The Pearl at the Center
"Why do you want your children to read literature in the original Latin or Greek?"
On one level, we can answer this common question with an Italian proverb: Traduttore, traditore -- every translation is a betrayal. A Japanese person reading Shakespeare in translation may well understand plots and character development, but can she be said really to understand Shakespeare's artistry without access to his language? The same is true of the classical literary masters: Homer, Virgil, Cicero.
As Tracy Lee Simmons writes, "the problem with translations is that those readers unlettered in the original languages can't know what they're missing."
A translation seems as the shadow of a tree to the tree itself, and the discerning mind will not confuse one for the other. Much of the power and the glory no longer shine within the poem that's been run through the enervating sieve of translation. Something leaks out. Unfortunately that something is often the very essence that once drove centuries of readers to the poem. We lack that which made it great. We've lost the pearl at the center. (Climbing Parnassus, pp. 218-219)
While I can understand the concern of parents who are trying to decide whether it's worth their students' time to master these complex and often frustrating languages, I am dismayed by an assumption that I seem to see lurking beneath the question. Perhaps this presupposition is not, in fact, what drives these parents, but I've seen too many discussions of this sort to think that it is entirely absent from our collective educational consciousness.
That assumption is that classical languages -- and, by association, any challenging academic subject -- are something that no child in his right mind would ever want to learn. It's as if we teach Latin for the same reason we eat oat bran or take cod liver oil: It's Good for You. Nasty stuff, but healthful, so we choke it down.
Now I'm a big proponent of the formative value of a curriculum that emphasizes the classical languages. Mental discipline is a fine thing; I'm all for it. But this isn't boot camp, even if our grammar chants can sound a bit like marching cadences. Why on earth would you have your children memorize heaps of Latin grammar but stop before they actually get to read any real Latin literature? It's like having a child do nothing but scales and arpeggios on the piano, but making him quit before he ever gets to "Fuer Elise." He'll have good hand-eye coordination and a certain amount of technical knowledge about key signatures and such, but I can guarantee that he won't become a competent pianist, let alone love music. I'm convinced this is why so many people think Latin is deadly dull: they dropped out before they got to the good stuff. Caesar may be many things, but I wouldn't call him boring.
The assumption -- anti-intellectual at base -- that classical learning is anything but pleasurable spawns a chilling monster: the homeschooler who teaches the classics because they're Good and Uplifting, but without once ever enjoying them or conveying that enjoyment to her children. Yes, classical languages are good for you and there are many enduring truths to be found in the literature of the Greeks and Romans, but we mustn't forget the third part of the great classical paradigm: Beauty. People haven't read Virgil for centuries because he exhibited mental rigor but because his poetry is supremely beautiful. We can't separate that loveliness from the language in which it is clothed. And so we chant our forms and look forward to the day that our children will "sing of arms and a man."
Drew Campbell is the author of The Latin-Centered Curriculum. This is the second in a series of articles on the pleasures of classics; the first part can be found here.