She was hiding behind the door.
Would anyone please explain the difference or nuances between era nascosta, and seemingly (to me) equivalent phrasings such as si nascondeva or stava nascondendo? The sentence given seems to me to be the least active of all options and might be better translated as was hidden.
Ciao cannoniere14. I read this as just another way of saying ‘she was hiding etc…’, perhaps it is easier or better Italian? Not sure, it would be interesting to see what a madrelingua says here. A dopo …
I think that the translation “she was hidden behind the door” captures the meaning better. In this setup, I expect the context to be about something else happening after she is already hidden, not while she is hiding (i.e., this is not a progressive tense like, “she was hiding behind the door as I searched for her,” it’s more like, “I greeted everybody I saw, but she was hidden behind the door.”)
The proposed translation “was hiding” is misleading in English because it implies that she hid herself (hide can be used intransitively). But this is not what the Italian says! It just says that she “was hidden.” Somebody else could have stuffed her behind the door. Si era nascosta would make this clear. As written, it’s ambiguous.
If you translate nascondere with an exclusively transitive verb like “conceal,” the difference is obvious: you cannot say “she was concealing behind the door,” but you can say “she was concealed behind the door.”
To my ear, si nascondeva or si stava nascondendo each imply something a little bit different from each other and from the original era nascosta. Perhaps that she was either “hiding (as usual) behind the door;” or “at that very moment, she was slipping behind the door to hide herself;” or, as mentioned above, that the act of remaining in hiding is not yet complete.
Welcome @bgrazia. Enjoyed reading your post. I still read this as an ongoing action but will run it by our club madrelingua. A dopo …
Piu tardi … from our madrelingua: Non so come si renda la differenza in inglese, ma in italiano si possono usare due frasi con significato leggermente diverso:
1- Si nascondeva dietro la porta = l’accento è posto sull’azione del nascondersi (e a me pare che questa frase corrisponda meglio alla frase tradotta in inglese)
2- Era nascosta dietro la porta = verbo essere + aggettivo = la frase mette l’accento sulla condizione nella quale lei si trovava
Grazie per aver condiviso la spiegazione. Pensavo ancora a questa piccola frase semplice ma piena di complessità.
Sì sì sono d’accordo, come “mica” no 