Letter count is meaningless. You can change it by just changing the way you spell things, which was already arbitrary. (For example, there is a very real question of whether that final m in nimium is pronounced at all.)
Nimium saepe valedixit is 9 syllables and, as frequently noted on the page, does not attempt to translate the entire English source text, which is 10 syllables. It was kind of surreal reading the answers, since none of them attempt to determine what the English lyric means, and it can't be considered fluent English when seen as an isolated sentence. You need to determine what it means before you try to translate it into another language.
I just listened to the song (well, the first three verses, which is all of the verses) while looking at a printout of the lyrics, and I can't determine what that line in the chorus is supposed to mean. It's very strange grammar:
This love has taken its toll on me
She said goodbye too many times before
Her heart is breaking in front of me
And I have no choice
'Cause I won't say goodbye anymore
The line in question, She said goodbye too many times before, stands out like a sore thumb for being preceded and followed by sentences that, unlike it, are both in the present tense. There is no indication anywhere in the song, as far as I can see, of what "before" refers to.
So my instinct is to essentially write off the possibility of translating the lyric with the aphorism "garbage in, garbage out".
> it can't be considered fluent English when seen as an isolated sentence
Can't it? Why not? What's wrong with it?
> The line in question, She said goodbye too many times before, stands out like a sore thumb for being preceded and followed by sentences that, unlike it, are both in the present tense.
But it's a song. Prosody can't be held to the same strict rules of tense consistency (or other grammatical rules) as prose. And flipping tenses between lines is hardly an uncommon feature of songwriting. Take, for example, Leonard Cohen's "Boogie Street":
It is indeed quite common for poetry to violate the normal rules of the language. But that takes one of two forms: archaism, or a flaw in the poetry. (It's also common for poetry to violate the rules that govern the poetry itself. Composing poetry is very difficult!) Compare the opening of Mark Chesnutt's She Was:
She started her new life
Ten dollars in debt
That's all it took to get started back then
A trip to the courthouse across the state line
No one could stop her
She'd made up her mind
He was eighteen
And she wasn't
But she said she was / and never thought twice
And came back home as my daddy's wife
She just shook her head
When her mama said "Are you sure he's the one?"
But she was
Here we see some fairly complex temporal structure handled fluently, with no problems of any kind. The writing is better.
>> it can't be considered fluent English when seen as an isolated sentence
> Can't it? Why not? What's wrong with it?
The use of the simple past tense is not compatible with the sense of before that everyone here is trying to assign.
I don't think it's that complex. The implication seems to be that they have broken up/argued so many times before, and this time they're breaking up for good
And the first line is past tense, just like the second.
Edit: Reading all of the lyrics they were sleeping together, she fell in love with him so he broke it off
> And the first line is past tense, just like the second.
This is a somewhat complex issue, so please bear with me.
First, we can dispense with the idea that the tense of the first line is "just like the second". They are different and the difference is quite significant.
Whether the first line should be called "past tense" or "present tense" is more of a fussy terminological issue. There are two concepts in linguistics which have to do with how the verb relates to a timeline:
- "Tense" has to do with whether the action takes place before, during, or after whatever time would be referred to by the word "now".
- "Aspect" has to do with the temporal structure of the action itself, rather than its position relative to a "camera" placed at "now": maybe the action occurs at an indivisible point in time ("That's when I noticed the rabbit"); maybe it takes place continuously over an extended duration ("I've been reading for thirty minutes"); maybe it occurs at a large number of separate points within a continuous window ("I used to visit the donut shop every day after school")
Except I used the wrong words just now. "Tense" and "aspect" are terms from syntax, and you can determine them purely by looking at the form of the verb. The definitions I gave belong to semantics: when I said "tense", I should have said "time", and I'm not sure what the semantics-specific term for the quality related to aspect is. Anyway, we name the verb forms, "tense" and "aspect", according to whether they primarily correspond with those semantic definitions.
Except, again, there's a little more to it. We'd like to name the verb forms according to this distinction, but there is a long tradition in Latin scholarship of referring to both of those distinctions by the same name, "tense", and this bled over into English.
So we can say the following about line 1 and line 2:
- Line 1 is, semantically, focused on the present. It is making a claim about "now".
