The Origin of Sin. An English Translation of the “Harmartigenia” of Prudentius by Martha A. Malamud (review)

“Prudentius is a pivotal poet” (xi), and Prudentius is a staggeringly astute reader of his predecessors. He demonstrates this in his creative manipulations not only of the canonical authors, the Latin poets, but also in some daring adjustments to the canonical text for Christians, the Bible. These astute readings are demonstrated in the lyric, meditative, and didactic poems, but the Hamartigenia has a particularly wide range of allusion. At one level it shows Prudentius’ wide reading, and shows him as a writer familiar with authors such as Manilius, Persius, and Claudian as well the authors we might more reasonably expect like Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid. Malamud’s book is a welcome addition to the critically aware studies of Prudentius that have been emerging over the last few years and are helping to open his richness to a new set of readers. Her approach illuminates what could initially seem to be a dry text: Is anyone desperate to read a poem on the origin of sin and the problem of evil? Are readers rushing toward Christian didactic poetry? For some, even the word “didactic” can be off-putting? Malamud increases the accessibility of the text by providing a new translation of this challenging poem. The translation is based on the Latin text of Thomson, that of the Loeb Classical Library which is in its turn based on that of Bergman in CSEL. The last attempt at a verse translation, by Sister Mary Clement Eagan, was in the old Fathers of the Church series published by Catholic University of America. It is an ambitious and challenging task to bring before English-language readers this difficult and intense poem, but Malamud’s work tends toward a real respect for the original.

Malamud faces a problem similar to that faced by translators of Persius: is the translation to be as difficult as the text it communicates and represents? It is no surprise that she has to comment upon her own translation to bring out the power and resonance of Prudentius’ writing in this rich text, and to suggest which strategy of reading should be to the fore. This will depend so much on each reader’s previous reading experience, and Malamud realizes that people come to Prudentius from various academic backgrounds: critics of Latin verse, dogmatic theologians, historians of the early Church, liturgists, those exploring the literature of Late Antiquity, and the merely culturally curious.

In the Hamartigenia Prudentius presents a world that, although originally created good, has been distorted by wicked choices. In this scheme even the physical, “natural,” world mirrors the bad choices of freely-choosing human agents. His ostensible opponent is Marcion, the siren of dualism who argues for the existence of two gods, one revealed in the Old Testament, one revealed in the New. For this reason Marcion attempts to construct a new canon of scripture that includes nothing more than some of the Gospel of Luke and certain letters of Saint Paul.

Without the Old Testament one abandons the narrative of the Fall and Original Sin, This is (in Prudentius’ mind) the essence of Marcion’s misreading: “The Hamartigenia is an explanation of the problem of sin, which for Prudentius . . . is inseparable from the fallen state of language and the fruit of the fall” (12). Malamud makes much of this fallen state of language and of Prudentius’ apparent belief of the impossibility of language to convey truth : “The poem is deeply preoccupied with the limits of human language, in particular with its excessive polysemy. . . . For early Christian thinkers, human language is marked by its radical separation from the divine Logos” (67). Now, it is certainly true that “wordplay reveals language’s inability to limit itself to a single stable meaning” (69), but Prudentius’ multivalent meanings are not contradictory, nor are they at variance. They are convergent. The multivalence puts particular pressure on the reader, who is to become engaged...