To say that the fourth-century biblical epic poet Juvencus is not as well known as he might be would be an understatement. McG.’s excellent new translation of his only surviving poem, the Evangeliorum libri quattuor (The Four Books of the Gospels), goes some way towards rectifying this defect.
It is true that Juvencus holds less intrinsic interest in exegetical and theological terms than his later followers such as Paulinus of Nola, who wrote an epyllion on John the Baptist, or Sedulius, the author of the five-book Paschale carmen. Those later works, however, would have been impossible without Juvencus, the initiator of a tradition of biblical poetry that not only endured but flourished until early modernity, culminating in Milton's Paradise Lost.
Like Milton's poem, McG.’s rendering of the ELQ is in blank verse, with wonderful effect, though the challenge is formidable: the iambic pentameter is a shorter line than the Latin dactylic hexameter, but McG. nevertheless maintains line-by-line translation. As he notes, this ‘necessitat[es] compression’ (p. 25). The resulting translation is not, therefore, ‘word for word’, but what it sacrifices by that lack it makes up for in poetic fluency and literary polish, while maintaining a fundamental faithfulness to Juvencus’ Latin text. One can get a sense of the foregoing from the opening lines of the Praefatio:
Now, McG.’s pentameters (p. 34):
The phrase mundi conpage must be paraphrased – but it is an awkward phrase even in Latin, and one might suggest that McG.’s rendering smoothes out the line in a way that does minimal violence to the source-text while improving its readability for an English audience.
The translation is preceded by a substantial introduction (pp. 1–33) that does an excellent job of setting up the poem and its author, about whom we know extremely little. McG. usefully situates the ELQ within the classical genre of epic, but also discusses the significant ways in which the author's Christian faith impinges upon his handling of the genre (‘[t]here will never be “pessimistic” readers of the ELQ as there are of the Aeneid’, p. 19).
As a biblical poet, Juvencus conforms much more closely to the biblical text than his epigones (McG. helpfully gives the references for each pericope in the margins), and in the main follows Matthew's Gospel. Nevertheless, he is at the same time a highly allusive poet. Thus there is immense value in McG.’s lengthy annotations (pp. 113–273). Here he tracks differences from Juvencus’ Old Latin text of the Bible and intertextual references to other works of poetry, particularly Virgil. The nature of the commentary does not permit extended analysis – though McG. often makes brief remarks that put readers on the scent of Juvencus’ allusive programme – but the notes prepare the ground for more work in this area in the future.
In sum, this volume, Juvencus’ first appearance in English, is excellent and will benefit newcomers and veterans of late Latin poetry alike.
