It must have been good because I was invited back and that second talk led to a further engagement – well, actually several engagements. It was plain sailing thereon in and everyone had a jolly fine time. It was a large hairy dog (belonging to the lady of the house) that had dozed off behind a settee. I know I can go on a bit but I haven’t actually made someone doze off within the first ten minutes before,” I announced. The rumbling became louder and gradually others could hear it. This time I was met with little but frosty glares and then I heard it…a soft snore. I’d tried it out several times in conversation with positive results. Normally, people immediately associate with that. Undeterred, I launched into why I wrote and what my novels were about. My local book club only manages to read wine labels.”) They met with a stony silence. It seems far more impressive than my own. (“Thank you for inviting me to your Book Club. I attempted to break the ice with a few feeble jokes. Still, humour is always welcome, no matter what genre you write, so I always try to start off on a positive note. Okay, I can be funny, especially if I have had a glass or two of wine, but in this situation I had been invited to talk about publishing. People think if you write humour you are a comic – well, I’m not. The problem was, they were a tough crowd, tougher than usual, because they had been kept waiting. They had consumed all the fruit cake and coffee assigned for a half-time interval. Through no fault of my own I turned up late, hot and bothered, to face a crowd of grumpy women who had been sitting around for over half an hour. I’d prepared what I considered to be a cheerful and upbeat talk. It consisted of formidable and rather clever ladies who were semi-reluctant to let an upstart like me come and talk to them. It took place in an intimidating, sprawling house where the sitting room was the size of my entire bungalow. My first speech as an author was to a book club. Some of the IU team are very gifted in that direction), or are blessed with oratory prowess. We rarely employ rhetorical irony to win over our listeners (actually, I take that bit back. We are not practised in such verbal skills. *Julius Caesar may have been a great statesman and a gifted orator but we are merely authors. Of Denison and Goodchild, alas, I know nothing, so I'm not in a position to comment on the quality of their translations, but I will say that commodate mihi aures vestras, though a literally exact translation of the English, feels far too metaphoric for Latin, which tends to be a very concrete language.Got your first author gig? Giving a speech? That first speech or book signing event can be pretty daunting. Goodchild there they are rendered:Īvellanus was a native Latin speaker, but I don't know the extent to which he futzed with his writers' material in the Praeco Latinus. The other, from an 1899 issue of Praeco Latinus edited by Arcadius Avellanus, is by C. One, from 1856, is by Henry Denison the relevant lines are rendered:Īmici, Cives, Quirites, commodate mihi aliquantisper aures vestras: adsum ut efferam Cæsarem, non ut laudem. (I would leave this as a comment but it's too long, so.)įor what it's worth, there seem to be two translations of Julius Caesar into Latin, and both are useless for determining what's "correct" here, since they use plural nouns, which would be the same whether nominative or vocative.
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