'We Had Better Re-define Major'

R.L. Barth has been translating Martial’s epigrams for more than forty years. I think I first encountered his versions in the anthology Epigrams of Martial Englished by Divers Hands (eds. J.P. Sullivan and Peter Whigham, University of California Press, 1987), which included VI.60: 

“Rome praises, loves, and sings my little verses;

They’re in all hands, all pockets, and all purses.

Look there! One blushes, pales, gasps, longs, and curses.

That’s what I want! I’m happy with my verses.”

 

Contubernales Books has now published Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial, which includes Bob’s versions of 141 of the 1,561 originals, with parallel Latin texts. In the new book, “longs” in the third line of the epigram above is replaced by “yawns,” a stronger word. Readers of Bob’s own poems, most of which are rooted in his experience as a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, and written in the epigrammatic form, will recognize his kinship with the first-century Roman from Hispania, Marcus Valerius Martialis. In his note to the translations, Bob refers to him as his “smart aleck brother.”

 

Both poets are tough-minded, tartly satirical, skeptical of authority and human duplicity, not even remotely “poetic,” as in “flowery,” and they value concision in their poems perhaps more than any other quality. Their epigrams are pithy and barbed, and there’s nothing stuffy or academic about Bob’s translations. The poems are classical, the translations are contemporary, all-American and never genteel. “I wanted all the translations,” Bob told me recently, “to read as if written by the same poet, with a coherent and unvarying tone and attitude.” Martial isn’t shy about rough language, and neither is Bob. Here is VI.91:

 

“Domitian publicly

Outlawed adultery.

Cocksuckers need not fear.

Zoilus, you’re in the clear.”

 

And here, VII.70:

 

“Philaenis, dyke, you chase her for her gender,

And then you fuck her, flaunt her, and girlfriend her.”

 

And this, X.43:

 

Phil’s seventh wife lies buried in his field.

No other land returns so rich a yield.”

 

For the epigraph to his collection, Bob takes a line from “The Undeceived,” an essay on Martial by his late friend Turner Cassity, published in the Winter 1990 issue of Chicago Review: “If Martial is minor we had better re-define major . . .” The passage continues:

 

“ . . . and I for one am perfectly willing to. Martial offers no vision, advances no program, embodies no archetype. He hoots at philosophy, is too uninterested in religion even to mock it, mocks at love, enjoys violence, ignores landscape, refuses to sentimentalize sex. He flatters the Emperor Domitian in the exact spirit and in the exact degree of honesty with which present day academics fill out grant applications. He understands the social and behavioral dimensions of money better than any writer before Edith Wharton, his fellow in pornography; he penetrates further into the mystery of death than anyone before or since, stripping away veil after veil to reveal it as, finally, the handmaiden of inheritance. What he gives us, stunningly undiminished across nineteen hundred years and the barriers of a language embalmed, is self-recognition. The Romans were not like us: they were us. Now that our own era, so far out of the closet and so close to Elagabalus, can no longer plead his obscenity, we shall have to come to terms with him.”

 

Clearly, Martial is a poetic precursor for both Cassity and Barth. “Without necessarily mimicking Martial poem by poem,” Bob told me, “I’ve tried to suggest his great skill in varying the subjects and forms of his poems in his various books. Mostly, I've tried to do this metrically (pentameters, tetrameters, alexandrines, even the very odd trimeter line) and by rhyming (couplets, alternate rhymes sometimes strictly abab in form and sometimes abcb, and blank verse).” The two dozen Martial epigrams cited by Cassity in his essay were translated by Bob, who includes a poem of his own, “To Martial,” in the new collection:

 

“After your death, Pliny wrote praising you

For genius, satire, wit, and candor too.

Now, take this note across the centuries:

Tribute from one of your lesser legatees

Who, Pliny-like, would also recommend

Your poems, you—good company, good friend.”

 

There’s more to Martial than dirty words and savagery. Here is X.47, a blessing addressed to his friend Julius Martialis:

 

“The things which make a life of ease,

Martial, my dearest friend, are these:

The patrimony’s easy yield;

A thriving fire and fertile field;

Neither the courts nor formal dress;

Good health; a wise judiciousness;

Some friends whose conversation’s able

To dignify your simple table;

A wife with neither forwardness

Nor prudery; deep sleep to press

Over the shadows in swift flight;

Ability to see you’re right

When you’re content; and, with head clear,

Face death without desire or fear.”

