david kovacs is as much a joker as he is learned. hm. that looks like it could be put in latin easily. he gave us a mystery poem in elegiac couplets, in the form of an academic article he wrote, as a competition. ($20 cash prize, not tradable for an increase in final grade, to the first student who correctly identifies the source.) the poem purports to be a fragment of the 12th book of ovid's fasti; although a definite forgery, nothing un-ovidian is apparent in either the style, vocabulary or prosody. kovacs appealed to the learned readers of the journal for help in locating the source of the narrative. thus stands the background. what this mystery poem will turn out to be, once the class got down to translating it, is "the night before christmas". kovacs had written this many years ago, and, posing as the author of the article, sent it off to a classics journal. if one read german, it seems, he wouldn't have needed to look at the latin text, for kovacs had left plenty of clues that this was a joke. the very first footnote attributed the discovery of this fragment by a certain max schnell (hurry up), in the journal sitzungsb. akad. gelehr. albernh. (journal for scholarship in foolishness). it is terribly funny and his version is very clever. and the editors of the journal thought so too and published it for a lark. isn't that great? he thought it proved that elegant latin poetry can still be written today about modern matters. now we all think so too!