A Garden of Roman Verses!

Our book today is a pretty little volume the J. Paul Getty Museum put out in 1998 – it’s called A Garden of Roman Verse, and it features snippets from dozens of different Roman translations, each set in attractive typeface and accompanied by full-color reproductions of ancient Roman paintings or mosaics recovered from the entombed cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The book’s title guarantees that you’ll be meeting Virgil, Horace, Catullus, Ovid and the rest inside, but nevertheless the title is a bit misleading. This isn’t really a garden of Roman verse so much as it’s a garden of English verse.

It’s no less pretty for all that, as even a casual dabbler into the vast translation-literature of English poetry could attest. First flowering in the Age of Elizabeth and continuing in an unbroken tradition to the 19th century (it limped into the 20th and has died almost utterly in the Twittering 21st), the efforts of English poets and classicists to render the ancient greats in contemporary verse were unrelenting. It was the favorite pastime of procrastinating dons, the most predictable route to publication for aspiring poetasters, and a sublime alternate voice for the greatest masters of the various British eras.

The singular charm of this little volume is that it touches on all of those various exponents. This isn’t just Alexander Pope’s Greatest Hits, although of course he’s in here, hilariously letting his ‘numbers’ get the better of him, as in this rather verbose rendering of a mere two lines from Virgil’s 7th ecologue:

Some god conducts you to these blissful seats,
The mossy fountains and the green retreats!
Where-e’er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade,
Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade,
Where-e’er you tread, the blushing flowers shall rise,
And all things flourish where you turn your eyes.

And in an undertaking such as this one, where there’s Pope, there must be Dryden! Here’s here a few times, never more felicitous than in this bit from Virgil’s Georgics:

Wet weather seldom hurts the most unwise,
So plain the signs, such prophets are the skies:
The wary crane foresees it first, and sails
Above the storm, and leaves the lowly vales:
The cow looks up, and from afar can find
The change of heaven, and snuffs it in the wind.
The swallow skims the river’s watery face,
The frogs renew the croaks of their loquacious race.

I love that almost tactile use of ‘snuffs,’ and the subtle echo of ‘croaks’ in the first syllable of ‘loquaious’ accurately but not pedantically reflects the ‘veteram’ and ‘querelam’ of the original. Dryden was never better than when he was quietly trying to match wits with somebody this way – it’s when he has the poetic stage to himself that he sometimes gets into long-winded trouble.

Long-windedness isn’t a problem for the famous adventurer Sir Walter Ralegh, who here gives us a portion of the soles occidere of Catullus very nearly as taut and pointed as the original:

The sun may set and rise:
But we contrariwise
Sleep after our short light
One everlasting night.

But it’s not just the mighty and famous you’ll find in this volume (if you can find this volume at all – I presume it’s available online, like everything else) – the editors have seen fit, charmingly, to include a small sample from “the young gentlemen of Mr. Rule’s Academy at Islington.” This is a bit of the parcius iunctas of Horace, published in 1766:

The bloods and bucks of this lewd town
No longer shake your windows down
With knocking;
Your door stands still, no more you hear
‘I die for you, O Lydia dear’,
Love’s god your slumbers rocking.

Horace is also represented by the volume’s only selection from a woman, this portion of the solvitur acris done by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu:

Sharp winter now dissolved, the linnets sing,
The grateful breath of pleasing Zephyrs bring
The welcome joys of long desired spring.

The galleys now for open sea prepare,
The herds forsake their stalls for balmy air,
The fields adorned with green approaching sun declare.

In shining nights the charming Venus leads
Her troops of Graces, and her lovely maids
Who gaily trip the ground in myrtle shades

And sadly, there are names here that lack the glitter of either Lady Mary or her arch-nemesis (every writer should have one) Pope, though not from wanting it badly. Foremost here must be our sad old acquaintance Branwell Bronte, the alcoholic failure dreamboat brother of those super-talented Bronte sisters. There’s a snippet of his work on the sunt quos curriculo of Horace – showing, it must be admitted, a bit of strain:

Many there are whose pleasure lies
In striving for the victor’s prize,
Whom dust clouds, drifting o’er the throng
As whirls the Olympic car along,
And kindling wheels, and close shunned goal
Amid the highest gods enroll

