Holt Parker is Professor of Classics at the University of Cincinnati and a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.
Antonio Beccadelli's The Hermaphrodite is the type of book that
corrupts you. At the same time, it reminds you that there is
something quite delicious about being corrupted. There is that
vivacious tingle as one feels one's inhibitions slipping away. The
mind fills with fantasies you never knew were lurking there. It is
dangerous and exciting. But don't take my word for it. Following
the publication of this collection of startlingly sexually explicit
Latin poems in 1425-26, there was an outcry from moralists.
Effigies of Beccadelli were burned in Bologna and Milan. Pope
Eugenius IV threatened to excommunicate anyone found reading The
Hermaphrodite. The work is honey to a decadent sensibility. In the
19th century, one of Beccadelli's biggest fans was Leonard
Smithers, up-market pornographer and publisher of Aubrey Beardsley
and Oscar Wilde. These poems are vivid and raunchy. If there is a
tendency to associate the Italian Renaissance only with high
culture, then Beccadelli reminds you that Renaissance thinkers were
all too familiar with the gutter...An ambitious scholar, Beccadelli
intended his poetry to make a mark. The Hermaphrodite is the type
of topsy-turvy virtuoso piece Renaissance humanists loved. This
volume of poems juxtaposes clever and elegant Latin with filthy
subject matter. It is a shiny, gilded dung-heap...Holt Parker's
translation deserves much praise for the way that it combines
clarity, accuracy and artistry. Producing this translation was not
easy. Beccadelli's Latin is not always terribly clear. Sometimes it
is difficult to work out precisely what is being done to whom or
who is sticking what into where. Beccadelli's contemporaries could
rely on their shared fantasies to guide them through the syntax.
They knew how these scenes played out. We, on the other hand, have
only the rules of grammar to help us and sometimes they fall short.
Parker steers his way deftly through every ambiguity. His choices
in interpretation are sensible and well argued...The final poem is
one of the saddest. In about 1435, facing increasing condemnation
for his work and abandoned by some of his most important defenders,
Beccadelli wrote a poetic recantation of The Hermaphrodite. In a
poem dedicated to Cosimo de' Medici, Beccadelli writes that he is
"now ashamed that I taught various filthy acts and impious ways of
Venus" and castigates the ambition that made him think that he
could establish an immortal name with such a work. There is
something quite pitiful in seeing such a lively, irreverent spirit
crushed by conventional morality. This poem is the real
obscenity.
*Australian Literary Review*
Ask a Question About this Product More... |