The Plagues of Egypt and the Hebrew Exodus without the letter 'f': translation of Book VI of the lipogram De aetatibus mundi et hominis by Fulgentius the Mythographer

Abstract

This is the first lipogrammatic translation and also the first to the Portuguese language of the sixth Book of De aetatibus mundi et hominis, which is considered the oldest lipogram that has come down to us. This work is attributed to Fabius Planciades Fulgentius, an African writer belonging to Late Antiquity, a period still few investigated in research developed in our language. De aetatibus is a theological work, presenting, in its 14 Books, what would be the ages of the world and of the human being from the Christian moral perspective of Fulgentius. It so happens that, in each section of this writing, the lipogrammer avoids the use of a certain letter, which was done from ‘a’ to ‘o’. In this sixth part, now translated, the Hebrew Exodus is described poetically without the use of lexical units containing the letter 'f', which was cultivated in the proposed target text, which started from the critical edition established by the Latinist philologist Rudolf Helm (FULGENTII, 1898).