And naturally no such anthology would be complete without that most Romanesque of all the Romantics, Lord Byron. His translations form the Romans were, you should pardon the expression, legion – we’ll never known how many he consigned to the fireplace, but what we have is almost universally choice. And really, could there readily be a better latter-day candidate to do justice to the passionate mood-swings of Catullus? We’ll let them both have the last word here:

Equal to Jove, that youth must be,
Greater than Jove, he seems to me,
Who, free from jealousy’s alarms,
Securely, views thy matchless charms;
That cheek, which ever dimpling grows,
That mouth, from which such music flows,
To him, alike, are always known,
Reserved for him, and him alone.
Ah! Lesbia! though ‘tis death to me,
I cannot choose but look on thee.

The Floating Book

Our book today is Michelle Lovric's lush and utterly confident first novel The Floating Book, which takes its readers to the very beginnings of print culture by taking them to 1468 Venice, where Wendelin von Speyer and his assistants Bruno Uguccione and Felice Feliciano have just set up the city's first printing press - which is revolutionary enough, but their choice of printing matter only increases the tension between themselves and the city's ruling councils: they've chosen a first edition of Catullus, whose Lesbia poems, some of you may recall from school, are raw and scandalous. As the inevitable controversy erupts, so too does an intense love triangle between Bruno, Felice, and a mysterious woman named Sosia.

Lovric interweaves this story with the story of Catullus himself (printed in a different font; as befits a book about the birth of Venetian printing, The Floating Book is gorgeously and variedly assembled), and it's impossible to judge which portions of the book are better: both 15th century Venice and 1st century b.c. Rome come marvelously alive through Lovric's talent. In the case of the former, tossed-off descriptions are brought home with one or two perfectly chosen adjectives:

The clouds had parted in front of them all the way back to Venice. By the time Lussietta and Wendelin set foot in Mestre, the warm rain had evaporated, leaving the streets shining with puddles dizzy as shaken mirrors.

And in the case of the latter, Catullus' tortured love for Clodia, his 'Lesbia,' is followed through all its painful stages, as is his terror that all the poems into which he's poured his heartache, all the work he's created in his short life, might one day amount to nothing:

I know all too well the way these things go. Ignominious destinies meet some of the best books ... after languishing overlong in the storerooms of the booksellers they're sold off by weight to the grocers and bakers to wrap pastries and spices or to line barrels in which cereals are stored, or theyre sent to the butchers where they're wadded around sanguineous cuts of veal and the lolling heads of tiny songbirds impaled on sticks. There are so many ways for a poet and his poems to lose their immortality - even while he's still alive! I walk past the butchers and bakers, whistling, but in my heart I dread to see my own work embrace their wares one day. Yesterday I saw one of Caelius's poems flapping like a tunic round a fine mackerel, and smiled for the first time in weeks.

Of course, to those modern-day readers familiar with Catullus' textual history, his worry in this passage is only the more ironic, for we have him today through the survival of only one manuscript - he came that close to being fish-wrapping and only fish-wrapping.

Lovric's book has everything in it for the reader tired of thin, jaded prose and flimsy plots. The old Venice and much older Rome it evokes are each perfectly rendered, and the storylines in each are very satisfyingly intertwined and counterbalanced. And as an added little bonus, each chapter is headed by an English rendering from Catullus. Since the book nowhere attributes them, we have to assume they're Lovric's own, and some of them are quite good:

You have forgotten.
But the Gods remember
and so does the Truth.
It's the truth that will make you sorry
one day
for everything you did, and everything you do.

We here at Stevereads whole-heartedly endorse The Floating Book; it's an extravagant example of historical fiction done right.

penny press! the new york review o' books!

A very full issue of the New York Review of Books this time around (thanks, no doubt, to our young friend Sam's ever-increasing sway behind the scenes at that august establishment! Stand up and take a bow, Sam!), so let's start sorting the wheat from the chaff, shall we?

(The sorting can begin by one of your clever little marmosets finding me a visual of the COVER of this issue, something 30 minutes of tooling around the Web on my own failed utterly to do)

As I predicted, Jason Epstein's piece on Google's plan to create an enormous, unlimited virtual library garnered some heated responses in the letters page.

