Living with a Dead Language

by Ann Patty

  “Don’t eat the doughnuts,” my colleagues warned me. (In the novel the children are given the “treat” of doughnuts covered with arsenic-laced powdered sugar, which is what eventually kills one of the twins.)

  I did eat the doughnuts. Virginia’s mother presented them, on a crystal plate, along with a pitcher of water covered with a clean linen napkin. Virginia was amused, watching me looking warily at the doughnuts. “I told Mother we had to have them,” she said. “Mother hasn’t read the book.”

  Mother had been Virginia’s caregiver and prison warden from the time Virginia was fifteen, when a fall led to surgery, which led to arthritis, and, finally, paralysis of her spine from neck to coccyx. Virginia reclined, rather than sat, in a type of wheelchair I’d never seen before—rather like an ironing board with large wheels and leg rests. When she wrote, she would alley-oop herself out of her chair using a trapeze that hung from the ceiling, and stand leaning against a chest-high table for support. She typed on a red IBM Selectric and always dressed for work. “I think it makes me more creative,” she declared.

  For the next six years, Virginia and I cranked out a novel a year, on a crazy-fast schedule, which required me to become more of a co-writer than simply an editor.

  Fortunes changed. The novels became the best-selling paperback originals ever. Virginia called me her Fairy Godmother. I called her my Golden Goose. And Humphrey and I shared a somewhat preposterous, somewhat scandalous author. Virginia became a wealthy woman, moved to a large house overlooking the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia Beach, and bought herself a customized wheelchair and a van so she could hire herself a driver to squire her around town.

  I parlayed my success into a hardcover imprint at Simon and Schuster, though I’d never published a hardcover book. In the heroic mode of deluded grandeur, I named my imprint Poseidon, the Greek god who drove Odysseus on his ten years of wanderings. I identified with both the driver, on the rampage from old passion, and the clever, driven hero. Like him, I had managed to navigate between the Scylla of power and the Charybdis of sexism to make my own way at Simon and Schuster.

  For my logo I chose the sea horse: one of the few aquatic animals whose female lays her eggs in the male’s pouch and leaves it to the male to carry them to birth. Was it odd to name my imprint after a male? Since I was a young woman in a world where the males held all the power, it seemed appropriate.

  In October, a week before Halloween, lanky Ralph appeared in class dressed as a centurion in full Roman legion regalia: red tunic (tunica) bordered in gold and covered by a leather cuirass that ended in lappets (a skirt of decorated leather strips). Over that he wore a cingulum (military belt) and lorica segmentata (metal armor, segmented like a beetle’s back, that covers shoulders and upper arms). He also sported a red focale (scarf) and a paenula (red hooded cloak). A golden laurel band festooned his hair, and a sword was strapped to his cingulum.

  We all gathered around him, delighted and impressed. Where did he get such a costume? He told us he’d found the cuirass on eBay and his mother had helped him make the pleated skirt.

  When Rob entered the room and saw us all standing around, he enacted my favorite longest word from the previous year: subductisupercilicarptores. Then Ralph stepped out from the surrounding circle and displayed himself, at which point Rob broke out into delighted, if subdued, laughter. It was our most fun class ever, a Roman legionary in our midst, but still we translated! It was not yet Halloween, but we were a class of Romans on that day.

  The next week we left Catullus for Propertius, who was of the next generation of Roman poets. Though heavily influenced by Catullus, Propertius confined himself to elegiac verse. He is known as one of the most difficult of the poets to translate. His use of Latin is deemed experimental by many classicists; he mixes vernacular with high literary Latin and expresses his feelings in elliptical, sometimes paradoxical lines, often imposing intellectual scrutiny on deep emotion. He is also extremely fond of including obscure mythological references, whose bearing on his own plight is often strange and ambiguous. His poems often seem like jagged mosiacs of feeling, his emotions ricocheting from the depth of misery to the height of ecstasy.

