Sulpicia

 

     Sulpicia’s poems may be read in the original with English translation and notes on the Perseus site at https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0071.  Other translations are available at https://people.uncw.edu/deagona/lit/Sulpicia.pdf (by Lee Pearcy) and https://www.classicscorner.org/translation (by seventeen-year-old Sarah Freeman).

 

 

     When discussing Sulpicia, consideration of her gender is inescapable due to the simple fact that very little survives of women’s writing from the ancient Roman world.  A good many texts which we know once existed have vanished: Cornelia’s letters, Agrippina’s memoirs, Hortensia’s speeches, poems by Catullus’ Clodia, even a later Sulpicia whom Martial praised, all these are lost [1].  It is therefore no wonder that the mere fact of a competent female Latin poet has attracted considerable interest, particularly in recent decades. 

     Her obscurity was long compounded by the fact that her elegies were folded into the Corpus Tibullianum, which includes texts by poets other than Tibullus [2].  The six poems now considered to be Sulpicia’s follow a group of five on the same love relationship called the “Garland of Sulpicia” or the Cerinthus-Sulpicia cycle, the authorship of which is uncertain.  One might write a meaningful study of the interference of non-aesthetic elements into literary evaluation by charting critics’ reactions to the Sulpicia poems once their female authorship had been accepted.  Some critics found the poems weak, with sexist critics using terms with gender associations such as naïve and emotional, while feminist readers found the poems asserting their own feminism.  Those who, consciously or not, think little of female writers are slow to recognize Sulpicia’s debts to earlier elegiac conventions while more sympathetic readers consider her allusions and literary debts substantial and sophisticated.  The present intention is largely descriptive, acknowledging the issue of gender in a context of Roman patriarchy but then proceeding without value assumptions either positive or negative from a woman as writer.

    Most love poetry – one need only think of the blues – deals with difficulties or disappointment in romance.  The first of the poems attributed to Sulpicia (Tibullus 3.13) instead expresses fulfilment.  In the opening phrase “love has finally come” (Tandem venit amor) the relationship seems accomplished and mutually satisfying.  The poet has, it seems, like Sappho, invoked the goddess of love, but here her success seems explicit.  The obstacle is only others, those who might not approve of the couple, the sort of meddlers called “serveriorum” and “malus” in Catullus 5 and “curioso” in Catullus 7, like unsympathetic parents in New Comedy and Romeo and Juliet or the “jealous ones” of Occitanian verse. 

     The tension of individual desire in a context of social conventions is present throughout this verse from the first line’s mention of pudor to her later concern at busybodies reading her love notes and the final declaration that she is glad to sin (pecasse), having found a satisfyingly mutual relationship signified by the closing phrase suggesting both lovers are worthy (“cum digno digna fuisse ferar”).  Poetry and the goddess have contributed to the temporary triumph at least of a personal love which brings an island of joy in a less than ideal world.

     The threats to a love relationship become specific in the second lyric 3.14 (or Sulpicia 2) in which the lover’s uncle insists she spend her birthday on his country estate when she would prefer to be with her beloved in Rome.  While the birthday poem (or γενεθλιακόν) was a recognized genre [3], it is here, rather than a celebration, a lament about the interfering uncle [4]. 

   In this case the poet’s intrusive relative is a prominent Roman, Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, a general and author (whose works are lost) and a significant patron of the arts like Maecenas.  He was particularly close with Tibullus and the poet known as Lygdamus, though he knew Horace and Ovid as well.  A powerful man, his authority over Sulpicia is unquestioned.  Yet she resists the excursion, preferring Cerinthus’ company and saying that the country estate Is cold (frigidus) and too rural (agro), unfit for a girl (puella).  The more conventional Latin praise of the rural life evident in, for instance, Martial 10.47 or Horace’s  Epode 2, is altogether lacking;  Sulpicia’s preference is for the city.

     The third poem, a pendant to the second,  indicates that Sulpicia’s wishes prevailed and she is able to observe her birthday with her lover.  The tone is especially intimate as the elegy is cast in the form of a letter to Cerinthus.

     The fourth reveals a different obstacle to love: Cerinthus is spending time with a courtesan.  The ambiguities about propriety in the first poem return here to describe a frivolous infidelity on the part of her beloved.  She pretends it is her family’s concern about reputation rather than her own jealousy that makes her angry.  She suggests that she deserves better as the daughter (filia Servi) of Servius Sulpicius Rufus the distinguished jurist, a student of Cicero when young and consul in maturity.  Invective similar to that used in iambic poems appears here in phrases like “obscure bed” (ignoto toro)  and “whore” (scortum), yet Sulpicia maintains her pose of superior composure, resisting being put into an absurd (inepta) situation.  Her anger nonetheless betrays her passion.

