A strong review praising our edition of George Herberts Latin verse entitled MEMORIAE MATRIS SACRUM appeared in the recent YEARS WORK IN ENGLISH STUDIES. For my friends who dont know, George Herbert was a poet and Anglican priest in the early seventeenth century. My friends Richard and Catherine Freis and I spent several years working on this. Its in the world and is being well received. In the category of Herbert studies, the reviewers conclude, Certainly the most significant publication of 2012 is a new edition and translation of Herbert’s Memoriae Matris Sacrum (his verses on the death of his mother in 1627) by Catherine Freis, Richard Freis, and Greg Miller. This special issue of the George Herbert Journal (33:i–ii [2012]) presents a new translation of Herbert’s Latin (and occasionally Greek) original that aims for accuracy in non-rhymed verse with some light metrical patterning. More literal than the McCloskey and Murphy translation [1965], this will now be the place where Herbert readers and scholars turn for an authoritative text and translation. In addition to the text (with critical apparatus) and translation, the volume offers an extended (120-page) commentary section, in which construals (literal, word-by-word translations, showing the grammatical relations) and line-by-line analyses are given for each poem. This last feature should not be overlooked: the rich commentary reflecting on basic sense, poetic technique, and Herbert’s allusions goes far beyond the attention that has been given to most seventeenth-century neo-Latin texts. Appendices offer guides to the poems’ prosody and use of rhetorical figures, and, most helpfully, a guide to ‘Parallel Passages in The Temple’. This edition successfully opens up to readers a work that has been too much neglected to this point. Overall, it is a very impressive achievement, and one hopes that these same scholars will offer similar editions of Herbert’s other Latin poetry.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 02:42:33 +0000
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