An unhappy discovery in the past 20 minutes

[quislibet]

I suppose if I am going to do a dissertation on "representations of women in Tacitus" I will at some point need to come to terms with this.

I am sad.

(In case the link doesn't work from outside a server that subscribes to the UMI digital dissertations website, it's the abstract of a 985-page dissertation from just last year, in Spanish, on "Female archetypes in Tacitus' Annals." Nine hundred and eighty-five pages. In Spanish. Blah.)

Comments

[rojagato.livejournal.com]

How dare they steal your thesis and publish it before you, in a non-classical language, to boot! You should get your Spanish-speaking (or at least Spanish-reading) friends together to split the thing up and translate or annotate the margins ... if there's GOGA to be found, I'm sure you'll have volunteers.

985 pages in dissertation terms = 115 pages single-spaced, right?

[quislibet.livejournal.com]

Well, fortunately the Spanish dissertation is only on women in Tacitus' "Annals." Of course, it's his most important work and it's the one with all of the women in it, but still.

No GOGA, though, I'm afraid.

And we're still probably taking 350 words a page for those 985 pages. i

[rojagato.livejournal.com]

Hrm. You have at least three friends who can read Spanish. We could make a couple of evenings of it. It sounds like it could be fun, with the right plan of attack. (Mind you, I'm not envisioning a word-for-word translation--maybe just marking up the paper to make it easier to navigate.)

[quislibet.livejournal.com]

Hmm. That'd be cool. It will be a while, however, esp. as I'll have to order the thing from UMI. (Now at 985 pages, do I want to be cheap and have them send it to me electronically or unbound, or is the extra 10 or 15 bucks worth it to me to have it bound in softcover? Oh well. I'm probably not going to rush to do this...)

[damiel.livejournal.com]

It's comforting to know that, since GoGA is completely absent, there's at least some good old... Oh, wait. Those are two n's.

Nevermind. This reading sounds boring.

The nerve that some people have to write about Tacitus in a Romance language. I tell you. Might you give this a try, backed with your Latin, and fare better than with the Italian? Although I suspect Latin would've been more useful, if anything, with the latter.

But yeah, if you need help translating some passages, or like rojagato said navigating, do ask.

[quislibet.livejournal.com]

The last time I had to read Spanish -- a couple of weeks ago, a recent and brief article on pretty much the same toppic, actually -- it did go reasonably well with help from Latin and, dare I say it, occasional use of babelfish. Although what probably made the article particularly easy to read was that it consisted almost entirely of non-analytical summary of Tacitus with a few factual errors to make it interesting.

If I were lucky it'd be the same author and I'd know I could skip the dissertation.

Anyway, thanks for the offers of help -- I may well take you all up on it some time this summer.