Hodierna Juvenalia

Anti-woke Latin dactylic hexameter verse

Ecce academiae lucos coronatos turpite

Fatuis utilibus, caerulea coma ubique.

Valde pinguides, et semper torvae facies,

Dicentes in lingua quod lingua ipsa inanis.

Flent palam veterani culturorum bellorum, itaque

Virtutem demonstrantes fragilitatis ipsius sensus.

Quia queror in me maledictum de candore meo,

Etsi sum quoque nocens eodem modo, sed tamen

Quomodo harioli se nostri tyranni iniungant,

Evigilati hostes plebis dum quasi tribuni?

**********||**********

To be continued, as and when the urge arises. So far the feel is quite scattergun, as well as being declamatory and splenetic, the latter two qualities being what I’m aiming for.

I’m not too aghast at the Hodierna being scattergun either, since it was also a feature of Juvenal’s own Satires, at least if my memory serves me from when I was translating them in my youth many years ago. In this regard, the Satires are unlike e.g. the Aeneid. The Aeneid’s narratorial cohesiveness is readily apparent, and at any given point I always had a decent rough idea of the place of the passage I was translating in the narrative of the particular book it was in, and of the book to the Aeneid as a whole.

It is of course possible that I’m mistaken about this aspect of Juvenal, and I’d better re-read a Satire or two of his - in English, I’m afraid - just to establish how structured or otherwise his verse was. I think Sam Johnston’s Vanity of Human Wishes, which I read about five years ago, may be a translation of Satire X, or one of the other Satires, so that’s as good a place to start as any. Otherwise I’ve probably got my old Loeb’s(?) somewhere.