VESPERINI Pierre.
Forgotten poets and scholars of ancient Rome.
The Beautiful Letters
Regular price
€15,00
| N° d'inventaire | 29843 |
| Format | 12 X 19.5 |
| Détails | 160 p., paperback. |
| Publication | Paris, 2023 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782251454702 |
This book is the fruit of a fascination: that of the author for the infinitely rare fragments left behind by an unexpected stroke of luck by the unknown poets of the Roman Republic. Unknown because forgotten, erased by the following era and then collected little by little by scholars since the end of the 19th century . The author therefore wandered through their slim collections, sometimes to get lost in them, always to dream. From them he created this gallery of portraits or "literary medallions", as they were called around 1830. For it is indeed literature that is at stake here: the author did not set out to simply translate some of the Fragmenta poetarum Romanorum . He wanted, for each of the poets who "spoke" to him, to write a text that brings them back to life. This without ever inventing anything, by sticking strictly to the testimonies, by remaining on the side of History.
Putting on these two enchanted boots – writing and History – the author explores the two mysteries found at the origins of European literature, like two sphinxes at the start of a road: that of the very invention of literature, in the 4th century BC, around the great Library of Alexandria; and that of the gesture, almost mad, by which, in Rome, generations of poets and scholars “struck by the Muses”, alone among all the Barbarians of the Hellenistic world, decided to build, in their own language, a new “Greek literature”.
Putting on these two enchanted boots – writing and History – the author explores the two mysteries found at the origins of European literature, like two sphinxes at the start of a road: that of the very invention of literature, in the 4th century BC, around the great Library of Alexandria; and that of the gesture, almost mad, by which, in Rome, generations of poets and scholars “struck by the Muses”, alone among all the Barbarians of the Hellenistic world, decided to build, in their own language, a new “Greek literature”.
Putting on these two enchanted boots – writing and History – the author explores the two mysteries found at the origins of European literature, like two sphinxes at the start of a road: that of the very invention of literature, in the 4th century BC, around the great Library of Alexandria; and that of the gesture, almost mad, by which, in Rome, generations of poets and scholars “struck by the Muses”, alone among all the Barbarians of the Hellenistic world, decided to build, in their own language, a new “Greek literature”.