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  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction by Peter Heslin

  POEMS

  Book One

  Book Two

  Book Three

  Book Four

  Notes

  Afterword by Patrick Worsnip

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  PROPERTIUS IS PERHAPS the most enigmatic of the great poets from the golden age of Latin literature. There are a number of reasons for this: the corruption of his Latin text as it was transmitted across the millennia; a difficult, abrupt, idiosyncratic style which demands a great deal of the reader; an obsession with mythological minutiae; and the bone-dry sarcasm with which the poet reflects upon his own vicissitudes and the politics of the day. On the one hand, Propertius seems to lack Catullus’ apparent sense of immediacy and unmediated passion, while on the other, he lacks Ovid’s outrageous wit. But for the connoisseur of poetry, the rewards of persevering are immense, and Patrick Worsnip’s vibrant contemporary translation will bring Propertius to a new generation of discerning readers.

  Propertius’ distinctive contribution to love poetry is an utterly refined sense of irony. His first three books are devoted to poems narrating the ups and downs of his relationship with his girlfriend, Cynthia; he often blurs the distinction between the girl and the poetry he writes about her. He presents himself as a lover oppressed by an inescapable passion for his beloved, enslaved to her beauty and unable to write about anything else. As he invents countless variations on this basic scenario, his persona never changes. Where Catullus invites us to read his poetry as truly autobiographical and Ovid constantly lifts the mask of the earnest lover in order to wink at his readers, Propertius plays the comedic role of the absurdly obsessive lover but plays it straight. The result is poetry that presents itself as a sincere, authentic narrative of lived experience, but which is in fact a highly arch and self-ironising fiction. Propertian elegy sends up its own earnestness not by explicitly subverting its events and characters but by taking them to absurd extremes, never letting the pretence of authenticity slip.

  Propertius’ work belongs to the genre of Latin love elegy, which had, especially via Ovid, a vast influence upon the history of Western love poetry. The particular discourse of the genre is a first-person narrative about an obsessive love affair with a pseudonymous mistress whose beauty and wit are celebrated while her indifference, unfaithfulness and cruelty are lamented. This obsession leads to a state of voluntary slavery which causes the poet to abandon all of his serious commitments to work, family and country. The metre of elegy is borrowed from the Greeks, and consists of couplets in which the first line is a six-foot hexameter (the metre of epic) and the second is a shorter pentameter. Couplets are generally end-stopped in terms of their sense: the hexameter sets up a thought and the pentameter completes it. This format lends itself to pointed, epigrammatic expression: elegiac couplets are also the metre of epigram in antiquity.

  The classical canon of Latin love elegy – Cornelius Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid – was constructed by Ovid himself, who presents himself as its culmination and climax: ‘Tibullus was your successor, Gallus, and Propertius was his; after them came I, fourth in order of time.’ Ovid claims Propertius as his immediate predecessor, and Ovid is indeed Propertius’ greatest disciple: he picks up those elements of Propertian elegy that are couched in an elegant irony and takes them to outrageous extremes. But Propertius would not have recognised Ovid’s self-interested account of the elegiac tradition: he would have been quite furious to find himself described as Tibullus’ successor. When Propertius lays out for us the poetic tradition that he saw himself belonging to, he honours Catullus and positions himself as the immediate successor of Cornelius Gallus, but he writes his rival Tibullus out of the picture entirely. All agree that Gallus was the founder of the tradition of Latin love elegy; very little of his poetry survives, though Vergil and Propertius both address him frequently in their earliest works. An important military and political figure as well as a poet, he was one of the primary lieutenants of Octavian, the man who was to become Augustus, heir of Julius Caesar and the first Roman emperor. After Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra and captured Egypt, he left Gallus in charge of the country, an enormously powerful and sensitive position. Before long, Gallus was accused of disloyalty and was compelled to commit suicide.

