[poetry] raise your hand if you thought latin poetry was stodgy (I know I did!)

[vanitashaze]

...But I was wrong! Grievously so! To wit: this hilarious Ovid poem, as (rather liberally) translated by Peter Green.

The Amores: Book One, Poem ThreeFair's fair now, Venus. This girl's got me hooked. All I'm asking from her

Comments

[antinous_wild]

I read Ovid's Amores & Ars Amatoria for one of my classes this spring. Such a blast! And you're absolutely right about translations. Ovid is one of the best examples of this same; same goes for Aristophanes. The translations we read in my classics class were all pretty excellent for this very reason: the captured the feel of the texts, as well as the meaning.

[vanitashaze]

Ah, college education. I keep forgetting it's so different from high school. To read a good translation of something right now would be absolutely heavenly, though of course I'd settle for people just understanding that a lot of the poems we plow through? There's actually some fertile ground there. I mean, Shakespeare. He's the scourge of middle- and high-school English classes across the country, but I just cannot understand why. He's witty! Hilarious! And sexual, which is always approved of by teenagers!

Methinks we should read more Ovid in class. That might liven up our Monday mornings a bit.