[Chris Childers]

I use it in speech (not sure about poetry), and I'm under 30. I learned the other day that my students have been going around translating Latin words like heu with "alas" without knowing what the word meant. One thought it meant "at last," and others had other ideas which I have forgotten. These were high school seniors.

Chris

[Peter Chipman]

This one's for you, Chris. A snippet from Frost's "The Lesson For Today":


I can just hear you call your Palace class:
Come learn the Latin eheu for alas.
You may not want to use it and you may.
O paladins, the lesson for today
Is how to be unhappy yet polite.
And at the summons, Roland, Olivier,
And every sheepish paladin and peer,
Being already more than proved in fight,
Sits down in school to try if he can write
Like Horace in the true Horatian vein,
Yet like a Christian disciplined to bend
His mind to thinking always of the end.

[Orwn Acra]

Alas is one of those words that I know the meaning of but couldn't explain if someone asked. I think of it as the equivalent of a big, pitiful sigh.

[Duncan Gillies MacLaurin]

If it's any consolation, the situation is exactly the same in Danish, where we have the very old-fashioned "ak og ve!"

Duncan

[W.F. Lantry]

I don't get it. I use it all the time, in speech, in postings, in printed verse.

Maybe that's why no one takes me seriously...

In fact, in 18 months, I've used it at least 78 times on this site alone!

Does that make me archaic?

Thanks,

Bill

[Adam Elgar]

Duncan, the Danish 'alas' is astonishingly like the Welsh "ach y fi!" which is pretty old-fashioned, though still in use. (Fi is prounounced vee, and the y is as U in cup.)

[Maryann Corbett]

I asked myself, How do people usually translate the Old English word eala, the ancestor of alas? The dictionaries give O and Oh as possibilities as well as alas. But what I found in poems was mostly alas. And it felt like the only right choice, in the context of high diction and serious, ancient content and lament.

Andrew, what Italian expressions raise the question? Could we investigate how (for example) John Ciardi handled them? He was big on using contemporary English in his translations of Dante.

Actually, I do use alas in speech, but I know I'm being faux-archaic. And people already think I'm weird.

[Ann Drysdale]

"Ach y Fi" is used in daily conversation here in South Wales. I heard it this very morning when a young mother slapped the wrist of her little boy who has just picked up something very interesting from the pavement. It is, in my experience, only ever used as an expression of mild disgust. Was it ever thus?

[John Whitworth]

Bill, you are archaic. Let us be archaic together.

[Gregory Dowling]

Maryann, the Italian for "alas" is "ahimé". It is very close to "alas" in usage, being decidedly old-fashioned, if not archaic, except in jocular language. Very common in opera libretti.

Haven't been able to check on Ciardi's translation of it.