Merton Classicist is double winner

Daniel Schwennicke, a second year undergraduate reading Classics at Merton, has been awarded the 2014 Chancellor’s Latin Prizes for both prose and verse. Daniel - who had already won last year's faculty Declamation Competition for Latin recitation - attributed his achievement to the excellent teaching he has had over the last two years. He says:

"Both Latin prose and Latin verse composition are exercises that I had not encountered before coming to Oxford, and it is thanks to the excellent teaching outside of college (with Beppe Pezzini and Armand D’Angour) for verse and with Merton's own John Eidinow for prose that I was able to achieve this success."

Daniel explained what the competition involved:

"The passage for this year's verse was William Cowper's Poplar Field, which I translated into Latin hexameters in the spirit of Virgil's Eclogues. For me the challenge was twofold: on the one hand, I had to come to terms with writing Latin poetry in the tremendous wake of the golden age of Latin pastoral poetry; on the other hand, I had to both engage with the stanzaic structure and relate to the spirit of the original eighteenth century poem which is about how the mutability of the natural world provides a mirror of, or a foil for, the evanescence of the human condition.

"For the prose I translated a rather self-ironically chosen passage from Cardinal Newman's The Idea of A University about the inadequacy of the education provided by the collegiate university. The trick here was to find suitable ancient comparanda and a smooth Ciceronian flow in the periods."

Since his double success, Daniel has added further to his tally: last Wednesday, 28 May, he won this year's Classics Faculty Latin reading competition.