     In the fifth poem Sulpicia is ailing and wonders whether recovery would be worth it, since Cerinthus is behaving in a thoughtless manner.  Thoughts of suicide enter her mind as lovesickness complicates a physical illness.  She appeals to her lover as a petitioner, just as countless courtly love poems address the woman in a similar manner.

     The final poem associated with Sulpicia finds her again complaining of inattention, but blaming herself, suggesting the ruminations occasioned by the anxiety of love.  She regrets having pressed Cerinthus, fearing that she has alienated his affection further in taking a standoffish approach, what the troubadours were to call daunger.

     Considered together, Sulpicia’s poems present the reader with a picture of a love relationship consistent with elegiac conventions which anticipates the love poetry of the High Middle Ages.  While one of her poems seems to celebrate love’s fulfilment, frustration -- with her uncle, her lover, and herself -- is the more common theme.  Far from writing about lust, Sulpicia is primarily concerned with a mutually affectionate relationship, and repeatedly expresses anxiety about her lover’s emotional commitment, only to question her own gambits in trying to retain his devotion.  Some would regard this delicacy, along with the social limitations suggested by her uncle’s authority over her and her lover’s option of a purchased sexual partner, as indicative of her femininity, but such judgements have no effect on evaluation nor do they constitute a protest against ancient Roman patriarchal values. 

     If the judgement of Kirby Flower Smith in calling her an “amateur” whose primary gift is “simplicity” and who “writes from a full heart” is prejudiced, Ezra Pound’s claim that to translate her forty lines would be worth ten years of one’s life is at least hyperbolic [5].  As a woman writer of love elegies, she is neither a naïve imitator of male models nor is she a standard bearer for women’s rights.  The six poems attributed to Sulpicia constitute a satisfying pocket drama, complicated by the tensions between insistent passionate love on the one hand and limitations in one’s society and in one’s partner or oneself on the other. 

 

 

 

 

1.  They are known only because they are mentioned in other people’s writing: see Cicero Brutus 58.211,  Tacitus (Annals 4.53.3) and Pliny (Naturalis historia 7.46) for Agrippina, Valerius Maximus (8.3.3) and Quintilian (De institutione oratorio 1.1.4-8) for Hortensia.  A scholiast quotes two iambic lines of the later Sulpicia (sometimes called the satirist) in a manuscript known only from a citation in a fifteenth century edition of Juvenal.  Martial praises her in 10.35.

 

2.  They had long been known as Tibullus 3.13-3.18, but are today  sometimes identified as Sulpicia 1-6. 

 

3.  Among Latin examples of the genre are Tibullus 1.7, and 2.2, Propertius 3.10, Ovid, Prop. III 10, Ov. Tr. III 13, V 5, Pers. 2, Mart. VII 21, 22, 23, IX 52, 53, and X 24.

 

4.  An uncle is similarly an obstacle to love in Horace Odes 3.12.

 

5.  For Smith, see The Elegies of Albius Tibullus (1913). Pound’s comment is in “Horace,” in The Criterion 9 (1929-1930), reprinted in Arion 9 (1970). 

A Look at Ten Versions of Martial's Guide to the Good Life

 

 

 

Martial x 47

 

Vitam quae faciant beatiorem,

Iucundissime Martialis, haec sunt:

Res non parta labore, sed relicta;

Non ingratus ager, focus perennis;

Lis numquam, toga rara, mens quieta;

Vires ingenuae, salubre corpus;

Prudens simplicitas, pares amici;

Convictus facilis, sine arte mensa;

Nox non ebria, sed soluta curis;

Non tristis torus, et tamen pudicus;

Somnus, qui faciat breves tenebras:

Quod sis, esse velis nihilque malis;

Summum nec metuas diem nec optes.

 

 

     All translators agree that no translation can be altogether successful in reproducing a poem’s qualities in a new language.  Yet translations remain useful for two reasons.  They convey some portion of the original, allowing readers a view, though an imperfect one, of otherwise inaccessible writing.  Secondly, each translation may excel in different ways, so that the reader of a number of versions of a lyric will not only develop a fuller view of the source poem but also encounter new poems, some of which are worth reading in the target language.  Works like Chapman or Pope’s renderings of Homer, Fitzgerald’s Rubiayat, Pound’s Cathay, and Lowell’s Imitations are valuable in themselves as well as embodying, to varying degrees of accuracy, earlier literary works.

