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Notes C:.0000MANTUANAintro-briefer.nbC:.0000MANTUANAintro-briefer.nbC:.0000MANTUANArati-intro.nbC:.0000MANTUANArati-intro.nb Introduction Among the many heirs and emulators of Virgil’s eclogues, down from Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the one who challenged Mantua’s most famous son on his home ground was one Baptista (17 April, 1447-22 March, 1516)—identified as ‘from Mantua’, where citizenship was granted (1460) by the Gonzaga court to his family, Citizenship granted by Ludovico III Gonzaga (1412-1478), who after mid-century liked to entrust administration to “new men”: Girondo, Giulio. 2012. “Patrician Residences and the Palaces of the Marquis of Mantua (1459–1524): The Gonzaga, the Town Nobility, and the Renovatio Urbis.” In A Renaissance Architecture of Power. Princely Palaces in the Italian Quattrocento, 164. On line: Brill. In 1459/60 Ludovico had acquired as court painter from Padua— Andrea Mantegna. who had settled there after misadventure instead of returning to their native Spain (hence the other moniker, Spagnoli). Their progeny entered the court’s famed school, called from the building’s former function Ca Zoiosa (Giocosa), https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vittorino_da_Feltre. which had been created to educate the sons and daughters of the Gonzagas. Access 2016.01.24: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vittorino_da_Feltre (1378-1446); Giannetto, Nella. 1979. Vittorino Da Feltre e la Su Scuola: Unmanesimo, Pedagogia, Arti, 66–74. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki. Its reputation drew pupils from elsewhere, Cortesi, Mariarosa. 2017. “Greek at the School of Vittorino Da Feltre ..” In Teachers, Students, and Schools of Greek in the Renaissance. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 57–60. Leiden Boston: Brill. as well as selected locals. Access 2016.01.24: http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ludovico-iii-gonzaga-marchese-di-mantova_(Dizionario_Biografico)/ Among the latter Baptista of the Spanish would look back with pride at his teachers (also renowned scholars)—Gregorio Tifernate (1414-1462+), Had studied with Vittorino da Feltre, active as a teacher and translator of Greek, taught Greek at the Sorbonne, taught in Mantua from April, 1460, to December, 1461: Mantuanus. 1989. Adulescentia The Eclogues of Mantuan. Edited by Lee Piepho, xvi, n7. New York: Garland. and Giorgio Merula (1430/1-1494). Mantuanus. 1911. The Eclogues of Baptista Mantuanus. Edited by Wilfred P. Mustard, 11–12, n3. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. Mustard notes that Tifernate “seems to have been in Mantua from April, 1460, to December, 1461; Merula from 1460 to 1463.” He quotes Mantuan’s later reference to the death of Merula—“primum condiscipuli postea praeceptoris mei.” Piepho allows Merula at Mantua as late as 1465: Mantuanus, Piepho 1989, xvi,n7. New York: Garland. Tifernate’s nineteen months in Mantua (April, 1460-December, 1461) began just as the future poet turned thirteen, by then surely well-grounded in the school’s distinctive mix of moral, physical, and linguistic discipline. When Tifernate left for Venice, the grateful pupil, adolescent, perhaps then restless, would not have reached fifteen. He himself soon left to pursue philosophy at the university in Padua, With Paolo Bagelardi: Mantuanus. 2010. Battista Spagnoli Mantovano Adolescentia. Studio, Edizione e Traduzione. Severi, Andreas <ed>. Tr Andrea Severi, 67. Bologna: Bononia University Press. Www.buponline.com. where he showed that his schooling had encompassed poetry, since he composed, among other verses, an elegy commemorating Tifernate’s death. Mantuanus, Severi, 67, n10. However, lack of means and a quarrel with his father led him early in 1463 to retreat to a Carmelite monastery at Ferrara. His next steps testify to precocity and its recognition by others: already in 1464 the Carmelites assigned him to teach rhetoric, and the next year to study logic; then in May 1466 (aged 19) to deliver the official oration for their general assembly. Mantuanus, Piepho 1989, xvi-xvii. Repeatedly he would be called to govern Carmelite congregations in Mantua and Bologna, also to represent the order’s interests at the papal court in Rome. Mantuanus, Piepho 1989, xvii-xx. At Ca Zoiosa, its creator, Vittorino had taught from manuscripts, including one on Greek music theory, as well as Latin authors such as Quintilian, Cicero, Juvenal, Persius, Terence, Ovid, Lucan, Sallust, and Valerius Maximus. Meriani, Angelo. 