Google plans to digitally scan vast innumerable piles of books, to be available at the touch of a button to anybody with access to the Internet. The ruckus arises over copyrighted material - Google says it will offer only 'snippets' of such, presumably with readers able to pay them to see the whole work. Naturally, this has authors and bookstores in an uproar.

Law professors in an uproar too, apparently. Peter Friedman, an associate professor of law at Case Western, writes:

"Jason Epstein writes in 'Books @ Google,' that Google's creation of a searchable database of copyrighted texts without the permission of the copyright holders cannot constitute 'fair use' under US copyright law because the creation of such a database 'violates the provision of copyright law that forbids copying more than a brief passage.' There is no such provision.

Professor Friedman goes on from there, but that's where we here at Stevereads stopped and said, 'Yes there is. Dickwad.'

It's a well-known mental affliction, contracted mostly by lawyers and law professors, that leads them to believe their profession consists of sacred books locked away from the soiling gaze of the knuckle-dragging public. Alas for them, despite the level best efforts of the present administration, all American laws are matters of public record. If you've passed the fifth grade, you can look them up and READ them.

So: yes there is such a provision. Dickwad.

Equally frustrating is a little assertion tossed off in an otherwise excellent piece by Peter Green. He's reviewing three books on the archeology of Homeric Greece, and since he's a towering authority in the field and one of the smartest classicists alive today, the review is absorbingly good.

Except for this:

"Though the famous love affair between Catullus and Clodia Metelli ('Lesbia') is better documented than many other episodes in Roman history, there are still distinguished Latinists determined to treat it as fiction."

As Beepy would say, What the Eff?

This is probably as good a time as any to point out that Peter Green, despite having written a shelf-full of great histories and translations, is a bit of a nutjob. Not a nutjob, really, but ... well, shall we say 'stubborn in the holding of eccentric opinions'?

But even so, this one really puzzles. The history of ancient Rome prior to the death of Trajan is one of those subjects on which I can safely say I know as much as anybody in the world, and I'm telling you, boys and girls: there's absolutely NO 'documented' love affair between Catullus and Clodia. There's no surviving evidence they ever met. There's no evidence Clodia and Lesbia are the same woman. It's a pretty surmise alright, but 'documented'? I have no idea what Green is thinking.

Unless he's enough of a nutjob to consider passionate love-poems to be 'documents.' But that surely can't be - nobody in the world could be that dense.

And finally, it was density of another kind that kept cropping up in Larry McMurtry's review of Gore Vidal's latest memoir, "Point to Point Navigation."

On first glancing at the table of contents, I smiled: a wonderful match! Two excellent prose stylists, one patrician the other plebian, both outstanding historical novelists.

Then I read a bunch of other things in the issue and forgot about the symmetry. By the time I got to the review, I'd even sort of forgotten McMurtry was its writer. Instead, I just dug right in.

And almost immediately started snagging on the prose of the review itself. Some curious mental block prevented me from thinking of McMurtry every time this happened - instead, I was mentally cursing WHOEVER the editorial nobody was who could write like this:

"Gore Vidal has the looks of a prince, the connections of a prince, more wit than any prince I can presently recall, and a prose style that should be the envy of the dwindling few who realize that prose style matters, both for the glory of it and also because if one makes one's living mainly by the making of prose sentences, as Gore Vidal has, it's nicer if the sentences are strong, supple, and pleasing."

Geez. I'd have handed that back to a freshmen in high school.

OK, I thought, once I'd reminded myself that it was, in fact, McMurtry writing the piece. Anybody can find themselves in a rhetorical box canyon now and then. But it keeps happening:

"After the death of Barbara Epstein saddened this journal, I wrote a tiny tribute, along with many others.
None of these offerings is more painful to read than the dozen harrowing pages Gore Vidal devotes to the passing of his long, long companion, Howard Austen."

Again, geez. So McMurtry wrote a tiny tribute - and then wrote many other tiny tributes? So 'Gore Vidal' is a single nomenclature, never to be shortened to 'Vidal' (in the entire course of the piece, it never is ... the effect is hilariously and ironically Eucharistic)? So Howard Austen was really, really long?

