Latin in Modern Fiction: Who Says It’s a Dead Language?

Henryk Hoffmann, Latin in Modern Fiction: Who Says It’s a Dead Language? (Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2022). 9781622739493.

Reviewed by Garrett Dome, independent scholar, gdome@gwu.edu.

Henryk Hoffmann’s latest reference book, Latin in Modern Fiction: Who Says It’s a Dead Language?, argues, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the Latin language is not dead. The book offers readers a delightful survey of authors, particularly English and American, who have incorporated Latin into their writing. Hoffmann divides the volume into three main categories: Latin in Mainstream Literature, Latin in Crime and Detective Fiction, and Latin in Frontier and Western Fiction. Across these three categories, the book is further divided into 45 sections, each focusing on a different writer. The reference book, while teeming with legal terminology and Latin expressions from modern authors, does not ultimately prove the vitality of the language, despite Hoffmann’s intentions. Throughout his survey, original Latin composition, once prominent in fiction of the early modern era, is nowhere to be found, while the integration of lengthy passages from ancient or medieval Latin texts, essential for earlier authors such as Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope, rarely occurs. Hoffmann, instead, demonstrates that Latin within most of modern literature has been reduced to phrases and mottos.

Each section begins by providing the reader with a biography of the author’s life, literary accomplishments, and influence over other forms of media, particularly film. Hoffmann makes sure to include relevant film adaptations, lowbrow or highbrow for most of the books listed. Latin in Modern Fiction excels when Hoffmann explores his interests, like film, and when he leaves behind more traditional reference material like the origin of words. 

Hoffmann provides context for the Latin quotes found in modern fiction. He does not assume that the reader is familiar with all the books mentioned for each subject and he makes sure that readers know a work’s overall story before diving into any Latin content. For someone who has never read S. S. Van Dine’s The Canary Murder Case, for example, Hoffmann’s summary is pleasurable and useful. The Latin quotes themselves that Hoffmann chooses to discuss, however, lack substance. Throughout his survey, it is clear that most modern authors, when incorporating Latin, in fact stick to legal phrases (e.g., in flagrante delicto, in the act of wrongdoing) and biblical expressions (e.g., Dominus vobiscum, Lord be with you). The lack of dense Latin content within modern fiction, unfortunately, does not support Hoffmann’s claim that Latin is not dead.

Hoffmann gives ancient sources for many of the Latin quotes he has compiled, but his quotes contain some transcription errors. For example, he writes mbrosiaque comae (p. 59) for ambrosiaeque comae and antiquam documentum (p. 78) for antiquum documentum. Flannery O’Connor and John Updike, the authors who incorporate these Latin phrases into their books, do not have the same transcription errors. Latin in Modern Fiction also has several incomplete translations, such as Lucretius’s Nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinent hilium, quandoquidem natura animi mortalis habetur (Therefore, death is nothing to us nor concerns us in the least; p. 81). Hoffmann’s translation of Lucretius does not extend past quandoquidem and he incorrectly substitutes pertinent for pertinet and hilium for hilum. Branded as a reference book, Latin in Modern Fiction should not have so many transcription errors and incomplete translations. A second edition that fixes all transcription errors and translation inaccuracies would be ideal.

Latin in Modern Fiction ends with an intriguing conclusion, detailing the relevancy of Latin during the coronavirus pandemic. Hoffmann discusses the etymology of “coronavirus” and shares a memorable scene in Latin from the western film, Tombstone (1993). The conclusion, an enjoyable read, affirms that Latin in Modern Fiction is worth reading for Hoffmann’s unique commentary on the modern texts in which these quotes and mottos occur, not for his defense of Latin as a living language. No prior knowledge of Latin or modern fiction is needed to find the book enjoyable. This reference book is great for fans of literature and classics, especially film aficionados.

Table of Contents

Preface (pp. xi–xx)
I. Latin in Mainstream Literature (pp. 1–108)
1. Samuel Hopkins Adams (1871–1958)
2. Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
3. Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951)
4. F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
5. James Hilton (1900–1954)
6. Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938)
7. John Steinbeck (1902–1968)
8. Irwin Shaw (1913–1984)
9. Julio Cortázar (1914–1984)
10. Saul Bellow (1915–2005)
11. Morris L. West (1916–1999)
12. Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
13. Gore Vidal (1925–2012)
14. Herman Raucher (1928–)
15. Umberto Eco (1932–2016)
16. John Updike (1932–2009)
17. John Gregory Dunne (1932–2003)
18. C. K. Stead (1932–)
19. Jerzy Kosinski (1933–1991)
20. John Irving (1942–)
21. Dermot McEvoy (1950–)
II. Latin in Crime and Detective Fiction (pp. 219–22)
1. Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
2. S. S. Van Dine (1888–1939)
3. Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970)
4. Brett Halliday (1904–1977)
5. Ellery Queen (Manfred B. Lee, 1905–1971; Frederic Dannay, 1905–1982)
6. John Dickson Carr (1906–1977)
7. Ross MacDonald (1915–1983)
8. William X. Kienzle (1928–2001)
9. Tom Kakonis (1930–2018)
10. Joe Gores (1931–2011)
11. Joseph Wambaugh (1937–)
12. Robert K. Tanenbaum (1942–)
13. Sara Paretsky (1947–)
14. Paul Levine (1948–)
15. Elizabeth George (1949–)
16. Scott Turow (1949–)
17. Joseph Finder (1958–)
18. Greg Iles (1960–)
19. Ian Rankin (1960–)
20. Dennis Lehane (1965–)
III. Latin in Frontier and Western Fiction (pp. 223–39)
1. Emerson Hough (1857–1923)
2. Paul Horgan (1903–1995)
3. Will Henry/Clay Fisher (1912–1991)
4. Larry McMurty (1936–)
Appendix (pp. 247–54)
Conclusions (pp. 255–67)

Discussion

1. Over the years, you have published many reference books. Why do you gravitate towards publishing reference books? Are there any reference books published by other authors that you strongly recommend?

