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As we move back through time (insert appropriate time travel music here), we reach our good old friend Ennius. I’ve encountered him once before, back in a survey course in second year, but by now I’ve figured out that the Ennius text I read then was heavily edited to follow classic-era Latin orthography, even aside from all the footnotes. Now I get to translate pretty much all of his stuff that we still have available, in more or less the original spelling. Fun!
Anyway. Much as Cato is considered the first real author of Latin prose literature, Ennius is the “father” of Latin poetry. It is amusing to me--coming from Livy’s historical prose and Virgil’s poetry of farming advice--to move back through Cato’s prose on farming advice, and now Ennius’s history in poetry. He wrote things other than history, but he’s best known for his Annals, a ginormous eighteen-book poetic history of Rome, from the fall of Troy to around Cato the Elder’s time.
What we have left is not a hell of a lot. Certainly nothing complete of any of his works; what we have are quoted fragments preserved via other texts, and not a lot of those. You can see everything I’m working on translating this week--it’s basically all the chunks of the Annals that are long enough to be interesting--at this page here.
On a minor note of interest, Latin poetry of this time--or at least the poetry of Ennius, but I recall the prof of my survey course saying it was typical of this time period--was a lot more into alliteration than classic Roman poetry is. It’s sort of Beowulf-esque in that regard, and uses it to an extent that later poets would’ve found stilted and inelegant. (But then, try writing like Shelley in a modern poetry class and see how far that gets you.) Alas, virtually none of this will come through in my translations. Nor am I going to try to keep poetic lines, here; I’m striving for accuracy, not Poetry, in my translations.
( And finally I stop nattering about this and start translating it. )
Anyway. Much as Cato is considered the first real author of Latin prose literature, Ennius is the “father” of Latin poetry. It is amusing to me--coming from Livy’s historical prose and Virgil’s poetry of farming advice--to move back through Cato’s prose on farming advice, and now Ennius’s history in poetry. He wrote things other than history, but he’s best known for his Annals, a ginormous eighteen-book poetic history of Rome, from the fall of Troy to around Cato the Elder’s time.
What we have left is not a hell of a lot. Certainly nothing complete of any of his works; what we have are quoted fragments preserved via other texts, and not a lot of those. You can see everything I’m working on translating this week--it’s basically all the chunks of the Annals that are long enough to be interesting--at this page here.
On a minor note of interest, Latin poetry of this time--or at least the poetry of Ennius, but I recall the prof of my survey course saying it was typical of this time period--was a lot more into alliteration than classic Roman poetry is. It’s sort of Beowulf-esque in that regard, and uses it to an extent that later poets would’ve found stilted and inelegant. (But then, try writing like Shelley in a modern poetry class and see how far that gets you.) Alas, virtually none of this will come through in my translations. Nor am I going to try to keep poetic lines, here; I’m striving for accuracy, not Poetry, in my translations.
( And finally I stop nattering about this and start translating it. )