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A review by theyoungveronica
Long Live Latin: The Pleasures of a Useless Language by Nicola Gardini
5.0
maioresque cadunt altis demontibus umbrae
longer shadows fall from high in the mountains (Virgil)
invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi.
against my will, O queen, I left your shores.
Seamus Heaney: I embarked from your shore, my queen, unwillingly... (Virgil)
"Literature is a handing-down, a reservoir of memory, a genealogical system; in a word, imitatio, a cornerstone of aesthetics in the ancient world. Imitation does not prohibit or exclude innovation. The poet-creator's so-called originality is in truth a myth of the Romantic age."
"Pietas is devotion to intellectual clarity, to responsible judgment, to assured intuition."
moenia mundi, the walls of the universe
materiae pleagusthe sea of matter
"Life therefore organizes itself in the universe_and here's the interpretive paradigm—just as language organizes itself on the page. The creation is writing, and writing the creation. The poem itself is a small-scale image of the universe."
"By carefully alternating the musical note lengths in a sentence, it is as if one can mirror the order of the cosmos itself."
Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio ext excrucior.
"I hate you and I love you. Why do I do this, you might ask.
I do not know, but I feel it happening and I'm tortured." (Catullus)
"To speak of 'Latin' is first and foremost to speak of complete dedication to organizing one's thoughts in a profound and measured discourse, to select meanings in the most pertinent manner possible, to arrange one's words in a harmonious order, to give verbal evidence of even the most fleeting states of our inner self, to believe in verbal expression and in demonstration, to record the contingent and the transient in a language that survives beyond all circumstance."
"Thanks to Latin, every word I knew doubled in sense. Beneath the garden of everyday language lay a bed of ancient roots."
"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."
"The study of Latin...must not be treated like a cognitive boot camp...Latin is beautiful...Beauty is the face of freedom...Why give ourself practical reasons for encountering beauty? Why impede ourselves with false arguments about comprehension? Why submit ourselves to the cult of instant access, of destination over journey, of answers at the click of a button, of the shrinking attention span? Why surrender to the willlessness, the superficial, the defeatists, the utilitarians?...A living language is one that endures and produces other languages."]
"Literary dialogue is a simulation of speech...literature being the space in which we express spiritual nobility through linguistic excellence."
"The functions that literature has traditionally served, and is still quite capable of serving, better than any other form of knowledge or communication: giving order and meaning to the human experience through story and metaphor; broadening the scope of the visible by imagining potential worlds; forming and disseminating paradigms of thought and action; representing ideas and modes of living that are still resistant to, or already exist beyond, institutionalization; giving form to feelings and emotions and moral values; reflecting on justice and beauty, and constructing cultural centers out of otherwise distant and fragmentary communities; and, not least, uplifting a national language to the level of art. And, in doing all this, allowing a particular kind of pleasure: the pleasure of understanding through interpretation."
"Words! Our greatest gift, our most fertile ground."
"To enter into contacts with the ancients requires a transference of oneself, as clearly indicated by the Latin preposition trans: this is an effort to understand historically, to step out of one's individual identity and approach the other."
longer shadows fall from high in the mountains (Virgil)
invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi.
against my will, O queen, I left your shores.
Seamus Heaney: I embarked from your shore, my queen, unwillingly... (Virgil)
"Literature is a handing-down, a reservoir of memory, a genealogical system; in a word, imitatio, a cornerstone of aesthetics in the ancient world. Imitation does not prohibit or exclude innovation. The poet-creator's so-called originality is in truth a myth of the Romantic age."
"Pietas is devotion to intellectual clarity, to responsible judgment, to assured intuition."
moenia mundi, the walls of the universe
materiae pleagusthe sea of matter
"Life therefore organizes itself in the universe_and here's the interpretive paradigm—just as language organizes itself on the page. The creation is writing, and writing the creation. The poem itself is a small-scale image of the universe."
"By carefully alternating the musical note lengths in a sentence, it is as if one can mirror the order of the cosmos itself."
Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio ext excrucior.
"I hate you and I love you. Why do I do this, you might ask.
I do not know, but I feel it happening and I'm tortured." (Catullus)
"To speak of 'Latin' is first and foremost to speak of complete dedication to organizing one's thoughts in a profound and measured discourse, to select meanings in the most pertinent manner possible, to arrange one's words in a harmonious order, to give verbal evidence of even the most fleeting states of our inner self, to believe in verbal expression and in demonstration, to record the contingent and the transient in a language that survives beyond all circumstance."
"Thanks to Latin, every word I knew doubled in sense. Beneath the garden of everyday language lay a bed of ancient roots."
"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."
"The study of Latin...must not be treated like a cognitive boot camp...Latin is beautiful...Beauty is the face of freedom...Why give ourself practical reasons for encountering beauty? Why impede ourselves with false arguments about comprehension? Why submit ourselves to the cult of instant access, of destination over journey, of answers at the click of a button, of the shrinking attention span? Why surrender to the willlessness, the superficial, the defeatists, the utilitarians?...A living language is one that endures and produces other languages."]
"Literary dialogue is a simulation of speech...literature being the space in which we express spiritual nobility through linguistic excellence."
"The functions that literature has traditionally served, and is still quite capable of serving, better than any other form of knowledge or communication: giving order and meaning to the human experience through story and metaphor; broadening the scope of the visible by imagining potential worlds; forming and disseminating paradigms of thought and action; representing ideas and modes of living that are still resistant to, or already exist beyond, institutionalization; giving form to feelings and emotions and moral values; reflecting on justice and beauty, and constructing cultural centers out of otherwise distant and fragmentary communities; and, not least, uplifting a national language to the level of art. And, in doing all this, allowing a particular kind of pleasure: the pleasure of understanding through interpretation."
"Words! Our greatest gift, our most fertile ground."
"To enter into contacts with the ancients requires a transference of oneself, as clearly indicated by the Latin preposition trans: this is an effort to understand historically, to step out of one's individual identity and approach the other."