New literal translation now available 📖

Fab­u­la de Cor­ne­lio Lentu­lo got an update today and you can now use the Eng­lish trans­la­tion. Sim­ply down­load or open the book here.

One more gen­er­al note on trans­la­tions: You will some­times see a Latin present-tense verb, like dīc­it (“he/she says”), trans­lat­ed into the Eng­lish past tense as “he/she said.” This is not a mis­take but a stan­dard way of han­dling a Latin lit­er­ary device called the “his­tor­i­cal present.”

Roman authors used this tech­nique to make their sto­ries about the past feel more vivid and dra­mat­ic, drop­ping the read­er right into the mid­dle of the action. While this is pow­er­ful in Latin, a lit­er­al present-tense trans­la­tion sounds awk­ward in for­mal Eng­lish, so we use the past tense to keep the nar­ra­tive flow­ing nat­u­ral­ly.

You can spot the his­tor­i­cal present when you see a present-tense verb sud­den­ly appear in a sto­ry that is clear­ly set in the past, often sur­round­ed by past-tense verbs. It’s a styl­is­tic choice to make a sequence of events more excit­ing.

I wish you a great start to the new week!