A spirited new translation of a forgotten classic, shot through with timeless wisdom
Is there an art to drinking alcohol? Can drinking ever be a virtue? The Renaissance humanist and neoclassical poet Vincent Obsopoeus (ca. 1498-1539) thought so. In the winelands of sixteenth-century Germany, he witnessed the birth of a poisonous new culture of bingeing, hazing, peer pressure, and competitive drinking. Alarmed, and inspired by the Roman poet Ovid's Art of Love, he wrote The Art of Drinking (De Arte Bibendi) (1536), a how-to manual for drinking with pleasure and discrimination. In How to Drink, Michael Fontaine offers the first proper English translation of Obsopoeus's text, rendering his poetry into spirited, contemporary prose and uncorking a forgotten classic that will appeal to drinkers of all kinds and (legal) ages. Complete with the original Latin on facing pages, this sparkling work is as intoxicating today as when it was first published
"This is a fun little book; it is also a scholarly edition of a little-known sixteenth-century didactic poem, accompanied by an eminently readable translation-an unusual and commendable combination. . . . We should be thankful to Michael Fontaine for undertaking this edition and translation, and to Princeton University Press for publishing it. . . . Obsopoeus might well be proud of how his poem has been presented to twenty-first-century readers."
---David Money, Neo-Latin News
