LATIN 3217

Having Fun with the Latin Language: Putting Classic Rock into Classical Latin

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2023-2024.

A one-credit course meant to foster excitement, joy, and enthusiasm for the Latin language, while simultaneously helping students appreciate subtleties of Latin idiom and expression. In this course, students will analyze Nicholas Ostler's new translations of classic rock songs by Jimmy Buffet, the Eagles, and others into classical Latin elegiac couplets. Students will gather once a week to listen to a song, to sight-read the Latin together with my guidance, and to compare Ostler's Latin to the lyrics of the English original. Since Ostler rejects verbatim, unidiomatic translations, we will dissect and discuss Ostler's choices. As Ostler himself writes in Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin, Composition in the [Latin] language was never now a straightforward act of communication, or aesthetic expression, if to a rather small but international audience: rather, it was billed as "the proof and the flower of that scholarship which loves the old writers with an unselfish love, and delights to clothe modern thoughts and modern expressions in the dress of ancient metre and rhythm." In studying Ostler's efforts, therefore, students will leave the course better equipped to recognize modern thoughts and modern expressions as they appear in ancient dress, to abandon "translationese," and to find natural, idiomatic English renderings of the classical Latin they read elsewhere.

When Offered Fall.

Prerequisites/Corequisites Prerequisite: at least one semester of Latin.

Comments The credit hour of this course does not count towards the Arts College language requirement.

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