How Harrius Potter Helped Me Read More Latin
When, after a seventeen-year wait, my father-in-law’s name was pulled in the annual lottery for a license to raft down the Grand Canyon, he probably didn’t think his son-in-law would spend the trip reading Harry Potter. He definitely didn’t think any relation of his would spend the trip reading Harry Potter in Latin. But that is what I did.
For eighteen days, between captaining an eighteen-foot raft down 296 miles of the Colorado River, making sure all our human waste made it into the cans we carried for that purpose, and, late in the trip, grimly helping re-right the capsized craft that held those cans, I read Harrius Potter et Camera Secretorum, having read Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis shortly before the trip.
While some might dismiss Peter Needham’s translations of J.K. Rowling’s novels as cacata charta — not ancient enough, not grave enough, not “humanistic” enough — Harrius Potter was a cornerstone of my early Latin-reading life.
There is a long tradition of translating children’s stories into Latin. In the introductions to several of these works, the translator mentions a hope that the translation will help learners enjoy reading a higher volume of Latin than they otherwise could, and that this increased volume will lead to greater ability to read other Latin texts. I read the Harrius Potter books before I had seen those introductions or learned what some linguists say about the sheer volume one ought to read in a language one is learning, but these translators’ hopes were realized, at least in me.
Never before had I lapped up Latin by the double digits of pages per day — actual, full pages of Latin, uncramped by notes in another language on vocabulary, manuscripts, history, and other things that are often worthwhile and sometimes essential, but also distract from the Latin text. A much-adapted dictum about pleasure reading claims that there’s no such thing as kids who don’t like to read, only ones who haven’t found the right book. I already liked to read Latin, but Harrius Potter was a gateway text for me, leading to regular, sustained sessions reading authors of all eras.
It also, along with Hans Ørberg’s Familia Romana, helped my brain get used to reading Latin roughly the way I read other languages I knew, in the order the words appear and without stopping constantly to look things up or puzzle over a sentence. (Sitting in that raft, I did sometimes allow myself to underline words or phrases I wanted to revisit later, either to find out what they meant or to add them to my own repertoire of Latin locutions. My waterlogged copy of Harrius Potter et Camera Secretorum shows about one smudgy underline per page.) If you’ve never read Latin for a while without stopping to look stuff up, please try it just as soon as you’ve read this article without stopping.
It’s crucial to note that Harrius Potter was able to play this role for me only because I had already read (actually, listened to Jim Dale’s performances of) the English books several times. For one thing, I wouldn’t expect anyone not already sold on the story of Harry Potter to bother with the Latin version, let alone stick around for the fruits of persistent page-flipping. For another, I would have missed much of the plot had I not already absorbed the story and no small part of the exact wording of the original. I also couldn’t have had nearly the incidental vocabulary growth for which many linguists tout extensive reading. I might not even have made it past terebras (“drills”) in the third sentence of the first book. But reading Latin translations of stories one knows well — like reading the Latin originals of works one has imbibed in translation, and like rereading works whose Latin one has read before — is a powerful way to achieve real-time comprehension that solidifies the language in one’s brain.
Of course, you might worry whether the Latin of Harrius Potter is such that you would even want to soak it up. It’s not the nimblest Latin, and the English sentence structure underlying the Latin frequently seeps through. Among the readers who notice, some will find this endearing, others distracting. The following scene from Harrius Potter et Camera Secretorum may tell you into which category you fall. It is the morning of Harry’s twelfth birthday, which he momentarily thinks Uncle Vernon has actually remembered:
Rowling:
At that moment, Uncle Vernon cleared his throat importantly and said, “Now, as we all know, today is a very important day.”
Harry looked up, hardly daring to believe it.
“This could well be the day I make the biggest deal of my career,” said Uncle Vernon.
Harry went back to his toast. Of course, he thought bitterly, Uncle Vernon was talking about the stupid dinner party. He’d been talking of nothing else for two weeks. Some rich builder and his wife were coming to dinner and Uncle Vernon was hoping to get a huge order from him (Uncle Vernon’s company made drills.)