2016. “Teoria e Storia Della Musica Greca Antica Alla Scuola Di Vittorino Da Feltre.” Rivista Di Cultura Classica e Medioevale 58: 311–35; Cortesi, op. cit. Crab, Marijke. 2015. “Life and Works of Omnibonus Leonicenus.” In Exemplary Reading: Printed Renaissance Commentaries on Valerius Maximus (1470–1600). Scientia Universalis. Studien Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Vormoderne, 48–49. Zurich: LIT Verlag. Vittorino won praise for living with his pupils, not merely instructing but raising them—a kind of boarding school tradition continued by his pupil and successor, Ognibene da Lonigo (ca 1410-1474/75, teaching at Ca Zoiosa,1449-1453), so that Vittorino’s influence and model will have colored young Baptista’s initial schooling. The school’s tradition continued with Tifernate who had won respect for his mastery of Greek. Mantuanus, Severi, 84–85. Tifernate’s pedagogy would be cited by Merula (also pupil and successor) “for requiring students not simply to repeat what they had been taught but to present their own arguments buttressed with evidence and clear reasoning.” Quoted by Lee Piepho, Mantuanus, Piepho 1989, xvi, n7.   Such a spur to originality might well prompt a precocious youngster, spurred too by his family’s new civic status, to emulate Mantua’s most famous son. Like Virgil he might inaugurate a poetic career with eclogues, not merely repeating, for sure, but adding arguments of his own: arguments in the etymological sense of themes that might catch a boyish eye and prick a restless mind, such as love’s peril (satisfied in marriage or grotesquely fatal), the local Po in flood, folk fables, proverbs, clashes between stereotypes of city and country, mountain and plain, poet and patron, visions of monastic calling, and most vivid the virulent misogyny attributed to an authoritative teacher, Umber, revealed as a pastoral disguise for Tifernate himself. Called Umber in homage to his Umbrian origin, Civitá di Castello. Piepho argues, “Granting the widest latitude to the period Mantuan spent at Padua, it nonetheless seems improbable that all eight eclogues in addition to his unprinted collection of elegies date from this time. It seems more likely that the eclogues had their beginnings at Mantua, perhaps with the encouragement of the humanist Gregorio Tifernate, and that at least the seventh and eighth eclogues may have received their final form as late as Mantuan’s novitiate or soon afterwards. On the basis of John Bale’s work, we can say with confidence that the collection existed in published form by 1476 when the Flemish Carmelite Adrien van Eckhoute made a transcription of it at Padua from Mantuan’s personal copy: Mantuanus. 2009. Adulescentia: The Eclogues of Baptista Mantuanus (1498) Second Edition. Hypertext Critical Edition by Lee Piepho. Edited by Lee Piepho, 11. Birmingham: The Philological Museum. Http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/mantuanus/. Some of the non-Virgilian arguments were so idiosyncratic that even their maker in retrospect might well judge them juvenilia, Mantuanus, Severi, 241. or puerilia. Ibid., 78. Arguments of piety would win converts across the Alps, projected by the rising tide of print media for schools, yet self-indulgent expatiation, gross rusticity, and fantastical grotesquerie might initially divert but would eventually pale before Virgil’s magisterial and measured style. At what time the new Mantuan set about composing eclogues that he would twice disparage, yet also dedicate and make public twice, daring to leap from manuscript to print, has divided his most observant readers. In the printed preface of 1498, the poet claims to have produced eight eclogues while at Padua (1461-63) before entering religious orders. This Lee Piepho would modify to suppose the adolescent writing while still at Ca Zoiosa: producing eight eclogues for the book to be entitled Suburbanus. The manuscript would be dedicated to the Bolognese notable with a bucolic name, Refrigerio, and would be available to be copied by a pious visitor in 1476. Ibid. Andrea Severi, however, denouncing the 