(Hint: No it’s not)

Watched The Einstein Factor this evening and the second contestant’s subject was the life and poetry of Wilfred Owen (more or less).

One of the poems mentioned — which of course it had to be — was Dulce et Decorum Est. Everyone – most of them very well-educated and perhaps even erudite – pronounced it “DOOLL-chay et d’-CORum est”.

Which is fair enough, but I think it is wrong, at least in the context of the poem itself.

Way back in the….well, more than a couple of minutes ago….I was sitting in an English tute at UNE. Wilfred Owen’s poetry – and this poem in particular – was the topic.

The tutor asked if anyone knew how the title was properly pronounced. I remember because this smarmy new chap, who was the only person I ever knew who had done Latin for the Leaving Certificate, showed the rest of us up by casually giving the correct answer. It wasn’t that he knew, exactly; it was his attitude of “well, of course, I thought everyone knew that, don’t they? (And by the way amn’t I clever?).” 

Anyway, his pronunciation was something like: “DOOLchet DECKerest”.

Our tutor nodded sagely, with an approving smile at the cleverboy, so I have no doubt it is correct. But why would it be different from the “normal” pronunciation? Is it for the scansion of the lines? Is it because accepted Latin pronunciation began changing sometime around the early 1900s? cf. Mr Chips’s joke about vicissim:

Headmaster to Chips: “This question of Latin pronunciation, for instance–I think I told you years ago that I wanted the new style used throughout the School. The other masters obeyed me; you prefer to stick to your old methods, and the result is simply chaos and inefficiency.”

At last Chips had something tangible that he could tackle. “Oh, that!” he answered, scornfully. “Well, I–umph–I admit that I don’t agree with the new pronunciation. I never did. Umph–a lot of nonsense, in my opinion. Making boys say ‘Kickero’ at school when–umph–for the rest of their lives they’ll say ‘Cicero’–if they ever–umph–say it at all. And instead of ‘vicissim’–God bless my soul–you’d make them say, ‘We kiss ‘im’! Umph–umph!” And he chuckled momentarily, forgetting that he was in Ralston’s study and not in his own friendly form room.

So this has been bugging me for hours. I haven’t found anything about it, any guidance on it, on the intertubes.

That is why I throw myself at your mercy, dearest and most appreciated blog-lurker. Please, if you know, tell me if I have come anywhere close to this special pronunciation. Tell me, if I am wrong, why I would have this memory? Or tell me that I am really stupid and old and losing it. I can take it [just don’t all rush in at once…].

 Just by the way, Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori means, more or less, “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”. Owen did not, you can imagine, subscribe to this view. Yet the same idea is still trotted out by such as George Bush (who are fairly confident that they are not about to be called upon to die for their country, either sweetly or fittingly) with terms like “sacrifice” and “honor” as some sort of justification for deaths in pointless, cynical wars.

My favorite Owen poem is Mental Cases. It’s about what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. There’s so much of it about these days¹…..

[….]

These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.

Memory fingers in their hair of murders,

Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.

Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,

Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.

[….]

etc…….

¹UPDATE: Some 300,000 of the 1.6 million US soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression or both, an independent study showed last month.