For me Latin is the hardest language to translate because they were capable of condensing a lot of information into few words. For example, amans puer means something along the lines of "the boy who is currently in the midst of loving." And they would just throw that in the middle of a sentence casually, so I'd end up writing long strings of words to fully express what the author was saying. I try to make it succinct as possible with limited results. Whenever I read other people's attempts I see them falling into the same pattern, and consequently I find Roman authors to be somewhat difficult to read; it's very prolix with the main sentence punctured with subordinate clauses.

That however doesn't explain this. I'm reading a 1917 translation of Caesar's The Gallic War, and I'm trying to figure out of if translator's using an archaic meaning that I don't know or if he just fucked up:

The next day, or ever the enemy could recover from their panic and rout, Caesar led the army into the borders of the Suessiones.^*

Can someone please explain to me what the fuck that first part of the sentence means? "The next day, or ever the enemy could recover." Is the comma in the right place? "The next day or ever?" But that doesn't make any sense because it's either the next day or not. It's not forever. It's gotta be "ever the enemy could recover." Can someone explain that to me? I'm literally looking to the Latin to figure out what the hell the English is saying. That's fucked up. This was translated in 1917, and it's gone through countless editions since then. No one has stopped and thought, "Maybe we should edit that because it makes no goddamned sense."

^* G. Julius Caesar, The Gallic War, trans. H. J. Edwards (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 107.