Interview With Luke Ranieri
Luke Ranieri, YouTuber and polymath
Perhaps the most widely known Latin YouTuber - even the business major I roomed with last semester watched his videos on occasion, despite not knowing a word of Latin - you'd be hard-pressed to find a Latin speaker who hasn't at least heard of Luke Ranieri. Known amongst “Active” Latin students and teachers for his algorithm-pleasing videos, iconic appearance, and keen interest in correct pronunciation, Luke isn't just a Latin teacher and YouTuber, he's also a veritable polymath whose interests range quite widely. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing him over Zoom about Latin novellas, the perils of dubbing films in Latin, and more.
Luke called me from a room which I recognized as the "set" of some of his videos. He apologized profusely for arriving slightly later than planned because the wifi at his place had been malfunctioning. I assured him that I was just glad he’d agreed to the interview in the first place.
“Well, you caught me at the right time,” he said, going on to explain that for most of the year he’s pretty busy.
I then got right down to business, asking him how he became the most watched Latin-speaking YouTuber. Did he set out to do so? Viral online popularity, especially the sort sustained over a long period of time, is rarely wholly serendipitous.
Luke chuckled. “That’s very flattering. Obviously, YouTube and their algorithm work in their mysterious ways and I have a couple videos that have gone viral.” Thanks to this, he tells me, he’s become more widely known. “It’s interesting because, while I’ve obviously been a teacher of Latin for most of my adult life, there are just so many incredible experts in the field - not just ones who are philologists and great professors, but ones who actually speak Latin, from whom I’ve learned over the years.” He credits a combination of his love of the language and his understanding of how YouTube works with his relative success. “It’s a blessing and hopefully it brings the language, the culture, and these ideas to more people because it really feels like a chain, like we’re all links in a chain [that] goes back to Erasmus, that goes back to these ancient authors. It’s something we get to pass on and I look forward to the next great scholars and philologists, the next great speakers of Latin and YouTubers.”
This seemed to suggest, to me at least, that the goal of his channel is to bring this histroy, this literary tradition to new people.
Originally, Luke had a blog by the same name. “Back when blogs were a thing twenty years ago!” he explained with a good-natured chuckle. “What I wanted to do was to create things that were more ephemeral.” That led to his earliest videos, which stemmed from an interest in, as he put it, “doing the news,” because that’s pretty much the most ephemeral thing there is, in the original Ancient Greek sense of the word. Such projects already existed, as he acknowledges, most famously the Finnish radio show Nuntii Latini and the website Ephemeris. Yet nobody had ever made an audiovisual news program in Latin. “If you go to my earliest videos [on YouTube] they’re all based around the topics of the actual news.”
He quit, though, because the workload was too much - although he hopes somebody else picks up where he left off. “That really becomes your job and ideally you’d have a team, and I didn’t.” In the mornings he’d wake up as early as possible, read the news stories, “and then summarize and translate some things into Latin to make a five, ten minute video.” After all this plus the necessary edits and the lengthy exportation process (“this was back when computers [were] pretty slow”), he still had to upload the video by the afternoon. “This was a very intense job I’d created for myself.” He only managed to do this for a few weeks before losing momentum. Plus, his Latin news program wasn’t very popular. “I guess it makes sense because people can get their news any way that they want.”
Despite the unsubstainability of this particular project, he remained interested in producing content in Latin, “especially audio- and video-based things.” He neglected the channel for some eight years while starting active duty in the military. Being stationed in Japan, he became far more focused on learning the language of the people around him. Then, an old friend from the world of spoken Latin contacted him and pointed out that his old videos were still helping people learn. “I kind of got back into it.”
“I started to film out in the desert, talking about phonology [and] Latin pronunciation.” He decided to focus on this specifically because he’d noticed that speakers of Latin tended to make lots of really blatant errors. “A really obvious one is that native English speakers can’t say [...] open vowels. [...] I know it’s a dead language but there are certain priciples we can achieve.” These videos became pretty popular, leading him to do “other fun stuff,” like dramatic readings of Vergil and, most famously, his songs. “A lot of them from Disney - especially with my friend Stefano Vittori, speaking of amazing Latin speakers. [...] I really wanted to create whatever content I felt like making, but in the Latin language.”
But why so many songs from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas specifically?
