In the late summer of 2023 I received through the post a strange book from the poet Oliver Reynolds entitled Seven Romes Eight. It looked handmade, with a small block of marble glued to the cover, paint daubed over a ragged cloth spine, pieces of crushed paper stuck to some of the pages, blue electrical wire taped to some of the others. It was published by Sosban, a publisher I could find no trace of online. Its pages contained various versions of a sonnet I had always thought was the work of Joachim du Bellay – in Latin, French, English, Spanish – on how the once great city of Rome had collapsed into ruins. My interest in versioning was known to Reynolds – he had read my own campus versions of du Bellay published under the title Bad Times – but as I read on I quickly saw that this was not just an anthology of different versions of du Bellay, rather it revealed the
little-known fact that the French poem was always already a translation, from the Latin of Janus Vitalis of Palermo. For a long time, it seems, the French had assumed the poem was by du Bellay, and a version in Spanish had been written by Quevedo, whose Spanish readers had likewise taken it for an original. Reynolds quotes the following exchange from Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson:

CAMBRIDGE: ‘A Spanish writer has this thought in a poetical conceit. After observing that most of the solid structures of Rome totally perished, while the Tiber remains the same, he adds: ‘La que era Firme ...