When I first decided to write, it was not because I thought I had some exceptional writing skills, but because, having studied film as a personal hobby for nearly thirty years, I felt I had plenty to share in terms of knowledge and opinions. At that time, in the early 1990s, when the internet was still a novelty, IMDb just starting to develop and Wikipedia nonexistent, reference books were really precious to people looking for information in many areas. Thus, I treasured books like The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the World’s Great Movie Stars (1979), by Ken Wlaschin, Western Films: A Complete Guide (1982), by Brian Garfield, Words and Shadows: Literature on the Screen (1992), by Jim Hitt, The BFI Companion to Crime (1997), edited by Phil Hardy, and all the volumes in the series The Films of…, comprehensively discussing works of major celebrities from Ronald Colman to Woody Allen. One of the later reference publications that I am not ashamed to recommend is 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2007), edited by Peter Boxall. In addition to reconfirming the classic status of some obvious mainstream masterpieces, it includes a number of genre titles, e.g., four novels by Dashiell Hammett, three by Raymond Chandler, one by James M. Cain, and three by Elmore Leonard. The most commendable book on Classics is, in my humble opinion, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015), by Mary Beard.

2. At the end of each section, you make sure to include the Latin motto for the college that the author attended. What is your favorite Latin motto? Do you think new, emerging colleges should have Latin mottos?

I believe that having a Latin motto is a good tradition, both for colleges and secondary schools. Not only can Latin mottos play a classy publicity role, usually communicating a given school’s strengths, goals, and philosophy, but a lot of them, in addition, carry some deeper meanings, a great deal of wisdom expressed in a laconic and, occasionally, metaphoric or sarcastic way. I really like Solvitur vivendo, the motto of the school where I had taught for twenty years, and Esse quam videri, the motto of North Carolina, the state where I had lived for eight years. But my personal favorite is probably Cicero’s Adulescens sperat se diu victurum esse; senex potest dicere se diu vixisse. I love it for its richness of rare grammatical forms, but, even more, for its rather optimistic message, implying that everyone, regardless of age, has a reason to be happy. It is because of that message that I included the quotation in the preface of my memoir, Ironies, Coincidences and Absurdities in My Ordinary Life on Both Sides of the Atlantic (2019).

3. When I think of authors who include Latin in their books, James Joyce and Ezra Pound come immediately to mind. While no book could be comprehensive, I was wondering about the selection process and reasoning you used to choose specific authors and hoping you could elaborate on it.

The answer regarding Joyce happens to be in the preface of my book, where I state, “James Joyce, who wrote in the first half of the twentieth century, frequently embellishing his prose with Latin lexicon, is also excluded here for a different reason: his case has already been discussed in a serious book—Latin and Roman Culture in Joyce (1997) by R. J. Schork—an excellent and comprehensive work, which cannot be improved and should not be plagiarized.” As for Pound, I spent a full semester in college (as an English Philology major) analyzing line by line (ad nauseam) his and T. S. Eliot’s poems and, as a result, either due to that experience or, more likely, because of Pound’s fascist sympathies, I never had any desire to return to his works in my post-college years. At the same time, there was no need for it as I had accumulated more than enough data to prove my point. The citations used in support of the thesis had been extracted from novels, short stories and plays that I had read in the period of nearly thirty years, starting in the early 1990s, when I began teaching Latin. Because in the same period I was working on a variety of film and literature-related projects, the genre of the books on my reading lists covered, in addition to significant mainstream titles, many items of frontier and western fiction and plenty of mysteries. Puzzling, in the eyes of some readers of my book, may appear the striking disproportion in the featured authors’ genders. However, in my extensive research, I had incorporated a multitude of female authors—from Pearl S. Buck, Edna Ferber, Carson McCullers and E. Annie Proulx to Toni Morrison, Anne Tyler, Elizabeth Hay and Jill McCorkle—and I had quoted many of them (quite extensively) in my other books, but, in terms of a sufficient number of Latin references, only fifteen qualified to be included in this project, three featured in the main body and a dozen listed in the appendix.

4. Along the same lines as the third question, I was wondering why you chose not to include modern books that are written in Latin? For example, Capti: Fabula Menippeo-Hoffmanniana Americana is a modern novel written entirely in Latin by Stephen A. Beard that comes to my mind.

My goal was to show samples of Latin lexicon in non-Latin literature, works originally written mostly in English (the majority of the authors), in Spanish (Julio Cortázar) or Italian (Umberto Eco), where it appears sometimes randomly, sometimes purposefully, but inevitably, with the authors having no intention of showing off or making a statement about the ancient language’s longevity, but offering convincing evidence thereof nonetheless. Thus, any works either conceived in Latin, like Stephen A. Beard’s Capti, or translated into it, like Alexander Lenard’s Winnie ille Pu, were automatically excluded from the scope. But, admittedly, I might not have made it absolutely clear in the preface. Mea culpa!