This book seeks to explore the most distinctive aspect of poetry in Latin, namely, that it characteristically finds definition over against poetry in another language. In origin, famously, Latin poetry was constituted by its relationship with Greek; in later times it has been constituted by its relationships with the European vernaculars. This is not, however, a history of or a handbook to these things; rather, it is a set of essays that presuppose such a history or handbook, and which offer test cases, sometimes limit cases, for such a history or handbook. Most of my chosen vignettes will fall into (and between) two categories: ancient conversations between Latin and Greek verse texts, and modern (especially early modern) conversations between Latin and vernacular verse texts, reflecting the linked stories of reception that make up the so-termed classical tradition: conversations across language, across period, and sometimes both at the same time.

In short, this will be a book of intertextual juxtapositions, with the kind of movement between minutely self-conscious allusivity and broader relationality to which I have always been drawn in my critical writing. I will give especial emphasis to cross-linguistic events in which correspondences are so close as to approach the condition of translation, without quite being the same thing as translation (itself, of course, a contested category), and where the very issue of movement between languages is somehow central or foregrounded.

The core project will be to get a particular kind of purchase on literary history across languages, word by word and letter by letter. Not just ‘literalism’, then, but (to coin or commandeer a term) ‘transliteralism’. Transliteralism sometimes for its own sake (because literary study should always be an inquiry about how words, understood as words, are transacted among readers and writers), but also transliteralism in the service of an approach, from first principles, to transculturalism. Arguably, the distinctiveness of the impulse to worry away at a literary text through the extreme close-up has been sidelined a bit in post-millennial criticism: there has been something of a reduction in mutual engagement between critics who like to say things about particular lines of verse (whether within or across languages) and critics who like to say things about the larger cultural work that literature does. This will be a book of extreme close-ups, but one that hopes to broaden possibilities for discussion by narrowing them.

My own now generation-old Allusion and Intertext (1998) fell (more by accident than by design) into a concentration upon ‘Latin on Latin’ engagements, even though much of the key critical and philological work that inspired me at the time had dealt with ‘Latin on Greek’; the intertextual case studies here will do something to redress that imbalance in my own output. In an unanticipated subplot, that book’s emphasis on Latin on Latin relationality set it up (in a way that now seems almost planned) to serve as a kind of ‘analogue’ foil to a new generation of digital work, in that the years following its publication saw an acceleration in the tools and databases enabling Latin on Latin relationships to be located or tested with a new level of technological ease, an ease (so far) beyond the reach of cross-linguistic relationality. So I can again be timely (or, rather, can again be just behind the times) in writing a book on cross-linguistic poetic intertextuality in the last critical generation in which a close approach to such an enterprise can be largely uninfluenced by digital ways and means, largely but not quite (see Chapter 2).

To adapt (and to borrow from my first chapter) an aphorism used in a different but related context by Horace, to add to the study of Latin poetic allusion to Greek is to carry timber into a forest. In adding to the pile in the ‘ancient’ part of this volume I have chosen one distinctive emphasis: I will give an especial spotlight to periods and communities (‘later’ periods, to a Hellenist) in which the usual Latin poetic access to Greek texts is mirrored, in principle at least (and thereby hangs a tale, as we shall see), by reciprocal Greek poetic access to Latin texts. That is, even though Greco-Roman conversations about poetry are preprogrammed to be, first and foremost, Latin responses to the work of dead Greek poets, this book will foreground conversations in which the possibility exists for the older literary language to ‘talk back’ to the newer one. My hope is that, even for non-classicist readers, this restriction (which in practice will not take any Latin poets off the table) will work to enlarge, rather than to diminish, a sense of Roman literature and Roman literary possibility.

These essays have a special interest, in fact, in two-way poetic traffic across languages, an interest that, for me, derives from some excursions into cross-referential Latin and vernacular poetry in early modernity represented in Part II of my volume. Here, to mitigate the inherent overreach of a main title from which, in principle, almost no verse text written in awareness of classical antiquity can be excluded on a priori grounds, I will for Chapters 4 and 5 narrow my attention down to individual poets who write and are published in both Latin and vernacular, for whom, then, the relationship with the classical language can be thought of as something uniquely concentrated and self-aware. In other words, I will be drawn in both parts of the book toward case studies in which the relationship between poetic writing in two languages involves an especially heightened element of self-conscious reciprocity.

