Poems Read online

  The decades immediately preceding and following the transformation of the Roman Republic into an Empire were marked by an extraordinary upsurge of poetic talent – the four writers I have mentioned, plus Vergil, Tibullus and others whose work has survived only in fragments or not at all. There is a striking similarity with another historical turning point nearly two millennia later – the Russian Revolution of 1917: think of Blok, Yesenin, Mayakovsky, Tsvetayeva, Mandelshtam, Akhmatova and Pasternak. And, as with that period, those engaged in the apparently harmless pursuit of personal poetry soon found themselves at odds with a regime demanding public art that would promote its political agenda.

  The Republic, governed for centuries by a Senate and two annually elected consuls, staggered through decades of civil conflict between rival warlords until it finally collapsed. On 2 September, 31 BC, at the naval Battle of Actium off the west coast of Greece, Octavian routed the fleets of Mark Antony and his Egyptian ally and lover Cleopatra. The way was clear for the victor to establish a new political order.

  The date also marks a clear fault-line in literature. The Republic may not have been a democracy as we now understand the term but Catullus, its principal love poet whose work has survived, was able to write passionate lyrics to the well-known wife (if it was she) of a prominent politician as well as rude epigrams lampooning Julius Caesar. Those were not options for his successors, as the price of peace in Italy turned out to be the loss of many civil liberties that had existed before. Augustus progressively introduced totalitarian rule and policies that included the ‘family values’ programme that has been dear to dictators of various epochs.

  Reading through Propertius’ work leaves little doubt that he (among others) was on the sharp end of these policies. He wanted to write love poems; the regime wanted him to write panegyrics on Augustus, or at least something dealing with Roman history and its triumphal progress towards the Empire.

  Propertius’ initial reaction was to resort to a traditional recusatio, a disingenuous protestation that he was not up to grand themes. In this he cited the precedent of Greek poets he admired such as Callimachus, the leading light in the Alexandria-based Hellenistic school of the third century BC. But by the time we come to his fourth book, he had been forced to compromise: he would go half-way to meeting official demands for poems in praise of Roman history by writing ‘aetiological’ verse (from Greek ‘aition’, a cause) on the origins of religious practices or buildings of his day. There is a notable parallel with Horace, whose fourth book of Odes appeared only a couple of years later, suggesting official pressure was building at that time. Both men give signs of trying to resist becoming poets-laureate. But Horace looks more willing to ‘render unto Caesar’, and a number of his later poems can only be seen as straight adulation of Augustus and his military conquests on the far-flung borders of Roman-controlled territory.

  Today’s reader may ask what Propertius’ real attitude was. I concur with Professor Heslin, that he was far from being the committed imperialist some scholars have portrayed, although neither was he an open political dissident. His compliments to the emperor are often back-handed and even in Poem IV.6, which describes Actium, he distances himself so far from the action that it is hard to imagine the imperial court would have been satisfied with it. My impression is that his resistance was primarily literary: he felt that anything he wrote along the lines the regime was demanding would prove to be what Catullus had memorably described as ‘cacata carta’ – ‘shit-covered paper’.

  Political changes also affected those poems (the bulk of the hundred or so he published) that on the face of it have nothing to do with public life and concern a relationship with a woman he calls Cynthia. Few readers have been able to avoid wondering who (or what) Cynthia was.

  Again, it helps to look first at Catullus and his poems about ‘Lesbia’, the name he gave his beloved in homage to the seventh-century-BC Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos. His audience would have known that in reality (as most – though not all – modern classicists have accepted) she was Clodia, the wife, and later the widow, of the politician Metellus Celer, and a figure who crops up elsewhere in Roman literature. More than twenty centuries later, the love story recounted by Catullus still makes perfect sense: from initial infatuation through doubt to despair and anger.

  By contrast, the Cynthia story makes far less sense. The only piece of information we have about her comes from the second-century-AD writer Apuleius, author of the fantasy novel The Golden Ass, who says in another work that she was really called Hostia – a name suggesting she came from a prominent Roman family. (The name Cynthia is linked to an epithet of Apollo, the patron god of poetry.) This has been increasingly disputed by scholars. While a few think she may have been an upper-class wife, most believe she is meant to appear as a ‘meretrix’, usually translated as ‘courtesan’. In today’s terms, she comes across much of the time as a sort of self-employed escort.

  Furthermore, it has proved impossible to construct a coherent chronology of an ‘affair’ between her and the poet. The details Propertius supplies of, for example, how long they have been together, are contradictory. While literary historians and translators once took his declared passion for her at face value, the prevailing view in the academic world nowadays is that she is a composite figure of his imagination; in short, that she did not exist. Some see her in ‘metapoetic’ terms, as a symbol of the sort of poetry Propertius wanted to write. What seems clear to me is that Propertius was more or less compelled to present her in this way in the new world in which Augustus was promoting marriage, child-bearing and chastity (of women, at least) among well-born Romans. For a poet, it was now safer that a beloved should be of dubious social status and uncertain identity, somewhere in the no-man’s-land between literary tradition and real life.

