Latin Literature's Resonance in Other Languages and Traditions

FAIN: FA-57324-13

Stephen E. Hinds
University of Washington (Seattle, WA 98195-1016)

A book on the cross-linguistic relations of poetic writing in Latin, which will seek to destabilize the usual narratives of Roman literary culture and classical tradition. Latin literature has always been constituted by its relationships with other languages and traditions: for ancient readers by its ever-changing relationship with Greek; for modern readers by no less constitutive relationships with the European vernaculars. I will emphasize cross-linguistic events in which the correspondence between texts in different languages is so close as to approach the condition of translation, without quite being the same thing as translation, and where the very issue of movement between languages is somehow central. This chronologically spacious project involves a significant mid-career redirection of my energy and expertise. A Fellowship can allow me to make a concentrated push on the book after I present its core as three invited Gray Lectures at Cambridge University in May next year.

Associated Products

J.H. Gray Lectures (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: J.H. Gray Lectures
Abstract: Lecture 1: Paratextualizing the classical tradition Lecture 2: Parallel lives Seminar: Petrarch’s epistles to ancient authors (Fam. 24)
Author: Stephen Hinds
Date: 11/8/13
Location: Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, UK
Primary URL: http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/seminars/research-archive/seminars/gray
Primary URL Description: J.H. Gray Lectures archive, University of Cambridge

UW Faculty Solomon Katz Distinguished Lecture (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: UW Faculty Solomon Katz Distinguished Lecture
Abstract: 'Marvell's Latin and Wordsworth's Greek: Literature and Literalism in the Classical Tradition' Stephen Hinds investigates poetry across languages: he explores moments of connection between texts which approach the condition of translation without quite being the same thing as translation. For his Katz lecture, he examines the work of two poets: Andrew Marvell and William Wordsworth. The works of Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) contain paired English and Latin poems which were clearly meant to be read together. Focusing on Marvell’s famous The Garden alongside its lesser-known twin, Hortus, the first half of the lecture asks what is at stake when Marvell translates Latin into English, and English into Latin. William Wordsworth (1770-1850), who began and then abandoned a translation of the Aeneid, had a long and anxious relationship with the classical tradition, a relationship which can be dramatized by examining his first drafts, revisions, and deletions. The lecture’s second half visits Wordsworth’s classical laboratory, focusing on the post-Virgilian Laodamia and the Greek-inspired Dion.
Author: Stephen Hinds
Date: 2/25/14
Location: University of Washington, Seattle
Primary URL: https://simpsoncenter.org/programs/lecture-series/katz-distinguished-lectures-humanitites/stephen_hinds
Primary URL Description: Description of this public lecture; link to a full podcast. Not included are the lecture handout and powerpoint. (I can provide these to anyone who contacts me at shinds@uw.edu)
Secondary URL: https://simpsoncenter.org/media-publications/video-page/751
Secondary URL Description: Link to 4-minute video clip from this public lecture.

Grupo 'intertextualidade na literatura latina' / research group 'intertextuality in Latin literature' (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: Grupo 'intertextualidade na literatura latina' / research group 'intertextuality in Latin literature'
Author: Stephen Hinds
Author: Stephen Harrison
Abstract: In November 2014, as part of a ‘double act’ with another senior poetic Latinist, from Oxford, I made an invited research visit to the University of Campinas in São Paulo Province, Brazil, one of the major centers of a recent nationwide expansion in Brazilian Classics, for a two-day event on poetic intertextuality in which we each gave two papers and offered consultations to the department's graduate students about international contexts for their research. My hosts had just completed a research project on the early 19th century translation of Virgil’s Aeneid into Brazilian Portuguese by Odorico Mendes, a founding event for the establishment of transatlantic Portuguese as a language with an identity and prestige separable from its European counterpart. This was an apt project for the growing Campinas department, in which, even now, a characteristic MA assignment is to produce an annotated translation of an ancient work not previously translated into Brazilian Portuguese, both as a kind of advanced basic training in Classics and as a visionary attempt to restore ancient Greek and Latin texts to the mainstream of modern Brazilian learned literary culture; the PhD assignment, after the MA, adds a research monograph to complete a published ‘package’. A week spent hovering between Latin, English and (through interpreters) Portuguese was fascinating in itself and as living context for my own research project on Poetry across Languages; and, unexpectedly, the Campinas team turned out to be the ideal audience for my work in progress on Wordsworth’s Aeneid.
Date Range: 11/17/14-11/18/14
Location: University of Campinas, Brazil

