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INTERVIEWER
Auden was concerned that the quality of the English language be preserved, and he hoped to help to do that with his writing.
PETER LEVI
I think it’s nonsense. Do you think that Ausonius should have written in Burgundian? . . . Ausonius is an excellent Latin poet, who was surrounded by what he regarded as barbarous Burgundians who put butter in their hair, a characteristic that he thought foul. What he chose to do was write lovely pale imitations of Virgil. Highly successful. In a kind of Latin that almost nobody was speaking then. Few people could have appreciated how good he was. Should he have learned a Germanic language, or Burgundian? Perhaps. I’m just trying to say that whoever you are, you’ve got to start from where you are. If you’re a sailor, and only know sailor’s language, well, write in it, for God’s sake.
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| Related Links |
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| Authors Mentioned |
| Horace, Virgil, T. S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, George Seferis, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Ausonius, John Berger, C. M. Bowra, Robert Browning, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Clare, John Donne, Nikos Gatsos, John Holloway, Randall Jarrell, David Jones, George Katsimbalis, Sir Walter Scott, William Shakespeare, Christopher Smart, Leo Tolstoy, Henry Vaughan, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats |
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