The story of the Latin Pooh M y Latin library is the only one increasing. It seems that the books of Petronius, Apuleius, and Ausonius have discovered my valley and flock together on my desk, under it, and around my bed. They have a long past and certainly a great deal of experience. Perhaps they remember that their own world was struck by a catastrophe, which appeared to be the final one. And while the books in the centers of culture disappeared, those which had fled in due time to the back country escaped destruction. Valleys in the Pyrenees preserved a few. Others fled from the borders of Scotland to Ireland and survived the darkest ages. Now the outskirts of civilization are in even remoter areas; perhaps Donna Irma is one of them. Apart from the aims of the books themselves, I must admit that I called upon them to help me in a particular enterprise. I hesitate to speak about it. My friends, to whom I have confessed having this hobby, prefer to call it my obsession. They regard me as though I had told them I was going to build an exact replica of the Cathedral of Milan with matches and make a living by exhibiting it. It has been suggested that I take up fishing or stamp collecting instead. I feel I had better explain how it came about that inside of the wall of boards I built another one of grammars and dictionaries and retreated, rather than only one century like the other inhabitants of the valley, almost twenty. It was difficult to live through the war in an Axis country. "Anyone who does not lose his reason in the face of certain events has none to lose," says Lessing. Taking the wise ostrich as an example, I tried my method: not to touch printed material issued after the French Revolution. In the particular fields of medicine, this decision forced me to read the old Latin books of the wise physicians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The untapped treasure of bedside talk of yore, their anecdotes, superstitions, and hypermodern clinical wisdom enchanted me. After a while I felt at home in their mother tongue: humanists' Latin. It is a strange language, known by few. It is not pure Ciceronian - those doctors cut into the feeling flesh and did not pass their nights studying classical poets. It was even less the Church's Latin-the Latin of the priests, who used to say, "Three doctors, at least two atheists." It was the language of awakening Occidental science. Copernicus, publishing his treatise on the revolutions of the celestial orbs, used it as perfectly as Vesalius, who published, in the same year, his book about the fabric of the human body. It is a language which may appear to a classicist as combined - to quote one of them - from "Chaucerian, Shakespearian and Tobacco- Road usage." It contains words which make professors of philology shudder, like hallux for the big toe ... but it is the language Gilbert used in the first scientific treatise on magnetism, Harvey on circulation, Newborn on the calculus, Morgagni on pathological anatomy. It has influenced the language and the thinking of scientists down to our own day (doctors still obstinately use hallux) and even the first paper on non-Euclidian geometry appeared in it. Scientists know little Latin today; classicists know less about science. The language that humanists made into an unparalleled means of understanding is appreciated by very few. In a Europe torn by internal strife, witnessing a new and perfected barbarism, I found consolation in Erasmic Latin and came to love it. Reading these old Latin books does not really lead us back into antiquity. The language of the learned in ancient Rome was Greek. It leads us into our own, private past, into good old Europe, into the happy centuries of Voltaire and Bach, when every learned person wrote and told stories and jokes in Latin, the language which today appears to many only an expression of sets of complicated rules. I felt bad enough among my contemporaries. I tried to enter another society of men: the timeless society of humanists. They accepted me with good grace. I could chat with them in a common mother tongue: Latin, mixed up from phrases of Cicero and Plautus, Terence and Martial, unheard of in the Forum Romanum, but alive every time you open a scientific book printed before the French Revolution. I felt I was accepted into this society as a reader, a passive member, and sometimes, in ambitious moments, I hoped I could become a full member: one who had written a Latin book himself! The relatively peaceful times in Rome finished abruptly in September, I943. Overnight a situation developed which not even prophets of the rank of Nostradamus could have foreseen. Rome was defended by the arch-enemy, the Germans, and attacked by her friends, the Anglo-Americans. General Kesselring sat in the belly of Horace's beloved Mount Soracte, listened to his private Don Cossack choir, and phoned into town when he wanted hostages shot. Arabs in French uniforms, Afrikaans-speaking Bushmen, Texans and English-speaking Japanese fought their way from Cassino up. Germans with emblems showing a jumping tiger and the inscription "Free India," Fascists in newly invented uniforms roamed the town. My only protective paper-resistance fighters seek the protection of paper walls - was a document issued by the Royal Hungarian Legation, which represented no king at a court that had no monarch either. It was not much more fake than the credentials of the missing minister. Meanwhile, I had to live on