Whereas in the classical area I move impartially between more canonical and less canonical texts, as befits an insider, in the post-antique area my case studies skew more heavily toward works at or near the centre of the canon. This may come across as an outsider’s laziness or presumptuousness, or both of these at once; in part I do seek here the indulgence granted to a well-meaning tourist. But also, I hope to contribute something worthwhile in the (early) modern context through my Latinist’s angle of approach to these familiar works: to Paradise Lost via Latin translations of Paradise Lost, to Marvell’s Garden via Marvell’s Hortus, and, in a later period, to Wordsworth via Wordsworth’s translations from Virgil. There may be an institutional virtue in the resultant juxtapositions. In such venues as the annual meetings of the Renaissance Society of America, the communities of neo-Latin and of vernacular classical tradition specialists tend to carry on their research more or less independently of one another, in separate panels. The compartmentalization is understandable; but one of my aims in a book titled Latin Poetry Across Languages is to align myself with those who would break it down.

The book will treat ancient material in Chapters 1–3 and (in the broad sense) modern material in Chapters 4–7. I end this preamble with some words on how and why these two halves are put into one book, rather than into two. Like many classical Latinists, I have long benefited from patterns of affinity between critical approaches to Roman and to Renaissance literary tradition. When I wrote Allusion and Intertext, some of the critical writing that helped me most came from early modernists; so too, insofar as that book has found out-of-field readers, it has been, reciprocally, among early modernists. One of the reasons for mutual traction between eras and fields here is, undoubtedly, the shared trait under discussion here, in broad terms a bilingual literary culture based upon the interaction of an older literary language and tradition and a newer one. The parallel is both suggestive and problematic. Close up, comparison between the two situations soon reveals how differently such literary bilingualism can sort itself, in terms of cultural practices and blind spots, in terms of inclusion, exclusion, and occlusion; more on this in Chapter 1. Furthermore, the envisaged parallelism may impose a binary structure on relationships that are not always reducible to a binary. In post-Dantean Italy the questione della lingua means that the issue of poetic composition in Latin versus Italian vernacular runs hand in hand with the (even more urgent?) question of what form that Italian vernacular should take; mutatis mutandis the same kind of issue exercises the French Pléïade poets represented in my book by Du Bellay. And of course Latin itself for much of its post-antique history – even though its antiquity and alterity can be troped as antiquity and alterity – is also in practical terms a modern language as well as an ancient one, that is, a language with a continuing history as well as a dead one; in particular, Latin is the language of the western Church (and eventually of Roman Catholicism in particular) from later antiquity through early modernity, a sign that belongs no less to the Christian than to the classical world. And this is to say nothing of the different kinds of pressures put upon a simple binary model by ancient grammatical theories that make Latin a dialect of Greek, or early modern humanist theories that have the elite Romans of Cicero’s time using a colloquial form of proto-vernacular alongside their literary Latin.Footnote ¹

With those caveats, I believe that it is heuristically useful to juxtapose in a single volume these ancient and (early) modern case studies in the poetic relations of Latin across languages. The literary choices of one era can illuminate the literary choices of another; the literary choices of one era can defamiliarize the literary choices of another. The book’s essays do not seek to offer a unified field theory, or to identify a universal set of practices. On the other hand, in allowing different phases in the translinguistic history of Latin to be juxtaposed, these separate studies can become more than the sum of their parts, not just by their close and sustained focus on language crossing, but by a broader tendency (which I shall encourage rather than force) to put into play linked and recurrent questions, preoccupations, themes, and tropes. At a less high-minded level, my hope is that the book’s juxtapositions will give to a reader with a prior interest in any subset of my studies a reason to try all of them; both by personal inclination and by design, and with the encouragement of friends, I have for the most part chosen texts that are fun to think with.

The conversations in this book could be extended to almost any poetic text, or set of texts, with any kind of stake in Latinity. These are the conversations that have occupied me on and off for the greater part of a decade, and more. Treating ‘classical tradition’ as process rather than as product, indeed for the most part eschewing the customary ‘the’ that monumentalizes classical tradition into a single master-narrative, they find different ways to track the negotiations and micronegotiations of authors and readers across language and culture. They make no claims to be the only or the best conversations available, but they do strive to be representative throughout of larger areas of possibility.

