The City of Angels in Latin

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"The Best New Book Written Entirely in Latin You’ll Try to Read This Year:  Why Donatien Grau, an adviser at the Louvre, decided to write 'De Civitate Angelorum,' a book about Los Angeles, the Roman way."  By Fergus McIntosh, New Yorker (September 16, 2024)

Since even elite schools like Penn and Princeton no longer have a language requirement in their Classics departments, I doubt that many people, other than a few extraordinarily conscientious lawyers and biological taxonomists, will understand much of what Grau has written.  Still, it's an interesting experiment to see how much of his book fluent speakers of French, Spanish, and Italian comprehend.

Donatien Grau, an adviser on contemporary programming at the Louvre, was in town from Paris to do a reading from his book “De Civitate Angelorum,” a treatise on Los Angeles written entirely in Latin. He wore an intellectual’s patterned scarf and a too-heavy blue blazer, and was fortifying himself with a pre-reading iced tea.

In 2018, Grau was curating an exhibition about Plato at the Getty Villa, in Los Angeles, when he had an idea. “For Jean Paul Getty, the United States were the new Roman Empire, and the Pacific Palisades were the new Amalfi Coast,” he said. “The way the villa was received, in the seventies—it was very strongly criticized as being, you know, Miami. But a lot of scholars, they spoke to archeologists who said that it actually was a fairly accurate rendition of what a Roman villa would have been.” He mopped his brow. “So I thought, What if I do this silly thing and write a book on L.A. in Latin?”

The project soon turned serious. A numismatist by training, Grau took inspiration from fourth- and fifth-century Latin literary texts. An art-house publisher in Paris agreed to print a few hundred copies. For a title, he borrowed from St. Augustine’s “City of God” (“De Civitate Dei”), written when the Roman Empire was in its decline. “In the late fourth century, a number of writers and aristocrats and members of the élite thought that their time was over,” he said. “Christianity had arrived, and would erase the heritage of paganism.”

He wondered: Could Los Angeles be at a similar juncture? Perhaps writing in Latin would help him decide. “Latin was, of course, an imperial language,” he said. “And now it’s a non-hegemonic language. Whereas English is an imperial language that still has that sense of hegemony.” He went on, “We have to accept the foreignness of Latin in order to be able to understand it again.”

After Fergus McIntosh has described the cognoscenti who had gathered for the reading at 192 Books, on Tenth Avenue, "to hear Grau declaim in a dead language", the author begins:

In ultima terra Civitas Angelorum locata est. Nam inter solitudines et mare, montes et caelum, silvas et urbem, posita est.” So far so good: The City of Angels is at the end of the earth, amid deserts and sea, mountains and sky, forests and sprawl. The next bit was trickier: The city is diverse (“Civitas varia est”), crossed by raised freeways (“viae altae liberae”), prone to earthquakes (“motus terrae”); everyone always thinks that they’re young and happy (“Omnes semper se iuvenes ac beatos esse putant”). Some people frowned in concentration; others looked out the window. Occasionally, Grau slipped in a familiar name—Venice Beach, Topanga, the Oscars—to grateful chuckles. The last section was about David Hockney. “Ad civitatem pictor e Britannia venit,” Grau intoned: A painter came from Britain.

Afterward, fans waited for Grau to finish stacking chairs. “Oddly, I could follow certain parts,” Aisha Butt, who works for the Guggenheim, said. “I think I ended my Latin education at sixteen, but there are little parts you keep.”

For some, it was more about vibes. “He read it without one hint of irony,” Ernesto Estrella, a poet and a philologist, said. “It was beautiful. He read it as if everybody would understand everything, and that makes you understand.”

Magnifique!

We do this all the time when we listen to operas in languages we don't know.

 

Selected readings

[Thanks to Don Keyser]



18 Comments »

  1. Philip Taylor said,

    September 16, 2024 @ 11:18 am

    Any chance of a link to an audio recording thereof ? Incidentally, we don't all "listen to operas in languages we don't know" (or even "listen to operas [at all]") but some of us experience a similar effect when watching films with the dialogue in a language which we don't know.

  2. jhh said,

    September 16, 2024 @ 12:27 pm

    Any chance of a link to order a copy of the book? I can think of a classicist who might enjoy it…

  3. Philip Taylor said,

    September 16, 2024 @ 2:15 pm

    (Audio / video) link found — https://paulacoopergallery-studio.com/posts/about-ed-x7zkf-5s9ga-aa5xb-xgrhn-ncrxj-rgtk9-zhme5-fe3l9-cmgn8-hwhlk-dncll-64fnn-lj5rs-3kknp — audio weak, video dark. I will improve both and make improved copies in response to individual direct requests.

  4. AG said,

    September 16, 2024 @ 5:45 pm

    "the United States were…" is rare these days.

