“Fābāmur thematis fātī,” vel, qualiter didicī quiēscere sollicitārī et Latinum amāre

(“We Were Speaking of Fate”, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Latin)

On 2020-03-27, I translated Where Monsters Are in Dreams’ level name “We Were Speaking of Fate” to Latin as “Fābāmur thematis fātī”. This is actually wordy: its most obvious literal translation is “we were speaking of the theme of fate”. “Fābāmur fātī” would be more precise and concise, so why didn’t I use that? Three reasons:

1. Thema, whence thematis, has an alternate meaning: the alignment of celestial bodies at a person’s birth, horoscope (per Wiktionary, whither all links on this page go, apart from the footer). So, metonymically, also fate. (I don’t believe in astrology, but I set that aside for the sake of poetic license.)
2. Fābāmur is the active imperfect indicative first-person plural form of the verb for, or I speak. As if by fate, fātum (destiny, fate, lot, death, speech of a god, utterance, declaration, proclamation, prediction, prophecy), whence fātī, is the neuter form of for’s perfect active participle, fātus; thus, it also means spoken, said, told, foretold, related, predicted, or having or had spoken.
3. Since Latin’s genitive case expresses a two-way possessive relationship (e.g., both the X of Y and the Y of X), and since both our nouns are in genitive case, we can also put our two nouns in either order.

Thus, “Fābāmur thematis fātī” also means “we were speaking of the fate of the foretold”, “we were speaking of the fate of the spoken”, “we were speaking of what was foretold of fate”, “we were speaking of what was spoken of fate”, and so on. It also packs two puns or double entendres into three words. I found this absolutely wild (I wrote “Latin is amazing” on Discord in response), and it turned Latin from a casual interest into an obsession.

(For the record, the Latin for Where Monsters Are in Dreams is something like Ubī̆ mōnstra sunt in somniīs.)

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