The latest mea culpa... but with fables to follow! :-)
Well, everybody, I've been feeling badly for not having been very active at Fireside lately. It's a "no news is good news" situation - this summer has been a time of amazing stuff for me on the Latin side (thanks especially to Tar Heel Reader and glorious GoogleBooks), that I just have not had much going on in English! As the Latin projects keep evolving, however, I realized that I need a blog space for some English fables and - instead of creating another blog at Blogger.com - I thought I would use my Fireside blog for this purpose! So, before I start posting some English fables here, I should explain a bit about what is going on and why I need some English space to work in.
As some of you know, I work on Aesop's fables - and thanks to GoogleBooks, I've been finding one treasure trove after another of medieval, Renaissance and modern Latin fables, often from sources I had never even heard of before, or from sources so rare and obscure that I never hoped to actually have access to them in my lifetime. Now, thanks to GoogleBooks, not only do I have access to these books, I have access to them at any hour of the day or night in my own home. Simply incredible!
So, about a month ago, I found an odd little book, published in 1852, which is an anonymous collection of Aesop's fables put into elegiac verse form - "intended as a help towards original composition." In other words, this is a book from back in the day when students were regularly expected to be CREATIVE in their use of Latin... not like nowadays, where 99% of Latin instruction consists of having students crank out English translations (worse: English translations of texts which have already been translated into English time and time again) - back in the 19th century, it was still common practice for students to learn how to compose original poetry in Latin, and elegiac verse was the most popular meter for doing so. Most of the elegiac verse textbooks, however, emphasized classical authors, whose interests are really not pertinent to the school-age students who would be composing the poems. Hence the need for this collection of Aesop's fables - and the anonymous author of this book believes, as I do, that the stories of the fables have a kind of ageless appeal that makes them far more suitable than conventional lyric poetry for inspiring original writing by students.
Well, the discovery of this book, aside from the sheer pleasure of the contents for their own sake (he even includes poetry based on the Renaissance prose fables of Abstemius!), prompted me to see just how many Aesop's fables I could find in elegiac verse form. In terms of the overall tradition, iambic verse has been the more popular form of versifying the fables (going all the way back to Phaedrus, a freed slave in the household of the Emperor Augustus Caesar who put fables into iambic verse over two thousand years ago) - but I knew of at least a few medieval authors who had used elegiac verse form, including the anonymous collection sometimes attributed to Walter of England which was actually very influential in the earliest printed editions of Aesop in the 15th century.
So... I started collecting: and I've ended up with over 500 such poems, from the late antique author Avianus (kind of prickly to read, but he tells some marvelous stories), to medieval authors like Walter and Alexander Nequam (I absolutely adore Nequam), to Renaissance authors like Osius (he wrote hundreds of these, in fact) and Pantaleon, and even emblematic authors like Alciato, as well as my anonymous 19th-century schoolmaster. In my penchant for the magical number of days in the year, I'm going to select my 366 favorite among these poems, and make a book of them (I'm publishing two of them per day at a blog, so that I will make my way through all 500 of them, and then begin the process of winnowing them down to my favorites: Aesopus Elegiacus). And that is just stage one of the project (scheduled for summer 2010) - for stage two, I want to take the old textbooks I've found on composing elegiac verse poetry and update them, creating a modern textbook on composing elegiac verse, using Aesop's fables as the raw material (that will be summer of 2011 or 2012 I guess). It's the most exciting work I've ever embarked on!
At the same time, my husband keeps telling me to think about some way to make my work available to an audience larger than the maybe three people on the planet at this time (ha ha) who are actually interested in what I am doing. So...... here's what I've decided: when I publish the Latin poetry collection next summer, I'm going to include English versions of the poems. NOT translations (translating poetry is just wrong, especially when the raison d'etre of this collection is the specific meter of the verse which is impossible to reproduce in English), and NOT Latin word lists (although I am publishing those online, for people who need some help in reading the Latin)... instead, they will be English versions of the same fables, drawn from the 15th- and 16th- and 17th- and 18th-century versions of the fables that I've also been collecting in English, again thanks to GoogleBooks.
And, since I need somewhere to let those pile up online while I'm working on the Latin texts, I thought I might as well do that here at Fireside. Some people might find the fables fun, and it will help keep me closer here to the Fireside while I am so incredibly busy with all these projects (I am going to be very sad indeed when school starts up in August and I won't have days and days and days of leisure to use in working on Latin). So, I'll go find something fun from Sir Roger L'Estrange to get things started, or maybe some emblems from Whitney. But that's the plan... very exciting stuff for me, so much due to the amazing advent of GoogleBooks! Whoo-hoo!!!