After enough of this, I found it impossible to concentrate on the review AS a review ... at least, not a review of Vidal's - sorry, Gore Vidal's - new memoir (I'll have to look elsewhere for that, or perhaps bite the bullet and read it myself). Only belatedly did I realize what I was reading in this review, and the realization came with a little twist of pain:

This review is, quite unintentionally, the best tribute yet paid to the editorial skill of Barbara Epstein.

In the penny press! the TLS and Jebus!

Unlike with virtually every other penny press publication in existence, the TLS never needs pruning for these dispatches. It's always great, in all its parts. The task I have here at Stevereads is to single out the things I think will be of interest to you little marmosets, not, as with other publications, to pick out what's good.

We should start with the perennially enjoyable J.C.'s NB column: it always has something to start the senses.

This issue is no exception: JC has a great deal of fun with a new issue of Perdika Press:

The poetry pamphlet is among life's gentler pleasures. Fine paper, good printing and elegant design are essential; editorial discrimination, even more so. Perdika Press has issued the first three of a projected series of numbered pamphlets, nicely printed and well designed. What about the contents? The 'Series Editors' are Mario Petrucci, Nicholas Potamitis and Peter Brennan. According to Mr Brennan, 'Nicholas undertakes design, typesetting and runs the website. Mario advises on every aspect - very much a hands on counsellor'.

From Mario's counselling emerged the decision to devote the first Perdika edition to work by Mario Petrucci ('one of the most dynamic and original poets writing in English'). Thus we have 'Catullus,' eight 'contemporary adaptations' of the Roman poet, with original facing ('No one is better equipped to present Catullus to the modern reader'). Catullus' 'Melitios oculous tuos Iuuenti/siquis me sinat usque basiare' is wittily transformed into, 'Honey - when it comes to kissing/ we'd out-score Juventus.'

That's awful, of course, and it prompts one to recall that my young friend John Cotter is a dab hand at Catullus adaptations himself - his are, in fact, breathtakingly good. Perhaps he'll share one with all my loyal readers? Or better yet, compose a NEW one, based on Melitios oculous, for our delectation? Well, he's a busy lad, but we can always hope ...

Speaking of poets, Andrew Motion has a wonderful piece in the same TLS about the preservation of original manuscripts in public libraries. He has a wonderful passage about seeing a couple of autograph drafts of Wilfred Owen's sonnet 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' with comments by Siegfried Sassoon:

I learned more about writing by looking a those two pages and in whole terms of study and instruction. To realize at a glance that first thoughts were not inevitably best thoughts; to see in the most pratical way imaginable how what we used to call inspiration needed to be combined with ingenuity and sheer hard work; to understand how valuable the interventions of a second and sympathetic mind might be: all these things made my discovery of those pages feel like a revelation. And when I later saw the pages themselves, in the British Library, the revelation deepened and the pages became almost sacred. I still glimpse them in my mind's eye now, almost forty years later, whenever I write a poem. Think harder, they say to me. Stretch your imagination. Write better.

Wonderful stuff! 'Think harder ... stretch your imagination ... write better.'

One little thing in this TLS did perturb, however. In a brief review of Cinematic Savior - Hollywood's Making of the American Christ, Stephenson Humphries-Brooks writes:

To this point Jesus movies were made by Protestants. With 'Jesus of Nazareth,' Rome takes over. Zeffirelli - and, following him, Mel Gibson - bases his interpretation on Isaiah' Suffering Servant: 'He was wounded for our iniquities ...' With Gibson, however, this theme has been joined by another, roped in, so to speak, from the Western ...

I know, I know - it says 'however.' But even so, considering a) the depth of Gibson's current public disgrace and b) the scabrous ineptitude of 'The Passion of the Christ', I felt I should stress to any of you out there who might not be familiar with Franco Zeffirelli's "Jesus of Nazareth" - it's NOTHING like 'Passion of the Christ. NOTHING. "Jesus of Nazareth" is incredibly intelligent and moving and epic. Linking it - however ephemerally - with a loud, brainless, masochistic, anti-semitic piece of crap like 'Passion of the Christ' does it a disservice that can only be remedied by all of you putting 'Jesus of Nazareth' on your Netflix list right away!

So there you have it, folks, for perhaps the first time in history: Catullus, John Cotter, and Jesus Christ!