Concatenatio Catulliana : A New Reading of the Carmina /
The arrangement of Catullus' Carmina is one of those controversial issues that in-cite respectable commentators to take up extreme positions. In 1914, the German scholar Bernhard Schmidt described the collection as 'a wild chaos'. Forty-five years later, his compatriot Otto Weinreich...
Main Author:
Format: eBook
Language: English
Published:
Leiden; Boston :
BRILL,
2002.
Series:
Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology ;
9.
Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology Online, ISBN: 9789004419025.
Subjects:
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Call Number: PA6276
| Summary: | The arrangement of Catullus' Carmina is one of those controversial issues that in-cite respectable commentators to take up extreme positions. In 1914, the German scholar Bernhard Schmidt described the collection as 'a wild chaos'. Forty-five years later, his compatriot Otto Weinreich riposted with the laconic statement: 'Chaos? Cosmos!' Former attempts to detect a structure in the collection were based on rather subjective assumptions. While translating Catullus' poetry into Dutch, Dr Claes detected an objective foundation: the principle of concatenation, i.e. the recurrence of motifs and phrases in consecutive poems. The generality of this phenomenon proves that the poet conceived of the Carmina as a coherent collection, in which the poems fit like links in a chain. The discovery of this coherence suggests a new reading of Catullus, which has also implications for the constitution of the text. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource. |
| ISBN: | 9789004409040 9789050632881 |