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I was reading an Italian translation of the following verse from "The Hill":

They brought them dead sons from the war,
And daughters whom life had crushed, ...

The translation is ambiguous on the first line, and on the second line it says something like "and daughters crushed by the (their) life", which sounds erroneous to me. Can someone explain in prose the exact meaning?

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  • You want the exact meaning of the original or of the mistranslation?
    – KillingTime
    Jan 27, 2020 at 6:34
  • @KillingTime, I ask for the exact meaning, in order to see whether the translation is bad. Giving that this is poetry, maybe this is not so simple.
    – linuxfan says Reinstate Monica
    Jan 27, 2020 at 6:45
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    I take it to mean 'daughters [mentally] crushed by the hard circumstances of their lives'.
    – Kate Bunting
    Jan 27, 2020 at 9:30
  • @KateBunting ty, but did the lives crush (or crush something), or did the daughters crush (or crush themselves)?
    – linuxfan says Reinstate Monica
    Jan 27, 2020 at 9:33
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    Whom is the object form of who. No, it cannot be substituted by whose. 'Daughters whom life had crushed' means 'daughters who had been crushed by life', presumably meaning that they had had hard lives which had damaged their physical or mental health. I don't know how I can explain it any more clearly.
    – Kate Bunting
    Jan 27, 2020 at 11:43

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