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Why didn't Latin hold Europe together as Mandarin did in China?
David R. Slavitt is a poet, novelist, critic, and translator, most recently of the Oresteia of Aeschylus, Three Amusements of Ausonius, and Epinician Odes and Dithyrambs of Bacchylides. His rendition into English of The Voyage of the Argo of Valerius Flaccus will appear later this year. Sometimes, the only way to understand what happened is to consider what didn't happen but could have. These unrealized possibilities--historians call them "counterfactuals"--are occasionally useful and almost always entertaining. What if the Union hadn't had a General Grant and the Confederacy had been able to hold out just a little longer? What if Hitler hadn't broken his pact with Stalin and invaded Russia? What if Charlemagne's empire had held together for another few generations? That last question, which is less likely to raise eyebrows, was one that the late Arthur Wright posed twenty years ago in his elegant book on the Sui dynasty, and I still remember the odd feeling I had when I read his pages comparing the legacy of Sui Wen Ti, who in 581 declared himself the "Son of Heaven" and emperor of China, with that of Charlemagne, who in 800 had himself crowned in the Church of St. Peter on Christmas Day as the Holy Roman emperor. What I remembered was sitting in boredom in an elementary school classroom and staring at the world map at the front of the room in Mercator projection. There was that great Eurasian landmass decked at east and west with the earrings of the British Isles and the islands of Japan. To the left, there were all those European countries, but to the right, there was just China. How had that happened? How and why had China held together? (Or how and why had Europe fallen apart?) It was wonderful to have my fifth-grade woolgathering so authoritatively validated. My schoolboy's speculation turned out to have been interesting enough to engage the Charles Seymour Professor of History at Yale! And the answer is that if the Sui reunification had not been so signally successful, the "Chinese world," as Professor Wright suggests, might well have been divided into independent successor states, perhaps four of them. And given the separate and distinctive cultures of the four geographic areas of sixth-century China, there might well have developed, in succeeding centuries, states with their own institutional structures, their own vernacular languages and literatures, their own prides and chauvinisms. China, which Michelet once characterized as "une autre Europe au bout de l'Asie," would have become another Europe in a far more literal sense. What held together in China--and held China together--is Mandarin. Charlemagne's dream was of a similar imperium, in which Latin law and language would bind together his many disparate peoples and serve as the medium of exchange of all intellectual life. He went so far as to invite Alcuin of York to his court at Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen) to see that classical Latin standards were maintained. (One thinks of Confucius' insistence that for government to be improved, the language must be purified.) The dream, of course, remained unrealized. When Charlemagne died in 814, the empire, which he had held together mostly by the strength of his own personality, began to fall apart. At the death of his son, Louis I, in 840, Charlemagne's three grandsons divided up what was left. The treaty of Verdun gave Charles I (the Bald) most of what we think of as France, while Lothair I took Lorraine, Burgundy, and northern Italy, and Louis II got what is now Germany. The Flowering of New Latin Another crucial moment occurred in the fifteenth century, when there was a brief flowering of what is called New Latin (or Neo-Latin, or Modern Latin). The importation into Europe of the techniques of papermaking (from the Islamic world that had got it from China) and Gutenberg's invention of movable type (Gutenberg was working in the 1450s) provided the technology for a broadening of literacy that inaugurated a new era in Europe's intellectual life. On the one hand, it put the Renaissance, that astonishing revival of classical learning that had begun in Italy and was already spreading northward, into high gear. But at the same time, it fueled the Reformation, one of the great issues of which was whether prayer should be in Latin or in the vernacular. In 1517 Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door and declared to the world that religion should rest on each individual's faith based on