SCENE IN SCHOOL-AN EXERCISE IN COMPOSITION
Students: Hello, teacher.
Teacher: Hello (to) you all too. Did you bring your writing tablets and styluses?
S: We brought them.
T: Now, we will learn a fable from Aesop. I will read, you write in your tablets. And you, Publius, give me the book of Aesop from the book box. Now, everyone listen: The Fox and the Grape.
A fox once urged by hunger saw a hanging grape. It jumped to the grape trying to get (it). Having tried for a long time in vain, at last, it was angry, and as it stopped jumping it said, “That grape is sour; I don’t care about a sour grape.”
Did you write everything, boys?
S: Everything, teacher.
True enough but false to the Latin. I think inverting genders in animal fables is asking for trouble.
And wouldn’t it more helpful to highlight the changes that you make to Propertius’ translation (which you don’t signal as changes at all!), or simply to tell him that uva is a bunch of grapes rather than a single grape? Then neither he nor a casual visitor like me would have to make a word-by-word comparison in order to see how you’ve interfered with what he wrote. That prefatory “Propertius wrote” is very misleading.