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A Home


Not without a certain vaingloriousness, I had begun at that time my methodical study of Latin.

—Jorge Luis Borges1

How does one come to love a language? And a language like Latin?

I fell for Latin at an early age. I’m not exactly sure why. When I try to make sense of it, all I can ever dig up is a memory or two, not necessarily linked to any reason. It’s hard to explain an instinct, a calling. The best you can do, perhaps, is tell the story.

Latin helped me excel in my studies, find my way toward poetry and literature, fall in love with translation; it gave my divergent interests a common goal; in the end, it’s even earned me a living. I taught Latin at the New School in New York, at one high school in Lodi and another in Milan. And even now, at Oxford, where I teach Renaissance literature, I use this language every day, because there’s no such thing as the Renaissance without Latin. Growing up, I wielded it like an amulet or a magic shield, a bit like Stendhal’s Julien Sorel in The Red and the Black. When I went to my rich friends’ houses in Milan, where I grew up, I always made a good impression, precisely because of my reputation as a good Latin student. And later, with my brand-new classics degree in hand, when I began a doctorate in comparative literature at New York University, it was my knowledge of Latin that American professors valued most. Only then, in that American world, where who you are matters more than your parents’ surname, did I understand how fortunate I was. Thanks to Latin, I was never alone. My life stretched for centuries and across continents. If I’ve done any good for others, I’ve done it through Latin. And whatever good I’ve done myself—that, without question, I owe to Latin.

Studying Latin set me in the habit early on of thinking about language in terms of discrete sounds and syllables. It taught me the importance of musical language: the soul of poetry. At a certain point, words I’d used every day began disassembling in my mind and swirling around, like petals in the air. Thanks to Latin, every word I knew doubled in sense. Beneath the garden of everyday language lay a bed of ancient roots. This is true of Italian and the other Romance languages, but it also applies to English, whose vocabulary is mostly derived from Latin, either directly or through French. The double origin of the English vocabulary is obvious in the different roots of semantically related nouns and adjectives: consider, for example, the pairs “sun/solar,” “moon/lunar,” and “tooth/dental.” The noun is Germanic, the adjective is Latin. Even the most Germanic-sounding word may have sprung from Latin. Take “laundry”: it derives from the Old French lavanderie, which derives from the Latin gerundive lavandum, “that which must be washed.” It makes perfect sense, no? The same root lav- (wash) is to be found in “lavatory,” or even in “lavish,” taken from the Old French lavasse, “deluge of rain”: hence the notion of abundance, which originally applied to speech. We now forget that there is a connection between, say, a lavish banquet, an overflowing amount of water, and an excessive discourse. But the connection—a metaphorical one—is definitely there.

If on the one hand this multiplicity of meanings requires an understanding of history and a faith in even the most remote connotation, on the other it makes one alert to insidious nuance, to the splendor of figurative language, and therefore to ambivalence, elusiveness, mystique, and the gift of saying two or even three things at once.

I was drawn to Latin as a child because it was ancient, and I’ve always loved antiquity. Or to put it more accurately, certain images of the ancient world have always given me a special pleasure, along with something like tachycardia—the pyramids, or the columns of Greek temples, or the Egyptian mummies. I also recall a passage in my elementary school textbook about the domus, the house of patricians, and the insulae, where everyone else lived. My family and I, I discovered, lived in an insula.

It wasn’t until my second year of middle school that I came to own an actual book in Latin. And there it was, the domus, described in detail. Alongside it was a wealth of architectural terms, my first Latin words: impluvium, atrium, triclinium, tablinum, vestibulum, fauces. I then overlooked the fact that this terminology came from a book by Vitruvius, one of the most influential figures in history. Who would have dreamed: a house that let the rain in through a hole in the roof and collected it in a basin below, that had columns and rooms atop rooms; a house so big you could hide in it and never be found! So, yes, Latin became entangled with my desire to, in a certain sense, climb the social ladder: the dream of a magnificent home. More precisely, it became a space in my imagination where I could live happily: the happy place. And it wasn’t solely internal, this space: uncontainable, it slipped out of me into my drawings. Everywhere I could I sketched plans for this domus, filling in every box with its proper Latin term, certain that I too would one day have my own domus. My apprehensive parents tried to justify the habit by saying I’d grow up to be an architect.

Nor, in truth, could Latin have been anything other than an imaginary space to me at the time. In 1977, the year I entered middle school, it was deleted from the required curriculum. My dutiful teacher, Ms. Zanframundo, went on dedicating an hour of her class to Latin, more out of habit than any particular belief, though she never expected too much of us students. I learned the first and second declensions on my own, as a labor of love, without bothering to understand the logical functions of their different inflections. But what a pleasure just to know the names of the cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, ablative.

