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 Tenant of Wildfell Hall!

Our book today is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte's taut little 1848 masterpiece, and it completes yet another organic trilogy of a type I've noticed crops up on Stevereads with fair regularity. This one was a Bronte-trilogy, centering on that weird, unprecedentedly brilliant family of siblings living out in the middle of nowhere, competently but rustically educated and yet producing a stunning complement of toweringly great works of English prose.

The Brontes have always held a fascination for me, and not only because their novels are uniformly marked with a moor-and-storm-touched bleakness I very much like in novels (the Brontes, a good Irish family, came by this good Irish trait honestly) - no, they also fascinate because the specter of 'what if' hovers around them more closely than it does almost any other figures in Western literature. And the 'what if' here is wrenchingly simple: what if they'd all lived? What if premature death hadn't killed every single one of them? What works unguessed by all of us might we now have, shattering our comforts far more effectively even than the half-dozen books that are all we'll ever have from this family?

We'll never know the answer to that, but it could be worse: the sisters could have taken to drink and drugs like their brother, in which case fragments are all we'd have. As it is, we have Villette, Wuthering Heights, Shirley, Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey, The Professor ... and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

We've already touched on the events that gave rise to this book - the five-year stint Anne did as governess for the Robinson family at Thorp Green, including the much shorter time poor tortured Branwell spent there as tutor to the Robinson boy. Anne's experiences at Thorp Green informed both her novels, although The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a more ragged, more artificially staged, and altogether more powerful work than Agnes Grey. Both are titanically scathing of polite society and the various savageries lurking beneath its veneer, but Tenant is by far the more savage work in itself. Here is the story of earnest, moralizing Helen, who is fatally infatuated with the licentious rake Mr. Huntington (and equally infatuated, one sees early on, with the possibility of reforming him), even though all their earliest meetings give the reader a decidedly ominous feeling about him. He's brutal, opportunistic, and psychologically paring even before he's physically so. In one dinner party scene, Helen is showing guests some of her drawings when Mr. Huntington gives her an unpleasant shock:

So far, so good; - but hearing him pronounce sotto voce, but with peculiar emphasis concerning one of the pieces, 'THIS is better than all!' - I looked up, curious to see which it was, and, to my horror, beheld him gazing complacently at the back of the picture - it was his own face that I had sketched there and forgotten to rub out! To make matters worse, in the agony of the moment, I attempted to snatch it from his hand; - but he prevented me, and exclaiming 'No, by George, I'll keep it!' placed it against his waistcoat, and buttoned his coat upon it with a delighted chuckle.

Helen eventually marries Huntington, and they descend by quick passages to all-out domestic warfare ... a cause into which Huntington enlists their child as soon as the boy is old enough to walk and talk on his own. It's a squalid, darkly horrible portrait of a relationship that's in every way poisonous, yet despite how awful it is to read about, the reading itself is so compelling that you can't stop. The most amazing thing about it all is that Anne never flinches, she never tenders things up or draws curtains over anything; "she must be honest," Charlotte once wrote about her, and it's nowhere more true than in this book.

But Anne was also young, and so it's no surprise that a much better love is always waiting in the wings - in the form of doe-eyed young simp Gilbert Markham, who's in love with Helen through everything. At one point late in the novel, they have a dialogue I find more mind-bendingly weird and touching than almost any I know from the literature of the period; it's about the permanence of love in the face of its greatest obstacle - eternal bliss! Here's a representative snippet:

'And must we never meet again?' I murmured in the anguish of my soul.

'We shall meet in Heaven. Let us think of that,' said she in a tone of desperate calmness; but her eyes glittered wildly, and her face was deadly pale.

'But not as we are now,' I could not help replying. 'It gives me little consolation to think I shall next behold you as a disembodied spirit, or an altered being, with a frame perfect and glorious, but not like this! - and a heart, perhaps, entirely estranged from me.'

'No, Gilbert, there is perfect love in Heaven!'

'So perfect, I suppose, that it soars above distinctions, and you will have no closer sympathy with me than with any one of the ten thousand angels and the innumerable multitude of happy spirits round us.'

'Whatever I am, you will be the same, and therefore, cannot possibly regret it; and whatever that change may be, we know it must be for the better.'

'But if I am to be so changed that I shall cease to adore you with my whole heart and soul, and love you beyond every other creature, I shall not be myself; and, though, if ever I win Heaven at all, I must, I know, be infinitely better and happier than I am now, my earthly nature cannot rejoice in the anticipation of such beatitude, from which itself and its chief joy must be excluded.'

'Is your love all earthly then?'

'No, but I am supposing we shall have no more intimate communion with each other, than with the rest.'

'If so, it will be because we love them more and not each other less. Increase of love brings increase of happiness, when it is mutual, and pure as that will be.'

'But can you, Helen, contemplate with delight that prospect of losing me in a sea of glory?'

If Western literature provides a more bitterly accurate picture of the tragic mental and emotional distortions organized religion (to say nothing of fantasies about an eternal afterlife) can produce in the human brain, I can't readily recall it. And all of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is like this: weirdly intelligent, oddly refracted, a rudely staring raw chunk of observational genius, served up by a young woman not yet thirty. What such a young woman might have written at 50, what her brother might have written, what any of them might have written - the literature's loss of that - quiets the imagination for a time.

Tales of Angria!

A loyal Stevereads reader (who never comments - the Silent Majority, as it were) has pointed out, in response to my recent posting on Branwell Bronte, that something very close to a 'Works' of that talented, tormented young man has indeed been brought into print in an authoritative, attractive, and affordable version - naturally, by Penguin Classics. It's called Tales of Angria, and it contains several of the longer, more polished dark social comedies set in the titular imaginary land. I found the book at my local Barnes & Noble, and as you can see, it was filed under Charlotte Bronte, even though Branwell was the presiding genius and main creative force behind the Angria tales, as all three of his sisters - even including the headstrong and slightly imperious Charlotte - were the first to admit when they were alive.

So it's a wonderful thing that Penguin Classics has produced this volume, but in subsequent reprintings, they should have the courage to ignore all the various academic quibbles - and the pecuniary allure of associative selling - and put 'Branwell Bronte' on the cover instead of 'Charlotte Bronte.'

Not many things ever brought that family much happiness, but if they could come forward in time just long enough to see such a volume, they would cast off their genetic melancholy and clap their hands for joy. The sisters would, if anything, be happier to see it than Branwell would. Let's hope Penguin makes the change; and in the meantime, go to their website and order yourself a copy of this weird, enjoyable, and slightly heartbreaking glimpse of what might have been.