Living with a Dead Language

by Ann Patty

  Another example from Metamorphoses I, where Cupid does the same love mischief to Apollo: sagittifera prompsit duo tela pharetra (takes from the arrow-bearing quiver two spears) or, as written, arrow-bearing takes out from two spears quiver, so the placement of the words, with the arrows (duo tela) surrounded by the quiver (sagittifera pharetra), enacts the placement of the arrows in the quiver.

  Why does this most wonderful of poetic strategies not have a Greek name, or at least a Latin one? I asked Ben Stevens, but he did not know, so I e-mailed both Rob Brown and Curtis, but neither were aware of a formal term for it, other than “iconic” or the boring “word picture” or “Virgilian word picture” (since Virgil was the first to excel at this strategy). Unlike the other poetic devices, ancient critics didn’t recognize it. Might it better be called “visual onomatopoeia”? My research turned up the term “technopaegnia,” which is a poem in the shape of what it’s writing about, such as Lewis Carroll’s poem in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that begins “Fury said to a mouse,” which is written in the shape of a mouse’s tail. The Web also revealed the word “onomableva,” for nouns that look like the thing they label, such as I, which looks like a standing person, bed, with its headboard and footboard, and awkward, with its awkward wkw. But further research revealed this to be a neologism, back-formed from the Greek for word and resemble.

  I’d like to coin an appropriate Latin term for a word picture. Perhaps verba acta (words enacted) or verba imaginata (words in image) or imago in verbis (image in words)?

  I asked my friend Jan Heller Levi, an accomplished poet, if there’s anyone who can do this in English. A few days later, this excerpt from an E. E. Cummings poem arrived via e-mail:

  somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond

  any experience, your eyes have their silence:

  in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

  or which I cannot touch because they are too near

  your slightest look easily will unclose me

  though I have closed myself as fingers,

  you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

  (touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

  —E. E. Cummings

  The last two lines come as close as English can get, with the petal by petal slowly revealing myself. I had always loved E. E. Cummings when I was in high school, and later, as I was recovering from breast cancer, his poem “i thank You God for most this amazing day” was my prayer. In the depths of chemo, staring down death, every day of being alive was a blessing. Like Ovid, E. E. Cummings has gone in and out of fashion; recently he’s come back in. He was, of course, a Latinist.

  As we proceeded on to selections of the Metamorphoses, Ovid’s visual acuity with words was well in evidence. In Pyramus and Thisbe (IV.121–24), he has a bloody description worthy of Quentin Tarantino, written, I suspect, with equal wryness:

  Cruor emicat alte,

  non aliter quam cum vitiato fistula plumbo

  scinditur et tenui stridente foramine longas

  eiaculatur aquas atque ictibus aera rumpit.

  Blood spurted up high,

  not unlike when a faulty lead pipe is split open,

  and shoots out long streams of water

  from a small hissing opening,

  and burst in jets into the air.

  Here’s a more pleasing example: In Metamorphoses V.592–96, Arethusa, a wood nymph, tells her story. Always embarrassed by her beauty, and not desiring to please men, she was a fine hunter and wanderer in mountain meadows. One hot day she came upon a lovely clear stream. She then describes, in seductive imagery, what is almost a striptease, as she cools herself in the stream. Here Ovid puts us in the gaze of Alpheus, the river god down below, as Arethusa tells her tale:

  Accessi, primumque pedis vestigia tinxi,

  poplite deinde tenus; neque eo contenta, recingor,

  molliaque inpono salici velamina curvae,

  nudaque mergor aquis; quas dum ferioque trahoque

  mille modis labens, excussaque bracchia iacto

  I approached, and first dipped in the tips of my feet

  then as far as my knees; not content with that, I strip off

  my soft robes and hang them from a curving willow

  and naked I merge with the waters. While I strike and stroke the water

  gliding in a thousand ways I flourish and shake my arms

  If she’s so chaste, why such a description, we might ask? Is not Ovid once again enacting a sexual metaphor? Does this not sound like foreplay?

