This video is intended as an aid for anyone interested in or studying Latin (AP or college level), who wants to hear the Aeneid read aloud (as the author intended)...with some dramatic interpretation... OR for anyone interested in SEEING a line-for-line translation of the work while LISTENING to the work in Latin. (in my opinion- this is the fastest way to develop aural/listening fluency) DISCLAIMER ON THE READING: While I do some tutoring for high school and college students, I have NO legitimate academic qualifications in Latin! I don't claim to have 'correct' pronunciation or flawless meter. Therefore, expect the occasional error in elision and quantity (especially towards the end as i get super tired) Secondly-- I have not pre-scanned the lines, I am simply reading. I feel that 'scansion' is a crutch too-often relied on when teaching classic poetry-- The beauty of poetry in many languages is that the meter is expressed naturally when reading it as if one is speaking conversationally. Greeks and Romans knew this well! Only when Latin became a "dead" language did the stuffy Victorian academicians (and clergy, with their hilarious sing-song ecclesiastic pronunciation) decide that all poetry had to be seemingly 'de-humanized' by chopping it up into pieces and inventing various 'rules' and 'sums' for the meters. I think this process of rigorous 'scansion' artificially tunes-out the natural role of interpretation on the part of the reader! The thing is (I assert, Quod erit demonstrandum,) the whole point of the 'ictus' (beat) in epic poetry was the subtle (or not so subtle, depending,) expression of it by the reader throughout the whole of the 'song'. Long and short-form repetitions of rhythm, gestures, and facial expressions create a powerful resonance between performer and audience which actually AIDS COMPREHENSION (as well as memorization!) as the story is told. This is what I've tried to re-create in this reading. A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION: (english caption track) working on a "new" translation for the Aeneid has been my magnum opus for the past nine nine months (in my spare time..) This is the draft version, but I'm proud of how it's developing! If you are fluent in Latin, I hope you will notice 3 things about this translation: 1. It's in fairly plain "modern-english" with a word-order similar to the Latin. I think this really helps comprehension when reading along, but it does create a lot of run-on sentences. 2. It's at least 90% literal-and-true to the original text in both vocabulary and grammatical sense. (ok admittedly, i don't always distinguish between the imperfect and perfect tenses when using the indicative case, I really don't ever translate the 'poetic plural' literally, and I do change around some of the proper nouns to make it clearer WHO is being talked about when dealing with metonymy) 3. Hey, look- The English is also somewhat metered! (various lines of pentameter, hexameter, and quads are used) and contains rhythms somewhat resembling the latin dactylic hexameter.

• published: 01 Sep 2013
• views: 40