Poems E-Book

Sextus Propertius

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Classics
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 326

Beschreibung

The Poetry Book Society Autumn 2018 Recommended Translation.Asked to name the great Latin love poets, today's reader is likely to offer Catullus, Ovid, Virgil, Horace. Propertius, a successor of the first and influential peer to the others, has not been blessed by posterity. Yet at their best his Poems match any of the period. They are Poems of love, of desire, of insecurity and obsession: of struggle, too, as they resist the Augustan Empire's attempts to turn its love poets into propagandists. The result is a highly refined irony, a subtlety of tone and humour that is unique. Patrick Worsnip's translations bring out Propertius' playfulness and his psychological acuity, reinstating his Poems at the heart of Latin literature's golden age.

Leseprobe

to TRICIA

my life and travel companion

qua nebulosa cauo rorat Meuania campo,

et lacus aestiuis intepet Vmber aquis…

Contents

Title PageDedicationIntroduction by Peter HeslinPOEMSBook OneBook TwoBook ThreeBook FourNotesAfterword by Patrick WorsnipAbout the AuthorCopyright

Introduction

PROPERTIUS IS PERHAPS the most enigmatic of the great poets from the golden age of Latin literature. There are a number of reasons for this: the corruption of his Latin text as it was transmitted across the millennia; a difficult, abrupt, idiosyncratic style which demands a great deal of the reader; an obsession with mythological minutiae; and the bone-dry sarcasm with which the poet reflects upon his own vicissitudes and the politics of the day. On the one hand, Propertius seems to lack Catullus’ apparent sense of immediacy and unmediated passion, while on the other, he lacks Ovid’s outrageous wit. But for the connoisseur of poetry, the rewards of persevering are immense, and Patrick Worsnip’s vibrant contemporary translation will bring Propertius to a new generation of discerning readers.

Propertius’ distinctive contribution to love poetry is an utterly refined sense of irony. His first three books are devoted to poems narrating the ups and downs of his relationship with his girlfriend, Cynthia; he often blurs the distinction between the girl and the poetry he writes about her. He presents himself as a lover oppressed by an inescapable passion for his beloved, enslaved to her beauty and unable to write about anything else. As he invents countless variations on this basic scenario, his persona never changes. Where Catullus invites us to read his poetry as truly autobiographical and Ovid constantly lifts the mask of the earnest lover in order to wink at his readers, Propertius plays the comedic role of the absurdly obsessive lover but plays it straight. The result is poetry that presents itself as a sincere, authentic narrative of lived experience, but which is in fact a highly arch and self-ironising fiction. Propertian elegy sends up its own earnestness not by explicitly subverting its events and characters but by taking them to absurd extremes, never letting the pretence of authenticity slip.

Propertius’ work belongs to the genre of Latin love elegy, which had, especially via Ovid, a vast influence upon the history of Western love poetry. The particular discourse of the genre is a first-person narrative about an obsessive love affair with a pseudonymous mistress whose beauty and wit are celebrated while her indifference, unfaithfulness and cruelty are lamented. This obsession leads to a state of voluntary slavery which causes the poet to abandon all of his serious commitments to work, family and country. The metre of elegy is borrowed from the Greeks, and consists of couplets in which the first line is a six-foot hexameter (the metre of epic) and the second is a shorter pentameter. Couplets are generally end-stopped in terms of their sense: the hexameter sets up a thought and the pentameter completes it. This format lends itself to pointed, epigrammatic expression: elegiac couplets are also the metre of epigram in antiquity.

The classical canon of Latin love elegy – Cornelius Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid – was constructed by Ovid himself, who presents himself as its culmination and climax: ‘Tibullus was your successor, Gallus, and Propertius was his; after them came I, fourth in order of time.’ Ovid claims Propertius as his immediate predecessor, and Ovid is indeed Propertius’ greatest disciple: he picks up those elements of Propertian elegy that are couched in an elegant irony and takes them to outrageous extremes. But Propertius would not have recognised Ovid’s self-interested account of the elegiac tradition: he would have been quite furious to find himself described as Tibullus’ successor. When Propertius lays out for us the poetic tradition that he saw himself belonging to, he honours Catullus and positions himself as the immediate successor of Cornelius Gallus, but he writes his rival Tibullus out of the picture entirely. All agree that Gallus was the founder of the tradition of Latin love elegy; very little of his poetry survives, though Vergil and Propertius both address him frequently in their earliest works. An important military and political figure as well as a poet, he was one of the primary lieutenants of Octavian, the man who was to become Augustus, heir of Julius Caesar and the first Roman emperor. After Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra and captured Egypt, he left Gallus in charge of the country, an enormously powerful and sensitive position. Before long, Gallus was accused of disloyalty and was compelled to commit suicide.