     This principle is illustrated by an examination of several of the many translations of Martial X, 47, a poem that owes much of its celebrity to its attractive moralizing theme.  The poem has been a favorite for centuries: one scholar has published an article with thirty-nine versions before 1750 (Stuart Gillespie, “Martial's Epigram 10.47: Thirty-Nine English Translations to 1750,” Translation and Literature, Volume 24, Number 1).  The attraction is doubtless largely due to the author’s recommendation of a rational and moderate enjoyment of life.  Martial’s theme here has been labeled an “Intellectually debased Epicureanism” as well as, more sympathetically, “a cultivated Epicurean conformist.”  (The former is the opinion of Alison Keith,  the latter phrase is J. P. Sullivan’s.  See Allison Keith, “Epicurean Principle and Poetic Program in Martial Epigrams 10.47–48,” Phoenix Vol. 72, No. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2018.)  For a modern pagan the recommendations remain as appealing as they did to the ancients.  This variety of philosophia perennis has been so attractive that this poem has been very frequently translated.  While another rendering is far from necessary to convey Martial’s ideas, each version possesses unique charms and weaknesses. 

     Martial seems to imagine himself being advised by a philosophic mentor on that central topic of Classical philosophy (though it plays little role for today’s academic philosophers), “the good life.”  Epicurus adapted  the old Delphic maxim “nothing in excess” (μηδὲν ἄγαν) recommending sophrosyne (σωφροσύνη) and taught that one must strive to eliminate or minimize pain, both physical pain (ἀπονία) and mental anxiety (ἀταραξία).  Avoiding suffering is surely a program most could accept as desirable.  Martial here not only resembles other Classical authors (for instance Horace in Epode 2), but he is also reminiscent of the long tradition of Chinese poets retiring to mountain retreats under the influence of Buddhist or Daoist quietism or the Confucian doctrine of the mean, zhōngyōng (中庸). 

 

 

A new translation of Martial x, 47

 

The things that make a happy life,

are these, my genial friend:

no work, but money one’s been left,

rich fields, a burning hearth,

no fights, rare togas, quiet mind,

with strength and fleshly health,

simplicity and well-matched friends,

good guests at rustic meals,

no drunken nights, but free of cares,

a joyful decent bed,

good sleep that makes the night slip by,

satisfied, with spite for none,

you’ll neither dread nor crave your final day.

 

 

     The long list of desiderata makes this a comparatively simple poem to translate.  I proceeded pretty much line by line.  This version uses iambs with tetrameters alternating with trimeters with a bit of syncopation in line twelve and a concluding pentameter to lend the last line a gnomic air.  I like the less-than-blank verse line for its casual, folksy cadence.  Even without the rhyme, the background beat is like a nursery rhyme or folk song.  (And a few of Surrey’s stumbles are enough to suggest why rhyme is a burden in this short lyric even in the most skilled hands.)  This does, of course truncate the lines somewhat, leading to such decisions as the omission of Martial’s own name in the second line.  (This detail struck me as distracting in any event, causing the reader to wonder fruitlessly who the speaker might be.)  We will assume, as others do, that “rare togas” sufficiently implies a minimum of formal business.

 

 

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1557)

 

Martial, the things that do attain

The happy life, be these, I find:

The riches left, not got with pain;

the fruitful ground, the quiet mind:

the equal friend, no grudge, no strife;

No charge of rule, nor governance;

Without disease, the healthful life;

The household of continuance:

The mean diet, no delicate fare;

True wisdom join'd with simpleness;

The night discharged of all care,

Where wine the wit may not oppress:

The faithful wife, without debate;

Such sleeps as may beguile the night.

Contented with thine own estate;

Ne wish for Death, ne Fear his might.

 

 

   Surrey uses smooth and polished four beat lines, though he does use three more than the Latin.  The interference of rhyme intrudes in such places as the slightly odd use of “attain” in the first line and the obscure “continuance” in line eight.  Surrey expands the reference to “rare toga-wearing” in line six as suggesting avoiding government office and then repeats the meaning to pad out the line.  In line thirteen the phrase “no debate,” absent in the original, calls up the convention of the termagant spouse, whereas the original simply implies passionate yet faithful.  Line fourteen is memorably strong.

    Surrey’s is a polished craftsman whose translations were among his most memorable and influential work.  He pioneered the use of blank verse in his admirable translation of a portion  of the Aeneid, and these shorter, more intimate lines are equally effective.  The epigram form encourages the formulation of witty little packages of thought contained in a line or a half-line, almost every one of which delivers his thought direct without distractions.  The tendency toward sententiae is foreign to the modern sensibility, but it appears here to advantage. 

