SCS-27: Translators' Showcase: Bilingual Readings

In this bilingual reading, I will highlight the plays of words and sounds in the English that attempt to mimic the Greek in non-choral sung passages of Euripides’ Hecuba. I emphasize the techniques that work for performance: accuracy and clarity, sound, alliteration, repetition of words in various grammatical forms, and rehearsals with actors. While I do not follow a set metrical pattern, I craft the lyric voice with this flexible method. The reading in Greek and English, with some remarks, will fit in 15 minutes. Sample:

Hecuba

I propose to read from my forthcoming translation of 800 years of Greek and Latin lyric poetry, a book over ten years in the making, which will be published by Penguin Classics in July 2023, with an Afterword by Glenn Most; the book anthologizes a generous selection of poetry, which, along with lyric proper, also encompasses elegy, iambus, epigram, and even pastoral. I am happy to read both Greek and Latin originals as well as translations, and/or to talk about principles and approach employed in the translation, as time and interest allow.

Sample Translations

I’m working on a verse translation of the Odyssey into (Brazilian) Portuguese. While many (inventive) verse translations already exist, mine is different for two (related) reasons: first, it is inspired by and remade into the style of cordel literature, a type of regional, popular literature, which is related to the oral tales improvised by repentistas (our own rhapsodes).

Below I include the opening of Persius’ third satire, translated into fourteeners, following Stallings’ Lucretius’ The Nature of Things (a poem with which Persius’ 6-part libellus makes important contact, for example with “void” in the last position of the first line of Satire 1, above).

Ubertino Carrara’s Columbus is a neo-Latin poem in twelve books which casts the
eponymous protagonist as a latter-day Aeneas who “added world to world for Spanish
kings.” Since Columbus has never before been fully translated into verse in any
language, my presentation will seek to both give a taste of the fusion of the (early)
modern sensibilities of Columbus as well as show its indebtedness to its Roman models,
ranging from the Aeneid to the Thebaid by reading my translation myself alongside a

Translation remains, as the CFP states, “a mainstay of education and outreach.” This
proposed talk showcases translations produced by high-school students and their teachers at an
active Latin school. It aims to show what students trained in an active Latin curriculum can
accomplish and how the school prepares its graduates for Latin at the college level, where they
can expect a heavier emphasis on reading, grammar, and translation. The approach this school
utilizes, variously called “acquisition-based,” the “natural method,” “active,” “spoken,” or

1. Sic immensum procedit in dies opinio; sic insulas iam proxumas et terrae plusculum provinciasque plurimas Fama porrecta pervagatur.

Apuleius is known for his florid style—alliteration, rhyme, isocola, etc. Not all translators replicate this central feature of his style, yet we lose much by omitting it, especially since the euphuism peaks at emphatic moments—style linked to content. The following passage from Cupid and Psyche aims to mimic Apuleian stylistic features and to bring out the voice of the old slavewoman narrator.