John Henderson
THE MEDIEVAL WORLD OF ISIDORE OF SEVILLE
Truth from words
244pp. Cambridge University Press. £55(US $99).
978 0 521 86740 5
Stephen A. Barney et al
THE ETYMOLOGIES OF ISIDORE OF SEVILLE
475pp. Cambridge University Press. £85. (US $150).
978 0 521 83749 1
As you come into Philadelphia airport, you are confronted by an enormous sign that gives an etymological definition: Phil-a-del-phia, “City of brotherly love”. The poster reminds you that this name comes from two ancient Greek words, philia, “love”, and adelphos/adelphe, “sibling”. But, in context, the information offered here is hardly value-neutral. One recent ranking gave Philly the sixth highest rate of homicide in America, and fifth highest for robbery. The etymology (from the Greek: etymos, “true”, and logos, “word”) suggests that the real essence of Philadelphia is betrayed by such statistics. The etymology assures tourists that all is well here, while native inhabitants are reminded of their underlying friendliness – which they may be in danger of forgetting.
Etymology, as Isidore of Seville tells us, is “the origin of words, when the force of a verb or noun is inferred through interpretation” (this is from the excellent new translation by Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach and Oliver Berghof). Isidore adds that “one’s insight into anything is clearer when its etymology is known”. This notion of the pedagogical value of etymologies guides Isidore’s magnum opus, the Etymologies, which offers an encyclopedic account of just about everything, from grammar to God, and from Nero to newts – all expounded through the underlying truth of the Latin language.
As the new translators remark, the Etymologies was “arguably the most influential book, after the Bible, in the learned world of the Latin West for nearly a thousand years”. Isidore, a prolific and learned writer, lived from about AD 560 to 632 (the exact dates are uncertain), in a Spain which was under the rule of the Visigoths (Leovigild, Reccared, Leiuva, Witteric, Gundemar, Sisebut, Suinthila). It was a time of great upheaval: in the sixth century, four successive kings were murdered; the government was often forced to fight off attempts by Byzantine forces to claim control of the country. Now that Spain’s political links with Rome had been more or less decisively severed, Isidore’s Etymologies provided a summation of the complete intellectual heritage of Roman antiquity. As Isidore’s friend, Braulio, wrote, in Isidore “antiquity reclaimed something for itself”. The broken Roman Empire was reconstructed in Isidore’s book.
Isidore, who served as Archbishop of Seville from 600 until the time of his death, was canonized by the Catholic Church in 1598. He presided over the Council of Toledo in 633, which tried to eradicate Jews and heretics from Spain, not for the first or last time. Isidore’s whole family, especially his brother Leander, had played an important role in the conversion of the Visigothic kings to Roman Catholicism, away from Arianism (a form of Christianity which denied that the Son is co-eternal with the Father). But Isidore also spread the reach of the Roman Catholic Church back into classical antiquity. In his Etymologies, three central books (Six, Seven and Eight) deal with Ecclesiastical Offices, God, angels and saints, and the Church. Isidore manages to tell the story of the Latin language in such a way that it becomes the property of Roman Catholicism. He thus made this ancient language the cornerstone for contemporary European culture.
Isidore became the patron saint of the internet in 1999. The analogy between the Etymologies and our own information superhighway is in many ways a tempting one. Like the internet, the book contains information from a bewildering number of different sources, ranging from ancient Roman proto-encyclopedias (especially Varro’s De Lingua Latina, Pliny’s Natural History and Servius’ commentaries on Virgil), through Byzantine school manuals on logic, music, grammar and architecture, to the works of Boethius, Jerome, Augustine and Eusebius. One of the few disappointments in the new English translation of the Etymologies is that the authors offer very little detailed information about Isidore’s sources. To do so would, of course, be the work of several lifetimes: more information on this subject will be forthcoming in the ongoing French edition of the Etymologies, of which so far five volumes out of twenty have appeared.
