Remedia Amoris (Love’s Remedy or The Cure for Love) is a 814 line poem in Latin by the Roman poet Ovid written around 5 BC. The aim of the poem is to teach young men how they can avoid idealizing the women they love and to give assistance if love brings despair and misfortune.
I discovered this poem when I was researching antique stained glass sundials and I came to the initial conclusion that Ovid’s prose is visually interpreted on Blaeu’s world map from the mid-1600s (detail above). Late last night I found both the latin and translated version of the poem, so I decided to do something I wish there was more of on the internet: a side by side layout which shows the original Latin on the left and the translated English on the right.
To add a unique visual element to the poem, I made the line number (which came from the Latin text) the color of the English translation. This involved quite a bit of manual coding, but I think it makes the latin / english comparison easier and slightly more visually engaging. By using red & white type face and numerical indention, the layout looks like a creve coeur or broken heart when scrolling. I bolded one section for emphasis related it’s discovery [hint: around line #185].
There are a few translation discrepancies that I’ve found thus far and there are many others which come across slightly convoluted and require more inquiry, but overall the poem is quite interesting. It includes topics like tree grafting (Genetic Engineering Version 1.0), having multiple lovers, travelling, and what to do and not to do when getting over a relationship. It’s interesting how much things have changed in the last 2,000 years, and as cliche as it may sound, how much our emotions have stayed the same. We all face the same relationship troubles and like Ovid, there will always be people telling you how to deal with them.
If you’ve got about 45 minutes to spare, here is Ovid’s Remedia Amoris / The Cure For Love:
(You might need to widen your browser window to view the on-line polyglot correctly — it was originally design for a previous layout on this website. Drag the lower right hand corner to make the screen wider. Some browsers you can adjust the font size to achieve a similar result.)
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ABSOLUT STATEHOOD
|| 4/8/2008 || 4:52 pm || Comments Off on ABSOLUT STATEHOOD || ||
Screen grab links to .kmz file for Google Earth
A geovisual response to an LA Times blog entry showing mostly isolationist responses to an alternative history map of North America by Absolut Vodka.
This interactive map for Google Earth shows the familiar Absolut Vodka bottle labeled “Absolut Statehood” and placed inside of the original boundaries of the District of Columbia. These boundaries existed until 1847 after the residents of Virginia voted to cede back the portion of the District of Columbia that was west of the Potomac River.
Absolut Statehood represents the cartographic notion that the nation’s capital can become America’s 51st state*. Today there are over 550,000 American citizens living in the nation’s capital that are being denied the fundamental right of representation in Congress. This ongoing human rights violation currently practiced by the government of the United States has been denounced by the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The United States is the only country in the industrialized world that forbids the residents of it’s capital city the right to elect representatives to their national legislature.
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