  

 

Ben Jonson (1640)

 

The Things that make the happier life, are these,

Most pleasant Martial; Substance got with ease,

Not labour'd for, but left thee by thy Sire;

A Soyle, not barren, a continewall fire;

Never at law; seldome in office gown'd;

A quiet mind; free powers; and body sound;

A wise simplicity; freindes alike-stated;

Thy table without art, and easy-rated:

Thy night not dronken, but from cares layd wast;

No sowre, or sollen bed-mate, yet a Chast;

Sleepe, that will make the darkest howres swift-pac't;

Will to bee, what thou art; and nothing more:

Nor feare thy latest day, nor wish therfore.

 

    

     Jonson, a close student of Martial and the expert author of many epigrams himself, employs pentameters.  “Gown’d” is a clever word for the phrase about togas. “Friends alike-stated” is clumsy and unclear, and its rhyme “easy-rated” is little better.  “Cares laid waste” is another casualty of the rhyme scheme, and the phrase itself suggests the opposite of temperance.  Simply saying one’s wife ought be neither sour nor sullen yet chaste seems rather too modest an aim.  The penultimate line is neatly crafted, but the final word seems weak enough to spoil the otherwise good effect of the whole. 

    Jonson is, as in all his work, professionally competent.  I find this piece, however, to contain  few delights.  Though in fact he uses a syllable less per line than Martial, his English sounds slightly loosened.  The rhymes for me come round with too great a regularity, promising a conclusion with every other line that does not always arrive (and which sometimes arrives at more inopportune points). 

 

 

Abraham Cowley (1656)

 

Since, dearest Friend! 'tis your desire to see

A true receipt of happiness from me;

These are the chief ingredients, if not all:

Take an estate neither too great, nor small

Which quantum sufficit the doctors call.

Let this estate from parents' care descend;

The getting it too much of life does spend.

Take such a ground, whose gratitude may be

A fair encouragement for industry.

Let constant fires the winter's fury take,

And let thy kitchen's be a vestal flame.

Thee to the town let never suit at law,

And rarely, very rarely, business draw.

They active mind in equal temper keep,

in undisturbed peace, yet not in sleep.

Let exercise a vigorous health maintain,

Without which all the composition's vain.

In the same weight prudence and innocence take;

And of each does the just mixture make.

But a few friendships wear, and let them be

By nature and by fortune fit for thee.

Instead of art and luxury in food,

Let mirth and freedom make thy table good.

If any cares into the daytime creep,

At night, without wine's opium, let them sleep,

Let rest, which nature does to darkness wed,

And not lust, recommend to thee thy bed.

Be satisfied, and pleas'd with what thou art;

Act cheerfully and well th' allotted part;

Enjoy the present hour, be thankful for the past,

And neither fear, nor wish th' approaches of the last.

 

 

     One first notices the length.  At thirty-one lines Cowley’s rendering is two and a half times as long as Martial’s.  In part this expansion is due to vestiges of the amplificatio characterizing much medieval rhetoric and Renaissance euphuism.  Thus the two words denoting “fertile soil” here become two lines on the ideal size for an estate, an attribute unmentioned in the original, including the clause “which quantum sufficit the doctors call,” words that seem rather like an altogether unnecessary footnote.  Though neglected at first the simple word “ingratus” had not been forgotten, as it bobs up a few lines later in “Take such a ground, whose gratitude may be/ A fair encouragement for industry.”  The four word recommendation for “prudens simplicitas” and “pares amici” becomes here four lines instead. 

     This relaxed unfolding of Martial’s laconic phrases has its own charm, however, as Cowley generates a tone of leisurely discursiveness, implying a persona at ease, whose unhurried portrait of the civilized life is exemplary of the peaceful ease he has achieved.  In spite of his expansions and deviations from the Latin Cowley’s poem has much to recommend it.  He sounds like a baronet with a glass of port by the fireside, not Martial perhaps, but appealing.  (Cowley’s poetry and essays are, is in my opinion, unjustly neglected.)

 

 

Sir Richard Fanshawe (c. 1660)

 

The things that make a life to please,

Sweetest Martial, they are these:

Estate inherited not got:

A thankful field, hearth always hot:

City seldom , lawsuits never:

Equal friends agreeing ever:

Health of body, peace of mind:

Sleeps that till the morning bind:

Wise simplicity, plain fare:

Not drunken nights, yet loos'd from care:

A sober, not a sullen spouse,

Clean strength , not such as his that plows:

Wish only what thou art, to be;

Death neither wish , nor fear to see.

