No, I don’t mean another warblog, I mean Martialis, a blog devoted to the poet Martial. As Nick says:
This is an insanely ambitious project. On this blog I intend to present the Latin text and an English translation of all the epigrams of the first-century AD poet Marcus Valerius Martialis, better known to the English-speaking world as Martial. By my reckoning there are 1565 epigrams together with the five prose prefaces – which at a rate of one a day will take the better part of four-and-a-half years to cover.
By concentrating on one poem a day I hope to encourage readers to make their own observations in the comments section and develop a discussion to which anyone can contribute on matters of translation and interpretation: some books and some poems are rather better served than others by existing translations and exegetical works.
He’s only three poems into it at the moment, so it’s a good time to start reading. (Via Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey.)
Update. Alas, the project seems to have died in March 2005, in the middle of Book III. Ave atque vale!
Excellent! I’m bookmarking forthwith.
Martial has always been a favourite of mine. The first edition I had (and still have) was the Loeb 2 volume one. Having ‘small latine and lesse greeke’ I depend on the translations, and I still recall my bafflement on finding that many of Martial’s choicest epigrams were translated by the Loeb editor into Italian! (It may well have been British censorship laws of the time which dictated this course.)
Of course, Martial is now available in all his glorious frankness, and I have a couple of Penguin editions with some of his choicest verse, but I’m really looking forward to this new project with its purposed translation of the whole corpus.
Well, all turned out to mean ‘twelve’. Such is the worth of ambition. So it goes.