Lucus Eques sodalibus omnibus s.d.p.
So something’s really starting to piss me off. I’m taking a class in Latin literature, and I have an assigned Latin tutor for the course (the tutoring sessions are infinitely more interesting than the class, but, as we say in Italy, meno male, could be worse). When I was first reading lines of Virgil’s first Eclogue for my tutor, practicing the scansion outloud, and in the restored pronunciation (which my tutor by miraculous chance also prefers), I was naturally giving proper length to the syllables long and short; but I was also careful to include the pitch accent, which is of course separated in many cases from the stricter periodicities of the dactyls and spondees — this, in my opinion, is the essence of the beauty of Latin, and Greek poetry, that the stressed and long and accented syllables are not each the same, but flow one over the other, like ball bearings, or like the planets against the fixed constellations, the music of the spheres.
My interpretation, however, seems to be somewhat lost on my fellow Italians. The first line of the Eclogue I pronounced as follows, using the ’ ´ ’ to indicate the accent of musical pitch, and underlining the long syllables:
Títyre, tú pátulae récubans sub tégmine fági
which is in fact where the natural word accents fall. I’d like to reiterate that this lack of uniformity between the pitch accents and the long syllables is, secundum me, what gives Latin and especially its poetry an inherent pulchritude unmatchable outside of Greek and English (though the latter is rarely attempted). But Italians, it seems, much like the English or Germans or Americans or anyone else with an often voluntary misunderstanding of Latin’s delicate yet formidable beauty, just don’t get it. This strikes me as exceptionally odd, for Italian is a rare language which possesses distinct lengths in vowels, most of which are usually identical to those corresponding to their Latin cognates, unlike Spanish, for instance, which has syllables all short — however, this concept is never taught to Italians, or so it would seem when my Greek and Latin professors say that “the concept of vowel length is lost to our modern languages,” and how ridiculous that! when the very words they use are full of vowels long and short, that if pronounced improperly immediately reveal the mark of the foreigner. Indeed, I believe them to be almost completely ignorant of this concept in their language (excepting perhaps my Latin tutor). In any case, upon pronouncing the word “pátulae,” my tutor corrected me: “patuláe”, leaving me somewhat dumbstruck. Indeed, an Italian would pronounce the line thus:
Títyre, tú patuláe recubáns sub tégmine fági
unnaturally, in short, in order to demonstrate the emphasis of the long syllables, and to be more specific, the first syllables of every foot. Both my tutor and my professor in class have described this as the “ictus,” the “hit,” where the accent falls.
Is this really how the Romans intended to pronounce their poetry? in this ungainly placement, to paraphrase the joke, of the wrong em_pha_sis on the wrong syl_la_ble? I can’t imagine it would be so. Firstly, it seems dreadfully unnecessary; Latin poetry is based on syllable length alone, and rarely if every puts much importance on the actual word accents. And secondly, never is poetry written, to my knowledge, if we may use English as an example — or rather, perhaps I should emphasize “good” poetry — rarely if ever is English poetry written where the natural word accents (which are essential to our iambic pentameters) are deliberately disobeyed simply to fit the meter. It’s sloppy. When we read Shakespeare, numerous accents seem variable or awkwark when scanned, but this is on account of the common pronunciations of the time, which have since changed and become fixed. A good contemporary example is the word “romance,” which properly was originally pronounced on the ultimate syllable: “románce.” However, the modern pronunciation accepts two placements of the accent, both the former, and also “rómance,” as much as I dispise the latter. Nevertheless, it is possible that the latter will supercede the former in generations to come. And then those generations will scratch their heads to see the word scanned “románce.”
In any case, if anyone could help clarify this for me, I’d much appreciate it.
Valete atque ualete!
Florentiae a.d. VI kal. Nou. anno MMV°.
LV·EQ
) the more archaic or Franckicized orthographies.