 

    

     Fanshawe is notably concise, with each four-beat line a unit.  Tight expressions such as “estate inherited not got” are followed by satisfying rhymes, here “a thankful field, hearth always hot.”  Similarly

“city seldom , lawsuits never” admirably conveys the sense, completed by “equal friends agreeing ever” where the melody compensates for the phrase’s awkwardness.  As with many other translators, Fanshawe decorously minimizes the marital joy with “a sober, not a sullen spouse,” which implies nothing positive at  all.  The antepenultimate line “clean strength, not such as his that plows” seems to come from nowhere, owing little to the corresponding Latin “somnus, qui faciat breves tenebras.”  Was he desperate to rhyme “spouse”?  And why does its apparent closer translation “sleeps that till the morning bind” occur earlier?  The concluding couplet, on the other hand, is accurate, shapely, and sweet-sounding.

     Sir Richard Fanshawe translated ably from Portuguese, Latin, and Italian.  This version of Martial has much to admire was well as several lapses.   

 

 

James Elphinston (1782)

 

Of things that heighten human bliss,

The sum, sweet Martial, may be this.

A freehold, not amast by care;

But dropt on a deserving heir:

A soil, that ev'ry culture pays,

A hearth, with never-dying blaze:

No contest, and but little court;

A quiet mind, her own support:

A gale, to fan ingenuous flame;

Exertion, to enforce the frame:

Simplicity, that wisdom blends;

Equality, the bond of friends:

An easy converse, artless board,

With all the little needfull stor'd:

A night not soaking, care effac'd;

A couch not dismal, always chaste:

Sleep stealing o'er the gloom so sweet,

That evening bids and morning meet.

content, which nought beyond aspires;

And death nor dreads, nor yet desires.

 

 

     Though Dr. Johnson’s friend James Elphinston was a considerable linguistics scholar, he seems to have been an indifferent poet.  Expanding the verse to twenty lines, he managed to include considerable extraneous material.  The meaning of “a soil, that ev'ry culture pays” is not immediately obvious; “enforce the frame” is awkward; and “not dismal, always chaste” hardly sounds positive.  A couplet like “Sleep stealing o'er the gloom so sweet,/ That evening bids and morning meet” has regular cadence and a neat rhyme but the syntax requires untangling.  “With all the little needful stor’d” comes out of nowhere and the meaning of “not soaking” is not clear at once.  Such difficulties are obstacles that the smooth metrics glide over.  His final line is tidy and effective, but perhaps more memorable than Elphinston’s translation is Burns’ epigrammatic reproach to its author.

 

 

To Mr E - on his translation of and commentaries on Martial

 

O Thou, whom Poesy abhors,

Whom Prose has turned out of doors;

Heards't thou yon groan? - proceed no further!

'Twas laurell'd Martial calling, Murther!

 

 

     While I would hardly imagine the shade of the Roman poet calling out for revenge, I do find Elphinston’s translation marred by awkward phrasing and shackled by rhyme. 

 

 

Rolfe Humphries (1963)

 

Here are the things, dear friend, which make

Life not impossible to take:

Riches bequeathed, not won by toil;

Fire on the hearth; responsive soil;

No law suits; seldom formal dress;

A frank but wise disarmingness;

A healthy body, and a mind

Alert, but peaceably inclined;

Congenial guests; a table set

Without excessive etiquette;

Nights free from exigence and worry,

But not too bleary or too blurry;

In bed, a wife not frigid nor

Too reminiscent of a whore;

Slumber, to make the shadows swift;

Contentment with your native gift;

And, without longing or dismay,

The prospect of your final day.

 

 

     Humhries is a professional, but his wit sometimes leads him beyond his original.  Lines like “life not impossible to take” are clever but misleading.   The rare term “disarmingness” is distracting.  “Bleary” and Blurry,” again, are ingenious but off-focus for tone.  “Exigence” is too formal a word for this usage, and “too reminiscent of a whore” is too inventive.

     In spite of these strictures, Humphries’ is an excellent version.  He is capable of juggling even the rhymes while staying on course. 

 

 

Peter Porter (1972)

 

Friend and namesake, genial Martial, life’s

happier when you know what happiness is:

money inherited, with no need to work,

property run by experts (yours or your wife’s),

Town House properly kitchened and no bus-

iness worries, family watchdogs, legal quirks.

