Hodierna Juvenalia

Ecce academiae lucos coronatos turpite

Fatuis utilibus, caerulea coma ubique.

Valde pinguides, et semper torvae facies,

Dicentes in lingua quod lingua ipse 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?

Working Notes. For some reason I've started writing dactylic Latin hexameter anti-woke verse at the same time as I'm getting my teeth into my new novel, Woking Pox - an addition to my Bristolian chronicles which so far include Amoeba Dick, Pretty Poli, and Helix Folt the Conservative which are all available on Amazon, as well as Odour Issues, which I've withheld because of various dissatisfactions of mine.

The verse above strives to be in strict accordance with the rules of dactylic hexameter:-

i. a line of dactylic hexameter has six feet.

ii. each foot can be either

(a) a dactyl, i.e. a three-syllable foot with the stress on the first syllable, e.g. "implicate", or

(b) a spondee, i.e. a two-syllable foot with both syllables stressed, e.g. "birthday".

iii. There's generally a caesura, i.e. break after two feet and one ("2:1") syllable, although I think variants are probably permitted; I seem to recall from A level Latin a very long time ago that one such was a double caesura, at 1:1 and 3:1.

I think in practice there's considerable scope for treating iambs and trochees, two-syllable feet with respectively the first and second syllables unstressed, as "honorary spondees". However, I'm not sure whether this excuses my line 6:-

Virtutem demonstrantes fragilitatis ipsius sensus.

"Virtutem demonstrantes" reads very naturally as two dactyls and a stressed syllable, taking us very conveniently up to the conventional caesura at 2:1. So far so good. But then we hit a bit of a snag with parsing the second half of the line. To accommodate that many syllables requires treating feet 3-5 as dactyls. But this means that the third syllable of "fragilitatis" is stressed rather than the second as would be natural in speech. One way round this conundrum might be to treat foot 3 as spondaic. This would have the advantage that the first two and final syllables of "fragilitatis" are stressed, which seems very much in accordance with natural speech. However, it comes at the cost of treating "ipsius" as the two-syllable unstressed sequent of a dactyl, which feels awkward with the elsion of "-ius". My preference is to bluster through, treating foot 3 as dactylic and foot 4 as a novelty three syllable foot with the second syllable stressed, which gives us a very natural-sounding "fragilitatis" with only the penultimate syllable stressed, but which probably breaks the rules horrendously. I don't even know the name for my novelty three-syllable foot, which is probably quite telling in itself!

The content itself has a somewhat disparate feel. There is a marked absence of unifying theme. However, this also seemed from what I remember to be a feature of the satires by Horace and Juvenal which I translated at school several decades ago. I think this comes out in my own translation of one of Horace's Odes:-

From the Odes, Epigrams, & Further Sonnets

XXXIX

Q.Horatius Flacco. Odes 3.30.

This monument will keep up with each Jones,

a ziggurat for Kurigalzu’s bones.

No rising damp, dry rot, or subsidence,

dilapidate this shrine to cool pretence,

now it’s uploaded to the Internet.

It needs no obsequy or epithet;

no sluts puffing up Park Street sing its praise

in rap or drill or other inane ways.

It won’t be sung down where the Avon flows,

fed by the Frome’s contaminating hose,

through diverse brute unlettered yokel tribes,

on whom Montpelier’s snob bestows his jibes,

a pseudo-intellectual who wears

his learning on his sleeve. But noone cares:

no Arts Council will fund his calumnies,

or garland him with Delphic laurel leaves.