Confessions of a Wimpy Latinist

A Review of Commentarii de Inepto Puero

I once saw a copy of the Latin translation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in the “Novelties and Gifts” section of a bookstore, near Darth Vader and Son and Go the F**k to Sleep. This seems to sum up the fate of so many Latin translations of children’s literature. In the minds of the public without Latin, such books are a curiosity — a quirky thing some hobbyist did, like translating Hamlet into Klingon or rewriting The Big Lebowski as a Shakespearean verse drama. (Coming soon: Geoffrey of Monmouth in High Valyrian!)

Classicists will tell you a different story, of course. The tale goes that we translate worthy children’s books into Latin as an educational tool. There are precious few texts with which to fill the formidable canyon between learning the last uses of the subjunctive and diving into the oceans of classical Latin prose. So translating works like Winnie the Pooh or The Hobbit into Winnie Ille Pu or Hobbitus Ille helps fill the gap by providing that rarest of creatures: a true intermediate-level text, more sophisticated than Ecce Romani-like stories but easier than the Pro Caelio. For those bored stiff by Caesar’s campaigns and Cicero’s letters, it also helps the medicine go down in the most delightful way.

Like so much else in classics, this story is a myth. The myth lives on in Jeff Kinney’s prefatory note to the Latin translation of his best-selling Diary of a Wimpy Kid, transformed by Monsignor Daniel Gallagher into the Commentarii de Inepto Puero (hereafter, following the conventions of the Oxford Classical Dictionary, the CIP). Kinney remarks hopefully: “I hope that students trying to learn Latin (or looking for a laugh in this very-much-alive language) will see Greg Heffley from a fresh perspective.” Endearing — but mistaken! It’s touching to imagine a gaggle of beginning Latinists laughing over the travails of Gregorius Heffley in his schola media, working their way up to Cicero and Virgil on the AP Latin syllabus. But one only needs to read the first two sentences of the translation to see why this might not work in practice:

Iam primum omnium, aliquid clarandum est: Hic LIBELLUS COMMENTARIORUM est, non “diarius”! Quamvis mater voluerit ut “libellus diarius” vocaretur, vobis affirmo me OMNINO matrem meam vetuisse ne libellum eo titulo vocaret. (CIP 1.1–3)

In order to read this, you have to understand the following grammatical concepts with some degree of grace: use of the gerundive in the passive periphrastic; the imperfect subjunctive; sequence of tenses; indirect speech; result clauses; use of ut and ne with verbs of permission. In most high schools, these would be third-year curriculum items. The CIP is 217 pages long, and most Latin students are taking other honors classes, juggling multiple extracurriculars, and worrying about applying to colleges. They are also 16 year olds — about 6 years older than the target audience of the English Diary of a Wimpy Kid. If you are a 16-year-old Latinist strapped for time, would you turn first of all to the CIP? Hardly. You’d dive into the real thing, not read a translation of a book for elementary-school kids! For as much effort as it takes to make sense of a phrase like vobis affirmo me OMNINO matrem meam vetuisse ne libellum eo titulo vocaret, it’s going to feel more worthwhile to work on a text from the civilization that got you interested in Latin in the first place — and not a book you could borrow from your younger brother.

So who, exactly, are books like the CIP are meant for, if not for intermediate Latin students? The answer I came to when reading the CIP for this review was, well, me — or readers like me, which is to say, “wimpy Latinists.” It’s hard to admit that you’re a wimpy Latinist, even though most Latinists have worried that they are at some point. After a certain point in our Latin education, we rarely get the chance to speak frankly about what we still find difficult about the language. For those who enter the academy, those weaknesses too often end up forbidden ground: you’d never mention your own, and to allege them in others would be an act of war. False modesty and cautious irony abound, but candor and vulnerability are as rare as practical examples of the inverse cum clause in classical authors.

So, with apologies in advance to everyone who has ever taught me Latin since the seventh grade (all of them doctissimae atque eruditissimae), and after having just finished three and a half especially intense years of engagement with the language, I’d like to take a moment to transgress this unwritten rule. I am going to confess all the things in the Latin language that still make me throw up my hands in frustration and throw a book across the room — or at least run to consult Gildersleeve and Lodge. (To quote St. Augustine: et tu fortasse inrides me, sed conversus misereberis mei!)

