One of Donne's missing epigrams?
Featuring probably the first publication of what might be one of them (though also might not be)
John Donne must certainly have written a great deal of Latin verse, both as part of his education, and, very probably, in the years afterwards. He lived and wrote during pretty much the peak of Latin verse culture in England, at a time when the regular composition of Latin verse was, for boys and young men, a routine part of educational experience and of public life. But only a tiny number of his occasional Latin poems have survived.1 Early modern manuscripts, however, are brimful of contemporary Latin verse — there are tens of thousands of examples, from what was essentially a bilingual literary culture — and this material has been very little studied. Even the catalogues and finding aids of specialist research libraries and archives generally contain little to no information on the early modern Latin poetry to be found in their manuscripts. It is pretty likely, in other words, that more of Donne’s Latin verse is out there waiting to be identified.2
Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection, BC MS Lt q 18, however, contains a bilingual epigram — that is, a Latin & English epigram pair — in which the Latin is plausibly attributed to Donne. This is not my ‘discovery’: scholars are sometimes guilty of claiming to have ‘discovered’ archival items when all they really did was read the catalogue carefully. I noticed the attribution because I was working through images of this manuscript and systematically transcribing all the (very large number!) of Latin first lines. (Suddenly seeing ‘Dr Donne’ in tiny script in the margin is just the sort of thing to keep you going in these circumstances.) But if you dig around enough in the excellent Leeds online catalogue, the attribution is duly noted. It’s quite typical, unfortunately, that the database records the English translation only, even though it is the Latin poem (not the English) which is attributed to ‘Dr Donne’. So as far as I know, this little bit of Latin, plausibly though not certainly by John Donne himself, has not been published before.3
Here is what might be Donne’s little poem. It’s a single elegiac couplet, and really not much more than a squib:
Jactura Ingenii non pangam Carmina, Pauci
Mille quidem numeris plus valuere sales.
The accompanying translation runs:
Nere will I Rhime at Witts Expence:
Better loose ten Rhimes, then one sense.
The poem is found in a section of the manuscript titled ‘Other epigrams ancient and moderne’, arranged in parallel rows with the Latin texts on the left and the English versions on the right. As the title implies, the Latin texts are drawn from a wide range of sources, ranging from Lucan, Seneca, Petronius and Ausonius to a selection of fashionable contemporary epigrams by authors such as William Alabaster, John Owen, George Buchanan, Hugo Grotius and Jacopo Sannazaro. This might sound like a rather unlikely mix but the overall selection is actually very typical of its moment. Several are unattributed, but where the (unknown) compiler does attribute the Latin to a named author, the attributions are largely accurate. This is what I mean by a ‘plausible’ attribution: it’s found in a manuscript of the right sort of date (probably before about 1650), and in which other similar attributions are mostly correct.
All the English translations seem to be made by the compiler of the manuscript himself. (Although the manuscript is anonymous, we can be fairly confident it is a man, probably of middle age.4) From the Donne epigram he has made a neat and memorable English couplet, true to the spirit of the original, though not a very close translation. A more literal rendering of the Latin would be something like: “I shall not compose poems at the expense of wit; indeed, a few witty phrases are worth more than a thousand numbers.” Such a clunky translation collapses the delicate distinction between ingenii, which means wit in the sense of intelligence or cleverness, wit as a characteristic; and sales (literally, ‘salty things’) which means rather ‘witty sayings’, ‘examples of wit’. Another hard-to-translate term here is numeris, ‘numbers’: this is the standard term for referring to metrical quantities in Latin. So the Latin suggests that the wit of a poem matters much more than whether it is perfectly metrical.
In fact, this epigram attributed to Donne reflects rather closely Jonson’s famous verdict on his verse, as delivered to William Drummond of Hawthornden: ‘That Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging.’5 Donne had a reputation for metrical irregularity in his own English verse, especially the early Satires. This might make us a bit suspicious: an epigram on prioritising wit over metrical regularity might sound like the sort of thing Donne could or should have said, and might easily be attributed to him, even if it’s not actually by him. There’s a lot of this kind of attribution-by-association in manuscript verse culture, just as there is online, and epigrams, in particular, often circulated anonymously or with a wide range of attributions. To be more confident of Donne’s authorship, we’d want to find other copies of the same epigram, also attributed to Donne, and preferably in manuscripts which did not have any obvious connection with the Leeds one. But false or dubious attributions can be as revealing as genuine ones: even if this poem is not in fact by Donne himself, the fact that our compiler believed it was tells us something about the reputation of his poetry in (probably) the first couple of decades after his death.
Both known examples are verse inscriptions in books in Donne’s own hand, of epigrams addressed to the author of the book in question: one to Joseph Scaliger (dating from after 1583), one to Richard Hooker (dating from around 1603). The Latin prose epitaph Donne wrote for his wife Ann More, who died in August 1617, is also extant, as well as a few Latin prose inscriptions. A Latin poem on Igantius Loyola found in several manuscripts was thought for a while to be by Donne, because it is ascribed to him in one source, but is in fact by the doctor and accomplished Latin poet Raphael Thorius. Tantalisingly, we do have what purports to be an English translation by Jasper Mayne of a set of Donne’s Latin epigrams, published in 1652, but no Latin poem corresponding to any of those ‘translations’ has yet been found.
Personally, I suspect that some might be lurking disguised by a playful Latinization of Donne’s name. We know that he enjoyed playing on the meaning of his name in his English verse, and ‘Donne’ could be Latinized as, for instance, ‘Factus’, ‘Factum’, ‘Perfectus’, ‘Perfectum’ and so on.
If anyone is aware of a prior publication, do please let me know and I’ll add the reference here.
Women did compose, collect and translate Latin verse, especially epigrams, though they did so less commonly than men. This manuscript, however, contains a large later section, in the same hand, of “Epigrammes by mee long since made in Latin and of late Englished”, which contains 71 Latin epigrams with translations. Such extensive Latin verse composition would be very unusual for a woman, though typical for a boy or young man at school or university (“long since”), where such composition was a standard set exercise. In addition, the particular choice of classical and post-classical extracts made by this compiler is very typical of a university milieu of the first part of the seventeenth century.
In the ‘Conversations with Drummond’ dating from 1618, though not published till much later. There’s a charming short article about the Conversations by Anthony Madrid for the Paris Review available online here. Dryden, who was certainly thinking primarily about Donne’s Satires, made some similar remarks.