From Prose to Poetry – Lessons from Translating a Prose Source (György Pray: Poema de institutione ac venatu falconum libris quattuor comprehensum)

Abstract

György Pray has provided footnotes for his didactic poem on falconry, Poema de institutione ac venatu falconum libris quattuor comprehensum. The footnote in the fourth book, marked (k), differs from the others in that the author not only refers to his source, but also quotes verbatim from Aldrovandus's Ornithology, his source. A comparison of the main text and the footnote gives us an idea of the way in which Pray, trained in ancient poetry in the context of the Jesuit repetens teaching, transforms the prose text into hexameters. An in-depth study of the text has been carried out using ancient and late antique texts from the Bibliotheca Teubneriana database.