Posts by Joshua

I tend to agree with an Amazon reviewer who found some of Stallings' choices distracting. Personally the most jarring thing for me was the way she referenced famous lines by prominent English poets. This is a very natural thing to do, but somehow the anachronism doesn't play well for me. Her effort at long lines is admirable and quite rare in English. Whitman proved that they can be made to work in this language, but they are unusually difficult to write–and that's for hexameter. I've never even tried heptameter.

I love Rolfe Humphries' translation, in spite of his liberties, and Charlton Griffin has become the voice of Lucretius in English for me. His delivery has a sticking power and many of the lines from that audiobook occur to me as I go through life.

For a sample of Watson's prose, here is a line from his erstwhile suicide note;

Quote

I have killed my wife in a fit of rage to which she provoked me.

Surpassingly straightforward and direct!

By the by, he survived the attempt–stood trial–pleaded insanity–and had his sentence reduced from execution to life imprisonment. Watson was a Clergyman of the Church of England.

The translation by John Selby Watson (1898, Public Domain), styles itself "literal", and at a glance appears to be exactly that.

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.…&view=1up&seq=7

Quote

But the reason I make this post is directed at Joshua: I still don't have a feel for whose translation I really think is "most literal."

You raise an excellent point here. I recall that in the 1743 edition there are strange additions to the text, or cases where something perhaps implied in the Latin is made explicit in the English. An early example is in the Hymn to Venus:

Quote

For when the buxom Spring leads on the year, and genial gales of western winds blow fresh, unlock’d from Winter’s cold [...]

None of those three underlined words can be justified by the Latin. The West Wind (aura Favoni) is indeed described as "free", or "unlock'd", or "unbarred" (reserata), but it is only implied that what Spring has "reserated" Favionius from is Winter's clutches.

And yes, reserated is–apparently–a word!

The argument for throwing it out was in my opinion never very strong. The early critics believed that it involved Lucretius in an unpardonable contradiction, given his preceding appeal to Venus. But an Epicurean (ie. not merely academic) reading of the poem resolves all hint of a problem. In a later book Lucretius explains that invoking the names of the gods metaphorically—Bacchus for wine, Ceres for grain—does not bring trouble so long as it does not lead to confusion about the way things are. To invoke "nurturing Venus" as a muse is to draw one's inspiration from the restless, erotic, generative power of nature herself—a power coexistant with the eternal recombination of the atoms.

And beside all that, Lucretius re-uses text elsewhere as well; most notably in the passage regarding the administration of nauseous wormwood.

Quote

Wow! So not until the late 1800s? That's very interesting. Before that they were just the Principal Doctrines with no number attached then it looks like?

It would take a bit of legwork to find a source for the claim on that wiki. But Usener evidently had a profound dislike for Diogenes Laertius!

Quote

Beginning with Usener, the doctrines are enumerated as forty individual sayings.

http://wiki.epicurism.info/Principal_Doctrines/

Quote

The Greek/Latin edition of 1692 by Marcus Meibomius divided each of the ten books into paragraphs of equal length, and progressively numbered them, providing the system still in use today.

Via Wikipedia.

Sticking this here for lack of a better place. This essay (attached) is the original inspiration for my fitful start at memorizing Lucretius. The proposed Interlinear Edition had its conceptual beginning with Prof. Harris' method. Scroll to section 2 for his ideas on the subject. The seed has been several years in germinating, I'm glad I was able to find it again this evening!

Yes, choosing a Latin text to work with is an ongoing consideration. The text used by Perseus would be easiest, but I'm not sure I want to be tied to their licensing agreement (however free and easy). I believe they use William Ellery Leonard's correction of the text, which should be Public Domain, but since revision is ongoing for all Perseus texts that presents a problem.

Quote

At some point maybe there's not much choice other than deciding on an authority to copy.

Quite so! I'm tempted to go back to Munro, and use his Revised 4th Edition. (1900) If I can find it...