his (or her) reading of the Ble. The Bible Gutenberg had printed was a German translation, after all. There is something appealing about the idea of a shared medium of expression, a lingua franca, if you will (although that term, which is made up of two Latin words, originally referred to a pidgin mixture of PvenŤal, French, Spanish, Arabic, Greek, and Turkish that was spoken around the Mediterranean, an impromptu trade language like Swahili). At a loftier level, it was convenient to have a language in which anyone, anywhere, could read the writings of Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus, or Thomas More. By writing in Latin, they were no longer confined to an audience that was Italian, Dutch, or English but could address what they took to be the entire civilized world. On a more modest and practical level, the writers of the Renaissance who looked about them and saw how the national languages were shifting and changing so rapidly thought it might be a safer bet to express themselves in a tongue where the tradition stretched back for a couple of millennia and the well-established rules were unlikely to change. The fact that it was a dead language--in the sense that nobody was using it in the marketplace--meant that it was safe, like the good china one keeps on the shelf and only takes down for special occasions. As the seventeenth-century Royalist poet Edmund Waller suggested, "Poets that Lasting Marble seek, / Must carve in Latin or in Greek; / We write in sand ..." On the other hand, the survival of a language depends on something more fundamental than convenience and, one must be frank, elitism. For many people, literacy of any kind is elitist enough. The academic gowns of professors, judges, and preachers are nothing more than sartorial proclamations to the world that the wearers can read. And Latin and Greek are what doctors use (even if they mispronounce things much of the time) to impress their patients. These are the languages that English schoolboys studied at Eton, Harrow, and Winchester, and then at Oxford and Cambridge, to prepare themselves for the civil service so they could run an empire--not because skill in Latin composition was useful but, precisely and extravagantly, because it was not. Even the Catholic Church, though it still uses Latin for its communications, has accommodated itself to the real world and, over the objections of traditionalists, changed to the vernacular for prayer services. Those writers of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century who thought Neo-Latin was the safer bet have been proved utterly, even catastrophically wrong: The lingua franca of our time turns out to be English, which is now used by between 750 million and a billion people, fewer than half of whom speak it as a native tongue. Whereas Isaac Newton thought he could count on Latin as the universal language of science and mathematics, English is the international medium for air-traffic controllers. There has to be some standard for communication to all pilots and control towers, after all, and the Anglophone world was there first and remains the predominating presence. The Neo-Latin Poets
George Buchanan, one of the great Neo-Latin poets of Britain, was a Scotsman. Born in 1506 in Stirlingshire (a Gaelic-speaking area), he spent time in Paris where the PlŽiade poets were working, returned to Scotland, but then fled to Bordeaux after having published some anticlerical satires. He taught at the CollŹge de Guyenne (Montaigne was one of his students) and wrote tragedies in Latin. Partly this was to reach a wider audience; partly it may have been because Latin was portable, unlike Gaelic, English, French--or Portuguese. In 1574, he went to teach at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, got into trouble with the Inquisition because of his Protestant leanings, and returned to Scotland in 1561. From 1570 to 1578, he served as tutor to the young King James VI, later King James I of England. (Dr. Johnson thought Buchanan "the only man of genius his country ever produced.")
By Shakespeare's time, it was clear that Latin was not going to be what Charlemagne, Erasmus, or Buchanan and the PlŽiade poets had hoped. But its diminished prospects gave the language a perverse attractiveness. Isaac Bashevis Singer used to begin his readings by apologizing for his accent. ("I speak all languages with an accent," he would say, "even Yiddish.") Explaining that he was often asked why he chose to write in a dead language, he would give his darkly impish answer: "A dead language is good, if you're writing about ghosts."
