For many students, tackling verse unseens will be their Everest. Even in departments that prepare their pupils for the rigours of examined prose composition at A Level, translating Ovid will be the hardest element of the course. At first glance, this makes little sense: Ovid’s verse is fairly limited in terms of syntax (and certainly in comparison to Livy), while the prospect of translating Latin into English fills many with dread.
However, despite the initial reservations of our students, many of them will have been practising the skill of composition since they began their Latin careers: as a compound language, the years of reproducing their fundamental accidence and syntax allow them an immediate entry into this facet of A Level.
What, on the other hand, is so tricky about translating Ovid? Some will point towards the technical aspects: the consistent hyperbaton; the truncated verb; the absent esse. Others will suggest the entirely new skill of scansion, an exercise that will initially blindside the less mathematical in the class. Another group will simply gesticulate with frustration at Ovid’s endless desire for cleverness: puns and paradox abound.
The reality is perhaps more mundane: for many students at the end of Year 12 and the beginning of Year 13, the process of facing unadulterated Latin is a huge leap. Before encountering Ovid, pupils will still be mainly translating prose that has been edited for ease; on the other hand, verse is almost impossible to alter or simplify in a similar way – save the excision of whole lines or couplets. There is nowhere to hide in front of Ovid: the irregular word order forces the student to rely upon their basic accidence – for those who have skipped through GCSE and Year 12 with lots of vocabulary and even more nouse, Ovid can therefore be a nasty wake-up call.
As a result, it can sometimes feel like you’re starting from scratch when you introduce students to Ovid verse. Here are three ideas that have worked for me when introducing students to Ovidian verse successfully.
1. Teaching Critical Thinking
Bred on a diet of defined word lists, students can be overwhelmed by the absence of an official prescription of vocabulary at A Level: while Matthew Owen’s textbook provides helpful lists, our pupils quickly find that strange words will regularly appear unglossed.
I like to remind the students of two fundamental truths:
1. Nobody ever goes into a Latin unseen translation paper with confidence that they know every word.
2. The examiner is also testing grammatical / contextual / derivational skill.
It is the second point that I emphasise in the early weeks of translating Ovid. For every unrecognisable word, the student could go through the following routine:
- Derivation – does this Latin word have an etymological link to something in English?
- Grammar – what type of word is this? What form? How does it fit into the rest of the sentence grammatically? (Once they know the word’s grammatical properties, e.g. the fact that it is an accusative plural noun, half the battle has been fought).
- Contextual – look back over the story, paying special attention to the English introduction / summary. What would make sense in this context?
More often than not, this routine unearths the meaning of a particular word; when it doesn’t, the student has already spent a considerable amount of time analysing it – once they’ve scribbled it in their personal vocabulary list, they’re more than halfway to memorisation.
Even more important is that this routine can instill students with self-belief: they don’t need to rely upon a specified vocabulary list, but rather, with some practised lateral-thinking, they will become far stronger analysts and linguists.
2. Take Your Time
As noted above, Ovid’s language is marked by some important idiosyncrises: the truncated forms of the third person plural perfect, and the second person singular present/future passive; the looseness of singular and plural agreements; the omission of prepositions, and so on.
I try to resist the temptation to lump all these irregularities into a single lesson at the beginning of the course. I always treat these quirks as part of a new dialect, and stick to my normal practice: isolating each peculiar form with multiple examples, just as I would with a normal construction, such as a purpose clause.
The same is true of scansion: I won’t try to introduce it all in a single lesson.
Rather, I divide this exercise into its natural parts: the recognition of long and short syllables; the rules that govern vowel length; the differences between the hexameter and pentameter (and where they are used!); trickier rules, such as ‘i’ as a vowel or consonant ; and, finally, elision.
3. Wider Reading
It is a regular sight: a student who produces a superb translation of some Ovid because, well, they knew the myth. A strong knowledge of the Ovidian corpus will pay dividends in the exam, and thus such an awareness could helpfully be incorporated into your curriculum.
I tend not to ask my students, however, to read the Metamorphoses as a whole: they are already inundated with reading already for coursework subjects, and such an open-ended task is naturally difficult to track. An alternative approach is to set a particular myth as required reading for that week: tales such as Apollo and Daphne, or Scylla and Minos make for easy reading in a single setting. Sometimes I ask an individual to present on the key stories from a specific book of the Metamorphoses in a particular week; I will use a translation rather than a compilation like Stephen Fry’s Mythos.
Given that the OCR specification states that the verse unseen can be taken from any work by Ovid, I find it worth introducing pupils to the broad generic differences between the different texts. Even if pupils go into the exam knowing that an unseen from the Ars Amatoria will be a first-person narrative regarding love, and that an extract from the Tristia will involve exile and misery, I will have helped them evade a certain level of confusion.
Useful Resources:
- Hexameter.co – this is a fantastic website where students can practise their scansion; you can also set up a class leaderboard, and the Rapid Scan function makes for a fantastic starter / plenary.
- Matthew Owen Vocabulary Lists – there are brilliant, ready-built lists on Quizlet for revision and class competition.
- ARLT A Level – plenty of practice passages, complete with mark schemes.
