Translations into Greek and Latin from Goethe, Schiller, R. L. Stevenson et alii.
http://www.pantoia.de/
Excellent link; thank you!
By the way, in the prooemium to the Latin edition of Treasure Island, I was surprised to find how Arcadius Avellanus, the translator, devotes a very large number of pages to peculiarly heated invectives against German latinists. Some highlights:
“Disquisitionibus his summis in Germania unum tantum defuit, bona fides. Non enim verum quesiverunt Germani, sed argumenta ad suas præconceptas doctrinas, atque præiudicia iam pridem parata, suffulcienda.”
“…quod obtusa Germanorum mens perspicere non videtur. Debent perpetuo adversari ob nullam causam nisi malevolam simultatem; …”
“Satis sciunt, sed contra agnitam veritatem luctantur.”
“Femina, femur, femen, feteo, cena, sunt testimonia fÅ“dæ inscitiæ Germanicæ.” (I.e. that the Germans favour these forms, as opposed to “fÅ“mina”, etc.)
“At Germani ne Cæsarem quidem audire volunt, quia non quærunt veritatem, quærunt simultates, adversari volunt atque linguam Latinam corrumpere.”
And so on, and on… It’s amusing in a way, not the least since many of the things he impeaches are in accord with current teachings.
It is interesting how much modern versifiers are prepared to deploy γε to solve problems. I think I’ve used it once in my own compositions.
Maybe we should have more translation challenges with pop songs or something over on the composition board.
Ah, if you didn’t know this… http://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost18/Goethe/goe_intr.html It’s worth of taking a look.
Absolutely. but the difficulty with such challenges is that someone would have to review the poster’s work, and this often does not happen, particularly with longer texts.
Yeah, that can be difficult. Perhaps pick a song, then go through verse by verse over a few weeks?
Sounds good. brownie points for those writing in a specific meter?
After reading through the majority of the same preface, I wholeheartedly agree with you Alatius. I’ve never seen such virulent attacks before. He seems to think the Germans are a lot of devils.
His vehemence got me interested, so I started looking into this Arcadius Avellanus. It turns out he is a very fascinating man, and it’s a shame that he’s all but fallen into complete obscurity.
In essence, he was born in Hungary in the mid 19th century and learned Latin fluently, both spoken and written, as a second language. He came over to the US at some point and spent the rest of his life as a stalwart proponent of living Latin and new teaching methods. He was a master linguist in a number of languages. He translated many thousands of pages of novels into Latin under a series called the “Mount Hope Classics,” and published two monthly Latin periodicals. He published a textbook aimed at spoken Latin, and he edited many Renaissance dialogues. He also had a Latin group in New York he would meet with periodically to speak Latin.
He espoused Latin as a universal language, and he claimed to be able to teach anyone fluent Latin in a flash. In one story, after having taught a 10 year old boy for a short time, a stranger picked a passage from Livy which was deemed most difficult; after having read it aloud once, the boy was able to easily paraphrase the entire passage in Latin.
As we noted, Avellanus was also a violent critic of German scholars, and apparently held similarly strong views about everything. The author of the below memorial talks about this as his main weakness.
Anyways, I thought he struck a very fascinating character, and I was delighted to have stumbled across the story of his life. He was described as one of the best Latinists in the world… a Reginald Foster of his day, I suppose.
Here are some links of information:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3291825?seq=1 An extensive memorial to Avellanus written by a friend in 1947. If you don’t have Jstore, I can try to upload the article separately.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=990CEFDC123EE233A25752C0A96E9C946997D6CF
A random violent, and I would say close-minded and imperialistic, attack on proponents of Esperanto, Germans, the modern languages, and anyone who has a problem with Latin.
Well I, for one, am interested in reading the complete article from JStor. Is that possible?
http://www.2shared.com/file/3599983/64d479cf/avellanus.html
Be prepared to navigate the sketchy layout on that download page…
Plurimas gratias tibi ago, Thesaure! 