 

I’m assuming Martial, even in Bob’s contemporary rendering, will never be a bestseller, which is a shame because he really is, as Cassity suggests, one of us – foul-mouthed, cynical, psychologically astute, cranky and often very funny. He’s far more interesting to read than most of today’s “creative writers.” Here is Cassity again:

 

“Homer, not surprisingly, was a favorite of the Victorians. He provided exactly what their own literature lacked: sex and pace. A hundred years later, Martial should be a favorite, as he provides exactly what we lack: clear-sightedness and an absence of sentimentality. If nothing else the AIDS epidemic has produced the worst writing since the death of the Prince Consort.”

'This Function Is to Make Me Happy'

“It is best to open with a simple declaration. I belong to a quaint depleted sect of serious readers who believe that literature exists to make men happy.”

That so joyous a declaration was issued in 1968, annus horribilis, makes it even more revolutionary. Few of us started to read books hoping to achieve unhappiness, though you wouldn’t always know that from the dreary roll call of critics, scholars and schoolmarms.

 

From Boris Dralyuk I learned that the ebullient polymath Oscar Mandel died on May 20 just short of his one-hundredth birthday. The passage above is taken from his essay “The Excesses of Seriousness in Literature,” published in the Spring 1968 issue of The Antioch Review. I can testify that reading Mandel’s varied output makes me happy. Such happiness started in 1985 when New Directions published The Book of Elaborations, an essay collection blurbed on the cover by Guy Davenport, who was the original reason I bought the book. When I reviewed Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters in 2007 for the Philadelphia Inquirer, I discovered this in a 1984 letter from Davenport to the founding publisher of New Directions:

 

“O nobody knows Oscar Mandel. He writes scholarship as well as anybody (except that he writes it humanly, with jokes and brassy opinions); he writes poems that remind me of yours (poetry as a civilized skill rather than a wind from the infinite and the absolute); and he writes some of the best prose in the Republic.”

 

Later I read Mandel’s The Cheerfulness of Dutch Art: A Rescue Operation, published in 1996 by Davaco, a Dutch publisher. It’s another book no one else seems to have read. Mandel and I exchanged emails in 2022 and he sent me a copy of Otherwise Poems (Prospect Park Books, 2015), signing it “with high greetings.” His poems blur distinctions between light verse and dark. Here is a poem from that collection, “Holy Books”:

 

“Christ is bad and Moses worse;

Montaigne fills my mental purse.

 

(Re the Number 3 Strong Cheese –

Bullets and bombs! I’ll hold my peace).”

 

And this, “Forgive Me”:

 

“Forgive me, you so pitifully dead,

when at the trombone’s bleat I dance,

as I forgive, reluctant! In advance,

the whoopers on my grave and huggers in my bed.” 

 

Mandel tells us his Antioch Review essay is intended to address “the quarrel for pre-eminence in literature among truth, morality, and pleasure.” Like Mandel, I object to none of these virtues, which remain perfectly compatible, assuming pleasure-giving is part of the package. He writes:

 

“I should like something of the spirit of Daphnis and Chloe and Aucassin and Nicolette to return to literature. I do not object to having a novel or a play expand my conscious- ness; I do not even mind its converting me into a better man; both of these events may contribute to the pleasure I take in reading, and when they do they are welcome. But I accept them only in their pleasure-giving capacity. For I keep the true function of literature exposed under a perpetual light. This function is to make me happy. The only difference between good and bad literature is that the first administers happiness to me, and the second does not.”

'To Be the Symbol of a Great Largesse'

Sometimes I suspect I’m a country man marooned in the city, though I grew up in the suburbs. Years ago I read an anthropologist who theorized that our species’ ideal setting, given our birth on the plains of Africa, is a pasture, meadow or prairie bordered by forest. We can hunt – and find shelter among the trees. That’s how I picture the perfect surroundings. Always with trees and optional water, which is why deserts seem so disturbing. The absence of green. A crew of Guatemalans trimmed our trees last week, juggling chain saws while suspended by ropes. They evened up three oaks and one pine in the front and a lone oak in the back. Our Houston neighborhood is called Oak Forest. 

In the essay “The City Shepherd’s Calendar” (Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70s, 1975), L.E. Sissman writes as a lifelong city dweller who has moved with his wife to the country and adapted Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579). For the month of May in the North he writes:

 

“All flower names: iris, including the incomparably haughty blue flags in the stream bed; lilac, sweet white, not quite cloying lavender, grape purple; tulips, all looking forbiddingly manmade; dandelions [much celebrated by Chesterton], tough, independent, beautiful; last daffodils; first buttercups. The sound of cows; the smell, cutting across the lilacs, of fields freshly fertilized. At night, the largest and pearliest of possible moons.”

