Paul Valéry (1871-1945), "Variations on the
Eclogues,"
Collected Works, Vol. VII:
The Art of Poetry, tr. Denise Folliot (1958; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 295-312 (at 296-297):
My
small amount of schoolboy's Latin had faded, after fifty-five
years, to the memory of a memory; and as so many men,
among them the most scholarly and erudite (not to mention
others), had toiled in the course of three or four centuries at
the translation of these poems, I could only hope to do much
worse what they had accomplished so well. In addition, I
must confess that bucolic themes do not excite my interest
uncontrollably. Pastoral life is quite foreign to me and strikes
me as tedious. Agricultural industry requires precisely the
virtues I lack. I am depressed by the sight of furrows—including those made by my pen. The recurrence of the seasons and
of their effects illustrates the stupidity of nature and of life,
which can persist only by repeating itself. I think, too, of the
monotonous efforts required to trace lines in the heavy soil,
and I am not surprised that the obligation inflicted on man
of "earning his bread by the sweat of his brow" should be
considered a harsh and degrading punishment. This rule has
always seemed to me ignominious.
Id. (at 298):
So I again opened my school Virgil, where, as is usual, there
was no lack of notes revealing the erudition of some professor
but revealing it to him alone, for on the whole they are wonderfully calculated to entangle the innocent pupil in philology
and doubts—if, that is, he should consult them, which he is
careful not to do.
O classroom Virgil, who would have thought that I
should have occasion to flounder about in you once more?
Id.:
How many
poetic works, reduced to prose, that is, to their simple meaning, become literally nonexistent! They are anatomical specimens, dead birds! Sometimes, indeed, untrammeled absurdity swarms over these deplorable corpses, their number multiplied by the teaching profession, which claims them as food
for what is known as the "Curriculum." Verse is put into
prose as though into its coffin.
Id. (at 301):
Although I am the least self-assured of Latinists, the slender
and mediocre knowledge of the language of Rome that I still
retain is very precious to me. One can quite easily write in
ignorance of that language, but I do not believe that, if one is
ignorant of it, one can feel that one is constructing what one
writes as well as if one had a certain awareness of the underlying Latin. One may quite well draw the human body without having the least knowledge of anatomy, but he who has
this knowledge is bound to profit somewhat by it, if only by
abusing it in order more boldly and successfully to distort
the figures in his composition. Latin is not merely the father
of French; it is also its tutor in matters of the grand style. All
the foolishness and extraordinary reasoning that have been
put forward in defense of what are vaguely and untruthfully
called the Humanities do but obscure the evidence of the true
value for us of a language to which we owe what is most
solid and dignified in the monuments of our own tongue.