Warm-Up With Ree-Ree

I’ll always remem­ber my first Latin prose com­po­si­tion teacher. He was Mon­signor Anton Ries­linger, a smil­ing and rotund-faced priest who, despite his decades in Amer­ica, still had a slight trace of an Aus­trian accent.

Ries­linger was born in the province of Styria, in what were then the Haps­burg domin­ions, to a devoutly Catholic fam­ily. Dur­ing the First World War he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army, and spent two years in the trenches until he was wounded and invalided out in 1916. He was ordained a priest in 1924, and served as a Latin mas­ter in sev­eral schools before mov­ing to the United States in 1938. He refused to stay in Aus­tria after the Anschluss; he hated the Nazis for hav­ing mur­dered his hero Engel­bert Doll­fuss some years ear­lier. When we boys encoun­tered him as a teacher, he was already an old man.

Among our­selves we affec­tion­ately referred to him as “Ree-Ree Reese,” a par­ody on the name of the Brook­lyn Dodgers short­stop Pee Wee Reese. Some priests were tough types whom we dis­liked, but Ree-Ree wasn’t one of them. We enjoyed his class, despite its dif­fi­culty. In the school’s cur­ricu­lum his course was listed as Scrip­tio Prorsa in Lin­gua Latina, but every­one just called it Latin Prose Comp.

Ries­linger taught those stu­dents who had already mas­tered the fun­da­men­tals of Latin gram­mar how to com­pose in Latin, by direct­ing our atten­tion to idiom, good usage, and rhythm. In the Monsignor’s class it wasn’t enough to sub­sti­tute Latin words for Eng­lish ones. You had to obey the lit­er­ary con­ven­tions of writ­ten Latin, using Cicero’s ora­tions as a guide. The whole process involved much read­ing, a lot of rote mem­o­riza­tion, and an ear for what the Mon­signor called latini­tas—that is, proper Latin style. The only times the ordi­nar­ily good-natured Ries­linger showed annoy­ance were when we gave him club­footed trans­la­tions that were defi­cient in latini­tas.

It was all very hands-on and inter­ac­tive. There were sev­eral Latin gram­mars and dic­tio­nar­ies at hand, includ­ing the mas­sive Lewis & Short, a sta­ple of Latin ped­a­gogy back then. Ries­linger insisted that we use only pen­cils in his class, since he expected us to erase fre­quently. Only our sub­mit­ted home­work was in ink. He pro­vided us with pur­ple rex­o­graphed hand­outs (remem­ber them?) that explained the more abstruse points of syn­tax and gram­mat­i­cal form. Com­put­ers and audio­vi­sual resources? For­get it. Ries­linger was the audio; the black­board was the video. These were the days before peo­ple had swal­lowed the myth that tech­no­log­i­cal razzle-dazzle is req­ui­site for teaching.

There was always a warm-up drill for us as soon as we sat down, and it had to be com­pleted within five min­utes. For these drills the Mon­signor delighted in choos­ing sen­tences from pop­u­lar cul­ture or cur­rent slang, ones which could be ren­dered into Latin only by means of the most bizarre cir­cum­lo­cu­tion. I recall one day enter­ing the class­room and see­ing that we were expected to trans­late the fol­low­ing into Ciceron­ian Latin:

When the Gid­get goes Hawai­ian, she goes Hawai­ian all the way.

This fatu­ous sen­tence was taken from a San­dra Dee film of the time. We were allowed to help each other in Latin prose com­po­si­tion, and I’ll never for­get our fran­tic inten­sity as we argued about how to pro­duce a Latin noun equiv­a­lent for “Gid­get,” and an adver­bial periphra­sis for “Hawai­ian.” We finally came up with

Cum pumilio fem­inea agit in modo insu­larum quae anglice Sand­wich vocan­tur, ipsi modo total­iter instat.

It’s atro­cious Latin, espe­cially that bar­barous coinage total­iter for “all the way,” but at least we were able to end with a dactylic hexa­m­e­ter clausula, and thereby claim that it was a Ciceron­ian sen­tence. Ries­linger loved clausu­lae. As for “Gid­get,” since the term is a com­bi­na­tion of girl and midget we decided that pumilio fem­inea (“fem­i­nine dwarf”) would have to do.

One of the advan­tages of exer­cises of this sort, apart from improv­ing the student’s Latin, was that they inured you to the habit of look­ing for le mot juste at all times. You had to put your thoughts into a cer­tain chan­nel and nav­i­gate it, just as canoers nav­i­gate white water. I sup­pose it is no dif­fer­ent from what a cryp­tog­ra­pher does when break­ing an enemy code, or what a com­puter expert does when design­ing new soft­ware. But doing it in Latin day after day had the salu­tary side effect of mak­ing you extremely con­scious of the pos­si­bil­i­ties of Eng­lish. And like every repeated exer­cise, it tough­ened the fac­ulty that per­formed it. Once we had learned that we could trans­late any­thing into Latin, we real­ized as a corol­lary that we could say any­thing we pleased in English.

