(manu propria) Arth. Jam. Balfour
I’ve been proofreading for most of this month. A three-volume text and annotated translation of a Latin-language newspaper is not a simple thing to check, it’s fair to say, and at the best of times the checking is not the most stimulating part of producing a book. Of all proofreading I’ve ever done, though, this for Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ Alaudae is by far the least painful, and for the simple reason that I’m reminded, page after page, how incredibly interesting the material is.
An illustration follows, a single paragraph taken from the middle of somewhere approaching 400 pages in total. I’m not sure I can properly explain why I like it so much, and only partly because I am seriously shattered, but it captures how Ulrichs, an impoverished exile in the middle of the Apennines, managed to leave behind him, the work of his very last years, such a remarkable, oblique document of late nineteenth-century European history.
But some background is required.
Ulrichs has sent two issues of his newspaper to Arthur Balfour, future Prime Minister of Great Britain and Ireland, whose honorary degree ceremony at Trinity College, Dublin in February 1891, when Balfour was Chief Secretary for Ireland, Ulrichs had described across two issues in March 1891 and April 1892. Ulrichs was in the habit of sending copies of his newspaper to significant people who had featured in it, an obvious way of garnering some publicity for his publication. The ceremony at Trinity had fallen at the end of Balfour’s time in Ireland, a tenure which both established him as a major force in British politics and damned him as “Bloody Balfour” among Irish nationalists. There were not a whole lot of nationalists at Trinity at this time, but Ulrichs’ source for the event was the editor of Freeman’s Journal, the leading contemporary Irish newspaper which supported the dominant nationalist aspiration at the time, Home Rule for Ireland. For the aftermath of the degree ceremony, the Journal’s pointed account repeated and embellished in Ulrichs’ Latin, see here.
Balfour is a figure whose significance is hard to overstate. Barbara Tuchman has ten pages (pp. 45-54) in The Proud Tower that make of him something like the very embodiment of Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, its “Splendid Isolation” at the heyday of Empire. Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, he was for forty years one of the very leading figures in British politics, for 28 of those years in some form of ministerial role. The Balfour Declaration of 1917, when he was Foreign Secretary under Lloyd George, is of course one of the most momentous documents of the twentieth century. It is rather less well known that we have Balfour largely to thank/blame for the popularity of the game of golf.
That Balfour and Ulrichs had any contact at all is bordering on the surreal; the form it took truly so, as the Italian postal authorities refused to recognise the official government franking of Balfour’s letter, and Ulrichs as a consequence had to pay for the cost of its postage and the same again in a fine. If Balfour by this stage was Leader of the House of Commons, effectively Deputy Prime Minister, Ulrichs was so short of resources when John Addington Symonds visited him in Aquila in October 1891 that he had “no shirt and no stockings on.” But Ulrichs knew how to write a Latin newspaper that people would want to read, and the engaging writing and content was programmatic—proof of Ulrichs’ passionately held belief that Latin could be a practical modern language that would overcome the ever sharpening divisions between the ethnic and linguistic communities of late nineteenth-century Europe.
Anyhow, here is one of my favourite paragraphs in Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ Alaudae, in Latin and English, and then in English and English:
I believe that Balfour’s papers for this period are held by the Bodleian library. When I’m not up to my ears in proofreading or admin, which may coincide with the next blue moon, I shall head over and investigate whether there are among his papers the issues of Alaudae that Ulrichs sent to him. If so, and you never know, they will no doubt be addressed to Balfour in Ulrichs’ very finest Latin calligraphy.
How not to say “cricket” in Latin
A few words to mark the final submission of pre-proof material to Bloomsbury for our three-volume edition of Alaudae, the remarkable Latin-language newspaper published by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs from 1889 until 1895 which I may have mentioned a couple of times. I am just as I release this post into the wild back home after walking the dog on Port Meadow. Many skylarks, alaudae, which must be a good omen.
In my very first encounter with Ulrichs, translating Alaudae Issue 27 a couple of years ago, I found myself not only turning his Latin into English and explaining what he was telling us about Latin at the end of the nineteenth century but also trying to understand his mistakes, which in a strange way I found as compelling as anything else. At the time I described it as like peering over Ulrichs’ shoulder as, for instance, he struggled to read a Cyrillic signature.
