson things; or simply being or being circumstanced or situated with crimson things; or being occupied, busied or engaged with crimson things - "versamur purpureis" - when it would make more sense to assert that "we are (or abide) everywhere and nowhere? i.e., take "versamur" with both preceding adverbs and "imperamus" with the two words preceding it, as it is in the French).  The translator has used the wrong word "ubicumque" (in whatever place, wherever; somewhere, wherever that may be ) for "ubique" (in every place, everywhere).   And somebody left the "F" off "luminibus" which without that "F" means "lights" not "rivers".  As might have been expected the subtitling is even worse:

This is subtitling so carelessly done as to seem surpassingly stupid, since there was no need to translate anything, just to read, i.e., print, the words written on the top line of the leather notebook cover: domini sumus. sumus servi. 

Is it impossible for a film with a 14 million dollar budget to get a decent quality Latinist on board?   What would the Latin look like in a better rendering?  There are no doubt dozens of possibilities, but here is one rather straightforward suggestion (restoring the surveyor reference but eliminating the anaphora):

Nos, simul domini servique, fluminibus purpureis imperantes, 

mensores, et ubique et nusquam versamur.

So, just a suggestion, Christophe, or Mathieu, or whoever does Les rivières pourpres III. . . Feel free to drop me a line the next time you think it's a good idea to punch up the symbolism in your next screen-play with a little Latin.

It has occurred to me since posting this originally that the fault may lie not so much with the contributor of the Latin rendering as with those who executed that contribution by preparing the stone inscription and the leather note-book cover.  Certainly it would be rather unexpected to have tech people and other artisans who had upper-level Latin composition skills.  I suppose that once the project got into the editing room - if indeed anybody even at that point noticed the problems - it was too late to do anything about it. 

time machine

I think I'll invent a time machine, kind of a cool looking box like one of those Apple computers, that start at $599, like this:

On my flat little squarish thing with rounded corners and the logo on top (note: I might skip the logo since the apple is probably proprietary and a watermelon would be too big, a grape too small, and a banana too long, yellow and phallicky. . . maybe I could try a negative image of itself - a slick drawing from a unique perspective - scaled down to about the same ratios as this one . . . oh, I don't know; I hate having to be creative) just as with this one, there wouldn't even be a button to start it.  You'd just put it on your desk or coffee table and it would apparently do nothing for what would seem like forever and then at some unspecified, undesignated, indeterminate time in the future it would just work and suddenly you would see some kind of touch screen in the air hovering over it with images and text for suggested times and places to go visit in the past - maybe clickable ads for popular venues and things to wear and drink when you're there - and a box you could type in some address or other like Google Earth with a date and time of day, and then, zoom, you'd just go there to that place and time.  Yes, you could type, because the thing would be projecting a holographic keyboard like this nifty little gizmo here:

The more specific the coordinates of the location on the space-time continuum you input, the better chance you would have of not ending up in a wall or a freeway or congress or something.

While waiting for it to become active, you'd just go about your daily life, such as it is and whatever it is.  Or you could sit and stare at it like a TV.  I could even invent a remote for it.  There would be no apparent effect from clicking up or down the range of channels, but the exercise might have something to do with the mechanism for the activation of the machine itself.  Probably most people would not notice any difference between doing this with the time-travel box and doing it with regular TV.

Whatever time and place you pick to time-travel to, the box would instantaneously give you fully developed skills in the language spoken and written there, so you could understand Homeric Greek or Elizabethan English or the Italian of the Renaissance or Rap Music without having to buy Rosetta Stone.  I think it would do this by a process of molecular transformation of your brain which would be necessarily incidental to the manipulation of the time-space continuum entailed by time travel in the first place.  Or maybe there would be a sort of wireless upload direct to the brain of something digitalized from the stem-cells of geniuses.  Wait, both those ideas sound a little unscientific.  This might be better.  The box, upon becoming active, does its little number and sends itself far enough into the future where somebody smarter than I am has thought all this out, uploads whatever app is necessary for it to handle this language thing and then returns to your desk or coffee table instantaneously as if nothing had happened and you were still just staring at it, waiting for something to happen, idly clicking the remote.

Ooh ooh, I just remembered, it probably would be necessary add a thing in the holographic touch screen so you could set a duration for the trip, since once you got back to, say, the Renaissance, you'd have to wait a significantly longer time for the box to be invented in order to program yourself back to the present.  Most people probably would not live that long.  On the other hand, suppose you changed your mind and wanted to stay there, or you're in the middle something you really want to finish and forgot what time it was. . . Needs more thought.  Or maybe I could just have the box include a life-expectancy enhancer as part of the overall time-travel experience which the box is capable of producing. . . yeah, that's it, some kind of a cross between a five hour energy drink, Viagra and penicillin.  Or, maybe, wait a minute, okay, got it now - the experience includes a mind operated homing device like GPS: you just think yourself back to your original space-time continuum coordinates.

Or would it be better to have the box create some kind of eco-friendly vehicle for your time-space transportation pleasure, maybe like this?

 

(All I did here was google "weird ass electric cars" and this is one of the coolest images that popped up.)

 Or maybe this one is cooler?  At least it's a little more aerodynamic.

(Believe it or not, this sleek little dark charmer was on the same page as the geek-mobile above.)

Nawh, that's not such a good idea.  Consider the effect on folks in the time and place you choose to visit.  I can't even imagine how freaked out the ordinary people of the time would be if either of these cool sets of wheels dropped out of the sky in the middle, say, of a medieval French village while peasants were just going about their late morning daily squalor and ignorance.  It probably would be necessary to do an immediate time-travel re-set to prevent a pitchfork attack by a mob of desperately stupid villagers.  Good thing I thought of that mind operated homing device.  But why not avoid all that in the first place and just skip the car thing?

I'm not sure what happens after the box becomes active and you start time-traveling.  I guess you could just go on time-traveling forever, although it is not clear what the term forever could reasonably mean.  Maybe the short answer is that there there would be no point to the question, since basically for the thing to have become active there would have to have been some kind of holistic paradigm shift in the composition of the universe of such a kind and nature as to have caused to be filled, of its own volition - as it were - and without any apparent physical explanation, a perfectly empty, though really cool looking, box with some kind of time-travel circuit wizardry.  Obviously, if that can happen then pretty much anything can happen.