By the early nineteen-nineties, at least in the United States, Latin instruction in schools wasn’t what it had once been. Students everywhere had long been showing impatience and irreverence about their having to study that “dead language,” of course. But surely it had never felt quite so irrelevant as it did in a world of shopping malls, cable television, and the emerging internet. Thirty years ago, few students would have freely chosen to do their Latin homework when they could have been, say, listening to Nirvana. But now, in the age of Youtube, they can have both at once.
In the video above, the_miracle_aligner covers “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in a medieval (or “bardcore”) style, using not just period instrumentation but also a translation of its lyrics into Latin. Since its release a few years ago, this Colosseum-worthy version of the song that defined grunge has drawn thousands upon thousands of appreciative comments from enthusiasts of Nirvana and Latin alike.
As one of the latter points out, “most Latin words rhyme because of conjugation,” and when they don’t, the language’s unusual freedom of word order provides plenty of opportunity to make it work. Still, the song contains more than its share of truly inspired choices: another commenter calls it “just immaculate” how “the ‘hello, how low’ rhymes as ‘salvé, parve.’ ”
As tends to be the way with those of us here in the twenty-first century inclined to dig deep into a language like Latin, some take the opportunity to get into character: “I vividly remember the night Gaius Kurtus Cobainius the Elder premiered this song at the Amphitheater of Pompey in the Summer of 91AD. The plebs went nuts and were throwing Sesterti and Denari on the stage. I even saw a patrician woman lift her tunic! Oh how I miss those days.” In whatever language it’s sung, the instantly recognizable “Smells Like Teen Spirit” will send any Generation-Xers in earshot right back to the strenuous slacking of their own youth. And the cry “Oblectáte, nunc híc sumus” would have cut as sharply in the age of bread and circuses as it did in the MTV era — or, for that matter, as it does now.
Related content:
Learn Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Classical Greek & Other Ancient Languages in 10 Lessons
Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” Played By Musicians Around the World
The First Live Performance of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991)
What Ancient Latin Sounded Like, And How We Know It
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Wonderful, magnificent, clever. Bless. You
The worst part is I can never “unhear” that! What’s next? A convent of Carmelite nuns belting out Soundgarden’s “Jesus Christ Pose” in Aramaic?! Oh, the humanity!!!!
Cool stuff. Is the time signature changed because of the style?
Lovely.
Except for the butchering of Latin pronunciation, making the whole endeavor really grating to anyone who ever bothered to check whether every other language is supposed to sound like English or not. [Spoiler: not at all]
Honestly, it doesn’t hold a candle to the original … and I’m not a huge Nirvana fan.