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.