Latin in the 21st Century AD: The Implications of Monumenta Mexicana
by William Cooper
Ladies and gentlemen, please repeat after me: Lingua . . . Latina . . . non . . . mortua . . . est. And again - let's make a sentence out of it: Lingua Latina non mortua est. Louder: Lingua Latina non mortua est! Now what did you just say? Latin is not dead!
Latin Is Alive and Well
And indeed it is not. If you live anywhere in the Western world, look for Latin in the motto of your nation, your state, your province, your civic organization, your military unit, your school, your college or your university. If you live anywhere in the world and study the world language, English, do you know that half the words in the dictionary come from Latin? But it's not just lying silent on the page. The fact that Latin has been spoken continuously for two and a half millenia - 2,500 years - is little known. As a spoken medium among people of learning, it has allowed doctors to discuss patients in their presence, priests to celebrate the mysteries of God, scientists to communicate across national borders, statesmen to settle disputes, and parents to confer on discipline in front of their unwitting children.
As a literature, it has continued to produce great works from the fall of Rome to the present day. Latin Columbiads were written when Columbus reached American shores in 1492. In the 17th century, Roger White's Iter ad Marilandiam (Journey to Maryland) described the native Americans of the eastern seaboard, painted for war in red and blue. The book is in print today. Epics in the style of Virgil celebrate the Battle of Concord Bridge, the triumphs of George Washington, and the Battle of New Orleans. In the 20th century, three poems can be selected. The first is a lively appreciation of the miniskirt:
Dummodo sint bellae, As long as they are fair,
Sint ut sunt puellae. Let the girls be girls.
Another explores modern urban life:
Omne die, omne mense Every month and every day
statione Fordhamense down Fordham station way
cum per nubes sicut rima when first light slips through the crack
lux insinuatur prima of the cloudy storm wrack,
sine pace, sine pausa without peace and without pause,
laborandi semper causa labor always as the cause,
mihi mobile est cubiculum my little bedroom's under way
subviarium vehiculum. on the underground subway.
Behold, our poet is heading for work on the New York subway, jammed in with all the other miserae sardinae. Then, using Virgils's rolling dactylic meter, he renders the rhythm and roar of the wheels:
Unda profunda profunda profunda
Unda profunda profunda profunda
Reaching out into the global culture of the 21st century, a third poem, translated into Latin from the Korean language, praises the Buddha.
Yet this living heritage of Latin has until recently escaped the attention of the world at large. Note that I had to begin with a denial of Latin's mortality. The general public think Latin marched off into the sunset with Caesar's legions, and even college graduates, at least those who still take history, believe it died with Erasmus in 1536. Those who devote their lives to the study of Latin have organized themselves into classics departments in the colleges and universities and many are still convinced that they are dissecting a fossil tongue. As for me, aside from a few lines out of Virgil and Ovid, nothing was left in my brain except the neat rows of declensions and conjugations from the back of my high school Latin grammar and an abiding affection for the language. I was in the position of the Englishman who said, "A gentleman need not know Latin, but he ought at least to have forgotten it."
It was not until 1985 that a renegade group of scholars gathered in Augsburg, Germany to orate, recite, converse, and sing in the language they loved, and the living Latin movement was born. Its fruits can be found today at Rome in the impassioned teaching of Reginald Foster, who enrolls Latin instructors in his summer Latinitas Aestiva and makes them experience Latin as a 220-volt transmission line. It is seen in the seminars run by such dymanic professors as Nancy Llewellyn of Wyoming College, Terence Tunberg of the University of Kentucky, and Stephan Berard of Seattle. You can strike gold on the internet at the NAILLS website, www.latin.org, one of thousands devoted to the language. For example, the Weather Underground gives forecasts in Latin; the Ermine Street Guard re-enacts Roman battles; E. L. Easton, mother of all language sites, offers Latin lyrics for popular songs; Nuntii Latini gives a weekly broadcast of world news highlights; Grex Latine Loquentium connects Latin correspondents around the world; and Contemporary Latin Poetry displays the work of 27 living authors from Japan to Hungary, Holland, France, Canada, and the United States. And in a hit recording, off-beat Finnish professor Jukka Ammondt croons Elvis ballads in the language of Catullus.