It may often seem as if Isidore, like a bad search engine, offers little or no control over all this material. Certainly, much of the “information” he provides is (from a modern perspective) blatantly false, albeit entertaining. For instance, we are assured that “Beavers (castor) are so-called from castrating (castrare). Their testicles are useful for medicines, on account of which, when they anticipate a hunter, they castrate themselves and amputate their own genitals with their teeth”. Isidore lifts this detail of natural history straight from Pliny (backed up, in this case, by a number of other ancient authorities, including Aristotle and Juvenal). As with the internet, written testimony takes on a life of its own – even in cases where you might think it would be better to go out and look at some beavers. That thought seems not to have occurred to anybody for several hundred years: the story of the self-castrating beavers was still current in the seventeenth century, and was mocked by Thomas Browne in his wonderful analysis of ancient errors, the Pseudodoxia Epidemica of 1646.
Isidore’s heavy reliance on Latin written sources makes it difficult to assess how useful the Etymologies might be as a source for the culture of seventh-century Spain. For instance, as the editors to the new English translation note, Isidore discusses paper and papyrus, but tells us nothing about the production of books in his own scriptorium. “Instead, he reproduces Pliny on the types of papyrus sheets and the ancient types of papyrus.” Isidore gives his written sources more authority than his own physical experiences. There are some wonderful comic moments, when the pure play of language results in extreme banality. It is somehow deeply comforting to be told that “A sheep (ovis) is a mild livestock animal, with wool, a defenceless body, and a peaceful temperament”.
Most of Isidore’s supposed etymologies are – by the standards of modern academic philology – complete twaddle. About a quarter of them are made up out of his own head. The Etymologies often reads like a series of bad puns: “Horses (equus) are so called because when they were yoked in a team of four they were balanced (aequare)”; “Humus (humus) was the material from which the human (homo) was made”. His real subject is the Latin language in which he writes. This makes the Etymologies extraordinarily difficult to translate in a satisfactory way. As Isidore himself suggests, translators have to be like priests or prophets: “Translator (interpres) because he is the medium ‘between the sides’ (inter-pres) of two languages when he translates. But the person who interprets (interpretari) God is also called an interpreter for the humans to whom he reveals divine mysteries”.
The new Cambridge University Press translation plays it safe by not even attempting to replicate Isidore’s wordplay; instead, the authors offer us fairly neutral English versions, and then give the Latin in brackets. Mostly this is fine, if unexciting, though there are inevitably moments when the committee nods. For instance, we are told that “health (salus) is thought to take its name from salt (sal), for nothing is better for us than salt (sal) and sun – in fact, we see that the bodies of sailors are well-hardened”. It is pleasing to be reminded that people once thought that lying out in the UV rays and eating olives was a kind of health cure. But the translators miss a trick here, since the Latin word for sun – sol – also sounds similar to salt (sal) and health (salus). Isidore’s language puts all three together. No translator, however skilled, is going to be able to replicate every such verbal doodle. I wish the budget could have stretched to produce a fully bilingual edition, with the Latin text facing the English, to allow the reader to notice how Isidore’s puns and wordplay may go beyond the strict boundaries of the etymological definition.
One difficulty with the Cambridge method is that it may obscure how truly silly some of Isidore’s etymologies are. John Henderson, in The Medieval World of Isidore of Seville, his characteristically insightful and characteristically crazy new book about the Etymologies, translates a few passages in his own, much jazzier way. “Homo – Humus” becomes “man-manure”. “Dies dicti a deis” is, in the CUP version, rendered in a characteristically po-faced manner: “Days (dies) are so called from ‘the gods’ (deus, ablative plural diis)”. Henderson translates the same phrase with an echo of Isidore’s cringe-inducing pun: “days are called after dayities”.
Henderson’s method would be difficult to sustain for a translation of the whole twenty books of Etymologies. But the little samples he offers are a helpful reminder of Isidore’s playfulness – even his jouissance. Like Henderson himself (who may be the only academic left alive who is still unapologetically mucking around with phrases under erasure, and partially bracketed “wor(l)ds”), Isidore finds both truth and joy in his language games. Henderson gives us a stimulating invitation to try to read Isidore “through”. His own work mirrors some of the difficulties we may find in reading the Etymologies. Both these books are fundamentally unreadable.
