VIRGIL: AENEID VIII (selection)
By Keith Maclennan
Bloomsbury (2016) p/b 113 pp £12.99 (ISBN 9781474271905)
VIRGIL: AENEID X (selection)
By Christopher Tanfield
Bloomsbury (2016) p/b 121pp £12.99 (ISBN 9781474266109)
PROPERTIUS, TIBULLUS AND OVID (selection)
By Anita Nikkanen
Bloomsbury (2016) p/b 171pp £16.99 (ISBN 9781474266147)
OVID: HEROIDES (selection)
By John Godwin
Bloomsbury (2016), p/b 108pp £12.99 (ISBN 9781474265904)
This is the latest batch of attractively produced commentaries from Bloomsbury on OCR ‘A’ and ‘AS’ prescribed texts. All are by teachers with sixth-form classroom experience, some of it extensive, so the specific needs of advanced school students are kept firmly in sight—a far cry from the 19th C editions endured by this reviewer, with their lists of parallel passages and apparent reluctance to help the struggling reader understand what it all actually meant. All four have clear, informative introductions that set the poems in their social and historical context; all give help in their notes with difficult phrases or passages, as well as exploring literary aspects of the text—sometimes with great enthusiasm and learning; all supply vocabularies relevant to the work in question (doubtless clever students will be steered by teachers towards a dictionary for words with a wider resonance). None of the contributors talks down to pupils, or pretends that the translation of poetry is a simple matter; alternative views, from Servius onwards, appear widely in the notes.
It is, inevitably, in their attempts to lead post-GCSE students towards a sophisticated appreciation of Roman poetry that the editors differ slightly. How much to include, and how much to leave to teachers? All tackle the technical business of dactyls and spondees, ictus and arsis, in their introductions. This inclines to the dry, but it has to be done, and better here than on a black (white?) board. MacLennan, who refreshingly begins his explanation ‘What’s the difference between prose and verse?’ is the most successful at lifting the words from the page. (Note that his selection deals only with AS.) He and Tanfield, who have clearly worked closely together, thankfully insist on the importance of reading the Latin aloud. Nikkanen has all the relevant material, but will occasionally need a teacher to make it all come alive. (Note that her selection includes material for both AS and A level, clearly tagged by the publisher.) Godwin’s style is light, rapid and informative, of a kind surely to appeal to sixth formers. He alone postpones the list of rhetorical devices—presumably specified for inclusion by OCR—to his further notes located on the appropriate Bloomsbury website; if you don’t know what synecdoche or tricolon crescendo (appearing in G.’s notes) mean, you’ll have to go to your laptop. This must be right: M., T. and N.’s intros feature a forbidding taxonomy of terms from hyperbaton to polyptoton before the student encounters the actual text. These are useful labels, but they need to know their place. On the website, M. and T. offer further interesting literary comment, some of it at undergraduate level; N. concentrates the equivalent in her printed notes; and G. has a stimulating illustration of literary techniques in action.
In a sense, these excellent books need no review, since teachers using OCR will automatically go to them (they can of course also be used after 2018 as a taster for Latin poetry, and university classics departments could use them as bridge material). They all cover necessary ground admirably, as well as offering the intellectually curious plenty to take them beyond the exam. Strongly recommended, by one who wishes they had been around when he was teaching A level.
Anthony Verity