Lacrimae Rerum
A personal story about a forbidden language, war, and why we create art
When I was in the fourth grade, a pilot program was started at my Catholic school to teach some of the students Latin. To be tapped for this special class meant that the teachers felt you were fairly bright. All you needed to do was get a permission slip signed by your parents which allowed you to skip religion class. I took the slip to my father, the parent I most wanted to impress. I thought he would be proud and sign it. He looked over the paper silently and then ripped it up saying, “Latin is for priests. Only boys can become priests, and you are not a boy.”
And that was the end of my hopes to study Latin in elementary school. I tried once more in high school but my schedule never allowed me to choose it as an elective, and Latin was not a language option at my college.
It is almost 40 years since I was first offered the course as a child. During the intervening years I tried to learn on my own. I got handbooks, dictionaries, children’s books in Latin, and all sorts of resources. In the day of Duolingo and YouTube you would think that a person as autodidactic as I am would have a chance… alas no. Language is one of the hardest things for my mind to grasp. I barely understand the dialect my parents spoke when I was growing up. Latin was looking impossible.
Enter The Catherine Project…
The Catherine Project is an online lyceum founded Zena Hitz which she described as a place where one could pursue an education “without strings attached, no grades, no credits, no tuition, run on the manifest love of learning alone.” It is through this program that I was able to study Latin for free. My class meets every Monday and Wednesday over Zoom. For me it has been slow going, but I can now do simple conjugation of verbs and declension of nouns. I spend many spare moments during the week translating sententiae antiquae—bits of Horace, Seneca and Cicero. I have a terrible tendency of floating from classical to ecclesiastical pronunciation.
Through The Catherine Project I was also able to study Aristotle’s Politics, Augustine’s Confessions, and Homer’s Iliad.
And Virgil’s Aeneid…
Writing in Latin, Vergil used dactylic hexameter—six feet per line containing two or three syllables each in order to tell the story of the birth of Rome from the ashes of Troy. Line 462 of the epic is known for being one of the hardest lines in Latin to translate as it contains the poetically evocative phrase, lacrimae rerum.
In a scene from the first book, Aeneas is in Juno’s temple looking at art that depicts the Trojan War. He stands there, as a survivor of the war and refugee in a foreign land, looking upon images of his friends who had fallen in battle.
En Priamus! Sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi; sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. Solve metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem. (lines 461-463)
The genitive form of rerum could mean either tears of things or tears for things. Not knowing Latin well, I picked up a number of translations. Allen Mandelbaum, winner of 1973 National Book Award for Translation (1971), translated it like this,
Look! There is Priam! Here, too, the honorable finds its due and there are tears for passing things; here, too, things mortal touch the mind. Forget your fears; this fame will bring you some deliverance. (Lines 653-657)
In 1981, Robert Fitzgerald translated it thus,
Look, here is Priam. Even so far away Great valor has due honor; they weep here For how the world goes, and our life that passes Touches their hearts. Throw off your fear. This fame Insures some kind of refuge. (Lines 627-631)
Stanley Lombardo gives us these lines in 2005,
There is Priam! Here, too, honor matters; Here are the tears of the ages, and minds touched By human suffering. Breathe easy, my friend. Troy’s renown will yet be your salvation. (Lines 566-569)
And in 2006 we have Robert Fagles,
There’s Priam, look! Even here, the world is a world of tears and the burdens of mortality touch the heart. Dismiss your fears. Trust me, this fame of ours will offer us some haven. (Lines 556-561)
In 2021 Sarah Ruden published a substantial revision of her 2008 translation. She is notable for keeping her own text to Virgil's text line by line. But I find her wording too lean.