There was, now that I think about it, one other factor that affected my imagination: the example of my mother. On some level, I can say that even before encountering it I considered Latin a maternal language (as it was for Montaigne, who, by his own account, learned to speak it even before French)—or if not maternal then certainly natural, something born from emotion. As a girl, before emigrating to Germany, my mother had lived for a time in a convent, in Aquila degli Abruzzi, where she’d learned several prayers in Latin: the Requiem aeternam, the Pater noster, the Ave Maria … This was enough to convince me that she knew Latin. She, to be sure, had never claimed such knowledge; in fact, by her account she didn’t know the language at all. Like the other girls, she had learned to parrot what she heard in Mass every morning, noon, and night, spitting back who knows how much nonsense. Yet I needed no further evidence than her parroted prayers; stilted and incomprehensible as it was, I thought her Latin was perfectly fluent. Thanks to those strange utterances, she became in my eyes the magnificent matriarch of the equally magnificent home I would one day build—with Vitruvius’s simple words.

I learned Latin during my first two years of liceo classico—the humanities track at an elite high school, where I was initiated into classical languages—and perfected it in the final three. At university, I simply read a lot of poetry and prose in Latin. I always had very capable and demanding teachers. But Latin, I can say without presumption, I learned on my own: with passion, dedication, and curiosity. If my teacher assigned us a passage to translate, I turned in three or four versions. I translated every day, whether there was homework or not. In addition to the one we used for class, I picked up two or three translation exercise books from the teacher’s library, from which I could pluck at will. The best time to translate, I found, was in the evenings, just before bed. I’d scan the text for those passages marked by three asterisks—the most difficult. Nights, I muttered Latin in my sleep. Or so claimed my father, drawn by the sound of my voice.

I never put my translations to paper: I did them in my head and committed them to memory. If called on in class, I’d reproduce them, or else retranslate the passage then and there, with the Latin text in front of me. I never liked fixing one version to the page. Writing, I felt, served only to legitimize the imperfection of a particular phrasing, to set errors in stone. Better left to the mind. There you could improve the translation, dispensing with any vagueness, filling in any gaps—for memory has little interest in the disagreeable, and even less in the incomplete.

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And here I am today, writing a book that communicates, or tries to communicate, my love for, and faith in, Latin, to put into words that joyous atrial flutter, that sense of expansion I still feel, despite my accruing experience, whenever I read the language. Not a grammar book, not a history of language or literature, but an essay on the beauty of Latin, which may ultimately encourage readers to refresh their Latin or even start learning it from scratch.2

If in part I draw on my long study of the literature, what you’ll find in these pages comes fundamentally from a renewing of my vows, so to speak: a revived effort of intuition and penetration founded upon rereadings and reconsiderations, which nurtured the writing of this work at every step, calling upon my entire sensibility—the very same sensibility, I believe, that I bring to the drafting of a poem or the structuring of a novel.

In each chapter, I’ll focus my attention on specific authors and passages, keeping technical discussions to a minimum, and avoiding any detailed accounts of the close ties between Latin and Greek, else we veer too far off course. Authors and excerpts, to be clear, do not figure here as they would in a history of Latin literature. In this book, they stand as “episodes” in the life of Latin, and not necessarily in chronological order; they are examples of what Latin has accomplished, what it has gained at a certain moment, in certain circumstances and conditions, and handed down to its long—and still living—tradition. The authors, therefore, do not function as individuals but as linguistic instances. When we encounter Cicero or Virgil, we won’t speak of the particular Latin of Cicero or the particular Latin of Virgil. Rather, we’ll consider what Latin gained and accomplished when expressed in Cicero’s style or Virgil’s style. And even here we must distinguish, given that Cicero and Virgil are not people but sums of linguistic phenomena, as the differing forms, styles, and rhetoric of their works demonstrate. Besides, I’ve always believed, even beyond the field of Latin, that individual authors are only embodiments of the empirical conditions that allow a language to break new ground or transform itself. We speak often, of course, of personal style, how style separates one thing from another; but style, ultimately, is only an event in the life of a language.

This is a book, above all, for young students, the most eager among us to make sense of what they do and see. Though I hope, in truth, to say something in these pages to the not-so-young as well, whether or not they are Latinophiles; perhaps even to help a few former high school students rediscover the pleasure of their longed-for or abandoned studies; to communicate something vital and necessary to politicians and teachers, businesspeople and doctors, lawyers and writers; and even to those who’ve never once asked themselves the question of Latin, and who, today, without bias, without fear or vague excuses, decide they’d like to know a little more about it—just because, out of curiosity.

It will have been enough even if I succeed in helping only a few readers to see the importance of the Latin language, why knowing it, or at least understanding its properties, can truly add life to your years.


Copyright © 2016 by Nicola Gardini

Translation copyright © 2019 by Todd Portnowitz