The whole world in a book

Landívar's Rusticatio Mexicana is part of a tradition of describing the whole world in a book. Anyway, some enormous chunk of it. Landívar's Latin poem on beavers reminded me that Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton wrote his own ode to the beaver* in his enormous Poly-Olbion (1613/1622), his attempt to describe all of England in verse - the history, the rivers, the animals, everything:

Being bodied like a boat, with such a mighty tail
As served him for a bridge, a helm, or for a sail,
When kind did him command the architect to play,
That his strong castle built of branchèd twigs and clay;

And then it goes on and on like that. And then on some more. Drayton claims the idea for the sled came from watching beavers drag branches across the snow.

The poly-whatever impulse goes back to Pliny, at least, but early modern writers really went to town with it. The all-time champion must be the 17th century German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher,** who wrote numerous books, on China, geology, music, and everything, and planned many, many more, mostly on enormous topics. If I remember correctly, one of his ideas was to write a book cataloguing the heights of all the trees in the world. Not all of the species of trees - all of the individual trees.

The idea is still alive. Here is Borges skewering Pablo Neruda's Cantos, in "The Aleph" (1945):

'Only once in my life have I had occasion to look into the fifteen thousand alexandrines of the Polyolbion, that topographical epic in which Michael Drayton recorded the flora, fauna, hydrography, orography, military and monastic history of England. I am sure, however, that this limited but bulky production is less boring than Carlos Argentino's similar vast undertaking. Daneri had in mind to set to verse the entire face of the planet, and, by 1941, had already dispatched a number of acres of the State of Queensland, nearly a mile of the course run by the River Ob, a gasworks to the north of Veracruz, the leading shops in the Buenos Aires parish of Concepción, the villa of Mariana Cambaceres de Alvear in the Belgrano section of the Argentine capital, and a Turkish baths establishment not far from the well-known Brighton Aquarium. He read me certain long-winded passages from his Australian section, and at one point praised a word of his own coining, the colour "celestewhite," which he felt "actually suggests the sky, an element of utmost importance in the landscape of the Down Under." But these sprawling, lifeless hexameters lacked even the relative excitement of the so-called Augural Canto. Along about midnight, I left.'

* In this case, a species of English (Welsh?) beaver, already extinct when Drayton was writing.

** For more on Kircher, I would go to Ingrid Rowland's The Ecstatic Journey, or the essays in Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, neither of which I have read.

Rafael Landívar, neo-Latin poet - shall I not now rush with spear upon the clever beavers

Neo-Latin literature* is the realm of specialists. A couple of books - Thomas More's Utopia (1516) and Erasmus's In Praise of Folly (1511) - are widely read, as they should be. What else? Harvard University Press has created a neo-Latin series to parallel their Loeb Classical Library, the I Tatti Renaissance Library. Pietro Bembo, Petrarch and Boccaccio's Latin work, Ficino's Platonic Theology in many, many volumes. I read reviews of these books with some interest, but I haven't been convinced that I should crack a spine myself. For specialists, mostly.

Andrew Laird's The Epic of America: An Introduction to Rafael Landívar's Rusticatio Mexicana (2007) is also for specialists, really. Landívar (1731-93) was a Jesuit priest, born in what is now Guatemala, educated in Guatemala and Mexico. He was a central figure in the small world of colonial humanism. When the Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish empire in 1767, Landívar fled to Italy, where he wrote his major poetic work, the Rusticatio Mexicana (1781). Laird's book consists of a long essay** about Landívar and his work, and a reprint of the Latin poem, with a facing-page English translation.

Rusticatio Mexicana is essentially imitative. Of what, though? The base is Virgil's agricultural poem, the Georgics, itself an imitation of Hesiod's Works and Days. This explains why a poem about Mexico by a Jesuit priest is full of references to Venus, Orpheus, Phoebus, and so on. But Landívar is late in the neo-Latin tradition, so he is not just imitating Virgil, but also numerous earlier imitations of Virgil, along with many other works. Laird's introduction is very useful for sorting this out.

The poem itself is a fifteen canto practical description of Spanish Central America. "The Lakes of Mexico", "Cochineal and Purple"***, "Beavers", "Sugar", "Birds" - those are some of the canto titles. I know, it sounds thrilling, but does the poem live up to its promise?

How could it. For modern readers, the interest in Virgil's Georgics is in the digressions, images, and inset stories, not in the descriptions of Roman agriculture. The pieces of the Rusticatio Mexicana are unfortunately mostly just what they say they are. The canto on "Sugar" even includes labeled engravings of sugar mills, which does not make for dynamite poetry:

Orbita (a) tune axem (b) tignis compacta profusum etc.
[L]et a wheel (a), supported by braces, encircle the long axle (b)...

There are exceptions. The canto on the 1759 eruption of the Jurullo volcano has characters and a narrative, and imitates Old Testament prophetic books rather than classical sources. Some of the natural history and anthropology is interesting. And the section on beavers is sort of hilarious. It borrows heavily not just from the Georgics' description of bees but also from Utopia. The beavers all work together in a sort of communist society, except for the ones who have been driven from the community for their "crimes". Here's an unusually vivid metaphor:

"As a deranged step-mother prepares a cup of poison for her son’s wife and amiably offers her the cup to drink, and the latter, unaware of dire peril, takes the deceptive drink and drains the cup of black death with great relish, thus the beavers, deceived by the treacherous gifts, exchange their peaceful life for a violent death.” p. 170

The real reason to read this book, which is obviously not for everyone: it's evocation of the world of educated, humanist, 18th century Spanish America, all new to me. Laird's book, and Landívar's poem, fill in a little corner of the historical map.

I heard about this book from the Classical Bookworm. Thanks for the tip.

* Post-medieval Latin. Not Roman, not Thomas Aquinas.

** My favorite part of Laird's essay is where he says that indifference to his work is "not very far removed from the bigotry and prejudice shown towards the Americas and their peoples, which Landívar and his compatriots encountered in Europe in the 1760s." p. 7. Ha! Neo-Latinist scholars in England play rough!

** While enjoying Renaissance paintings in the Uffizi, try to forget that the canvases are smeared with ground up beetles