  Arethusa does disturb and excite the river god Alpheus, who exhorts her to stay, but she runs all the way to Diana, who hides her in a fine mist. As Alpheus, momentarily taking bodily form, stares at the mist, she gradually liquefies. Alpheus returns to his river form, hoping their fluids might mingle, but Diana sinks Arethusa down deep underground, whence she rises up into the air as a fountain.

  At our last class before the two-week March break, Ben Stevens finally had some words to say about the incursion of the computer in our classroom. “For the next part of class, I’m going to ask you all not to bring your computers; they’re a distraction.”

  I admired Ben’s tact. Leonardo frequently read his translations from a cell phone. Were they downloaded from elsewhere on the Internet or had he translated them himself and keyed them in on that tiny keyboard? There was no way to know. And Guy, with his laptop ever at the ready to look up a word in class, was just as often surfing the Internet and shopping when it wasn’t his turn to translate. I knew because I sat next to him.

  During the break, I read all of The Metamorphoses, getting up from time to time to stare out the window and gaze at the mostly barren landscape that surrounded me. When I lived in New York City, I’d spend hours on my window seat overlooking Riverside Drive, watching the people parade pass by. I could tell the weather by their dress: light or heavy coats, necks naked or wrapped with scarves. I liked charting the change of season through the intermittent splashes of color that enlivened the drab black, brown, and grey winter coats.

  Here I have only squirrel, deer, and birds to watch. Though Ovid tells of no human being changed into a squirrel, legions (over forty by my count) are turned into birds in The Metamorphoses, a few of which are named: crow, hawk, dove, stork, heron, owl, eagle, magpie, and woodpecker. Of those, many have made their way onto our property to use our bird feeder and suet; luckily, some stay all winter long.

  The kitchen and living-room windows look directly out onto a stone patio, behind which stands a small magnolia tree swathed in a petticoat of deer netting. A bird feeder hangs from its highest branch. On the other side of the patio, a bright blue bluebird box sits atop a rusty, six-foot pole, a suet cage dangling from it like an outsized earring. That patio is the metropolitan hub of our yard. Birds come and go all day, particularly in the morning—juncos, chickadees, and a pair of cardinals, dazzling splashes of red in the brown, grey, and white winter landscape. In February a pair of red-bellied woodpeckers arrives. Why they are called red-bellied is a mystery—there’s no discernable red or even a blush of rose on their bellies. The male sports a full red Mohawk, the female a mere yarmulke of red. The doves, who are ground feeders, also arrive in February. But I always have my eyes peeled for bluebirds, my favorite harbingers of spring, who arrive even before the robins.

  My first father-in-law used to say that if you want to understand human society, raise chickens. I’ve now come to think the same is true for all birds; I can watch them for hours. There are alphas, betas, aggressives and passives, and those who avoid the pecking order altogether, just as there are in human society. The male woodpecker chases a junco from the feeder to the less favored suet, where the junco flaps and flutters and drives away his cousin or wife, whoever got there first. As soon as the woodpecker flies off, the juncos return to the feeder. The d
oves stay on the ground, where they avoid conflict and enjoy dropped seed.

  In The Metamorphoses, most of the humans are turned into birds for failing to love the god or goddess who desires them. The saddest of all, for me, is Picus, the handsome prince of Latium who spurns Circe, the weaver goddess of magic, because he so loves his wife, Canens (Singing). Circe does not like being denied, and as Picus rushes back to his wife, she turns him into a woodpecker. His powerful beak knocks against trunks and branches in perpetual anger and frustration. His wife, whom Circe holds equally responsible, is turned into nothing but air. We have our own Picus here in the summers, a magnificent pileated woodpecker, whose slow, powerful drumming we begin hearing in the early spring, and whose deep kuk kuk kuk echoes through the forest.

  I hope, if I’m turned into a bird, I might be a bluebird, or perhaps an owl, like the barred owl whose plangent hooo hooo hoo hooooooo (who cooks for youuuuu: a spondee and an iamb) we hear on summer nights, sometimes echoing another call in the distance. But I fear I might be a hummingbird, whose fast machinelike whir announces its arrival even before you see it. Like me, it is always in motion. George would certainly be an eagle, sitting up high somewhere, watching the world below.