What follows is along similar lines. If Ulrichs was unfamiliar with the Russian language and script, and indeed with Russia in general, though also very keen to learn what he could about it, his view of Britain wasn’t so very different. The occasional remarks about Britain that we encounter in Alaudae offer a fascinating impression of a European’s perception of this island in the period of “Splendid Isolation”, the confident aloofness from the European continent that Great Britain cultivated at the zenith of Empire. It interests me that Ulrichs’ origins in Hanover–until the age of 12 his monarch was the same as Great Britain’s–seem to make no difference here: Britain remains to him an essentially strange, inexplicable place.
One thing Ulrichs is particularly intrigued by, albeit still quite uncomprehendingly, is the British love of sport. He is amused and bemused by the information that Arthur Balfour, the future British Prime Minister with whom Ulrichs exchanged letters, used to relax with a round of golf. Elsewhere Ulrichs observes how British sports had accompanied the British to far-flung colonies like New Zealand, but in the process he gets seriously confused between golf and another ball game played by the British home and colonial elites, lawn tennis.
Today, however, our concern is cricket.
In the penultimate issue of Alaudae from January 1895 Ulrichs published four Latin speeches by the long-serving Public Orator of Cambridge, John Edwin Sandys. He had been sent them by Sandys himself, and they were speeches marking honorary degrees bestowed upon significant individuals in the summers of 1893 and 1894. Sandys had in fact sent Ulrichs all twenty-one speeches he had delivered for honorands in ceremonies on June 13, 1893 and June 27, 1894, and from them Ulrichs selected four for the international readership of Alaudae. The first of these four, from June 1893, marked the award of an honorary LL.D. to the monarch of a princely state in India, the Maharajah Raol Sir Takhtsinhji Jaswantsinhji of Bhavnagar. Bhavnagar was located in the Kathiawar peninsula in north-western India and was one of many nominally independent princely states in India over which the British nevertheless exerted significant influence. Sandys’ Latin oration for the Maharajah can be found in The Academy, published four days later, and in Sandys’ collection of his Latin compositions for Cambridge, Orationes et epistolae Cantabrigienses,1876-1909 (Cambridge, 1910), p. 105—and will of course be available in Volume III of our edition.
But the speech as presented in Alaudae diverges somewhat from Sandys’ original. The last couple of sentences in Ulrichs’ version run as follows:
Juvat regem, de populo suo erudiendo tam praeclare meritum, titulo academico hodie decorare. Juvat etiam unum e popularibus eius inter alumnos nostros numerare.
I’ll hold off from a translation for a moment, but if you compare these two sentences in Alaudae with those in The Academy (above) and in Sandys (1910), you’ll notice that Ulrichs has missed out a bit. The full, original version reads, “It is our pleasure to adorn with an academic title a king who has registered such exceptional achievements in the education of his own people. It is our pleasure also to number among our students one of his fellow-countrymen who has distinguished himself in the game of the open field.” The underlined part, “in ludo campestri insignem” in Latin, is what has failed to make it into Ulrichs’ version. Now, Ulrichs had no qualms about abbreviating any Latin text he published. The finances of Alaudae were such that he had to be pretty ruthless to keep himself to his self-imposed length of, latterly, 16 pages per issue. This is in fact not the only part of Sandys’ speech for the Maharajah that he cut, but this omission was one that caused me no little difficulty when editing. Who was this fellow-countryman of the Maharajah, presented with no further identifying detail?
Consulting the Public Orator’s original proved to be something of a revelation, particularly with the notes Sandys helpfully provides in his 1910 collection. The Maharajah’s fellow-countryman “who has distinguished himself in the game of the open field” turned out to be quite a significant personage, the celebrated cricketer Ranjitsinhji, at the time of this ceremony a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in the cricket season of 1893 making his first major splash as an unorthodox and high-scoring batsman in the Cambridge University eleven.
