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Horatio Caesar Roger Vella: Properzju Eleġiji. Assisi, 2012. 107 pp.
The name Horatio Caesar Roger Vella does not need any introduction, and it is certainly familiar with the reading public of the Maltese islands. His name was immortalised for posterity with his translation from Latin of The Earliest Description of Malta: Lyons 1536, published way back in 1980.
Vella has since published various scholarly works. Most noteworthy of these are the translation, from Greek into English, of a poem written by a slave who lived on our islands in the 12th century.
Vella’s latest contribution to Maltese literature is his translation from Latin of Propertius’s Elegies.
The man in the street would show absolutely no interest whatsoever in such a translation from the ancient language of the Romans into our own Maltese tongue. However, the same cannot be said for those who enjoy reading classical works in their own native language, due to the fact that they have no command of the original one.
If readers are to appreciate Propertius’s Elegies in Maltese, they will need to have some kind of background information about the author. A quick search on the internet will provide the general reader with the basic information.
Propertius was a Latin elegiac poet of the Augustan age. He was born around 50–45BC in Assisium, the present Assisi, and died shortly after 15BC.
Propertius’s surviving work comprises four books of Elegies. He was friends with the poets Gallus and Virgil and, like them, enjoyed the patronage of Maecenas.
If readers are to appreciate Propertius’s Elegies in Maltese, they will need to have some kind of background information about the author
Thanks to the latter, he could also count the emperor Augustus as a patron. Propertius fell into obscurity in the Middle Ages, but was rediscovered during the Italian Renaissance along with the other elegists. Petrarch’s love sonnets certainly show the influence of his writing, and Aeneas Silvius (the future Pope Pius II) titled a collection of his youthful elegies Cinthia.
There are also a set of Propertian Elegies attributed to the English writer Ben Jonson, though the authorship of these is disputed. Goethe’s 1795 collection of Elegies also shows some familiarity with Propertius’s poetry.
I imagine it would have been hard for Vella to find a Maltese publisher interested to take into consideration the publication of such an archaic piece of Latin literature rendered into our own language. This is due to the fact that the amount of people interested in this particular field of the arts is not numerous at all.
However, the same argument could not be applied to the Accademia Properziana del Subasio, based in a street named after Francesco Bernardone, or rather our St Francis of Assisi, which city also witnessed the birth of another great Italian poet, Propertius himself.
The publication will please lovers of Roman mythology, which is one of the immortal heritages the Romans inherited from the Greeks, whom they very much admired. Defences to Roman gods and heroes such as Venus and Prometheus, and even historical figures such as Augustus Caesar and his favourite poet Virgil, abound throughout the entire text.
As I went through the book, I could not help remembering Victor Xuereb’s translation of the Odyssey, which I had read and studied for my Sixth Form Systems of Knowledge examination. The Accademia Propertiana of the Umbrian city of Assisi is to be applauded for taking it into its stride to publish on Italian soil such a renowned classical work in our Maltese native language.
Genuine love for its glorious son Propertius must have been the one and only aim behind such an enterprise.
On the other hand, Vella is to be congratulated for entering upon such an endeavour.
Although it is not likely that the book will sell in thousands, Vella’s work is another feather in his cap and stands to be counted ad futuram rei memoriam.