Carmen de bisonte in English and for an International Audience – a Critical Review of and Supplement to Frederick J. Booth’s Bilingual Edition

Abstract

The publication of a Latin-English edition of Nicolaus Hussovianus’ “Carmen de bisonte” in 2019 is a highly significant event as it makes this canonical text of Old Belarusian (as well as Lithuanian) literature accessible to a broad, international and interdisciplinary audience. This article analyses in detail the merits and shortcomings of Frederick J. Booth’s edition. It proposes some alternative translations, adds information that was not accessible to the classical philologist, and highlights the relevance of recent discoveries that change our knowledge about Hussovianus’ origin and biography. Designed as a kind of interface between research communities that are scarcely connected, the article demonstrates what we can and should learn from each other. With emphasis on the significance of working with the original old print, a subchapter of the article acquaints the reader with the figures in “Carmen de bisonte” and analyses the emblem on the last page of the book. It shows a picture of the Roman god Terminus, framed by quotes in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. This emblem served in the 1520s as a printer’s device for a “humanistic series” of the Krakow publisher Hieronymus Vietor. The fact that it was built upon an iconic symbol used by Erasmus of Rotterdam exemplifies what aroused Booth’s initial interest in CdB : the pan-European scope of Neo-Latin literature and the close connectedness of regions which in his academic youth were separated by the Iron Curtain.