I ran across this idiom with accompanying translation in Wiley’s Guide to Latin Conversation:
Haud mūtō factum - I do not repent of what has been done.
I was trying to figure out how you would get all that out of the Latin which seems only to say the equivalent of “I don’t change what is done.” Wouldn’t the English meaning given demand the subjunctive in Latin:
Haud mūtem factum - I would not change what has been done.
While Googling this phrase to see if someone has explicated it already, I noticed that some people have it translated as “Nothing happens by being mute.” But that doesn’t seem right either. If I take mūtō to refer to silence, then more likely this literally means “Nothing is done by a mute person.”
Were there two disparate meanings in use for this exact same expression, or does someone have it wildly wrong?
I tentatively suggest that the emphasis of the “haud” as opposed to a milder negative like “non” is what’s motivating the forcefulness of the translation.
Colloquially, it might come across as something like “No way am I changing the done [deal].” “I certainly [would] not change [what’s] done.”
I agree that translating that with “repent” seems a bit free, but it has a pretty firm sound to it and maybe that was the idea. I’ve also seen “I don’t regret it”.
While there are indeed tons of Google hits for the translation “Nothing happens by being mute”, I don’t know of any actual use of the phrase in Latin where that meaning applies. (In fact, the only occurrence of “haud muto factum” that I know of at all is a passage in Terence. Maybe it’s a more common idiom than I realize or maybe it’s just a one-off literary quotation.)
ETA: The “nothing happens by being mute” translation references all seem to trace back to some journalist’s description of the aristocratic family motto of the late UK fashion designer Isabella Blow (d. 2007). Did somebody at that time just naively mistranslate a late-medieval motto taken from Terence and it’s been wandering the interwebs ever since?
Wouldn’t surprise me if it was something like that. The translation of “mutem” as “mute” looks suspiciously like what my old Latin books labeled “Lazy Latin” – “translating” Latin by replacing the word by the closest English equivalent, regardless of whether it’s accurate or not.
Well, the mūtem above is my change, to put it in the subjunctive because the translation carried a force that suggested it.
Alright. I’m less confused now. And I if I hadn’t gotten stuck on that one I’d have seen that Wilby was pretty free with the sense of other phrases. Ecce:
Quiesse melis erit! - Evil to him who wags.
Mostly, though, he doesn’t seem to add any baggage even with translations that aren’t quite literal.