1498 preface as a literary fiction, argues that the stimulus to poetic imitation might have come not from philosophical and scientific Padua but Ferrara, where Baptista entered his noviate in 1464, when Boiardo was publishing pastoralia and the previous decade had seen other bucolic poetry produced. Mantuanus, Severi, 67. As for prompting the revisionary move from manuscript to print, Severi cites the 1497 reprint at Bologna of Petrarch’s Bucolcum carmen, Ibid., 66. with its synthesis of pagan and Christian themes—like the syncretic program that Mantuan promotes in the revised and amplified book that he consigned to print in 1498. Regarding the manuscript Suburbanus, Severi argues that Mantuan would have dedicated it only after 1471, when he took up residence in Bologna and met Refrigerio; nor does anything in the surviving extracts from that 1476 copy prove that it comprised eight eclogues. Ibid., 82. In any case, notes Severi, the original dedication had to be dropped, after Refrigerio took part in a conspiracy that failed. Ibid., 68, n13. Thus adducing accidents and circumstances, Severi looks away from the poet’s original context: his intense schooling, his fresh citizenship in a city that idolized Virgil, who set the pattern of eclogues prefacing poetic ambition. Moreover, Severi’s own exemplary notes to even the book’s first one hundred twenty lines testify that the fledgling poet, who commemorated his teacher in an elegy, had perused and absorbed many books in prose and verse, both classical and modern: a process surely instituted and fostered among the manuscripts at school. Citing Ausonius; Boccaccio, Buc. (two); Cantalicio, Buc.; Cicero, De Sen.; Claudian (two); Juvenal (three); Livy; Lucan (two); Lucretius; Martial (three); Nemesianus (three); Ovid, Met. (five), Fast. (two), Her., Ars (two), Am. (two), Rem. (two); Persius; Petrarch, Buc., Africa; Piccolomini (two); Plautus (two); Politian, Rust. (two); Pontano (three); Propertius (two); Silius; Statius, Theb. (two); Strozzi, Erot. (three); Tibullus (two); Virgil Aen. (three), Georg. (two), Buc. (five): Mantuanus, Severi, 242–47.   In any event, the erstwhile Suburbanus, chastened and enlarged ventured from manuscript to the new, more active, medium with the programmatic title Adulescentia (Mantua 1498), still rife with schoolboy idiosyncrasies but ripe with the moral and religious sentence that would engage the northern schools. The move to print paid off. Within four years Adulesentia was on its way to becoming a schoolroom classic across the Alps, its poet identified with the home of Vergilius Maro as Mantuan and hailed as another, even the Christian, Maro. Guardedly in the context of Christian humanism at Paris by Erasmus: Mantuanus, Severi, 400–424 Compare too pastor uterque Maro (‘each Virgil pastoral poet’), prologue: Hessus, Eobanus. 2004. “Bucolicon.” Poetry in Student Years at Erfurt 1504–1509. Vol. 215, The Poetic Works of Helius Eobanus Hessus, Vol. 1, edited by Harry Vredeveld. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 272. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaiisance Studies. Endowed with commentaries for school use in Paris, then in Germany, imported soon to England, it would so far permeate the English school curricula as to merit a cameo by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) in the “pleasant conceited comedie” of Loves Labors Lost (1598), where the first line of Adulescentia figures in a parody of schoolroom style: Loves Labour’s Lost (quarto 1598— 4.2;1245) (access 23/06/2018). Iaque. Good M. Parʃon be ʃo good as read me this Letter, it was geuen me by Coʃtard, and ʃent me from Don Armatho: I beʃeech you read it. Nath. Facile precor gellida, quando pecas omnia ʃub vmbra ru- minat, and ʃo ḟoorth. Ah good olde Mantuan, I may ʃpeake of thee as the traveiler doth of Venice, vemchie, vencha, que non te vnde, que non te perreche. Olde Mantuan, olde Mantuan, Who vnderʃtandeth thee not, loves thee not, vt re ʃol la mi fa:..... LLL [IV.ii.1245 - 1252] Shakespeare represents the illiterate Jacqueneta imploring the parson Sir Nathaniel to read for her what she cannot: first tentatively, flattering, “Good Master Parson, be so good,” almost apologetic, offering an account and excuse; but then redoubling, urging, “I beseech you read,” rising to language from the parson’s professional sphere—“Heare us (o merciful father) we besech thee”; “Wherefore I pray and beseech you with a pure heart and humble voice.” Cummings, Brian. 