It is hard to imagine a reader who will be able to read the new translation of the Etymologies from cover to cover, and resist the temptation to skip around, look up funny words, or open at random (in the manner of the sortes Virgilianae). Reading book by book seems to take away most of the fun. The Etymologies is not only (as Henderson notes) a “work of reference”, but also a perfect lavatory book. Henderson begins his own work with a citation from Roget’s Thesaurus: “I believe that almost everyone who uses the book finds it more convenient to have recourse to the Index first”. It is a pity that Cambridge University Press did not check the index and other references in Henderson’s own book more thoroughly. I noticed a significant number of small errors, without even looking for them: for instance, he cites 3.20. 1–2 instead of 3.19. 1–2; the index gives the discussion of Hispania at 14.2.28 rather than 14.4.28. This kind of sloppiness does a major disservice to the reader who finds herself unable actually to read Henderson, but who wants to dip and glance back to Isidore every so often.
Henderson compares the Etymologies to Roget’s Thesaurus, and argues that we underestimate both if we merely use (or “abuse”) them as reference works and ignore their pedagogical intentions and strategies. He shows that the Etymologies has a taut and quasi-epic structure, building up from the letters of the alphabet in the first book, to an analysis of contemporary culture. Henderson is particularly interesting on the difficult central book, Book Ten, which is itself a miniature encyclopedia: an all but exhaustive alphabetical list of Latin adjectives for human beings, reminiscent of Macbeth’s “catalogue” in which “ye go for men”. Isidore’s lists, though fascinating in small doses, are even more unreadable than most of the Etymologies. Henderson sees the book as the equivalent of an epic journey into the underworld, but in this case the journey is into the bewildering multifariousness of human experience: “a kind of thesaurus of human mores”, carefully placed “at the point when the Aeneas of this Lexical Odyssey has been led along the road halfway to Roman nirvana. Time-out”.
We should resist the temptation to read Isidore simply as a hodgepodge of myths, anecdotes and information from the Dark Ages. The internet analogy may be misleading: perhaps Roget is indeed a better analogy than Google. This is a reference work guided by a single man’s intelligent design, and with a specific pedagogical and moral purpose. Isidore is highly conscious that the Latin language itself has a history. He knows that Latin draws on other languages: “the tiger (tigris) is so called because of its rapid flight, for this is what the Persians and Medes call an arrow”. Etymology can be a way of showing our debt to tradition: ancient cultures are preserved in the words we write.
Henderson has acute observations on Isidore’s “self-fashioning”, and his positioning of Spain at the centre of the new emergent Europe. The Etymologies offers derivations of various nations, in accordance with national stereotypes: Britannus comes from brutus (“dumb brute”), and similarly, Francus (French) comes a feritate (“from their wildness”). Readers of Astérix will be unsurprised to note that the Germans (Germanicae gentes) are named for their immania corpora (“huge bodies”), while Celts or Gauls (Galli) are named for their pasty faces, from the Greek word for milk (gala). Spain turns out to be proven by etymology to be the true heir of Graeco-Roman antiquity: Hispania is the real Hesperia, the land of the Evening Star which lies west of Greece, where it was once foretold that the new Troy would arise.
As Isidore well knew, etymology is not a value-neutral science. The search for a “truth in words” is cultural, moral and philosophical, as well as philological. If we think back to the Philadelphia airport sign, we might remember that, in the ancient world, the most famous Philadelphia was named by Ptolemy II of Egypt (“Ptolemy Philadelphus”) in honour of his sister, Arsinoe, to whom he was married. “Philadelphia” could just as well be glossed as “the city of sister-fucking”. The writers of etymologies – from Isidore in the seventh century to politicians in modern times – choose how we should define our world.
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Emily Wilson's new book, The Death of Socrates: Hero, villain, chatterbox, saint, has just been published. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