  By the time class ends in May, the bluebirds have built their nest in the birdhouse, the doves are feeding on the seed they’ve dropped to the ground, the robins have arrived with their warbling song, and George has found yet another vista he’s been seeking for several years. He has attended several presentations given by Michael Kudish, a retired professor of environmental science and forestry who has devoted his life to studying the history of the Catskill forests. He also has taken several educational forest walks offered by Kudish. Last winter he returned from a day’s outing to report that there was a Latinist among Kudish’s acolytes. “He wanders off on his own and finds plants to show us,” George told me. “And he knows all the Latin names for them. I think he must have a photographic memory. You should come to one of these outings and meet him.” That seemed unlikely.

  George was now hunting for a trail Kudish himself knew existed but had never found, a carriage trail that led from the lower slopes of Mount Tremper to the vista at the top. Armed with his geological survey maps, he was determined to find it. The Zen Mountain Monastery, at which George is a sometimes student, sits at the base of that mountain, and George has come to feel a special affinity with it. As I have favorite words (-ids, -ims, et cetera), George has favorite mountains.

  In the 1800s, New Yorkers fled the heat and humidity of the city and summered in the Catskills. Some of them stayed in the grand hotels that were scattered all over the mountaintops. With the advent of air-conditioning, the hotels fell into desuetude and finally burned down. Only one, the Mohonk Mountain House, still stands. Most were built at a high elevation, where spectacular views of the range were only a short walk from the hotel. One of the hotels, on Mount Tremper, was situated in a valley; from it, guests were transported to view the mountaintop panorama via horse and carriage, not unlike George and I, who must travel an uphill trail to enjoy our vista. George follows several types of trails. In descending order of width they are: carriage trails, quarry roads used to transport bluestone, bark roads for transporting the hemlock bark used in tanning, bridal paths for horses, and hiking paths for people.

  After several unsuccessful forays on the mountain, George finally found what he was looking for: an old carriage trail that went halfway up the mountain on a well-graded, if abandoned, road. But it soon petered out to a barely discernable path. That’s when George discovered an unusual guide: Bobcat tracks in the snow led him up and up to the top of the mountain. “I never saw the bobcat,” he later told me, “but I definitely had the sense he was leading me to the summit.”

  George studies old trails the way I study old language, taking off on various roads (authors) and tangents (poetic lines). For him the different characteristics of trails are as interesting as the sequence of tenses is for me: He is visual, I am verbal. How different he is than the other men I’ve loved. Month by month, year by year, I’m learning to accept, even delight in, our differences. He gives me a kind of love and comfort no man ever has before. I now look elsewhere for conversation about books and words—especially New York. In my younger years, I required sophistication in the men I loved; now all I ask for is kindness.

  That’s a transformation age allows, along with the happy triangle I enjoy every June, when both my straight and gay “husbands” are in residence. Once again, the house gets a thorough Steve cleaning, and I have a chattering mate to keep me company while I garden. That year, partly in celebration of Steve, I had a rose trellis built on the wall between the house and barn, and by the time Steve left at the beginning of July, a red floribunda rose was climbing around on it, surrounded by Russian sage and the foliage of the dinner-plate dahlias I’d planted for late-summer glory. Because it’s a narrow, triangular-shaped garden between the wall of the barn and the wall of the house, I figured it would be safe for roses: surely the deer won’t want to hazard the narrow bluestone trail I’d laid to bisect the garden. I wanted to attract my kindred busy hummingbirds, who love red flowers, and here, I hoped, they would not act as nymphs, luring the deer gods, at whose pleasure my gardens thrived or were destroyed.

  CHAPTER 10

  Si hortum in biblioteca habes, deerit nihil.

  If you have a garden in your library, you will lack nothing.

