Morir morirás ‘for certain you will die’

In this article we analyze the translation strategies used by medieval and early modern Spanish translators when rendering the infinitive absolute (IA) in the Hebrew Bible. In a literal translation, this structure, which had no immediate equivalent in the Spanish of the time, would be rendered with the infinitive followed by a conjugated form of the same verb, as in Spanish llorar llorarás ‘to cry you will cry’, meaning either ‘for sure you will cry’ or ‘you will cry a lot’. The exhaustive analysis of the IA construction in a parallel corpus reveals the full repertoire of structures — from literal calque to creative paraphrases — used to convey the pragmatic values expressed by the Hebrew IA. In addition to characterizing each of the twelve Bible translations in the corpus in terms of literalness or creativity, we also address the question of the permeability of the calque into non-translated texts and even oral registers. Based on structural, chronological, and socio-historical factors, we conclude that this type of fronted infinitive did not evolve into a productive pattern, and that present-day Spanish topicalized infinitives (which superficially resemble the IA calque) are an independent development. Instead, the translation of the Hebrew IA into Spanish crystallized over time into tautological gerunds rather than infinitives.