Hardly ever required to wear a suit,

mind relaxed and body exercised

(nothing done that’s just seen to be done),

candour matched by tact; friends by repute

won and all guests good-natured -- wise

leavers and warm stayers like the sun;

food that isn’t smart or finicky,

not too often drunk or shaking off

dolorous dreams; your appetite for sex

moderate but inventive, nights like sea-

scapes under moonlight, never rough;

don’t scare yourself with formulae, like x

equals nought, the schizophrenic quest!

What else is there? Well, two points at least --

wishing change wastes both time and breath,

life's unfair and nothing's for the best,

but having started finish off the feats --

neither dread your last day nor long for death.

 

 

     Peter Porter called his 1972 collection After Martial since his intention was not to follow closely upon his original.  He stretches out Martial’s thirteen lines to twenty-four five-beat lines, allowing himself to introduce considerable new material.  His rationalization of the name in the first line (“friend and namesake”) serves a purpose, but the second half of line four is not only absent in the Latin but, more seriously, it adds nothing in the English.  Suspending the word ”business” at the end of line five only to complete it on line six is surely distracting and fussy to most peoples’ taste.  Breaking “seascapes” into two parts is less jarring due to its being a compound word and the whole phrase “seascapes under moonlight” is pretty enough to be satisfying though there is nothing in Martial to give it birth.  Lines seventeen and eighteen, though, run seriously awry with the peculiar formula “x equals nought” and the modern term “schizophrenic.”  Whatever it may mean to “finish off the feats,” the phrase enfeebles the conclusion here, though the final line is neatly crafted.  The “sneer” and “the poisoned sigh” are elaborations, vivid in English but absent in the original.

 

 

Peter Whigham (1984)

 

My carefree Namesake, this the art   

Shall lead thee to life's happier part:

A competence inherited, not won,

Productive acres and a constant home;

No courts, few formal days, your mind stable,

A native vigor in a healthy frame;

A tact in candor, friendships on a par,

Convivial courtesies, a plain table;

A night, not drunken, yet shall banish care,

A bed, not frigid, yet not one of shame;

A sleep that makes the dark hours shorter:

Prefer your state and hanker for none other,

Nor fear, nor seek to meet, your final hour.

 

 

     A follower of Pound, Whigham was capable of sounding like an eighteenth century neo-Classical poet at times, yet he has loosened his model to allow many half-rhymes in a pattern that will seem unpredictable at first reading.  His use of a pentameter line allows regular caesurae, and the whole proceeds most smoothly. 

     This is the best in my view of the modern translations. 

 

 

Brendan Kennelly (2008)

 

What constitutes a happy life?

Enough money to meet your needs

steady work

a comfortable fire

a clear distance from law

a minimum of city business

a peaceful mind and a healthy body

simple wisdom and firm friends

enjoyable dinners and plain living

nights free from care

a virtuous wife who's not a prude

enough sleep to make the darkness short

contentment with the life you have,

avoiding the sneer, the poisoned sigh;

no fear of death

and no desire to die.

 

 

     Kennelly is a talented modern poet whose version flouts the regularities of the original, preferring free verse with the line varying from three syllables to ten and little attention to rhyme or assonance.  Alliteration is allowed a subdued effect: the proximity of “money” and “meet” in line two, “”firm” and “friends” in  line eight, “sneer” and “sigh” in  eleven, and “desire” and “die” in thirteen.  This casual form and the lack of punctuation until the end supplies an appropriate off-hand tone that reinforces the theme.  M any of the lines are out so efficiently into English that, though Kennelly‘s version has three more lines than the Latin, many of the terms are expressed in fewer syllables.  “Steady work” deviates from his source which is closer to meaning no work at all, but perhaps this is a concession to modernity which frowns upon the idle aristocrat.  Like others, Kennelly neglects the positive term in describing the connubial bed.  “Make the darkness short” is both accurate and neatly phrased. 

     His rendering is smooth and natural in modern American usage and conveys the poem’s essential elements without asserting any translator’s peculiarities.  Its weakness arises from the same qualities: an offhand prosiness that, as it draws no attention to itself, run s the risk of sounding artless, though it is more successful than versions with distracting characteristics not found in the original.

Catullus’ Currency of Kisses: New translations of Catullus V, VII, and XLVIII

 

 The Latin texts of the poems are appended.

 

 

     Erotic relationships seem sometimes, to some lovers, reducible to the rules of accountancy: a bit of pleasure in return for a certain amount of trouble, a financial cost balanced against flights of delight.  When upbraiding Ameana for an excessive fee (41) or complaining of Aulifilena’s deception (110), Catullus displays the confident misogyny of a substantial citizen in a patriarchy.

