Poems Page 8

in the middle the temple rises in gleaming marble –

  the god might prefer it to his native Delos.

  Over the pediment the chariot of the sun,

  the twin doors a masterpiece of African ivory:

  one with the Gauls kicked off Parnassus’ summit,

  the other lamenting the deaths of Niobe’s children.

  Apollo himself, between his mother and sister,

  plays songs in a long robe …

  You should take a stroll there in your spare time,

  Cynthia! But I don’t trust you: too many men

  have seen you rushing to fulfil your vow

  with lit torches at Diana’s grove out of town.

  And seeing is sinning: only those who don’t see you

  won’t be tempted: eyes are the malefactors.

  Why patronise dubious soothsayers in Palestrina,

  Cynthia, or visit the walls of Tuscolo?

  Why does your carriage take you to Tivoli

  so often or down the Appian Way to Lanuvio?

  Pompey’s portico with its cooling columns

  and brocaded hangings is too tacky, is it?

  Or the dense row of level-topped plane trees,

  or the rivulets spouting from sleeping Maro,

  the city filled with the sound of splashing water

  suddenly pouring out of Triton’s mouth?

  I don’t think so. Your road’s signposted ‘Infidelity’;

  it’s not the city you’re running from but my scrutiny.

  It won’t work; your artless schemes against me are pointless;

  I know your snares – I’ve learnt from experience.

  But my views scarcely matter; throwing away

  your good name will bring you what you deserve, I fear.

  A nasty rumour about you reached my ears lately;

  it went through the whole city – unpleasant stuff.

  But pay no attention to malicious tongues:

  gossip was ever the penalty for beauty.

  It’s not as though you’ve been caught in possession of poison;

  Apollo will witness that your hands are clean.

  A one- (or two-) night stand doesn’t bother me –

  it’s petty crime. Helen, for example,

  emigrated after falling for a foreigner,

  but was brought back home alive and unpunished.

  Venus herself gratified her lust for Mars

  but still retained her good standing in heaven.

  A goddess loved a shepherd on Mount Ida,

  bedding him among the sheep – a goddess, remember;

  her sister nymphs calmly watched it all

  en masse, as did Silenus and his satyrs;

  she’d collected apples with them in the mountain vale,

  catching them as they fell into her hand.

  In this abundance of fornication, who asked:

  ‘Why is she so rich? Who gave her the money and where

  did it come from? Rome is fortunate these days

  if only one woman commits moral turpitude’?

  Lesbia once did all this and got away with it:

  successors will surely attract less opprobrium.

  Anyone seeking upholders of old-fashioned virtues

  obviously only arrived here yesterday.

  Anyone who’s managed to dry up the ocean waves,

  or pulled down the stars from the sky with his mortal hand,

  can think about making our women forswear sin:

  the sin-free lifestyle ended with Saturn’s reign

  and the day flood waters covered the earth;

  after the Flood of antiquity, tell me,

  who was able to keep their bed undefiled,

  when even goddesses slept around with gods?

  King Minos’ wife once – or so they say –

  was seduced by the beauty of a raging bull;

  and Danae, for all her bronze prison walls,

  couldn’t just say no to mighty Jupiter.

  So whether you’re mimicking Greek or Italian women,

  here’s my verdict, Cynthia: you’re free to go, and good luck!

  II.33a

  This wretched festival is here again:

  Cynthia’s on ten nights of abstinence.

  Time to abolish the rites Io sent

  from the steamy Nile to Italian women.

  What goddess so often parts lovers gagging for it?

  In all guises, she’s been hard on her followers.

  Io, your secret affair with Jupiter

  led you down many roads across the planet.

  When Juno put horns on your woman’s head,

  changing your speech into a cow’s hoarse lowing,

  you hurt your mouth so often, chewing

  oak leaves and arbutus on your stable bed!

  Since Jove stripped away your bestial form,

  have you become an arrogant goddess?

  Not content with Egypt’s swarthy devotees?

  Why have you made designs on distant Rome?

  What’s in it for you if girls sleep alone?

  Trust me, you’ll get those horns back again,

  or else we’ll simply ride you out of town:

  the Nile and Tiber never did get on.

  Cynthia, your piety’s brought me to my knees;

  once past these nights, we’ll compensate:

  three times, please.

  II.33b

  You drink slowly but steadily:

  late nights can’t stop you.

  Your hand’s not tired enough to drop those dice.

  You’re not listening to me,

  just letting me prattle on,

  as the stars fade.

  Death tracked grape fermenting from the start,

  the ruin of good water! Icarius

  learned the bitter smell of the vine

  (those Athenian farmers were right to throttle him).

  Centaur Eurytion died of wine,

  and the Cyclops – the strong vintage.

