Translate "Now and Forever" into Latin

Question

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?

Answer 1

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)¹
2. Nunc et in perpetuum (from the Athanasian creed)

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

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

Also, the variation,

4. 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.

Answer 2

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.