Translation of a passage from "The Man Who Laughs"

Question

I found this line in "The Man Who Laughs", by Victor Hugo, and would like to know what it means. I think it has to do with a horrific kind of surgery/body modification performed on children, so warnings for that.

Bucca fissa usque ad aures, genzivis denudatis, nasoque murdridato, masca eris, et ridebis semper.

I can guess about half of the nouns because of the resemblance to French. My best guess would be something like "mouth split [...], stripped gums, ruined/dead nose,[...] and always laughing". Could someone give me the full translation?

Answer 1

This is a long series of ablative absolutes, followed by two main verbs.

Bucca fissa usque ad aures,
With your mouth split all the way up to the ears,

genzivis denudatis,
with your gums exposed,

nasoque murdridato,
with your nose crushed,

masca eris,
you will be a mask,

et ridebis semper.
and you will always be laughing.

This definitely doesn't look Classical; masca "mask" is a fairly late word, for example, borrowed from Germanic in the 600s. A few of the other words are also unfamiliar.

Genzivis looks like the ablative plural of a word like *genziva that I don't recognize at all. Many sources seem to quote it instead as genezivis, but I don't recognize that either, and can't find it in any dictionaries; it certainly doesn't seem to be a Classical word. This book translates it as "gums" (as in the things holding the teeth; Classical gingivis > French gencive) which makes sense given the context.

Murdridato, similarly, seems to be the participle of a verb like murdridare that I also don't recognize at all. Murdrum is another late loan from Germanic (cognate with English "murder") and so this is probably a verb derived from it, but "crushed" makes more sense for a nose than "murdered". The book linked above gives "battered", but this doesn't seem quite violent enough for a verb derived from murdrum (in modern English at least).