     Yet with passionate attachments, the values shift dramatically.  One lover’s side, at least, of the exchange can balloon to virtually infinite value which may or may not be equaled by the love object.  Catullus expresses the degree of romantic love by a figure of speech, as innumerable kisses. [1]  The association of love and kisses is natural, of course, but, when the kisses become uncountable, the image signifies the power of eros.  Such lover’s desperation may lead either to love-sickness, depression, and the miserable conviction that one has been playing the fool or, for the more fortunate, to an ascent to Elysium. 

     In Catullus XLVIII the convention appears at its simplest in the context of gay relationship. 

 

Your honeyed eyes, Juventius,

if I could kiss them on and on,

three hundred thousand times would not

suffice.  I’d never have enough,

not if they numbered more than grains

could grow in fields of one estate.

 

     A hyperbolic compliment, but one fully intended in passionate moods, the hundreds of thousands of kisses remain still insufficient to express the lover’s emotion.  He cannot rest in languorous pleasure, but always wants more.  Love is measured by a currency of kisses, and the quantity must be countless to indicate the ineffable magnitude of the love. 

     The association here, first with honey and then with ears of cereal grain reinforces this indefinite and enthusiastic measure of love, and links the poem to archaic practices designed to foster fertility, human, animal, and vegetable alike. [2]  If, as Frazer reported, people would copulate in their fields in hopes of a good harvest, holding one’s lover may remain, in a vestigial way, a ritual of sympathetic magic to renew the world.  Such a link has at least an emotional reality, recorded in all the poems of spring’s regreening accompanying the blossoming of romance. 

     Catullus VII first extends the hyperbole, with an elaborate series of references at first geographical, then historic and cosmic. 

 

How many, Lesbia, kisses between us,

might be enough to surfeit me and more?

As many as the grains of Libyan sand

that lie in Cyrene where the silphium grows,

between the oracle of torrid Jove

and Battus’ old and holy sepulchre,

as many as the stars in silent night

that see all peoples’ secret love affairs.

So many kisses must the mad Catullus have

to be enough and then some, too,

so that the curious can never count

nor any tongue cast evil words our way.

 

This lyric reinforces the kisses’ meaning familiar from XLVIII and expandss it with concrete specifics, while also adding considerable semantic territory.  Extravagant love, measurable only by countless kisses, is associated with the exotic (Cyrene), the rare and precious (silphium or asafoetida), the sensual (“torrid”), and yet the venerable (the grave of the city’s founder) and indeed the universally human (“peoples’ secret love affairs”). 

     Rich in content if lacking the straightforward and spontaneous-seeming apparent speaking from the heart of XLVIII this poem suddenly turns in the final two lines to reveal a new aspect of the lovers’ situation.  Whereas the original referent of the currency of kisses had been erotic intensity, here they provide a mystical protection from hostile busybodies very like the “jealous ones” of Troubadour lyric over a millennium later.  As a subjective experience of the lovers from which all others are excluded, the kisses create a private utopian world, protected against all threats by the power of their affection.  These ill-wishers are the projection of the lovers’ fear that their bliss is endangered and perhaps cannot last.

     In V, likely the most familiar Catullan carmina, the motif of countless kisses is employed in service of the carpe diem topos.  Here it spotlights the contrast between the couple’s delirium of love-making and those disapproving superannuated meddlers. 

 

Oh, let us live, my Lesbia, let us love!

And any idle talk of crabbed old men

we’ll value at one pennyworth, no more.

The sun, we know, will set and rise again,

and yet, for us, when our brief light is gone,

what follows then will be an endless sleep. 

A thousand kisses and a hundred more I want,

another thousand, and a hundred yet,

and when the thousands upon thousands mount,

we’ll stir the pot and then we’ll never know

and those who envy us won’t know as well

how many kisses you and I enjoyed.

 

The seventh through the tenth lines simply juggle numbers, indicating the ineffable quality of a necessarily private erotic experience.  Like a jazz singer going into scatting the artist best approximates the joy of love by admitting its inexpressibility.  The two are so confidently in control that they, as though with a wave of a magic wand, can fling the scene into confusion and frustrate the hostile intentions of the envious while enjoying the marvels of each other’s bodies.   

     Catullus’ lyrics portray a range of lovers, some selfish, some selfless.  For him erotic play was could be simple recreation without emotional engagement, but other verses suggest a whole-hearted tumble into total commitment scarcely expressible in words.  Adopting the apparently natural association of love and kisses, he elaborates the imagery of a currency of kisses to signify a passion so great as to require a figure of speech, so great it may provide an apotropaic charm against the invidious. 