2011. The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, 30. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Cranmer’s text, 1549; . Her rise from politesse to prayer provokes an auditor to further escalation in schoolroom style, glossing her “beseech” with precor (“I pray”)—stretching from Church of England piety to the opening words of Adulescentia: capping Anglican liturgy with language from another canon—parsed commonly in English classrooms to be sure, although originating from another century, another country, and another church. Here Shakespeare makes the speaker take his cue from the marked word, disregarding the plight, capitalizing on poignance to score a pedantic point. Latin assigned the curate in the quarto (1598), where the title page proclaimed, "Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespeare"; emended in the Second Folio (1632) to Mantuan’s received text, “Nath. Fauʃte precor gelida, quando, pecus omne sub umbra, ruminat, and ʃo forth.” [4.2:1242]; but then Nicholas Rowe (1709: p. 422) distributes the speeches sensibly: Hol. [interjects the gloss] Fauste precor...[then looking at letter] verses. Nath. Ay Sir,...[from letter] Hol. Let me hear...lege domine. Nath. [reads letter] http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/book/BPL_Rowe1/494/?zoom=450. The gloss and nostalgical digression in proverb style testify to the employment of the Adulescentia in schools and early modern English literature, as documented most fully by Piepho, Piepho, Lee. 2001. Holofernes’ Mantuan: Italian Humanism in Early Modern England. Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures, 67–72. New York: Peter Lang. complementing W. P. Mustard, Mantuanus, Mustard. other basic studies by Piepho, Mantuanus, Piepho 1989; Mantuanus, Piepho-Hypertext. as well as the admirable industry of Severi, Mantuanus, Severi. and the insightful analysis by Tom Hubbard of Mantuan in the English pastoralists such as Fletcher and above all Spenser. Hubbard, Thomas K. 1998. The Pipes of Pan. Intertextuality and Literary Filiation in the Pastoral Tradition from Theocritus to Milton, 247–341. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Reasons for the embrace of a Roman Catholic poet, despite England’s fraught venture into Protestantism, emerge in Piepho’s careful account: “Composition and Publication of the Adulescentia and Its Use by Tutors and in Grammar Schools”: Mantuanus, Piepho-Hypertext, 7. he relates the “massive number of printings” to the fact that teachers “found the eclogues’ subject matter, moral tone, and the relatively high level of Latinity to their liking,” the Alsatian humanist Jakob Wimpfeling and the Belgian humanist pedagogic printer Badius Ascensius in Paris (the commentary most frequently reprinted in England), which “likewise praises Mantuan’s eloquence and good sense in treating delicate subject matter.” Ibid., 17.69. “The coming of the Protestant Reformation,” adds Piepho, “gave an unexpected stimulus, however, to the institution of his collection of eclogues within English grammar school curricula.” Ibid., 17.n71. Mantuan’s satire against corruption in the Papal Curia fueled polemics, among them Luther’s, against Rome: “That he was a Carmelite made his condemnation of the Curia in Eclogue IX especially valuable.” Ibid., 17.n72. “By mid-century,the Adulescentia had displaced Virgil’s eclogues,” reports Piepho, “in the influential curriculum of Saint Paul’s School, Ibid., 17.n74. and from this time onwards it is commonly found in the statutes of grammar schools throughout the realm.” Ibid., 18.n75. Thus “editions of Mantuan’s Adulescentia increase in number after John Kyngston’s in 1569 until, eventually passing into the English Stock, at least forty printings appeared before 1700.” Ibid., 18.n76. Nurturing this success, the “familiar” commentaries of Badius operated mainly by means of paraphrase: Ibid., 19. The English schoolmaster Charles Hoole left behind a good general account of how Mantuan’s eclogues were used in the classroom. At each lesson students were to take six lines of a given eclogue and, first committing them to memory, were to construe and parse them. Then the master was to help them to pick