For the publication of serious literature, the Loeb Classics still set the standard, but don't overlook the many small gems available at Bolchazy-Carducci, who offer not only classics in easily accessible short format, but also modern short fiction and poems translated into well-written Latin. If you want literature lite, look up Winnie Ille Pu; or Latin for Pigs by Hog and Dass; or Which Way to the Vomitorium?; or Grunt: Pigorian Chant, a fantasy farm where Old MacDonaldus and all the animals speak proper Latin except for the pigs - the porci hold forth in pig Latin, while an accompanying CD records all this solemn nonsense in Gregorian chant. For magazines, two of the best are Guy Licoppe's Melissa out of Belgium, and Latinitas, the Vatican's review of Latin culture. Note the term Latinitas, that is, the cultivation of Latin. We're talking here not just about a language, but about a point of view, seeing the world from the profound, civilizing, unifying perspective of the West's most influential language, the language which found us in primitive medieval Europe living in huts and forests, divided by tribalism, ridden by superstition, and gave us our languages, our medicine, our science, our technology, our nations, and our law. To study Latin is to greet the mother of our civilization. When we cultivate Latin, we in the West can hold up our heads to such giants of world literature as China and say that we have contributed something and that we have something more to contribute. The joy is, the discovery is, that we need not confine ourselves to looking backward - Latin has a bright future. This extraordinary language is still embracing new cultures, and Monumenta Mexicana: Mexican Heritage by Francisco Cabrera is a case in point.
Enter Cabrera
When I finally logged onto the internet in 1998, my first search was "Latin." I was amazed to find www.latin.org, the NAILLS site, and delighted to enroll in their summer seminar on New World Latin. We were to speak only Latin for a week. The first morning, barely knowing "Hello" and having forgotten "Where is the dining room?" I found myself seated for breakfast with ten people who spoke fluently. When I opened my mouth, out came Spanish. Nonetheless, coaxed by Nancy Llewellyn's skill and compassion, the class became a unit. I learned that a car is a raeda, a gas station a benzenarium and a woman's purse a marsupium, and I began to see the light. Then on the third day we received copies of Francisco Cabrera's Laus Guadalupensis (Praiseof the Dark Virgin of Guadalupe). It tells the story of how the Virgin, bearing a bronze complexion, appeared to Juan Diego, an illiterate native, on a hill outside Mexico City. This was the event by which the aboriginal people of Mexico, and indeed all of Latin America, were converted to Christianity. I knew of the Dark Virgin, having as a native Californian absorbed Mexican culture along with the Spanish language, and here was her story, hammered out in lovely Virgilian hexameters. Instead of Aeneas and the Trojan War,
Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris
(I sing of arms and the man who first from the shores of Troy)
I read
Mexicei regina soli, Guadalupia Virgo
(O Guadalupian Virgin, queen of Mexican soil)
I was thunderstruck, but upon reflection I need not have been. When one considers all the cultures and gods and languages the Romans absorbed into an empire which reached from England to modern-day Iraq, it is clear that cultural diversity was built into the language from the beginning. Francisco Cabrera's poems are modern classics because they extend that tradition. Here is an empire won not by force of arms but by a living idiom, and far from leading to conquest and subjection, it allows native cultures to flourish, much as the Romans adopted the local gods wherever they went. I'll give a special example of this inclusiveness shortly.