Most poets today don’t enjoy that con­fi­dence, and it has noth­ing to do with their fail­ure to take Latin prose comp. They’ve been brain­washed to think only a cer­tain lim­ited range or reg­is­ter of Eng­lish is “appro­pri­ate” or “accept­able,” and all other ranges and reg­is­ters are off-limits. As a result, they are con­stantly second-guessing them­selves, and look­ing for the advice and appro­ba­tion of oth­ers in work­shops or sup­port groups. That’s why there is so much ane­mic and life­less and unin­spired poetry being writ­ten. It’s exactly what the gun­nery offi­cer tells recruits on the fir­ing range: If you lack con­fi­dence you’ll be uncer­tain; if you’re uncer­tain you’ll waver; and if you waver you’ll miss the target.

You had to be both con­fi­dent (and even a lit­tle reck­less) to trans­late the fol­low­ing sen­tence into Latin in the space of five minutes:

It was a one-eyed, one-horned, fly­ing pur­ple peo­ple eater.

This was from some absurd rock ’n’ roll song. I often won­dered if Ree-Ree had a secret life devoted to the worst ele­ments of Amer­i­can pop­u­lar cul­ture. In any case, here’s what we man­aged to gen­er­ate as an equivalent:

Erat vesca­tor hominum volatilis, cocles et uni­cor­nis, tinc­tus col­ore purpureo.

The end­ing is pretty lame, but it was the best we could do in the short time given us. Ries­linger was lenient with us when it came to these warm-up drills; they were just a humor­ous way to jump­start the class. His only cavil about the above trans­la­tion was that we prob­a­bly should have used hominibus rather than hominum, since the verb vescor reg­u­larly takes the abla­tive, and its deriv­a­tives should fol­low suit.

Another advan­tage to Ree-Ree’s instruc­tion was the way in which one’s Eng­lish vocab­u­lary expanded. Indeed, you couldn’t have pre­vented it if you tried. Por­ing over those dic­tio­nar­ies day after day, com­par­ing the def­i­n­i­tion in one with the def­i­n­i­tion in the other, weigh­ing words care­fully to see how well they fit a context—all this gave you a vise-like grasp of Eng­lish. Famil­iar­ity with Latin roots and stems led to the very quick under­stand­ing of a whole range of oth­er­wise new vocab­u­lary items.

We even found our­selves coin­ing Eng­lish words based on what we knew of Latin words and their pat­terns. Since we were ado­les­cents, a lot of this coin­ing was sex­ual or obscene in nature. I recall how we used the Latin term clunes (the but­tocks) to cre­ate a Neo-Latin adjec­tive clu­nalis, which we decided meant “per­tain­ing to the but­tocks.” From there it was an easy step to invent the Eng­lish deriv­a­tive clu­nal, which we then started using as a pejo­ra­tive for any­thing we didn’t like, or thought infe­rior. “Man, that’s so clu­nal,” we’d say if some­thing both­ered us. My over­sexed pal Vin­nie invented the term durifi­ca­trix, which if it actu­ally existed in Latin would mean “woman who makes hard.” He’d employ it when dis­cussing cer­tain girls we knew. Vin­nie would say “You know, guys, that lit­tle cutie in the Registrar’s office is one real durifi­ca­trix.”

The defend­ers of Deweyite education—if there are any left these days—will object that forc­ing stu­dents to learn a dead lan­guage and com­pose prose in it is the height of use­less­ness. They’ll also spout the well-worn cliché that a cur­ricu­lum of this sort vio­lates a student’s nat­ural spon­tane­ity and ebul­lience, pre­vent­ing him from express­ing his true self and his demo­c­ra­tic free­dom. Yes, there are some idiot lib­er­als who still talk like that.

What the Deweyites never real­ized is that there isn’t any mean­ing­ful free­dom with­out the con­comi­tant mas­tery of skills. If you give some­one a pis­tol and say “Here—take this… you’re free to do what you want with it,” the most likely result is that he’ll shoot him­self in the foot. But if you give him the pis­tol and train him in every sin­gle detail of proper gun­smithing and marks­man­ship, you’ll have an extremely capa­ble and dan­ger­ous man.

This is what hap­pens if you put your nose to the grind­stone of mas­ter­ing any lin­guis­ti­cally closed sys­tem, whether Latin or Clas­si­cal Ara­bic or Ethiopian Ge’ez. You wres­tle with its pecu­liar­i­ties and require­ments and rigidi­ties. You force your­self to deal with it in all its com­plex­ity. And pretty soon this expense of energy has an effect on your com­mand of Eng­lish. To con­tinue the gun metaphor, you earn your sniper’s badge.