Good question...

I'm downloading LaTeX right now. It has a package (ExPex) built specifically for Linguists. I'm hoping it can solve a lot of the formatting issues that are invariably cropping up. It would be nice to have one long stream of lines for each book and have the code format it while keeping footnotes on the appropriate page.

Here is an example using a table exported from LibreOffice Calc to Writer, and saved as a PDF.

LaTeX is a typesetting mark-up format that's supposed to be great for this kind of thing. There's a learning curve, but I may see if I can get a handle on that before I commit to doing it this way.

For my purposes I want it in print, so the online version will likely have to be a PDF.

Right. The idea is to have a simplified interlinear text at the top of each page, and the extra annotations below the solid line. Sort of a middle path between Draper and NoDictionaries.

Yes, it is Libreoffice.

Here is a page from P.A. Draper's annotated Greek text of Iliad Book 1;

And my Loeb copy of Lucretius, with unsatisfactory results;

I've discovered that it's very easy to copy and paste whole sections of text into Excel to where it puts one word into each cell and still maintains the appropriate line break. So getting the Latin text into my tables will be really simple.

I'm betting there's also a way to "inter-leave" the rows from two different spreadsheets in a merger. If I can figure that out, then the only challenging part will be to type out the English in a word document. Then it will be a simple matter of merging the two in excel, exporting the combined table to Word (or a typesetting program like InDesign) and building out the rest of the annotations around the tables. I need to get more proficient with Excel (or the open-source knock-off I'm currently using!)

No no! That's why I'm suggesting an additional glossary or lexicon on the same (or perhaps facing) page, under the line as it were. I just want to get all that extra stuff out of the main body of the interlinear text. A year or so ago I memorized the Hymn to Venus in Latin and can still recite and translate it in my head. What I want is an efficient way to read and memorize more of the text with just a helpful hint as I go through it. I'm off work again tomorrow, I'll work up a page or two to show what I mean.

https://www.amazon.com/Revellers-Chor…s/dp/0526006145

Ok, this appears to be the McBride text mentioned above. It's not actually interlinear from what I can tell; it is a translation of the third book of Lucretius published alongside a translation of a selection from Euripides.

I can't find any evidence that there has ever been an interlinear Latin-English edition of the complete text of DRN.

Yes, Cassius and I briefly discussed that one. It only contains the first book, and even when pared down using the filters is far too cluttered for my liking.

I did find an obscure reference to an interlinear edition in an issue of Publisher's Weekly from 1921:

Quote

"On the Nature of Things , Lucretius , interlinear . Revellers , McBride , Broadway Pub . Co."

I haven't been able to track it down.

Proposal:

To prepare an edition of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura with English gloss under Latin text.

Proposed Source Text:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?do…%3a1999.02.0130

Proposed License:

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0

(Necessary if using the Perseus text)

Proposed Format:

Not yet determined.

Brill Publishing (a printer of scholarly works, who I mention for no other reason than that they have a webpage on this subject) recommends for its authors that interlinear glosses should be typeset in a table. The linework is to be made invisible upon completion.

The academic standard for linguistic glossing is the Leipzig System. My preference for this work, however, is for the simplest presentation, and the greatest possible focus on the Latin. To that end, I propose;

-A two line system for the main body of the text, Latin over literal English

-A separate glossary on each page beneath the main body of text for extraneous lexical information (word stem, part of speech, alternative meaning, etc.)

-Snippets of translation within said glossary for more difficult passages.

This table is a proposed gloss for Book I, line 1. Input and feedback welcome!

Proposed Software:

I haven't used Google Docs in quite a long time, but it does seem to be an option for ease of collaboration or even simply feedback. It might be best to use a spreadsheet for the table-work, for importing large quantities of Latin text into separate cells.

I've been combing the internet for the last few days in search of a more elegant solution, but all of the code-based options look frankly like trouble.

-Josh