something, and as times were far too dramatic for people to be sick, I taught English. "They will come in a fortnight," was the watchword of all who waited, and learning English seemed to hasten liberation. Rich people even offered a piece of bread and cheese for a lesson! On a particularly hungry autumn day I got a new pupil. He spoke the melodious accent of Venice and said, "I know no English at all. We had it in school and you know what schools teach. I hate grammar. I do not want to memorize words. But I have to talk to Allied authorities, once they are in Rome." "When do you think they will come?" I asked. "In a month or so." "Yes, sir," I said, surprised to find a pessimist. Actually the Allies did not get to Rome until more than eight months later. "We start tomorrow at eight." "Yes, sir." "And you choose me a book." "Yes, sir." I chose. My choice was greatly facilitated by the fact that I had only one -namely, Alan Alexander Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh. I loved that book so much that I had even forgotten who had lent it to me. I dived into it to see if I could use it. Soon I was relieved to see that I could. The book contains remarks about the present and expected weather, a subject which I felt would be a perfect introduction to conversation with British staff officers, though I was not quite sure about the American attitude in this matter. The book contained information about the transmission of messages by air, by means of bottles, or by whistling in a particular way. It contained a plan, pure General Staff style, for capturing someone or something by means of deception. Finally there was a banquet with an appropriate speech one might deliver if honored in a particular way. "Here is the book I have chosen from among many," I lied next morning at eight o'clock sharp. We started with the chapter on the Heffalump, as I held the conversation between Pooh and Piglet as essential, in case my friend made contact with senior officers: "Piglet said, 'lf you see what I mean, Pooh,' and Pooh said, 'lt's just what I think myself, Piglet,' and Piglet said, 'But, on the other hand, Pooh, we must remember,' and Pooh said, 'Quite true, Piglet, although I had forgotten it for the moment."' We made speedy progress. When we reached the Cunning Trap, I already knew that rny pupil had been sent by the underground of Venice in order to obtain arms from the Allies. The day Piglet took his bath Monty left the command of the Eighth Army. The Allies seemed stuck at Cassino very much like Pooh in Rabbit's door. My pupil's English improved rapidly, although it was I who was getting slenderer and slenderer. Eeyore's balloon exploded and the island of Leros fell to the Germans. Roo took a swim and Leipzig went up in flames. When finally Pooh received his pencil-case my friend said, "No more lessons." "The irregular verbs . . . " I objected. "I have to leave. Besides, I think my English is good enough by now." I did not meet Pietro Ferraro again until after the war, after the ending which was a happy one for all of us who had not already been shot. He had received the arms, and had been parachuted back into Venice, where he had led the insurrection and prevented the Germans from carrying out their sabotage plan. He had been awarded the highest Italian decoration, the Medal of Gold. "I had no difficulty in treating with the British," he said. "On the contrary. They complimented me on my English." So Winnie-the-Pooh had helped Winnie Churchill to win the war. He was not mighty enough to win the peace. It was one of the most depressing postwar phenomena that peace wouldn't come. Italy became more and more crowded. Half a million persons arrived regularly every year, without passports, without knowing the language, waiting for food and jobs, and nothing could be done about it, because the government was against birth control. I did not feel tempted by the idea of crossing the Iron Curtain in the wrong direction. Therefore I applied to the IRO, the International Refugee Organization, to bring me into a peaceful country across the water. Even big organizations disappear without a trace, as if ferns had overgrown their tombs. Nobody will ever dig through the tons of their records to write their histories. Expressionless figures do not tell the story. The DPs -Displaced Persons-have disappeared even more untraccably. They have become just plain people again. They have tried to forget and most of them have managed to. Many will not praise the IRO. Neither the overpaid Allied executives nor the terribly underpaid displaced employees were in a particular hurry to get things done. Saturdays and Sundays, and on all Italian, American, British, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish holidays, the whole organization slept. Much of the rest of the time was consumed in waiting - waiting for commissions to come, for regulations to be issued, for people to pass from black lists to gray ones, from the grays to whites, for the world to forget what the Nazis had done or to realize what the Communists wanted to do. The Displaced Person meanwhile passed his time sitting in a stinking camp, listening to loudspeakers shouting in twenty languages, living under conditions that human society ordinarily reserves for burglars or worse, so that they shall think and repent. The condition of the inmates - I mean those cared for - was worsened by their deep conviction that food and clothing destined for them were stolen, that