  There are signs, especially in the earlier poems, that Propertius was groping for a new context in which to place love poetry. Possibly he was influenced by Lucretius’ scientific epic De rerum natura (On the Nature of the Universe), which promoted the view of the Greek philosopher Epicurus that love, beyond the straight satisfaction of the sexual urge, was a kind of transient and sordid madness. In any case, when we read that Cynthia has gone to the country, or that the poet has been shipwrecked on a desert island while trying to get away from her, there is no expectation that we should take these as historical events. They are dramatic scenarios. But what many of these poems are really about is insecurity, jealousy, or obsession in relationships – and these are very real emotions. Elsewhere Propertius explores, sometimes in whimsical fashion, such issues as whether love can survive the absence or death of the beloved, the relationship of anger and violence to love, and even whether one should take all one’s clothes off to make love. It is his psychological acuity that seems to me his true contribution to the genre.

  Attempts to identify Cynthia would not matter greatly were it not that, of all the women who appear in the pages of the Roman love poets, she is, in my view, much the most fully and subtly drawn. By the end of the poems, we feel we know her, real or otherwise. And if we wonder why the narrator should be so concerned about the fidelity of a woman who may have been simply an up-market prostitute (or she about his), we should perhaps look at the heroines of nineteenth-century operas like Giacomo Puccini’s Manon Lescaut or Giuseppe Verdi’s Violetta in La Traviata. I will leave the last word on Cynthia’s reality to Austin Warren, co-author with René Wellek of the influential Theory of Literature. Warren wrote in an essay on Robert Herrick: ‘Does any artist, whether novelist or poet, either draw literally the people he has known or not draw upon observation?’

  A few years after Propertius’ death, Ovid was permanently exiled by Augustus to the Black Sea coast of what is now Romania for reasons almost certainly connected in part with his spoof didactic poem The Art of Love, seen by the emperor as seriously off-message. The lesson cannot have been lost on other poets. Ovid’s own death effectively marked the end of the short personal poem, barring an atte
mpt by Martial to resurrect it in the second century AD in the form of epigrams. Between the first verses of Catullus and the last of Ovid, barely seventy-five years had passed in the many-century history of Latin literature.

  One of the main obstacles that has come between Propertius and a modern appreciation of his poetry is his constant citing of Greek myths that were familiar to his contemporaries but are mostly not so today. Professor Heslin discusses this point in his introduction, and at much greater length in his recent book Propertius, Greek Myth, and Virgil. To help readers, I have written notes on the poems that provide background on mythology, Roman history and other matters not obvious to a twenty-first-century public. These appear in a separate section following the poems, where they may be consulted or not.

  It is not my wish to burden the reader with another disquisition on the theory of verse translation, but, given Propertius’ remoteness in time, it may be useful to say something of my own approach, in order to address issues raised with me by friends and acquaintances who have seen early drafts of these poems.

  All of Propertius’ extant poetry was written in the metre known as the elegiac couplet (described in the introduction). Like all classical Latin verse, it was unrhymed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s version of a couplet by the German poet Friedrich Schiller gives an idea:

  In the hexameter rises the fountain’s silvery column;

  In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.

  But Latin metres were based on syllable length, an effect which cannot be reproduced in English, and not on stress, as is the case in modern verse (including the lines just quoted). For this reason, and because the stress-based elegiac couplet has proved monotonous in English when used for page after page, I am not aware of any full version of Propertius that has attempted it. I have not either.

  Instead, the traditional measure for translating Propertius into English was long the heroic couplet (iambic pentameters rhyming AABBCC, etc.) Like the elegiac couplet, it tends to make the unit of sense two lines, but I can see little other similarity. For one thing, as Schiller indicated, the hexameter is stronger than the pentameter in elegiacs, whereas in the heroic couplet the second line is stronger as we build up to the expected rhyme. Furthermore, in English literature the heroic couplet is the metre par excellence of such poets as Alexander Pope and John Dryden, and suits the kind of poetry they wrote. But Propertius is a very different poet, writing a very different kind of verse. The heroic couplet does not, in my view, have the flexibility the elegiac couplet had in classical Latin. I have used it in just one poem, the last, to symbolise its apparent surrender to the Augustan ideology of wifely virtue, consigning to history almost everything Propertius had written about Cynthia and his relationship with her.

