Sunday, March 29, 2020

BOOK: Angelo Poliziano, "Greek and Latin Poetry"

Angelo Poliziano: Greek and Latin Poetry. Edited and translated by Peter E. Knox. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 86. Harvard University Press, 2018. 9780674984578. xx + 418 pp.

We've already encountered Poliziano in the I Tatti Renaissance Library before: his letters appeared as vol. 21 and his Silvae, a collection of minor epics/didactic poems, as vol. 14. The present volume contains the rest of his poetry, consisting mostly of numerous short poems and epigrams. Another work of his, the Miscellanea, a prose book about various philological questions, is apparently set to appear in the ITRL in the very near future.

The publisher's text on the front flap of the dustjacket, here as well as in the earlier ITRL volumes of his work, describes Poliziano as “one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance”, which struck me as a very suitable description while reading the poems in this volume. He is very keen to show off his learning and he includes some reference to classical mythology or history in almost every line of his poems; and he seems to hardly ever refer to any ancient god or person by his or her normal name when some obscure synonym or allusion is available. This sort of thing would be enjoyable in more moderate amounts, but here in Poliziano's work I found it to be mostly just a nuissance. The translator provided notes with explanations of such references, of course, but having to look them up still interferes with your reading.

Most of the poems in this volume are epigrams, generally quite short though a few are also longer. There are about 130 Latin ones and, a rare thing in the ITRL series, also 57 Greek ones. Poliziano seems to have been influenced by various anthologies of ancient epigrams. I had heard of the Greek Anthology before, but the translator's notes here also mention two others that were new to me, the Palatine Anthology and the Planudean Anthology. But they seem to all be more or less extensive editions of the same thing.

As usual with epigrams, they are on various subjects. There are several poems sucking up to Lorenzo the Magnificent, Poliziano's patron and employer (Poliziano worked as a tutor to his sons; p. x); epigrams about numerous friends and contemporaries, some quite famous (e.g. Marsilio Ficino, Bernardo Bembo); a number of short epitaphs and elegies for the dead (including e.g. several epitaphs for the painter Giotto, pp. 171, 287–91, one of which was inscribed on his bust in the Florence cathedral; n. 211 on p. 353); some translations of ancient Greek epigrams into Latin, and some of Latin ones into Greek (p. 237); and also a few love-poems, including a very pretty one praising his girlfriend in short verses that made me really regret the fact that it's translated into prose and that I can't read the original (pp. 137–43).*

[*But that poem also makes for a very drastic contrast with one that appears a little later, on pp. 159–61, in which the poet expresses disgust with and mockery of a woman who is old and ugly but still lustful (“her enormous breasts putrid from old age, full of cobwebs, pendulous and pointless [. . .] her cunt one big sore, her anus crawling with vermin” etc. etc.). And you can't help wondering, of course — did his girlfriend see both poems, and what did she think? After all, she would be an old woman one day herself, if she was lucky.]

There are several invectives against one Mabilio da Novate, described by the translator as an “itinerant poet” (p. 336), but Poliziano is not so delicate and euphemistic, he mocks the bum's appearance as well as his poetical efforts in very blunt terms (p. 77), and ends the series with an epitaph on Mabilio that suggests he was not one for not speaking ill of the dead (“This way stinks, for in this pit are buried Mabilio's putrid body and soul”, p. 105).

There's a nice poem in praise of two Greek printers (p. 63): “Why do you scoff, Turk? You destroy Greek books; these men produce them. You might as well try to cut off the Hydra's heads.”

There's an epigram about an olive tree entwined with grape vines: “O grapevines, why do you coil around me? I am Minerva's plant, not Bromius! Take away your grape clusters, lest I, a maiden, be called a drunk.” (P. 151. According to the translator's note, it's a translation of an ancient Greek epigram. We saw a similar one in the recent ITRL volume of Ariosto's poetry; see my post from back then.)