No lan­guage has the exact same tools and strengths and advan­tages as every other lan­guage. A trans­la­tor has to be ver­sa­tile and flex­i­ble when work­ing, and that in itself has the won­der­ful side-effect of forc­ing you to take cre­ative steps that you might oth­er­wise never have con­sid­ered pos­si­ble. One morn­ing we came to class and Ries­linger had the fol­low­ing on the board, a cou­plet from an early rock song by Fabian:

You got my heart a-jumpin’ like a kan­ga­roo—
I’m cookin’ like an onion in a bowl of stew.

We boys were dumb­founded. “Ree-Ree’s insane!” some­one whis­pered. “How the hell are we going to trans­late kan­ga­roo?” But we got to work quickly, and at the end of five min­utes we came up with:

Effi­cis ut cor meum saltet sicut ferus mar­sup­pi­alis—
Coquor quasi caepa in crat­era iuris spissi plena.

We fig­ured a kan­ga­roo is a mar­su­pial, so we just took the Latin mar­sup­pium (pouch) and made it into an adjec­tive to go with ferus, the noun for “wild beast.” Ries­linger liked our ver­sion, though he said that he would have used bes­tia instead of the con­no­ta­tively sav­age ferus. “A kan­ga­roo isn’t sav­age like a bear,” he explained, “though they can be trained to box.”

Some peo­ple, when I describe my prose comp expe­ri­ence, raise the fol­low­ing objec­tion: If you were forced, as you say, to write Latin in a strictly pre­scribed style, how could it pos­si­bly have led to greater free­dom in Eng­lish? Now I hap­pen to think that this a purely sophis­ti­cal objec­tion, raised dis­hon­estly as a ruse by Deweyites as a way to pro­tect their turf. But let’s pre­tend that the objec­tion is put for­ward in good faith, and let’s demol­ish it.

Free­dom can be under­stood in two ways. If by free­dom you mean the license to dis­re­gard all rules and write in a purely hap­haz­ard, self-chosen man­ner… well, then there is no such free­dom in a closed lin­guis­tic sys­tem. You can’t arbi­trar­ily change the inflec­tions, tense forms, or orthog­ra­phy of a lan­guage. Writ­ing in stan­dard Eng­lish means fol­low­ing the con­ven­tions. If you don’t do it, you are only semi-literate.

But if by free­dom you mean the abil­ity to say what­ever the hell you wish to say, in terms of con­tent, then skill in lin­guis­tic con­ven­tions only enhances and expands that free­dom. Peo­ple are inar­tic­u­late when they know what they want to say, but can’t say it effec­tively. Give them the tools of lit­er­ary expres­sion, and they are set free from their pre­vi­ous silence. All of a sud­den they can kick ass.

It’s my opin­ion that a real but undis­cussed prob­lem in the teach­ing of Eng­lish com­po­si­tion today is the polit­i­cal prej­u­dice of those left-liberal fac­ulty who teach the sub­ject, and their con­flicted atti­tudes on this very point. Although they won’t pub­licly admit to it, left-liberals are jackrabbit-terrified at the prospect of a truly artic­u­late work­ing class. Such a class might demand some really rad­i­cal polit­i­cal changes, not all of which would be palat­able to our self-appointed elite of NPR lis­ten­ers. In the United States, the left has a vested inter­est in keep­ing the work­ing class inar­tic­u­late. That’s why they have turned com­po­si­tion stud­ies into a morass of jar­gon and fak­ery. The late Richard Mitchell (him­self a polit­i­cal lib­eral) under­stood this atti­tude quite clearly, and con­demned it in his won­der­ful book Less Than Words Can Say.

But enough of my right­ist road-rage. Let’s get back to Ree-Ree and Latin Prose Comp.

There was one time that the class came close to rebel­lion over a warm-up drill. You see, if we couldn’t gen­er­ate an accept­able trans­la­tion for the warm-up, Ries­linger would give us twenty rather than ten lines of Vergil to con­strue for home­work. So it was in our inter­est to do that five-minute exer­cise as well as pos­si­ble. One morn­ing we came in and on the black­board, in Ree-Ree’s pre­cise Cen­tral Euro­pean script, were the fol­low­ing lyrics from a Dean Mar­tin song:

Do they take ’em for espresso?
Yeah, I guess so—
On each lover’s arm a girl I wish I knew.

