We know that
Morris himself translated from ancient Greek and Latin – Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, among other things – and some of us may even have actually read
his versions of these weighty epics. But
what would Morris’s own writings read like when translated into those
languages? Since even fewer of us could
perform that linguistic task for ourselves, we shall have to turn to the Oxford
classicists of an earlier age when such curious pursuits seemed worth the time
and effort.
For in 1899
– so, sadly, Morris himself did not see this volume – two Oxford scholars,
Robinson Ellis and A.D. Godley, published Nova
Anthologia Oxoniensis, a substantial collection of English poems made over
into Latin or Greek by various Oxonian hands.
Turn to pages 228-9 and you can have the pleasure of seeing a couple of
stanzas from Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’ (that most Oxonian poem of
them all) put into Latin by J.S. Phillimore.
Or turn back to pages 160-61 and you come across nineteen lines from
Morris’s ‘The Doom of King Acrisius’ in The
Earthly Paradise done into Greek by J.Y. Sargent, M.A., Fellow of Hertford
College. They look visually very
impressive on the page in their new guise, even if – like me – you can’t
actually read a word of them.
A major cultural aim of Morris’s was to orient us away from this Mediterranean frame of reference towards a more Teutonic and Nordic inheritance, with his own Sigurd the Volsung very much at its centre. But he remained enough of a residual Oxford classicist for us to feel that he might have turned to pages 160 and 161 of the Ellis and Godley volume with eager anticipation if he had lived three years longer. The book is available online at https://archive.org/details/novaanthologiao01godlgoog, so we can share at least some of that pleasure too.
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