Translating Virgil

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Reply 20

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by becausethenight

No problem, glad I could help :biggrin:

Elisions of ‘esse’ (and also weird syntax generally - Virgil loves his Greek-style participles) are v common in verse, annoyingly.

Yeah, that sounds good! Honestly I would not ever want to do a transaction into verse - I can’t write poetry in English at all so it would be a disaster lol.

Meter is super cool! Because I love inflicting pain in others, here is a link to an exciting reading of Catullus 63 with highkey stressed galliambic meter (it’s even more of a ride when you know what the poem’s about, too): https://youtu.be/DcYTpj2wb6g :biggrin:

prsom!

Reply 21

spqr101

Hi! Not to do with the translation from book 6 (which I am working on though!) but I've been trying to have a go with scansion because I'm bored and need to waste time (also that video @becausethenight was brilliant haha), so I decided to scan some bits from book 2 which I talked about in an essay to see if I could find anything interesting like spondaic/dactylic lines but I think i realised that scansion is not as easy as it seemed when I first read up on how to do it!

I've attached pics of what I did here, and numbered each section for easier referencing:

scansion 1.jpg

First of all, am I right in saying that long syllables are vowels followed by two consonants? Because that just wasn't the case for all of the feet and I feel like i'm just doing something wrong. It didn't help that I could only find the Latin with macra for a few of the quotations, because I find them kind of helpful.

So for block 2 I just was generally confused. I couldn't get the right number of feet in the first line and the second line just doesn't seem right...

For block 3, I was a little confused by whether foot 2 and 3 should be spondee dactyl or the other way round

Block 4 was general confusion again... I somehow got 5 feet for the first and third lines, and wasn't completely sure with the second line

Block 5, I somehow got 7 feet in the second line (how??)

Yh... scansion ain't easy...
(thanks in advance for any help!)

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