Matthew Payne, ‘Translated word for word’? Re-examining the relationship between Greek and Roman Republican tragedy

Aangezien de lezing van Arthur Bot, die op 15 december gepland stond, uitgesteld werd, biedt het Griekenlandcentrum ter vervanging deze lezing aan.

(Her)bekijk deze lezing hier.

Voorsmaakje

Not a single Roman Republican tragedy is preserved for us in complete form. They survive to us in a disordered, lacunose, voiceless form, disconnected from the performance context which gave them meaning. And yet we can only ascribe these qualities to the fragments because we know that they once formed a complete play, with a continuous, meaningful text, ordered by a plot and performed a cast of characters embodied and voiced by actors in a theatre at one of Rome’s public festivals. But from the nineteenth century, serious attempts to restore some of these properties – their order, voicing and meaning in relation to the lost whole – began. Yet finding clues towards such reconstruction was complicated by the disjointedness between the fragments and their contexts. Indeed, the collection and publication of the fragments in dedicated editions from the sixteenth century amplified this dislocation. Instead, scholars looked backwards, to the far better documented Attic Greek tragedies, and particularly the thirty-two (relatively) complete tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. In this they were guided by the statements of Cicero and others that the Roman playwrights translated from the works of Greek tragedy, but what translation meant in the pre-Jeromian Roman world was often left under-interrogated.In this talk, I will use examples from Ennius’ works to investigate these issues, and show how different editors use Greek tragedy to offer creative responses to the frustration of the ambiguities of the Roman tragic fragment.

Over de spreker

Matthew Payne graduated in 2012 from the University of Cambridge with a degree in Classics, then came back to Cambridge to complete an MPhil in Classics in 2014. He then moved to the University of St Andrews in Scotland for a PhD. He completed his thesis, on aberration and criminality in Senecan tragedy, in 2018. Since September 2018 he has been a post-doctoral researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His project concerns the surviving fragments of Roman tragedy. In 2021-22 he is a guest professor at the University of Gent, lecturing on Latin literature.

Praktische informatie

Wanneer? donderdag 16 december, om 20u

Waar? de lezing is gratis online te volgen via het platform Zoom: https://ugent-be.zoom.us/j/96373838398?pwd=ZHNVSG9BS1lkZVpNcTVxdFExWjNvUT09.

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