Early Christian Latin Poets (review)

Carolinne White. Early Christian Latin Poets. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. x +195. Paper $24.99; Cloth $75.

This collection of translations, including a general background and a brief introduction to the poets as well as notes and bibliography, represents a useful contribution to the study of the Christian Latin poetry of Late Antiquity. This, despite the fact that the claims for the book made by its "blurb" ("the first substantial overview of the Golden Age of Christian Latin poetry") are a trifle exaggerated. Otto Kuhnmuench's anthology of 1929, bearing the very same title as White's, is clearly not as well known as it should be, but it deserves at least some credit for the precedent it set. The adjective "substantial" is also debatable. In fact, the general "background to the texts" provided in the first twenty pages does not actually go into very much depth at all, and the two or three pages of introductory remarks devoted to each of the twenty poets represented do not always reflect the latest scholarship. One would barely guess, for instance, from White's brief discussion of the identity of Proba (39) that there has been quite a lot written in recent years about which Proba it was who wrote the Cento. Similarly, with regard to White's observation of Juvencus that he gives "a certain slant to his account," one searches in vain in the notes or bibliography for a reference to the articles and monographs on the Evangeliorum libri quattuor that have appeared in recent years, many of them from the pen of Klaus Thraede and his students, who have been industriously demonstrating this very point.

The translations of the poems (most, of necessity, excerpts) are quite successful. White sensibly chooses "a middle course between reducing the poetry to prose and producing a metrical translation: these translations follow the original more or less line by line but no attempt is made to imitate the original metres . . . ." The result is a readable translation that appears to be generally accurate, if not always as vivid as the original. In her translation of Sedulius' description of the crossing of the Red Sea, for instance, White renders perque profundum / sicca pergrinas stupuerunt marmora plantas as "and the dry waters / Were stunned to see strange feet walking through the deep." It is not the feet of the Israelites, actually, but only their soles (plantas) which Sedulius imagines the waters, from their unique perspective underneath them, glimpsing in amazement. Equally flattened out is the translation of mordebat as "criticized" in the same poet's description of the thief on the cross who "Hurled wicked taunts at the Lord and criticized him / . . . and like a bristling goat / He tore at the lovely vine with his poisonous mouth." Surely, in the context of this colorful simile, mordebat still retains some of its radical meaning. (Would "chewed out" be too colloquial?)

These reservations aside, it should be said that Kuhnmuench's volume has been out of print for some time, and there is clearly a real need for a new anthology such as this. As White correctly points out in her introduction, Christian Latin authors of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries produced a substantial and richly varied body of poetry which for over a millennium exerted a widespread and lasting influence on western European culture. It is all the more remarkable, then, that these works should still be fairly unfamiliar to so many classicists, patrologists, and medievalists alike. In the last quarter century there has been a dramatic surge of interest in Late Antiquity, which is increasingly seen not as a period simply of decline and decay but as possessed of critical importance for the perpetuation and the dynamic transformation of the Greco-Roman cultural tradition. For students of the period, especially those with little or no Latin, this volume will provide a nice, reasonably priced introduction.