Speaking of trees, here's another good one, “On a prostitute's bed made of laurel” (p. 149): “I escaped one man's bed, only to become every man's bed.” This refers, of course, to the legend of Daphne, who was turned into a laurel to avoid being molested by Apollo. But perhaps it also illustrates how his keenness for clever classical allusions sometimes drove Poliziano to write improbable things: how likely is it that a prostitute's bed would be made specifically of laurel-wood, and that he would notice such a detail in the first place?

One or two poems in this book are filthy enough that they would not be out of place in the work of a Beccadelli, e.g. the poem about a prostitute with an unusually large clit, which prompted Poliziano to wonder who was fucking whom (“I demand payment in return: for you buggered me, Galla, I didn't fuck you”, p. 285), or one where he praises his cock for going limp when a prostitute demanded excessive payment (“you're pretty smart on your own, even when my actual mind is deranged”, p. 295).

His Greek epigrams are often addressed to various Greek scholars then living in Italy, such as John Argyropoulos and Theodore Gaza; and I was impressed by how young he was when he wrote many of them, 18–20 years old or so. There are also several poems in Greek to “Alessandra, the poetess”, i.e. Alessandra Scala, daughter of the humanist Bartolomeo Scala, some of whose books we've seen in the ITRL series before. Apparently Poliziano had a love interest in her, but she eventually married another poet, Michael Marullus. Interestingly, both men were about 20 years older than her.

A fine sentiment from one of his Greek poems dedicated to his friend Giovan Battista Buoninsegni: “The dawn rises in shadows for the man without a friend; honeycombs are bitter, the whole of life is death. Without friends I do not wish to be immortal, not even to be king of the immortals.” (P. 189.)

One of the longest and perhaps also oddest poems in this volume is the Silva on Scabies. It is about 350 lines long and describes in vivid and suitably disgusting detail the poet's sufferings under this afflication. No matter how much pain he's in, however, he still doesn't fail to provide the usual dosage of classical allusions throughout the poem. I just realized that I don't quite know what sort of poem the word silva is supposed to refer to here; considering what other poems of his Poliziano had also referred to as silvae, the idea perhaps is that it is a medium-length poem in the sort of verses that you would expect in epic poetry, but with a didactical content rather than about action. The wikipedia says that the use of the word was inspired by a collection of occasional poems by Statius. And I also realized that I didn't quite know what scabies are, and looking in the wikipedia a bit, it seems to be the same thing as mange, or perhaps a special case of it. In Slovenian we have the same word for both, garje, which would help explain why I didn't have scabies as a separate concept.

The translations, as usual in the ITRL series, are in prose, but apart from that I have no complaint about them. The style is often a bit less stiff and formal than we usually see in the ITRL, which I guess reflects the fact that Poliziano's style in some of these poems was probably a bit more informal as well. Perhaps the most extensive example of that is the preface he wrote for a new production of Plautus' Menaechmi (p. 155). And this may well be the first time I've seen “chutzpah” (p. 101) and “zilch” (p. 107), not to mention “piss-tippler” (p. 219) in the ITRL. The translator also made a good effort with Poliziano's occasional puns (p. 107).

This was a pleasant book and I liked it better than the previous volumes by Poliziano in the ITRL. I'm looking forward to seeing what his Miscellanies will be like.

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BOOK: Giannozzo Manetti, "On Human Worth and Excellence"

Giannozzo Manetti: On Human Worth and Excellence. Edited and translated by Brian P. Copenhaver. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 85. Harvard University Press, 2018. 9780674984585. li + 362 pp.

One thing that fascinates me about the humanities is how the people there manage to have a kind of conversation across a span of many centuries. In the present case, it began in the 12th century when the future pope Innocent III, back when he was still cardinal Lotario dei Segni, wrote a “tirade on human misery” (p. xiii), showing how man's life on earth is burdened by his sins and by the vileness of his material reality. This work is not included in the present volume, but judging by the description in the translator's introduction it must have been something to behold: “Lotario's contempt for his own kind is relentless, intensified by mannered prose: if there were a Library of Loathing stocked with attacks on the human species, and if its masterpieces were ranked, the cardinal's book would make the top ten.” (Pp. xvi–xvii.)

