BEYOND GREEK: THE BEGINNINGS OF LATIN LITERATURE PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Denis Feeney | 326 pages | 05 Jan 2016 | HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS | 9780674055230 | English | Cambridge, Mass, United States Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature by Denis Feeney, Paperback | Barnes & Noble® By the time Rome became the unquestioned dominant power in the Mediterranean over the course of the next century, its citizens could boast of having a distinct vernacular literature, as well as a historical tradition and mythology, that put them in a unique relationship with Greek culture. Faculty Bookshelf. Main page content. Author s Denis Feeney. Like Naevius he was trilingual in Greek, Oscan, and Latin; he memorably asserted that because he knew three languages he had three hearts. In addition to translating tragedies he wrote an epic, the Annals , which covered the whole course of Roman history down to his own day. In it he made one crucial innovation. His two predecessors had used a native Italian verse form for their epics, the so-called Saturnian. None of these works survives intact. In most cases we have only brief quotations in later writers, particularly grammarians who were attracted by their archaic language. From the surviving twenty or so lines plus the title we can deduce that the girl in question was a courtesan, that she had some connection with two free-spending young men, and that the play was probably not set at Tarentum. But even his longest fragment runs to only eighteen lines, and most are much shorter. Cleopatra was the first—and last—Greek ruler of Egypt who knew any Egyptian. One would expect the Romans to show similar indifference. And for the most part they did. Sabines and Oscans, Spaniards and Gauls, Britons, Illyrians, and Dacians—all had to learn Latin, and most of their descendants still speak a language recognizably related to it. Yet the Romans did learn Greek. Indeed, they ran the eastern half of their empire in it, from Egypt all the way to the Black Sea, as well as Greece itself. This striking phenomenon has a traditional explanation. How natural, then, that the first recognizable works of Latin literature should be translations from Greek. No other people in the ancient world did this: not the Egyptians, not the Phoenicians or their colonists at Carthage, not any of the other Italian peoples, the Oscans, Umbrians, or Etruscans. And certainly not the Greeks. The one apparent exception, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible known as the Septuagint, was carried out by Alexandrian Jews for their own Greek-speaking community. The legend that it was commissioned by one of the Ptolemies has no foundation. The nearest real parallel seems to be the Akkadian translations of the Sumerian Gilgamesh epic, which were certainly not known to Livius Andronicus. Was Greek literature simply too appealing, too powerful to be ignored? But in that case why did the Romans not simply write in Greek? This, after all, was a path followed by a number of non-Greek writers, including the Egyptian chronicler Manetho, the Jewish historian Josephus, and the Alexandrian Ezekiel, who composed an account of the Exodus in the form of a Greek tragedy. Indeed, the first Roman historian, Fabius Pictor, did write in Greek, as did one or two of his immediate successors. Greek was widely spoken on the Italian peninsula, including at Rome itself. Far from bursting upon the Romans in the third century, Greek culture had always been there. In the late Republic, elite Romans were effectively bilingual; one can imagine Catullus writing poetry in Greek just as the aristocrats of Heian Japan did in Chinese. The first Roman translations are unusual in other respects too. L2 is what produces the assembly instructions for your new baby stroller. But Livius and his colleagues are literary L2 translators, moving from their first or second language Greek to their second or third Latin. This is not normal. In thinking about these issues Feeney acknowledges a considerable debt to the work of David Bellos. Rather, translation involves movement between a language of lower status defined by prestige, popularity, or both to one that is comparatively higher. Translation UP generally tries to elide the foreignness of the source—to produce a text as much like one composed in the target language as possible. Translation DOWN tends to preserve linguistic features of the source language, since these carry cachet in and of themselves. Yet for Livius it had been UP. What does that imply? But in an ancient Mediterranean world made up of many multilingual societies with no equivalent to the text-based literature of the Greeks, literary translation was unusual if not unprecedented. Feeney shows how it allowed Romans to systematically take over Greek forms of tragedy, comedy, and epic, making them their own and giving birth to what has become known as Latin literature. The growth of Latin literature coincides with a period of dramatic change in Roman society. The powerful but geographically confined Roman city-state of BCE had conquered all of Italy just fifty years later. By the time Rome became the unquestioned dominant power in the Mediterranean over the course of the next century, its citizens could boast of having a distinct vernacular literature, as well as a historical tradition and mythology, that put them in a unique relationship with Greek culture. Fall Reading List. Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature - Denis Feeney - Google книги Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Horace, and other authors of ancient Rome are so firmly established in the Western canon today that the birth of Latin literature seems inevitable. Yet, Denis Feeney boldly argues, the beginnings of Latin literature were anything but inevitable. The cultural flourishing that in time produced the Aeneid , the Metamorphoses , and other Latin classics was one of the strangest events in history. Beyond Greek traces the emergence of Latin literature from to BCE, beginning with Roman stage productions of plays that represented the first translations of Greek literary texts into another language. From a modern perspective, translating foreign-language literature into the vernacular seems perfectly normal. But in an ancient Mediterranean world made up of many multilingual societies with no equivalent to the text-based literature of the Greeks, literary translation was unusual if not unprecedented. Feeney shows how it allowed Romans to systematically take over Greek forms of tragedy, comedy, and epic, making them their own and giving birth to what has become known as Latin literature. It is easy enough to write a novel in which Livius Andronicus is commissioned for the special peace games because his former master, or his patron, L. Livius Salinator, is on the committee planning the games. In reality there is nothing inherently implausible in such a scenario. A translation is an assemblage of words, and as such it can contain as much or as little poetry as any other such assemblage. The Romans can make some claim to have done this too. Our fullest insight into Roman adaptation of Greek drama is provided by the comedies of Plautus, working in the late third and early second centuries BC , a generation or so after Livius, and those of Terence a generation later still. Both based their work on the so-called new comedy of fourth-century Athens whose best-known playwright was Menander. Here we have more than fragments, but the loss of most of the Greek originals had made it hard to evaluate them as translations. Some help came in when the sands of Egypt yielded up a papyrus codex with remains of three plays by Menander, though none of them turned out to underlie an extant Latin play. Yet it is also perfectly descriptive. Since the original publication, more Menander has come to light. Plautus retains the plot of his originals but adds references to Roman institutions, puns that only work in Latin, slapstick humor, and the elaborate aria-monologues known as cantica. In Roman comedy this is the Woosterish young man around whose frustrated amours the plot typically revolves. It may be that Livius and Naevius anticipated some of these elements. Certainly they prepared the way for them, and for a progeny that runs from The Comedy of Errors to Noises Off. Roman writers continued to exploit this device well into the imperial period. Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest. 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