One-Hundred Years Tributes and Memories
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Tributes and Memories One-Hundred Years 1922-2022
*This is a phrase that is very hard to translate. It is the epithet that Virgil uses to characterize Aeneas. The word "insignis" means something like "emblem." The meaning of "pietate" [pietas ] comprises several kinds of veneration and duty, duty to family, to the past, to the future, and to the divine. Bill Alfred was a very pious man in that last sense, a devout Catholic who went to Mass every morning. He was also pious in Virgil's broader sense, and since he was a lover of language and since Latin was probably the first language he learned in school, I take the liberty of using it here.
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
Of sondry folk, by áventure y-falle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Prologue
William Alfred was a medievalist (even though both his interests and his knowledge included other periods of literature in several languages). Although I think he focused his scholarship on Anglo-Saxon and medieval Latin poetry, I understand that he was very fond of Chaucer's great Middle-English poem, The Canterbury Tales. I wish I could have heard him talk about that profound, funny, and sonorous poem.
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