Elegies:
with Parallel Latin Texts by Tibullus
Translated
by A. M. Juster.
Oxford
University Press. 2012. 176 pp.
ISBN 978-0199603312.Rome of the mid and late 1st century BCE was an enormously powerful republic in flux. It had achieved an empire stretching from Great Britain to Egypt, from North Africa to the Black Sea, at the cost of a continuing struggle for internal and external cohesion. Uprisings in its own immediate countryside were quelled at the price of Latin citizenship for all resident and natural born Italians, a category which included a wide range of ethnic groups. The need to maintain huge tracts of conquered land required the naturalization of key citizens from the subject countries.
These demands resulted in massive changes to the Roman
culture, not altogether different from the changes to our own over the past 60
years. Foreign citizens brought foreign customs. The Romans themselves were
deeply divided over whether to incorporate these customs into their lives. The
young, in particular, often found the new eastern influence irresistibly
attractive.
The changes were so complex and confusing that the citizens
sought their familiar lives back by accepting a dictatorship under the most
Roman of Romans Julius Caesar. The opposition understood that the one most
important aspect of traditional Roman life, however, would be destroyed as the
result: Rome would no longer be a republic. Caesar was famously assassinated
and a great civil war ensued while the frontiers still needed to be defended
and their goods brought to market. Huge ethnically mixed armies were required
in order to accomplish all of this. The confusion only increased.
Among the vastly many changes all of this provoked, the
heads of Rome's patrician families, and their sons and retainers, were
constantly away from home conducting war and trade. They left behind them their
wives to manage their estates. Those wives and their daughters were freed, as a
result, to enjoy a kind of de facto women's liberation. The youngest often
followed the new "cool" customs, worshipping Osiris and Isis instead
of the Roman gods, donning rich robes and jewelry, and seizing the opportunity
of their freedom to take lovers.
At this time, patrician husbands began to experience an
unprecedented difficulty begetting heirs. Many wives had become adept at a wide
range of methods of contraception and abortion in order to enjoy their lovers
without detection. They preferred lovers, and the gifts and delicious intrigue
that came with them, to being mothers.
Among the most desired lovers were the sons of wealthy
families who had been left behind as too young or otherwise unfitted for war.
As young men they had certainly been sent to school in Rome, and, almost as
certainly, to finishing school in Athens or Alexandria, where many primarily
studied Greek poetry. In short, they were highly polished and sometimes even
possessed of access to considerable wealth.
Over the space of some dozen years, Julius Caesar's favorite
nephew Octavius—who later would be known as Augustus Caesar—would craftily win
the succession of civil wars that followed his assassination. It seems that
young Albius Tibullus's family had initially sided with the faction around the
assassins, and, perhaps as the result, the majority of their estates had been
lost during the poet's youth. In order to get into Octavius's good graces, he
followed his family's patron, Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, on a
victorious military campaign into Aquitaine, on behalf of the new Caesar, where
he shared Messala's table and appears to have received commendations for valor.
For all the confusion and conflict, Rome grew vastly
wealthier, over the same period, with war booty and colonial trade. In the
words of A. M. Juster's particularly adept translation of Tibullus's Elegies:
Our iron age approves not love but,
loot of war—
though loot has played a role in
many evils...
A looter longs to occupy the boundless
plains
so many acres feed his countless sheep.
He longs for foreign marble, and his
column's hauled
through city street-life by
uncounted oxen.
Traditional Roman virtue was rapidly disappearing. The
traditional noble ideal was being replaced by the avarice of "mere"
freemen. A nouveau riche was displacing the culture in which Tibullus had grown
up.
However Tibullus came to be decorated for his service in
Aquitaine, his Elegies make it clear that the campaign left him with one
overwhelming desire:
I offer you first fruits from my
ancestral fields,
from a full sty, a pig, a farmer's
gift.
I'll follow in clean clothes and bear
the basket bound
with myrtle leaves with myrtle on my
head.
I'll please you all this way; let
someone else well armed
and helped by Mars lay hostile leaders
low
so as a soldier he can tell me deeds while
drinking
and paint the camp with wine upon
the table!
War was dirty, uncomfortable and dangerous. Upon his return
he had become Delia's lover and only wanted to marry her and leave the run of
the estate to her. Pleading fragile health, he managed to live out the rest of
his days between his farm and visits to the poetry circles of Rome.
To support his aversion to business and war, Tibullus often
cites a mythical prehistoric Rome much like modern American hippies
romanticized pre-Columbian, native American lifestyles. In the olden days, when
men lived on acorns, according to Tibullus's amusing mythology, there were no
wars, no long dusty trips to be taken, and love was simple and unencumbered by
coyness or exchange for expensive gifts.
Among the conservative factions to which almost all patrician families and their clients belonged, such sentiments were offensive. Among the liberal factions to which almost all poets and their patrons belonged, they were provocative, delightfully decadent. Tibullus was a pretty boy and he didn't care who knew it. He had his estate, his friends and his lovers and no worse complaint than a reduced fortune.
Among the conservative factions to which almost all patrician families and their clients belonged, such sentiments were offensive. Among the liberal factions to which almost all poets and their patrons belonged, they were provocative, delightfully decadent. Tibullus was a pretty boy and he didn't care who knew it. He had his estate, his friends and his lovers and no worse complaint than a reduced fortune.
I do not miss my fathers' wealth or
profits built
from yields that my old grandfather had
saved.
A small crop is enough; it is enough to
rest
in bed and loll upon familiar sheets.
How sweet it is while lying down to
hear fierce winds
and hold a mistress with a tender
grasp.
As for his friends, they had his sensual, beautifully fluent
poetry, descended from the Greek of Callimachus and the Greek
Anthology—probably gained by the finest liberal education a Roman could
afford—and the gentle melancholy of his person, and that was enough.
