Poets in a Landscape

A long time ago - we're talking half a century here - I found a dun-coloured hardback book in the school library and took it out for a fortnight. I took it out again later in the year as my mother hadn't finished it when I first brought it home, and I noticed that no-one else had borrowed it in the intervening months. I suspect it was only there because the author had been a pupil at the school. Later, I was to regret not having nicked it when I had the chance, but I was an honest adolescent and it didn't cross my mind. Years later, my mother spotted the same book, reissued as a "Lost Treasure" by Prion, and bought it as a present for me, unregcognisable in the attractive paperback illustrated here. And so Gilbert Highet's Poets in a Landscape found its way onto my bookshelves in 1999, and I see that it's still possible to buy it online.

It has taken me till now to re-read it in its entirety. Maybe it's not a book to be galloped through with the voracious speed of my teenage self, for apart from the section on Catullus I recalled little of it. Highet, whom my parents apparently knew at university, draws pictures of the great Roman poets - Catullus, Horace, Virgil, Propertius, Ovid, Juvenal - in their own locations, visiting their special places in Italy, seeking out ruins and rumours, legends and literary fragments, recreating the lives they led and the people they encountered.

At the first time of reading this book, I had visited only one of the places he describes. The so-called Grotte di Catullo at Sirmione, which the poet know as Sirmio, are in fact the ruins of a huge lakeside house of a later date than the poet, but the peninsula jutting out into Lake Garda is an evocative place, and even as a teenager I found myself quoting Tennyson as I walked round 'sweet Catullus' all-but-island, olive-silvery Sirmio' - for Highet is never afraid to complement the works of the ancient poets with their more recent echoes in the poems of others.

The book takes us through the Italian countryside and the boiling streets of Rome, beside the cool springs of Clitumnus and the echoes of the now-ruined Forum, translating chunks of Latin poetry into his own, preserving the metre and as far as possible the tone, so that someone with no knowledge of Latin could still feel they were within touching distance of the works as well as the life of ancient Rome. His description of hot exploration of the Italian countryside as he sought out unremarked ruins is as powerful as his evocation of the Dark Ages, when the glories of the Palatine Hill were ruined and buried and dogs scavenged around the capitals of hidden columns. A fairly recent visit I made to Rome has left me with powerful impressions of my own to recall - including pictures painted of the period before archeologists started work on these strange mounds and apparent caverns, but above all it is the sound of the poetry that has returned.

Whether I was realising how the metre of popular songs worked - as exemplified by a line about Julius Caesar: Watch your wives, you poor civilians, here comes
              Baldhead Lover-Boy!

or, as I suddenly recalled it from Thornton Wilder's The Ides of March:
              Here he comes, the bald whore-monger - Romans
              lock your wives away! -
or taking delight in some erudite explanation of some facet of language that I had never previously considered, this book proved a joy.

I may even get down my copy of Horace Odes (Odes lll, if you're interested) and see if I remember how the Latin works ... O fons Bandusiae, splendidior vitro...

In tanto discrimine rerum...

I'm indebted to my erudite and witty friend abf for this wonderful link to the New York Times. As one who preceded me through the rigours of Professor Christian J. Fordyce's Latin (or "Humanity") classes at Glasgow, he alone can now furnish me with the forgotten phrase or lost particle - and stands firm with me against the hordes who abuse the apostrophe and split their infinitives.

This piece of writing recalls the days spent wrestling with the weekly Prose Composition exercise, in which we had to render such writers as Macaulay and Churchill into idiomatic Latin. Brush up your amoamasamat and enjoy!

Darn. I've just realised that my link takes you only to the registration for the NYT site. Here is a small sample of what you are missing if you don't register:

Bellum Gallium

Manes Julii Caesaris paucis diebus aderant — “O, most bloody sight!” — cum Ioannes McCainus, mavericus et veteranus captivusque Belli Francoindosinini, et Sara Palina, barracuda borealis, qui sneerare amant Baracum Obamam causa oratorii, pillorant ut demagogi veri, Africanum-Americanum senatorem Terrae Lincolni, ad Republicanas rallias.

Rabidi subcanes candidati, pretendant “no orator as Brutis is,” ut “stir men’s blood” et disturbant mentes populi ad “a sudden flood of mutiny,” ut Wilhelmus Shakespearus scripsit.

Whose past is it anyway?

Augustus Caesar
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Back in lugubrious Scotland, suffering a drop of 20 degrees Celsius from the heat of Rome, I have at least a proper keyboard to blog on - even if the laptop, after a brief burst of energy, seems to be relapsing into stammering senility. This photo of a statue of Augustus Caesar, perched now on Mussolini's Via dei Fori Imperiali, sums up the effect much of the Roman experience had on me because of its ubiquity in my adolescence. It appeared in my Paterson and MacNaughton's Approach to Latin - the bible for Latin scholars in a school where the redoubtable Paterson was the Headmaster - and as such was there on a daily basis every time I opened the book.

And it was really then that my obsession with all things Roman began. Learning Latin was a matter of much acquisition of vocabulary and grammar - and we did it by rote, turning over the page to see if we'd managed to memorise it yet. As often as not, Augustus would gaze at us as we did this. I could have drawn that pose from memory. It was a part of my life.

And in a fascinating way the Rome of two thousand years ago is still a part of life in Rome today. The excavated Forum, for example, keeps getting in the way when you try to go from one point to another in that area of Rome. You can't cross it, as you have to pay to get in and it shuts at sundown. In the warm evenings, people hang over the fence simply looking down at the shadowy pillars - those still standing, those lying jumbled on the ground. In a small park which we had to cross to get to the main road, two large sections of stone pillar lay half-buried, and people sat on them to eat a sandwich, or merely to take the weight off their pins. Even as we were being driven into the city from the airport, we could see ruins of huge villas off to the left, along the line of the Via Appia Antiqua, and the arches of an aqueduct marching towards Rome.

Some of the time I felt my Italian was coming on a treat - and then realised that I was reading a sign in Latin, not Italian. Street names referred to long-dead first century Romans. They seemed closer by far than the shadowy figures of the Dark Ages, closer even than the Popes and the sculptors who took over from them. I shall have more to say about the ruins we visited - but right now I feel I've been on a visit to my own past as well as that of a civilisation.

I'm glad I didn't leave it any longer.