Books: Ecce Milnennium

WINNIE ILLE Pu (121 pp.)—A Latin Rendition of Winnie-the-Pooh—A. A. Milne, translated by Alexander Lenard —Dutton ($3).

Latin scholars, whenever they peek out from behind their soup-stained neckties and that untidy mess of irregular verbs, seem to be nice old dears. Take Alexander Lenard, M.D., a 50-year-old Hungarian linguist who for the last eight years has been teaching and farming in a small town near Sāo Paulo, Brazil. When he first read A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, he apparently thought of all those poor little children in ancient Rome who would never be able to read it, and he felt just awful. There was only one thing to do: translate it for them. So he did. Unfortunately, publication in ancient Rome turned out to be impractical, so Dr. Lenard paid for his book’s first edition himself. Surprisingly, there was a lot of interest in the modern world, and finally, the translator turned to the U.S. He had obviously heard that the U.S. was a prosperous country with a crib in every nursery.

Published this week, Winnie Ille Pu proves to be a Latinist’s delight, the very book that dozens of Americans, possibly even 50, have been waiting for. For the weary pedagogue, home from The Gallic War, it provides surcease of solecism and a welcome chuckle. It might even make a suitable Latin text in a progressive school.

Classic, Medieval. On the whole, the translation is excellent (see box). In fact, it is superior to the English original in at least one respect: Milne’s occasionally cloying cuteness cannot be rendered in the sober Latin tongue. The tone of the translation is innocently serious, childlike rather than childish, and its style is graceful and frequently inspired. Milne’s names and phrases take on a rich new intonation in Lenard’s Latin. Heffalumpum (for Heffalump) sounds like the name of a dirty German town transliterated by Tacitus, lor (for Eeyore) might be a monster out of a Persian legend.

The language Translator Lenard uses is generally of Tiberian vintage, seldom earlier than Augustus, seldom later than Pliny, but the verse forms he employs are those of medieval doggerel, which he writes with distinction.

No Toast, No Butter. Now and then, of course. Dr. Lenard suffers a slip of the stylus. Forgivably enough, he fumbles a number of Milne’s choicer puns (“ambush” as a bush, “issue” as a sneeze), and the great gag about Piglet’s grandfather. Trespassers W. somehow just lies there in Latin. Furthermore, panistostatus cum butyro, though verbally correct, makes no sense at all in the Roman context as a translation of “buttered toast.” According to Dr. Frederick L. Santee, a leading U.S. Latinist, the Romans had no toast and no word for it, and though they had a word for butter (borrowed from the Greek), they never used the stuff. Why not just panis cum olio?

But then, on the other hand, why look a gift bear in the mouth? With the holiday season at hand, the book suggests some redoubtable opportunities for Christmasmanship—what better gift for the child who has everything? And for just any old reader with two years of Latin somewhere in his past and Junior’s copy of Winnie-the-Pooh in his other hand, the Lenard translation will readily provide a week or so of verbal fun and fireside games—a contribution to nursery literature that can only be compared to E. L. Kerney’s translation of Alice in Wonderland into Esperanto.