Spring Awakening

I've always wondered what those random lines of Latin were, you know the ones that they sing in the background in the song, "All That's Known," off of the "Spring Awakening" soundtrack? (That's like 50,000 lame points for me)

Anyway, I guess since I took a lot of Latin classes throughout my youth (and since I've retained like 30% of it...) I thought I would try to listen to the song, write down the Latin and translate it, no problem.

So I wrote down this:

Littera multum ille et terris iactatus et alto (so far so good, I'm thinking)

??? saevae?? memoram????

Iram multa quoque et bellum..er, bello possus

? conderit urbem arma verique????

(I give up)


Hmmm... that's not gonna work..

littera= books?
multum= many
ille= those guys/things
et= and
terris= to the ground
iactatus= thrown/carried/taken
et= and
alto= high???

Ok, so I didn't have much to work with...and so I looked it up online. Sigh. OH well.

This is what the words ARE:

Litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto
VI superum, saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram
Multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem
Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris
Italiam fato profugus Laviniaque venit.

Ok, so yeah, I took some classes in college, translating Ovid's love poems. But that was a whiile ago and I don't remember that stuff at all.

Listening to another song on the soundtrack, I heard the character Moritz talking to Isle (two of my favorite characters). He says in the middle of "Blue Wind" that he has to go translate some lines of Virgil.

I look up Virgil and this latin text and what do I get? These lines are the first seven lines of Book 1 of Virgil's Aeneid (the lines are out of order, but that doesn't really matter that much in Latin anyway). Well, that's kind cool. And geeky. Anyway, the Aeneid is translated only by John Dryden. The first book therefore starts with:

Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc'd by fate,
And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate,
Expell'd and exil'd, left the Trojan shore.
Long labors, both by sea and land, he bore,
And in the doubtful war, before he won
The Latian realm, and built the destin'd town;
His banish'd gods restor'd to rites divine,
And settled sure succession in his line,
From whence the race of Alban fathers come,
And the long glories of majestic Rome.

These lines introduce the story of Aeneas, moving from Troy to Italy to found Rome. All that history in the background of that song. Now that is depth. I like that.