  Love, for Propertius, is a siege that he is powerless to repulse. In the very first poem, we get a taste of his misery in love, as well as the difficulties in translating it into English.

  Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis

  contactum nullis ante cupidinibus

  tum mihi constantis deiecit lumina fastus

  et caput impositis pressit Amor pedibus.

  Cynthia was the first to capture me with her eyes

  miserable me, untouched before by any desire

  until her eyes slayed my habitual arrogance

  and love trampled my head with his commanding feet.

  Propertius’ fondness for participles (contactum, constantis, impositis) is the least of what makes him vexing to translate.

  After Propertius came Horace, commonly considered the best of the lyric poets, though I did not immediately love him. Perhaps because he was the class-climbing son of a freedman, many of his poems toadied to Augustus. And his tone, which of course we can’t truly know, was superbus (haughty, proud, arrogant). Unlike our suffering, passionate, occasionally turgid Catullus and Propertius, Horace’s voice is stately. He was moved more by philosophical musings than emotions. Formally, he was a virtuoso, writing in almost every meter and genre of the Greeks, and made innovations in all of them. Horace seemed never to doubt himself, never to suffer the tempests of loves. Instead he handed down wisdom as if from on high:

  In Ode I.1:

  Me doctarum hederae praemia frontium

  dis miscent superis, me gelidum nemus

  nympharumque leves cum Satyris chori

  secernunt populo.

  The ivy garland, privilege of learned brows

  unites me with the gods above

  the icy grove and the nimble chorus of Nymphs with Satyrs

  distinguish me from the common crowd.

  No nugae or libelli (trifles or little books), as Catullus called his poems, for Horace. Instead gods, demigods, and nymphs dance just for him. Nevertheless, there was no mistaking his great artistry as a poet: In the line above, nymphs and satyrs are placed so the words lightly dance together. The word placement enacts the scene.

  Horace was also a master of the poetic figure zeugma, from the Greek for “yoking together,” which is when one verb has multiple objects, each with a different sense of the verb. Here it is in Ode I.9, which became my favorite of Horace’s poems:

  Nunc et Campus et Areae

  lenesque sub noctem susurri

  conposita repetantur hora

  nunc et latentis proditor intumo

  gratus puellae risus ab angulo

  pignusque dereptum lacertis

  aut digito male pertinaci.

  Now the fields and courtyards

  are sought again

  at the trysting hour at dusk

  and now the low whispers are repeated

  now the telltale happy giggles of the girl

  hiding in the corner are renewed

  and the token snatched

  from her barely resisting arm or finger is claimed.

  Repetantur does quadruple duty as a verb: meaning first “sought again,” then “repeated,” then “renewed,” then “claimed,” as in the translation above. Of course such syntactical acrobatics make translating Horace all the harder. The same poem also uses this line: donec virenti canities abest / morosa (while morose greyness is far away from you, blooming).

  Rob points out that virenti (blooming) is used for youth and canities (grey) for age and asks, “Now are those metonymy or synecdoche? I always confuse the two.”

  Even Rob Brown, after thirty years of teaching Latin, still confused metonymy and synecdoche! His question was
an island of relief in a sea of Greek.

  Ralph came to his rescue. “They’re metonymy.” He explained that metonymy is when one thing, which is closely related, is substituted for something else, as in “glass” or “grape” for “wine” (with Horace, as with Ralph, it always came back to wine). “Synecdoche is a part standing in for the whole, or vice versa, as in ferrum (iron) for sword.” Make that wine and costume.

  That one line gave us much to discuss. Morosa comes from the noun mos. Osus or osa added to the end of a noun makes it mean “full of,” as in our English vernacular expression fabulosa. Mos, moris in the singular means “custom” or “practice” or even “law.” In the plural, mores means “character” or “personality.” Thus character is a collection of customs and habits. Morosus means full of mores and translates as “stubborn, hypercritical, gloomy” (like the English word “morose”). Too much custom, practice, or character can become toxic. Babae! (Wow!) What lessons can be learned from a single word of Latin!

