Book Review: How to read a Latin poem

This book is subtitled "If You Can't Read Latin Yet", but is also of great interest to people like me - presumably the vast majority of those who ever studied the subject - who can't read Latin any more. Between the "don't know but would like to" and the "I've forgotten and regret it" we must make up a substantial constituency.

It gave me intense pleasure at school to read Ovid's Metamorphoses or Horace's Odes. I equally enjoyed Vergil, despite the fact that our most laborious punishment was to copy out one of his Georgics, the shortest of which is more than 500 lines. But reading Latin poetry, especially classical Latin poetry (medieval is easier), is not something I have been able to maintain in later life because I was never proficient enough to read uninstructed. After repetitious labour, I could partially understand a poem for a bit, but I could never, unaided, apply my knowledge to a new one.

Reading this book reminds me of how much I enjoyed the encounter with something that was great, old and different. Its difficulty was part of its pleasure. It gave one the illusion of intelligence. Much more important, it brought moments of recognition. Each person lives in what WH Auden called "the prison of his days". How wonderful to escape to another time, and hear, in another tongue, Horace inviting his patron to drink the wine he makes and bottles himself or Vergil describing how, in spring, the ploughshare "rubbed by the furrow, begins to shine". It feels so near, and yet so far.

William Fitzgerald is a distinguished professor of Latin. He writes with charm and lucidity, but it is the intrinsic complexity of the whole subject that strikes the reader. This is not like one of those cookery books that tells you how easy it is if you just sling everything in. As Fitzgerald himself puts it, "Latin speaks to us, paradoxically, in a language that is no longer spoken." So when we are trying to work out what it is saying we must always be, to some extent, detectives, and it may be that not every clue we need has survived. No ancient Roman will walk into the room to put us right.

Take one of Vergil's most famous phrases "sunt lacrimae rerum", which is commonly translated "there are tears in things". According to Fitzgerald, it really means "There are tears for things". Besides, the word "res", of which "rerum" is the genitive plural, does not merely mean "a thing", but at least 19 different possibilities, including "a deed", "wealth", "a matter at issue", "the affairs of state" and "the state of affairs". So each time one thinks one might be able to grasp something, it slips away.

Nietzsche praised Horace for "The mosaic of words in which every word, by position and meaning, diffuses its force, right, left and over the whole." And although Horace may be the finest example of this, Latin in general is a language that tends this way. English, with all its definite and indefinite articles, its prepositions, its uninflected character, is forever trying to solve a problem of meaning by adding another word. Latin makes each word work almost alone. Fitzgerald shows this by comparing an anglicised rendering of a line by Martial - "few poets achieve after death the fame that you have given me while living" - with a strictly literal translation - "to whom, dedicated reader, what you have given, living, fame, and conscious, few after ashes have achieved it, poets". The Romans were aware of this effect: "They compared it to the flowers in a meadow, whose different colours stand out from each other." They called it "varius".

We describe the world of ancient Greece and Rome as "classical", often without quite thinking why. We mean that it was of a high class, and also that it set a standard against which later things might be judged. Reading this book, I realised how apposite the word "classical" is in this case. Latin poetry is a standard-setting example of how all poetry works. Poetry is, says Fitzgerald, "the most heightened form of speech of which a language is capable". By this he does not necessarily mean "high-falutin'" or dealing with a decorous subject. Poetry can be equally heightened in scatology or satire as in epic. He means that it does much more with words than any other form of language: "Poetry is the place where language performs." Latin poetry performs with a peculiar intensity.

I cling to the hope that, one of these days, when I have more time, I shall use this brilliant book as a means of getting back into Latin poetry, as the author would like. But even if I fall by the wayside, I have already extracted great value from it, because, by telling me about Latin poetry, it has helped me reconsider English poetry, and poetry in general, once more.

Because of modernism, we tend to think of poetry as being too obscure, and therefore the reading public has turned away from it. This book helps remind one of how poetry can be incredibly rich without being incomprehensible. It shows how English poets of all sorts - Milton and Gray, Tennyson and Hopkins - raided Latin poetry to enrich their own language. The great opening lines of Paradise Lost, for example, depend for their effect on the Latin habit of putting the verb at the end. "Of Man's first disobedience," it begins, and then goes on for five lines before the poet gives his command: "Sing heavenly Muse." Only by understanding and importing unEnglish effects could Milton become England's greatest poet.

How to Read a Latin Poem by William Fitzgerald (OUP).