Reading Latin Poetry Aloud: A Practical Guide to Two Thousand Years of Verse

Embracing the whole two-thousand-year corpus of Latin poetry, this book seeks to stimulate interest in the neglected art of reading aloud. It establishes a practical working pronunciation for Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Latin by means of a detailed analysis of the essential known facts, and it develops and explains a clear and practical system of phonetic notation, based upon the International Phonetic Alphabet. A substantial number of poems and extracts from all periods is offered for practice. Issues relevant to both quantitative and rhythmical prosody are fully discussed and translation notes are supplied to aid the student. Each poem is fully transcribed into phonetics and is accompanied by an English verse translation, whose main purpose is to reveal something of the literary quality of the verse. Two accompanying CDs aid pronunciation by giving the practice words found in the pronunciation sections and offering a complete reading of the poems.

• Explains clearly how to pronounce the Latin of any period, whether for the student, singer or anyone with a general interest in Latin • Audio CD allows the listener to hear exactly how the poems should be performed, taking into account pronunciation, meter and rhythm • Demonstrates the astonishing longevity and consistency of Latin poetry over two thousand years, including full texts and translations of many poems that are not widely known

Introduction; 1. Measuring up; 2. The sounds of Classical Latin; 3. Classical prosody and the dactylic hexameter; 4. The elegiac couplet; 5. Iambics; 6. Aeolic verse; 7. The sounds of Medieval Latin; 8. Medieval hexameters; 9. Other quantitative metres; 10. Medieval vowels and rhythmical verse; 11. Medieval rhythms I; 12. Medieval rhythms II; 13. Early Modern pronunciation; 14. Renaissance verse I; 15. Renaissance verse II; Postscript: the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Glossary of terms; Appendices.