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5.0 AVERAGE
5.0 AVERAGE
This book was originally published in Britain in 1885 and has been republished by BiblioLife Reproduction Series. Perhaps not many people these days want to write poetry in Latin, but if you enjoy reading Latin, or writing Latin prose, you could find it really rewarding to try your hand at poetry. This book focuses on the elegiac metre, which was used by Ovid and other poets for love poetry and, well, elegies. The author shows you how the metre works in “real” poetry and gives a lot of guidance on correct use of words (the vocabulary for poetry in Ovid’s day was rather different from that for prose, but the author warns against throwing in all sorts of words you might have picked up that are not attested in extant poetry). He gives a vocabulary at the end of the book. He also introduces things gradually, so you start by doing bits of lines, like the first half of the first line of the metre (the hexameter), then the second half, then whole hexameters. Then you do the same for the second line of the metre (the pentameter). You do several exercises with hexameters only and pentameters only before putting the two lines together, which then lets you see how and when it’s okay to run the first line into the second.
To get through a large chunk of the book successfully (up to Exercise XXI) you don’t need to know a great deal of Latin vocabulary as for each of the exercises the author gives the Latin words you should use. Of course, you then have to use the correct form of the word, i.e. decline the nouns and conjugate the verbs, but it does mean that although you’re getting a helping hand, you still have to work out the correct word order to get the metre to work. You get a lot of satisfaction and a growing sense of confidence as you complete each exercise.
In the second part of the book, though, things get harder. What you get from Exercise XXII onwards is rather more difficult. For each exercise, the author gives a poem in English, or a stanza from a longer poem. He then gives a version of the poem or stanza “turned” for translation into Latin. That is supposed to be a big help for the student, though often the “retranslation” seems more challenging than the original piece. Your job is then to translate the retranslation into Latin elegiac couplets. You get some helpful notes for each poem, but no more than that. It is a challenge and it must be said that some of the poems are pretty dull, the kind of Victorian stuff that only specialists read now. However, you realise that doing these translations is the best way to become comfortable with the metre. If you think you can skip this kind of exercise and jump straight into writing your own original Latin poetry, you’re probably kidding yourself, unless you’re some kind of poetic genius. My advice would be to look through the exercises and try the ones that appeal to you. Altogether there are a hundred exercises in the book, so nearly eighty of them are English poems for translation. If you try translating at least twenty of those into Latin you may well be ready to try writing some original elegies and making yourself immortal.
To get through a large chunk of the book successfully (up to Exercise XXI) you don’t need to know a great deal of Latin vocabulary as for each of the exercises the author gives the Latin words you should use. Of course, you then have to use the correct form of the word, i.e. decline the nouns and conjugate the verbs, but it does mean that although you’re getting a helping hand, you still have to work out the correct word order to get the metre to work. You get a lot of satisfaction and a growing sense of confidence as you complete each exercise.
In the second part of the book, though, things get harder. What you get from Exercise XXII onwards is rather more difficult. For each exercise, the author gives a poem in English, or a stanza from a longer poem. He then gives a version of the poem or stanza “turned” for translation into Latin. That is supposed to be a big help for the student, though often the “retranslation” seems more challenging than the original piece. Your job is then to translate the retranslation into Latin elegiac couplets. You get some helpful notes for each poem, but no more than that. It is a challenge and it must be said that some of the poems are pretty dull, the kind of Victorian stuff that only specialists read now. However, you realise that doing these translations is the best way to become comfortable with the metre. If you think you can skip this kind of exercise and jump straight into writing your own original Latin poetry, you’re probably kidding yourself, unless you’re some kind of poetic genius. My advice would be to look through the exercises and try the ones that appeal to you. Altogether there are a hundred exercises in the book, so nearly eighty of them are English poems for translation. If you try translating at least twenty of those into Latin you may well be ready to try writing some original elegies and making yourself immortal.