Counterfactual Literary History

If the first chapter of a handbook would have begun with an initial overview of the ways in which classical Latin verse constructs itself over against Greek, the opening essay in this book begins with a kind of anti-overview, a sketch of some paths not taken or only partly taken by classical Latin verse in its interactions with Greek. It takes its bearings from a simple but seldom-asked question. Given everything that we know about Latin literature as an outgrowth from Greek, about the persistent habit of Roman poets of fashioning their works as always and pervasively in dialogue with Greek, and more generally about the grounding of Roman elite education in Greek (and about Roman elite philhellenism at large), shouldn’t we reasonably expect some actual surviving poetry in Greek from our canonical Latin poets? With just enough interesting exceptions to prove the rule, such poetry is conspicuous by its absence. In early modernity, in contrast, an analogously deep and learned engagement with an older literary and linguistic tradition (in this case Latin, now in the ‘Greek’ role), coinciding with the development of newer vernacular possibilities, leads to a situation in which (with all kinds of variation across time and place) poetic publication is possible either in the newer language or in the older one, or sometimes in both at the same time. If (say) Petrarch or Milton can have a bilingual poetic oeuvre, why not Virgil or Ovid? The chapter offers some close-up exploration of this ‘blind spot’ in ancient intertextual behaviour. After looking at some moments at which an individual poet’s compositional practice could have reached across languages but did not, I end by dwelling upon one anomalous case where it did.

Transliteralism for Beginners

Chapter 2 offers some up-close treatments of negotiation between Latin and Greek in epic proems, at points of heuristic intersection between allusion, translation, and character-by-character transliteration. As the enterprise of Romanizing the Greek epic project gets under way, how does the incipit of a Latin epic negotiate its cross-linguistic turn? How does it begin its beguine? The essay mobilizes the idea of poetic ‘transliteralism’, as defined above, and does so partly by touching upon the world of digital text analysis, which is just now moving on from the easy victories of Latin–Latin matching to the more complicated business of harnessing translation technologies to achieve meaningful digital text-matching of Latin and Greek.

The chapter takes us from the very first verse in Roman epic tradition, Livius Andronicus, Odussia 1, to the opening (and closing) lines of the Ilias Latina, the probably Neronian epitome that served for the western Middle Ages as a make-do surrogate for the Iliad, and a poem which short-circuits Latin literary history through a sense of structural affinity with Livius’ Odussia. In between, the ‘transliteral’ approach will be applied to more familiar Homerizing setups by Virgil and by Statius; and the chapter will have recourse also to the hexameter work that becomes both a topos and a trope for the translingual poetics of Greek into Latin, the Phaenomena of Aratus (something picked up in Chapter 3 too).

Parallel Lives

Chapter 3 samples some ancient conversations across language at the interface of literature and lived experience: lifestyle, in the strictest sense. My title takes its bearings from antiquity’s most famous Greco-Roman comparativist, Plutarch; but the first extended case study takes as its subject not the ‘parallel lives’ of Plutarch but those of a slightly less well-known observer, the Latin prose miscellanist Aulus Gellius. Beginning from some treatments of Greek and Latin learned and literary usage in the Attic Nights (in different ways verse-related), I attempt to elicit both metapoetics and anthropology from the micro-dramas of philological competition characteristic of Gellius’ inquiries. What can we learn, both close up and in a larger view, if we press the cruces of the Attic Nights for their cultural insights into the parallel lives of the Greeks and Romans whom we encounter in them?

A notice in Gellius of Virgil’s adaptation of a verse by his Hellenic friend and mentor Parthenius serves as a catalyst for discussion of a matter earlier raised amid the counterfactual vignettes of Chapter 1: What if we had some stories to tell, against the grain of literary history, about a Greek poet responding to something – anything – written in Latin? Virgil, who spent much of his life in the bilingual Bay of Naples, and whose fame is such as to test to the utmost the apparent Greek disinclination to acknowledge the mere existence of Roman poetry, is a good poet to ponder here, in terms alike of self-fashioning and of perception by others; the Bay itself invites attention as a potential microclimate of poetic biculturalism. The chapter moves on, via a Hellenic moment (as it seems) in the reception of the Eclogues, to consider a collection of Greek epigrams thought to have been assembled in the early to mid first century CE by a Greek epigrammatist who sought or enjoyed patronage at Rome, Philip of Thessalonica: In the face of most modern critical work on the Greek Anthology, and (probably) against the compiler’s own intention, what happens if the Garland of Philip is read as Roman poetry?