After the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra, Octavian returned to Rome and set about a programme of national renewal to celebrate and consolidate the ensuing period of peace (and absolute hegemony). As part of that programme, the regime actively solicited a new kind of verse. Augustus did not want love poetry celebrating powerful women (like Cleopatra) and the men bewitched by them (like Antony, according to the history that was written by the winners); he wanted an epic celebrating the national destiny. Before long, the regime was actively encouraging Romans to return to traditional family values and later resorted to legislation to support that aim. In this atmosphere, Latin love elegy came to stand in contrast to patriotic epic; to traditional Roman values of family, nation and masculinity; and to several of the particular obsessions of the new regime of Augustus. ‘Why should I bear sons for my country’s triumphs? No child of mine shall be a soldier.’ When Propertius addresses these words to his mistress, swearing that he will never marry, he is pointedly rejecting the values of the new regime. This opposition between elegy and the emperor came to a head many decades later, when Ovid was exiled from Rome by Augustus; his outrageously cynical poetry about love and sex was an important factor in that punishment. Propertius himself, in his fourth and final book, moves away from an exclusive focus on love to write about Roman themes, but, given Propertius’ penchant for dry humour, the extent to which this should be interpreted as marking a sea-change is disputed.

The themes of Latin love elegy can be easily enumerated, but what is more difficult is to give a sense of the qualities that set Propertius apart from the other writers in that genre. A century after Ovid, the critic and educator Quintilian revisited the canon of elegists: ‘Of our elegiac poets Tibullus seems to me to be the most terse and elegant. There are, however, some who prefer Propertius. Ovid is more lascivious than either, while Gallus is more severe.’ Quintilian was not often at a loss for words (this quote comes from a work in twelve books), but he seems here to be unable to capture a salient quality for Propertius in one or two adjectives, as he can easily do for the others. He simply says that ‘some prefer Propertius’, without being able to put his finger on quite why they do prefer him. To see what it is that has always made Propertius the choice of a select but discerning readership, it might be useful to contrast the responses of two modern poets in English who were obsessed with his work. Between them they illustrate several of the problems that have always stood in the way of appreciating Propertius and the intense appeal he holds for those who are willing to work through them.

A. E. Housman and Ezra Pound both had significant encounters with Propertius in their youth, though for very different reasons. The two poets may have briefly overlapped in Edwardian London, but they came from different worlds and were on antithetical trajectories. Housman spent his early life as a private scholar working on difficult technical problems in Latin poetry until he had accrued such an international reputation as a classical scholar that he was appointed a senior professor of Latin, first at University College London and later at Cambridge. He always regarded his own verse as a private pursuit which was secondary to his scholarship. Pound, by contrast, gave up a very brief career in academia as quickly as possible in order to cultivate a flamboyant public life as a poet. Both men were attracted by the particular difficulties and beauties of Propertius, which they sought to address in ways that were diametrically opposed.

Housman built his career as a scholar on the textual criticism of Latin poetry. Even our earliest manuscripts of ancient poetry are separated from their authors by many centuries; the texts have been copied again and again from generations of exemplars that have long been lost. The work of the textual critic is to reconstruct the original text from the conflicting evidence of the manuscripts and, where the manuscripts do not help, by force of imagination. Housman exemplified a school of thought which holds that the text of Propertius not only has localised problems; it also exhibits large-scale dislocation of couplets from their original position and places where couplets are obviously missing. Housman’s early work as a scholar made his name, but it was not widely known beyond specialists until Tom Stoppard’s brilliant dramatisation in The Invention of Love of the young Housman’s struggle with Propertius: ‘He’s difficult – tangled-up thoughts, or, anyway, tangled-up Latin –’.

