Catholic Online Forum

Since last November it has also been heartily recommended to budding Latinists and to readers a little older who look back with nostalgia at the hexameters they scanned at school, thanks to the translation by Marie-France Saignes (who changed her name into a self-ironic “Maria Gallica Cruenta”) and by Elizabeth Antébi (alias “Sanctaedes Dusselpaganica Lustralunda”) of eight unpublished stories. Pullus Nicolellus in Latin (Paris, Imav éditions, 2012, 103 pages, € 15) would probably have made Goscinny very happy, and maybe even St Augustine. The comparison is not out of place, as it might seem, given that the Bishop of Hippo himself remembered with pleasure the natural method with which he learned the language of Caesar and Tacitus, sine ullu metu atque cruciatu, inter etiam blandimenta nutricum et ioca arridentium et laetitias alludentium (Confessiones, i, xiv, 23, a passage cited by Luigi Miraglia in the article Come (non) si insegna il latino [How (not) to teach Latin] in "Micromega", no. 5 of 1996), "almost as a game, among those who blandished it and joked and laughed with him"; but he has harsh words for those who taught him Greek in an odious and constraining way, "sprinkling with bile" the joy of reading. “Glaucops est”! Nicolas would say to his friends, the Latin form of "that's neat!", a word that literally means “owl” but in slang means the same as the Spanish guapo and the English nice.