He laughed. “That’s Stefano Vittori again. Stefano said ‘Hey, I translated every song [from Nightmare].’ We haven’t finished them yet.” Luke considers Vittori to be one of the greatest Latin poets of recent centuries. “He’s incredible.” They gathered together a whole bunch of people, including Chris Davis and Aurora van Bel, “and it’s really just been us adding our voices to those songs.” However, the actual production of the videos isn’s as simple as it might appear at first glance. “It’s one thing for me to do a solo [version] of something, but working with other people is an incredible challenge.” Negotiating time and scheduling differences, not to mention technological difficulties such as poor-quality recordings and more philogical matters of pronunciation errors, has posed a challenge. “It’s something that has been very fun, and involving, and challenging.”
He’ll be relieved when the project is complete. “Stefano also threatened - and I’m joking with that word - to translate all of the scenes of the text. That’s so much harder because, [as] you might notice, it’s filled with sound effects.” Unlike a professional dubbing company, he doesn’t get access to the audio without the dialogue. So Luke does the foley himself for these videos, most notably the crashing pumpkins and so on in Mundus Pateat. “It’s super fun to do, but it’s incredibly time consuming.” He estimates that redubbing the entire film would take about a year.
This made me curious about whether he’d considered shooting a feature film in Latin or Greek. After all, in his Nightmare videos he does pretty much everything aside from the visuals. I also know that, recently, the Accademia Vivarium Novum made an unreleased film in Latin, Greek, and Italian, about a third of which is essentially just Gerardo Guzman with a beard hamming it up in Ancient Greek while his students pretend to sacrifice goats in the woods.
“You make an interesting point. [...] Something like that - what’s it going to do? It’s probably going to inspire [people] to learn more about this language.” He told me that he got to communicate directly with the Latin translator for the Netflix show Barbarians, although he’s never gotten much closer than that to real Hollywood filmmaking. “It would be such a cool thing to be involved with that,” certainly as a translator, but especially as an actor or someone involved in the production. “I would love to, but I’d have to be really driven, [because] it would mean putting everything else on hold.”
This brought us to the topic of Latin novellas. Some of my own teachers are pretty opposed to the use of novellas, because the quality varies so widely. However, I have also heard of teachers working up students to, say, authentic Cicero using graded readings.
“I’m really glad you brought that up. That’s a part of the purist argument.” Novellas are, of course, extremely simple Latin written to help the student learn. Luke pointed out that these aren’t like children’s books written in living languages because children already have “a fully developed system of grammar” when they begin to read. Because of this, “[Latin novellas] look a little weird - it’s not like reading, say, Dick and Jane. The child is learning to read, yes, but they can already speak.” Latin students generally can’t read or speak when they begin using novellas, meaning these books are “structured in a way that’s absolutely alien to normal Latin communication.” Teachers, he said, write these books in imitation of Familia Romana to help thier students with concepts they may be struggling with.
The counter argument is that “they’re not really Latin. True as that is, they are training wheels. I started with a tricycle myself, then I had training wheels, then I rode a bicycle as a kid.” He explains that he knows some absolutely amazing Latin speakers and teachers, yet “not only do they have a negative opinion of novellas, but even something like Familia Romana, because it’s not a good Latin style” until the very end. “That’s a subjective reaction misunderstanding the pedagogical value of those kinds of works.” He noted that others argue that it’s an issue “if novellas make significant mistakes,” based on cognates with the writer’s native tongue, or “making it too much like English” in terms of syntax. “There might be all these idiomatic expressions that [the authors] just don’t know.” This is something Luke has spent quite a lot of time on. Studying idioms, he explained, helps us comprehend original texts while also ensuring we don’t import them from our native languages or invent them out of thin air. “It’s not easy to develop the skill set to do that.”
He described using a variety of tools, including Latin to Greek dictionaries, Greek to Latin, all-Latin dictionaries, and searchable texts to search for genuine Latin phrases. “You don’t want to develop [an idiom], you want to find it, ideally, and prove that it’s something that actually exists in the language. It’s not easy to develop the intuition to know to do that, much less to be able to do all the things I can do off the top of my head because they’re saved to tabs on my browser.” Sometimes Latin novella writers attempt compositions that are too complex for their skill sets, leading to bad Latinity. “That’s the question - yeah, it’s Latin, but is it good Latinity?” He mentions Latinitium as a good source of well-vetted graded readers and novellas.
Last of all, I just had to ask what author in Latin he enjoys the most.
“It’s an easy win for me - Apuleius.” That’s not to say he doesn’t enjoy other authors. Ovid was his favorite for a long time. “But Apuleius - it’s just crazy, man.” The story is horrifying, ridiculous, so many things at once. “It’s strange. Every time I read it, I get a different idea of what he actually wanted to evoke in the reader - whether it was pure comedy, or indeed it’s supposed to be more like horror.” He compared it to the Scary Movie series. The latinity, he says, is not perfect, but still quite good, and he praises the work as “rich [and] ornate.”