Jan Ziolkowski has recently observed that there are surprisingly few echoes of Propertius in Housman’s own poetry. Indeed, they share very few themes in common. Housman’s melancholic reflections on the passage of time and his evocation of the countryside as a place of lost innocence have strong echoes of Horace, Tibullus and Vergil; but Propertius is a poet of the city, of elegant salons and urban decadence. When Propertius and Cynthia go to the countryside, they are fish out of water. Housman spent much of his life working the text of Manilius, a poet he considered deeply mediocre, but that was not his view of Propertius, despite their difference in outlook. Rather, as Stoppard has seen, Housman’s work on Propertius is linked with his own poetry on a deeper level: they both stand as quixotic efforts to resist and repair the passage of time. Not infrequently, however, his struggle with the forces of decay turned into a struggle with Propertius himself. Where Housman sees nonsense, others would see those genuine aspects of Propertius’ style that Pound responded to: bold image and metaphor. Where to draw the line between stylistic idiosyncrasy and textual corruption – between tangled-up thoughts and tangled-up Latin – is still a matter of heated debate.

Housman never produced a critical edition of Propertius, so a truly radical, modern text has had to wait a long time. The present translation is based upon the excellent Oxford Classical Text of Stephen Heyworth, a work in the spirit of Housman, which is to say that it aims to restore a lost smoothness to the poetry, though at the risk of sometimes fixing that which was never truly broken. The reader needs to be aware that this translation is based upon a radical text, and that there is no manuscript evidence for some of its changes. One always needs to be cautious in comparing two different translations in the hope of getting a fuller picture of the meaning of the original. But that is a particular issue with Propertius, where two translations may reflect an entirely different arrangement of the underlying Latin.

Like Housman, Ezra Pound found himself engaged as a young man in a project of rearranging and rewriting Propertius. His intervention, however, took the form of a very free translation of selected passages. ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ is, in fact, not so much a translation as a new poem inspired by Propertius. Where Housman’s work aimed to remove the jagged, fragmented qualities of the text as it has been transmitted to us, Pound celebrated, enhanced and exaggerated those very qualities. Pound saw Propertius’ abrupt and elliptical style not as signs of damage, but as a forerunner of Modernism in general and Imagism in particular. Propertius was one of Pound’s many personae: the artist as a rebel who lives for art and for love, refusing to conform to the economic and civic values of his society. Pound was particularly interested in the poems from Books Two and Three in which Propertius proclaims his aesthetic independence and his refusal to write an epic for Augustus and for his empire; it is no coincidence that those two books were written while Vergil was at work on the Aeneid. Where Housman’s own poetry imagines Shropshire rustics singing ‘God Save the Queen’ as they celebrate Victoria’s golden jubilee, Pound saw Propertius as a prophet of his own attitude toward the ‘infinite and ineffable imbecility’ of the British Empire in 1917.

The greatest contribution Pound made to our understanding of the text of Propertius was his insistence upon its pervasive irony. Victorian critics tended to read love elegy in a naively biographical mode: as the sincere expression of emotion and the narrative of real events. Classical scholars of Pound’s own day did not react positively to the ‘Homage’, dismissing it as an inept and error-riddled translation by someone who did not know his Latin. But Pound was absolutely correct to regard the first-person voice of Propertius as a fiction, a persona, projected through an elaborately constructed mask. It was not until the 1960s, when a new generation of scholars became interested in Roman voices critical of empire and of traditional masculinity, that Pound’s evocation of an ironic, anti-imperialist Propertius was rehabilitated as a prescient contribution to our understanding of the Latin poet’s work.

Who then was right, Housman or Pound? Textual corruption and stylistic idiosyncrasy are not mutually exclusive explanations for the difficulty of Propertius’ Latin. In that sense, both positions are correct, though where to draw the line in any particular passage will remain controversial. Pound brilliantly perceived the archness of Propertius’ persona, the virulence of his criticism of Vergil’s epic and his scepticism toward the emperor and his moral agenda. But he simply refused to engage with Book Four, where Propertius seems to acknowledge the greatness of the Aeneid and write in the national interest; the irony here is most subtle and most difficult to judge.

