Fountain It’s Virgil’s 2083rd birthday: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Vergilius.jpg I read my first line of Virgil when I was eight. Billy Bunter’s Beanfeast opens with a scene in the Remove when Bunter – as usual – has failed to prepare his Latin translation. Two entire chapters are devoted to his unsuccessful attempt to turn into English a line from the Aeneid. Frank Richards gives us the detail of his various failures; then Skinner, after Bunter has been told to write it out under threat of dire punishment, deliberately gives him the wrong answer: ‘…“You may hand it to me, Bunter.” Bunter handed it to him. Quelch glanced at it. Quite an extraordinary expression came over his face, as he read. As Bunter had had ample time to work out the translation of that verse, and as even Bunter was capable of it if he chose to put in a spot of work, Quelch expected to read: “Terrible, O Queen, the sorrow thou bidst me renew,” or words to that effect. But what he read was: Infandum regina jubes renovare dolorem The jujubes renew the pain of the queen’s infant. Mr. Quelch gazed at it. He seemed speechless for a moment or two. Billy Bunter, blinking at him, felt an inward misgiving that Skinner must have got it wrong somehow. “Upon my word!” said Mr. Quelch, at last. “Bunter! I refuse to believe that even you are capable of stupidity to this extent — this is impertinence!” He rose to his feet, and picked up his cane. “Bunter! Bend over that chair!”…’ friardale.co.uk/Cassell/11-%20Billy%20Bunters%20Beanfeast.pdf That was one line, at least, I would know for ever. Then, years later, came Book II at O Level and Books IV and V at A Level and in 1964 my first attempts under Eliot’s influence to read the Inferno: …Poeta fui, e cantai di quel giusto figliuol d’Anchise che venne di Troia, poi che ’l superbo Ilïón fu combusto… [I was a poet, and sang of Aeneas, that virtuous son of Anchises, who came from Troy when proud Ilium was burned.] …Or se’ tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte che spandi di parlar sì largo fiume?, rispuos’ io lui con vergognosa fronte… [I answered him, with a humble expression: ‘Are you then that Virgil, and that fountain, that pours out so great a river of speech?] …Tu se’ lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore, tu se’ solo colui da cu’ io tolsi lo bello stilo che m’ha fatto onore… [You are my master, and my author: you alone are the one from whom I learnt the high style that has brought me honour.] And around the same time, I was reading Robert Graves’s attack on Virgil in The Crowning Privilege as ‘the anti-poet’, denouncing his ‘pliability…subservience…narrowness; his denial of the stubborn imaginative freedom that the true poets who preceded him had valued; his lack of originality, courage, humour, or even animal spirits.’ Graves knew vastly more about classical poetry – about poetry – than I could ever hope to know. Was he right and Dante wrong? I’m still trying to find out. Mobilitate viget, viresque acquirit eundo. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GiorcesBardo42.jpg
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 18:26:28 +0000
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