Daniel Vincent

Viva la musica!, 30 Mar 2011

This is fantastic. Stomping music, and the lyrics show a poets sense of the (en)chanting sound of words. So much fun!

A breezy intro to Latin, 30 Mar 2011

This book is an ideal breezy and chatty accompaniment to a traditional grammar primer, and warrants re-reading when your head is spinning with too much of the serious stuff. It's is at its best and most useful when Mount talks about the mnemonics he used at school for learning and memorizing different parts of grammar, like declensions and different verb tenses. He manages to do this in a light-hearted way, and gives you just enough to help you start with a confident stumble into Latin.

The publishers categorize it as 'humour'. Personally, I wasn't struck with the humour: with an obsession with the British royalty, photogenic actresses, wine varieties and nostalgia for… Read more

Rollicking verse translation, 20 April 2010

Fagles' verse translation is fantastic. It rollicks along boisterously, mainly in blank hexameters, sometimes shrinking to smaller lines for more domestic scenes, tugging the reader along with the ebb and surge of the oceans that throw Odysseus to and fro.
A verse translation, compared to prose, is so much more dynamic. Here, for example, is T.E.Lawrence's prose toward the end of Book 5: "Exactly as when a squid is dragged out from its bed the many pebbles come away in the suckers of its arms, so did the skin peel off Odysseus' strong hands against the stones. Then the billows closed over his head." Where Lawrence ends the paragraph there, Fagles elides the passage into the next event,… Read more