All Scholars

Rolfe Humphries was taught Latin by his father before he could read English. He also inherited a love of baseball from his father, who in 1883-1884 played outfield for the New York Gothams (two years before they changed their name to the Giants) and Washington Nationals. Humphries enjoyed a 50-year career as teacher, translator, and poet at the center of American literary community. A child of small towns who worked his way through his student days occasionally as a manual laborer, Humphries never lost touch with the language of the common man (he particularly loved the slang of the racing tout), and brought to his translations as well as his teaching a sense of the artist's immediacy as only a practicing poet could: “No classical writer ever thought of himself as a classic ... He writes, always, always, as a living man. He holds a pen, or a stylus, in a human hand at the end of a human arm; a bust does not write, nor does one of a series of bearded figures portrayed under fly-specked glass in the eighth-grade classroom. He is much more concerned with his own time than he is with other men's past or his own future.” (All quotations from Gilman & Novak.)

Though he translated French, Spanish, and Welsh works, it was the Latin authors he was closest to. He enjoyed Catullus (“No modern poet spits as effectively”), while of the Aeneid he said “It is mostly a bore, stuffed shirt and New Republic poetry ... I find my own language much more easily in Ovid.” He translated the three major poems of Latin, his Ovid being the most successful. His unique translation of Lucretius' title “is meant to sound almost passionate in its directness; look, Memmius, this is the way things are.” The translations move swiftly and clearly through their works and gained both authors and translator wide popularity.

After moving to California as a boy, Humphries and his father picked apricots to pay the freight costs of shipping their books from Pennsylvania. In his teaching Humphries similarly taught students that the higher rewards of great books came only after hard labor. Seniors at Woodmere read the entire Aeneid, at a pace of 150 lines a day. At the end of the year they were assigned not a “silly 'term paper' . . ., where all they do is copy articles out of the Britannica,” but rather “a dirty nose-to-the-grindstone problem: list all the animals, flowers, or trees in Virgil; who killed whom, etc.?” Generations of students learned much about joy from Humphries, the joy found in the rewards of work, the beauties of poetry, the symmetry of the baseball field, the joy passed on from teacher to student as from father to son.