Teaching Delivery: This module is taught in 10 weekly lectures.

Content: This module investigates the relationship between Latin poetry and its English translations through close study of a selection of Horace’s Odes. Consideration will be given to the differences between the Latin and English languages, their respective techniques for producing poetic discourse, the historical context of individual translations, and their nature as a mode of reception. Class discussion will include literary analysis of the source text as well as a number of its translations ranging from the early modern period to the present day. Students will be required to prepare their own translations of a prescribed poem or poems from Horace’s Odes and to do some background reading of secondary sources in advance of each session.

Each week there will be readings of Horatian odes in the original and a number of translations as well as a couple of articles on Horace and translation and group work in class on particular passages of poems and their translations. The coursework will be a critical analysis of a translation you have chosen of a poem from a designated selection in Horace Odes.  

Skills: The module aims (1) to develop students’ linguistic and critical reading skills both in relation to works of Latin poetry in the original and to their English translations; (2) to discern the effects on poetic production of different language structures; (3) to evaluate Latin poetry and its translations in their social and cultural contexts; (4) to understand the strategies and the processes of translation; (5) to assess translation as a mode of reception of Latin literature.

Suggested preliminary reading:

Commentaries: Nisbet and Hubbard (1971) on Odes 1; Nisbet and Hubbard (1978) on Odes 2; Nisbet and Rudd (2004) on Odes 3; Hardwick, Lorna Translating Words, Translating Cultures (Bristol, 2000); Balmer, J. Piecing Together the Fragments: Translating Classical Verse, Creating Contemporary Poetry (2013).