Meanwhile “the game of the open field” was a way of expressing “cricket” in Latin favoured by Sandys whenever the need arose (and in Cambridge orations that was quite frequently: on pp. 88, 130, 143 and 225 of his 1910 collection, and there’s one example at least in a later collection of Sandys’ speeches and letters from 1909 to 1919). I should add that Sandys also uses “ludus campestris (or campester)” for polo and golf, but with suitable qualification. Thus he describes Pratap Singh, at the time Chief Minister of Jodhpur, as “in ludo campestri eques egregius”, “an outstanding horseman in the game of the open field” (p. 130), and credits the lawyer Robert Finlay with notable talent “ludi campestris Caledonici in certamine”, “in playing competitively the Scottish game of the open field” (p. 190). We can only imagine what he would have done with football or rugby.
Restoring those four words to the speech for the Maharajah and consulting Sandys’ explanatory footnotes doesn’t iron out all the difficulties, I should say. The phrase “unum e popularibus eius”, “one of [the Maharajah’s] fellow-countrymen” is tricky. “Popularis”, “belonging to the same country or people”, would most naturally imply that Ranjitsinhji was a subject of the Maharajah of Bhavnagar, but in fact he was from a separate princely state in Kathiawar, Navanagar–of which, furthermore, Ranjitsinhji would later become ruler. I don’t believe that Sandys would have allowed himself to confuse these two adjacent states, or for that matter that identifying a “popularis” in the broader sense of a “fellow-Indian” would have had any point as a conclusion of his speech. My preferred explanation is that Sandys perceives that Ranjitsinhji and the Maharajah shared a common origin in Rajput states in Kathiawar–and there was a certain cohesion between those states: both the Maharajah and Ranjitsinhji had attended the same school, for instance, Rajkumar College in Rajkot, a school established by the rulers of the Kathiawar states, with the encouragement of the British authorities, to educate the Kathiawar elite along the lines of British public schools. The Maharajah had in fact been its very first student. The phrase “unum e popularibus eius” thus perhaps means something like “one of his fellow Kathiawar Rajputs.” I am open to other explanations.
But it’s Ulrichs we’re really concerned with here. His version of the speech, lacking as it did “in ludo campestri insignem”, gave very little clue as to the identity of a student who was in Alaudae simply one of the Mahararajah’s fellow-countrymen. And it makes the speech fall rather flat as a consequence, I think. But it’s easy enough to explain why he left it out. Ulrichs found the British obsession with sports fascinating, but golf and tennis and cricket were never anything but a mystery to him, and “in ludo campestri insignem” might just as well have been in Russian. On Balfour’s love of golf Ulrichs had commented with some irony, “The road that leads to public glory seems mixed in your country with a wonderful kind of pleasure, a pleasure unknown to those mere mortals whom a harsher destiny has set down on this side of the English Channel.” Bemused by a politician playing golf, confused by multiple ball games played enthusiastically by the British on grass, and generally foxed by the British devotion to their eccentric leisure activities, Ulrichs thus simply omitted the great Ranjitsinhji from his newspaper.
Which I think you’ll agree just isn’t cricket.
Ulrichs Bodleianae d. d.
As some of you will have gathered, I’m spending much of my time at the moment editing translations of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ Latin newspaper Alaudae, which he published with considerable, perhaps surprising, success, from 1889 until his death in 1895.
Somewhat late in the day it occurred to me to investigate what my local Bodleian Library possessed in the way of original Alaudae material. I had an idea it held original copies of Ulrichs’ Latin newspaper, but I only got round to calling them up from the stack two days ago. What I found, bearing in mind I’ve been working through the 33 issues of Alaudae since September, was rather special.
First the disappointing news, though. The Bod doesn’t seem to have a full run of issues, 1-33, but rather 1-15 and then 25. As we’ll see, what the Bodleian has depends on what Ulrichs thought to send it.
Issues 1-15 are bound together in the Bodleian copy, with Issue 25 loose and tucked in the same volume. Glued in the front of the volume is a postcard (front and back in the photos below) with a handwritten note from Ulrichs in Aquila, the Italian town (now L’Aquila) where he spent his final years, and where he composed all those issues of Alaudae:
“Dear Sir!
You have had the kindness (the 20 May) to thank me for having sent my little journal périodique Latin Alaudae I & II. With the present lines I would ask, the Bodleian library might accept an abonnement gratuit of Alaudae and, in consequence, accord me the honour to send, in quality of donum auctoris, also the following numbers.