  5. Paul Garrett said,

    September 16, 2024 @ 6:05 pm

    Yeah, why not return to a less nationalistic lingua franca… so to speak. Or, for that matter, why not the mercantile Greek that lasted throughout the Mediterranean far longer than Latin…

  6. JimG said,

    September 16, 2024 @ 8:19 pm

    For purchasing a printed copy:
    https://www.yvon-lambert.com/products/donatien-grau-de-civitate-angelorum?srsltid=AfmBOopeoowQYVcoswlZlCVaLjy5NqnY4_kFCM8HRG8KZ16piZi93V0v

  7. Viseguy said,

    September 16, 2024 @ 11:48 pm

    Did he write the first draft in Latin, I wonder, or did he write in his L1 and translate it therefrom? If the former, I am duly impressed.

    This sort of thing — translation into Latin, I mean — is business as usual at the Vatican, of course. For many years, the head Latinist was a down-to-earth priest from Wisconsin, Reginald Foster, whose trademark "habit" was a blue track suit. He died in 2020. (The American Scholar ran an in-depth profile of him, oh, about 20 years ago.) I gather that his replacement, Daniel Gallagher, is another American priest. Two American Latinists in a row is a bit surprising, no?

    Another Vatican tidbit: When Benedict XVI announced his resignation, he did it in an address, in Latin, to a gathering of bishops. The bishop sitting to his far right evidently know enough Latin to appreciate what was going down, as his facial expression indicates.

  8. Viseguy said,

    September 16, 2024 @ 11:51 pm

    Correction: "… to his far left …" — in the linked video, I mean …

  9. Viseguy said,

    September 17, 2024 @ 12:01 am

    My comment preceding the correction was lost in the ether. Oh, well….

  10. Peter Taylor said,

    September 17, 2024 @ 4:27 am

    A numismatist by training, Grau took inspiration from fourth- and fifth-century Latin literary texts.

    Am I the only one who sees a violation of the Gricean maxim of relation in this sentence?

  11. Benjamin E. Orsatti said,

    September 17, 2024 @ 7:26 am

    Viseguy,

    Neat! Where did you get all those nuggets of Vaticanaria?

    Peter,

    Clearly; what do coins have to do with books? I guess maybe he was already adept at translating imperial inscriptions from Roman coins, so it wasn't a big leap to the books? I dunno.

  12. Robert Coren said,

    September 17, 2024 @ 9:24 am

    Am I the only one thinking of Winnie Ille Pu?

  13. Benjamin E. Orsatti said,

    September 17, 2024 @ 10:33 am

    ISWYDT:
    (from Wikipedia)

    Impact
    The success of Winnie ille Pu spurred further interest in Latin translations of children's books. Five years after its publication, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Little Prince, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland were all translated into Latin. However, after this brief renaissance, the enthusiasm for translation into Latin slowly declined.

  14. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 17, 2024 @ 11:37 am

    Re "He read it as if everybody would understand everything," I am reminded of the time many decades ago when out of anthropological/cultural curiosity I went to attend an old-timey Tridentine Mass celebrated in Latin. I had naively imagined that the priests would chant their parts in Latin "as if everybody would understand," i.e. as if playing along with what everyone knew to be a polite social fiction that the congregation actually knew the language. I say this was naive because in truth and fact the "performance style" of the Mass that had slowly developed over many many centuries prior to Vatican II had quite sensibly evolved to fit the lived reality that the congregation did not know the language, so there was lots of semi-audible murmuring rather than any elocution-lesson-style attempt to make everything clear and comprehensible to a hypothetical person in the rear pews who did understand Latin quite well.

  15. Daniel Tse said,

    September 17, 2024 @ 4:05 pm

    Did anyone notice that in the recording (https://paulacoopergallery-studio.com/posts/about-ed-x7zkf-5s9ga-aa5xb-xgrhn-ncrxj-rgtk9-zhme5-fe3l9-cmgn8-hwhlk-dncll-64fnn-lj5rs-3kknp) — the author's Latin stress is a little shaky? You can hear that cīvitās and divitissimae are read out with penultimate stress.

    Does this betray unfamiliarity with Latin, or is it maybe just a different reading tradition?

  16. VVOV said,

    September 17, 2024 @ 7:40 pm

    On the one hand, I am delighted by this project. On the other, it strikes me that if someone is going to write a book about Los Angeles in an extinct language, that language should be Tongva.

  17. Chester Draws said,

    September 17, 2024 @ 11:30 pm

    You take that back VVOV! Latin is not extinct.

    Uncommon, yes, but it still has speakers.

  18. John Chew said,

    September 18, 2024 @ 9:24 am

    I asked a German friend a long time ago, "What's it like listening to Die Zauberflöte as a native speaker?" She shot back, "What's it like for you listening to the Beatles?"

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