I’m taking a Latin course in high school - my teacher is getting us through his college textbook in a matter of months. I’m not doing too well, but I enjoy trying to write poetry in latin. He’s told me that if I manage to write a longer than four line poem in latin, using the dactylic hexameter, then I’ll get A LOT of extra credit. Anyone able to help with that? I don’t really understand the hexameter.
Have you read any introductions to Latin hexameter poetry? Are there any key concepts that you’re having trouble with, like metrical feet, vowel length, etc? Have you attempted to produce any lines thus far? It would be most useful if you took a shot at it and posted that here.
I think we are all happy to help, so long as this “help” takes the form of us helping you through difficulties and answering questions, rather than composing the lines for you.
Although it is very rare to find Latin verse composition taught in schools anymore, it used to be a fundamental part of Latin education, and you can find lots of manuals and textbooks, along with keys to the exercises in those textbooks, at GoogleBooks. I haven’t updated this list since about a year ago, but here is a list of the appx. 30 different verse composition textbooks that I found. Most of them focus on composing in dactylic hexameters and/or elegiac couplets, but you will find a few books that cover other meters as well:
http://www.delicious.com/lkgbooks/prosody+latin?sort=alpha&order=asc&setcount=50
Basically, I’ve made one latin poem so far:
Dissonantia
hic est dissonantia
magna, aspera, fracta
deformis
ego sum dissonantia
auscultā
hic est silentium
magnum, asperum, fractum
vacuum
ego sum silentium
ascultā
ego sum tacita dissonantia
auscultā mihi
ausculta
Yeah, I know, it isn’t exactly the epitome of latin poetry, and doesn’t follow any real meter or anything. But when I showed it to my teacher, he said it was a good start, and told me if I was serious about latin poetry, I should try dactylic hexameter. I looked it up, and I don’t know, it just isn’t clicking I guess. I mean, I think I’ve finally figured out what a dactyl is. I’ve read the Wiki entry on dactylic hexameter. I’m heading to the library soon to see if I can find any books on the subject. But if anyone could provide a comprehensive explanation for me? Or a link to where I could find one?
And believe me, I have no intention of taking something written by anyone else. I am, primarily, a writer (though my medium isn’t usually Latin). I take plagarism seriously. I just wanted to know if anyone here as any experience and would be willing to help.
And thanks to anyone who does. 
(Oh, and thank you, lauragibbs! I’ll check the link out)
I’d say that’s a pretty hard thing to require from a high schooler. To understand hexametre is hard enough, and to write it is beyond even most college education by today’s standards.
Huh? Hexameter is easy to understand, and I could write Latin poetry in hexameter quite easily. Now, writing something that’s meaningful or profound in it is an entirely different question!
If creating dadaistic poems in latin hexametre would count as doing it for real, then we all would be Vergils 
.
People might be interested in this very curious old book, Steganometrographia, which is a kind of elegiac verse generator in which people could encode secret messages, hidden inside the elegiac couplets:
http://tinyurl.com/3y87b5e
As you will see, starting at p. 21 of the book, there are some metrically equivalent bits of poetry, each of which is given a letter of the alphabet. You pick the first letter of the secret message you want to encode, and then proceed to the next table, choose a bit of verse based on the second letter of your secret message, and so on.
So, if I were to encode my name I would start with these two couplets (the system will generate many more couplets to continue encoding the message):
Promptus, Amice, velis, chartae perfringere gemmam;
E fortunatis advenit illa locis.
Non tibi fatales narrabit epistola questus;
Laetitias mentis servat et illa tuas.
That is the elegiac encoding of LAURAGIB
You can get a sense of the elegant substitutions if we encode DARTHVADER - there is a similarity of content, even though a different secret is encoded here, based on different elements chosen from the encoding tables:
Docta Thalia iubet chartae perfringere gemmam;
A tibi dilectis prodiit illa locis.
Non portentosos referet mea littera casus;
Mentis delicias non vetat illa tuas.
That is the elegiac encoding of DARTHVAD
No particular poetic virtue - but it’s like a secret decoder ring in elegiac couplets. There are encoding/decoding tables for the epistle in verse, and then for the return epistle, plus another poem encoder.
Quite ingenious. I mention it here because the book is useful for beginners to really get to see how the variations in different chunks of verse might look. Even if you don’t want to use this for your secret Latin decoder poetry ring, so to speak, you can still look at how the author has analyzed the different parts of a poem and see the different ways that the variant chunks are made up of material that is both metrically and grammatically interchangeable.
Such boasting must be substantiated. 
Well, “quite easily” is pushing it, I suppose. 
