An Old Poem That Tells You How to Have Beautiful Children

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• An Old Poem That Tells You How to Have Beautiful Children
• Anthony Madrid (bio)

All right, you never heard of this one. And I don't blame you. It's called Callipædia, or the Art of Getting Beautiful Children ("Getting" as in begetting.)

Originally written in Latin by a French doctor, Claude Quillet, and published in 1655. Translated into English many times, I'm told. It had a certain popularity, I'm told. But today? Utterly forgotten.

Only reason I know about it is 'cuz of Nicholas Rowe. He's fairly forgotten as well, but he was a big deal, three hundred years ago. Poet Laureate of Great Britain. Author of several plays that held the stage for years after his death. Translator of Lucan's Pharsalia, Bruyère's Characters, Boileau's Lutrin. Writer of the first biography of Shakespeare. Important early editor of Shakespeare.

Also, you know how occasionally a womanizer will be called a "Lothario"? That's 'cuz of Rowe's play The Fair Penitent (1702). Samuel Richardson's Clarissa owes a lot to that play.

Anyhow, this Rowe translated Book I of the Callipædia (there are four books, in all). The English version to which Rowe contributed is more than twice as long as the original. I have a facsimile of the original right here, and the poem occupies fifty-two not-at-all-crowded pages. The English is a hundred and thirty-seven.

That's actually fairly standard eighteenth-century translation praxis. The rhyming couplet offered the translator room to expand, clarify, and otherwise improve the original. Today, of course, any talk of "improving the original" is heresy, but it's good to be reminded occasionally that our assumptions about reading are not based on, shall we say, the laws of physics. Not everyone in history went to translations hoping to find exactly what the original writer said. In the eighteenth century it was quite reasonable to imagine that the English version of something might be quite a bit better than the original. Everyone could name examples of this. [End Page 55]

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And it's not like Callipædia ever had the reputation of having been composed by a poetic genius. People were drawn to it, not because of Quillet's handling of neo-Latin hexameters, but because of the information the poem might contain. There was a porn possibility.

Remember: Europeans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries hadn't heard of the Kama Sutra yet. They needed one as much as anybody; good information was even more scarce then than it is now. And they also needed some kind (any kind) of excuse for thinking about sex. You don't want your kids to be ugly, right? Good, so here's how you gotta do it …

That's what everyone wanted the poem to be like. But it isn't really like that.

I suspect Quillet was kidding himself when he wrote it. He had to tell himself he was writing an Ovidian tour de force, whose main grace was gonna be the mountain of delightful mythological crapola he was going to heap up. The louche element would be there, but it wasn't gonna be the main show. His readers would surely appreciate the "tact" with which he was to handle the dirty stuff. Whereas, actually, the last thing anybody was looking for was tact. [End Page 56]

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If Quillet had given the people what they wanted, I wouldn't need to be explaining who Quillet was, or who his translator was, or any of this. The poem would have been notorious, and loved, and studied. Everyone working on eighteenth-century studies would own a copy. Figure 1 shows my copy. It's quite a beaut, ain't it? Today, if a scholar owns a print of Rowe's Callipædia, [End Page 57] that's more or less what it's gonna look like. A dissolving, beat-to-shit, rag of a book. The above is marked "3" on the spine, but there's nothing on the title page to indicate it...