Yours very sincerely,
Carlo Arrigo Ulrichs
Aquila degli Abruzzi
Italia
31 May 1889.”
Most of the readers of Alaudae were paying subscribers: the terms of subscription (in Latin, like everything else) precede every issue. What Ulrichs is offering the Bodleian here is a free subscription, a gift of the author, and he is committing himself, if the offer is acceptable, to sending “the following numbers”, which I take to mean all the issues to come.
I shan’t show all my workings, as that might get a bit dull, but from a combination of postmarks, accession notes added by Bodleian librarians, and in particular Ulrichs’ own elegant autograph inscriptions on some numbers, it emerges that Ulrichs fulfilled his generous offer up to a point, sending issues periodically in batches. Thus a postmark and half of a five-cent stamp (and all of King Umberto I’s substantial moustache) at the end of 2, plus the fragment of what I think is a newspaper wrapper (there’s another fragment of a newspaper wrapper attached to Ulrichs’ note; more on wrappers below), testify to Ulrichs’ posting of Issues 1-2 as mentioned on the postcard. (King Umberto was a bit of a philistine, incidentally. But Queen Margherita subscribed to Alaudae, as well as allegedly lending her name to a pizza.)
At the end of Issue 4 we find the same postmark, AQUILA (ABRUZZI), and in the newspaper itself, in Issue 3, there is a personal communication (Ulrichs likes to include such communications to subscribers & sim. at the end of his issues) to “E. B. Nich.” at the “Library of the University of Oxford”: Verba tua benevola accepi. Ecce hic, quod obtuleram, “I have received your kind words. Find here what I had offered.” Ulrichs seems to refer back here to his own note and its offer quoted above, while “Nich.” is Edward Nicholson, Bodley’s Librarian at the time, who has evidently replied to Ulrichs’ postcard. At the end of Issue 6 there’s another address and postmark, and accession notes by the library indicating that 7-8 arrived along with 5-6 (in Issue 10 Ulrichs records the Bodleian’s thanks acceptis lib[ellis] 5-8, “for the receipt of Issues 5-8”); at the start of 9 a very elegant address including Nicholson’s name (image at the top) accompanies issues 9-13; and again at the start of 14 (below) there is an indication that 14-15 are being sent, though accession notes indicate that 14-15 were sent before 9-13. Finally, 25 (also below), not bound with the rest, was apparently sent individually.
Were the other issues ever sent by Ulrichs? The accession of these issues was so meticulous at the Bodleian end (judging by the accession dates) that I doubt it. I can also understand why he might not have done. Ulrichs struck up productive relationships with readers in Spain, the US, Britain, Finland, Egypt, the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire, and much of his content is generated from material shared or sent by these contacts. There’s no evidence that I’ve yet encountered of anything similar with Nicholson or the Bodleian, so perhaps no strong reason for Ulrichs to keep the library in mind, more’s the pity.
One thing I have to develop in the next few months is a greater understanding than I can currently claim of postal habits at the end of the nineteenth century. (I seek the Bozi Mohacek of circa 1892 self-sealable pre-paid postcards.) I already know much more than I once did about newspaper wrappers, the means by which newspapers reached their intended destination, thanks to this video, and I was more delighted than I would ever have expected to be to find traces of such wrappers among these Bodleian issues.
Ulrichs has a special interest in matters postal, having written in the past about the postal service in his native Hanover, and being faced with a pressing need to despatch to the four winds a Latin newspaper on which, he calculated, the sun never set, so remarkably far-flung was its readership. This generates some exceedingly tricky passages as he translates contemporary postal realities into Latin, but also some excellent content. He recounts, for instance, the peregrinations of some Romanian newspapers sent him from Constanța, Ovid’s place of exile (he contrasts the existence of a statue of Ovid in Constanța with the lack of any such statue, in his day, in Ovid’s hometown of Sulmona, not far from Aquila, the regrettable neglect of Latin in contemporary Italy being a regular theme in Alaudae). The Romanian newspapers had been bound in two newspaper wrappers, with the address to “Aquila” written across both. When the wrappers became separated, and “Aqui” from “la”, the parcel went to Acqui (Terme), which is a very long way from Aquila.