  After the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra, Octavian returned to Rome and set about a programme of national renewal to celebrate and consolidate the ensuing period of peace (and absolute hegemony). As part of that programme, the regime actively solicited a new kind of verse. Augustus did not want love poetry celebrating powerful women (like Cleopatra) and the men bewitched by them (like Antony, according to the history that was written by the winners); he wanted an epic celebrating the national destiny. Before long, the regime was actively encouraging Romans to return to traditional family values and later resorted to legislation to support that aim. In this atmosphere, Latin love elegy came to stand in contrast to patriotic epic; to traditional Roman values of family, nation and masculinity; and to several of the particular obsessions of the new regime of Augustus. ‘Why should I bear sons for my country’s triumphs? No child of mine shall be a soldier.’ When Propertius addresses these words to his mistress, swearing that he will never marry, he is pointedly rejecting the values of the new regime. This opposition between elegy and the emperor came to a head many decades later, when Ovid was exiled from Rome by Augustus; his outrageously cynical poetry about love and sex was an important factor in that punishment. Propertius himself, in his fourth and final book, moves away from an exclusive focus on love to write about Roman themes, but, given Propertius’ penchant for dry humour, the extent to which this should be interpreted as marking a sea-change is disputed.

  The themes of Latin love elegy can be easily enumerated, but what is more difficult is to give a sense of the qualities that set Propertius apart from the other writers in that genre. A century after Ovid, the critic and educator Quintilian revisited the canon of elegists: ‘Of our elegiac poets Tibullus seems to me to be the most terse and elegant. There are, however, some who prefer Propertius. Ovid is more lascivious than either, while Gallus is more severe.’ Quintilian was not often at a loss for words (this quote comes from a work in twelve books), but he seems here to be unable to capture a salient quality for Propertius in one or two adjectives, as he can easily do for the others. He simply says that ‘some prefer Propertius’, without being able to put his finger on quite why they do prefer him. To see what it is that has always made Propertius the choice of a select but discerning readership, it might be useful to contrast the responses of two modern poets in English who were obsessed with his work. Between them they illustrate several of the problems that have always stood in the way of appreciating Propertius and the intense appeal he holds for those who are willing to work through them.

  A. E. Housman and Ezra Pound both had significant encounters with Propertius in their youth, though for very different reasons. The two poets may have briefly overlapped in Edwardian London, but they came from different worlds and were on antithetical trajectories. Housman spent his early life as a private scholar working on difficult technical problems in Latin poetry until he had accrued such an international reputation as a classical scholar that he was appointed a senior professor of Latin, first at University College London and later at Cambridge. He always regarded his own verse as a private pursuit which was secondary to his scholarship. Pound, by contrast, gave up a very brief career in academia
as quickly as possible in order to cultivate a flamboyant public life as a poet. Both men were attracted by the particular difficulties and beauties of Propertius, which they sought to address in ways that were diametrically opposed.

  Housman built his career as a scholar on the textual criticism of Latin poetry. Even our earliest manuscripts of ancient poetry are separated from their authors by many centuries; the texts have been copied again and again from generations of exemplars that have long been lost. The work of the textual critic is to reconstruct the original text from the conflicting evidence of the manuscripts and, where the manuscripts do not help, by force of imagination. Housman exemplified a school of thought which holds that the text of Propertius not only has localised problems; it also exhibits large-scale dislocation of couplets from their original position and places where couplets are obviously missing. Housman’s early work as a scholar made his name, but it was not widely known beyond specialists until Tom Stoppard’s brilliant dramatisation in The Invention of Love of the young Housman’s struggle with Propertius: ‘He’s difficult – tangled-up thoughts, or, anyway, tangled-up Latin –’.

