One Thousand and One Nights - Intermediate Arabic

One Thousand and One Nights - Intermediate Arabic

*Please note that this course will run only if two or more students enroll. 

Course Description: Poems are meant to be read aloud. At least, this was a given in Antiquity: often, they were or music themselves or accompanied by music. Yet, today, many people (from university students to teachers) are feeling uncomfortable to do this, either being unfamiliar with metre at all, or, although knowing how scansion works, are not sure how it is to be actually read. Doing so, you concentrate mainly on the poem’s contents and its rhetoric, but you miss a great deal of the poet’s artwork: its outer form, its sound, its music, which, very often, is employed skillfully to underline the meaning. Apart from that, knowing metre helps a lot in understanding the grammar of a poem (e.g. when you have to decide which words belong together based on its quantities), and appreciate also prose rhythm as adhibited by authors like Cicero or Seneca.

We will start from an introduction into prosody (pronunciation, accent, vowel and syllable quantities etc.), passing on to some selected metres of Classical Roman poetry as e.g. Hexameter, Elegiacs, Iambic Trimeter and Lyrical verses. All of this will always be in line with the skills and wishes of the students, and the atmosphere will be chilled!

DETAILS

Level: “This course is meant for students who have completed the Telepaideia Consolidation Level. A knowledge of the present and past conjugations, of verb forms I through VI, and a strong foundation in core vocabulary are necessary to follow this course.

Textbook: Instructor will provide materials

Sections capped at: 5 students. If the course is sold-out, please fill out this waiting-list form.

When
Fridays, 10:30a.m.

Cost
$375

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Instructor

Roberto Salazar

Roberto Salazar is an experienced polyglot language coach and nomadic classicist, with a passion for teaching Latin and Greek as spoken languages, and an impossible desire to speak all tongues imaginable, and to teach them to those who want to learn them.

He has taught Latin, Greek, Arabic, German and more in different places around the world, including various Paideia programs, online and on site. A former fellow of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris, where he studied Classics and Philosophy, he's currently writing a PhD dissertation on the reception of Greek tragedy in the Arab World, Modern Greece and Latin America. He has also done research on European Classical Reception and Neo-Latin.

He has published fiction translations into French and Spanish from various languages including Swedish. In 2017, he was the head literary curator for the French-Colombian Year.

That's probably why he's still scrambling to complete his PhD at the University of Versailles.

He currently lives between Athens, Cairo and Saint Denis, France.