'Delight Crowns All My Days, and Here I’ll Die'

R.L. Barth has been translating the epigrams of Marcus Valerius Martialis – the first-century Roman poet Martial, as we know him – for more than forty years and now has self-published a collection of 104 of his translations (of the 1,561 Latin originals extant): Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial. Bob and Martial share similar sensibilities. Both are tough-minded, skeptical of authority figures and human duplicity, not even remotely “poetic,” 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. Here is II.83: 

“Catching the cuckhold, you unsheathed your knife

And went to work on him who screwed your wife,

Lopping his nose and ears. Pure vengeance gained?

No, one of his appendages remained.”

 

As an epigraph to the collection, Barth 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.”

 

For Barth and Cassity, Martial is a poetic precursor, a sort of unholy father figure and unwelcome guest at the party. 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.” 

 

Bob takes the title of his collection from Martial’s IX.81:

 

"Readers and listeners praise my books:

You swear they’re worse than a beginner’s.

Who cares? I always plan my dinners

To please the diners, not the cooks.”

 

The collection concludes with “Martial in Bilbilis to Juvenal in Rome.” Martial was born in Bilbilis, located in what is now Spain. Bob appends a note to the poem: “I would say of my use of Martial XII.18 what Samuel Johnson said of his two great versions of Juvenal [“The Vanity of Human Wishes,” “London”]: ‘a kind of middle composition between translation and original design, which pleases when the thoughts are unexpectedly applicable, and the parallels lucky.’ Or simply call it riffing on Martial XII.18.” I think it’s one of Bob’s finest poems:

 

“Know what, dear Juvenal? While you are slogging

Across the racket of Suburra or dogging

Diana’s hill, jostled by pimps and whores,

Catamites, muggers, thugs in darkened doors,

Property speculators, politicians

And lawyers, Romans without inhibitions—

All those types who activate your spleen—

Your good friend Martial’s nowhere to be seen.

My friend, stand in your toga drenched with sweat

(However much you flap it, it stays wet)

Waiting at thresholds of your high-powered friends.

I’m back in Bilbilis, making amends

For all the sleep lost. I’m a gentleman;

After the long years gone, my city can,

And does, take to her bosom her lost son.

I have no clients here nor anyone

Disturbing peaceful sleep, at least till nine!

I wear no toga, any old clothes of mine

Suffice when I awake. There’s a fire burning

In the hearth, laid by my steward, and my yearning

For a good breakfast’s quickly satisfied

By his wife’s breakfast, almost countrified.

A little later comes my housemaid, who’d

Have you, friend, drooling to end her maidenhood

As she cleans up the bowls and sweeps the floors.

My young attendants start their daily chores.

Thus home, city of iron and gorgeous gold!

(You know, if you will let me be so bold,

I’d say that epithet describes my epigrams.)

I hear you snarling a long string of damns!

I’m sorry, Juvenal, but this is why

Delight crowns all my days, and here I’ll die.”

 

Cassity writes in his essay: “As the entire tradition of English poetry runs directly counter to the characteristics I have enumerated, he is very difficult to translate, though he is frequently honored by plagiarism. There is no Martial famous as Pope’s or Chapman’s Homer is famous. The translations I shall quote here have been newly done by R.L. Barth, aiming for both the precision of thought and utterance, and the absolute freedom of expression. Martial’s concision has been a brake on his reputation as on his translators. Criticism tends to equate brevity with triviality, and in nine out of ten literary eras it is flatulence that carries the day. Epigrams will never have the attention epics have, inflating the racial consciousness being outside their scope.”