It’s vital that children translate English to Latin at GCSE

One of the most rewarding exercises a Latinist can attempt is to turn a piece of English prose into Latin. The reason is quite simple: it means getting under the surface of the English meaning — to ‘get beyond the word to the thought behind it’ (Gilbert Murray) — and transferring it into a form most closely corresponding to a Roman way of thinking and writing. It takes one to the very heart of how Romans made sense of their world. Only someone with a supreme understanding of the Latin language and its culture can do that effectively. That master prose-composer Colin Leach was once asked in an exam to translate ‘The hour brought forth the man’ into Latin. He came up with vir quantus, di boni, quanto in rei publicae discrimine! ‘What a man, good gods, at what a critical juncture for the state!’ Utterly brilliant.

Many regard this sort of exercise as a waste of time. The purpose of learning Latin, we are told, is to read Latin literature; there is no place for these intellectual acrobatics, especially at a time when, with the pressure on school timetables, one will be lucky to get two periods a week for two years to prepare pupils for a GCSE that will demand they read e.g. Virgil and Tacitus. Besides, Latin is already one of the most difficult GCSEs. What future will the subject have if it is made harder still? But no one has decreed that pupils do Latin prose. What Michael Gove has proposed is that Latin GCSE must contain an element of translation of English into Latin, worth 10 per cent of the total marks. Is he right? Yes.