Alongside it was a wealth of architectural terms, my first Latin words: impluvium, atrium, triclinium, tablinum, vestibulum, fauces. And there it was, the domus, described in detail. It wasn’t until my second year of middle school that I came to own an actual book in Latin. My family and I, I discovered, lived in an insula. I also recall a passage in my elementary school textbook about the domus, the house of patricians, and the insulae, where everyone else lived. Or to put it more accurately, certain images of the ancient world have always given me a special pleasure, along with something like tachycardia-the pyramids, or the columns of Greek temples, or the Egyptian mummies. I was drawn to Latin as a child because it was ancient, and I’ve always loved antiquity. If on the one hand this multiplicity of meanings requires an understanding of history and a faith in even the most remote connotation, on the other it makes one alert to insidious nuance, to the splendor of figurative language, and therefore to ambivalence, elusiveness, mystique, and the gift of saying two or even three things at once. But the connection-a metaphorical one-is definitely there. We now forget that there is a connection between, say, a lavish banquet, an overflowing amount of water, and an excessive discourse. Take “laundry”: it derives from the Old French lavanderie, which derives from the Latin gerundive lavandum, “that which must be washed.” It makes perfect sense, no? The same root lav- (wash) is to be found in “lavatory,” or even in “lavish,” taken from the Old French lavasse, “deluge of rain”: hence the notion of abundance, which originally applied to speech. Even the most Germanic-sounding word may have sprung from Latin. The double origin of the English vocabulary is obvious in the different roots of semantically related nouns and adjectives: consider, for example, the pairs “sun/solar,” “moon/lunar,” and “tooth/dental.” The noun is Germanic, the adjective is Latin. This is true of Italian and the other Romance languages, but it also applies to English, whose vocabulary is mostly derived from Latin, either directly or through French. Beneath the garden of everyday language lay a bed of ancient roots. Thanks to Latin, every word I knew doubled in sense. At a certain point, words I’d used every day began disassembling in my mind and swirling around, like petals in the air. It taught me the importance of musical language: the soul of poetry.
Studying Latin set me in the habit early on of thinking about language in terms of discrete sounds and syllables. And whatever good I’ve done myself-that, without question, I owe to Latin. If I’ve done any good for others, I’ve done it through Latin.
My life stretched for centuries and across continents. Only then, in that American world, where who you are matters more than your parents’ surname, did I understand how fortunate I was. And later, with my brand-new classics degree in hand, when I began a doctorate in comparative literature at New York University, it was my knowledge of Latin that American professors valued most. When I went to my rich friends’ houses in Milan, where I grew up, I always made a good impression, precisely because of my reputation as a good Latin student. Growing up, I wielded it like an amulet or a magic shield, a bit like Stendhal’s Julien Sorel in The Red and the Black. And even now, at Oxford, where I teach Renaissance literature, I use this language every day, because there’s no such thing as the Renaissance without Latin. I taught Latin at the New School in New York, at one high school in Lodi and another in Milan. Latin helped me excel in my studies, find my way toward poetry and literature, fall in love with translation it gave my divergent interests a common goal in the end, it’s even earned me a living. The best you can do, perhaps, is tell the story. It’s hard to explain an instinct, a calling. When I try to make sense of it, all I can ever dig up is a memory or two, not necessarily linked to any reason. How does one come to love a language? And a language like Latin? Not without a certain vaingloriousness, I had begun at that time my methodical study of Latin.
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