Here's the title page of the book that started the elegiac adventure:
As some of you know, I work on Aesop's fables - and thanks to GoogleBooks, I've been finding one treasure trove after another of medieval, Renaissance and modern Latin fables, often from sources I had never even heard of before, or from sources so rare and obscure that I never hoped to actually have access to them in my lifetime. Now, thanks to GoogleBooks, not only do I have access to these books, I have access to them at any hour of the day or night in my own home. Simply incredible!
So, about a month ago, I found an odd little book, published in 1852, which is an anonymous collection of Aesop's fables put into elegiac verse form - "intended as a help towards original composition." In other words, this is a book from back in the day when students were regularly expected to be CREATIVE in their use of Latin... not like nowadays, where 99% of Latin instruction consists of having students crank out English translations (worse: English translations of texts which have already been translated into English time and time again) - back in the 19th century, it was still common practice for students to learn how to compose original poetry in Latin, and elegiac verse was the most popular meter for doing so. Most of the elegiac verse textbooks, however, emphasized classical authors, whose interests are really not pertinent to the school-age students who would be composing the poems. Hence the need for this collection of Aesop's fables - and the anonymous author of this book believes, as I do, that the stories of the fables have a kind of ageless appeal that makes them far more suitable than conventional lyric poetry for inspiring original writing by students.
Well, the discovery of this book, aside from the sheer pleasure of the contents for their own sake (he even includes poetry based on the Renaissance prose fables of Abstemius!), prompted me to see just how many Aesop's fables I could find in elegiac verse form. In terms of the overall tradition, iambic verse has been the more popular form of versifying the fables (going all the way back to Phaedrus, a freed slave in the household of the Emperor Augustus Caesar who put fables into iambic verse over two thousand years ago) - but I knew of at least a few medieval authors who had used elegiac verse form, including the anonymous collection sometimes attributed to Walter of England which was actually very influential in the earliest printed editions of Aesop in the 15th century.
So... I started collecting: and I've ended up with over 500 such poems, from the late antique author Avianus (kind of prickly to read, but he tells some marvelous stories), to medieval authors like Walter and Alexander Nequam (I absolutely adore Nequam), to Renaissance authors like Osius (he wrote hundreds of these, in fact) and Pantaleon, and even emblematic authors like Alciato, as well as my anonymous 19th-century schoolmaster. In my penchant for the magical number of days in the year, I'm going to select my 366 favorite among these poems, and make a book of them (I'm publishing two of them per day at a blog, so that I will make my way through all 500 of them, and then begin the process of winnowing them down to my favorites: Aesopus Elegiacus). And that is just stage one of the project (scheduled for summer 2010) - for stage two, I want to take the old textbooks I've found on composing elegiac verse poetry and update them, creating a modern textbook on composing elegiac verse, using Aesop's fables as the raw material (that will be summer of 2011 or 2012 I guess). It's the most exciting work I've ever embarked on!
At the same time, my husband keeps telling me to think about some way to make my work available to an audience larger than the maybe three people on the planet at this time (ha ha) who are actually interested in what I am doing. So...... here's what I've decided: when I publish the Latin poetry collection next summer, I'm going to include English versions of the poems. NOT translations (translating poetry is just wrong, especially when the raison d'etre of this collection is the specific meter of the verse which is impossible to reproduce in English), and NOT Latin word lists (although I am publishing those online, for people who need some help in reading the Latin)... instead, they will be English versions of the same fables, drawn from the 15th- and 16th- and 17th- and 18th-century versions of the fables that I've also been collecting in English, again thanks to GoogleBooks.
And, since I need somewhere to let those pile up online while I'm working on the Latin texts, I thought I might as well do that here at Fireside. Some people might find the fables fun, and it will help keep me closer here to the Fireside while I am so incredibly busy with all these projects (I am going to be very sad indeed when school starts up in August and I won't have days and days and days of leisure to use in working on Latin). So, I'll go find something fun from Sir Roger L'Estrange to get things started, or maybe some emblems from Whitney. But that's the plan... very exciting stuff for me, so much due to the amazing advent of GoogleBooks! Whoo-hoo!!!
Here's the title page of the book that started the elegiac adventure:
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