Throwback Thursday (Dies Iovis Reiectata): Latin charm

"Why read the classics?" asks Italo Calvino in a famous essay published in The New York Review of Books. Then, true to form, instead of answering the question he just posed, the author noted for mixing irony, fable and allegory in works such as Cosmicomics and Invisible Cities, devotes the rest of his allocated space to "suggested definitions" of what makes a classic. Except that in a sort of game of mirrors, when he gets to the end and throws up his hands, we realise that he had been answering the question all along.

Here is how his list starts off:

The classics are the books of which we usually hear people say: “I am rereading…” and never “I am reading….”

Just as you are wondering if this implies you don't make the grade if you don't read your classics multiple times, Calvino deftly unhorses any such presumption. That reiterative prefix, he says, is almost always a small hypocrisy: people are ashamed to admit they've never read the title in question, so pass it off as a rereading.

But actually, he goes on to say, they shouldn't worry, because "read" or "reread" is of little importance with classics. Because,

Every reading of a classic is in fact a rereading.

And similarly, rereadings are like first readings, because, 

Every rereading of a classic is as much a voyage of discovery as the first reading.

I was reminded of these points recently thanks to the wonderful Central City Library basement with its seemingly endless store of old treasures, where I found these:

Winnie Ille Pu

Aliciae per speculum transitus

Winnie the Pooh and Through the Looking Glass in Latin!

May I put it out there right away that I have never studied Latin, except for a summer vacation twenty years ago with a book optimistically titled Latin made simple (ha!), and one or two encounters with bilingual editions of Latin poetry. But I have had so much fun leafing through these books. You don't need Latin - you just need to have loved the original. And enjoy words.

From Winnie Ille Pu, the scene where Pooh (sorry, Pu) tries to steal the bees' honey by floating up to their hive attached to a balloon ("folliculo" in Latin!):

'De apibus semper dubitandum est.' says Pu. Always be doubtful of bees.

Famous phrases by great Roman orators and writers are played on wherever possible:

"I don't hold with all this washing", grumbled Eeyore. "This modern Behind-the-ears nonsense."

And what does Ior say? He says "O tempora, o mos ablutionis retroauricularis!" "Oh, this modern custom of washing behind the ears", an adaptation of Cicero's famous exclamation on the shortcomings of his contemporaries, "O tempora, O mores". "Oh what times, oh what customs."

Such gems are pointed out, if you miss them, in notes in the back, which also provide many evocative instances of further information. For instance, we are told that when Pooh asks Christopher Robin if he can see which is the Queen Bee, this has been translated literally as regina apium, but the ancient Romans did not in fact use this expression. For them it was a rex apium, "the sovereign being regarded as a male".

Quite a few works of literature have been translated into Latin, from traditional 19th century classics such as Superbia et Odium (which you can read on line at ephemeris.alcuinus.net) to more modern childhood favourites such as Ursus Nomine Paddington, recently made into a imaginem subitariam.

See if you can guess what these translations correspond to:

Fundus Animalium

Puteus et Pendulum 

Vestes Novae Imperatoris

Tela Charlottae 

Quomodo invidiosulus nomine Grinchus Christi Natalem abrogaverit 

Fabula De Petro Cuniculo  

Insvla Thesavraria

Did you get them all? Congratulatio!


-- Karen

one brown box

Unlike the way it always seems to happen in fairy tales, I was not heading off to market to sell the family cow when I stumbled onto good fortune the other day, but walking home from a K Rd art gallery. Feeling a bit disjunctive in the bright sun after emerging from the cool shadows of the Michael Lett Gallery where I had been watching four green-hued videos involving night, dark water and saturation at Campbell Patterson’s “Orewa” show, I went right past an open doorway beyond which stood a big empty brown box before the feeling of intrigue a big empty brown box still manages to inspire in me, even if with a bit of a delay compared to once upon a time, made me stop, turn around, go back and peer inside.

The open door was that of the objectspace gallery and the big brown box was part of an exhibition by Bronwyn Lloyd and Karl Chitham called “one brown box”, all about storybooks and fairy tales.

Everyone whose heart stirs at the thought of fairy tales should go see this marvellous exhibition. Starting from the plainest structure with the most unlimited imaginative potential, the brown box, “one brown box” illustrates five classic fairy tales with sculptures and models made entirely from boxes and paper, such as a tiny canopy bed made by Bronwen Lloyd with a real pea (I asked Bronwen) on the pillow, an entire castle for the Steadfast Tin Soldier and, most amazing of all, Karl Chitham’s “King’s Tower” from the “Twelve Dancing Princesses”, which is a tower and a King’s face, too, perched high on a wall for all the world like a cardboard version of a river god grotesque in one of those mannerist stone grottoes in the gardens of old Italian villas.
There are also fairy tales retold from the point of view of minor characters (eg "Snow White: The Mirror’s Story”), an I Spy Cabinet and a Cabinet of Curiosities, and a wonderful display of Jack Ross’s collection of fairy tale books, with one of the nicest signs I have ever seen in an art show letting you know that you are welcome to pick them up and look at them, along with a written piece by Jack called “A Short History of Fairytales”.

I was happy to see Jack mention Italo Calvino’s book of traditional Italian fairy tales, which I was given as a child and read many times over, with no knowledge of Calvino’s literary status but a keen appreciation for their whimsy -- I remember chick peas which turned into children -- and for the figs, dates and pomegranates with which the stories were festooned, so … southern compared to those tales with little match girls freezing to death or bears bursting into houses to get out of the torment of snow.

Jack’s piece is reprinted in the brown paper-covered exhibition ‘catalogue’, which makes it possible for me to end with this wonderful quote from Dr. Johnson with which Jack introduces it:

“Memory once interrupted is not to be recalled. Written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. Tradition is but a meteor, which if once it falls, cannot be rekindled.”

-- Dr. Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775).

The show is open until December 18th, at object space, 8 Ponsonby Road.