The "familiar sheets," from the swatch of Juster's
translation above, are something of an anachronism meant to invoke a comparable
feeling in the modern reader's mind. He uses such tropes sparingly and with
excellent judgment throughout. Elsewhere, in Juster, Tibullus imagines a
"For Sale" sign in front of his house such as did not exist at the
time. In the original Latin the sign is an auction notice. He imagines his
lover picking a door lock with a hairpin while such locks at the time were much
too large to pick. In the case of the "familiar sheets," they are
part anachronism, part best guess. In the original, Tibullus is referring
either to pillows or mattress ticking. Juster chooses ticking and lightens it
up to give the modern reader a recognizable contemporary equivalent for the
poet's sense of simple luxury. Bed sheets, as we presently know them, did not
yet exist in the western world.
The allure of running a small estate, and being the subject
of poems already highly appreciated by Rome's finest poets, was not enough for
Delia, in the end. In time, she married another, probably wealthier, more
ambitious man, who seems to have spent considerable time on the road. Tibullus
briefly remained her secret lover and poet as opportunity presented itself.
For all that Tibullus's noble heritage and reduced circumstances
had left him decrying the new wealth and the changes it was bringing, his love
of young friends and lovers left him with a foot in both camps. While his older
contemporary, the poet Virgil, sternly wrote country poems filled with details
of crop rotation and manuring fallow fields and strictly Roman gods, Tibullus's
Elegies are delightfully interwoven with allusions to Isis and Osiris
(interlopers from the east) and flower-strewn local festivals. He cherished the
Lares of his family home—much humbler spirits that protected the hearth—more
than the huge gods that traveled the universe beyond. He found the slaves and
servants on his estate, and his country neighbors, and their rustic
celebrations, delightfully picturesque—much to be preferred to Mars, the god of
war.
Poetry was not all Tibullus brought back from Greece. Even
sturdy, supremely Roman Virgil was unable to resist an elegy reviving the Greek
tradition of boy-love. In Virgil's case, the elegy is a dialogue between two
purportedly fictional characters. Tibullus, on the other hand, was all about
satisfying his own desire, a fact that suggests his elegies about his pursuit
of the boy Marathus where genuinely personal. When the boy cheats on him, he is
clear about what has been sullied between them:
And yet my lad has slept with him! I
might believe
that he could couple with an untamed
beast!
How dare you sell my fondling to other
men?
Weren't you insane to offer them my
kisses?
The Romans of that time, while not as disgusted as modern
British and Americans, rejected boy-love as a vice (the "Greek vice,"
as the poet Horace called it). The new young sophisticated noble, on the other
hand, found it daring to write about, even tempting to engage in.
Here, as in most of Juster's translation, the rendering is
not only fine as poetry but literal. The poetic unit is the unrhymed couplet
throughout. More than occasionally (as is the case in the first two lines
above), the first line features one more iambic foot than the second,
approximating the original elegiac couplet, utilized by Tibullus, which
consisted of a dactylic hexameter followed by a dactylic pentameter. Juster
allows his iambics to grow quite loose from time to time in order to get the
same effects of concision or of a gentle falling-off in the second line, and
even an occasional sense of the longer, quantitative (long-and-short, versus
our English stressed-and-unstressed) Roman poetic foot. The frequency and
selection of enjambment and run-on lines even approximates the original text.
His affair with Delia having ended, Tibullus, as might be
expected, will seek out a more sophisticated dalliance. He will refer to her as
"dominam" (mistress, domineer-ess) and stress her imperiousness, a
trope that will dominate love poetry for centuries to come. For the sake of the
elegies he will write for her, he will name her "Nemesis" (the Greek
Goddess of humiliation). She is his irresistible torturer.
I swore so often not to go back to her
door,
yet when I swore, my willful feet
returned.
Cruel love, if only it were possible
I'd see
your darts and arrows smashed and
torches snuffed.
For these very reasons, she is his muse. He cannot write a
lick of poetry without the luscious pain she brings him.
But, for all the second book of the Elegies belongs to
Nemesis, she is less present than was Delia. Other subjects require her poet's
attention: friends, festivals, his patron's son. And then there is the silence
of an early grave. He died, in 19 BCE, in his mid-30s. According to the poet
Ovid, his mother was with him when he died which probably means that he died on
his farm. In Ovid's elegy, Delia and Nemesis were in attendance at his funeral
pyre.
It is clear that an enormous amount of effort has gone into
making A. M. Juster's translation seem as artfully simple as Tibullus's
original Elegies. It is difficult to believe that they could possibly be better
rendered into contemporary English.
Also from the Library of Babel:
- The American Garden. January 16, 2019. “By 1890, the Ladies' Home Journal was the most popular advertising venue in the country. There, between ads for cook books, children's clothing, stave-less corsets, indoor water-closets, refrigerators and pianos, and popular female columnists who advised the housewife about them all, were a profusion of ads for seeds.”
- Blank Verse Now and Then. January 1, 2019. “Surrey was as erratic as most young noblemen during early English history, and far more brilliant, and was imprisoned several times for temper and intemperance. In the end, he became rather impatient for the gouty, porcine, syphilis-riddled Henry VIII to die, and for the Howard faction to rule as regents to the young, fragile, son conceived of the syphilitic, Edward.”
- The Elegy and the Internet. July 1, 2005. ‘Drummond, we may remember, was the William Drummond, of Hawthornden, who Ben Jonson visited during a trip to Scotland, in 1619. The Scot took the time to jot a memorandum of Jonson's conversation, in which we learn inter alia that "he cursed Petrarch for redacting Verses to Sonnets, which he said were like the Tirrant's bed, wher some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short,"7 and "That Shakspear wanted Arte."’
No comments:
Post a Comment