  Perhaps it was Horace’s fondness for the grape that made him somewhat morose. Just before his most famous line in Ode I.11, the oft-quoted carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero (seize the day, putting little trust in what will come next), he advises his friend, sapias, vina liques, et spatio brevi spem longam reseces (be smart, pour the wine, and, our span being brief, trim back boundless hope).

  The man liked to drink. As often as he anticipates death in the poems, he also exhorts his interlocutors to bring out the wine, sometimes going so far as to specify region, vintage, and glass size: deprome quadrimum Sabina, O Thaliarche merum, diota (I.9) (Thaliarchus, pour out the four-year-old unmixed wine from the Sabine wine jar).

  Whenever a reference to drink was made in Horace’s poems, Ralph cheered, lifted an imaginary glass, and mimed drinking. It’s probably no surprise that he did not finish the semester.

  Now, when I feel fretful of an afternoon, rather than breaking out the wine, I translate. I must be entirely sober to translate. I’m always happy when a friend who knows I’m now a Latinist sends me an e-mail, asking me to translate a line. A writer friend asks what a line used in that week’s New Yorker means: Absens non erit haeres. Non erit means “it will not be.” Absens means “someone absent or far away.” My online dictionary tells me that haeres is second-person singular imperative of the verb haereo, haerere meaning “to hang, cleave, stick to.”

  So I try: The absent will not cling? Do not cling to the absent? But absens is nominative, so that can’t be right. Finally I give in and google it. “An absent person will not be heir” is the translation.

  In none of my three Latin-English dictionaries does “heir” appear as haeres, though on the Internet it does appear as an alternate spelling of heir (heres, heredis). How on earth did Latin students not break out the wine daily without the Internet?

  The next morning at the Retreat I ran into Tom Beller, a writer acquaintance who had attended Vassar and was giving a reading that day. We began discussing Latin, and I told him the above story, which led to his telling me about his grandfather’s heavy, carved wooden armoire, which Tom had shipped from New York to New Orleans. “It sits like a fortress in my office,” he said, “and takes up way too much room, but I can’t bring myself to get rid of it.” And here, serendipitously, is the noun’s relationship to the verb: inheritance as clinging. Clinging and letting go, inalienable possessions and transitory possessions, those would become the bêtes noires of my next two months.

  My past was suddenly rushing back at me. Within a day of each other, two e-mails arrived in my mailbox. Flowers in the Attic was being remade as a Lifetime TV movie with two former movie stars and an up-and-coming young TV star. The first e-mail was from a Young Adult novelist wanting to interview me for a new blog, The Toast, curated by women in their forties. Women who came of age in the late seventies/early eighties were the largest contingent of the V. C. Andrews cult, and with the announcement of the film, the Internet was awash in things V. C. The Toast was devoting an entire day to her.

  The second was from the popular Web site BuzzFeed. The writer was preparing an in-depth article on the posthumous V. C. Andrews phenomenon.

  Five years after her death, I had been forced to sign away large sums owed to me on her posthumous books, as well as to the franchise that I thought would be the inalienable possession, not to mention financial engine, of my career. I was legally enjoined from telling which books published after her death were or were not written or conceived by her, and what my role was in their conception and writing. I had allowed myself to be painted as an extortionist and with no little determination had moved on. And here it was coming back again. The past is always present, especially in the Internet age. I became possessed—read: obsessed—with this inheritance wrested from me so long ago. Was it time for me to change the past, claim my inheritance, and clear my name? Did anyone but me even care?

  For days I pondered, tormented, raged. Should I write a book, a wrathful chronicle about a young woman being screwed by men who stole what she had created? Finally, on the advice of a savvy publishing lawyer, I decided to let the past lie. There was, however, one inheritance I could recover: I could resurrect Humphrey, who had been written out of the story long before I had.

