Insula Thesauraria

Treasure Island in Latin should not work. And yet it does, magnificently. Acadius Avellanus, a Hungarian who spoke Latin as his first language and later tutored John D. Rockefeller's grandchildren, translated Stevenson's immortal adventure with the verve of a man writing in his native tongue. The result pulses with an energy that textbook Latin rarely achieves. Young Jim Hawkins still discovers the haunted captain's map in the old inn. Long John Silver still plots his betrayal. The treasure still waits on distant shores. But here the prose moves with classical precision and rough-hewn vigor, as if Latin had been waiting centuries for this particular story. This edition includes Avellanus's sixty-three-page Prooemium, a fiery polemic arguing that Latin belongs to the living, not to German philologists encased in academic amber. For intermediate Latin students, it is a rare thing: a story that teaches by seducing. For scholars of Neo-Latin, it is evidence that the language never truly died.