He measured the length and breadth of Middle and Neo-Latin literature: the Göttingen Latinist Fidel Rädle, who also wrote in Latin, has died.
There may be many professors who write poetry. With professors who write in Latin, things get clearer. Fidel Rädle, at the University of Göttingen for many years specialist for the Latin Philology of the Middle Ages and Modern Times, was one of these, and he had a reason for his hobby that his poems never failed to redeem. On the one hand, he said, the Latin text form creates a solemnity that either benefits the cause or parodies it; on the other hand, the Latin form demands clear content-related relationships, thus curbing the spirit of those who play with the content. This discipline allowed him to sing about the winter like this: “It snows to the suffering of deer and titmouse, / only boys pee yellow circles.” Latin: “In dies triste caelum ningit / et puer circos flavos mingit.”
He measured the length and breadth of Middle and Neo-Latin literature, with the Latin drama, which flourished in abundance during the Reformation and, above all, the Counter-Reformation, forming the clear focus of his research. Rädle’s scientific fertility kept pace with this abundance. Anyone who wants to take a look at his thorough, stylistically sophisticated and very clever texts in the right place will find some of them on the online platform set up two years ago by the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, to which Rädle belongedres doctae“.
In addition to Rädle’s own Latin poems, translations of German poetry into Latin have been added time and again. One of them was dedicated to Johann Peter Hebel, with an Alemannic bond. He translated the end of his poem “To the death of a drinker” as follows: “Nunc Lethe potus tempus somni / habet, quod vitae venit omni.” In the original: “Now he closed un waiß nüt dervo; / it chunnt e Zyt, it’s all like that.” This time had now come for Fidel Rädle. The clever, kind man was 85 years old.