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On Gary Numan's new album Intruder, he has a song called Now and Forever, which also uses that line repeatedly throughout the song. How would you express this in Latin? The lyrics are from a first-person perspective, and there are different verbs that accompany "now and forever" each time it's used, e.g "I'll walk with you", "I'll stay with you", etc.

I was thinking of something simple like:

Nunc et Perpetuo

Is this correct, and are there other, possibly more poetic ways to say this that capture the dramatic feel this can have in English?

2 Answers 2

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FWIW, there are some very common —some of them ancient, but post-classical anyway— formulas in ecclesiastical Latin meaning exactly what you want:

  1. Nunc et semper et in sæcula sæeculorum (from the Gloria Patri
  2. Nunc et in perpetuum (from the Athanasian creed)

For ever is also sometimes the translation for in æeternum, hence →

  1. nunc et in æternum, which is part of a typical ecclesiastical greeting.

Also, the variation,

  1. nunc et in sæculum is part of the episcopal or pontifical blessing

The issue with your choice, in perpetuo is movement, I think. In this case, in is followed by acc., since whatever the expression is referring to is happening now and will continue to happen: it's not just happening statically in a point of time.


¹ Here, ages of ages is an hebraism basically conveying forever, but in steroids/with added emphasis.

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You could say nunc et semper or nunc et in perpetuum (note the accusative to indicate a duration), or in the ecclesiatic phrase (from the minor doxology) nunc et in saecula saeculorum.

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