  Jan Ziolkowski has recently observed that there are surprisingly few echoes of Propertius in Housman’s own poetry. Indeed, they share very few themes in common. Housman’s melancholic reflections on the passage of time and his evocation of the countryside as a place of lost innocence have strong echoes of Horace, Tibullus and Vergil; but Propertius is a poet of the city, of elegant salons and urban decadence. When Propertius and Cynthia go to the countryside, they are fish out of water. Housman spent much of his life working the text of Manilius, a poet he considered deeply mediocre, but that was not his view of Propertius, despite their difference in outlook. Rather, as Stoppard has seen, Housman’s work on Propertius is linked with his own poetry on a deeper level: they both stand as quixotic efforts to resist and repair the passage of time. Not infrequently, however, his struggle with the forces of decay turned into a struggle with Propertius himself. Where Housman sees nonsense, others would see those genuine aspects of Propertius’ style that Pound responded to: bold image and metaphor. Where to draw the line between stylistic idiosyncrasy and textual corruption – between tangled-up thoughts and tangled-up Latin – is still a matter of heated debate.

  Housman never produced a critical edition of Propertius, so a truly radical, modern text has had to wait a long time. The present translation is based upon the excellent Oxford Classical Text of Stephen Heyworth, a work in the spirit of Housman, which is to say that it aims to restore a lost smoothness to the poetry, though at the risk of sometimes fixing that which was never truly broken. The reader needs to be aware that this translation is based upon a radical text, and that there is no manuscript evidence for some of its changes. One always needs to be cautious in comparing two different translations in the hope of getting a fuller picture of the meaning of the original. But that is a particular issue with Propertius, where two translations may reflect an entirely different arrangement of the underlying Latin.

  Like Housman, Ezra Pound found himself engaged as a young man in a project of rearranging and rewriting Propertius. His intervention, however, took the form of a very free translation of selected passages. ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ is, in fact, not so much a translation as a new poem inspired by Propertius. Where Housman’s work aimed to remove the jagged, fragmented qualities of the text as it has been transmitted to us, Pound celebrated, enhanced and exaggerated those very qualities. Pound saw Propertius’ abrupt and elliptical style not as signs of damage, but as a forerunner of Modernism in general and Imagism in particular. Propertius was one of Pound’s many personae: the artist as a rebel who lives for art and for love, refusing to conform to the economic and civic values of his society. Pound was particularly interested in the poems from Books Two and Three in which Propertius proclaims his aesthetic independence and his refusal to write an epic for Augustus and for his empire; it is no coincidence that those two books were written while Vergil was at work on the Aeneid. Where Housman’s own poetry imagines Shropshire rustics singing ‘God Save the Queen’ as they celebrate Victoria’s golden jubilee, Pound saw Propertius as a prophet of his own attitude toward the ‘infinite and ineffable imbecility’ of the British Empire in 1917.

  The greatest contribution Pound made to our understanding of the text of Propertius was his insistence upon its pervasive irony. Victorian critics tended to read love elegy in a naively biographical mode: as the sincere expression of emotion and the narrative of real events. Classical scholars of Pound’s own day did not react positively to the ‘Homage’, dismissing it as an inept and error-riddled translation by someone who did not know his Latin. But Pound was absolutely correct to regard the first-person voice of Propertius as a fiction, a persona, projected through an elaborately constructed mask. It was not until the 1960s, when a new generation of scholars became interested in Roman voices critical of empire and of traditional masculinity, that Pound’s evocation of an ironic, anti-imperialist Propertius was rehabilitated as a prescient contribution to our understanding of the Latin poet’s work.

  Who then was right, Housman or Pound? Textual corruption and stylistic idiosyncrasy are not mutually exclusive explanations for the difficulty of Propertius’ Latin. In that sense, both positions are correct, though where to draw the line in any particular passage will remain controversial. Pound brilliantly perceived the archness of Propertius’ persona, the virulence of his criticism of Vergil’s epic and his scepticism toward the emperor and his moral agenda. But he simply refused to engage with Book Four, where Propertius seems to acknowledge the greatness of the Aeneid and write in the national interest; the irony here is most subtle and most difficult to judge.

