I've been very interested in the several Guy Fawkes poems that
John Milton (British poets, 17th cent.) wrote in Latin, age 17. The
briefest of them, followed by Merritt Y. Hughes' rather
inadequate prose paraphrase [~John Milton: Complete Poems and Major
Prose~ 1957: Macmillan, NY, p. 14]:
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IN PRODITIONEM BOMBARDICAM --- IN EANDEM
Quem modo Roma suis devoverat impia diris,
Et Styge damnarat, Taenarioque sinu,
Hunc, vice mutata, iam tollere gestit ad astra,
Et cupt ad superos evehere usque Deos.
"Him whom impious Rome had consigned to her curses and condemned to
the Styx and the Taenarian gulf, him --- quite contrarily --- she sets
about too left to the stars and wishes to hoist among the celestial
gods."
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I love the idea, in the first place, of Milton being 17 at all (!).
(Who ever would have thought!?) Then, also that he took this sort of
adolescent male political enthusiasm in getting caught up in the
inflamed passions over Fawkes. That the kernel of ~Paradise Lost~
seems entirely in these poems, anti-authoritarianism, etc., whole
imaginative angelogies as the evil inspiration for Fawkes. And then,
too, that the prose paraphrases keep offering these completely garbled
and baffling translations, very funny!
This summer, when those Latin poems "seized" me, I very much wanted to
try my hand at re-translating them (My three years high school Latin
and a dictionary survive vestigially enough that I could bumble my way
through the ponies; a lot of my grammar and declensions has atrophied
without a memory trace, though), but I was caught up in a very fussy
translation agenda this summer, translating Greek tragedy choruses
into their original meter, and I definitely cannot scan Latin (let
alone XVIIth cent. Latin, which has its own separate modifications and
exceptions to the rules; Milton was lax about even those rules, too,
I think) in a way that would've given me the template I wanted.
I read an interesting, slim book of conference papers, during that
summer passion, about "New Latin" poetry, that is, the voluminous
literature of Latin poetry written by British poets, and especially
the --- what were they called? the Pleiades? the Parnassians? --- the
mythological, non-existent "school" of poets involving Spenser and
others --- and one of the dons made the attractive assertion that you
cannot really understand the history of British poetry without knowing
something of its parallel life in New Latin poetry. I liked that.
One of Christopher Marlowe's two or three surviving New Latin poems is
~much,~ much better, rhythmically, diction, than any of his English!
I like that notion, that English poets had this sort of "other" poetry
shadow, that's almost completely sealed off to most of us now.
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