Internets, do you speak french?

[highlyeccentric]

Because I have here a phrase which I cannot understand in either OF *or* modern French, and I don't think anyone else can either, because my English translations don't look much like the original.

Se je t'en oy parler jamais,
Ja n'i ara fors que t'en fuises.

First line is fine - "if I ever hear you speak of this...". Second line though, I'm stumped. I'm getting "then it will only *fors* that you *flee/had fled*"

The modern french translation I have of the second line is tu n'auras qu'à t'enfuir, which I do not understand either. I thought ne... que was an "only" construction? I don't know what to make of the à+infinitive construction (it's clearly not the same tense as the OF, but what on earth it IS i do not know, and my Coffman isn't telling me). "You will have to flee?" "You will only flee?"

The two English translations I have give variants on "you'll be sorry you didn't run away". Which sounds nice, but I'm not seeing the negation applied to fuises - it's applied to "i ara fors".

Any french-speakers care to explicate the modern french translation for me? If I can figure out what it says, I can probably sort out the OF.

Damn, I need an OF dictionary.

Comments

[frith]

Sacré bleue! Wheels within wheels... even with a smattering of joual in my patois, il se peut fort bien that I'm way out of my league. There is someone at work who harks from the Lac Saint Jean area and whose accent and use of idiom makes him very hard to understand. Wading through this Old French is a lot like that.

For the sense of hearing, there is l'ouïe, but the verbs in modern French are entendre and écouter. An infection of the inner ear (de l'oreille) is an otite, both starting with "o". But ringing of the ears is an acouphène.

Have fun wrestling with this Old French. 8^)

By the way, in Firefox, the right column on the page (the one with the tags and calendar) overlaps the reply "field" or "dialogs box" and interferes with it.

[highlyeccentric]

So it does! I shall endeavor to fix that :).

Wading through this Old French is a lot like that. It's a challenge! I end up in bungles because my modern french is quite slipshod - but on the other hand I've been reading Middle English for years, and that seems to help.

il se peut fort bien that I'm way out of my league
You had a remarkably good stab at it! When I was first studying OF I took the Chanson de Roland to a french-speaking Belgian friend of mine, also a medievalist (and a Latinist at that!), and he couldn't make head nor tail of it. I gather, from being in an honours class with French majors, that Old French is weirdly hard for people who are *good* at French - I think several people in my class gave up entirely and relied on translations the whole way through. Being crummy at french gave me an advantage in general comprehension, but it's coming to bite me on the arse when it comes to translation.

Thanks again for joining in!