An abundant specialized literature thus reasserts the ancient facts, the miracles of corpses, the cries heard in tombs, the devouring corpses, to reinterpret them in the light of what is known of apparent death.
° That's a best guess; I can get through academic French but I'm not entirely fluent in it. But I have some sense of grammatical constructions. It seems to me, in particular, that "dévoreurs" must be a modifier for the noun "cadavres" that precedes it; if it were "devourers of corpses" I would expect "les dévoreurs des cadavres."
° "Les miracles des cadavres" seems to me to be ambiguous in the original French, so an ambiguous translation in English is exact. However, in context, it seems to be a general phrase that subsumes the specific phrases that follow-that is, "cries heard in tombs" and "devouring corpses"-are examples of "miracles," which would make this something close to "miraculous acts of dead bodies
( ... )
"La mort apparente" is a situation when a person is thought to be dead, but is in some kind of lethargy. The problem was not to bury such a person, and some 18th century authors/doctors wrote about the ancient funeral customs as making sure if someone was dead or not.
That's the problem when you have two pages out of 600 pages book. You don't know the context. From the end of the previous chapter it seems that it was the corpses that ate their own flesh aka people buried alive. But maybe somewhere else there were other cases.
As for the "les miracles des cadavres" I think I will go back to "cuda zwłok", which is ambiguous, just like you said, but kind of sounds weird in Polish. As if the corpses had something of value and were all like: "Lookies, lookies, shiny!", like Gollum's 'precioussssssss' (That's because the Polish plural of 'miracle' is sometimes used to describe something you like, in an exaggerated manner).
I'm French and I agree with the first comment on both points.
1. Not possible to tell, it's "the miracles of the corpses" both in French and English, without specification as to whether the corpses perform the miracles or undergo them. Think of "with" instead of "of".
2. The devouring corpses. The devoured corpses (by something/somebody) would have been "les cadavres dévorés".
I ended up with 'cuda zwłok' which is equally ambiguous, but also a bit funny in Polish. As for "les cadavres dévoreurs" I used the Polish equivalent of 'flesheater'. From the context it seems that the author meant something/someone who eats the bodies, but I couldn't figure out who was doing it.
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° That's a best guess; I can get through academic French but I'm not entirely fluent in it. But I have some sense of grammatical constructions. It seems to me, in particular, that "dévoreurs" must be a modifier for the noun "cadavres" that precedes it; if it were "devourers of corpses" I would expect "les dévoreurs des cadavres."
° "Les miracles des cadavres" seems to me to be ambiguous in the original French, so an ambiguous translation in English is exact. However, in context, it seems to be a general phrase that subsumes the specific phrases that follow-that is, "cries heard in tombs" and "devouring corpses"-are examples of "miracles," which would make this something close to "miraculous acts of dead bodies ( ... )
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That's the problem when you have two pages out of 600 pages book. You don't know the context. From the end of the previous chapter it seems that it was the corpses that ate their own flesh aka people buried alive. But maybe somewhere else there were other cases.
As for the "les miracles des cadavres" I think I will go back to "cuda zwłok", which is ambiguous, just like you said, but kind of sounds weird in Polish. As if the corpses had something of value and were all like: "Lookies, lookies, shiny!", like Gollum's 'precioussssssss' (That's because the Polish plural of 'miracle' is sometimes used to describe something you like, in an exaggerated manner).
Thank you!
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2. No idea, sorry!
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1. Not possible to tell, it's "the miracles of the corpses" both in French and English, without specification as to whether the corpses perform the miracles or undergo them. Think of "with" instead of "of".
2. The devouring corpses. The devoured corpses (by something/somebody) would have been "les cadavres dévorés".
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I ended up with 'cuda zwłok' which is equally ambiguous, but also a bit funny in Polish. As for "les cadavres dévoreurs" I used the Polish equivalent of 'flesheater'. From the context it seems that the author meant something/someone who eats the bodies, but I couldn't figure out who was doing it.
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