  —Cicero

  With the cool, clearing light of September, class began again, and none too soon. By August, I had despaired of my newly planted rose garden. Despite my efforts to foil them, the deer had eaten every single bloom on my otherwise flourishing roses. My dinner-plate dahlias were nipped in the bud; even the “deer-proof” perennials—bee balm and cupid’s dart—in my other gardens had been decimated. Decimate comes from the Latin verb decimare and means “to select one in ten for punishment.” In English, the meaning of the word has changed over the years. The American Heritage Dictionary defines decimate as: “1. To destroy or kill a large part of (a group). 2. To inflict great destruction or damage on: as in the fawns decimated my rose bushes.” At least English got the result right, if not the primary meaning.

  Ought a proper Latinist eschew the modern mutations of Latin word meanings? Should I say, “By September, the deer were so ravenous they left only the grey-foliaged plants untouched”? Who needed this reminder of age (canities)? My hair was grey and so was my dog, Augie, now older than I in dog years. And I was already dreading the grey of the coming winter. Grey needs color to brighten it, like cardinals in winter. So I bought a new, bright-red lipstick. It accentuated my blue eyes and silver hair like the roses and delphiniums might have accented my artemisia and lamb’s ear had deer not devoured my flowers.

  I was returning to Vassar for fall semester and looking forward to seeing my old teachers and classmates. I dressed for class that first fall day in lavender, put on my makeup so as not to alarm whatever new youths might be my classmates, and finished myself off by applying my new lipstick. Early, as always, I headed to the Retreat for breakfast and, just as I opened the door, there was Curtis, walking out with a giant cup of soda pop.

  “Now you’re sure you don’t want to learn Greek with me?” he said. “Last chance!” It was the only class he was teaching, and he still didn’t know where he’d be next year, whether at Vassar or landing a new job elsewhere.

  I wanted to take Greek and longed to take another class with Curtis, but I was afraid I would lose all my Latin if I tried. Not to mention, I felt I needed at least five more years of Latin before I was anywhere near proficient. We had a nice chat, and at the end he put on a more serious look, touched my arm, and said, “Now, Ann, we’re friends, aren’t we?”

  I was alarmed. “I hope so,” I said.

  “This might not be my place,” he said, “and I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but you have lipstick on your teeth.” I thanked
him profusely and assured him that he was, indeed, a good friend, bonus amicus, then ran to the nearest ladies’ room. Was I becoming more and more eccentric, no longer the glamorous, high-powered publisher, merely an oldster auditor who couldn’t even get her lipstick on straight?

  That semester I was taking two classes, Roman Epigraphy and Roman History, both taught by Bert Lott. Earlier, I had visited him to ask for permission to take both, wondering if that might seem too greedy. “Not at all,” he said, but he warned me that he would be “very professor-y” in the history class, maybe not as fun as he had been in the seminar. “You’ll have to listen to me talk even more than usual,” he joked.

  “I’ll enjoy that,” I assured him. “I’ll have a semester of a lot of Lott!”

  After three years of study, I was eager to learn more of the Roman history I’d picked up in disconnected dribs and drabs from studying poetry and listening to novels about Rome by Steven Saylor, Robert Harris, and Colleen McCullough as I drove in my car. It made the daily commute seem more useful.

  The epigraphy class was held in the same large room as Beginning Latin, a comparatively big class: eight students! Alissa was back from her junior year abroad in Italy—she had metamorphosed into a young woman: more confident, more attractive, and more grown-up in every way. Naftali was a familiar junior, and now there was Peter, a senior, who sported purple and red polished nails, and Xavier, who had a full head of long, stringy brown hair, which he inexplicably wore in something resembling a comb-over. There were two new women: redheaded Sharon, a shy junior, and Gita, a freshman from a New York City private school. The only Latin student at Vassar who always brought her computer to class, Gita was habitually late and the class usually waited and watched as she removed the computer from her brightly patterned backpack, turned it on, and finally sat down. She never brought a book, but, like a court reporter, typed on the computer constantly throughout class. Correcting her translations? Writing down everything Bert Lott said? I never could tell. She was noticeably more self-confident than anyone else in the room, though not the best Latinist among us.