8 строк Овидия высылать на competition@antigonejournal.com
If you wish to have a crack, please do us the honour of emailing your entry to competition@antigonejournal.com by the end of Sunday 25 April (2021!). The judges, drawn from the cutting edge of our New Naso panel, will review the entries anonymously and announce the winners on Friday 30 April.
To help advance our researches, we would like to invite the wider Antigone community to “patch up” the start of the New Naso. You will recall that, according to Ralph’s apparently faithful transcription, the twenty complete lines of Ovid are preceded by the closing words of a couplet which seem to speak of a god-warding gourd: <c>ucumi terrificante deos, ‘with a cucumber terrifying the gods [?]’. It is entirely unclear whether Ovid is broaching this unusual subject directly or speaking with the poetic privilege of metaphor. So please help us:
Write the four couplets (eight lines) that Ovid very probably wrote before the start of the New Naso fragment, so as to end with this curiously cucumbric close.
Entries are accepted, from anyone anywhere in the world, in two categories:
(i) Latin elegiacs in the “textbook” style of the New Naso fragment (i.e. Ovid)
or
(ii) Rhyming English verse in the style of the “Skylark of Oxford”, whose translation appears here.
