Living with a Dead Language

by Ann Patty

  After learning each of our names, Matthew asked each of us a question or two in Latin, and we responded falteringly.

  My turn came when Matthew asked, Nonne cordi est musica tibi? (Don’t you like music?) His question contained several Latin idiosyncrasies: the dative of possession as well as another roundabout Latin locution to express “like”—there is no word for “like” in Latin; there is love, but to signal that you enjoy something you say cordi est mihi (it is to my heart—dative of possession again) or mihi placet (it is pleasing to me).

  I thought some questions deserved a simple yes or no answer, so I asked him how to say yes in Latin. But, alas, there is no word for yes in Latin. One might say ita, which means “the same,” or sic (thus) or sane (indeed, of course, to be sure) or oppido (exactly, very much) or certe (certainly) or even est (it is). The best way to answer in the affirmative is simply to repeat the question without the prefixes nonne, num, or the suffix ne, all of which signal a question.

  And it gets even worse. Nonne, a double negative, expects a yes answer, while num, which seems more indifferent, expects a no. And there is no single word in Latin for no either. One might say minime (leastly), nullus (none), haud (not at all), or non est (it is not). Non means not in Latin, it does not mean no. And while I’m at it, there is no independent word for hello: Salve, which is the greeting for hello, means “be in good health.” And vale, which is used for good-bye, means “be strong.” Ave, which translates as hail! or farewell! does double duty, though it is used only as a morning greeting or as a farewell to the dead; vale is used as an evening farewell. What is the mind-set of a culture that has no simple yes and no, hello or good-bye? Would I ever be able to understand it?

  I had asked Curtis, over our end-of-the-year lunch, at what point in his studies Latin had sunk deeply enough into his brain so he could think in Latin, as, after twelve years of study, I could think, albeit in fragments, in French. He took some time, then chuckled. “I’m not sure it has yet.”

  After about a half hour of questions and answers in Latin (with brief interruptions for the explanations above), Matthew returned to English. “I like to teach Latin more as one would teach a modern language,” he told us. We had already learned, from our Latin getting-to-know-you, that he was English, had never before been to the United States, loved music, and planned to join the Vassar College Choir (he was a tenor). His favorite color was purple (purpurus). “I want to give you a more organic way of understanding the language,” he told us. “After all, there’s absolutely no good reason for any of us to be doing this, so I will try hard to make it fun. And I hope you will find Catullus fun,” he added as he handed out the course syllabus, which included the warning: “Some of our poems contain lewd language and sexually explicit subjects. If that will be offensive to you, please talk to me.” Well, this was news!

  As the class bell rang, he assigned us to read Catullus V, one of the most famous of Catullus’ poems, which we had (luckily) translated at the end of the previous year. Unfortunately, I had failed to save the long-labored-over translation I had written out, but having once translated the poem helped nevertheless. As we exited the classroom, no one spoke to anyone else. The spirit of camaraderie and fun was so far absent in this group. I couldn’t help but wonder if my presence made them more taciturn.

  I loved the poem and came to class two days later feeling I had gotten a good grip on it. It was all about living and loving now, before our brief light sets, and kisses, hundreds and thousands of kisses, then more and more. Matthew didn’t go over every line of the translation but asked if we had any questions about the words or cases. We did: nox est perpetua una dormienda, which led to a long review of the passive periphrastic (est dormienda), which, you may remember, expresses necessity. Last year’s final bête noire became this year’s first. The line’s literal translation is “one perpetual night must be slept,” or, in the American vernacular, “when you’re dead you’re dead forever.”

  At the end of class Matthew gave us another handout: “Latin Rhythm and Meter.” This was a topic, doled out over two chapters in last year’s text, that Curtis had skipped entirely. Reading through the handout, I understood why.

  The Romans considered poetry to be a form of music, and rhythm was paramount. Latin poetry appropriated Greek forms and scansion. Prosody was fungible. Unlike English meter, which is composed of accented and unaccented syllables, all Latin meters are quantitative, and composed of patterns of short and long vowels. A long vowel is either long by nature (e.g., the first-declension ablative a is always long, the nominative a always short, and all diphthongs are long) or by position (because it is followed by two or more consonants). There were, of course, exceptions to the long vowel rule—the most confusing of which: a mute (b, p, d, t, g, c) consonant followed by a liquid (l, m, n, r) consonant does not count as two consonants. And worse still was this note that followed the mute/liquid exception: “There are other exceptions to the rule which are too complicated to go into here!”

  In hendecasyllabic meter, used by Catullus in most of the poems we studied (in Greek, hendeca means “eleven”), the meter is expressed like this:

  ūū |—u u |—u |—u |—u

  with u representing a short vowel and — a long vowel.

  Last year’s text and workbook had macrons (long marks over the vowel) marking all long vowels in each word. Unfortunately, these helpful marks wouldn’t be seen again in any of our texts. They are learning tools only for beginners, and we were now considered intermediate Latinists.

  This year, Matthew told us, we would read everything out loud. He wanted us to hear the poetry, as well as see it. And the one thing about Latin that is completely straightforward and unambiguous is its pronunciation. Each vowel has only two possible pronunciations (long or short), each diphthong and consonant only one. (G’s and c’s are always hard in classical Latin, though in Church Latin they are soft before e and i as they are in English. We know this because scholars were able to glean the pronunciation from various writings too complex for me to understand, much less explain.) Compare Latin pronunciation to English, which has abundant possibilities: for example, the English “ough” can be pronounced in ten different ways: rough, cough, drought, though, bought, slough, through, hiccough, hough, lough. In fact, Matthew told us, the odds of correctly guessing the pronunciation of a complex English word are around 26/1, whereas in Latin they are 1/1.

  Did that make scanning a poem easier? Not by much. Latin poetry also included elisions when a word ending in a vowel or diphthong is followed by a word beginning with a vowel or diphthong, or an h, or when a word ending in a vowel and m is followed by a word beginning in h. We spent the entire hour trying to scan Catullus V. It wasn’t so easy to differentiate long and short vowels. The text Matthew had assigned was a diminutive 3x5-inch clothbound 1970 edition by the renowned Catullan scholar Kenneth Quinn. It was my introduction to the nature of Latin textbooks: 87 pages of poems in Latin, 369 pages of commentary in English. And all in 8-point type, too minuscule for my aged eyes. I had already upped my reading glasses from 225 to 250 and didn’t think they went any higher without a prescription. Would I have to study with a magnifying glass? Luckily, I discovered that the Internet offered riches: I could download the Catullus poems in Latin, double-space them, increase the font to 14 point, and go to town.

  Monday’s assignment was to memorize Catullus V for the next class, which was, alas, only three days away. I hadn’t memorized a poem in forty years. And now a poem in Latin! It was both exciting and terrifying. “This will plant hendecasyllabic meter forever in your brain,” Matthew told us. “And on your deathbed, when you can’t read anymore, and you’re bored, you’ll be able to recite this poem to yourself, and make yourself happy.”

  I drove home trying to repeat the first line in rhythm to myself: Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus. (Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love.) Was memorizing Latin poetry a life? Was it c
onducive to happiness? Was this enterprise insane?

  That Sunday I drove with my friends Harlan, Jeanne, and Margaret to hear Margaret’s daughter Manon give a piano recital in Great Barrington, a two-hour drive from home. Harlan, a connoisseur of old Mercedes, was the driver; his wife, Jeanne, rode shotgun; and Margaret and I sat in the backseat, which felt more like a comfortable couch than a car seat. I had brought along Catullus V, printed out, double-spaced, and in 14-point type with the scansion marks above each word. While Harlan and Jeanne and Margaret chatted, I memorized. Finally, halfway to Massachusetts, I began to recite the poem.

  Harlan stopped me after line seven. “No more Latin,” he declared.

  “But I can’t get the syncopation in the meter,” I moaned. “I’ll never get it unless I repeat it out loud, and class is tomorrow!”

  Margaret, a composer and musician, took the page from me. “Here’s what you do,” she said, “clap it out, that’s the best way to get the syncopation.” She was kind enough to clap out the hendecasyllabic meter with me, and we clapped together, the same pattern over and over (though we substituted stress for length on the syllables) until we were silenced. “ENOUGH!” Harlan shouted, “or you’ll have to walk in meter the rest of the way!”

  I tapped out the meter with my right foot as I drove on cruise control to Poughkeepsie the next morning. It was a difficult syncopation, but finally I had it. I was thrilled to have memorized Catullus V. I knew if I wanted to keep it in memory, I needed to constantly repeat it aloud, and over the next few weeks, like a proud child with an esoteric piece of knowledge, I would recite it to anyone who would listen. Alas, few would. I seldom made it past the fourth line before I was told, “ENOUGH!” This was, as my friend Stephanie had earlier warned, a private passion, even though Catullus V was a classic love poem in every sense of the word.

  On Monday, I arrived at class ready to stand up and recite. Much to my disappointment, Matthew never asked us to do so. Instead he presented all the Catullan nouns for kisses (in order of increasing passion: basiationes, basium, osculum, suavium—the first a “little kissification,” a locution invented by Catullus himself). By the time we had studied four other Lesbia poems, and witnessed Catullus both passionately enamored and abjectly brokenhearted, we had thoroughly studied the verb “to kiss”: basio, basiare, basiavi, basiatum, in all its tenses and moods. Lesbia basianda est! (Lesbia must be kissed!) is a passive periphrastic. Who could imagine kissing could be used to review verb forms?

  Before we proceeded with more Catullus, Matthew spent a week on Catullus’ precursors, the most interesting of which, for me, was Laevius—even his cognomen remains unknown. It is believed he composed an erotopaegnia—a collection of playful erotic poems. He was also fond of making neologisms: His signal accomplishment, to my mind, was the sesquipedalian, twenty-six-letter subductisupercilicarptores, which translates as “disapproves with lifted brows” and beats out circumnavigaveramusne by five letters!

  The following week we translated Catullus I, the dedication poem, and the famous passer poems, Catullus II and III, all about Lesbia’s pet passer (sparrow). There has been much scholarly disagreement about the true meaning of these poems. In the Renaissance, a scholar named Poliziano put forward the theory that this little bird that frolics on Catullus’ beloved Lesbia’s lap and calms her deep passion (gravis ardor) is a sly metaphor for the male member—sparrows being more than uncommon house pets, and the word “sparrow” in Greek being slang for penis. His theory is buttressed by the last two lines: tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem / et tristis animi levare curas! (if only I could play with you as she does, and calm the sad cares of my mind), and by a poem, written by Martial a century and a half later, about his slave boy Stella, “My Stella’s pet Dove . . . has surpassed Catullus’ sparrow. My Stella is greater than your Catullus by as much as a dove is greater than a sparrow.” And in another poem, “Give me kisses, Catullan kisses. If they shall be as many as he said, I will give you Catullus’ Sparrow.”

  In Poliziano’s reading, Catullus II is a complaint that masturbation cannot satisfy Catullus the way Lesbia does, and Catullus III, a lament that his member has failed him, and Lesbia is in a weeping tizzy about it.

  The theory went out of favor for centuries, until it was revived in the libertine 1970s and began raging anew, producing dozens of scholarly articles. In our class discussion of the sparrow poems, I was the only one to come down decisively in favor of the penis interpretation. “It’s sure a lot more fun. And that it’s not a pure one-to-one correspondence makes it sly and witty fun,” I said. In a moment, I felt my young classmates’ eyes turn to me. Perhaps it had dawned on them at last that rather than a senex severa (a stern elder, such as was featured in Catullus V), I was an emissary from the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies. It seemed, indeed, that we elders, Matthew and I, might be the only lively persons in the class!

  That evening I was inspired. George and I had been in one of those arid troughs filled with criticism and alienation. I began telling him about Catullus II and the sparrow, whom Lesbia pokes provocatively, and holds to her breast, and knows so intimately. I read the poem aloud in Latin, then translated it for him. Though he loved it when I read him poetry, he’d endured plenty of my set-piece narratives about Latin, and I could tell this rendition was not winning the forgiveness for last night’s outburst I was seeking. Finally I told him, “The interesting thing is, lots of people think the sparrow is a metaphor for the penis.” There followed one of our most lively discussions ever about a poem. Catullus and his passer, qualecumque (such as it is)—a word from Catullus I—led us into a night of delectatio amoris, and luckily I never got the chance to tell him about the lament of Catullus III.

  As we proceeded through the poems, I saw more and more similarities between Catullus’ Rome and the literary New York of which I was a denizen for so many years. Both strove to embody the same qualities listed in another handout Matthew distributed titled “Catullan Buzzwords”: venustus (charming, pleasing, of Venus), bellus (pretty, handsome, gallant), lepidus (agreeable, fine, elegant), facetus (witty, elegant, fine), iucundus (delightful, pleasing, jocund), suavis (suave, elegant). As far as I can tell, the above all mean pretty much the same thing. Upping the ante are salsus (salty, flavorful), dicax (articulate, witty, sarcastic), and urbanus (sophisticated, urbane). Urbanus, of course, comes from urbs, the city, host of most things Catullan. Catullus’ urban poems are filled with friends, parties, poetic rivalries, learned conversation, gossip, and romantic (especially sexual) adventure.

  His poems are those of a young man; wisdom (sapientia, prudentia) was not included among Catullan buzzwords. He died young, probably just before he turned thirty, in 54 B.C. One hundred sixteen of his poems survive him.

  Though I continued to deface my old Quinn text with penciled-in translations, I now mostly translated from another volume my friend Lilla had given me. She and her husband, Hank, and George and I had spent a week on Nantucket the previous spring, and she was so impressed with the hours I’d spent translating workbook sentences that she felt I deserved her long-cherished hardbound volume of the poems of Catullus, copyright 1931. It featured the Latin text of the poem (in 12-point type!) on the recto, with Horace Gregory’s English translation on the verso. Each poem was laid out easy on the eyes. It had no notes at the back but was illustrated with elegant pen-and-ink drawings by Zhenya Gay.

  I have known Lilla for over thirty years. I worked for her husband, Maurice Girodias, a truly Catullun charmer, on and off for the first eighteen months I lived in New York, in 1975–76. Though we never published a book during my tenure, and moved from office to office around the not-then-chic Flatiron district, always one step away from eviction for nonpayment of rent, it was the most fun job of my life. Girodias was the founder of the Olympia Press in Paris, known to be both literary and licentious: He was the first to publish Lolita, Henry Miller, J. P. Donleavy, Samuel Beckett, and other luminar
ies. He also published pornography—most notably the Traveller’s Companion series printed in English for American GIs at the end of World War II. They were small, elegant hardcovers, discreet, appealing packages for pure smut, known among the cognoscenti as DBs (Dirty Books).

  The series featured such titles as Forever Ecstasy by Tor Kung, A Bedside Odyssey by Homer & Associates, and The Whip Angels by XXX. Most of the authors were pseudonyms (my favorite: Akbar del Piombo) for serious writers who needed a quick buck. Problem was, Maurice was a lousy businessman, always broke, and paying authors’ royalties was not high on his list of priorities. He lost Olympia Press to J. P. Donleavy, who successfully sued for unpaid royalties on The Ginger Man.

  I found it surprising that Lilla’s Catullus volume included the notoriously lewd XVI, though translated with the decorum of the era. Many editions to this day omit the first two lines entirely. The poem begins Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo / Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi, which literally translated means “I will sodomize you and face-fuck you, bottom Aurelius and catamite Furius.” In Lilla’s edition, Gregory translates the lines, “I’ll work your own perversions upon you and your persons.” Many scholars leave this, and a few other downright lewd poems, out of their volumes. I suspect my mother never studied Catullus. I can’t imagine the Church allowing such poetry to pervert their youth. Even as recently as 2009, during an interview with the well-known contemporary classicist Mary Beard, NPR bleeped out the lines, both in Latin and in English translation.

  After Maurice had been banned from publishing in France for ninety-nine years, he moved to New York City and started Freeway Press on some millionaire’s investment. Freeway’s only claim to fame was Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto (published not long before she shot Andy Warhol) and cut-and-paste jobs about Muhammad Ali and Henry Kissinger by Bockris-Wylie, the latter of whom, Andrew Wylie, would later become the brilliant literary agent known as “the Jackal.”