  Liquor destroys looks,

  corrupts youth,

  makes a girl unable to tell one lover from another …

  But to you it does nothing, damn it!

  Drink on – you’re beautiful,

  wine won’t hurt you.

  Your garlands droop into your glass,

  you read my poems aloud in a high voice …

  Oh, soak the table some more with spilt Falernian,

  let it fizz softly in that gilded cup.

  II.34

  Who’d trust even their best friend with a lovely

  woman? I almost lost my own that way.

  My researches prove it: anyone will double-cross

  you in love; no man can resist a pretty lady.

  Amor breaks up the family, wrecks friendship –

  all harmony yesterday, broadswords at dawn today.

  Menelaus’ guest checked out with his host’s spouse;

  Medea chased after a man she barely knew.

  You scoundrel, how could you touch up

  my darling? Didn’t your hands drop off, Lynceus?

  Suppose she hadn’t been so firm and true?

  Could you have lived with all that infamy?

  Poison me or run cold steel through my chest –

  just stay away from my sweetheart, that’s all.

  You may be committed to me, body and soul,

  you can take charge of my financial affairs,

  but keep out of my bed’s my one request:

  I can’t brook rivals – even Jupiter.

  I’m jealous of my insubstantial shadow,

  I shake from fear of nothing. I’m such a fool.

  I can forgive your shameful behaviour, though,

  on one ground: it must have been the wine talking.

  But don’t give me that ascetic furrowed brow:

  everyone knows how love is a good thing.

  Lynceus, you’ve got late-onset amorous

  dementia – but I’m g
lad you now worship my deities.

  Your books of Socratic wisdom cannot save

  you anymore, or knowing the universe’s ways.

  Epimenides’ poems are no use –

  your old mentor has nothing to say on hopeless love.

  You’d do better to emulate scholarly Philitas

  or the dreams of trim Callimachus.

  Recount the Achelous River’s course,

  its waters shattered in a battle of love,

  and how the Maeander winds through the Turkish plains

  so intricately it doesn’t know where it is,

  the strange tale of Adrastus’ talking horse,

  who won at Archemorus’ funeral games.

  Don’t get into the fate of Amphiaraus’ chariot

  or Capaneus’ fall that gratified Jove;

  and don’t compose Aeschylean tragedies:

  relax – it’s time to dance to a softer beat.

  Get out that fine lathe now to hone your verse;

  unbend, poet, write of your own feelings,

  or you’ll go the way of Antimachus and Homer:

  my girl has no time for gods, even the greatest.

  No bull will submit to the plough’s weight

  before its horns are caught in a strong lariat,

  and you will not endure love’s hardships,

  however tough you are, before you’re tamed.

  These women are not looking into matter’s origins,

  explanations for the moon’s eclipse,

  the evidence for life beyond the tomb

  or whether lightning has specific targets.

  Take me, for example. Little of the family fortune

  was left to me, no ancestor triumphed in war,

  yet at parties I rule over girls of all shapes

  and sizes through a talent you put down.

  I like to lie in, still sporting last night’s garlands,

  pierced to the bone by the bowshot of Amor;

  the Battle of Actium? Vergil will be on the case,

  he’s the man to describe Caesar’s mighty warships,

  as soon as he’s done with the campaigns of Aeneas

  and the foundations he laid in Italian land.

  Give way, you Roman writers, give way, you Greeks,

  something bigger than the Iliad is in the works.

  Vergil, you tell of the precepts of old Hesiod,

  what field is best for corn, what slope for grapes;

  the song you pluck from your subtle lyre

  could have come from Apollo’s fingers.

  You tell of the well-thumbed pipes of Thyrsis

  and Daphnis beneath Galaesus’ cool pinewoods,

  and how to relieve shepherdesses of their dresses

  with ten apples and a baby goat from the udder.

  Happy man, who can buy love cheap from a girl with apples;

  (mine would turn up her nose if Tityrus himself sang to her).

  Happy Corydon trying to steal the virginal

  Alexis, the treasure of his farmer master.

  He may have laid down his pipe from weariness,

  but he’s still applauded by the tolerant nymphs.

  And no reader is going to spurn his poems,

  whether expert in love’s arts or a novice.

  Varro, the crowning passion of Leucadia,

  relaxed in this way from the Golden Fleece;

  daring Catullus’ verse echoed the song:

  his Lesbia’s better known than Helen is;

  erudite Calvus, in pages like these,

  wrote of the death of tragic Quintilia.

  And how many wounds for lovely Lycoris’ sake

  did the dead Gallus wash in the underworld lake.

  Praised by Propertius, Cynthia will live on,

  if fame will lift me to that pantheon.

  BOOK THREE

  III.1

  Ghosts of Callimachus and Philitas of Kos,

  admit me, I request you, to your grove.