corruption was widespread, and that the records were part of the functionaries' conspiracy to conceal the facts from posterity. I have no proofs of corruption I could convince a jury with, but it is my private opinion that if, instead of having an organization, the United Nations had furnished every Displaced Person with a first-class ticket on a luxury liner to whatever place he chose to go to, they would have saved a great lot of money. Yet I would say the IRO worked wonders. They shipped about a million persons into countries which did not want them. New citizens are admitted everywhere via baby boom. All other ways are highly selective. The IRO was greatly embarrassed by the lists of persons wanted by the receiving countries. The Displaced Persons were displaced because they were unwanted where they came from. The bulk of them were "intellectuals"-small businessmen, doctors, lawyers, judges, teachers, ex-officers, civil servants. No overseas country had asked for such. Canada wanted specialists in the cultivation of sugar beets. South Africa wanted personnel for a lobster- packing plant, possibly of Anglo-Saxon extraction; the IRO was expected to find them among the refugees from Central and Eastern Europe. Australia asked for people to pass two years "at the Australian government's pleasure," eventually helping the Australian contingent in South Korea to clear mine fields. The exclusion lists were longer. The Australians were absolutely noninclined to admit single women past forty (and quickly sent back one who had passed her fortieth birthday on board the ship, which had been held up for two days because of smallpox cases). The United States excluded all who were suspected of present or past tuberculosis, as if antibiotics had never been invented. Brazil excluded doctors, barbers, streetcar motormen, syphilitics, and non-Aryans - a somewhat strange list, especially if we consider the high number of syphilitics already present and active, and the fact that the times of official Axis sympathies were supposed to be over, and that non-Aryans of various colors form the majority in most Brazilian states. That's where the IRO came in brilliantly. This oversized, inefficient machinery solved the difficulties in a genial way. The war had been the heyday of illegality. The daily production of laws and rules had created the most perfect chaos in history. Words like "law," "documents" "certificate," had lost their sense. What law should enjoy validity if those of humanity are trampled on every day? What was the sense of a certificate, when people were shot because the birth certificate of their grandmother was found wanting? The policy of the IRO very rightly held that sick papers had to be cured. The most efficient office was the one which provided people with appropriate names, grandfathers to please the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Brazil, birthdays to satisfy the Minister of Labor in Canberra. Judges of the Supreme Court of a Central European republic were supplied with certificates that they were experienced lobster-packers. Chest films were rechristened; positive Wassermann tests changed owners. People departed to faraway shores and became human beings again. The very few who were still leaving Hungary had to furnish two documents to the authorities there, showing that they were trustworthy Communists and hopelessly ill. The IRO furnished them with two equally important papers proving that they were safe anti-Communists and perfectly healthy. There were only a few hopeless cases-high and well-known Nazi functionaries with SS marks tattooed under their armpits; the IRO could not handle them and sent them over to the Pontifical Commission for Refugees. Their problems were solved there. Who could deny the Vatican the right to rechristen people, to open the way of repentance to black sheep or shirts? Argentina took them willingly. As I mentioned, I chose Brazil because it looked verdant and spacious on the map. Eventually, the IRO dumped me with several hundred similar agronomists, food chemists, and coffee-planting experts from the old Hapsburg monarchy into a sort of shabby coal freighter and we were marooned on the so-called Isle of Flowers in the Bay of Rio. The island is certainly not an attractive sample of the free world. It got some publicity later on, when the Hungarian freedom fighters arrived. They staged a revolt against the stench, hunger, lack of water and sanitary facilities, and a few succeeded in fleeing to England. Others wanted to return to Hungary. They were called "Communist agitators." After a week I seemed no closer to leaving the island than when I landed there. It was Carnival time, and the police had other things to do besides taking fingerprints in hell. In life and novels there are situations where actors or readers know no way out. Then the page turns and something happens. I have mentioned my employment at a lead mine. This came about when on my tenth day on the Isle of Flowers a gentleman came ashore there and announced that he was looking for personnel for such a mine. He wanted, arnong others, a male nurse. "Is the mine surrounded by water? " was all I asked. "No, it is in the forest." That was reason enough to sign up. I wouldn't recommend the mine to doctors. For the pay of a nurse, one has to deploy the abilitics of a universal specialist. There is everything to be treated: daily knifings, explosions, gas poisoning, dysentery, leprosy, a wide spectrum of tropical