 

A pastoral dream, one likely derided today. We’re fortunate: Houston, to my amazement twenty-two years ago on first arriving, is an enormously green city. From the air that’s what you first see: a carpet of dark green, mostly live oaks and water oaks. They flank the streets, their branches meeting overhead, creating a dappled tunnel effect. In the cloud-diffused light of late afternoon, it feels like a vast theme park devoted to photosynthesis. I’ve read evolutionary explanations for the soothing qualities possessed by green. I don’t know about that, though I know that massed quantities of green buoy my spirits. I associate it in some pre-rational way with solace and contentment. In “Green” (Collected Poems 1943-2004, 2004), Richard Wilbur calls it “a great largesse”:

 

“Tree leaves which, till the growing season’s done,

Change into wood the powers of the sun,

 

“Take from that radiance only reds and blues.

Green is a color that they cannot use,

 

“And so their rustling myriads are seen

To wear all summer an extraneous green,

 

"A green with no apparent role, unless

To be the symbol of a great largesse

 

“Which has no end, though autumns may revoke

That shade from yellowed ash and rusted oak.”

'Provocative Openness of Mind and Limitless Curiosity'

I think I understand a reader who fails to share my pleasure in reading Montaigne. It’s easy to think of the Frenchman as a blowhard whose essays are formless rambles stuffed with other men’s words, sometimes embarrassingly self-involved (more complaining about kidney stones?). Is he a precursor to a million contemporary narcissists? Perhaps, but don’t blame Montaigne. 

Few writers have so winningly mingled learning and life, books and experience. He’s never stuffy. A good essayist’s job is to reclaim a piece of the world we thought we understood and filed away on a shelf, and to remind us that humans are elusively complicated. We never exhaustively understand anyone, even the first-person singular.

 

The most stirring of Montaigne’s virtues for this reader is his relentless curiosity about the world. One wonders if he was ever genuinely bored. He is one of nature’s democrats. He will speak with anyone, including prostitutes and common laborers – and Pope Gregory XIII. He is fascinated by the commonplace – food, lodging, manners, the cost of everything. He writes a portion of his travel journal in Italian. Such omni-inquisitiveness is rare in any century, and seems almost freakish in our age of specialization, but think of such a sensibility enduring the sixteenth-century wars of religion in France, when perhaps as many as four million died. A wonderful contemporary essayist, Victor Bombert, writes in “Lessons of Montaigne”:

 

“[H]e surprises his reader by his provocative openness of mind and limitless curiosity. At the opening of one of his most celebrated essays, ‘Of experience,’ he remarks that there is nothing more natural than the desire for knowledge. Montaigne’s desire is, however, not satisfied by mere facts and affirmed certitudes. He relishes playing with ideas and delights in unsettling his reader and himself by challenging commonly held moral and intellectual convictions. His tolerance for views opposed to his own helps him revise his opinions.”

 

Montaigne is the opposite of a modern-day idealogue. He has beliefs and convictions but no air-tight theories. He’s no dogmatist. It’s easy to think of him as just a smarter, more learned and deep-feeling version of ourselves. His humanity is always front and center.

 

To my skeptical reader I say: For now, leave Montaigne alone. Perhaps when you’re older and life has had its way with you, you’ll return to the old boy, chastened and grateful.

 

[The book  to have is The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957).]

'Thinking of Young Men Whom I Had Known'

In 1943, at age forty-three, Yvor Winters was safely beyond draft age but tried to secure a commission in the U.S. Army. He was turned down because of the tuberculosis contracted more than twenty years earlier. A guilty sense of patriotic obligation nagged him. While teaching at Stanford, he joined the Citizens’ Defense Corps and served as its zone warden for Los Altos, Calif., where he lived. The Corps was organized in 1941 as an emergency war agency and some 11 million American civilians volunteered. In a May 10, 1943, letter to his friend the poet Louise Bogan, Winters writes: 

“I could probably go into the merchant marine as a crew member, but I can hardly take a job voluntarily that will pay me too little to support my family . . . Meanwhile I sit around & watch the kids go. All I can do for civilization is try to counteract a little of the effect of Lewis Mumford & our new School of Humanities, which is a god-awful mess.”