out the Phrases and Sentences; which they may commit to a paper-book; and afterwards resolve the matter of their lessons into an English period or two, which they may turn into proper and elegant Latine, observing the placing of words, according to prose. To illustrate this process, Hoole takes the first five lines of Mantuan’s first eclogue, thus rendering them in English prose: Shepherds are wont sometimes to talke of their old loves, whilest the cattel chew the cud under the shade; for fear, if they should fall asleep, some Fox, or Wolf, or such like beast of prey, which either lurk in the thick woods, or lay wait in the grown corn, should fall upon the cattel. And indeed, watching is farre more commendable for a Prince, or Magistrate, then immoderate, or unseasonable sleep. Small wonder, given this procedure, that we hear so much in sixteenth and seventeenth century England about “morall Mantuan!” Piepho’s own survey of marked copies of Mantuan finds “that the habits of reading practiced on his eclogues in the classroom were more diverse than this.” Ibid., 21. He writes that underlining or other markings show what interested teachers or pupils: “schoolboys had their own interests, and their markings occasionally reveal that they could go their own ways. Portions of Umber’s attack on women in Mantuan’s fourth eclogue (110 - 241) are often noted by readers, and the banter on drinking between Faustulus and Candidus (IX.22 - 31) predictably drew the attention of a few young wags.” Ibid., 22. Mantuan’s use by reformed Christianity stems not least, Piepho emphasizes, from the poet’s identity as a reformer in the Carmelite order, which claimed to be older than Christianity with the prophet Elijah as a founder, then eventually accepting Christ, making “vows to both God and Mary,” calling itself “brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel; Ibid., 23. but then scattered “ throughout western Europe” and “granted mendicant status and allowed to establish itself in urban areas. Hence arose a continuing conflict within the Carmelites between the contemplative ideal and the life of apostolic and clerical activity.” Ibid., 24. “The choice that the Virgin Mary urges on Pollux in the seventh eclogue,” observes Piepho, “reflects a number of ideals embraced by the Carmelite order, ideals Mantuan often defended after entering it,”. Ibid., 25,n86. adding that “Pollux’s retirement from the world is basic to the Carmelite idea of retreat into the ‘desert’ or ‘wilderness’ of the monastery.” Ibid., 25,n88. Piepho notes that “This ideal of eremitic withdrawal stands in part behind the antipathy expressed towards the city in Mantuan’s ninth and tenth eclogues,” remarking too the example of Petrarch’s self- identification as Sylvanus, “partly because I have always felt from earliest childhood a hatred of cities.” Ibid., 26,n90. Regarding the traces of adolescent idiosyncrasy in uneasy tension with increscent vocation, Piepho concludes: Ibid., 37–40. Granted this essential unity of intention, the impression of diversity within the collection nevertheless remains. That the eclogues were composed at different periods in Mantuan’s life accounts only in part for this multifaceted quality. More important is his seemingly insatiable curiosity to try out different styles, material, and points of view—coupled at times, the reader might feel, with a lack of proportion or due consideration for unity of effect. From romantic love to corruption within the Papal Curia, from the allegorical technique popularized by Petrarch and Boccaccio to the rustic realism of the literature of bergerie, Mantuan’s Adulescentia develops most of the possibilities open to pastoral in his time. For this very reason it became along with Virgil’s eclogues a textbook within the developing educational program of the Northern humanists, used in part to teach what pastoral should be. In time, however, the extremes of realism and allegory came to offend. Scaliger complains that Mantuan’s world is too rustic for pastoral, Ibid., 40,n114. and Doctor Johnson thunders against shepherds who are priests in poetic disguise. Ibid., 40,n115. At this point, the influence and esteem accorded to Mantuan’s Adulescentia have at long last come to an end. Yet one might infer that Mantuan’s penchant for arguments beyond Virgil and his emulators, arguments