[Allen Tice]

Now, I know what this says (even with its funny little "e" for "ex" -- consider "e pluribus unum" for the US motto), and can do my own (and will, if it comes to that), but I'm searching for the best words in the best order (and Not Too Prolix!). There are translations around here and there, but I seek zorch as well as parsimony. It's late Republican Latin of the very purest quill, and here it is:

ut illo e judico tamquam e naufragio nudus emersit

(It's a rich image, full of resonance from the Greek.) Thoughts?

I Do Not forget good help.

[Maryann Corbett]

If you're asking for an exact wording, erm, what do the words have to fit? Got a meter in mind? How much are you willing to turn around? With no limits there are too many possibilities. "Came out of court as stripped as Crusoe"?

[Allen Tice]

Full disclosure. This is to make the brains of British classicists explode. Its not a metrical problem, but a rhetorical challenge. I have a very tight word cap in an abstract for a paper I might present, and I suppose a blandly pedestrian rendering would go over best, all things considered, given their inexorable drive toward unarguable fact (bless them).

But I want more than the impressive actual truth of it all. I hope for a topnote of sheer truthiness. The extraordinary amalgam of reality with the realistic.

It's got to be a totally literalist reading, with a whiff of enchantment that lets one see the actual event unfolding in living shock.
I think of Odysseus in front of Nausicaa, but happening under the Eros in Piccadilly Circus with navvies alongside.

Your image of Crusoe is very, very good, and provocative. Thank you!