I spent many hours of my teens and early twenties translating chunks of English prose into Latin. Each week, when I was an undergraduate, it took me several hours, and it felt like a lot more. You would be confronted with a paragraph or so of (usually) rather conservative, or rousing, English prose. Winston Churchill was a favourite choice, as was Edmund Burke, as I recall, and rather few women (though I think that Elizabeth I got a look in). You were supposed to translate this into good, accurate Latin. For me, that usually meant the kind of Latin that Cicero would have written (though if you were very confident you could try doing in the style of, say, Tacitus). The idea was that you practised each week during term, then you did it “unseen” in the exam at the end of the year. (And the same went for ancient Greek too, but it never had quite the mystique.)
I have always felt ambivalent about such exercises. I hate the way that this, in some ways, pointless task has been fetishized as the marker of being a top-rank classicist. Does it really matter whether you can translate a bit of posh English into Ciceronian Latin or not? Yet I do see that I learnt a huge amount about how Latin works, through trying to write it myself (I’m not just meaning the details of grammar, but also understanding trickier aspects – like what the Latin language helps you say, or not). And, in retrospect, I recognize that I learned a lot about English rhetoric in having to look at chunks of it in this close detail.
In fact, I now rather regret that I didn’t ever learn how to write Latin verse. Back in my day, women didn’t usually get taught how to write poetry in Latin (or Greek). And I didn’t have the sense to ask for it. If I had done so, I would have learned a lot more, a lot quicker about ancient poetry.
Well, here’s the surprise. In this year’s Cambridge Part IA exam, in the “prose composition” exam paper, one option for the candidates was to translate a paragraph of my Roman Triumph into Latin. “True, other Romans celebrated even more triumphs than Pompey: Julius Caesar, for example, was to notch up five …” it began, and went on for several lines.
When I was sitting in the college library practising this exercise in the mid 1970s, I could never have imagined that my own words would have been set in a Cambridge Tripos exam. For anyone who thinks that these “traditional” skills have been abandoned even at places like Cambridge, worry not. The difference is that they have to translate me!
The post Translate into Latin appeared first on TLS.