  The trickiest aspect of Propertius for many readers is his frequent invocation of names from Greek mythology. Sometimes these are familiar and serve as straightforward illustrations of a general category: Medea the witch, Penelope the faithful wife, Orpheus the poet. Many, however, are inscrutable. For example, in Propertius’ second poem of his first book he wants an example of natural, unadorned beauty, and instead of reaching for Helen of Troy he invokes the names of Phoebe, Hilaïra, Marpessa and Hippodamia. Who on earth are they? This seems at first a perverse straining after obscurity with no purpose other than showing off. Propertius’ wilful obscurity can be off-putting to the reader, but he is actually doing something else. When examined closely, those four names in Elegy I.2 have something particular in common: they all exemplify stories of a woman who was carried away on a chariot by a more powerful male rival. So on a deeper level they illustrate the real theme of that poem. Propertius tells Cynthia to shun ornament not out of his professed love of simplicity, but because he is afraid of a wealthy rival who will be able to give her expensive baubles that he cannot afford. In other words, the myths serve an ironic purpose far beyond their ostensible rhetorical purpose.

  Sometimes Propertius invokes a myth that fails utterly to illustrate the point he is trying to make, and these passages can seem particularly disorienting to the reader. The answer again is Propertian irony. For example, in one poem from the second book (22 a), Propertius suddenly decides that it would be a good idea to have two girlfriends. As he boasts of his potency, he compares himself to Achilles and Hector going into battle after embracing Briseis and Andromache, respectively. But the Trojan War is not the most positive paradigm for infidelity. The war started because Helen had two husbands, Menelaus and Paris, and the tragedy of the Iliad was precipitated by the inability of Achilles and Agamemnon to share Briseis between them. The inappropriateness of the mythology is a signal of the irony of the poem as a whole. We know that Propertius’ idea of two-timing Cynthia will end in a disaster, so the Trojan War is actually a good parallel for what will happen: we have learned that Cynthia’s anger is as savage as Achilles’. In Propertius’ imagined threesome, he will not play the role of Achilles or Hector, but of Briseis. Another myth earlier in that same poem also functions ironicall
y. Propertius says that even if he were as blind as the poet Thamyras, he would never be blind to pretty girls. This seems to be nothing more than the invocation of a needlessly obscure myth until one examines it more closely. The reason for Thamyras’ blindness was that he challenged the Muses to a singing contest. If he won, he got to sleep with as many of them as he liked; if they won, they could do with him as they wished. He lost, and the Muses plucked out his eyes. Thus Propertius’ apparently off-hand reference to the blindness of Thamyras encodes a prediction of what really happens to a poet who proposes polyamory to his Muse/girlfriend. The poet’s confident claim that he can handle more than one girlfriend is sustained with a straight face throughout the poem; the irony is only revealed by close examination of its mythological references.

  The myths that pepper Propertius’ texts are not the meaningless products of a sterile rhetorical training, nor are they distancing gestures, invocations of timeless clichés; they are integral to the poems and are often the key to unpicking their irony. This close connection between myth and life is vividly illustrated in Propertius’ very first elegy. Vergil had included two poems in his pastoral Eclogues that situated the ‘real’ poet Cornelius Gallus in imaginary mythical landscapes, where he consorts with Apollo and other gods, nymphs, and so on. Propertius picked up on this half-mythologised aspect of the final poem of Vergil’s collection, and fully mythologised the love elegist under the guise of Milanion, who in an obscure version of the myth was the lover of the mythical huntress Atalanta. Like Vergil, Propertius playfully mingles the timeless world of myth and the present day by saying that Milanion’s adventures happened ‘recently’ (modo). For Housman, this was a logical impossibility, and he postulated that a couplet must have dropped out here with another instance of modo that would have changed its meaning; this is the position adopted by Heyworth. But I think this is to miss Propertius’ point, which was to overlay the distant mythical past and the immediate present in such a way as to signal the importance of this tactic to his readers from the outset.