There’s nothing boastful about it, though. It’s only a matter of making words match the meter. Now, doing fancy things like controlling how the stress matches the meter is another question, but I assume that the assignment has no such requirement.
It is a laborious process and it takes me much trial and error. Nevertheless, I don’t think it’s a daunting task; it just takes a while.
- Kef
And writing is a matter of putting marks on paper (or on the screen).
Et ars scribendi signa in chartâ (vel scrinio) complectit.
As you say, Hampie. // Ut dicis, Hampie.
Vergil managed 3 lines a day, the story goes, and, translating into English hexameters far less artfully, I can manage only about the same.
Tres versus in die scripsit Vergilius, fama est, et ego anglicè in hexametros arte valdè inferiore non citiùs vertere possum.
Do you understand quantitative meter ? It is so different from the accentual poetry of English that you may spend some time just getting the hang of hearing quantities.
As has been pointed out already, there’s a lot of material on Google Books that will guide you in this particular domain (Latin verse composition).
Best,
dp
Well, it is. Writing is easy; writing something good or interesting is hard. Same for Latin poetry. The assignment doesn’t require that it be competent poetry, merely that it be poetry.
I’d still like to see you do it, Furrykef.
You are right that it is just a matter of making the words fit the meter, but in my fairly limited experience, it is an enormously fiddly and time consuming thing to do in latin, and requires one to constantly check the length of vowels and account for elision, the lenghting of final syllables when placed next to the following word, etc., while still rendering a comprehensible grammatical sentence, indeed, irrespective of poetical merit.
In my native dutch I do fare bettter, but it remains a most time consuming exercise.
Here are two lines I cobbled together. Great? No. But neither is it dadaistic, and I do think it does fit the definition of dactylic hexameter:
_ . . / _ . . / _ . . / _ _ / _ . . / _ _
Scrībere sīc mihi nōn probum est, sed sīc agit Aulus
_ _ / _ . . / _ . . / _ _ / _ _ / _ . . / _ _
Parvō tempore in focum Aulum iactūrūm putŏ esse
Yes, it’s only two lines, but if I can write two, I can surely write more; it just takes a lot of time and effort. More time and effort than I’d anticipated, I admit…
(Now I’m wondering if the -um in “focum” or the -o in “putō” would normally be elided completely, throwing off the meter, but at this point I’m not going back and changing it. )
(EDIT: Corrected Aulus → Aulum, per Adrianus; also probus → probum)
Not too bad at all Fk!
There are a few scansion issues in the second line:
- the final ‘e’ in tempore will elide because it is followed by ‘in’
- the final syllable of ‘focum’ will elide because of Aulus
- same for puto (plus the final o is long, not short) and esse
To be honest, and this is likely due to my recent neglect of latin, i don’t quite follow what the sentence says…
[EDIT: if it is to be “Aulum”, this leads to another scansion problem]
“To write to me thus he isn’t a worthy man*, but Aulus acts thus.
Within a little time, I reckon that Aulus [=Aulum] is going to be thrown into the fire.”
- [nor is this phrase Latin // nec latina haec clausula]
It is an anti-art couple of lines and so Dadaist.
Contra artem distichon tuum, ergô Dadaisticum.
There are many rocks between grammar and scansion and you hit them. If you had been more modest, no one would want to point out the collisions so rudely. The sound of crashing is enough to make all sympathetic.
Difficile non facile est iter inter grammaticae Scyllam et Charybdem scansionis. Si modestior fuisses, nemo tam impolitè momordisset. Frangores concursuum nos affabiles faciunt.
We should start a ridiculous hexameter couplet contest to try our hands at it.
Thanks for catching Aulus → Aulum, adrianus. In addition I meant “probum” rather than “probus” (to agree with scrībere).
I thought final -ō can be either long or short in poetry. Not sure what you mean about “esse”.
My intention was:
To write that way is, to me, improper [bad, evil, etc.], but Aulus does so anyway.
I believe in a short time Aulus will be thrown into the fire.
I made a claim and, despite some problems, I believe I fulfilled that claim. Hence, there can be no immodesty involved. I said from the very outset that I was not talking about poetry that’s at all good, or interesting, or even competent.
If you think I was being immodest, you were reading something into my claim that was never there.
Unartistic and anti-art are not the same thing. Any iconoclasm is accidental; any humor is just a natural result of the fact that, well, I’m a guy living in 2010 who doesn’t speak Latin very well.
Ita, thesaure
Distichoni hexametris certamen constituatur
Ut tricas omnes hîc tunc stolidè traducant.
Still not yet. You have ignored Kasper’s corrections on elision.
Minimè. Illa corrigenda de Kasper quae elisionem spectant ignorasti.