Nathaniel Hess | The Invention of Verse Translation in the Latin Renaissance

When the humanists of the 15th and 16th centuries began to make translations of Greek verse, they found, in this long-untilled field, an open site of contestation. Should it be an exercise for poets and students of rhetoric? A marketable resource for learners of Greek? A genre of scholarship aimed at exact information transfer? Looking at some of the audiences and motivations for verse translation, this paper explores the genesis, development, and decline of an extraordinary attempt to resolve the problem, establishing a demanding and sometimes absurdly finickety principle of correspondence. The evolution of the genre is traced through figures such as Angelo Poliziano, Erasmus, Henri Estienne, and Joseph Scaliger, and through its transformation in the 17th century it is argued that the movement has had a lasting effect on the history of translation. --- Event Details: https://my.princeton.edu/rsvp?id=1969694