Diptych and Virtual Diptych

Chapters 4 and 5, which head up Part II of the book, explore conversations with antiquity made possible by different kinds of parallel Latin and vernacular composition in certain early modern poets; I have already noted above the attractions for my project of such heightened instances of two-way poetic traffic across languages. The greater part of Chapter 4 is focussed upon the English mid 1600s, and specifically upon John Milton and Andrew Marvell, whose lives, and whose investment in Latin, coincided not just in their verse but in their day jobs: from 1649 until 1660 John Milton was Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Commonwealth Council of State, commonly known as the ‘Latin Secretary’; in 1657 Marvell became his deputy in that office.

Although he is less famous for it than Milton, a substantial subset of Marvell’s poetry is in Latin; and of particular interest are instances in which he writes Latin and English versions of the same poem. On my read (indebted to the indispensable work of Estelle Haan), Ros and Hortus, usually read (when not simply ignored) as odd drafts or after-echoes of Marvell’s much-better-known Drop of Dew and Garden, ask to be considered, with some philological attention, as parallel and cross-referential compositions in which the poet plays with, and thematizes, his dual literary competence in English and in Latin. These are special cases; but the idea of ‘diptych’ composition offers a distinctive way of getting a purchase on literary bilingualism at large, not just at the level of the individual poem but at the level of the book or poetic career. In Marvell’s time, and in terms of bibliographical codes, the matter is rendered most fully tangible in Milton’s 1645 double book of ‘Poems English and Latin’, to be looked at more closely in Chapter 5, which (indeed) offers not so much a binary structure as a triangular one (Milton’s English in dialogue with classical Latin; Milton’s Latin in dialogue with classical Latin; Milton’s Latin and Milton’s English in dialogue with one another): a concentrated version of the diachronic and synchronic networks of any humanist or post-humanist poetry (and one that in Milton’s case involves other languages too). However, the midsection of Chapter 4 takes the idea of the cross-linguistic diptych in a different and hypothetical direction: what if one were to imagine a Latin ‘twin’ for every vernacular poem steeped in classical tradition, even in the 99 per cent of cases in which no such twin exists? Such a thought experiment finds immediate traction in the case of the notably Latinate English of Paradise Lost, with an added twist in that early translators were not lacking who took it upon themselves to do what Milton did not, and to render the Latinate and Virgilian verse of Paradise Lost into post-Virgilian Latin. I will end with a look at another sustained case of dual vernacular and Latin literary career, a century earlier, that of the French Pléïade poet Joachim Du Bellay.

Passages to Italy

Itineraries of poetry across language boundaries do not necessarily entail actual travel on the poet’s part; tropes of virtual poetic travel are as old as Virgil’s aspiration to bring the Greek Muses from their Aonian mountain home to his Roman (or Mantuan) patria, and much older. However, poets ancient and modern, including Virgil, did go on excursions to the lands associated with the poetic traditions with which they interacted – as did readers too. Chapter 5 resumes discussion of two poets who appeared in Chapter 4, Du Bellay in sixteenth-century France (via the French Antiquitez de Rome, the Latin Elegiae, and other works) and Milton in seventeenth-century England (via the bilingual 1645 collection, its Latin half framed by dedicatory testimonia from learned Italians and by the career-punctuating Epitaph for Damon). For both, language choice would certainly have been an issue even without their ventures abroad (Du Bellay’s La Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse predates his time in Rome as secretary to a French cardinal in 1553–7; Milton’s travels to Florence, Rome, and Naples in 1638–9 come when he is already established as a polyglot poet); but both use their time in Italy to explore, sharpen, thematize, and problematize transcultural issues of language and identity. Is the passage to Italy a celebration of linguistic cosmopolitanism or a test of linguistic loyalty, a journey home or a journey into exile and alienation? What kinds of language question do poetic travellers to Italy negotiate, and what Rome, or whose Rome, do they find?

