Gordon Willis Williams (1926–2010)

I found this book on the floor of a young relative's car. Serendipitously, 'A New Ganymede' in David Malouf's Typewriter Music is a version of ode 3:20, and the way Professor Williams presented 3:20 here was reader-friendly, so I decided to read the unfortunately pedagogical-looking book from cover to cover. Initially, the pleasures of reading it were mostly in the same category as the joys of really hard cryptic crosswords, but as my Latin began to revive I found myself engaging, enjoying the light the poems cast on my experience of the world. (Easy, for example, to see George W Bush and the new imperium as grotesque parody of Caesar Augustus and his imperium.) It strikes me that even though it does mean something to call Latin a dead language, it's not dead the way a tree or a bandicoot is dead: it's still full of life in these poems. A language isn't really dead until no one's left alive who can speak it or read it. Soon after I wrote that last sentence I read the 30th and last ode in the book, and found my thoughts echoed there:

Non omnis moriar, multaque pars mei
vitabit Libitinam.

In English:

Not all of me will die and a large part of me
will avoid the goddess of funerals.

He was right. Horace is dead and so is everyone who mourned his loss, but we can still engage with his language, the traces left by his mind spark living minds down fresh paths.… (altro)