The Appreciation of Latin Poetry

Extract

The best Latin poetry loses nearly all its quality in translation and even the beginnings of its appreciation need a little knowledge of Latin. This is not entirely a truism, or universally applicable. Some poetry, like Homer and the Psalter, can be truly though partially apprehended through translations; but the spirit of Latin poetry, deprived of its own embodiment, eludes us. The Italian Camena, however wooingly the great translators approach her, ‘flies, plunges deeper in the bowering wood’, in that sylvan felicity of sound answering to sound, which links Latin poetry to the senses rather than to the intellect, and refuses to yield up its secret in any language except its own.