Roman Daze.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Gunther
• Position: The Latinist: A Novel

Mark Prins, The Latinist: A Novel (New York: W.W. Norton & Company). 352 pp., $16.95.

In her celebrated essay, "On Not Knowing Greek," Virginia Woolf has nothing to say about ignorance of the language. She faults no one for failing to master it as she obviously has done. Her tactic above all is to present telling citations of the Attic tragedians in their linguistic authenticity. What better way to show how inadequate translations are than to forgo them?

In his debut novel, The Latinist, Mark Prins aims at a similar goal of whetting the reader's appetite in a less paradoxical way for getting a handle on Latin. It's no accident that the Latinist of his title, a young American named Tessa Templeton, should make an astonishing, pathbreaking discovery about a hitherto utterly obscure Roman poet, Marius--invented by Prins--in an Italian graveyard: these bones shall rise again might be her motto. Tessa, transplanted from the boonies of Florida to the august environs of an Oxford college brings to new life as well one of Ovid's stories of transformation: Apollo's stymied pursuit of Daphne, as she herself is pursued by her academic supervisor, Chris Eccles. Where Ovid, on Tessa's interpretation, was "silenced" through the god's implacable force, she is not. Prins has constructed a thrilling tale of personal transformation, a coming-of-age romance, anchored in the details of research into Roman poetry. The novel turns out to be a very original variation of the well-worn Jamesian theme of the American girl adrift in European waters alive with crafty seducers. For all the differences, she is more than a little evocative of Daisy Miller, "an inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence."

In his use of Ovid, Prins has distinguished models. That Shakespeare drew on the Pyramus and Thisbe tragicomic segment of the Metamorphoses for the version performed by the "rude mechanicals" of A Midsummer Night's Dream is common knowledge. Less obvious is an allusion in the play to Daphne and Apollo at the moment that Puck transforms the lovers' souls from love to hatred. An abused Helena cries:

The wildest hath not such a heart as you, Run when you will; the story shall be changed: Apollo flies and Daphne holds the chase; The dove pursues the griffin, the mild hind Makes speed to catch the tiger...

Shakespeare could assume an audience familiar with Ovid's version, in which Daphne "flies" from a chasing Apollo, and perhaps with Ovid's simile of hounds closing in...