A more typical production, more imitative of Martial:
The curious thing about some of these Renaissance writers who wrote in both languages is that they were sometimes more comfortable in Latin, more direct and personal, than when they expressed themselves in the vernacular. I can conceive of a number of naughty courtly poets turning out a jest like the foregoing; it's certainly within Matthew Prior's range. What is harder to imagine is the abrupt revelation of devout feeling of which Owen is also capable:
As one paws through his jewel box--the collection is too rich, really, for anyone but the wrong kind of scholar to attempt to read straight through--one discovers that its contradictory dimensions and textures cohere to reveal a personality, cranky and waspish sometimes but not unredeemably so. One gets to like the fellow, which is the test not so much of a particular poem but of the body of a poet's work. In Paris a couple of generations earlier, Jean Dorat (1508--1588), another schoolmaster, had been the poeta regius, the Royal Latin Poet of France, while his friend, Pierre de Ronsard, held the equivalent position as the French-language royal poet. Dorat was the central figure of the PlŽiade, that nest of dazzling songbirds which included Ronsard, Etienne Jodelle, RŽmy Belleau, Jean-Antoine de Ba•f, and Pontus de Tyard. His fellow PlŽiadists wrote mostly in French, but Dorat, a classical scholar, was prolific in French, Latin, and Greek as well. His panegyric Latin odes follow classical models and can appear to be mere scholastic exercises, but a close reading reveals a self-mocking poise that I find quite charming. He resembles, I think, the later Auden--which makes him admirable but intimidating to a translator. He is, in fact, the least well known of that eminent group, even though the other six wrote poems to and about him and thought of him as the sun around which they revolved as planets, the primum inter pares. Owen and Dorat languish in a profound obscurity in which, however, they have excellent company. Petrarch wrote a great deal of Latin poetry that is much less well known than his work in the vernacular. Other Italians include Baptista Mantuanus (or, more usually, just Mantuan), Michael Marullus, his great rival Jacopo Sannazaro, and, one of my favorites, Pietro Bembo (he was a Venetian nobleman who served as secretary to Leo X, had an affair with Lucrezia Borgia, and was made a cardinal in 1539 by Paul III). Among the non-Italians, there were a number of impressive writers, including Thomas More, who wrote a few fine poems in Latin, Johannes Secundus, Petrus Lotichius, and Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (known in England simply as "Casimir"). Milton wrote some Latin verse, and what makes his English poetry so distinctive is that it has the air of having been translated from Latin. You can find the work of these writers, and others too, in larger libraries in out-of-print anthologies. You have to have a perhaps perverse and probably elitist taste and you have to know that they're there and worth looking for, but the chances are very good that the books--if the library has any of them--won't be charged out to anyone else. Triumph of the Vernacular What did Latin in wasn't ignorance but that wider and shallower literacy that was the inevitable consequence of the Gutenberg revolution and the cheaper books that became more easily available. The vernacular languages could assert themselves, and anyone who could speak could learn, without a great deal of trouble, to read and write. Indeed, it can be argued that nationalism itself is an unintended consequence of Gutenberg's machine. Each language was out there asserting itself in an arena where success was to be determined the way it almost always is: by sheer power, whether military or economic. That map I used to look at in my elementary school classroom told the story clearly enough. Vast swaths of it were pink, the color for the British Empire, on which the sun was said never to set. The empire is gone, and English might therefore have been expected to decline just as French did, but the English language was only shifting its base, coming into its own as the United States emerged as the world's first superpower. English, as Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil point out in The Story of English, is "the medium for 80 percent of the information stored in the world's computers. Nearly half of all business deals in Europe are conducted in English. It is the language of sports and glamour: the official language of the Olympics and the Miss Universe competition. English is the official voice of the air, of the sea, and of Christianity: it is the ecumenical language of the World Council of Churches. Five of the largest broadcasting companies in the world (CBS, NBC, ABC, BBC, CBC) transmit in English to audiences that can exceed one hundred million." English is a fine language, capable of Latinate refinement but not at all precluded from German and Anglo-Saxon directness. Its enormous vocabulary is rich; its grammar is supple; and its brashness is such that it can absorb contributions from anywhere with confidence and grace. That dewy freshness it had from Chaucer's time through Shakespeare's may have been lost, but in its maturity it is robust, ready for the computer (through which any new coinage is instantly transmitted and recorded) and the new millennium. It is the battlefield where the cultural wars will be fought and where, one way or another, the victories and defeats of competing groups and interests will be recorded.n Part of The World & I Millennium Series Additional Reading Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil, The Story of English, Viking Penguin, New York,1986. I.D. McFarlane, Renaissance Latin Poetry, Manchester University Press, Manchester, U.K., 1980. Fred Nichols, An Anthology of Neo-Latin Poetry, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 1979. David Slavitt, Epic and Epigram: Two Elizabethan Entertainments (including sixty-odd epigrams of John Owen), Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, 1997. Arthur Wright, The Sui Dynasty, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1978. |
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