Synchysis is a rhetorical technique wherein words are intentionally scattered to create bewilderment, or for some other purpose.[1][2] By disrupting the normal course of a sentence, it forces the audience to consider the meaning of the words and the relationship between them.[3]
This poetry form was a favorite with Latin poets. It is described by the website Silva Rhetoricae as "Hyperbatonoranastrophe taken to an obscuring extreme, either accidentally or purposefully."[4] It is doubtful, however, whether it could be correct to describe effects in Latin poetry, which was very carefully written, as accidental.[citation needed]
A line of Latin verse in the form adjective A - adjective B - verb - noun A - noun B, with the verb in the center (or a corresponding chiastic line, again with the verb in the center), is known as a golden line. A highly common occurrence in Virgil's Aeneid,[5] an example is aurea purpuream subnectit fibula vestem, "a golden clasp bound her purple cloak" (Virgil, Aeneid 4.139). Usually, synchysis is formed through the adjective A - adjective B - noun A - noun B structure, but it can also exist as adjective-noun-adjective-noun.[6]
To this point, (my) mind is reduced by your guilt, my Lesbia.
The correct way to translate the line, however, is to take it with the more distant mens, observing Catullus's synchysis:
To this point, Lesbia, my mind is reduced by your guilt.
Another example comes from Horace (Odes I.35, lines 5ff.), part of a hymn to a goddess:
te pauper ambit sollicitā prece
ruris colonus, te dominam aequoris
quicumque Tyrrhenā lacessit
Carpathium pelagus carinā.
The meaning is "thee, (the mistress) of the countryside, the poor farmer beseeches with anxious prayer, thee, the mistress of the ocean, whoever provokes the Carpathian sea in a Tyrrhenian boat (beseeches)", dominam being understood with ruris as well as aequoris. Often, through failure to spot the synchysis, ruris is taken with colonus, and the verse is incorrectly translated as "the poor farmer of the countryside".
^Enos, Theresa (2010). Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition : communication From Ancient Times to the Information Age. New York: Routledge. p. 271. ISBN978-0415875240.
^"Synchysis". Changing Minds. Retrieved 22 October 2013.
^"Synchyses". Changing Minds. Retrieved 22 October 2013.
^Zimmerman, Brett (2005). Edgar Allan Poe: Rhetoric and Style ([Online-Ausg.]. ed.). Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. p. 129. ISBN0773528997.
^"Catul. 75". Perseus Digital Library Project. Retrieved 5 November 2014.
