'Nothing is Redundant, Nothing Wanting'

In 1950, the poet J.V. Cunningham translated from the French a work by the seventeenth-century Jansenist Pierre Nicole, “An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in Which From Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams.” The essay originally served as the introduction to an anthology, Epigrammatum delectus (1659), intended for use in classrooms. It omitted some poems by such epigrammatic masters as Martial and Catullus because they were “quite filthy and obscene,” Cunningham tells us in his introduction. He continues:

 “Young people are led by curiosity to read these, and losing all chastity of mind enter upon a progressive corruption of life. It would be best if they could be kept wholly from such books; but there is a good deal in them of genuine profit and literary merit, which makes it difficult to keep them wholly out of the hands of youth.”

 

We sense Cunningham, an epigrammatic descendent of Jonson and Landor, and translator of Martial and Catullus, is having a good time here. His own epigrams could be rather salty, as in “Epitaph for Someone or Other”:

 

“Naked I came, naked I leave the scene,

And naked was my pastime in between.”

 

And “The Lights of Love”:

 

“The ladies in my life, serially sexed,

Unscrew one lover and screw in the next.”

 

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.

 

Another gifted epigrammist, R.L. Barth, republished Nicole’s essay in Cunningham’s forty-four-page translation, with notes, in 1997. Bob and Cunningham would concur with this passage near the conclusion of Nicole’s essay:

 

 “[O]f all the special capabilities of the epigram none is more difficult to realise or more rarely achieved than the adroit handling, the suitable and easy unfolding, of the subject so that nothing is redundant, nothing wanting, nothing out of order, obscure, or tangled up in verbiage, and yet at the same time nothing too unexpected, nothing not adequately prepared for. Martial is pre-eminent in this; he develops his subjects so aptly, clearly, and perceptively that he obtains for ideas of no special note otherwise a good deal of distinction by the charm of the handling.”

 

Cunningham translated Martial’s 4.33:

 

“You write, you tell me, for posterity.

May you be read, my friend, immediately.”

 

Here is Barth’s version of the same epigram:

 

“Your manuscripts are stacked, bookcases groan,

And yet you’ve published nothing of your own.

‘My heirs will publish . . .’ What? After you’re dead?

Sosibianus, it’s past time you’re read.”

 

Cunningham was born on this date, August 23, in 1911, and died in 1985 at age seventy-three.

 

[The books to get are The Poems of J.V. Cunningham (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, ed. Timothy Steele, 1997) and The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham, Wiseblood Books, 2024). Barth’s versions of Martial are collected in Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial (Contubernales Books, 2026).]