  Had Humphrey lived, the scandal would never have occurred. He would have told the truth and protected me. Humphrey died in 1982, four years before Virginia. He had turned thirty-three only a week before. Though we didn’t realize it at the time, so new was the plague, AIDS killed him, and quickly. What started as two days of hiccups progressed into a month in the hospital, a face and body Day-Glo yellow, a stomach as big as a woman’s carrying triplets, dark eyes void of their usual warmth, shockingly distant and weary. It was the look, I later learned, of death.

  His mother, his boyfriend, my long-unseen former boyfriend Ed, Secret, and I attended him at the hospital every day for that month, as piece by piece his body shut down. I rehearsed daily the declaration of love I wanted to make him and daily gave him long foot massages instead. It allowed us both to believe we were still who we had been, California Ann imposing some touchy feely on her best friend, Humphrey. It was then, perhaps, that I finally understood and embodied irony.

  The call came on a wet, grey September morning, at four thirty, the hour of the wolf, that hour between night and dawn when most people die and nightmares are most real. The sky wept on us as we made our way to the hospital. The nurses knew us; they had left the body bag unzipped, knowing we’d want a last glimpse of him. Humphrey looked, in death, nothing like he had in life.

  That visitation was the only memorial we had for him. Though the agent for whom he worked hosted a gathering, I didn’t attend; it was the sort of event I would have attended only if Humphrey would go with me.

  Horace, it turned out, perfectly suited my revisiting that first death, so young, and I began to like him much more. I chose for my class presentation at the end of the semester Ode I.28, a poem about death, which, for once, Horace writes about without the consolation of wine. Horace first lists all the renowned men who have died: astronomers who measured the skies, beloveds of the gods, heroes of Troy, all morti concesserant atrae (consigned to black death). He even appropriates lines from Catullus V, that poem that uses death only as an impetus for kisses: omnes una manet nox et calcanda semel via leti (the same night awaits us all and we all must tread once the road of death).

  The last lines of the poem kept me thinking about Humphrey:

  Quamquam festinas, non est mora longa;

  licebit iniecto ter pulvere curras.

  Although you are in a hurry, the delay is not long;

  after three covering handfuls of dust, you will be allowed to run along.

  Humphrey’s body, after our visit that sad morning, was donated to science, neither buried nor burned. There was no box of ashes, no plaque commemorating him. All these years later, I regret that no memorial was held f
or him. I was too young, back then, to understand the power of a formal, public farewell. Although he’s been dead well over thirty years, this V. C. episode and the opportunity to talk about him with The Toast and BuzzFeed reporters brought him back again. If my accomplishment could be taken from me, my beloved, now-dead friend was forever an inalienable possession.

  Winter break began the second week of December, and as always, I dreaded it. Winter in the country always feels like exile to me, and that winter the snows arrived in early December, along with an unusual cold snap, a harbinger, I feared, of a brutal season to come. I began counting the days until what would become my annual Florida escape, just after New Year’s, for two weeks. To accompany my elegiac funk, I bought a copy of Anne Carson’s Nox, which is a brilliant translation, meditation, and reenactment of Catullus CI, Catullus’ elegy for his brother. Carson describes Nox as “an epitaph (for my brother) in the form of a book.”

  As much artifact as book, its accordion-folded pages rest in an elegant 6x9-inch box. The first page is the text of Catullus CI smudgedly printed on antiqued paper:

  Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus

  advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,

  ut te postremo donarem munere mortis

  et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem,

  quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum,

  heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi.

  nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum

  tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias

  accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu,

  atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.

  Carried through many lands and many waters,

  I come, brother, for these sad rites,

  that I might finally give to you the honors of death

  and speak in vain to your silent ashes

  since fortune has taken you from me.

  oh pitiable brother, so unfairly taken from me.

  now, however, in the ancient custom of our ancestors