'Gleams Like a Warm Homestead Light'

Here is epigram 1.33 by Marcus Valerius Martialis (c. 38-102 A.D.), better known in English as Martial: 

“In private she mourns not the late-lamented;

If someone’s by, her tears leap forth on call.

Sorrow, my dear, is not so easily rented.

They are true tears that without witness fall.”

 

Martial’s epigrams read like a cross between a syllogism and one of La Rochefoucauld’s maximes. Like the latter, it packs a psychological or ethical punch. The essence of an epigram is brevity and torsion, like a spring tightly wound. Martial’s translator here from the Latin is J.V. Cunningham, himself a master epigrammist. Here is his version of 4.69:

 

“You serve the best wines always, my dear sir,

And yet they say your wines are not so good.

They say you are four times a widower.

They say . . . A drink? I don’t believe I would.”

 

In his edition of The Poems of J.V. Cunningham (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1997), Timothy Steele includes nine of Martial’s epigrams translated by Cunningham. I returned to them while reading The Classics in Paraphrase: Ezra Pound and Modern Translators of Latin Poetry (1988) by the classicist Daniel M. Hooley. Despite more pages devoted to Pound and Louis Zukofsky, Hooley praises Cunningham’s versions of Martial as “nearly literal, minor perfections,” and adds:

 

“His original verse is conventional in all the old ways; regularity of meters and rhyme enjoy unusual modern prominence as do clarity and precision of diction. Paradox, ambiguity, symbol, and the rest do not wend their difficult way and conflicting courses through this verse. To the reader of modern verse weary of the struggle for orientation and certainty, Cunningham’s poetry gleams like a warm homestead light in a black Montana nightscape, visible for miles and welcome.”

 

Hooley notes that distinguishing the “disquieting differences” between reading Martial and reading Cunningham “may lead to interesting conclusions.” He cites what may be Martial’s best-known epigram, 1.32, as rendered by Cunningham:

 

“Sabinus, I don’t like you. You know why?

Sabinus, I don’t like you. That is why.”

 

Hooley contrasts it with the more familiar version produced in the seventeenth century by Tom Brown about John Fell, dean at Christ Church, Oxford:

 

“I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,

The reason why – I cannot tell;

But this I know, and know full well,

I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.”

 

Hooley writes: “Does Cunningham succeed in a way Brown cannot . . . In spite of the crude bluntness, one’s answer may be affirmative. For one thing, Cunningham’s  is demonstrably closer to a ‘translation’ than an ‘imitation’ (to revive for the moment that generally useless distinction). . . . Cunningham is very near Martial in several ways. His terse phrases mimic the compression of the Latin and allow him to keep to the single couplet . . . Cunningham’s rhymed pentameter couplet, weightier in effect than Brown’s easy tetrameter, is an appropriate analogue to the elegiac couplet.”

 

Epigram is from the Greek epigramma, “inscription,” from a related verb meaning “to write on, inscribe.” For the Greeks, epigrams started as brief verses written on votive offerings or monuments to the dead. The epigram’s appeal, for this reader, is terseness and wit. It means something and is about something -- rare qualities in poetry today. In 2011, the late poet Helen Pinkerton, a friend of Cunningham’s and mine, and a fellow protégé of Yvor Winters, wrote to me:

 

“Epigrams are very hard to write well. Cunningham did so, because, I think, he worked so hard at it and wrote a great number. For many poets they are only a sideline. Also, as he notes somewhere, brevity was characteristic of his temperament and style from the beginning. No epics for him. I praised his work once to him when he was visiting us in Palo Alto and he responded quite self-deprecatingly that he hadn't written anything long or ‘major’ or words to that effect. Some critics (I can't recall who just now) have made an argument that his ‘To What Strangers What Welcome’ should be regarded as a unified sequence somewhat equivalent to a single poem. I find that hard to do. He really loved the Renaissance epigrammatists, More, George Buchanan, and John Owen, besides the Romans, and learned from them.”