“Carpe diem.”

“Carpe diem.”

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Horace

Odes

13 BCE

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“Some Latin adages are easy to render in order languages.

A few are difficult to translate because they are enigmatic and their exact meaning elusive. ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ (‘I too am in Arcadia’) is a prime exemple of this type – what exactly does it mean? No one really knows.

Other maxims resist translation because they encompass so much in far fewer words than would be possible in any other language. ‘Carpe diem’ literally means’Seize the day’, yet although that is a common rendering, it fails to convey the rich underlying meaning, which is similar to that of ‘Let us eat and drink, fir tomorrow we die’, a phrase that occurs repeatedly in the Bible in Isaiah 22, Proverbs 23, and I Corinthian 15.

The basic idea is that we should enjoy the moment and try not to worry about anything that led up to it or that may happen in the future. Some people might think that this is an early from of existentialism – that the past has no bearing on the future and that each moment is hermetically sealed from every other – but Horace was a poet of common sense and normality, not of high-falutin’ intellectual concepts.”(JP)

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