 

A month later, in a letter to the Los Altos postmaster, Winters writes: “I gave courses at the Los Altos grammar school, which 35 [Civil Defense] workers out of a possible 200 completed. Since I have been Zone Warden, I have spent on an average of 12 or 14 hours a week driving about the Zone, or on trips to San Jose, on problems of organization. Most of the Precinct Captains have contributed a great deal of time and some money . . .”

 

In “Moonlight Alert,” dated June 1943, Winters recounts a night during wartime on the West Coast:

 

“The sirens, rising, woke me; and the night

Lay cold and windless; and the moon was bright,

Moonlight from sky to earth, untaught, unclaimed,

An icy nightmare of the brute unnamed.

This was hallucination. Scarlet flower

And yellow fruit hung colorless. That hour

No scent lay on the air. The siren scream

Took on the fixity of shallow dream.

In the dead sweetness I could see the fall,

Like petals sifting from a quiet wall,

Of yellow soldiers through indifferent air,

Falling to die in solitude. With care

I held this vision, thinking of young men

Whom I had known, and should not see again,

Fixed in reality, as I in thought.

And I stood waiting, and encountered naught.”

 

Today in the United States we observe Memorial Day.

 

[See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (ed. R.L. Barth, Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 2000).]

'Visited by the Bookstore Angel'

“Such places are not merely shops. They are glorious strongholds of true civilisation. They refuse to flatter the customer, to congratulate him for being there, to ‘educate,’ ‘affirm,’ or ‘challenge’ him with the unctuous do-goodery tone favoured by the Anglo-American retail class. They simply present the books—magnificent, absurd, profound, forgotten, indispensable—and trust that an adult may sort through them with whatever discernment God has seen fit to bestow.” 

The author is J.J. Kimche, proprietor of the newsletter “The Jew from Nowhere,” writing in “A Land Flowing with Books and Paradoxes,” his celebration of Israel as “a country of bookstores.” I read it before my middle son and I visited Kaboom Books here in Houston on Saturday. “I have long resigned myself,” Kimche writes, “to the tragic deracination of the book-purchasing experience in the English-speaking world. Bluntly put, bookstores these days are a disgrace.” Kaboom is a happy exception. I have never left the shop without having purchased at least one book I would be unlikely to find in any other bookstore in the city.

 

This visit I found The Rash Act (1933) by Ford Madox Ford, a novel reprinted in 1982 by Carcanet with an introduction by C.H. Sisson, who calls the book “a technical masterpiece” and “a piece of contemplation under the guise of fiction.” I remember it as a first-rate novel I plan to reread. The owner of Kaboom, John Dillman, told me the book was among the 14,000 volumes he recently purchased from a dying man who wished to leave the money to his widow. Not a title I would find at Barnes & Noble. Kaboom is an affirmation of what Kimche writes about Israel’s bookstores:

 

“Only in such establishments may one still hope to be visited by the Bookstore Angel: that benevolent, impish daemon who nudges the hand towards volumes one did not know one needed, or perhaps did not know existed. After a brush with such a creature, one finds oneself departing not with a modest paperback but with an armful of medieval theology, deranged memoirs, seditious polemics, and other long-forgotten treasures. Entire cultures have been perpetuated on less.”

'Our Self-Important Postures'

My middle son, a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, is visiting for a few days. The conversation turned to nostalgia. He’s young and contemptuous, as I used to be. He used the verb I would have used: “wallow.” The young believe in the future. Nostalgia represents a used-up yesterday, a distraction from today’s important business. 

The word arrived in English in the eighteenth century, though our modern sense evolved late in the nineteenth. The OED defines that usage as “sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past, esp. one in an individual’s own lifetime; (also) sentimental imagining or evocation of a period of the past.” In other words, an unearned longing for something that likely never existed, a comforting pipedream.

 

But memories are precious as we get older. I don’t cherish some mythical Golden Age in my life or the world’s. Memories can be a goad to gratitude – the teachers who encouraged us, friends and lovers, family now gone. In the closet are boxes of old letters, photographs, clippings of newspaper stories I wrote almost half a century ago, a copy of the underground paper that published my review of Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973. I keep these things, in part, to remind me how fortunate I have been. And how foolish.

 

Timothy Steele concludes his poem “Old Letters” (Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986) after warning us “to adjust / Our self-important postures,” like this:

 

“Likewise, to return the letters finally

   Back to wherever they belong

Is to admit how much of life's gone wrong

Because of vanity and discontent,

   And is as well to envy

Those who refuse to hunger for event

And who accept the wisely unbegun,

Just wishing decently to get through life

And trying not to injure anyone.”