March 20, 2005

Culture

Audio ergo sum By Paul Donovan

Si hunc libellum latine scriberem, quot lectores intellegerent? Which is how Vatican Radio, or Finnish Radio’s Friday-night news bulletin, might put it.

If this document were written in Latin, how many readers would understand it? Very few, I am sure. But, nil desperandum. Radio 3, the home of classical music, is doing its bit to rehouse classical studies.

On Saturday, at 10.40pm, it will broadcast 20 minutes with all the speech in Latin — extracts from Pliny’s Natural History, from dolphins and frogs to elephants, vultures, owls and cuckoos. The only translation for listeners will be specially composed and appropriately timed music (wet fingers on glass to accompany the description of whales, an Indian banjo for the crabs, and so on), juxtaposed with animal recordings from the BBC’s Natural History unit. There will be no English in the programme at all: for that, and more information about the author, who died observing the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD, you need to visit the website of the weekly series Between the Ears. As far as I can tell, this is, apart from language lessons, the first national radio programme based on speech that contains not a word of English. It is a tribute to Radio 3’s imagination and the persistence of Kate McAll, its producer. When she first proposed it, she got a rejection note back from her bosses that read: “Wonderful, mad, expensive. No.”

Dr Peter Jones of Newcastle University, the Spectator columnist and probably Britain’s best-known classicist, advised the two actors we shall hear on the correct Latin pronunciation. “I do think radio has a responsibility to produce slightly potty ideas to see how they run,” he says, “and to engage in occasional experiments that television, dominated by visuals, tends to resile from.

“In this particular programme, the listener is encouraged to make a connection between Latin and English partly through onomatopoeic music and partly through the choice of the Latin. Pliny’s ‘maximum est elephans’, for example, you might realise means ‘the elephant is the biggest creature’. These are connections that even the most illatinate can get.”

Professor Brian Sparkes, a retired archeologist and now president of the Classical Association, also approves: “I expect some listeners will say ‘What’s this funny language we’re listening to?’ And I wonder how much help Radio Times will give it. But there’s more Latin around than you might think.

It has been reintroduced into several primary schools, and about 3,000 people are studying Latin or Roman civilisation with the Open University. But the way it is taught has changed, with less emphasis on declining verbs and more emphasis on actually speaking it. It is taught as a language that can be spoken. So radio, where, obviously, you can hear it spoken, has a real role to play.”

Astonishingly detailed descriptions of bees, cuttlefish and nightingales made nearly 2,000 years ago; clips from the world’s biggest wildlife archive; original music with conch and drum and many other instruments. If ever a programme cried out for a daytime repeat, this is it. But Roger Wright, imperator of Radio 3, will probably agree to that only if enough people ask him. Carpe diem.