An early scene in Evelyn Waugh's novel _Scoop_ has eight-year-old Josephine construing her day's passage of Virgil. "'Floribus Austrum,' Josephine chanted, 'perditus et liquidis immisi fontibus apros; having been lost with flowers in the South and sent into the liquid fountains; apros is wild boars but I couldn't quite make sense of that bit.'" That is all we are told of her efforts.
I'm trying to figure out how this paragraph relates to other things happening in the scene and the novel. One (if not both) of my questions is likely to seem terribly elementary to many list subscribers, so I start by thanking you in advance for your patience and explaining that the fifteen years of accumulated rust since I took the intensive Latin course at CUNY have made me as bad as Josephine at construing passages of Virgil. My first question (in two parts) is what the passage says and what Josephine does to it; the second question is whether anyone knows where the passage appears in Virgil. With Gratitude, David Adams [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