The cardinal apparently intended to follow up his work with a sequel “on the worth and excellence of human life”, but never got around to writing it (pp. xxxv, 257). Two centuries later, Antonio da Barga and Bartolomeo Facio — two near-contemporaries of Manetti — wrote what tried to be such a sequel (their writings are included as an appendix in the present volume); but they don't really disagree with Innocent's misanthropic effort, they take it as a starting point and just add the supposedly positive facts, such as that people have an immortal soul, were made in god's image, and might go to heaven afterwards.

Manetti, it seems, wanted to write a more full-throated defense of man's excellence (Innocent's “vile invective disgusted him”, p. xlv). It was, after all, the age of humanism, and man had gained a renewed self-confidence and wasn't content to just crawl in the mud as in the middle ages. Manetti starts, in a conspicuous contrast with Innocent, with a book praising the human body, first in long quotations from Cicero and Lactantius, then in his own words. He shows the body as a remarkable and intricate mechanism, beautiful and noble in form, full of parts carefully designed for their respective function. At times this part of his work reads like the summary of an anatomical textbook, and indeed one such textbook, by one Mondino de Luzzi, seems to have been his source there (p. 315, n. 29).

In Book 2, he writes about the human soul; he starts with an overview of the opinions of various ancient philosophers, but unsurprisingly he is not particularly keen on them when they disagree with christian religious views of the subject. His main interest in this book is to show that the soul is non-material, created from nothing, and immortal, and he refers to numerous biblical passages in support of that. (An interesting argument for the immortality of the soul: without it, wicked people who had a pleasant life on earth could not be punished after death, and surely god would not allow such an injustice to stand; 2.23. But some of his arguments are very odd: “we all desire and long to be immortal by a natural and inborn will” and it would be absurd if there existed such “a natural desire utterly without hope”; and so, since our bodies aren't immortal, at least our souls must be; 2.22.) He then praises the soul's “three natural powers” (2.36), namely intelligence, memory and will — especially the first of these, which he demonstrates by listing numerous famous artists, poets, thinkers, etc., both ancient and modern, and pointing out their accomplishments.

Book 3 is supposed to be about the human being as a whole, as the union of body and soul, but my impression was that the biggest part of this book is about how fine the world and indeed the whole universe are and how nice it is that all this was created by god specifically for the sake of man (3.57) — a fact which, of course, is taken as another example of the dignity and excellence of man. Manetti's argument is that the world was not created for the sake of itself, because it is insentient; nor was it created for the sake of god, who has no need of it; so it must have been created for the sake of man (3.5). He also praises the human intellect and the various works of art it has produced (3.20); and he lists various examples of god's favour to man, e.g. by providing people with guardian angels (3.42) or granting some people the power to work miracles (3.33).

Finally, book IV struck me as something of a rehash of the previous ones. Manetti follows the same threefold structure (body, soul, man), restates or summarizes many of the things he had said in the earlier books, and spends much of book 4 arguing against the various people who wrote about the misery and vileness of man, against ancient pagan philosophers who thought it was better to be dead than alive, etc., but especially about pope Innocent III, whom we already mentioned earlier. I liked the part where he ridicules Innocent's silly pseudo-etymological claim that Eva, the foremother of all humankind, is so named after the two (Latin?) interjections of pain, he and ha (4.18, 44–5). (But then, Manetti himself commits plenty of silly pseudo-etymological fallacies himself throughout this work.) I must admit, however, that I found Manetti's arguments more hopeful than really convincing. He asserts that the same senses which cause us to feel pain also bring us pleasure, and that overall there is more pleasure than hardship in human life (4.57). He also spends a good deal time talking — as another way to illustrate, I suppose, what an important place man occupies in the bigger picture of things — about the bliss that awaits people in heaven, complete with a perfect 30-year-old body (4.59) and an enjoyable view of the torments endured by the souls of the damned in hell (a view which will occasion “the greatest jubilation”, 4.68)*.

