Nathaniel Hess. Banner for Nathaniel Hess vertical bar The Invention of Verse Translation in the Latin Renaissance

Nathaniel Hess | The Invention of Verse Translation in the Latin Renaissance

by Program in Translation and Intercultural Communications

Lecture Humanities

Tue, Mar 24, 2026

12 PM – 1:20 PM EDT (GMT-4)

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Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room 144

Princeton, NJ 08544, United States

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Nathaniel Hess. Flyer for Nathaniel Hess vertical bar The Invention of Verse Translation in the Latin Renaissance
When the humanists of the 15th and 16th centuries began to make translations of Greek verse, they found, in this long-untilled field, an open site of contestation. Should it be an exercise for poets and students of rhetoric? A marketable resource for learners of Greek? A genre of scholarship aimed at exact information transfer? Looking at some of the audiences and motivations for verse translation, this paper explores the genesis, development, and decline of an extraordinary attempt to resolve the problem, establishing a demanding and sometimes absurdly finickety principle of correspondence. The evolution of the genre is traced through figures such as Angelo Poliziano, Erasmus, Henri Estienne, and Joseph Scaliger, and through its transformation in the 17th century it is argued that the movement has had a lasting effect on the history of translation.
Food Provided (Lunch Provided)

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Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room 144

Princeton, NJ 08544, United States

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Nathaniel Hess

British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Warburg Institute

Nathaniel Hess is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Warburg Institute in London, pursuing a project on the Latin and Greek poetry of the Catholic Reformation. For the first decade of his adult life he was based at the University of Cambridge, where he read Classics and ultimately received a doctorate for his thesis on Greek-to-Latin verse translation in the Renaissance. Since then he has held fellowships at the LBI in Innsbruck, at BYU, and at KU Leuven, as well as a Frances Yates fellowship at the Warburg. He has several published and forthcoming articles on Neo-Latin poetry and translation history, and is working to complete a book on the subject, with the provisional title "Anxious interpretation: Renaissance humanism and the invention of verse translation". He dabbles in Renaissance cooking and the composition of Latin verse.


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