Professor Stephen Hinds has won a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers, which he will take in the 2014-15 academic year. The official NEH project title is Latin Literature’s Resonance in Other Languages and Traditions, though the working title of the planned book is Poetry across languages: literature, literalism and the Latin tradition.
The official press release announcing the awards may be found here; there is a link on that page to a pdf listing by state all awards (including Stephen's).
Stephen provides the following description of the book:
"I plan a study of the cross-linguistic and intercultural relations of poetic writing in Latin, within antiquity, between antiquity and modernity, and even at times within modernity. Discussions will reach back in time to Homer and forward to late antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond."
"Latin literature has always in important ways been constituted by its relationships with other languages and traditions: for ancient readers by its ever-changing relationship with Greek; for modern readers (in the most generous sense of ‘modern’) by no less constitutive relationships with the languages and cultures of European vernaculars. Latin as the language of the Aeneid is not (and yet is) the language of Homer; Latin as the language of the Aeneid is not (and yet is) the language of Paradise Lost. In other words, when Virgil’s Latin marks its undoubted discontinuities with Homer’s Greek, linguistically and culturally, the effect is not so much to erase as to augment and enrich a narrative of no less essential continuities; and so too with Milton’s English and Virgil’s Latin. Such stories are not just ancient-ancient and ancient-modern, but at times also modern-modern. Consider Andrew Marvell, less well known for Latin verse than his contemporary Milton, but of especial interest for his composition of Latin and English poems in cross-referential pairs. In a preliminary study for the present project, my reading of Marvell’s Hortus alongside his famous Garden argues for a new sense of mutuality between the two pieces, and seeks a point of access to some broader questions about poetic bilingualism."