     A master of invective and insult and capable of plain-speaking to the point of outright vulgarity, Catullus was at the same time a virtuoso of love poetry whose elegant and original language might be either ardent or nasty.  His range is evident in another poem using the multitude of kisses topos.  In his most notorious poem (XVI) he complains that Aurelius and Furius have mistaken his romantic side for weakness, and the very image under discussion is to blame.   “Because I write of countless kisses, you think me as less a man?” Catullus defends his masculinity with the purest sexual aggression “I will fuck your ass and mouth”. [3]  That this verse is written by the same author who wrote as a devotee of true love only suggests the breadth and variety of the wild territory of eros. 

 

 

 

1.  Among others who use the same image is Baudelaire who in “Le Balcon” exclaims “ô baisers infinis!”

 

2.  Leah O’Hearn demonstrates the details of the implications of honey and of grain, particularly the latter’s association with the emergence of facial hair in Classical love poetry.   See “Title: Juventius and the Summer of Youth in Catullus 48,” Mnemosyne LXXIV, 1.

 

3.  “Vōs, quod mīlia multa bāsiōrum, lēgistis male mē marem putātis?” and (“Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō”. 

 

 

 

 

 

XLVII

Mellitos oculos tuos, Iuventi,

siquis me sinat usque basiare,

usque ad milia basiem trecenta,

nec unquam videar satur futurus,

non si densior aridis aristis

sit nostrae seges osculationis.

 

 

VII

Quaeris, quot mihi bāsiātiōnēs

tuae, Lesbia, sint satis superque.

Quam magnus numerus Libyssae harēnae

lasarpīciferīs iacet Cyrēnīs

ōrāclum Iovis inter aestuōsī

et Battī veteris sacrum sepulcrum;

aut quam sīdera multa, cum tacet nōx,

fūrtīvōs hominum vident amōrēs:

tam tē bāsia multa bāsiāre

vēsānō satis et super Catullō est,

quae nec pernumerāre cūriōsī

possint nec mala fascināre lingua.

 

 

V

Vivāmus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,

rumoresque senum severiorum

omnes unius aestimemus assis!

soles occidere et redire possunt;

nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,

nox est perpetua una dormienda.

da mi basia mille, deinde centum,

dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,

deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum;

dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,

conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,

aut ne quis malus invidere possit,

cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

Horace I.21

Oh, sing Diana now, you tender girls,
and boys, you sing of Cynthus’ long-haired youth!
and of Latona, too, so loved
by Jupiter the strong.

What joy in streams and shady groves,
and all that flows with Algidus’ cold country streams,
the shade on Erymanthus,
the verdure of high Cragus’ woods!

You youths, exalt with praises Tempe’s valley too,
and Delos where Apollo had his birth, that god
whose shoulder bears a quiver
as well as brother Hermes’ lyre.

Away with war’s weeping and wretched famine too
and illness, too, drive off from us and from our king
to Persia or to Britain.
Your words and dancing make these flee.



     This is my own translation. Though some poets have attempted quantitative verse in English (notably Spenser and Swinburne), to most ears, their effect is faint and ineffective. Like all before me who have attempted English accentual version s of Greek or Latin quantitative verse (indeed, like all translators), I have settled for something different (and less) than I find in the original. The gap is all the more painfully regrettable in view of the fact that Horace’s chief professional boast (in Odes III, 30) was his importation of Aeolic meters into Italian poetry. To know what that means one must learn to read the patterns of long and short vowels on what ancient prosody was built whether or not one knows Greek and Latin.
     My own way is simpler and more well-trod. Indeed, my interest in this particular poem is largely thematic, so even a prose paraphrase would serve. If I have produced anything at all beyond that, I, for one, will deem the translation a success.
     Though often an effect of “natural,” colloquial language is considered the polar opposite of artful and literary diction, Horace seems to me to resemble the troubadours in his exemplification of both ends of this spectrum in a single verse. With a tone very nearly as casual as in the Satires, Horace is nonetheless unfailingly decorous, elegant in his music, and purposeful in his word-placement.
     Purely because it is so natural in English, I use a generally iambic pattern. Though I do not attempt to duplicate the meters of the original, I do preserve the number of syllables per line in the hope that this practice may transmit something of the poem’s general shape. In addition, I have usually, in spite of the contrast between a strongly inflected original and a weakly inflected target language, retained the content line by line. Though I know that the geographical references will be obscure to many and the mythological allusions to some, I prefer to leave these unchanged. Such proper names are, I think, critically important, even central to a poem like this, and the reader with sufficient interest to have a look at Horace at all will hardly be bothered by having to look up a thing or two.