I still don’t understand how clauses with quominus and quin work. Last month, I wrote quia when I meant to write quae in a Facebook status. One reader of my blog recently pointed out a post where I mistakenly, and very publicly, derived English “deter” from Latin deterere. If the day will have been good, perhaps I would remember the sequence of tenses correctly. The meanings of short common words — saltem! nempe! sane! — often flit out of my mind, cackling like imps, at exactly the moment when I need them, usually when translating aloud in a group setting. What can I say? Ita inruebam in dolores, confusiones, errores.

And now that I have ensured that no classics department on the face of the planet will ever want to accept me for a Ph.D., I can point out that it’s for readers like us — the wimpy Latinists — that these translations of children’s books really exist. We who have enough vocabulary to get along without a dictionary but are not yet (eheu!) casually leafing through Livy and Erasmus over breakfast — we are the ideal audience for the CIP. It’s wimpy Latinists like us, seeking to relearn some half-forgotten rules of grammar, who will benefit most from Gallagher’s prose. It abounds at every colon with tidier exemplary constructions than almost any actual classical Latin text, but has far more style than we’re going to find in any reference grammar. His conditionals are clean, his idioms sleek and casual. I wish that I’d had the CIP to pore over while taking prose comp; it would have been the perfect way to learn how to render casual English into Latin.

Gallagher has sprinkled his translation with little jokes that would be hard (though not impossible) to get unless you’d spent a lot of time studying the Romans — jokes that seem directed more toward an early-university than a high-school crowd. When our protagonist, Gregorius Heffley, runs for the officium arcarii of his concilium discipulorum and loses, he sighs, Sic factus est cursus honorum meus in re publica­­ — a sly cultural transformation that’s going to seem a lot funnier if you’ve read some Cicero. Although the work’s title clearly alludes to Julius Caesar, it’s Augustus’s voice that Gregorius’ most often resembles — as in the audacity of his ambitions for this year of schola media:

cum equidem dives et celebratus ero, res maioris momenti habebo faciendas quam hominum rogatiunculas universum diem respondere. Qua de re hic libellus haud inutilis erit. (CIP 2.2–5)

It might just be the superficial similarity of two spare Latin first-person prose autobiographies, but I kept catching hints of the Res Gestae throughout — often played against the most ridiculous possible context. For instance, when explaining why he asked his patruus Carolus (dives ille!) for a Barbie house one Christmas, Gallagher chooses these marmoreal tones for Gregorius:

Cum ego septimum annum vitae meae agebam, nihil accipere volebam nisi “Barbarae Aedes Optimas,” ac tamen non, ut dixit Roderigus, quia placuerunt mihi ludicra puellarum. (116.11–12)

At other times, there is a Tacitean darkness in the CIP’s treatment of institutions and politics. Gregorius’ flagrant abuse of power as a member of the Cohors Vigilum — a kind of minor magistracy at the schola media — to chase smaller children with worms is presaged with a scheming remark that obviously serves as a critique of greater systemic political corruption in Kinney’s own times: Scio insuper me, si auctoritate in schola uteris, optimas occasiones habiturum esse (151.10–11).

Is it conceivable that a very sharp high-school Latinist might catch all this, making sense of the grammar fluently enough so that reading is a pleasure and not a chore? Sure. And I can imagine that a junior or senior Latin class might enjoy working through a chapter or two at the end of the year as a break from tougher texts. But I really think the people who learn the most from these contemporary Latin renderings of children’s books are those with Latin, albeit wimpy Latin — those who need not so much a way into the language as a way to polish it up.

And if we acknowledged that, we might confer more dignity on the honesty involved in admitting that you’re a wimpy Latinist — the valor of saying publicly that you have a long way to go. Posturing and defensiveness abound so often, too often, in classics: if everyone in the field were the linguists they pretend to be (in Latin as well as in Greek), we’d all be declaiming like Hortensia and reading The Peloponnesian War as if it were The New Yorker. So why not don the mantle of modesty with confidence and declare ourselves wimps, the better to overcome our wimpiness? We inepti will set forth, copies of Alicia in Terra Mirabili and the Commentarii (Kinney, not Caesar) in hand. When our Latinist brethren ask us what we are doing, we’ll say, “We’re learning.” And when the Latinless multitudes ask why we’re reading the Diary of a Wimpy Kid in a “dead language,” we shall answer with pride: “We are classicists!” (They’ll never know the difference.)

Spencer Lenfield is currently the Post-Baccalaureate Media Fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. (Someday, he will casually leaf through Erasmus at breakfast. Someday.)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.