[*One of Manetti's predecessors, Bartolomeo Facio, makes a similar claim in his On Human Excellence and Distinction: “a just person will rejoice and wash his hands in the blood of sinners” (¶74 on p. 292).]

Incidentally, the translator's introduction includes a very interesting discussion on the Latin word dignitas, which appears in the original title of Manetti's book (translated here as “worth”). Nowadays we think of dignity as something universal and inalienable, something that a person has simply by virtue of being a human (p. xxxiii); but it seems that this notion of dignity only developed in the 18th century, largely through the work of philosophers like Kant (p. xxxi). The original sense of dignitas in classical Latin (and also in the Renaissance when Manetti used the word; p. xxxii) was more along the lines of “worth”, “status”, “position”, “excellence” and the like (p. xxxi) — something that was largely limited to gentlemen of leisure (p. xxxiii) and that you could have at one point and then lose it later (p. xxxiv).

One thing that bothered me about Manetti's arguments is how often he relies on ridiculous-looking (and probably mostly false) etymologies — they are often little better than puns based on nothing more than the vague resemblance of a handful of letters near the beginning of two words. Many people those days did that to some extent, but he seems to do it more than most. For some of these he refers to ancient Roman authors, but I guess some might be his own idea. But I have to commend the translator for coming up with equivalent puns in English: the creator “to give the eyes better protection from injury, he laid [occuluit] them under lids [oculos] to cover them — the reason for calling them that, according to Varro. The lashes [palpebrae] themselves — to whose rapid movement or lashing about [palpitatio] Varro attributes the term — make a very handsome fence for the eyes” (1.18), etc. etc.

One of the functions of the nose is “so that the waste from the brain flows down through its openings” (1.19) :))) But I think that waste from the brain more often flows through the mouth, and sometimes through a twitter account :]

Manetti on Plato: “Although many people consider Plato the cleverest philosopher of all, in many passages of his books he still makes rather obscure statements about the soul, stuffed with metaphors and figures of speech that are barely intelligible” (2.6). I'm glad to hear that someone has a similar opinion about Plato as I do.

Manetti occasionally refers to people committing or contemplating suicide, and I was surprised by how frequently it is here translated as “did themselvelves in” (2.27, 4.10, 4.35). Why would the translator use such a colloquial phrase in a work like this? I wonder if the original Latin uses some similarly informal word.

Manetti mentions the factoid that the Argonauts used the first ship ever built (3.13, 3.37) — we've recently seen the same in the ITRL volume of Ariosto's poems.

In praising art as one of the achievements of the human soul, Manetti mentions a painter that “depicted a mare and a bitch so that horses and dogs passing by [. . .] thought they were seeing real animals” (2.39); a sculptor “represented Venus so beautifully in marble [. . .] that it was hard to keep her safe and undefiled by the lustful embraces of bypassers [. . .] some other artist cast a cow in bronze that aroused a bull that was passing by to love her and mount her” (2.40) :)))

Sometimes people pull factoids out of their ass... sometimes from their balls: “just as sperm is produced from excess food, so blood comes in the same way from the substance of the same nourishment. The finer and richer the diet of any animal, the better and stronger the sperm produced by its residue. We should think the same of sperm as of blood, which in humans must excel what other animals have, inasmuch as our diet is more refined” (4.29).

A neat rhetorical trick from 4.45: Manetti says about Innocent's claims that “were I not restrained [. . .] by the reverence due to a supreme pontiff” he would “contend that they are trifling, childish and quite remote from pontifical and apostolic seriousness” :)

This was in a way an interesting book, but its interest for a non-believer like me is considerably limited by the fact that it's all taking place within the christian framework. If you take away such things as god and the soul, there's very little left of Manetti's argument (or those of the other authors involved in this conversation, for that matter).

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