Book 1 lines 1-14, Proem

The first fourteen lines of Vida's epic invoke the muse, as is fitting for this mode of verse. In this case the muse is a ‘spiritus almus’ (almus means ‘nourishing, kind, propitious’; it's a phrase often used in medieval hymns and renaissance Christian verse)—which is to say, the Holy Spirit.

Qui mare, qui terras, qui coelum numine comples
spiritus alme, tuo liceat mihi munere regem
bis genitum canere, e superi qui sede parentis
virginis intactae gravidam descendit in alvum,
mortalsque auras hausit puer, ut genus ultus     [5]
humanum eriperet tenebris et carcere iniquo
morte sua manesque pios inferret Olympo.
Illum sponte hominum morientem ob crimina tellus
aegra tulit puduitque poli de vertice Solem
aspicere et tenebris insuetis terruit orbem.         [10]
Fas mihi te duce mortàli immortalia digno
ore loqui, interdumque oculos attollere coelo
et lucem accipere aetheream summique parentis
consilia atque necis tam dirae evolvere causas.

You who brim sea, earth and sky with numinousness,
nurturing Spirit! help me tell the story of that king,
the twice-born—to sing how he from on high
swept down into an untouched virgin’s womb
and drank-up life as a mortal boy, to save humanity         [5]
from darkness and the shameful imprisonment
of death, guiding the faithful back to Olympus.
Freely he gave himself, dying for mankind's sins
as the sickened sun, too ashamed to look down,
terrified the world with a strange darkness.         [10]
Immortal Law! though I am mortal, dignify
my song, and lift up my eyes to heaven
for me to see the ethereal light of the Father:
counsel me in the causes of so piteous a death.

James Gardner translates line 5's ‘hausit’ as ‘breathed’, which makes sense. Still, hauriō is more forceful than that, I’d say: ‘I draw (especially water), I drain, drink up, swallow; (of blood) I spill, shed; I devour, consume, exhaust, deplete, use up; engulf’ [L&S]. ‘Olympus’ in line 7 is, of course, the home of the pagan gods, but by the 16th-century there was a longstanding convention by which what Patrick McBrine calls ‘the epic-resounding diction of the Latin genre’ was imported directly into Christian writing: ‘God becomes “Thunderer” (Tonans) and heaven Olympus’ [Patrick McBrine, Biblical Epics in Late Antiquity and Anglo-Saxon England: Divina in Laude Voluntas (University of Toronto Press 2017) 279]. The point, in the words of Hannibal Hamlin, was ‘to emphasize the unity of the two ancient cultures, Biblical and Classical’, although it arguably runs the risk of doing the opposite, and ‘wrenching’ the text ‘in two directions’ [Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern Literature (Cambridge 2004), 91]. We could, if we wished, translate Olympus here as ‘heaven’, but I have chosen not to do this.

[Next: lines 15-31]