from boyhood experience, from sights seen and stories heard, from epiphany and mission, or that catch his fancy and fuel his style among the hoard of manuscripts at school, arguments in short tempt him to recklessly expand beyond “the possibilities open to pastoral in his time,” hence provoking the rejections that Piepho records. Yet offering a contrary perspective, Stephen Hinds has looked closely at Mantuan’s provocative blend, drawn not only from the bucolic and heroic Maro but from Christian lore, so that the Virgin Mary captivating Pollux on the verge of divine vocation (Ad vii) resonates with Virgil’s Venus in disguise conjuring her son (Aen. 1.328-9). Hinds, Stephen. 2017. “Pastoral and Its Futures: Reading Like (a) Mantuan’.” Dictynna [En Ligne] 14, no. Mis en ligne le 21 novembre 2017: 47–51. Http://journals.openedition.org/dictynna/1443. Hinds to his credit and Mantuan’s argues that much of what has often grated in Adulescentia triggers recursive reading that enriches and reconstitutes pastoral as a genre. When he argues that “Mantuan restages the Christianization of pagan pastoral by testing his shepherds with a mixed bag of classical and biblical learning (and this time it is the classical rather than the biblical names that form the stumbling-block: Tethys, Cassiopeia, Aeolus ...), Ibid., 53. he pinpoints not only the paradox of giving pastoral a Marian mission but the conundrum that biographical and bibliographical data trace these eclogues to the polyglot curriculum and moralizing mentorship of that audacious school and to an adolescent, indeed precocious poet, inspired and stirred to forge in the woods of pastoral after Maro (hyle, silva) his retreat into Marian woods. Arguments in the Translation The effect of being “raised” in that school, then enabled at age thirteen to be called a Mantuan, might well motivate a match via new arguments with Mantua’s sacred Maro: reflecting along such lines tempered what had been initial repulsion when approaching the Adulescentia from Virgil’s Book of Bucolics. Van Sickle, John B. 2014. Virgil’s Book of Bucolics, the Ten Eclogues Translated Into English Verse: Framed by Cues for Reading Aloud and Clues for Threading Texts and Themes: The Illustrated Digital Edition [Kindle Edition]. Brooklyn: Bare Knuckles Press. There every syllable and the whole seemed concerted, choice threads of Latin and Greek epos woven into a vatic web against despair at Rome then rewound to contrive a mythic source for poetry itself. Virgil’s designing mythopoeia made Mantuan look desultory, digressive, with themes jarring, less bucolic than georgic if not folkloric, satirical, bristling with rude realisms (with the popularistic mannerism of a Pieter Breughel or Sebastian Brandt), like a schoolboy showing off, prone to purple passages, misogynist, sententious, preachy, reveling in idyllic loci and copy-book horrors, haunted repetitiously by wild beasts—the ever prowling insidious feral clans—before verging in the two late eclogues into monastic altercation, patent allegory and Marian lore. Initial shock validated Scaliger’s polemic, cited in passing by Piepho, against pedagogues comparing and even favoring Mantuan to Virgil: In nostro tyrocinio literarũ triuiales quidã paedagogi etiam Virgilianis paʃtoribus, huius hircos praetulere... Denique hoc ita cenʃendum est: Agros sine vrbanis delittiis feros esse aut sordidos. Iccirco dixit acerrimus harum rerum iudex Horatius -molle atque facetum Virgilio annuerunt gaudentes rure camenae. Pro quibus, de Carmelita poʃsis ita dicere, -putri atque caduco Carmelum imbuerunt ʃordentes rure cicadae. Quòd si verʃus immodicos, illotos, ʃcabioʃos huc afferre aggrediar, tempus ʃimul cũ viribus me defecerit. Scaliger, Julius Caesar. 