'Heed the Current of Your Stream'

In 1995, R.L. Barth published the chapbook Samuel Johnson: Selected Latin Poems Translated by Various Hands, with contributions by ten poets including Len Krisak who adapts Johnson’s “In Rivum a Mola Stoana Lichfieldiae diffuentem.” Krisak titles it “The River by the Mill of Stowe, In Lichfield, Where the Waters Flow”: 

“The river wanders still, and still as glass,

It passes through that boyhood’s grassy meadow where

My little limbs, with little skill, would flail the air

That settled on its pool. And there, held fast,

 

“I heard my father’s voice and learned to swim;

His words were soft and clear beneath the bending limbs

Of willows casting daylight shadows, hiding him

And me below the bright sun. Darkness dimmed

 

The secret place that father taught his son.

Now time has put an axe’s edge to all the trees,

And shade no longer lies there. Even distant eyes

Can see these naked waters barely run

 

“Their undeflected course beneath the air

Of Lichfield, making for the sea. Protected once

By leaf and branch, their channel moves them as it wants,

In openness, as if it did not care.

 

‘Dear Nisus, friend, now learn to do the same.

Ignore eternal age, with all its speed that cuts

Us from without, or wears us from within. Do what

You must, and heed the current of your stream.”

 

In Samuel Johnson: The Latin Poems (2005), the late editor and translator Niall Rudd renders the title as “On the Stream at Stowe Mill, Lichfield,” referring to the city in Staffordshire, about 110 miles northwest of London, where Johnson was born in 1709. Here is Rudd’s prose trot:

 

“The river, still glassy, flows through the green meadows in which as a boy I so often bathed my young limbs. Here I would vainly thrash my arms, which got nowhere with their inexpert movements, while my father with his calm voice taught me to swim. The branches made a hiding place, and an overhanging tree covered the hidden waters in darkness even by day. Now the shadows of old have fallen victim to cruel axes; and the bathing place lies exposed to distant eyes. The water, however, unwearyingly continues on its course from year to year, and where it once flowed unseen it now still flows, though in the open. You too, Nisus, continue your daily course, indifferent to what swift time may bring in from the world outside, and what it may wear away.”

 

Judging from Rudd’s version, Johnson’s original is a fairly traditional meditation on memory, time’s bittersweet passing and lost youth. Rudd’s prose effort is useful but dull. “Cruel axes” seems overdone. The adjective is unnecessary. Preferable is Krisak’s “an axe’s edge.” The late David Ferry titled his version of the poem “The Lesson” (Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translation, 1999):

 

“The stream still flows through the meadow grass,

As clear as it was when I used to go in swimming,

Not good at it at all, while my father’s voice

Gently called out through the light of the shadowy glade,

Trying to help me learn. The branches hung down low

Over those waters made secret by their shadows.

My arms flailed in a childlike helpless way.

 

“And now the sharp blade of the axe of time

Has utterly cut away that tangle of shadows.

The naked waters are open to the sky now

And the stream still flows through the meadow grass.”

 

What Ferry writes is more transformation than translation, and a first-rate English poem. He jettisons “cruel axes” and replaces it with the superior “the sharp blade of the axe of time.” He dispenses with the obligatory Virgilian allusion and reverses the conventional duality of darkness and light. Here, the shadows are comforting, an emblem of Edenic childhood; light exposes memories and leaves everything vulnerable. Some form of “shadow” shows up three times.

 

But for “and,” Ferry’s poem starts and concludes with the same sentence – appropriate in a poem about the unending flow of a river, with the Heraclitean caveat that’s it’s not the same river. We know from anecdotal evidence that Johnson was, in fact, a powerful swimmer, and we know his father, Michael Johnson, had died in 1731, long before his son wrote the Latin poem.

Dr. Johnson was born in Lichfield on this date, September 18, in 1709 and died in London in 1784 at age seventy-five.