We also hear of the wrapper for issue 17-18 (a single issue) arriving in Lima, New York without the newspaper, and then of the postcard sent to Ulrichs by the subscriber in Lima reaching Aquila via Bombay, having somehow been misdirected to the Indian Mail. That card had taken 68 days to get from New York State to Aquila, but in general the speed of the post from Aquila to Oxford at this time, and also the efficiency with which the Bodleian accessioned the material it received, if I’m interpreting correctly what I’m looking at, was impressive.
Ulrichs’ Latin addresses in full:
6: Alaudarum auctor: Carlo Arrigo Ulrichs, “The author of Alaudae, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs”;
9: Viris clarissimis bibliothecae universitariae Bodlejanae curatoribus, ad manus Viri Clarissimi Eduardi Nicholson, bibliothecarii, “To the most esteemed gentlemen, the curators of the Bodleian University Library, for the attention of the most esteemed gentleman Edward Nicholson, Librarian”;
14: Bibliothecae Bodlejanae universitatis Oxfordiensis; Misit D(ono) D(edit) D(edicavit) hasce duas Alaudas Alaudarum moderator, auctor, “To the Bodleian University Library of Oxford”; “These two issues of Alaudae have been sent, given and dedicated as a gift by the editor and author of Alaudae”;
25: Misit Alaudarum auctor, “Sent by the author of Alaudae“.
Do I need to add that encountering Ulrichs’ handwriting, both informal and calligraphic, and recognising in it that glorious eccentricity and charm that emerges from every issue of Alaudae; tracing in detail his dealings with Nicholson and the Bodleian; and gaining some sense at least of how he managed to broadcast his Latin newspaper from a tiny garret in Aquila to Mexico City, Madras and a remarkable number of places in between, is simply the kind of thing I became an academic to do?
Mascarpone
The joke in my Christmas cracker this year went something like, “What cheese is best for hiding a horse?” Answer: “Mascarpone”. This sets the standard for what follows.
As I may have mentioned once or twice, my time when not teaching or walking the dog this academic year is taken up editing and annotating translations of the Latin newspaper Alaudae, published by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in the last years of his life from 1889 to 1895. I’ve just finished a primary edit of Issue X (out of a total of XXXIII), January 1890, translated by Phillip Dupesovski, and a selection of its contents might be: discussion of the motto of the House of Savoy, FERT, as found on the edges of nineteenth-century Italian coins; an encounter between a Goliardic poet and an Archbishop based on a twelfth-century poem attributed to the Anglo-Welsh priest/courtier/writer Walter Map; a love poem which makes poignant sense against a poem Ulrichs had written in German 40 years before; and acknowledgement of receipt of a book from Max Müller, proving there was an avid and eminent reader of Alaudae at 7 Norham Gardens, Oxford.
At the end of Issue X there is a poem on coffee, presented with a translation below, and I need some help with it. Cafea is written in hendecasyllables, Catullus’ trademark metre (so a playful form), albeit not consistently respecting Classical rules of versification; or more accurately, following a nudge from Antigone, always a source of illumination, the Catullan hendecasyllables are alternated, pretty much at random, with sapphic hendecasyllables—the latter of which Ulrichs used a lot in his Latin poetry. The poem begins by describing Ulrichs’ morning ritual of brewing coffee over a spirit burner. (Ulrichs spent his final years in very straitened circumstances.) Then the figure MINITANTE appears, sharing Ulrichs’ addiction to coffee to a comic degree, and at the end he asks us to identify her.
I say “her” because that is clearly the gender of Minitante in the Latin. My best guess is that Ulrichs is punning, with a word that could be Latin but make no sense as such in situ, on German “meine Tante”, “my aunt”. The instruction to change a letter, but only one (if we’re understanding him correctly), I take to mean changing the first “i” of “minitante” to “eye”, but not the second, which unstressed could sound like the -e of “meine”. It would be nice to discover that “My aunt” is a regular feature of comic anecdotes, but I have no reason to believe that is true.
Anyhow, I’m inviting better theories, as well as any corrections of my (and Phillip’s) reading of the Latin. If we’ve got it all backwards, we’d be delighted to know!
