To Read a Latin Love Poems
Added 2021-04-22 16:01:01 +0000 UTCNote: Thinking about K inspired me to go back and read some Ovid in order to include references, only to realize that my Latin is rustier than . . . I can't actually think of something that's really rusty off the top of my head, but let's pretend I compared it to something clever. Anyhow, the result of my tackling Latin again is this poem. (Yes, I'm embarrassingly nerdy. But I rather liked how this turned out.)
To Read a Latin Love Poem
Grammatically pick
and peel away
each clause; don’t reach
for meaning, but gaze
at a participle
dangling
off the end of the top stanza
desperately seeking
the main subject.
Identify a meter
you can’t pronounce:
hendecasyllabical
or
a version
of that count.
Forage through the dictionary
for words fallen
from memory.
Unearth the object
of a verb’s affection.
Finally, impassioned
declarations neatly
parsed into translated
slices—
Interpret.
