'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.”