RIC's Professor Grund Scribes Latin Translation

This marks the fifth entry in a series looking at recently published books written by faculty members from the English Department. So far, the Anchor has looked at novels by Drs. Zornado and Cobb, a collection of poems by Dr. Calbert, and Dr. Kalinak's exploration of the music in John Ford's Westerns. Dr. Gary Grund has penned an entry in the "Most Unusual" category: his Humanist Comedies, a volume of Harvard University Press's I Tatti Renaissance Library aims to present important works of Renaissance Latin Literature to a modern audience. Each volume offers the original Latin text on each left facing page and an English translation on the opposite page. This means, for example, that while Grund's book comes in at 450 pages, only 225 pages must be read ("unless your love of learning compels you," offers Grund with a straight face).

Professor Grund worked for two and a half years on the volume of five period comedies he edited and translated from the original Latin-three of which had never before been translated into English. Says Anthony Grafton in the October 6, 2006 edition of The New York Review of Books: "Dr. Grund's edition nicely shows how the Renaissance comedy mixed ancient motifs with Christian lessons and offers fascinating information on the rapid development of comic performances in the Renaissance from pantomimes carried out by single characters, while a single character reads all the lines, to full-blown performances on stages, acted out before scenery painted in the new one-point perspective. (Ask an art major about "one-point perspective.")

While the edition is extremely erudite, what gets the attention of the casual reader is what Monty Python would have referred to as "the naughty bits." Originally performed for the aristocracy, these plays are filled with double entendre, single entendres, and sex scenes that are audible off stage. "Soft Porn," Grund calls it. One of the plays, Chrysis, begins with two priests knocking at the door of a whorehouse, and was written by "a guy who would become Pope Pius II." It seems like no matter what anyone studies, the lesson always comes around to what a peculiar world this is.

Dr. Grund's interest in this project grew out of his interest in ancient languages. He studied Latin and Greek for six years as a high school student and as an undergraduate. He offers classes in Latin and Greek here at the college. In case anyone thought "the classics" were no longer being taught at the university level, Grund is teaching them in the original Latin and Greek. His interest in English literature centers on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dr. Grund graduated from Harvard before the revolution over the nature of what teaching English literature meant, and he sometimes feels uninterested in some of the current discourse in the discipline. Nevertheless, his scholarly work greatly benefits the college by earning RIC what Dr. Maureen Reddy, the Chair of the English Department, calls "an enhanced reputation." He is currently working on a volume of Renaissance tragedies.