The Lost Art of Memorization
By: Jason Pedicone
Tags: Memorizing, Hack Your Latin, Teaching And Learning, Latin

The Lost Art of Memorization

Latin without notes.

One of the parts of Reggie Foster’s summer Latin program that I have grown to appreciate was the way he encouraged us to read and recite Latin aloud. This was not just the practice of reading a sentence out loud before we translated it. We would also reread passages aloud after we had translated them. We would do it together, in unison, with Reginaldus’ booming voice rising above the others to keep the rest of us on track. This meant that by the end of reading a passage of Latin, we would have heard all of the Latin sentences in that passage read out loud twice, once by each student before he or she began translating it, and then again when we all recited it together.

This practice of group recitation led to some funny moments when we did them out in public. Imagine a group of 70 people standing in the small parking lot next to the Church of Sant’ Andrea della Valle, right off Rome’s main thoroughfare Corso Vittorio Emanuele, reciting in unison a Latin paragraph from a Renaissance romance written by Pope Pius II. The Italians walking by must have thought they were witnessing some kind of cultic ritual. But the practice recommended an approach towards the language, one of slow savoring. We weren’t just rushing to find out what the words meant and then moving on. The language itself, in its words, sounds and rhythms, had a value that shouldn’t be overlooked.

This was different than the approach I’d seen in university classrooms, where students often didn’t even bother to read passages aloud at all before rushing headlong into translation. When they did read the Latin aloud, mispronunciations abounded, and these were often not corrected by the professor, who himself occasionally also mispronounced Latin words. In Rome, accenting the wrong syllable of a word (i.e. saying hábere instead of habére) would earn you a loud rebuke from the front of the classroom. “HaBEEEEEEre!!!!!!” Reginaldus would scream. Other times he would flinch and say “Ouch!” as if the very sound of someone saying dúxerunt when he should have said duxérunt caused him physical pain. One of his most memorable reactions to a mispronounced Latin word was when he simply screamed “Arghhhh!” and grabbed a bottle of wine that was sitting on a nearby table, tilted his head back, and took a long, deep drink, as if he needed the alcohol as an anesthetic to dull the pain, as if the mistreatment of the Latin language he witnessed every day drove him to drink. Perhaps it did.

A related and equally charming custom in the summer Latin program was that Reginaldus would offer cash prizes for students who memorized and recited Latin passages. This meant memorizing a paragraph or two of Cicero or Livy, or an ode of Horace, and standing up in front of the class to recite it from memory. Some were excellent at this and wowed the audience with their photographic memories and oratorical skills. Others tried and failed spectacularly, standing before us, sweating as they repeated themselves in an attempt to draw forth the last few words of a clause from their clammed-up brains. But everyone who was brave enough to try, if they made it to the end of their passage, earned the applause of the class. Reginaldus, with a grin, would call the person up to the front of the room to bestow their prize upon them, usually a €5 bill, enough for a large Peroni beer, which many reciters badly needed after their nerve-wracking performance.