Christiad
Marco Girolamo Vida
James Gardner translation
I Tatti Renaissance Library
Harvard University Press, 20009

Marco Girolamo Vida’s Christiad, the life of Jesus told in a Virgilian epic poem, is exactly the sort of now-forgotten masterpiece Harvard’s sedately brilliant I Tatti Renaissance Library is ideally suited to rescue. Vida’s poem was commissioned by Pope Leo X no less, and even before it was published in 1535, its samizdat renown had led Leo’s successor, Pope Clement VII, to shower Vida with offices and honors and cash. The work was a huge success in its own day and was subsequently translated into virtually every language in Christendom, but it’s unknown today outside of scholarly circles.

This I Tatti volume aims to rectify that, at least in part. It sports a lively Introduction, very extensive notes, and a fascinating study of the work’s long reception (reception studies being de rigueur in all corners of the Renaissance field, it seems). And at the center is James Gardner’s prose translation of Vida’s poem itself. Gardner tries hard to capture the way Vida is trying hard to capture Virgil; the elaborate faux-classical periods are reproduced, as are the requisite elaborate similes, and there are plenty of florid set-piece speeches, as when Pontius Pilate is trying to talk sense into a crowd of bloodthirsty Jews:

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With one argument after another, he repeatedly tried to restrain their cruel spirit and unforgiving heart, but to no avail, and he vainly opposed them with fruitless efforts. The more he tried to reason with them, now in calm in pleading tones, now in sharp and threatening ones, the more he angered their insensate souls. Finally he said, “According to the vain and ancient superstition of your forefathers at the high holidays, I have been in the habit of liberating one of the many men who are imprisoned, of freeing him from his tight bonds. Will you not bid me free this innocent man to you? For whom should I rather release? Already there has been enough punishment and savagery. Either I release him, or you go on and lead him hence, and, as you wish, condemn this undeserving man to a harsh death without my aid.

You can tell several things about the Christiad from that passage. For instance, Vida imbibed the full measure of his culture’s anti-Semitism . And he’s fairly adept at conveying personalities (his Jesus is by turns confiding and almost hilariously prickly). And most of all, Gardner has rendered Vida’s epic poem in prose. This last decision is certainly predictable (I Tatti’s much older sister-series, the Loeb Classical Library, always renders its verse in prose), but I can’t help but think something’s been lost in the choice. Still, a gorgeously-produced and meticulously-edited Christiad is modern-day miracle enough for one season -– I’m content to wait patiently for somebody to attempt the versification.

—Ignazio de Vega