The dim protagonist of Evelyn Waugh’s postwar novel Scott-King’s Modern Europe teaches classics at a British boy’s school. Inside the classroom, he slogs through Xenophon and Sallust. Outside, he has carved out a niche as the sole scholar of an obscure 17th-century middle-European poet, Bellorius, whose life’s work was “a poem of some 1,500 lines of Latin hexameters.” The poem told of “a visit to an imaginary Island of the New World where in primitive simplicity … there subsisted a virtuous, chaste and reasonable community.” The verse was, as Waugh put it, “irredeemably tedious.”
Classics professor Michael Fontaine has found a real-life Bellorius, a Renaissance German poet who composed verse in Latin and who is remembered, if at all, mostly for one work. The poet is Vincentius Obsopoeus. Where the fictional Bellorius penned a paean to an imaginary “virtuous, chaste and reasonable community,” the nonfictional Obsopoeus celebrated The Art of Drinking. This obscure poem has just been published by Princeton University Press under the unfortunate title How to Drink.
Unfortunate, because the new title loses the intended riff on and reference to Ovid’s The Art of Love. That’s a shame, because old Obsopoeus can function as a sort of Ovid for the age of COVID.
Obsopoeus is fair-minded in his recommendations about how to drink. He makes the case for imbibing one way and then offers an argument for the opposite. Early on, he presents a debate appropriate for the moment, asking whether it is better to stay home or go out. On the one hand, “If you want to drink wine right, have fun, and enjoy life, then no matter who you are, live it up at home.” On the other, “There’s also the fact that people are shirking their duty to human life by shutting everyone out and hiding away at home all day and night, and they gradually become like animals. It makes them listless, depressed, and antisocial.”
He also debates how much to drink. “Get buzzed, not hammered like most people today,” he advises. But the page before he allows that “it is okay to get hammered every once in a while.” He warns that “abusing alcohol will bankrupt you” shortly before he moves on to an extended section on “how to win at drinking games.” (The poet’s core strategy is to sip slowly while badgering one’s opponent to guzzle.)
The drinking games of Obsopoeus’s day seem to have largely been contests to see who could put away the most wine without collapsing under the table. A reliable way to win was to cheat, and this the poet heartily endorses. Regard “stealing a victory as great and glorious,” urges our guide: “Spike the wine!”
But that’s not much use if you have to drink the spiked wine, too. Obsopoeus has a solution: Bribe “the waiter with a few bucks in advance.” At your direction, he will “mix up superstrong wines for everyone” while serving you watered down stuff.
Fontaine clearly had fun with his Latin-to-English chores, at times perhaps a bit too much so. Even when he isn’t adopting a jokey tone, the translator makes some curious choices. In a passage singing the praises of Bacchus, for instance, he calls on the deity of drink to “produce fruit so abundant that the winegrower himself trembles at the sight of his harvests!” A lovely sentiment, no doubt, but what gives with “winegrower”? I’ll admit that it is an English word, though one of relatively recent vintage. Merriam-Webster dates its debut to the middle of the 19th century. But I think we can all agree it is a clumsy word. One doesn’t “grow” wine; one grows grapes and then uses them to “make” wine. Why not choose an aged-in-the-wood word such as “vintager” or its younger cousin “vintner”? Perhaps I’m asking Fontaine to stray too far from the original Latin. Or perhaps not, as the word being translated is “vinitor.”
But I’m being pedantic. And Obsopoeus has sound advice on that subject: Nobody likes “pedants interjecting their stupid clarifications.”
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