1561. “I. Historicus. II. Hyle. III. Idea. IIII. Parasceve. V. Criticus. VI. Hypercriticus. VII. Epinomis Ad Sylvium Filium.” In Poetices Libri Septem, 304D. Lyon: Vincentius, Antonius. [In our apprenticeship to literature, certain trivial pedagogues have even preferred to Virgilian pastors this one’s billy goats... In fine this must be censured thus: fields without urban delicacies are feral or sordid. About this that most sharp judge of these matters Horace declared a soft and fashioned well [scilicet epos] Camenae delighting in countryside vouchsafed to Virgil. In stead of which, about the Carmelite you could declare this way with decadent and putrid countryside cicadas growing coarse imbued Carmel. Inasmuch as if I should step up aggressively to bring here verses that are immoderate, lacking lotion, scabrous, time together with strength would quite defect from me.’] Despite Scaliger and my own diffidence, I started. In the actual process, I began to recognize recurrent quirks. Familiarity began to breed indulgence—kin to the ironical affection of Shakespeare’s “good old Mantuan”—despite the scathing Scaliger. Indeed close reading, and the very project of translating, made it imperative to imitate, emulate even that school-room style. Becoming compromised myself, amused by Mantuan’s ludic manners, I began to wonder whether the quirks that were growing familiar, the emerging profile of exuberant practice, matched a range of critical judgments concerning poetry in youth, beginning with assessments of Shakespeare’s play: Love's Labour's Lost abounds in sophisticated wordplay, puns, and literary allusions and is filled with clever pastiches of contemporary poetic forms.... Critic and historian John Pendergast states that "perhaps more than any other Shakespearean play, it explores the power and limitations of language, and this blatant concern for language led many early critics to believe that it was the work of a playwright just learning his art." Https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love%27s_Labour%27s_Lost#Reputation: 2015-09-24. This in turn brought to mind the school-master’s self assessment that the play distills: HOLOFERNES This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a 1213 [67] foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions: these are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. But the gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it. 1220 [74] LLL IV.ii.1213-20 [67-74] All this recalled the tour de force that first showed me the intersection between bucolic and book; Kuhn, David, aka David Mus. 1971. “Arminarm Eclogues.” In W. Antony. The Arminarm Eclogues with the Hexercises for the Heclogues. Roma & La Quercia: John Van Sickle & Giulia Battaglia. its then youthful poet would remind me how Valéry assessed the eclogues when commissioned late in his own career to translate them, surprised to find features that brought to mind his own beginnings: Les Bucoliques, me tirant pour quelques instants de ma vieillesse, me remirent au temps de mes premier vers. Il me semblait en retrouver les impressions. Je croyais bien voir dans le text un mélange de perfections et d’imperfections, de très heureuses combinaisons et grâces de forme avec des maladresses très sensibles.. Valéry, Paul (1871–1945). 1957. “Traduction en Vers Des Bucoliques de Virgile.” In Œuvres. Tome I. Poésies. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 216. Paris: Gallimard. The mix of grace and disgrace, extravagant spirit, churning stock of figures, forms, ideas, revolutions mapped not just to Mantuan’s quirks but to his recurrent motif of turnings in the mind (volvo, revolvo). In sum, for me, the aperçu of youthful process, illusion perhaps with Valéry of access even from the viewpoint of late age, of finding some sort of prior or essential self in writing, finally redeemed and justified the time committed to this paradoxical and problematic text—its marginality, schoolishness, its fate and mine. As a practical and theoretical matter, the translation observes meter: as Valéry puts it and I practiced in my own earlier translations— Le principal d’une oeuvre en vers, que l’emploi même du verse proclame, c’est le tout, la puissance résultante des effects composés de tous les attributs du langage. Verse form—in this case a loosely iambic hexameter—conditions, qualifies, and frames the execution of other choices—rhetorical, sonic and semantic. Where Mantuan’s schoolroom Latin still has a counterpart in English, I have used the Latinate terms, thus ‘herbose’ not ‘grassy’, ‘vitreous’ not ‘glassy’, ‘umbrose’ or ‘umbratile’ for ‘shadowy’ or ‘shady’, ‘insidious’ for ‘sneaky’; ergo, et cetera, licit and illicit for themselves. One basic term, pastor gets translated not as ‘shepherd’—in the reductive manner of the pastoral theorists, who gloss over the goatherds and cowherds distinguished by Theocritus and Virgil—or ‘grazer’ respecting its etymology (which I did