Latinity, Lake Poetry, and Lyric Revision

Whereas Chapters 4 and 5 sample earlier modern centuries in which possibilities for poetic publication are still poised between vernacular and Latin, a chapter devoted to a major nineteenth-century poet will not expect to sustain that emphasis, unless it be via a disingenuous recentering of neo-Latin. The explorations of William Wordsworth in Chapter 6 take their initial and final bearings not from any composition in Latin but from the poet’s English translations from Latin: his abandoned late-career Aeneid, and early versions of lines from the Georgics in his student sketchbooks. In between these vignettes, which serve to establish Wordsworth’s credentials in ‘transliteral’ Latin, the essay moves into broader engagements with classical themes in two mid-career lyric narratives; throughout, there is an interest in dramas of close-up conflictedness worked out at the textual level. As has been argued with increasing force in recent years, the history of classical tradition must include histories of resistance to classical tradition. In the case of Wordsworth (with the help of the monumental Cornell edition of that poet), the kind of verbal push and pull that is a common element in all my book’s studies finds a new immediacy through privileged access to the ebb and flow of Wordsworth’s transactions with the classical in his own successive redrafts and re-edits, and in the editorial and commentatorial interventions of his friends and family (including Coleridge’s minute and unsparing marginalia on the attempted Aeneid). The middle of the chapter explores the Laodamia, a poem whose up-close Virgilianism is obsessively worked and reworked over a thirty-year period; I then move on to the Dion, another oddly framed lyric narrative that, originating in Plutarch as an exemplary Greek ‘life’ parallel to that of the Roman Brutus, is in Wordsworth a poem that first opens and then (in revision) closes off a path to more autobiographical modes of parallelism. Here, as throughout the chapter, trace elements of Wordsworth’s distinctive poetic of lake and landscape are found to be in play, sometimes unexpectedly, as part of the story.

Reversions of Pastoral

Earlier chapters will already have registered the ancient pivot from Greek to Latin in Virgilian bucolic, and one of the many early modern pivots between Latin and vernacular in Miltonic pastoral elegy. Like other treatments of classical tradition before, mine finds itself drawn to pastoral as a milieu in which poets and their readers – and their exegetes – meet to decode and to encode ideas about literature, life, and cultural identity; and, in adding to this conversation in my final chapter, Chapter 7, I allow myself a little latitude, moving in and out of strict matters of cross-linguistic comparison. Up close, pastoral has some claims to be the genre of classical tradition, and, after antiquity, the genre that most persistently tropes classical tradition itself as a genre. When (say) the medieval Latin poets of the Carolingian court represent themselves as Virgilian shepherds, they are fashioning themselves not just as Virgilians or as shepherds, but as translators and recreators of classical antiquity as a cultural system. At one level, post-antique pastoral will always transcend the (already manoeuvrable) ancient limits of the genre, expanding into the magical rural space of so-called paganism at large, or unlocking Christian allegories that render prelate or ruler – or poet – as a Davidian or Christ-like ‘good shepherd’. Conversely, and in ways that speak to the interests of this study, the pastoral poem will always allow its transcultural conversations to revert once more to the first linguistic principles of a Virgilian Eclogue – at times literally, word by word.

Different worlds of early modern ‘pastoral philology’ will be sampled in the Bucolicum carmen of Petrarch, in the Latin eclogues of Virgil’s Carmelite fellow-townsman Baptista Mantuan, and in the English Shepheardes Calender of Spenser. Matters of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural poetics will play out in the names of the inhabitants of these worlds, pulling them at times toward and at times away from their classical and Virgilian points of origin. And all three poets will be found to draw from the Virgil of the Fourth (‘messianic’) Eclogue some kind of interest in a pastorally inflected salvation, whether temporal, spiritual, or both at once. My chapter will end with three eclogues by Seamus Heaney, including Bann Valley Eclogue, in which a poet of our own time with a deep understanding of the staying power of pastoral will enter into a rural dialogue with his ‘hedge-schoolmaster Virgil’ to remake the Fourth Eclogue itself from first principles: an elemental lesson in reversion and redemption from the author of Alphabets.