Book, Poetic Art (bilingual Latin-Portuguese)[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. Poetic art is how the small verse treatise that Horácio wrote as a letter to the Pisões brothers became known. It is Horace's longest poem, with almost five hundred verses. Starting from discussions about theater in general, interweaving discussions about problems of meters, characters and themes with passages of irony and poeticity, the poet created an amusing kind of treatise that for centuries has been considered a founding poem for other Western poetics, with a countless number of studies and translations. The translation by Guilherme Gontijo Flores recreates part of the old meter in its vocal character; however, it also shows the various moments of laughter and even satire that mark Horace's writing and make a radical contrast with traditional readings that saw the poem as a purely serious and almost academic expression. The challenge of this translation is to make Poetic Art a conversational poem, sometimes funny, without losing the complex debate about the literary adventure.