Nicola Gardini, Italian by birth and upbringing, now a professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Oxford, is here to share with us the joy he feels every time he reads one of Horace's odes or a few lines from a letter by Seneca—in the original, of course. And I, who have desultorily studied German, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek without retaining much about any of them, can feel the joy myself, due to the charm with which Gardini relates his own story and the clarity and enthusiasm with which he lovingly reviews the works of Cicero, Caesar, Virgil, Ovid, and other poets, philosophers, and historians of the classical era, giving each of these authors marks of distinctive character and highlighting their stylistic idiosyncrasies.
The book is a quick read, in part because it contains many long quotations in Latin—often half a page—which readers who don't know the language will have no choice but to skip; there is little point in scanning one's eyes across line after line of meaningless gibberish.
Anicetus villam statione circumdat refractaque ianua obvios servorum abripit, donee ad fores cubiculi veniret; cui pauci adstabant, ceteris terrore inrumpentium exterritis. Cubiculo modicum lumen inerat et ancillarum una, magis ac magis anxia Agrippina, quod nemo a filio ac ne Agermus quidem: aliam fore laetae rei faciem; nunc solitudinem ac repentinos strepitus et extremi mali indicia. Abeunte dehinc ancilla, “tu quoque me deseris?”
Of course, each such passage is followed by an English translation, and these are often interesting, though being in a different language, they don't possess the same stylistic nuances as the Latin, and Gardini's attempts to convince us of their wondrous literary merit will fall mostly on deaf ears. It would have been helpful for him to provide at least a primer of how Latin is pronounced, perhaps in an appendix. (Maybe no one really knows?!?) Lacking such a tool, we're at the mercy of his judgment, and there are one or two places where his praise of these illustrious Roman authors seems slightly misplaced.
Two examples, from opposite ends of the literary spectrum, spring to mind. On the one hand, Gardini idolizes Cicero, rhapsodizing that in the end, he "came to represent a model human being: a model of political and moral dedication, an unrivaled example of the power of words, a hero and a martyr of democratic freedom...who still today has the power to stir our emotions."
Even in this short passage, it's clear that Gardini is conflating three distinct aspects of Cicero's contribution the Roman history: his literary style, the import of his writings, and his statesmanship. My dim recollections from college of Cicero's role in Roman political life conjure a highly vain individual who articulated a lofty deal of how government might best function, though his own checkered political career had plenty of highs and lows.
Then again, Gardini raves about the poetry of Catullus, but the reasons he gives for that assessment aren't convincing. Perhaps you have to know the Latin, though I doubt it; Gardini devotes an entire chapter to a detailed explication of Catullus's sexual terminology, word by word. Here is a translation of one of the satirist's less scabrous pieces.
If not by all that his friends boast,
at least by pin-headed Otto’s unattractive pate
by loutish Erius’s half-washed legs
by Libo’s smooth & judicious farts
by Sufficio’s old man’s lust turned green
may great Caesar be duly revolted. Once more
my naive iambics strike home . . .
unique general
I suppose one might applaud the down-to-earth freshness of such a lyric, but you can find that same quality in the satires of Horace, put to the service of a far more mature and wide-ranging vision. Gardini knows this, of course, which explains why he reserves his highly appreciative treatment of Horace for the last part of the book. Before arriving there, he devotes chapters to Petronius, Augustine, Propertius, and others, each of whom, he suggests, brought new elements to the language, and hence to the vocabulary of our "modern" understanding of things.
Of Horace, Gardini writes:
Ancient and profoundly classical, Horace feels contemporary in every age. His voice emanates from afar, and yet it reaches us with impressive clarity, inviting dialogue. Every century has sent him its share of fan mail. At the dawn of humanism, Petrarch wrote him a letter brimming with admiration {Familiares, XXIV. 10), perhaps the most beautiful of those he sent to the ancient authors, focusing on his lyrical output ... Still more letters were dispatched from the twentieth century. Primo Levi, reflecting on modernity’s presumed achievements, felt the need to evoke Horace’s name; and the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky ... used him to take the pulse of modern poetry.
Long Live Latin offers us a friendly and erudite overview of the field, free of academic nit-picking and riddled with personal asides that allow Gardini's genuine love of both the language and the literature to shine through. Readers new to the field may well be entranced, while others who, like me, read and somewhat enjoyed Virgil, Ovid, or Tacitus in translation years ago, will appreciate the refresher course, and just might be inspired to take another look at the originals--in translation, of course.
Still the question remains: how does Latin sound? Are there diphthongs? Silent letters? Is the "g" hard or soft? I occasionally have a pertinent quip at the tip of my tongue but hold back, not sure how to say it: manus lavum manum; omni ignatus magnificat est; veni, vidi, vici; delendo est Carthago...
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