- The verb is conjugated in what would traditionally be called the "perfect tense"; according to the tense/aspect distinction described above, it is present tense (reflected in the form of have), indicating that we are talking about "now", and perfect aspect (reflected in the fact that have is used at all), indicating that the action described ("taking a toll") is already finished.
- Line 2 is semantically focused on the past. It is making a claim about some time before "now".
- The verb in line 2 is conjugated in what would traditionally be called the "simple past" or "preterite" tense. The aspect is not clear, because the English preterite tense is used for multiple different verbal semantic aspects.
The fact that line 2 is talking about the past when the rest of the chorus is talking about the present is very strange.
> There is no indication anywhere in the song, as far as I can see, of what "before" refers to.
Is English your native language? I’m asking because it is my native language and the entire phrase, including “before”, is clear to me.
“Before” is a temporal indicator. You could replace it with another temporal indicator and the phrase would still make sense, For example, “She said goodbye too many times today”. You wouldn’t ask what the antecedent is for “today”. Same with “before”.
Yes, English is my native language. USA, California and New Mexico. For what it's worth, I qualified for SET by scoring 710 on the SAT verbal section at age 12.
> I’m asking because it is my native language and the entire phrase, including “before”, is clear to me.
It is a common phenomenon for people to claim that sentences are perfectly clear to them when, objectively, those sentences do not have a meaning at all. On Language Log they occasionally discuss "Escher sentences", with the prototype example being "More people have been to France than I have".
> “Before” is a temporal indicator. You could replace it with another temporal indicator and the phrase would still make sense, For example, “She said goodbye too many times today”. You wouldn’t ask what the antecedent is for “today”. Same with “before”.
Except I can see what's happening with "She said goodbye too many times today." That sentence will be followed up with some explanation of the consequences of having said goodbye too many times.
In the chorus, the intent might have been that the line "she said goodbye too many times before" is an explanation of the preceding line (that's how people are interpreting it here). Or the line might just have been thrown in with no rhyme or reason, completely disconnected from the rest of the song. But regardless of the intent, the line has failed to connect to the sentence before it or the sentence after it, which means that we cannot determine what it's trying to say.
> You wouldn’t ask what the antecedent is for “today”. Same with “before”.
Moving back to this, it's necessary to ask what exactly "before" is referring to because the question came up of whether and how it should be represented in the Latin translation. It might conceivably refer to "before now" (in which case the suggestion of Latin perfect tense is fine), "before some point identified by the context" (you'd want pluperfect, if the point was in the past, or future perfect if the point was in the future [or of course perfect if the point is "now"]), or "before some specific event" (you'd want the preposition ante, and you'd also need to mention the event).
You are reading way too much into this. It’s just a pop song. This isn’t high literature. “Before now” makes the most sense to me, but, like poetry, you interpret it however you want. There is no right answer.
She said goodbye too many times before doesn't seem confusing to me.
He's lamenting a romance that's been difficult for him. Before now, during the difficult relationship, she said goodbye or left him too many times, causing the difficulty and toll it has taken on him.
I am not a native speaker, but doesn't "before" just mean "in the past" here? It sounds clear to me: the girl has previously tried to break up many times, so now he is breaking up with her.
Nimium saepe valedixit is 9 syllables and, as frequently noted on the page, does not attempt to translate the entire English source text, which is 10 syllables. It was kind of surreal reading the answers, since none of them attempt to determine what the English lyric means, and it can't be considered fluent English when seen as an isolated sentence. You need to determine what it means before you try to translate it into another language.
I just listened to the song (well, the first three verses, which is all of the verses) while looking at a printout of the lyrics, and I can't determine what that line in the chorus is supposed to mean. It's very strange grammar:
This love has taken its toll on me
She said goodbye too many times before
Her heart is breaking in front of me
And I have no choice
'Cause I won't say goodbye anymore
The line in question, She said goodbye too many times before, stands out like a sore thumb for being preceded and followed by sentences that, unlike it, are both in the present tense. There is no indication anywhere in the song, as far as I can see, of what "before" refers to.
So my instinct is to essentially write off the possibility of translating the lyric with the aphorism "garbage in, garbage out".