  A minor earthquake struck the Propertian world in 1919, when Ezra Pound began to publish his Homage to Sextus Propertius, written two years earlier. Pound had originally told friends it was intended to plug the gap created by the lack of a good translation. Written in twelve sections, it varies between a translation and a loose adaptation of parts of some twenty of Propertius’ poems. It was immediately derided by classical scholars on the grounds of mistakes they said Pound had made. For instance, ‘canes’, meaning ‘you will sing’, is rendered by Pound as ‘dogs’ (which the Latin word can also mean). Classicists accustomed to correcting ignorant schoolboy ‘howlers’ could not imagine that Pound’s mistranslations were anything else. The idea that he might have done them on purpose for his own effects did not occur to them. Wilfred Rowland Childe, a minor Georgian poet, sneered that the work was ‘so full of egregious blunders that a fourth-form boy would be whipped for the least of them’. Readers of avantgarde English poetry, on the other hand, reacted cautiously. Most of them were unfamiliar with Propertius and could not quite see what Pound was up to. But the work has steadily gained supporters, some of whom consider it one of his best.

  Pound replaced rhyme and metre with his own brand of muscular free verse, not unlike that used in his main original work, The Cantos. Here are a few lines (based on Poem III.1):

  Annalists will continue to record Roman reputations,

  Celebrities from the Trans-Caucasus will belaud Roman celebrities

  And expound the distentions of Empire,

  But for something to read in normal circumstances?

  For a few pages brought down from the forked hill unsullied?

  I ask a wreath which will not crush my head.

  And there is no hurry about it;

  I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral,

  Seeing that long standing increases all things

  regardless of quality.

  Pound’s metrics reinforced his reading of Propertius as an ironist rather than the Catullus-style romantic poet of passion he had long been seen as – a view I share.

  I have started from the belief that, despite the efforts of Pound and a number of subsequent translators, Propertius undeservedly remains a relative unknown among poetry readers today. In recent decades, he has attracted the attention of adherents of the theories of the twentieth-century French psychiatrist and philosopher Jacques Lacan and of feminist scholars interested in the gender implications of his work. But these studies have largely bypassed the broader public.

  For all my admiration for the Homage, it would be folly for me to cast myself as another Pound, or to try to ‘complete’ his work, and I have attempted neither. Every translator needs to find his or her own voice. I should stress that this is not a literal version designed to help those with a little Latin to work through the original. Several excellent prose translations exist that serve such a purpose, the most easily accessible probably being the Loeb edition of George Goold (1990), which has a facing Latin text. Instead, I have essayed a verse translation based on the impossible (and yet somehow only possible) premise that Propertius were, as has been said, ‘alive and writing in English today’. In other words, I have – at risk of serious hubris – tried to produce poems that can, despite the gulf of time separating us from Augustan Rome, work for the modern reader. Above all, I have sought to bring out the personality – ironic and at times subtly humorous – that I find in the original.

  Sometimes I have hewed fairly closely to the Latin, at other times I have felt the need to be more adventurous while still seeing my work as translation, not adaptation or imitation. I have further imagined that, even though Propertius used a single metre, were he writing today he would employ a variety of forms, as suggested by the subject matter and tenor of each poem. Thus, the reader will find here free verse, but also some use of rhyme, half-rhyme and various types of metre or rhythm.

  A word on place names. Like most translators, I have used English forms where these exist – Rome and Athens, for example. Slightly more controversially, where there is no separate English spelling, I have used the modern forms current in the countries concerned (mainly Italy), rather than the ancient versions. I have considered that Perugia is more likely to be known to readers than Perusia, and Modena than Mutina. Most controversially of all, I have occasionally used the names of countries that did not exist in the same form in classical times, such as Turkey, Albania and Afghanistan. I have employed ancient names only in cases where either there is no human habitation now where towns or cities once stood, or where the historical name is the one that is generally understood. It would be perverse to speak not of Troy but of Hisarlik, the Turkish village that now stands on the site.

  The numbering of the poems (if they originally had any titles, these have not survived) follows the order in medieval manuscripts, our earliest source. Cases where the manuscripts give as one poem what are now thought by scholars to be two account for numbers like II.26a and II.26b. The opposite situation accounts for such numbers as III.24–25.

  This book could not have come about without Michael Schmidt, Director of Carcanet Press and General Editor of PN Review, which first published some of these poems. He was willing to gamble on someone whose only previous c
ontribution to world literature had been wire-service news stories with a maximum life expectancy of twenty-four hours. As I made the transition from news agency journalist to verse translator, he also gave me the benefit of his tradecraft acquired over more than forty years as a practising poet, critic and editor, suggesting improvements and turns of phrase.

  I need to acknowledge those who taught me Latin and ancient Greek, in particular the late Robert Levens of Merton College, Oxford – himself no mean translator of some of Catullus’ more outrageous epigrams.

  In my teens, two books fired my interest in Latin poetry. One was Poets in a Landscape (1957) by the great classicist Gilbert Highet. Some of his literary judgments now look dated, but his enthusiasm for his subject (including the links between the poetry and the land of Italy) continues to shine through. The other was Latin Explorations (1963) by Kenneth Quinn, especially the chapter on what he terms the crisis in Roman personal poetry. Again, I don’t agree with all his conclusions – I think he underrates Propertius, for example – but his determination to treat poetry as poetry, not anything else, is something I find lacking in many of the innumerable books and articles that have been written on the subject more recently.