flemmings | (no subject)

Yes, well, it's the Ides of March again. But the only reason that matters to the English-speaking and largely non-Latin-reading world is because Wully Shaxper wrote a play about Julius Caesar. Otherwise the Ides and Caesar himself would mean as little to us as, say, the Emperor Nerva and the Pisonian conspiracy. This strikes me as very odd somehow. A century ago there were other ways to get to know Caesar, largely that primer for Latin school infants De Bello Gallico. We spent three and a half years in high school learning Latin grammar and vocab before being gingerly let loose on a Latin text, and the vocab during those years was all about camps and ramparts and arrows and sallies (cf the Beatles' song Longa Alta Eruptio). Rather like the military leaning of that 'graded course in Japanese reading' with its just-postwar concern with armies and commanders-in-chief and tanks. If the first thing you'll ever read is Caesar, better learn Caesar's vocabulary. I believe that newer primers start you out with different vocab and readings, and a good thing too.

But this makes me me wonder if in days to come (supposing there are any) Shakespeare's plays will be considered too arcane for modern ears, and will survive only as modernized movies. Charlotte Bronte? Jane Austen? Almost certainly Dickens and Henry James, who work much better as drama than as novels. Sic transit and all that.

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I think I first learned about Caesar from the Asterix comics in English translation. It was such a joy after I learned Spanish, to read the Spanish versions and discover that all the jokes were different!

I read them in (my miserably deficient high school) French because my father could get them on his business trips to Montreal. This was as they were coming out and years before the English translations. I should probably have a look at those but the names are so firmly fixed in my mind that it feels weird for them to be called something else.

Also, I stop with Goscinny & Uderzo. They were not the same after that.

Edited 2023-03-17 12:25 (UTC)

Yes, that I can believe. There's still quite a lot of G&C to be going on with.