My research focuses on the Astronautilia, an epic poem of 6,600 lines written in Homeric Greek and derived from the Odyssey, but in content science-fiction, space travel, and quantum physics. Composed in the 1990s by the Czech polymath Jan Křesadlo, the poem was published like a Loeb, with his Ancient Greek on the left page and Czech translation on the right. It has been almost totally unknown to scholarship since publication.
I have so far studied primarily the poem's literary debt to Homer, which I will extend to authors and texts such as Hesiod, Apollonius, Aratus, Lucian, and the Batrachomyomachia. I plan to examine Křesadlo's linguistic innovations of Epic Greek more closely, including its neologisms and novel Homeric formulae.
Throughout my MPhil I will be learning Czech to read that second version of the poem, as well as Křesadlo's broader literary corpus. I am also producing the Astronautilia's first English translation, which I am writing in dactylic hexameter and straight from the Greek, as was Křesadlo's intention.
Beyond this, I have research interests in Homer and the early Greek hexameter tradition; Golden Age Latin; textual criticism of literary authors, particularly Catullus; Greek mathematics, particularly Euclid's Elements and its own textual tradition; conlangs and/or classical linguistics; and reception more broadly.
