Translations – Discentes

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Lucan’s Witch

Posted on October 29, 2023November 26, 2023by Discentes

Lucan’s Witch
By Erin Schott

From Morgan le Fay to Hermione Granger, witches captivate the imagination. Their motives and magical prowess enthrall the little child in all of us who yearns to cast a spell. And since there is no time of year when the witch receives more attention than Halloween, I thought this would be an appropriate moment to reflect upon the genesis of the contemporary witch by translating a passage of Lucan’s Bellum Civile. This “genesis” of the contemporary witch lies in Lucan’s Erictho, a frightening Thessalian sorceress whom Sextus Pompey has asked to reveal his father’s fate. Erictho has just told Sextus Pompey that she will use her dark arts to reanimate a corpse, which will then tell the fate of Pompey Magnus…

Translations

Perpetua in the Arena: A Translation and Literary Analysis

Posted on September 10, 2023October 15, 2023by Discentes

Perpetua in the Arena: A Translation and Literary Analysis
By Dara Sánchez

From a prison diary in Carthage, Perpetua gives a captivating account of martyrdom in the Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis (Passio Perpetuae). Amidst the foul conditions of the prison, her father’s pleas for her to reject Christianity, and her separation from her infant, Perpetua wondrously describes the visions that come to her in dreams…

Translations

An Emotional, Brutal Translation of Iliad 5.1–29: The Beginning of Diomedes’ Aristeia

Posted on September 3, 2023October 8, 2023by Discentes

An Emotional, Brutal Translation of Iliad 5.1–29: The Beginning of Diomedes’ Aristeia
By Noah Apter

Through my word choice and overall translation of the text, I want to preserve the vivid imagery and raw emotions we feel while reading Homer (examples include intense feelings of awe, glory, and dread). When reading any original narrative Greek text, I feel like I can produce a realistic and precise painting of what is happening in the passage inside my head…

Translations

Daedalus and Icarus: A Tale of Many Metamorphoses

Posted on August 13, 2023November 28, 2023by Discentes

Daedalus and Icarus: A Tale of Many Metamorphoses
By Erin Schott

In his fifteen-book magnum opus, Ovid recounts over 250 myths. These range from the disturbing and violent (Procne and Philomela) to the sweet and innocent (Baucis and Philemon) and all shades in between. Yet what unites this seemingly disparate set of myths is the poem’s title Metamorphoses, for each myth describes a change or evolution…

Translations

Seneca Minor, Epistles, CIV.XVI–XX

Posted on July 9, 2023August 13, 2023by Discentes

Seneca Minor, Epistles, CIV.XVI–XX
By Hadleigh Zinsner

Seneca the Younger’s Moral Letters, written and published in the final years of his life, have often been considered the philosopher’s finest contribution to the Western canon, if only for the clarity they have provided future historians in dissecting the core tenets of Stoicism. For example, Letter 104, which I have translated below, expresses the importance of ἀπάθεια, or indifference, towards one’s surroundings…

Translations

History of the Peloponnesian War

Posted on June 4, 2023July 9, 2023by Discentes

History of the Peloponnesian War
By Noah Apter

Pericles’s Funeral Oration comes down the centuries as one of the most difficult pieces of ancient Greek literature to properly translate. To us classicists, it seems that Thucydides wishes to help us sharpen our teeth on his grammar. Why? It is in the nature of speeches to differ from narrative texts, the former tending to be “live,” while narratives deliver recollections of events past…

Translations

Latin Epitaphs

Posted on May 7, 2023June 16, 2023by Discentes

Latin Epitaphs
By Dara Sanchez

Observe traveler, the epitaphs of a long-gone era. In the field of classical studies, scholars mostly spend time looking over the grand works of Roman elites. Of course, we learn a lot about Roman society in this way, but with these translations, I wanted to highlight funerary epitaphs and get a glimpse of the people who were once beloved as daughters and wives or even had the more complicated status of being freedmen or enslaved…

Translations

Iliad, Hector, and Andromache

Posted on April 30, 2023June 3, 2023by Discentes

Iliad, Hector, and Andromache
By Doulin Appleberry

In this excerpt from Book 6 of the Iliad, Hector is speaking with his wife Andromache for the last time before his death. Andromache begs him to stay, but he insists he must go fight. I have translated the Greek text, originally in dactylic hexameter, into English iambic pentameter blank verse…

Translations

Are the Romans Better Than the Greeks in Philosophy?

Posted on March 26, 2023April 30, 2023by Discentes

Are the Romans Better Than the Greeks in Philosophy?
By Hanzhao Kuang

In a 2012 survey, Philosophy Now asked seventy-five academics to vote on the five most important/interesting philosophers from history. Among respondents, many Greek thinkers were popular choices: Aristotle came in first with forty-four votes and Plato ranked third with thirty-one votes. But Roman philosophers came short: Cicero, a famous Roman philosopher, received merely two votes…

Translations

For Medea, Love is Fear, and Love is Fire

Posted on March 5, 2023July 23, 2023by Discentes

For Medea, Love is Fear, and Love is Fire
By Rebecca Onken

Medea is, for many (classicists and armchair consumers alike), the quintessential classical witch. Her powers dazzle. Her escapades are many and run the gamut of moral acceptability: she ensures Jason’s success in attaining the golden fleece by means of wondrous “medicines,” returns the blush of youth to an ailing old man, orchestrates the murder of a different old man, kills roughly three family members, and spirits away from her crimes on a chariot drawn by dragons…