We looked at each other in con­ster­na­tion. “How can he expect us to han­dle THAT?” some­one whined in despair. “The Romans didn’t even know what a cof­fee bean was, let alone espresso!” Some­one else said “And what about that third line? There isn’t a main verb in the Eng­lish! It’s not a sen­tence!” We all remon­strated with Ree-Ree, argu­ing that the assign­ment was inher­ently impossible.

He looked at us over the tops of his old-fashioned wire-rimmed spec­ta­cles, with his cheru­bic smile. “Don’t worry, kinder, you can do it! This time ten min­utes I give you.” Although he spoke excel­lent Eng­lish, Ries­linger some­times slipped back into Ger­man sen­tence struc­ture, with a post­poned verb.

Well, after a lot of argu­ment and page-flipping, we pre­sented Ree-Ree with the following:

Ducuntne eas ad lat­icem calidum fac­tum e faba ara­bica odor­ata biben­dum? Porro, hic latex pre­mi­tur inusi­tate ac mir­i­fice per machi­nam.
Ita est, ut mea fert opinio.
In brac­chio cuiusque ama­toris puella est, quam cognoscere cupio.

This awk­ward tan­gle was the prod­uct of pure des­per­a­tion, a jerry-built struc­ture that still cracks me up today when I remem­ber it. The humor is appar­ent when you take the Latin and put it back into English:

Do they lead females to the drink­ing of a hot liq­uid made from an aro­matic Ara­bian bean? Fur­ther­more, this liq­uid is pressed in an unusual and won­drous man­ner through a machine.
So it is, in my opin­ion.
On the arm of each lover there is a girl, whom I desire to get to know.

That was the best we could do for Dean Mar­tin. Despite its clum­si­ness, Ree-Ree gave us a pass on those extra ten lines from Vergil.

Even before the warm-up, we started the class with the Latin prayer Ave Maria, and on cer­tain patri­otic occa­sions Ries­linger made us recite the Pledge of Alle­giance in Latin. I don’t know if he trans­lated it him­self, or if he had got­ten it else­where. I still have the red book­mark with the Latin text of the Pledge pasted on it, which I used back then as an aid in mem­o­riza­tion. It begins:

Fidem meam obligo vex­illo civ­i­tatium Amer­i­cae foederatarum

Ree-Ree took his teach­ing very seri­ously. Good Ciceron­ian Latin was meat and drink to him. Every home­work assign­ment was returned to us, scrupu­lously cor­rected and com­mented on with a red-ink foun­tain pen. This was how teach­ers had marked his work back in pre-war Austria-Hungary, and he saw no rea­son to do dif­fer­ently. The foun­tain pen was an ancient and well-worn thing from the turn of the cen­tury, and Ries­linger used it for every­thing. I have no idea where he got the red ink for it.

Ries­linger also taught us Latin verse scan­sion. We learned to scan dactylic hexa­m­e­ter and the ele­giac cou­plet, the two most com­monly encoun­tered Latin meters. Ree-Ree’s view was that such scan­sion was the best way to mem­o­rize the nat­ural long and short quan­ti­ties of syl­la­bles. And, of course, trans­lat­ing poetry gave one a greater sense of Latin’s amaz­ing flex­i­bil­ity and sup­ple­ness. Vergil and Ovid were the sta­ples for this work, though some­times Ree-Ree gave out rex­o­graphed sheets with verse from other poets.

Apart from his inter­ac­tion with us, he must have been a very lonely man. All his fam­ily in Aus­tria were dead, and he had only one dis­tant rela­tion in Mil­wau­kee. Ree-Ree occu­pied a small room in a rec­tory near our cam­pus, and other than trav­el­ling from there to work, he seemed to go nowhere. He was a man who had immo­lated all thought of self, and given his life over to main­tain­ing and nur­tur­ing a tra­di­tion. His sole reward, as Allan Bloom once said of older school­teach­ers, was the per­pet­u­a­tion of his tastes.

One day I hap­pened to meet him in the quad­ran­gle, and we sat on a bench and chat­ted for a while. That’s when I learned about his past in Aus­tria. He was an extremely affa­ble man, and never took a de haut en bas atti­tude towards his charges. In the course of our con­ver­sa­tion I asked him if he found it trou­ble­some to teach stu­dents like us. “Ah,” he replied, “but I do not teach stu­dents. I teach a sub­ject. The stu­dents come and go, like sum­mer flow­ers. The sub­ject Latin remains forever.”

Many years later, I ven­tured to make a sim­i­lar remark at a depart­men­tal meet­ing in some deservedly for­got­ten com­mu­nity col­lege. My dimwit­ted Deweyite col­leagues were duly out­raged. They exco­ri­ated me for my “cal­lous­ness” and “insen­si­tiv­ity to the needs of stu­dents.” I just smiled, and remem­bered Ree-Ree.