Beyond Translation: The Benefits and Drawbacks of English-to-Latin Composition
By Lily Nesvold
In an advanced Latin course my senior year of high school, my teacher gave the class an assignment that was deceptively simple: to compose four “correct” lines of dactylic hexameter, a quest which would result in an automatic “A” for the trimester. Naturally, we were all very excited about the grading scale for the task. What we failed to recognize was how difficult it would be…