Needham:
eo momento, Avunculus Vernon tussiculam sollemniter edidit et inquit, ‘iam, ut omnes scimus, hodie est dies maximi momenti.’
Harrius suspexit, vix ausus id credere.
‘potest fieri ut hodie negotium maximum vitae totius conficiam,’ inquit Avunculus Vernon.
Harrius ad panem tostum rediit. scilicet, cogitabat acerbe, Avunculus Vernon de cena illa stulta loquebatur. proxima hebdomade nihil aliud in ore habuerat. redemptor nescio qui dives et uxor ad cenam veniebant et Avunculus Vernon sperabat eum a se plurima empturum esse (societas Avunculi Vernon terebras fecit).
Needham’s preservation of Rowling’s diction, right down to the manner of framing direct speech (with an iffy inquit external to the quotation), is impressive, and enriched by classical stock phrases such as negotium conficere and fieri potest ut. And, when, I first read Camera Secretorum, I didn’t cock an eye at the use of cogitabat to introduce direct discourse, at the combination of stulta with cena, which suggests an ill-advised event, a dinner that it was foolish to have, rather than conveying Harry’s annoyance about “the stupid dinner party,” or at the dutiful translation of “were coming” as veniebant despite the context’s clear implication that the guests were simply scheduled to come to dinner twelve hours later.
There are other quibbles one might have with the translation, but the important thing is that I did not have them when I was churning pages in a blow-up boat in Arizona. The Latin was enough smoother than what I could have come up with, and I was little enough used to reading dozens of Latin pages in a sitting, that I’m confident my Latin improved as a result of reading Harrius Potter, both directly and through the habits this reading launched. If I internalized any solecisms, the effect was far outweighed by steady encounters with correct Latin forms and syntax throughout the books. Thus, though its Latin may not be golden, Harrius Potter turned out to be a sort of Philosopher’s Stone, gilding and extending my Latin-learning life by boosting the amount I read and could read.
Anyway, I’m not saying you should read Rowling-via-Needham instead of Caesar or Cicero, or even Eutropius or Sulpicia or Macrobius or Egeria, just that you might find it profitable and enjoyable, which is a pretty good reason to read just about anything. Harrius Potter is not the place to pick up fancy phrasing or grow your tricolon. But, especially if you’re a Harry Potter fan who still has to think about things like cases and verb forms and syntax to get the basic plot or point of a Latin text, Harrius Potter can provide you with a ton of accurate and memorable encounters with the elements of Latin.
Eventually, my delight in the books and my growing Latin competence gave me another way to play with both: seeing how I might have translated things differently and how I might translate the remaining books. (Only two of the seven were Latinized.) This gave me new appreciation for what Needham had pulled off. How would I translate even the short opening line of Book 3: “Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways”? Harrius Potter multis in rebus ab aequalibus distabat. Inter Harrium Potter aliosque pueros plurimum intererat. Haud par ceteris pueris fuit Harrius ille Potter. Harrius Potter aetate similibus dissimillimus ingenio. Non una in re discrepabat Harrius Potter ab eiusdem aetatis pueris. Rarus puer fuit Harrius Potter.
In a rash moment, I took this twice-nerdy exercise far enough to send Bloomsbury, the publisher of the UK original and the Latin translations, a letter offering my services to translate the third and any subsequent books, in case such translations were not already in progress. This was on September 27, 2011, and you must be as bewildered as I am by the fact that Bloomsbury’s reply has not yet crossed my desk. While we wait, evaluating the existing translations and playing with possible renditions of passages from books 3–7 can be a worthwhile practice — or party game.
If you like Harry Potter, but haven’t read the Latin because you didn’t know about it or thought it was beneath a classicist or figured it would be pointless, why not use the occasion of Harry Potter’s being around for twenty years to make a gleeful start of reading Latin widely and deeply for the next twenty?
Justin Slocum Bailey couldn’t convince the Sorting Hat to put him in Gryffindor instead of Ravenclaw. Between grasps at wit beyond measure, he operates Indwelling Language, a collection of resources and habits for boosting joy and success in language learning and teaching. He tweets languagy tips and tidbits as @IndwellingLang.
