Abstract: BOOK REVIEWS Recognizing Persius. By KENNETH J. RECKFORD. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. x + 240. Cloth, $45.00 / £30.95. ISBN 978–0–691–14141–1. Don’t even think of recognizing Persius from the gaunt Louvre Chrysippus glowering from the dust jacket; and as a likeness of Kenneth Reckford, forget it, that’s just as bad a joke. Persius surfed briefly on the youth surge of glitzy Neronian Rome; R. is the oldand -new emeritus of Chapel Hill, playing drama queen down the decades and perennially funsome. Neither of them match the icon. Pooh, Oz and Tolkien have kept as firm a grip on R.’s literary soul as the grand chain Homer-Virgil-Dante-Eliot-Housman. Trying to get Old Comedy right on stage as a student kicked off a life project in and on theatre, taking in Euripides and Plautus, translation, scholarship , teaching, direction, production, in thoroughgoing performativity . R. hasn’t stopped getting Latin poetry to leap from the page and into everyone in the vicinity, and doesn’t aim to any time soon. This latest instalment on the offbeat verse of the Roman satirists sits beside the Horace of 1969 (one product seeded by the 1957 PhD, Horace, Augustan and Epicurean), and I dare say R. has a Juvenal in his grasp; but dry old stick? Never. It’s easy to recognize in this perpolished Persius a teenager’s formative induction into early ‘50s Harvard humanism, specifically inspired by Satire lectures from RAB (Robert A. Brooks), and then catalysed by (Cedric) Whitman, whence R.’s specially distinctive twist on artistic pedagogy through Aristophanes-accented theatricality . The 1962 essay “Studies in Persius” has been a big landmark for me since I started in showbiz, and so it will be for Latinists to come, through its good-as-new incarnation as first chapter in the just published bulging volume Persius and Juvenal in the Oxford Readings series (edited by Maria Plaza, and hailed in Susanna Braund’s introduction ). Recognizing Persius represents the honed version of the Martin Classical Lectures of 1999, “In Search of Persius,” retaining the title for the “Prologue” and the original quadripartition, but energetically re-thought since, in the book’s final phase of gestation. Thus the notes for Chapter 2 at p. 193 n. 1 record in full the press reader’s “critical advice,” to stoke up the “performance theme” apparently then in danger of subsiding after Chapter 1: music indeed to R.’s ears! If R. were his own reviewer, he’d be honour-bound to let us know how much we readers are missing from the original gig at Oberlin; he always jovially loves up “presence,” to the point where he might 278 BOOK REVIEWS pass as less than enthused with verbal ebullience in the dance of print. Between them, revelling in the lecture-room scenario and packing away close reading into endnotes could risk suggesting that philology isn’t where it’s at—but that (if literary biography is back) would mean seriously mis-wrecognizing R. The Prologue sets out the book’s critical project. R. supposes there are such things as “cycles” in criticism. Recent postmodern distraction and fragmentation “may … help us find our way back … to a reconsideration of older, still vital questions about poetry and poets” (p. 10). Running past reader-response, reader-reception, and esp. performance theory leaves R. longing to “be there,” juggling enjoyment at first encounter, letting Persius grow on him as both parties change through reengagement, and “…if we will just read Persius’ Satires aloud as they were meant to be read…” (p. 13). It’s R.’s privilege to decide what impact all the deals that’ve gone down since “that course back in Spring 1951” have made on his version of Persius , but I have to say right away that “specialists” won’t miss the recuperative drive powering this “intuitive and empirical” presentation . R. has stayed receptive through the variously discomposing efforts submitted since he took those first steps towards what became body criticism (“Hogarthian scenes of decay, suffering, and death,” p. 87), but the postulates re-emerge here just as was olim. To reward attention, the verse satirist must write...
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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