There’s Priam! Even here is praise for valor And tears of pity for a mortal world. Don’t be afraid. Somehow, our fame will save us. (Lines 461-463)
Also in 2021, Shadi Bartsch gives a similarly tight translation of Virgil,
Look: It’s Priam. Here too, glory has rewards; the world weeps, and mortal matters move the heart. Let go your fear. This fame will bring some safety. (Lines 460-463)
Are we reading about tears of things or the tears for things? Latin is so contextual, and I am just at the beginning of my struggles with it. The question is can the universe—the things of this world—weep for us and our small lives? Or is weeping the sole business of mortals?
Does the world weep for our mortality…
Or does it merely tolerate our existence? Sara Teasdale’s There Will Come Soft Rains, a poem that protests war, seems to express a different sentiment.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly; And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone.
I am inclined to believe the natural world does not need us as much as we need it. However, when we talk about the world in the sense expressed in the Aeneid, I believe we are meant to think of the world as the one we have created around us: our relationships, our edifices, our industries, and our art.
About memorials…
I am writing most of this on Memorial Day, when the US celebrates the soldiers who sacrificed their lives for this country. Veterans have looked upon the names of their brothers in arms in beautiful monuments and other creations.
What happens when the tears of things and the beauty of things are the same—when like Aeneas, we are faced with art that reflects our grief? One of the most common uses of art is to memorialize those whom we have lost. In oil paintings. In monuments. In the music of requiems.
And in poetry, like Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth:
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Unlike the hero Aeneas, whose feats are responsible for the building of Rome, many of us will weep and will be wept for by others with no consolation of fame. Our deaths are more like the unnamed soldiers flanking Priam, consecrating the ground in anonymous and humble blood.
My stoic, humble father passed away on this day—May 30—seventeen years ago. Like today it was the Tuesday after Memorial Day.
I recently found the eulogy I delivered after his funeral.
My father loved true stories. He loved sports on tv, history books, and science programs. On Sunday mornings when my mother was at work, my dad and I would sit in bed, eat crackers, and watch PBS. One of those Sundays, when my mom was working at the hospital and my sister was sleeping, my dad and I were watching Nova. The episode was about time, space and time travel. At one point the narrator said that time still goes on long after we have died. That each one of us dies.
It was then that my six-year-old brain made the connection: We all die. And the narrator made it seem like that was the end. I looked at my father and started screaming and crying, "I don't want to die. I don't want to die. I don't want to die."
But he said, "I am your father. I won't let you die. I will always protect you." Even to my young mind it seemed like a ridiculous promise, but I listened to him and pressed my ear to his chest. He held me till I stopped crying. Now that I am a mother, I understand in totality what he was saying. We protect our children so they grow up to become loving, responsible adults... and it never stops.
Tonight look up at the stars. The Greeks used to think that when their heroes died they went up to the sky to live forever in the stars. However, we now know that even stars die. But think beyond those stars and their lifetimes. Think beyond whole universes. And think beyond time itself. And there you will find God, our creator, who is embracing my father, saying to him, "I love you. I am your Father and I won't ever let you die. For I have given you eternal life." And He holds my father in the palm of his hand, now and forever more.
Tears are fascinating…
According to Wikipedia, there are three types of tears: basal tears, reflexive tears, and psychic tears. Psychic tears are produced by the lacrimal system and are the tears expelled during emotional states. These tears produced during emotional crying have a chemical composition which differs from other types of tears. They contain significantly greater quantities of the hormones prolactin, adrenocorticotropic hormone, and Leu-enkephalin, and the elements potassium and manganese. My father would have found this fascinating.
These psychic tears can be evidence of our pain, our grief. Our bodies are the vehicles by which has God has granted us the ability to experience the world. And that includes suffering.
When we are too drained by grief, too bereft to create something eloquent and beautiful, God gives us the gift of crying as physical proof that we have loved and lost. God is constantly creating something through our bodies—bodies which are ever changing, ever feeling, ever aging and thus approaching a mortal end.
How ironic is it to be processing the death of my father through an epic poem in the language he forbade me to learn? As Master Oogway said in Kung Fu Panda, “One often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it.”
Te amo pater.
Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine Et lux perpetua luceat ei: Requiescat in pace. Amen.