OVID'S EXILIC VOCABULARY

Introduction Ovid's artistry with words has been called "logodaedaly", creative word magic.2 His "painting with words" lies partly in a controlled use of synonyms.3 The poet's originality in creating new words has also been much commented upon.4 His artistry with words when in exile offers continued pleasure. Words were of paramount importance for an exiled poet who was reaching out to his friends and to the enemy who exiled him. In the process he created a word-portrait of himself as suppliant; as Downing (1993:13) puts it: "The author makes a self, while the self makes a book of the self." Ovid's readership in Rome would have been familiar with the whole of his earlier oeuvre as context for a particular diction. In the context of his exile, the poet's choice of words and the uses to which he put his vocabulary were a powerful means of influencing public thought. Augustus, as very particular member of the more general readership, had to be persuaded that his previous works were innocuous, if ever the exile were to be allowed to return. At the same time the poet seems to have sought a means of criticizing the emperor without antagonising him

RENDERING CAESAR: THOUGHTS ON THE TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH OF N P VAN WYK LOUW’S GERMANICUS

This paper discusses its author’s attempt to translate into English the verse drama Germanicus by the Afrikaans poet NP Van Wyk Louw, which is based on Tacitus’ Annales 1-3. After a general discussion of translation theory and of Louw’s theories relating to the classical tradition, the paper highlights, with examples, problems encountered on the levels of prosody, of register and of equivalence of meaning. Louw’s poetic Afrikaans is so concise that it requires an effort to be as brief in English. “Shakespearian English”, both lexis and wordorder, is closer to the Germanic Afrikaans, but would be unacceptable in a modern translation. Louw’s idiosyncratic use of Afrikaans, deliberate archaisms and occasional neologisms call for interpretative reading before these can be translated. The paper ends with a short reference to the place of Louw’s Germanicus in the international Classical tradition

FRONTO AVUS: THE TALE OF A GRANDFATHER

This paper examines some examples from the correspondence of the secondcentury rhetor, the Romanised African M. Cornelius Fronto, in particular letters that relate to the death of his grandson, drawing conclusions about Fronto as grandfather and as a person who had sustained previous bereavements. His attitude to his daughter Cratia2 and son-in-law Aufidius Victorinus receives special attention. The question of why Fronto seems to favour Victorinus over his own daughter when both are plunged into grief is addressed. It seems that in the grief of the younger man the older relives the agonies of his own youth, when he and his wife lost a series of children before bringing up Cratia as an only child

LATIN FOR STUDENTS WITH AN AFRICAN HOME LANGUAGE

One of my favourite quotations has always been Tennyson's "The old order changeth, yielding place to new / and God fulfils himself in many ways, / lest one good custom should corrupt the world." That means, essentially, "Change is good, and we should not fear it"

LATIN OLYMPIAD 1991 GIRLS WIN COMPUTERS IN LATIN OLYMPIAD

The two top Latin pupils in the country are both girls, but boys were also well represented at the CASA's Latin Olympiad prizewinners' party held in the Michaelis Gallery;~ Cape Town on Friday evening (9 August)

Rendering Caesar : thoughts on the translation into English of N. P. Van Wyk Louw's Germanicus

CITATION: Claassen, J-M. 2006. Rendering Caesar : thoughts on the translation into English of N. P. Van Wyk Louw's Germanicus. Akroterion, 51:57-69, doi:10.7445/51-0-63.The original publication is available at http://akroterion.journals.ac.zaThis paper discusses its author’s attempt to translate into English the verse drama Germanicus by the Afrikaans poet NP Van Wyk Louw, which is based on Tacitus’ Annales 1-3. After a general discussion of translation theory and of Louw’s theories relating to the classical tradition, the paper highlights, with examples, problems encountered on the levels of prosody, of register and of equivalence of meaning. Louw’s poetic Afrikaans is so concise that it requires an effort to be as brief in English. “Shakespearian English”, both lexis and wordorder, is closer to the Germanic Afrikaans, but would be unacceptable in a modern translation. Louw’s idiosyncratic use of Afrikaans, deliberate archaisms and occasional neologisms call for interpretative reading before these can be translated. The paper ends with a short reference to the place of Louw’s Germanicus in the international Classical tradition.http://akroterion.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/63Publisher's versio

ac Losses in a Finite Z Stack Using an Anisotropic Homogeneous-Medium Approximation

A finite stack of thin superconducting tapes, all carrying a fixed current I, can be approximated by an anisotropic superconducting bar with critical current density Jc=Ic/2aD, where Ic is the critical current of each tape, 2a is the tape width, and D is the tape-to-tape periodicity. The current density J must obey the constraint \int J dx = I/D, where the tapes lie parallel to the x axis and are stacked along the z axis. We suppose that Jc is independent of field (Bean approximation) and look for a solution to the critical state for arbitrary height 2b of the stack. For c<|x|<a we have J=Jc, and for |x|<c the critical state requires that Bz=0. We show that this implies \partial J/\partial x=0 in the central region. Setting c as a constant (independent of z) results in field profiles remarkably close to the desired one (Bz=0 for |x|<c) as long as the aspect ratio b/a is not too small. We evaluate various criteria for choosing c, and we show that the calculated hysteretic losses depend only weakly on how c is chosen. We argue that for small D/a the anisotropic homogeneous-medium approximation gives a reasonably accurate estimate of the ac losses in a finite Z stack. The results for a Z stack can be used to calculate the transport losses in a pancake coil wound with superconducting tape.Comment: 21 pages, 17 figures, accepted by Supercond. Sci. Techno