'In and out of Latin: diptych and virtual diptych in Marvell, Milton, Du Bellay and others' (Book Section)
Title: 'In and out of Latin: diptych and virtual diptych in Marvell, Milton, Du Bellay and others'
Author: Stephen Hinds
Editor: Syrithe Pugh
Abstract: This paper (forthcoming in an Aberdeen University Press volume to be edited by Syrithe Pugh) offers access to the kinds of conversation with antiquity made possible by instances of parallel Latin and vernacular composition in certain early modern poets. Less obviously, I extend this approach through parallelism to embrace Latin translations by others of vernacular texts (with Paradise Lost as a key case), arguing that such Latin paratexts acquire their own complementary intertextual energy, which can extend and complicate the conversations of their ‘originals’ with the classical tradition. My discussion is driven by Marvell and Milton in the English tradition, and in the final pages glances briefly at Ronsard and Du Bellay in the French. In the longer term, this paper feeds into my book project, working title *Poetry across languages: literature, literalism and the Latin tradition*.
Year: 2018
Secondary URL: http://washington.academia.edu/StephenHinds
Secondary URL Description: Link to my academia.edu page for the final text of this paper, as submitted to the editor and publisher.
Publisher: Aberdeen University Press
Book Title: Conversations: Classical Imitation in Renaissance Literature

'Pre- and Post-Digital Poetics of "Transliteralism": Some Greco-Roman Epic Incipits' (Book Section)
Title: 'Pre- and Post-Digital Poetics of "Transliteralism": Some Greco-Roman Epic Incipits'
Author: Stephen Hinds
Editor: Neil Coffee
Editor: Christopher Forstall
Editor: Lavinia Galli Milic
Editor: Damien Nelis
Abstract: This paper offers cross-linguistic readings of ancient Greek and Latin epic proems or prologues, at a point of heuristic intersection between the study of translation (or quasi-translation) and of digital text-matching: a set of snapshots of what I term poetic transliteralism. It begins with Livius Andronicus and ends with a look at the so-called Ilias Latina ('Latin Iliad'). In the short term, the paper will appear in a forthcoming volume of the Geneva 2015 conference 'Intertextuality in Flavian epic poetry', within a group of papers on 'theory, practice and the digital humanities'. In the context of that volume it mediates between sets of contributions offering philological and electronic approaches to poetic memory and literary system. In the longer term, the paper feeds into my book project, working title *Poetry across languages: literature, literalism and the Latin tradition*.
Year: 2018
Secondary URL: http://washington.academia.edu/StephenHinds
Secondary URL Description: Link to my academia.edu page for the final text of this paper, as submitted to the editor and publisher.
Publisher: De Gruyter (Berlin) ('Trends in Classics' series)
Book Title: Intertextuality in Flavian Epic Poetry

Pastoral and its futures: reading like (a) Mantuan (Article)
Title: Pastoral and its futures: reading like (a) Mantuan
Author: Stephen Hinds
Abstract: Perhaps no poetic genre is as central to the ‘Classical Tradition’ as is pastoral; at times, indeed, despite its ostensibly narrow and stylized terms of reference, pastoral seems to operate as the privileged space of European classicism, a genre into which everything Greek and Roman can be subsumed, and more besides. This paper takes as its case study the Adulescentia of Baptista Mantuanus (1447-1516): its readings of Mantuan’s early modern pastoral collection offer synecdochic glimpses of the reception-history of Virgil's Eclogues, and map the generic self-awareness of the Adulescentia itself.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: http://dictynna.revues.org/230
Primary URL Description: Dictynna 14 (not yet published as of October 2017)
Secondary URL: http://washington.academia.edu/StephenHinds
Secondary URL Description: Link to my academia page for final pre-publication version of paper.
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Dictynna: revue de poétique latine
Publisher: University of Lille

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