Classics Ireland have done a wonderful thing. They have made the first twelve volumes of their annual journal freely available online, without subscription, to everyone. I suspect that is how all journals will operate before long. No doubt there are economic obstacles, but they will surely be overcome by the ingenuity, philanthropy and vanity of scholars.
There are some gems in the Classics Ireland collection. I’ve settled on two explorations of the extraordinary reach of Roman culture.
The earliest surviving vernacular translation of the Aeneid was undertaken in 11th or 12th century Ireland, and the translator in question was charmingly unburdened by the modern instinct for fidelity. He added a prologue and pruned the guff. Twelve-branched Virgilian similes were lopped to stumps. Seven lines of poetry:
And the hero of Laomedon’s line, seeing it all, tosses on a mighty sea of troubles; and now hither, now thither he swiftly throws his mind, casting it in diverse ways, and turning it to every shift; as when in brazen bowls a flickering light from water, flung back by the sun or the moon’s glittering form, flits far and wide o’er all things, and now mounts high and smites the fretted ceiling of the roof aloft.
Become three lines of prose:
When Aeneas then heard of that gathering of the Italians approaching him, he was worried, very fearsome, and full of many thoughts, and he did not know what counsel he should follow.
In my long-contemplated Aeneid For The Busy Modern, of course, this will simmer for another few hours:
Italians? Aeneas freaked!
Erich Poppe’s article is exactly what I look for in journals. It is well researched, cleanly written, and animated by a larger purpose: Poppe wants us to study “translation literature” more seriously. It’s also a half hour of your life which might yield that bright shining fact you return to twenty years later around a poker table, or in a footnote to your monumental reassessment of Gerhart Hauptmann. The Trivial Pursuit Mediaeval Epic Edition should be rolling off the factory belts any day now.
Next, Iggy Pop puts a shirt on and gets inky.
“…charmingly unburdened by the modern instinct for fidelity.”
I like that. It’s heartwarming to see that there really is continuity in Irish culture. A knowing American tourist recently remarked to me that “Irish people don’t lie, they just… exaggerate.” That was kind of her; I’d have said we make shit up.
It’s also slightly disorientating to think that this monkish scholar was doing the Reader’s Digest or Disney cartoon version of his day. I expect the mediaeval mind to needlessly overcomplicate things. (Well yeah, apart from Occam.) Good to find them going for tightly-paced narrative.
In December I was browsing lovely full-size facsimiles of mediaeval Irish manuscripts in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. The first great surprise was that there is far more of the stuff than I imagined. (And I understand from Celtic scholar pals that there are still manuscripts in Old Irish that have yet to be translated into English, which slightly boggled my mind.)
But a lovely bonus was the book that had – according to its introduction – been partly faked up in the seventeen hundreds. It’s true that bits of the illumination looked positively amateurish even to my untrained eye. And it didn’t help that at one point the forger signed his work.
Tragic that some of the original was lost – especially as it appears this was due to petty (minded) larceny – yet fascinating that an attempt was made to recreate it. We lose a bit of the far historic past, but gain an honest insight (for what is more honestly reveals your opinions than your best attempt to falsify?) into how more recent historic people perceived their past. It isn’t history as commonly understood, but it feels like an important data point.
I look forward to your new translation of the Aenid. That one I might actually read.
(Two errors! Sorry, I’ve been up since 3:30 am.)