After that seminar in 1998, Sr. Cabrera and I began a correspondence that warmed quickly into friendship. He generously sent me copies of the other six poems he had written by that date: Mexicus-Tenochtitlan (the Aztec capital), Gonzalo Guerrero (father of the Mexican race), Quetzalcoatl (the famous emperor), Quauhnahuac (Sr. Cabrera's adopted city of Cuernavaca), Angelopolis (the founding of Puebla) and Tamoanchan (the Mexican heartland). As he wrote the next three poems: Joannae Laudes (famous woman poet), Amato Nervo (famous male poet), and Malintzin (Cortez's interpreter), I began to translate some of them into English as an academic exercise. When I sent drafts of the translations to Sr. Cabrera, he did me the honor of correcting them meticulously. Such was his energy at age 86 that the corrected copies arrived back from Mexico four days after they were sent! Our collaboration took on a life of its own, we began discussing collecting the poems into a book, and in 2003 the poet took on the task of privately publishing Monumenta. A year later my wife and I visited him at his home in Cuernavaca on the 17th of March, 2004. In the years before meeting Sr. Cabrera, I had formed a picture of our meeting, sitting on a terrace overlooking Cuernavaca with snowy Popocatepetl smoking in the background. The day arrived and we sat in the greatest enjoyment, enclosed on all sides by the poet's lush garden, talking of the passions we share, the mountain forgotten. Not until a year later did I realize that the white-capped volcano had been in sight the whole time, quietly venting its creative force in the conversation of Francisco Cabrera himself. To add to the marvel, he received the first proofs of Monuimenta that day, his 88th birthday. With characteristic modesty, he said of the package, "Who should open it?" It was an experience none of us will ever forget.
Let's open up the book itself and have a look. A first glance at the overall organization of the poems provides a good look at Francisco Cabrera's basic beliefs and values. First, we read about heroes (Quetzalcoatl, Gonzalo Guerrero, Malintzin); then poets (Joannae Laudes, Amato Nervo); then cities (Mexicus-Tenochtitlan, Angelopolis Quauhnahuac); then the nation's patron saint (Laus Guadalupensis); and last, the homeland (Tamoanchan). The individual comes first, then the poet as the voice of the people, then society as represented by cities, implying perhaps that our author regards the individual as the source of greatness in the society and that the cultural achievements of the artist rest upon the stability provided by the deeds of heroic individuals. Note also that of the five outstanding invididuals, two are women - Sr. Cabrera is celebrating masculine and feminine aspects of Mexico's heritage. Then the Dark Virgin, the Woman of women, binds the nation together. By concluding with a celebration of the legendary homeland, I believe the poet is saying, "From myth we sprang, and to myth we shall return."
And now a word about each poem. The first one, Quetzalcoatl, while it explains how this divine emperor founded all the arts and sciences that made society possible, vividly protrays the forward-looking genius of this heroic ruler and the reactionary malice of the traditional priesthood. Gonzalo Guerrero, as his name shows, is a man of war, and the poem is filled with the clash of battle. In her poem, Malintzin, the native woman most skilled in languages, sides with the Spaniards, betraying the Aztec nation and ensuring its overthrow. In the penultimate scene, caught between the aboriginal culture that has abused her and the new culture that has destroyed her world, she agonizes over her tragic and fateful choice. As for the poets, in Joannae Laudes, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the Phoenix of Mexico and its most famous bard, is told by the Muses that she must be an advocate of women's rights three centuries before such ideas were recognized. The poem closes as she signs her vow of integrity in her own blood. In Amado Nervo, Mexico's foremost 19th century poet bares to us the torment of soul from which his work sprang.
In Mexicus-Tenochtitlan Sr. Cabrera gives a remarkable picture of how the Aztec nation evolved, and he skilfully keeps its focus on Montezuma himself, even at the end, by showing the impending doom of the empire as a prophecy. Angelopolis is outstanding in its portrayal of the splendor of Puebla's cathedral and of the artistic creativity flowing from the enlightened leadership of Bishop Palafox. In Quauhnahuac our poet gives a pastoral view of his retirement home in Cuernavaca where, like Horace on his Sabine farm, he can compose and be content. Without doubt, Laus Guadalupensis (Praise of the Dark Virgin of Guadalupe) is the flagship poem of the book, the longest and most important. My favorite passage calls the roll of the thirty-two states of Mexico, showing the devotion inspired from every corner of the nation for the Virgin who unites them all. Finally, Tamoanchan shows how the gods gave various gifts to the original Mexicans, among them tequila and copper.