in translating Virgil), but simply ‘pastor’—spanning the significant semantic slip and metaphoric transfer from rural economy and poetic panoply to Christianity that marks Mantuan’s argument with Virgil. Likewise, in the later religious eclogues, where pastoral imagery gets densely and pervasively allegorical, the translation renders sermo not as ‘conversation’ but—colored by the preachy tendency of the poems—by the common semantic shift to ‘sermon’; so too virgo not ‘maiden’ but ‘virgin’ which easily slips to ‘Virgin’ in the Marian poems. Yet Latinism has its semantic limits: e. g., vilior could not be ‘rather vile’ but ‘cheapish, rather cheap’. For Mantuan, as for Virgil, a common pastoral chore is expressed by agere ’to drive, to push’, which transfers from specific pastoral to general action in life and work, as often as possible still translated ‘drive’. The verb dicere 'to point out with speech; to utter' here gets translated to maintain emphasis so far as possible ‘declare’. Where Mantuan took pains recursively to knot congested periods at their close, leaving readers in suspense to remember and retrace, my own consideration for intelligibility decreed subordinating periodical display for the sake of intelligibility, granting priority to subjects and their verbs, leaving epithets and peripherals, allusive ornaments and displays, to tag along, expatiate, spell out, fill in. Metapoetic markers of bad faith, indiscipline, self-indulgence, lack of structure, proliferate: e.g., near the start, orientative, defining ambivalent linkage to prior pastoral norms—continuity posited with over-emphasis (‘this same...under...now..rest’) only to be undercut (‘remember badly’): This place, this same tree, under which we now take rest, knows well the pangs with which I groaned, with what fires burned two years ago or (do I remember badly?) four (Ad. 1.6-8) After which, Mantuan strays into school-boy excess that he signals and subverts, employing a pastoral metaphor to characterize his poetic practice (“chase strays”): But why with long circuitousness give tedium birth? I waste both time and words whilst chasing after strays. (Ad. 1.36-37) Or after a local digression into flash flooding by the Po, with a detailed localism that Virgil never ventured, the unseasonal flood becomes a metapoetic figure for the digressive and unpastoral localism: Just up to here old Po. Let’s get us back to our loves (Ad. 2.27) Or turning from a digression into paratheological chit-chat back to a more conventionally pastoral topic: That study—what you mayn’t know, thus necessarily won’t know— let’s postpone and seek again those pangs of Amyntas, (Ad. 3.39-40) Again, as frequently, making blunt rusticity subvert the very idea of tradition in genre: one spring whilst castrating boars and rams he handed it on (Ad. 8.19-20). Putrid and deciduous from the standpoint of traditional parameters, meant to mock the authorized formulas, so in this sense too perhaps attractive to school boys if not magistri, not to mention any impish impulses in modern readers, although, as Hinds argues, recursive and regenerative each in its perverse way, even enabling the cognitive pretense to genre. Hinds, op. cit. Generic likeness but also specific differences confirm Mantuan’s links with Virgil but also his push beyond. Generic terms abound like ‘countryside’ (rura), ‘fields’ (agri), ‘plains or flats’ (campi), ‘pastures’ (pascua), ‘plowlands’ (arva), divers waters—‘springs’ (fontes), ‘rivers’ (flumina), ‘streams’ (amnes), ‘lakes’ (lacus), ‘waves’ (undae), ‘mountains’ (montes)—, not to mention ‘livestock’ (pecus), ‘flocks and herds’ (greges), ‘cattle’ (armenta), sheepdom (oves, agni), goatdom (caper, capellae), pastors, virgins, perforate pipes. Indeed terms like ‘waves’, ‘plowlands’, ‘pastures’, ‘fields‘ occur with such promiscuity that they lose the specific reference to georgic work or place that they conveyed in Virgil. References Cortesi, Mariarosa. 2017. “Greek at the School of Vittorino Da Feltre ..” In Teachers, Students, and Schools of Greek in the Renaissance. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 54–78. Leiden Boston: Brill. Crab, Marijke. 2015. “Life and Works of Omnibonus Leonicenus.” In Exemplary Reading: Printed Renaissance Commentaries on Valerius Maximus (1470–1600). 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