This book's close-up readings explore ancient conversations between Latin and Greek verse texts, followed by modern (especially early modern) conversations between Latin and European vernacular verse texts, reflecting the linked stories of reception that make up the so-called classical tradition: conversations across language, across period, and sometimes both at the same time.
Introduction: literal Latin
PART I: READINGS BETWEEN LATIN AND GREEK
1 Counterfactual literary history
utriusque linguae
Ovid’s bilingual career?
Greeks reading Latin, Romans writing Greek
Ennius’ tria corda
Claudian between worlds
Ausonian macaronics
2 Transliteralism for beginners
Some Greco-Roman epic incipits
Begin the begin
Aratology
The wrath of Juno
Iliades Latinae (1)
Iliades Latinae (2)
3 Parallel lives
Plutarch in the mirror
The Greco-Roman nights of Aulus Gellius
Virgilian Parthenogenesis
Poets in a (contested) landscape
(Against) interculturalism: the Garland of Philip as Roman poetry
PART II: READINGS BETWEEN LATIN AND VERNACULAR
Middle proem: dead languages and living ones
4 Diptych and virtual diptych
Latin to Latin: Ad Regem Carolum Parodia
Marvell’s pairs: translation(ese) and transcendence
Paradise Latinized: reverse-engineering Milton
Comparative postvirgilianism
5 Passages to Italy
Du Bellay in Rome, between Latin and French
Milton comes home
6 Latinity, lake poetry and lyric revision
Axiologus
Anxieties of translation: Wordsworth, Coleridge and the abandoned Aeneid
Laodamia and her paratexts
Dion’s parallel lives
Wordsworth’s ‘found’ Georgics
7 Reversions of pastoral
Parthenias, Silvius and Monicus
Conversions of (a) Mantuan
Spenser between virgins
Bann Valley Eclogues
Conclusion/Epilogue: micronegotiation