28.12.2022. In addition to the suggestion in the comments below, two from Twitter. Eric Sheng points out that minutante in Italian can mean retailer or shopkeeper, and that might make better sense of the financial considerations towards the end. Meanwhile Charles Stewart, and independently my co-editor Michael Lombardi-Nash, have pointed out dialectal forms of “meine” that would bring the first syllable closer to “min-“. Editing Alaudae offers a great deal of intellectual fun!
Mira quaedam vis
I’ve been spending a lot of my summer, happily but quite unexpectedly, in the late Nineteenth Century. This is partly related to a book I’m co-writing on the origins of archaeology in Swat, modern Pakistan, but also to a week I spent translating an issue of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ Latin newsletter Alaudae (“Larks”).
My translation of issue 27 of Alaudae, from May 1893, is part of a project coordinated by Michael Lombardi-Nash to get all issues of Alaudae — there were 33 of them between 1889 and 1895, the year of Ulrichs’ death — translated into English in time for the bicentenary of Ulrichs’ birth in 2025. Ulrichs, a lawyer and journalist from Hanover, was a passionate promoter of the Latin language, but his greater significance lies elsewhere, as a fearless campaigner for the recognition and acceptance of same-sex attraction in writings and public statements that required, in nineteenth-century Germany, immense personal courage. This is a good account of Ulrich’s life and importance.
Toward the end of his life, disenchanted with his reception in Germany and with broader developments there, Ulrichs relocated to Italy, and settled in L’Aquila as the guest of Niccolò Persichetti, who shared his interest in Greco-Roman antiquity and was sympathetic to his campaigning in defence of homosexuality. It was from L’Aquila that Ulrichs published Alaudae, and in issue 27 at least this meant gathering together items in Latin that had been sent to him from all corners.
It makes for a wonderful mishmash of material. On a train into London I found myself translating the Latin oration for a graduation ceremony at Trinity College Dublin, where an honorary degree was being conferred on General Sir George Stuart White. An hour later I was looking at a statue of George Stuart White, a man I confess I’d never heard of before, as I hurried down Portland Place. Ulrichs is not very sympathetic to the military, it’s fair to say, having encountered too many militaristic Prussians back home, no doubt, and he spends more time humorously discussing the kilt worn by Major Napier of the 92nd (Gordon Highlanders), who was accompanying White to the ceremony. When I talk about vivid glimpses of the late Nineteenth Century, though, I don’t mean British generals so much as things like Ulrichs’ source for this chunk of Latin from Trinity Dublin. He was sent it by W. H. Brayden, the editor (who is later mentioned in Joyce’s Ulysses) of the “constitutional nationalist” newspaper the Freeman’s Journal—you are reading Latin in Alaudae, in other words, then suddenly deep in the complicated politics of pre-Easter-Rising Ireland.
Most of the issue I was translating was taken up by a celebration of the 300th anniversary of Galileo’s arrival as a teacher at the University of Padua in 1592, to which Padua had invited, in Latin of course, representatives from universities across Europe and in the United States, and received Latin responses back from a number of them. Ulrichs reproduces a few, and we’ll return later to the Latin letter from the University of Kazan on the Volga, an important centre for Classical studies, as my colleague Georgy Kantor has informed me. I’ll also come back later to a dance card sent to Ulrichs from a Society of Pharmacists in Brno, now the Czech Republic (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), written in Latin so as not to upset either Czech or German pharmacists in this bilingual city. It’s again odd to view this after an intervening century of Czech-German relations, though my immediate need was for someone to make sense of Latin terms for dances like Polonaisa, Polka Frankogallica and Saltatio germanica. My colleague Sophie Bocksberger, an expert on dance ancient and modern, stepped deftly into the breach. But for Ulrichs such an event embodied the motto that prefaces every issue of Alaudae, Latinae linguae mira quaedam vis inest ad jungendas nationes, “The Latin language has a remarkable power to bring nations together”—Latin, no one’s language and thus potentially everyone’s.