  I come from a pure spring, the first priest

  to put Italian rites to a Greek setting.

  Tell me, where was the glen where you refined your song

  together? How did you start? What water did you drink?

  Goodbye, martial epics that hold Apollo back!

  Let my verse run, honed on a fine lathe.

  That is how fame will raise me from the ground

  and my muse ride in triumph on garlanded horses,

  the gods of love beside me in the carriage,

  a host of writers trailing in my slipstream.

  No use shaking your reins to overtake me –

  there is no super-highway to the Muses.

  Many will add more praises of Rome to the annals,

  recounting how Afghanistan

  is the empire’s new frontier;

  but for peacetime reading, this offering comes down

  by an untrodden path from the Sisters’ mountain.

  Give your poet soft wreaths, daughters of Pegasus:

  a crown will sit too hard upon my brow.

  What the envious crowd takes away from me in life

  fame will repay twice over after I die.

  After death, time magnifies all things;

  funerals are the portal to renown!

  Or who would know how a fir-wood horse brought down a city,

  how the rivers of Troy battled with Achilles,

  how a chariot dragged Hector’s body

  three times through the dust?

  The sons of Priam, poor Paris in his borrowed armour

  would scarcely be heard of in their own home town.

  There’d be little talk of you these days, Ilium,

  twice captured by the power of Hercules …

  were it not for Homer, recorder of your ruin,

  who saw his work grow as the ages passed;

  and Rome will praise me in

  our grandchildren’s generation:

  I forecast that day will come when I’m turned to ash.

  The tombstone marking my bones shall not be neglected.

  It’s all arranged. Apollo has approved my prayer.

  III.2

  That said, back to my song-cycle, to gladden

  my girl with the touch of the familiar melody.

  Orpheus’ lyre froze wild beasts in Thrace

  and halted eddying rivers, says the legend;

  Cithaeron’s stones, it’s claimed, slid into place

  to form Thebes’ walls when Amphion played;

  and Galatea, beneath Etna’s wild slopes, steered

  her foam-flecked horses towards the Cyclops’ song:

  with Apollo and Bacchus on-side, then, what’s so strange

  if a crowd of women hangs on my every word?

  My house is not held up by marble columns;

  it has no ivory ceilings with gilded beams,

  or orchards like the Gardens of Babylon,

  or grottoes cooled by a private water supply;

  but my friends are Muses, readers love my poems,

  and Calliope dances my ballets till dawn.

  Happy you to be feted in my slim volumes,

  monuments I’ve raised to your beauty.

  Extravagant pyramids groping for the stars,

  Jove’s Olympia temple mimicking Olympus,

  the treasures of the original Mausoleum –

  none of them is excused a mortal outcome.

  Flame or flood will drag down their glories,

  or they’ll fall under the silent weight of years.

  But a name won by inspiration time

  cannot destroy: that name is deathless.

  III.3

  I dreamed I lay

  in Helicon’s soft shade,

  where the stream struck by Pegasus flows,

  and felt the power to mouth the derring-do

  of the kings of Alba,

  a magnum opus;

  I was dipping my dainty lips

  to th
e surging waters

  where old Ennius once slaked his thirst

  before singing of the Curiatii brothers

  and the javelins of the Horatii,

  the royal booty brought on Aemilius’ barge,

  how Fabius’ dilly-dallying won the day,

  the calamitous battle at Cannae,

  then the gods rewarding worshippers’ devotion,

  the guardian deities routing Hannibal

  from their Roman home,

  Jupiter saved by the honks of geese.

  Then Apollo, spotting me from the Castalian copse,

  leaned on his golden lyre

  near his grotto and said:

  ‘What’s your business with that river? Are you crazy?

  Who told you to get entangled in an epic?

  No glory awaits you that way, Propertius:

  small wheels need smooth going, if you want

  your book to be kept on a girl’s side-table

  to read as she waits alone for her boyfriend.

  Why has your pen strayed from its proper margins?

  Don’t overload your talent’s rowboat.

  One oar in the water, the other skimming the beach –

  then you’ll be safe; the worst storms are out at sea.’

  With that,

  he pointed his ivory plectrum at a place

  where a new path was laid along the mossy floor.

  A green cave was studded with pebbles,

  drums hung in the hollow rock;

  cult objects of the Muses, a terracotta

  image of Father Silenus,

  Pan-pipes;

  and Mistress Venus’ doves,

  my kind of crowd,

  wet their crimson beaks in the Gorgon’s pool;

  and the nine Wenches of the different arts

  turned their gentle hands

  to their special gifts:

  one plucked ivy for Bacchic staffs,

  another worked out string accompaniments,

  a third twined roses in both hands.

  One of those goddesses touched me

  (from her face, Calliope, I think):

  ‘Be happy to travel in a swan-drawn carriage,