Juvencus' Four Books of the Gospels: Evangeliorum Libri Quattuor trans. by Scott McGill (review)

"The ELQ is not a great poem," says the author of the first full translation of Juvencus' work into English (26). Detachment is a virtue in scholarship, but to find oneself in the presence of virtue can sometimes be a little unsettling. Why not just put this book down, readers might ask, and go and read a truly gifted poet—Prudentius, say, or Claudian—instead? McGill no doubt trusts that his readers will have the sense to understand that they should at least reward his honesty by finishing the paragraph, which goes on to lay a proper and justified emphasis on Juvencus' importance in the history of literature as the inventor of Biblical epic and as an influential and representative participant in a great cultural shift, "the wider hybridity of Late Antiquity." Read on, then, and learn from both the well-executed translation and the often rich and illuminating notes that, if not a poet of the first rank, Juvencus nonetheless does have some real merits: independence of mind in combining his varied and sometimes discordant sources, a certain daring in his handling of the hexameter, and, most strikingly, a genuine talent for sustained and engaging narrative.

Like all the volumes in the Routledge Later Latin Poetry series, whose description makes prominent mention of courses and students, and which promises accessible translations, this new Juvencus assumes very little pre-existing knowledge of the poet and his times. The introduction is therefore appropriately thorough but straightforward, providing such biographical and historical information as a first-time reader will need. Care is taken to establish Juvencus' status as an innovator, but also to demonstrate his poetic ambition: his aim is to give glory to Christ but also to earn fame for himself as a literary pioneer. McGill also sees Juvencus as a radical "agent of change" (13), in that his epic hero overcomes ordeals to win eventual victory, and therefore remains true to the generic model established by his pagan predecessors, and yet is also deeply unlike them, in that he remains unmistakably the socially marginalized religious teacher of the Gospels. The battles and victories of the Son of Man are of a different and still more cosmic kind than those of the son of Anchises.

McGill boldly opts to present a verse translation, arguing that to turn verse into prose would be to "undo Juvencus' achievement in turning the Gospels into poetry" (24). The meter he chooses, the iambic pentameter, is the one he rightly sees as best corresponding in the English literary tradition to the Latin hexameter as the sanctioned vehicle for heroic verse. A third choice, however, complicates the task. The decision to produce as nearly as possible a line-for-line translation must, given the differences in the syntactical structures of the source and target languages and the lower average syllabic count of the English meter, entail compression, which in effect means carefully considered omission. McGill walks this tightrope with delicacy, and though occasionally three lines are reduced to two (e. g., 2.177–79 and 3.498–500), most reductions take the form of the suppression of just one or two words of no great significance for the comprehension of the passage. Now and again, however, some readers who consult the original may think that what is cut out is indeed significant. Juvencus may be "adjective-happy" (2.285 n.) but, as McGill knows, he usually employs adjectives to good purpose (3.513–16, 521, 525–26 nn.), and omitting one may therefore result in some loss of point. At 3.302, for example, molli is not translated, but the adjective is surely not otiose, for Christ is there rebuking Peter "the Rock" for, on that occasion, turning shamefully soft. Similarly, at 4.622 the phrase hoc magis is not translated, but Juvencus is telling us something important: he depicts the Jews as being...