Read Who? Read Her!

This year’s Latin IV/V H class is about to embark on an exciting adventure: the opportunity to translate a fourth-century woman’s poetry and make it accessible for everyone. This came about thanks to the incredible iOS app that my friend and colleague Skye Shirley designed and created with the help of a former Latin student from Noble & Greenough who knows how to code. Skye was frustrated by two realities: that so many people believe that women didn’t write Latin literature that survives and that the books that are available are mostly expensive university press publications. Skye wanted to create a free app that listed all the women, biographies, their works, and translations written by teachers and scholars of Latin. 

Last summer, I met Skye and others in a coffee shop to pick an author and work of Latin to translate. My first translation was of Rachel Jevon’s Exultationis Carmen, written in 1660. Rachel Jevon was a 17th-century English writer, “part of a tradition of learned women who used Latin to engage with politics and public life, even as they wrote outside of formal institutions of power.” (Skye Shirley, “Introduction to Rachel Jevon”). While the poem celebrates King Charles II, Jevon makes use of many classical allusions highlighting her own education. 

While working on this translation for the app, I was also introduced to a fourth-century Roman poet named Faltonia Betitia Proba. “She rearranged phrases written by Vergil hundreds of years earlier into her bold retelling of the Old and New Testament. A convert from paganism, she crafted a cento – a poetic form considered a ‘patchwork quilt’ in Latin – entirely from lines of Vergil’s Aeneid, Eclogues, and Georgics” (Skye Shirley, “Introduction to Proba”).

When I began reading Proba’s Latin, I was amazed by her use of Vergil’s language. I knew that my Latin IV/V H course this year would be reading Vergil and thought this would be a great opportunity for them to be a part of this project. The Concord Carlisle High School Latin Club helped translate a poem for the app by Camille de Morel, a poem to Queen Elizabeth I, who also wrote and spoke Latin. Starting in May, I will make the text available to the students. The cento is quite long, and we will handle only a portion of the poem. Each student will be responsible for a part in this project. Some will examine the vocabulary used, some will work out the grammar, and others will look for the ways Proba uses Vergil’s poetry. Though I will guide the process, my expectation is that the students will primarily be in charge. 

How fitting to have women translating women and making neglected authors more accessible to everyone.