diseases, while the rest you may find in the index of handbooks of pathology. Besides these diseases, the workers suffer from lead poisoning. Their children's worms and hereditary syphilis have to be treated as well, and an occasional childbirth enlivens the picture. I would rather suggest the mine to a film scenarist in quest of unusual surroundings. The combination of the dangers and primitiveness of the forest with industrial dirt and dangers is unique. At least I doubt if there are other lead mines in which miners are bitten by rattlesnakes. As to the miners, they were also a chosen lot. Landless caboclos, fugitives from the drought in northeastern Brazil and the police in Sao Paulo, and a few greenhorns from the Isle of Flowers were those condemned to lead poisoning for a wage whose equivalent in U.S. money would have been less than ten cents an hour. One of the few who couldn't complain was my humble self. Half of the mine belonged to a French company and there were three French engineers. Two of them had daughters, and the daughters needed somebody to teach them Latin, English, mathematics, and history. Besides being a doctor with the salary of an orderly, I became a well-paid professor of philology and science. I hadn't wasted my time reading French novels for a lifetime and Latin medical books for fifteen years.... My former teaching experience having been limited to expounding and commenting on the deeds, poems, and adventures of Edward Bear, better known as Winnie-the-Pooh, I started with Milne's book, still the only volume representing English literature in my scanty library. The young ladies, having passed their early life in a lead mine in Argentina, had not known the book and were curious and enthusiastic. They were far less curious, let alone enthusiastic, about Latin grammar. They found that five declensions were far too much and cases like the ablative entirely useless. Eeyore, who had lost his tail, touched them more deeply than their compatriot Vercingetorix, who had lost a battle and his life. "Is there no Latin book like Winnie-the-Pooh?" asked Anne, the prettiest of them all. I could have told them about Petronius and Apuleius, but I realized that their lovely fables were not the ones I was expeeted to recommend to jeunes filles en fleur. " l'II try to find one," I promised vaguely. That night I sat down and tried to translate the story of the Heffalump, which we were just then reading, into the old, old doctors' Latin. I do not dare to say that my translation was brilliant, but it worked. The mademoiselles were ready to follow the events around the Cunning Trap even in spite of ablatives and gerunds. Even the Chief Engineer, a splendid humanist himself, and thanks to his education in Greek lead mines a far better Grecist than myself, liked both the Bear, which had helped him to live when a prisoner of the Boches, and the translation. When he left for Paris he sent me Quicherat's great and massive French-Latin dictionary. Now I felt under obligation to continue. The short spells between knifings and accidents belonged to classical philology. This idyllic life came to a sudden end when the manager who had hired me on the island fired me, apparently on a quick decision. I cannot reproach him. I had obstinately suggested to the lead-poisoned miners that they get the hell out of the place, although he had repeatedly warned me that the mine was not a welfare institution and that it was a hard job to find new personnel. Sadly I said "Au revoir" and left for Sao Paulo, the immigrants' hope city. Here I soon discovered that it was I who could not get out of the "Cunning Trap." The Latin Pooh--or Pu-had started as a necessity, had become a hobby, and was by now an obsession. I had asked myself a question that only years could answer: Is it possible to find all the phrases in the story of Pooh and his friends in the extant Latin literature? Knowing the book by heart, I started to read my way first through Horace, later Livy... and obstinately, like a dope addict, through more and more. The text slowly became a mosaic of fragments, ever more similar to those texts Gutenberg's invention had poured all over Europe, or at least the Republic of Humanists. Here I am now with the manuscript of the Latin bear, the manuscript I always consider finished until a new old author lands on my desk. I send the text to faraway friends and I keep receiving touching, discouraging letters. "Children read no Latin, grown-ups do not read children's books," a wise publisher wrote. "Maybe you have too much spare time, but we have not," was the reaction of another. My generous friend, the Chief Engineer, seems to be the only one who likes the idea.... I tried to write a letter to a few publishers. I considered it a masterpiece of argumentation. "The parents of good students will buy the book for their children as a gift. The parents of bad students will buy it so that their children will develop a liking for Latin. People who have studied Latin will buy it so that they will finally have a use for their Latin. People who did not study Latin will buy it to find out what Latin is like." I got only one simple, very short reply: "I am not crazy". On long Sunday afternoons I browse through my Latin authors, correcting the text here and there, replacing a line with one I think more suitable, hoping that there will be, among the countless publishers the world over, a crazy one.

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