Analysis: The language, the way it was taught and references to Latin literature are constants throughout James Joyce's work
As the world's Joyceans descend on Duke Street and Davy Byrne's this Bloomsday, most will likely pass by the quote 'in the particular is contained the universal’ painted on the wall of Kehoe's pub on South Anne Street. The full quotation is James Joyce's response to a compatriot’s plan to write French satire: ‘For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.’
Their discussion is also about different languages: how the universal is in the particular of each language. The question behind the whole exchange: what language should an Irish artist speak?
By his own estimation, Joyce was fluent enough in four or five languages. In a letter to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce says his father wanted him to learn ancient Greek as his third language, his mother German, his friends Irish. The result: he took Italian. As Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses, alluding to Portrait: non serviam (I will not serve).
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From RTÉ Radio 1's History Show, Phyllis Gaffney, author of Foreign Tongues: Victorian Language Learning and the Shaping of Modern Ireland, on how Ireland became a leader in modern language education in the 19th century.
Joyce's second language, which he does not name, was Latin. He learnt most of his Latin from the Jesuits at Clongowes and Belvedere and was good at it. The language itself, the way it was taught, and references to Latin literature are constants throughout his work.
As a student in Portrait, Dedalus sees a Clongowes classmate beaten with the ‘pandybat’ during a Latin class. Poor Fleming had tried to get out of continuing to decline the noun mare (sea) by claiming it has no plural.
As a teacher in Ulysses, Dedalus quizzes his charges on their Roman history. Supervising a student, Cyril Sargent, who must stay back to work on his maths, the sensitive Stephen sympathises with the boy and thinks to himself ‘Amor matris: subjective and objective genitive’. Dedalus processes his own relationship with his late mother with a point of Latin grammar. Amor matris means both ‘a mother’s love’ (subjective genitive) or ‘love for your mother’ (objective genitive). Finally, Finnegans Wake has copious earworms which rehash Latin school exercises.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's The Business, Tomás Kenny from Kenny's Bookshops on the Joyce and Bloomsday industry including straw hats, rounded specs, britches and braces
But to learn a little 'pop' Latin from Joyce, we should look to the ‘dog’ Latin Dedalus and his friend Cranly use in Portrait while at University College (the institution now known as UCD). Their Latin sermones (chats) translate the colloquial English of the time, appearing first in an argument over the signing of a petition organised by MacCann (modelled on Francis Sheehy-Skeffington).
‘—Are you annoyed? he asked.
—No, answered Stephen.
—Are you in bad humour?
—No.
—Credo ut vos sanguinarius mendax estis, said Cranly, quia facies vostra monstrat ut vos in damno malo humore estis.
…
Quis est in malo humore, said Stephen, ego aut vos?’
Cranly’s Latin translates ‘I think you’re a bloody liar because your face shows that you’re in damned bad humour’; Stephen’s, ‘Who’s in bad humour, me or you?’
This is not perfect classical Latin, but it is close enough. The words are Latin but the thoughts are of two young Dubliners in 1899. Sanguinarius for bloody and damno for damned are examples of calques. Some other everyday phrases done into Latin by Dedalus and friends include nos ad manum ballum jocabimus (let’s go play handball) and ‘I’ll kill you super spottum (on the spot)’.
Dedalus, walking along the Grand Canal and environs with another friend Lynch, lays out his aesthetic theory with (mis)quotes and translations of Aquinas’ Latin: Pulcra sunt quae visa placent (that is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases). The two return to town and see their fellow students sheltering from the rain in the arcade outside the National Library on Kildare Street. There they overhear two students talking about emigrating and we hear much the same bit of Latin as before.
‘Ego credo ut vita pauperum est simpliciter atrox, simpliciter sanguinarius atrox, in Liverpoolio.’
(I think the life of the poor is simply atrocious, simply bloody atrocious, in Liverpool.)
'When they passed through the passage beside Kildare house they found many students sheltering under the arcade of the library.' James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. pic.twitter.com/nMHqueTyQP
— National Library of Ireland (@NLIreland) October 16, 2019
Again there is some license taken but this is exactly the point. It is Latin as a code for showing off and having fun, but these interjections serve another purpose for Joyce himself. Earlier in the day, the dean of studies (an English convert to Catholicism) had upset Dedalus by commenting on his use of the word ‘tundish’ for a funnel:
‘Is that called a tundish in Ireland? asked the dean. I never heard the word in my life.’
Dedalus thinks to himself: ‘The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine…His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech.’
Some celebrate Bloomsday by wearing hats and eating fried kidneys, but we might also reflect on Latin's place in our literary and linguistic heritage.
Despite his discomfort with English, when confronted by a nationalist friend Davin about his reluctance to learn Irish, Dedalus retorts: ‘My ancestors threw off their language and took another. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for?’
To read Joyce is to be confronted with questions of language and identity, of what it means to belong to a nation. Latin was for Joyce a language between English (‘an acquired speech’) and Irish (‘what for?’). He has become paradoxically a symbol of Irish culture and identity. Some celebrate him by wearing hats and eating fried kidneys, but we might also take the chance this Bloomsday to reflect on Latin’s place in our literary and linguistic heritage.
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Dr Alastair Daly is a Research Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Classics at Trinity College Dublin.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
