The Frog

This morning I came across one of my old Latin exercises from years ago. In it, Reginaldus asks “what does the following sentence have to mean: ‘AEQVAS RARA INTER COAXAT RANA AQVAS’?” The answer: The rare frog croaks among level waters. These days I’d probably make an adjustment in the interests of English prose style and, notwithstanding the unequivocal meaning of aequas aquas, and Reginaldus’s larger point, which is that there can only be one meaning in this case—level waters, plural—opt instead for The rare frog croaks amid still water. The beauty of this simple Latin sentence is that the (to us) out-of-sequence word order actually reinforces its poetic meaning by beginning with a sort of floating adjective, level, that must wait until the very end before it joins up with its noun, in this case waters. Thus level... waters enclose the verb and its subject, the two parts of which, rara... rana, in turn orbit coaxat like planets around the sun. It is as if the arrangement of the words themselves reflect that lonely frog’s croak radiating over a calm pond. Just brilliant.

In English we are stuck with the relatively primitive, overriding stricture of word order, left to right. Everything is more or less governed by that. The dog bites the cat means one thing, and The cat bites the dog means the opposite. German is not so constrained. Der Hund beißt die Katze and Die Katze beißt der hund both mean the same thing: The dog bites the cat. Unlike Latin, the nominative and genitive cases are indicated in German by the form of the article. That’s why Die Katze beißt der hund can only mean The dog bites the cat, and not the other way around—in which case it would have to be Die Katze (subject) beißt den hund (object) if the cat were doing the biting. However, with Die Katze beißt der hund the word order implies a strong shift in emphasis, as if to imply with a degree of Teutonic impatience: Nein, Dummkopf: it’s the cat that the dog is biting, and not the parakeet. Somewhere along the line the English abandoned that kind of flexibility, and the rest of us are now living with the consequences. As a kind of word-order equivalent of Die Katze beißt der hund, we are obliged to take up those dreadfully blunt weapons of the passive voice and the gerund, and bludgeon our way towards something as hideous as The cat is being bitten by the dog, which, in any case, does not mean quite the same thing.

MALO MALO MALO MALO

This morning I received a card from Hamish in which he reminisces about Sponge Austin’s Latin classes at school, in particular the memorable proverb “Malo malo malo malo” which translates rather neatly into English as “I would rather be / In an apple tree (locative) / Than a naughty boy / In adversity,” further evidence (if it were needed) of the sparkling brilliance, economy, and homonymic brinkmanship of Classical Latin, and, incidentally, the resourcefulness of Myfanwy Piper in raiding a Latin grammar that apparently once belonged to her spinster aunt, and then splicing the text into Miles’s song for Benjamin Britten’s opera The Turn of the Screw (1954). The original designs for that year’s premiere at La Fenice were created by her husband the artist John Piper.

A flashy development of the original is “Malo malo malo malo malo malo malo, quam dente vento occurrere,” which means approximately “I would rather meet with a bad apple, with a bad tooth, than a bad mast with [i.e. in] a bad wind.”

I haven’t located Miss Playll’s Latin grammar, nor any evidence of ancient provenance—nice try, Wikipedia, but it is certainly not from Cicero—so “Malo malo malo malo” and “Malo malo malo malo malo malo malo, etc.” may well have been the inventions of some schoolroom wag, or an undergraduate with time on his hands.

Robert Reid remembered “Malo malo malo malo” having being used as an exercise at Glasgow Grammar School (Old Glasgow and Its Environs: Historical and Topographical, Glasgow: D. Robertson, 1864, p. 284, actually an addendum reprinted from one of his articles in the Glasgow Herald), and it was certainly also known to Alfred Henderson (Latin Proverbs and Quotations, London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1869) as well as to the Hon. Hugh Rowley (Gamosagammon; or, Hints on Hymen, for the Use of Parties About to Connubialize, London: John Camden Hotten, 1870).

Incidentally, I am rather tickled by the especially turgid German rendering of “Malo malo malo malo,” namely “Ich möchte lieber in einem Apfelbaum sein als ein schlechter Mann im Unglück,” which proves that strict case structure of a language does not necessarily guarantee anything remotely like concision.

Anyhow, the news from South Gippsland is encouraging: Mungo’s broken arm is mending well and apparently does not interfere with “his saxomaphone practice.” Roy played in the Inverloch/Kongwak school soccer side last Friday week in the lightning premierships (“against glamour teams from Foster, Kurrumburra, Leongatha, and Mirboo North,” but evidently not from Poowong East or Fish Creek). He even won a thrilling penalty shootout “Grand Final.”

I already knew about Mungo’s arm. He informed me about his excellent progress in a meticulously ciphered message that came by email last week. Poozles, meanwhile, seems destined to emulate his father’s fine record of sustained accomplishment on the school playing fields of Victoria.