I volunteered for this project because Ulrichs deserves all the recognition he can get, and because Latin and late-nineteenth-century intellectual life are a couple of my favourite things. But I found here something far more varied and interesting than I anticipated, and closely engaged with a fascinating moment in European history. What holds it all together, though, are Ulrichs’ journalistic skills of editing and composition, and the light touch and humour with which he threads it all together. He skips out of Latin at the end of my issue to share a French joke that is of its time but still quite funny, explaining why the English use “Esq.” in addresses: we are rather chilly in manner, and it stands for Esquimau. It’s a great project that Michael is leading, in short, and it deserves success—deserves, dare I say it, a publisher who’ll put these remarkable documents from a formative time between hard covers. If anyone is interested, feel free to get in touch.
However, two tiny and trivial thoughts that occurred to me while translating, chosen because they brought me quite close to Ulrichs and to these other people speaking Latin to each other 130 years ago.
At the end of the elegant Latin letter from Kazan University to Padua, a copy of which Kazan had sent him, Ulrichs gives the names of the Rector of the University and the Secretary, K. Boporuuno and M. Solovieff. A conversation on Twitter ensued between myself and Georgy Kantor, who like me initially thought that Boporuuno must be a Finnish name, but then established that the Rector in 1893 was not K. Boporuuno but Konstantin Voroshilov. The explanation is clearly that Ulrichs read Voroshilov’s name in Cyrillic, Ворошилов, as if it was in Latin script. But it can’t be quite that simple because Ulrichs reads printed Cyrillic elsewhere in the document from Kazan (and elsewhere again in issue 27) quite happily, identifying Latin derivations in administrative Russian. What’s happened, then, I think, is that Ulrichs was presented with two signatures from Rector and Secretary. One of them, that of Secretary M. Solovieff, was in Latin characters, leading Ulrichs to assume that the Rector’s was too. I can easily imagine a handwritten К. Ворощилов being read as K. Boporuuno. As for Ulrichs, to err is human, and one can encounter the human in a silly mistake. Here I felt like I was looking over Ulrichs’ shoulder as he struggled to decipher someone’s handwriting, something I’ve done quite a bit of myself in the recent past.
I’m not at all sure about my second thought. But it takes us back to those pharmacists in Brno. I couldn’t initially make sense of an abbreviation that prefaces each half of the dance card, “Rp.”: Rp. Polonaisa. Saltat. german. Polka francogallica … Rp. Saltat. german. Polka mazur. IVta Quadrilla …, and I think Ulrichs was as foxed as I was. But then I had a thought. One piece of Latin that’s quite peculiar to pharmacists, or at least pharmacists in Central Europe, is “Rp./” short for “Recipe”, “Take…”, the instruction from the medical practitioner to the chemist/pharmacist as to what they should give the patient. (An English “recipe” was originally a medical prescription; and Rx or ℞ is the local equivalent of Rp./, I believe.) Here is a guide to writing medical prescriptions that I was delighted to find on the website of Masaryk University, Brno, with some important abbreviations on the first page, and a model prescription on p. 7. The invocatio, Rp., is what we’re concerned with:
“Take a Polonaise, Allemande, Polka Française…” instructs the pharmacists’ dance card. If I’m wrong about this, and it’s very likely, errare est humanum and I do it a lot. If I’m right, though, how absolutely lovely that is, pharmacists telling each other, whether they be Czech or German, that an evening of dancing together is just what the doctor ordered.
[01/04/2024. I’m on the final run-through of the issues of Alaudae, or maybe the penultimate or prepenultimate. But on this occasion I confirmed my impression that remarkable things are being achieved in eastern Europe as regards the digitisation of newspaper ephemera, and in the process confirmed this last hunch of mine from two years ago. There are two reports of this ball that I’ve tracked down, aside from Ulrichs’ own. One is in the German-language newspaper Mährisch-schlesischer Correspondent and provides the very pleasing information that the dance card at the ball was in “the form of a prescription”, while both the German newspaper and a Czech-language pharmaceutical journal Časopis českého lékárnictva tell us that a box containing the dance card and two vials of perfume, which was handed to all the ladies attending, was designed to look like a first-aid kit. I think that establishes the character of the fun that was had pretty clearly, and my reading of Rp. fits in pretty neatly. I hope very much I can work more on this intensely moving event. Every time I return to it it reveals new layers.]
My thanks to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs for telling me about about this, and to Michael Lombardi-Nash for introducing me to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs.