Living with a Dead Language

by Ann Patty

  “I always loved difficult languages,” Daniel told me, “so I majored in Chinese and Russian. I finished in 1968, just when diplomatic relations were being reestablished with China, and, as you might imagine, there weren’t many Aussies who spoke Chinese so I become a diplomat.” After eight years in China he went back for his doctorate and then divided his life between diplomatic duties and teaching Chinese at Sydney University. He was now retired, widowed, and had a brain, like mine, that needed feeding.

  Back at the manse, I fell into sleep immediately.

  I was awakened at dawn, this time by the sweet singing of birds, two answering each other in the longest, most musical birdsong I’d ever heard, and in the background, a call that sounded like human laughter (which George would later recognize as a laughing gull). After that melodious awakening, I easily fell back to sleep and didn’t awaken again until noon, thus missing Paideia’s visit to the Aventine Hill and the Knights of Malta Priory.

  I walked down to the splendid Academy building for lunch, a copious vegetarian buffet prepared by graduates of Alice Waters’ Sustainable Food Project. The lunch line formed against the back wall of the courtyard, which featured inscriptions, most broken and partial, a few complete, plastered into the wall. As I waited, I tried to decipher:

  D M

  AELIA.MARINA

  SEBIBA.FECIT.AURELIO.

  BASSO.CONUIGI.B.M.

  ET.FILIS SUIS

  LIBERTIS.LIBERTABUS

  QUE.POSTERIS

  QUE.EORUM

  I was troubled not only by Sebiba, which didn’t seem like a name, but also by the libertabus, which would be dative or ablative plural, but what did that mean? From Bert Lott’s class, only six months ago, I knew a freed slave was libertus, liberti, a second-declension noun back-formed from the adjective liber. A freed female slave was liberta, libertae, a first-declension noun—so where did the third-declension inflection -abus come from? And wasn’t it unusual for a woman to have created a memorial? I needed a Latinist much better than I to sort out this one.

  The woman in line behind me noticed my study and asked, “Are you a classicist?”

  “I’ve been studying, auditing classes, for the past four years, and writing a book about it,” I told her. “And you?”

  “Yes, I’m a classicist here studying,” she said tersely. She was a Miss Grundy type, my age, I suspect, but with the stereotypical dowdy aspect of a true scholar. She had probably already clocked me as a dilettante. Before I asked for her help, I figured I’d better embellish my credentials. I said, “I’m here with Paideia Institute. Have you heard of them?”

  “Oh yes,” she said, mouth in a grimace.

  “Did you ever take a class with Reginald Foster?”

  “Oh, no,” voice dismissive, “he’s not universally admired. Many think his method too much disregarded the literature.”

  That surprised me. I had heard nothing but the greatest praise of Reginald Foster, but here was an old-style academic who probably believed the point of language acquisition was to facilitate literary analysis.

  A few days later, while touring the library, I saw her ensconced in a carrel down in the bowels of the building, where the raw materials of researchers lived. Books were piled like a fortress around her computer. She was the sort of scholar Jason did not want to be, and she was holding firm against the Reginaldian approach he had embraced.

  I had to wait until I returned from Rome and could seek Curtis’ and Bert’s help to sort out the inscription, which, properly translated, was:

  To the Gods of the Shades

  Aelia Marina

  while she was still alive made this

  for Aurelius Bassus

  her most deserving husband

  and for their children

  and for their freedmen and freedwomen

  and for their descendants.

  It turned out Sebiba was an error in inscription, which should have read se viva (herself living)—a common formula for making a tomb for yourself. The libertabus was also standard for inscriptions, the abus added in the dative and ablative plural to distinguish the feminine form from the masculine, freedwomen from freedmen. Not unlike the backwards C.

  Errors in insciption were, of course, common and usually uncorrectable. Marble was expensive, even then, as was the fee for the inscriber, some of whom were a lot better than others.

  This also explains the widespread use of abbreviations in inscriptions, a necessary money-saving shortcut, just as the compactness of the Latin language may be explained by the writing materials available at the time. Most common were wooden tablets covered with wax. A stylus, sharpened on one end for writing, flattened on the other for smoothing mistakes, inscribed the letters in the wax, and the entire tablet could be remelted and then reused.

  I suspect there would be much less insanabile cacoethes scribendi in our own time were writing materials so expensive and the act of writing itself so time-consuming.

  I had been to Rome only once before, for three days on my honeymoon with the Ablative Absolute. Now, twenty years later, I revisited those tourist sites I had visited then, replacing the miserable memories I’d retained from that first trip with new ones. When in Rome, I did as the Romans did, plastering over the old, building anew.

  Walking among the ruins of the Palatine, I found myself talking to my mother in my head, thinking how much she would have loved seeing these places she must have read about in her many Latin classes. Had she imagined them as she translated? Had she seen photographs? Movies? Perhaps she knew as much Roman history as I did. I could only speculate. My parents never traveled to Europe. My father had no interest, and though my brother Terry had invited Mother to accompany him on one of his many trips to the Continent, she never went with him. I think at that point, in her early sixties, she was afraid to travel, felt unequal to the experience. She was afraid to start anew; instead she allowed the losses of her old life to inter her.

  I spent that entire day in ancient Rome and returned too late and too tired to go to class. After all, when Jason introduced me to this or that person, he said, “Ann will be joining us from time to time for the next two weeks.” Liberal license from the boss man. There was that handy adjective liber again.

  I did join the group the next day, the Fourth of July, for a trip by bus to Nemi in the Alban Hills. I sat next to Gina Soter, the teacher of my juniores group, the only female among the Paideia teachers, and close to my age. Tall and thin, she was lively, irreverent, and fun. She had studied twice at Reginald’s Latin program in the mid-2000s and now ran the residential college at the University of Michigan. She called herself a “cautious zealot” regarding spoken Latin. “Pedagogically, it allows you to do great things, and the ability to use Latin actively has really helped my students learn better.”

  The name Nemi derives from the Latin nemus, or “holy wood,” and overlooks Lake Nemi, a volcanic crater lake. The town itself now stands on what was once the site of the Roman temple of Diana Nemorensis. Diana was the goddess of the hunt, as well as of nature and animals. Though many temples were consecrated to her, the Nemorensis (of the grove) was the most famous, and its myth served as the seed for Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

  For centuries, a sacred oak stood in the center of the grove, which was vigilantly guarded by the Rex Nemorensis (King of the Grove and priest of Diana). The rex was always an escaped slave, and only another escaped slave was allowed to attempt to break off one of the boughs. If he succeeded, he then engaged the current rex in one-on-one combat to death. Whoever prevailed would remain king until another escaped slave who could defeat him came along.

  Caligula had dedicated one of his sumptuous ships that plied Lake Nemi to the cult of Diana Nemorensis; the other, a pleasure boat, was tricked out with statues, engravings, baths, sumptuous bronze fittings, and a two-story building. By his era, the succession ritual
of the Rex Nemorensis had devolved into a forced gladiatorial combat before an audience of Caligula’s friends. After Caligula’s overthrow, the boats had been sunk in the lake.

  We sat on the steps of the Nemi Museum and read and translated passages from Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars. Then we proceeded to a restaurant overlooking the lake, where a lavish five-course feast, worthy of Caligula, awaited us. After lunch, and plenty of wine, we changed into bathing suits and trooped down to the lake.

  As Gina and I walked down the long hill to the lake, a bit worse for wear with wine, we marveled at two of the seniores walking in front of us who were reciting lines from Ovid’s Fasti from our literature booklet about the very site we were approaching.

  At the lake, some of the students plunged in at a run, others sat on rocks or towels, some still translated. Gina said, “Okay, you like Ovid, let’s read a few lines before we go in. We’ll set a good example.”

  I’d left my literature booklet with my bag at the restaurant, but Gina, a dedicated teacher, hadn’t, so she pulled it out and turned to Ovid Fasti 3.259.

  Quis mihi nunc dicet quare caelestia Martis

  arma ferant Salii Mamuriumque canant?

  Nympha, mone, nemori stagnoque operata Dianae;

  nympha, Numae coniunx, ad tua facta veni.

  Vallis Aricinae silva praecinctus opaca

  est lacus, antiqua religione sacer.

  Before I began to translate, she warned me, “You should know that Mamurium is Mamurius Veturius, who made the shields that hung in the temple of Mars.”

  Despite that help, I became stuck on nympha, Numae coniunx, ad tua facta veni.

  “I can’t tell if veni is the past tense ‘I came’ or the imperative ‘come!’ or ‘arise!’” I complained. “There’s always so much ambiguity.”

  “Read it again,” Gina said. “The first step to disambiguating the syntax is to look again at the word in the larger context of the verse.”

  And indeed, when I reread it for the fourth time, I realized that it had to be imperative. The imperative, “wait nymph” was in the line before it, and the second nympha, at the beginning of the line, gave another clue. “But what about ad tua facta,” I asked. “Participles always throw me.”

  “What do you think it might mean?” Gina asked.

  “Well, either ‘to your deeds’ or ‘having been made by you.’”

  “What’s the meaning of ad?” she asked.

  “Oh,” it suddenly dawned on me that I was confusing ad, which meant “to,” with ab, which meant “by” or “from.”

  “See,” Gina said, “it’s not ambiguous, just a very common mistake beginners make. You shouldn’t be confusing ad with ab at this point. You’re also making another very common elementary mistake,” she added gently, “confusing the personal pronoun with the possessive adjective.”

  I scoured my mind and finally realized that tua was a possessive adjective modifying facta. “O me miseram,” I wailed. “Four years in and I’m still making elementary mistakes.”

  “Well,” Gina said, “at least you know the difference. Most high school and college students these days can’t distinguish between a pronoun and a possessive adjective.”

  So I figured out it had to be “to your deeds.” Maybe I’d never again mix up ad and ab.

  Finally, after more figurative banging of my head, I had it sorted out:

  Now who will tell me why the Salii carry Mars’

  celestial weapons, and sing of their maker.

  Teach me, o nymph, devoted to Diana’s lake and woodlands:

  nymph, wife to Numa, arise to your deeds.

  There is a lake, circled by the shady groves of the Arician palisades,

  made sacred by ancient religion.

  “Okay,” I said, “my brain is fried, let’s go jump in the lake.”

  Together we rose and approached the sacred lake, as Ovid’s Arethusa had approached her stream, first dipping in our toes. The water was cold. Then we walked in to our knees. Finally, first Gina, then I, merged with the water. We struck and stroked the water, gliding in a thousand ways, floating through ripples of sunlight.

  In honor of the Fourth of July, on the way home we sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” in Latin:

  The Star-Spangled Banner

  Potestne cerni primo diluculo

  Vexillum quod vesperi salutabamus,

  Dum stellas clavosque et in proelio

  Fluitantes superbe in vallo spectamus?

  Atque salvum adhuc interdum subitae

  Vexillum noctu ostendebant flammae;

  O dic num despectet stellans vexillum

  Liberam patriam fortiumque domum.

  Then, Jason cued up his computer to the bus’s mike. He had downloaded karaoke-style music to pop songs, which had been translated into Latin in our “Songbook.” Soon we were all singing along to Journey’s Ne disperetis (“Don’t Stop Believin’”), to Survivor’s Oculus Tigris (“Eye of the Tiger”), and to my favorite, and wonderfully ironic in the context: Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”:

  Educandi nos non sumus,

  Ne coacti credamus,

  Sarcasmus ater in conclavi,

  Ma . . . gister . . . linque pueros,

  Tu omnino later fies hoc in muro

  Tu omnino later fies hoc in muro

  All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.

  All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.

  It was wonderful to hear those students gustily singing that song. They had visited so many bricks in so many walls, ancient, medieval, modern, and postmodern, yet were all too happy to add their own brick, as I was happy to add mine.

  I returned to the villa just in time for George’s arrival. He’d flown to Venice for four days. He’d never been to Europe on his own and wanted to try it without me serving as translator. How amazed he was at our splendid digs. I gave him a tour: pointing out the various fountains, the “secret garden,” the giant dome-shaped topiaries, the villa trees and Roman pines, with their cloud-shaped canopies atop high bare trunks.

  Just as darkness fell, we arrived at the stone balustrade on the south portico of the villa, which overlooked all of Rome, known to be one of the most magnificent views of the city. Below us spread thousands of years of history, all mixed together in the gleaming, glowing present. I don’t have adjectives superlative enough for our surroundings: Latin sounds more like it felt: Hortus maximus splendidissimus. All was beauty, nulli secundus.

  At the end of the evening, we walked down the long laurel allée, magically lit by the full moon, to the bee fountain and sat in the stone enclosure of its half dome. Above us, a bronze bee harvested from two stone cornucopiae, and as we sat silently, the slow drops that fell from the bee’s proboscis gradually coalesced into a thin stream, perfectly bisecting the full moon.

  I remembered the visualization my healer, Harry Bayne, had given me, those fifteen years before when I’d encountered the box of the void, that void I’d built words around all my life.

  “What if the void is not a threat but an opportunity?” he’d asked. And the fathomless black space before me had suddenly transformed into a dance floor. My mother had loved to dance, but she stopped dancing long before she reached my age; she was done, as she said so often. I was not done. I was going to keep on dancing.

  CHAPTER 16

  There is a pleasure, something so unspeakably thrilling, in uncovering the other version of our life, that, given a few days, a few weeks, a few years, this version will be the only one worth . . . remembering.

  —André Aciman, New York Times, April 17, 2013

  We returned home to high summer in Rhinebeck. The deer had kindly refrained from eating the border of zinnias and dahlias I had planted in the spring, and we were welcomed by a dazzling show. Butterflies (papiliones) were landing o
n the flowers, darting here and there, and a hummingbird whizzed overhead as we were unpacking the luggage from the car. Why shouldn’t I be completely happy in such a paradise?

  The day after our arrival, a package arrived from my brother Terry. It contained a newspaper clipping in a plastic sleeve and a silver box. The clipping was dated February 25, 1938, and its headline read “Broad Ripple Enters Latin Contest,” and below it a photograph. There, in the middle of a triangle formed by six students, sits my mother, the only one of the students shown down to the knees, the only one smiling. She’s far and away the prettiest of the four girls who surround her like bridesmaids. The lone boy, looking alarmingly serious, looms above her.

  The silver box contained a small gold pendant in the shape of a Roman galley, with Virgil embossed on its sail. It was the Latin medal Mother had won at the statewide Indiana contest. I’d never seen it before.

  After Mother’s death, I’d stayed with my father for a week. Three days before I was due to leave, I asked him if there was anything I could do for him. He told me he’d like me to pack up Mother’s clothes; he didn’t think he could bear to do that. I spent four hours in a white heat taking her clothes off hangers and out of drawers, folding them up and boxing them. I listened to the same songs over and over: Tracy Chapman singing “Fast Car” and “She’s Got Her Ticket.”

  I worked like an automaton, rarely stopping to associate memories with the dresses and blouses I was carelessly folding and dropping in the box, in a hurry as usual. I saved a few things I thought my siblings might want, and the next day took the boxes to Goodwill; eight of them, laid end to end, would roughly be the size of a casket. I saved one cashmere sweater she had always prized for myself, along with her diamond earrings and her jewelry box stuffed with costume jewelry. I was angry with her that day I boxed her up and discarded her; angry that she had drunk herself out of this life. Why hadn’t she found anything to be but mother and wife, why had she given in, plunged into the void?