Traduttore, traditore?
“I salute you, bountiful goddess, noble/generous goddess,| O our glory, O Venetian Queen!| In stormy, deadly whirlwind | You ruled secure; a thousand doughty | Bodies you laid low in bitter fight. | Through you I was not wretched, through you I do not groan; | I live in peace through you. Rule, O blessed one, | Rule in favourable/prosperous fortune, in high pomp, | In august splendour, in golden situation. | Serene, peaceful, pious, | And generous; save, love, and preserve.”
An address to the Venetian Republic, attributed here to Mattia Butturini, from Salò on Lake Garda, at the time within Venetian territory. The poem has enjoyed a certain celebrity as a curiosity, if one searches Google Books, since it is a text that has been written to be read both as Latin and as Italian. (Corrections to my version will consequently be welcomed with even greater enthusiasm than usual!) I wouldn’t make extravagant claims for its poetic quality, which doesn’t seem to me to survive the requirement to be intelligible in both languages. But like the “intercalary” verses on London tombstones a few blogs ago, I think this is more than a simple curiosity. Butturini’s biography may offer the best clue.
Born in 1752, Butturini was educated in Salò and at the University of Padua, and served as the representative of Salò in the city of Venice, remaining in the city thereafter, enjoying the society of artists and intellectuals, and gaining a reputation as a poet in Latin, Ancient Greek and Italian. But in 1797, as French and Austrian forces, the former under Napoleon Bonaparte, tussled for control of northern Italy, and the French fomented revolution within Venice, the last Doge, Ludovico Manin, formally abolished the Republic and resigned. Rapacious French control yielded to Austrian at the beginning of 1798, but Venetian independence was at an end after more than a thousand years. When the Austrians took over, Butturini left Venice for his hometown of Salò, where he practiced law, subsequently holding professorial chairs in Greek at Pavia, Law in Bologna, and Greek again at Pavia (under French, then Austrian control), until his death in 1817.
Butturini’s Latin/Italian poem clearly dates to the last days of the Venetian Republic. The form of the poem perhaps tells us a little more about its message. Its metre is not classical but Italian, the lines after the first, at any rate, conforming to the rules of the endecasillabo, the principal metre of Italian poetry. Strictly speaking, then, Butturini has written an Italian poem that can also be read as Latin. I think it’s easy enough to see the power of identifying the Italian with the Latin language and associating both with Venice, a state that made much of its being the successor to classical Rome,* all in the context of the imminent suppression of an ancient Republic by powers from beyond the Alps.
*For the idea, see D. S. Chambers, The imperial age of Venice, 1380-1580 (1970).
[Something odd happened to this blog when first posted, so I’ve reposted it.]
Pitt-Rivers
I have entered the world of the strange while attempting to provide a colleague with an accurate transcription and translation, which I had been led to believe he was seeking, of a Latin MS.
For the record, since I put in the effort amid a very, very busy week indeed, here is (what I would guess is) a rough draft of part of an honorary-degree oration delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford for Gen. Pitt-Rivers, a photo by Prof. Dan Hicks followed by my transcription and translation. The author is presumably the Revd. William Merry, Public Orator of Oxford University from 1880 until 1910, since the date of the ceremony at which Pitt-Rivers’ honorary degree was conferred was June 30, 1886. In 1884 Augustus Pitt-Rivers had gifted to the University a collection of anthropological artefacts which formed the core of the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford.
That the text is a draft, and only a partial one, is illustrated, I think, by the abruptness of the opening and the lack of continuity after peractis, a line underneath the latter word suggesting to me a continuation elsewhere. Here we have, in other words, part of the middle of the speech and its end, or some version of them. But I could well be wrong about any of this, and about other details of the transcription and translation, and I welcome corrections to both. It remains the case that when you have a chunk of Latin to transcribe and translate and work in a university with the largest Classics department in the World, there’s an obvious resource to hand.
Especially tricky moments include the first line, which would be clearer from whatever went before — something must have. And there is a word that looks a lot, in the author’s scrawl, like ortum, but may be artium. Missilis, gen. pl. missilium, must mean “rifle”, given Pitt-Rivers’ historical area of expertise, and I think that the words before peractis are qua re. The rest of my transcription is I believe sound. Ut admittatur etc. at the end is short for the standard formula for admission to a degree with which such an oration ends, in this case ut admittatur honoris causa ad gradum Doctoris in Iure Civili, “to be admitted to the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law.”
Feliciter ab hoc viro Musarum cum Martis studiis com-/mixta scitote, cui olim, quum optima missilium genera/ in exercitus nostri usum, huic officio praefectus, eligebat, venit/ in mentem consilium omne telorum genus undique/ conquirendi, scilicet ut hoc modo rei militaris artium [OR ortum] primordia/ progressus oculis submissa patefierent: qua re peractis/ additisque aliis priscorum temporum reliquiis, quae/ quo sint pacto artes excultae doceant, eum coacervavit/ rerum thesaurum quo nuper libens Academiam nostram/ ditavit. Hunc ergo grato oportet suscipiamus animo/ benefactorum recentissimum, hunc Vobis/praesento imperatorem egregium/ Pitt Rivers, Societatis Regiae socium, ut admittatur/ etc.
“Be informed of things happily produced from the combination of the study of the Muses with that of Mars by this man, to whom once, when he was choosing the best types of rifle for the use of our army, having been given charge of this task, the thought occurred of collecting every type of weapon from everywhere, evidently in order that in this way the beginnings of the development of the arts (OR the beginnings and developments of the arts; OR the origin, early days and developments) of warfare, presented to view, would be plain to see: therefore when … had been completed … and when other survivals of ancient times had been added such as would demonstrate how the arts have been refined, he gathered together the treasury of objects with which recently he has generously enriched our University. This most recent of our benefactors it behoves us to receive with gratitude. I present him to you, the excellent General Pitt-Rivers, Fellow of the Royal Society, to be admitted to etc.”
For other degree ceremonies featured on Lugubelinus, see here, here and especially here.