One special line from Mexicus-Tenolchtitlan represents the high degree of cultural blending to be found throughout these poems. In the midst of expanding the Aztec empire, the emperor makes treaties to extend his influence over neighboring regions:
Quauhnahuac, Mixquic, Cuautlahuac et Xochimilco
This is the line that so astounded the Latinists at that seminar in 1999. In one line of heroic verse appear four words in Nahuatl, language of the Aztecs, joined by the smallest of Latin words. We sat around the table scratching our heads, trying to figure out the line's rhythm, noting that the characteristic dactylic rhythm of !_ _ !_ _ !_ _ !_ _ is almost entirely absent. Eventually I wrote Sr. Cabrera and asked him how one should scan this line, and he replied that he was trying to write a line entirely in spondaic meter: ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! He quoted in support a famous passage from Horace's Ars Poetica while acknowledging that the line does contain one dactyl. This kind of creativity is unanswerable, and the line unforgettable.
In fact, the book shows Sr. Cabrera's wide-ranging, imaginative use of Roman models. Our author has extended the classical tradition by using four of its major elements: noble themes, epic structures, divine intervention, and classical allusions. First, true to the tradition of Virgil and Ovid, he has treated elevated subjects, the people and events most important in the shaping of his nation. Second, he employs classical narrative techniques of epic poetry, lavishly depicting important scenes and using long speeches to advance the story line. One of Virgil's customary descriptive techniques, the formalized list, appears in Laus Guadalupensis, where the Virgin's impact on the nation is shown by sounding the roll call of all thirty-two Mexican states. Such elaborate stylistic mechanisms can seem pondrous and dull in Virgil, but Sr. Cabrera's light touch ensures a fluid onward movement in the poems. A third important feature of epic poetry is the council of the gods, highlighted by formal speeches. In Laus Guadalupensis, the Creator opens the colloquy in heaven by asking how to show the Native Americans, enslaved by the Conquest, the path to heaven. In reply, the Virgin Mother volunteers to offer herself to the Indians as the vessel of God's grace. Finally, Monumenta extends the line of classical tradition by allusions which join Europe's story to the story of the Western hemisphere: the halls of Montezuma are referred to as "Caesar's palace," and the Dark Virgin's brow is "Caesarean," that is, royal. The spring at the site where Our Lady appears is compared favorably to the mythical springs of Greece and Rome, while in Tamoachan's description of how the god Tepoztecatl tasted the first cactus liquor and found it good, we hear echoes of Jove sipping nectar on Mt. Olympus.
The Future of Latin
If Francisco Cabrera's poems and the other achievements cited here are any indication, Latin is undergoing a renascence. What are we to make of "all this juice and all this joy"? I believe the answer is up to all lovers of Latin, and that, in an era of globalization, it will come from around the world. Sr. Cabrera's praiseworthy poems can furnish a path to follow for the literature of the future. Let Latin epics appear for all nations, races and peoples. Perhaps today somewhere in the United States of America a poet young or old waits his time to set down the story of the republic of the Founding Fathers. In his invocation, the noble bard could address that noble bird, the highest flier, the nation's emblem and standard bearer, the bald eagle.
From such heights one can envision a true world literature, one that celebrates the pyramids of Egypt, Buddha the Compassionate of India, the Ch'in and Han dynasties of China, the Divine Wind of Japan, Pele of the Hawaiian volcanoes, and the prophets Mohammed and Moses. And this is just for epic poetry. Remember the intimate lyric mode pioneered by Horace and Catullus, exploring not the wide reaches of history but the inner questings of the human spirit. On another small scale, Latin, with its genius for succinct expression, has already adapted itself to the classic 5-syllable/ 7-syllable/ 5-syllable form of Japanese haiku. What can Caesar's language not accomplish if properly cultivated? Many teachers must go forth and many lessons must be absorbed by many young minds around the globe before Latinitas can grow to its full potential, yet the very loftiness of the classical tradition calls us to action. Just as the peaks of the Rockies said to the American pioneers: "Give us men to match our mountains," so do the memorable works of Francisco Cabrera urge us on into a bright future: global, inclusive, enlightening and humanizing. Perched upon the monumentum aere perennius of Francisco Cabrera, freed by the passing of the centuries from national limitations, redolent with its accomplishments as founder of Western culture, Numen Latinitatis now offers its copious riches to the entire world.
