Yesterday evening I borrowed a book from the municipal library closest to home. The book, written by Philippe Roch, a Genevese who headed WWF Switzerland and then held the position of Secretary of State for the Environment, goes by a title – ‘La nature, source spirituelle’ (‘Nature, spiritual source’) – that made me wonder at first whether it was a work that one could categorise as purely esoteric in scope or one that belonged to a subgenre that is a combination of spirituality and ecology, ‘eco-spirituality’. Given that I have not finished the book yet, I am not going to delve on this question here.
Rather I would like to comment upon an excerpt I came across in this book which I found extremely sensual and which made me regret that I did not indulge in ‘gramine molli’ (‘soft grass’) on my way back from town last week when I stopped somewhere in between the grounds of l’Hermitage and Signal de Sauvabelin (Lausanne’s belvedere at the foot of the city’s ‘green oasis’). On page 51 of his book, Mr Roch quotes a passage from the second ‘book’ of De natura rerum by the Roman poet and philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus (better known as Lucretius) in a translation in French by Henri Clouard (whom Mr Roch fails to name!):
du moins nous suffit-il, amis étendus sur un tendre gazon, au bord d'une eau courante, à l'ombre d'un grand arbre, de pouvoir à peu de frais réjouir notre corps surtout quand le temps sourit et que la saison émaille de fleurs l'herbe verte des prairies.
The text in Latin reads as follows:
cum tamen inter se prostrati in gramine molli / propter aquae rivum sub ramis arboris altae / non magnis opibus iucunde corpora curant, / praesertim cum tempestas adridet et anni / tempora conspergunt viridantis floribus herbas.
Poetry, more than any literary genre, because it uses words to convey meaning through sounds and rhythm as arranged in verse, is impossible to render totally or faithfully in another language. However, I think that the following translation by the American translator William Ellery Leonard (1876-1944, according to Wikipedia) does justice to the original (his translation of De natura rerum is available here):
Yet still to lounge with friends in the soft grass / Beside a river of water, underneath / A big tree's boughs, and merrily to refresh / Our frames, with no vast outlay - most of all / If the weather is laughing and the times of the year / Besprinkle the green of the grass around with flowers.
Even though (from what I remember from my high school years) the purpose of Lucretius’s magnum opus was to defend Epicurean philosophy, notably the concept of ataraxy (roughly equivalent to peace of mind), and help humans free themselves of supernatural fears (because nature is governed by natural laws, not by the gods), passions etc, I was struck by the sensuality (in its original meaning of ‘appertaining to the senses’) of this description of nature as I had come to view the Romans as almost antonymous to nature because of my relatively recent rediscovery of the Celts and their very strong connection to nature.
So the next time I walk back home from town via l’Hermitage and Signal de Sauvabelin, on a fine evening that is, I shall have to recall Lucretius’s invitation to lie in the grass as opposed to merely sitting sub ramis arboris altae...
Links
Lausanne,
1st September 2015
