Kilo Lingo

Latin song

Gaudeamus igitur

So Let Us Rejoice

The choir sings its own selection and ordering of Kindleben's seven stanzas, as every university does - we print the customary three (1, 4 and 7); read along where the Latin meets.

Lyrics

Versus 1

,

,

iucundam iuventutem,

molestam senectutem,

.

Versus 4

Academia,

Professores,

,

,

!

Versus 7

Pereat tristitia,

Pereant osores,

Pereat diabolus,

Quivis Antiburschius,

irrisores.

Comprehension drill

4 questions on what you just read. Get one wrong and the story will show you where it says otherwise.

Standard text fixed by Christian Wilhelm Kindleben in his Studentenlieder (Halle, 1781), reworking older material (two of its stanzas resemble verses in a medieval manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, usually dated 1287); the melody is 18th-century traditional, in print by the 1780s. Stanza 1 follows the standard text with its "Post iucundam iuventutem" line, which some transcriptions collapse into a repeat sign. Author dead 240 years, melody anonymous. We print stanzas 1, 4 and 7 of Kindleben's seven - the selection universities customarily sing. Source text. Translation ours.

Students have sung this at graduations for centuries, mostly without noticing it is a memento mori: rejoice while we are young, because after troublesome old age - the earth will have us. Whoever sharpened that drinking song, medieval clerk or Kindleben himself, knew what they were doing.

Grammatically it is the subjunctive's greatest hits. - let us rejoice - is the same hortatory form Adeste fideles drilled. , - long live - is the jussive, a wish aimed at someone else, and stanza four fires it four times. Pereat, pereant - may it perish - is the same form turned hostile, aimed at sadness, at the haters (osores), at the devil himself. One mood, three attitudes, and the tune hammers each ending onto its own beat.

One vocabulary flourish worth savouring: - "whatsoever you please" - survives in English as the name of a musical mash-up. The KU Leuven choir we link sings it as universities actually do, crisp and unhurried.