"Terence, this is stupid stuff"
Jun. 24th, 2015 06:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceSo one of the wonderful things about working to, for, by, with or from several separate Mars Imperial stories at the same time is the inevitable overlap, Edwardian figures of literature criss-crossing each other at my whim and at theirs.
Take, f'rexample, the subject line: it is, of course, Housman, and not actually referring to the playwright Publius Terentius Afer, tho' much of Housman's Latin scholarship did treat with that Terence (the Terence in fact referred to here being in fact Housman's alter ego, the nominal author of the book that became A Shropshire Lad but was originally simply titled The Poems of Terence Hearsay). I learned this from my readings: as I also learned that after his release from Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde - who came to Mars, of course, in "The Astrakhan, the Homburg and the Red Red Coal" - was in correspondence with Housman's playwright brother Laurence, and specifically took the time to praise A Shropshire Lad. So there's that.
But at the moment I am only reading about Housman, and actually writing another La[u/w]rence altogether, T E of that [latter] ilk: and at the moment he is being harangued, and his haranguer is making clever play with the most famous surviving quote from that other Terence, and I need help.
If "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto" means "I am a man; I hold nothing human to be alien to me" (or words to that effect; that's the translation I grew up with), then what would be a thorough rendering-into-Latin of "I am a Briton; I hold nothing British to be alien to me"? (In context, this actually comes down to who or what counts as Martian, but let's not go there. All art is about questions of identity.)
Take, f'rexample, the subject line: it is, of course, Housman, and not actually referring to the playwright Publius Terentius Afer, tho' much of Housman's Latin scholarship did treat with that Terence (the Terence in fact referred to here being in fact Housman's alter ego, the nominal author of the book that became A Shropshire Lad but was originally simply titled The Poems of Terence Hearsay). I learned this from my readings: as I also learned that after his release from Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde - who came to Mars, of course, in "The Astrakhan, the Homburg and the Red Red Coal" - was in correspondence with Housman's playwright brother Laurence, and specifically took the time to praise A Shropshire Lad. So there's that.
But at the moment I am only reading about Housman, and actually writing another La[u/w]rence altogether, T E of that [latter] ilk: and at the moment he is being harangued, and his haranguer is making clever play with the most famous surviving quote from that other Terence, and I need help.
If "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto" means "I am a man; I hold nothing human to be alien to me" (or words to that effect; that's the translation I grew up with), then what would be a thorough rendering-into-Latin of "I am a Briton; I hold nothing British to be alien to me"? (In context, this actually comes down to who or what counts as Martian, but let's not go there. All art is about questions of identity.)