To buy a copy of Et Oritur Sōl, click here.

¶ This translation seems so un-Latin. The sentences are short and repetitive. There is little or no variety in their structure, and such niceties as ablative absolutes and inverted word order are rare. The Latin you will read, compared to the output of the Ciceronian acrobats of the past, seems dull and flat. The Latin is, in brief, Hemingway-esque. ¶ Ernest Hemingway’s short, solid sentences and the paragraphs he constructs have an almost cubist feel to them. He treats words and phrases as if they were facets in a complex image. He segments and disrupts the action, forcing the reader to react to what he has written as an observer might react to a painting by Picasso or Braque: eyes darting back and forth across the canvas to make sense of the whole. And what is the whole? A book without a climax, a diary of what happened to his fictional characters in the year 1925, a rebuke, I think, of narrative techniques where urgent page-turning is a virtue. ¶ All this sounds like a critique, but it is not. It is a way to justify what I have done in Latin. The Sun Also Rises is a work of art. To make it glisten in Latin with ablative absolutes and clever word order might elevate the style, but it would damage it beyond recognition. Cicero may not, were he alive today, approve of my translation, but like the readers a hundred years ago, he would be offered something fresh and original—a new kind of storytelling.