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

What's Balzac famous for again?

Well, for me at least, coffee and 19th century French potboilers. Coffee that he prepared Turkish fashion, but infusing the grounds in cold water first to make it even stronger, and, why not, diminishing the amount of water until the coffee was a thick as soup, to then drink it on an empty stomach.

"And then the mind is aroused, ideas pour out like the regiments of the Grand Armée over the battlefield, and the battle begins. Memories come charging in with flags flying; the light cavalry of comparisons extends itself in a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic hurries along with its ammunition train, and flashes of wit bob up like sharpshooters..." he wrote in his Treatise on Modern Stimulants.

Meanwhile, as his biographer André Maurois put it, "The paper gets covered with ink like the battlefield with black powder, the books get written and the author's heart suffers." This for sixteen hours at a stretch. Balzac seems to have drunk himself to his death on his coffee, dying at only 51, but into those 51 years he packed many lifetimes. Maurois again: "Balzac was by turns a saint, a criminal, an honest judge, a corrupt judge, a minister, a fop, a harlot, a duchess, and always a genius."

Or as another author fascinated by Balzac, V.S. Pritchett, put it in his biography, Balzac was "appetite itself" in an era (post-revolutionary France) in which "appetite was the note of the day".

My appetite for Balzac has been whetted by the work of getting ready for our upcoming Balzac celebration ("Balzac, baguettes and brie" at Central City Library, Wed. Aug. 29, 6:00 pm) and by the enthusiasm of Nicholas Reid, the historian, critic, and passionate Balzac reader and scholar who will be leading the show, assisted by Iain Sharp and, slightly, myself. I found the Maurois and Pritchett biographies in the fantastic Central City Library basement and have them here on my desk.

The Pritchett is densely illustrated with photos of Balzac's manuscripts, writing sets, dolls (read the book) and coffee pot, also engravings of Parisian soirées and reproductions of Balzac caricatures and portraits, even a statue, but not Rodin's famous bronze which I just last month saw at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where, oddly, it stands in what is basically the approach to the stairwell. People stream by chatting or consulting their maps, paying it no attention. Except me, of course, I was circling it like an alert coyote, trying to capture all its dramatic mass with my iPad's camera and failing, as you can see.

I'm never sure if people read 19th century French authors anymore, Iain Sharp mused to me the other day. Well, when Vintage Classics asked all the Orange Prize winners what book they would pick to pass on to future generations, Rose Tremain picked Balzac's Eugenie Grandet, saying 'This brilliant but devastatingly sad novel moved me so much, I began it again the moment I got to the end'. And when George Plimpton asked John le Carré who his favourite authors were, Balzac topped the list. (A great interview, one of the Paris Review's great "The Art of Fiction" series of author interviews, which you can read in the Review's online archives.)

Nicholas Reid has a case to make for Balzac being the most unknown of the great French novelists, but actually the greatest of them all, the French equivalent of Dickens, and no man could receive higher praise from Nicholas. So if you've already read The Three Musketeers and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, maybe it's time to give Balzac a try. I've picked The Magic Skin, Balzac's precursor to The Portrait of Dorian Gray, as the first Balzac novel I'm going to read. Oh, and I've decided to take Pritchett's Balzac, too. I need to find out if the lady whom Balzac so desired to come "perch" on the fifty-foot divan which was the centrepiece of this huge, extravagant, man's apartment ever did.

Check out Reid's Reader, Nicholas Reid's blog of book reviews and comment.

Thanks to Beattie's Book Blog, the homepage of the New Zealand Book Community, where I encountered both the Rose Tremain and John le Carré testimonies.