The trickiest aspect of Propertius for many readers is his frequent invocation of names from Greek mythology. Sometimes these are familiar and serve as straightforward illustrations of a general category: Medea the witch, Penelope the faithful wife, Orpheus the poet. Many, however, are inscrutable. For example, in Propertius’ second poem of his first book he wants an example of natural, unadorned beauty, and instead of reaching for Helen of Troy he invokes the names of Phoebe, Hilaïra, Marpessa and Hippodamia. Who on earth are they? This seems at first a perverse straining after obscurity with no purpose other than showing off. Propertius’ wilful obscurity can be off-putting to the reader, but he is actually doing something else. When examined closely, those four names in Elegy I.2 have something particular in common: they all exemplify stories of a woman who was carried away on a chariot by a more powerful male rival. So on a deeper level they illustrate the real theme of that poem. Propertius tells Cynthia to shun ornament not out of his professed love of simplicity, but because he is afraid of a wealthy rival who will be able to give her expensive baubles that he cannot afford. In other words, the myths serve an ironic purpose far beyond their ostensible rhetorical purpose.

Sometimes Propertius invokes a myth that fails utterly to illustrate the point he is trying to make, and these passages can seem particularly disorienting to the reader. The answer again is Propertian irony. For example, in one poem from the second book (22 a), Propertius suddenly decides that it would be a good idea to have two girlfriends. As he boasts of his potency, he compares himself to Achilles and Hector going into battle after embracing Briseis and Andromache, respectively. But the Trojan War is not the most positive paradigm for infidelity. The war started because Helen had two husbands, Menelaus and Paris, and the tragedy of the Iliad was precipitated by the inability of Achilles and Agamemnon to share Briseis between them. The inappropriateness of the mythology is a signal of the irony of the poem as a whole. We know that Propertius’ idea of two-timing Cynthia will end in a disaster, so the Trojan War is actually a good parallel for what will happen: we have learned that Cynthia’s anger is as savage as Achilles’. In Propertius’ imagined threesome, he will not play the role of Achilles or Hector, but of Briseis. Another myth earlier in that same poem also functions ironically. Propertius says that even if he were as blind as the poet Thamyras, he would never be blind to pretty girls. This seems to be nothing more than the invocation of a needlessly obscure myth until one examines it more closely. The reason for Thamyras’ blindness was that he challenged the Muses to a singing contest. If he won, he got to sleep with as many of them as he liked; if they won, they could do with him as they wished. He lost, and the Muses plucked out his eyes. Thus Propertius’ apparently off-hand reference to the blindness of Thamyras encodes a prediction of what really happens to a poet who proposes polyamory to his Muse/girlfriend. The poet’s confident claim that he can handle more than one girlfriend is sustained with a straight face throughout the poem; the irony is only revealed by close examination of its mythological references.

The myths that pepper Propertius’ texts are not the meaningless products of a sterile rhetorical training, nor are they distancing gestures, invocations of timeless clichés; they are integral to the poems and are often the key to unpicking their irony. This close connection between myth and life is vividly illustrated in Propertius’ very first elegy. Vergil had included two poems in his pastoral Eclogues that situated the ‘real’ poet Cornelius Gallus in imaginary mythical landscapes, where he consorts with Apollo and other gods, nymphs, and so on. Propertius picked up on this half-mythologised aspect of the final poem of Vergil’s collection, and fully mythologised the love elegist under the guise of Milanion, who in an obscure version of the myth was the lover of the mythical huntress Atalanta. Like Vergil, Propertius playfully mingles the timeless world of myth and the present day by saying that Milanion’s adventures happened ‘recently’ (modo). For Housman, this was a logical impossibility, and he postulated that a couplet must have dropped out here with another instance of modo that would have changed its meaning; this is the position adopted by Heyworth. But I think this is to miss Propertius’ point, which was to overlay the distant mythical past and the immediate present in such a way as to signal the importance of this tactic to his readers from the outset.

There is another coordinating modo in Propertius’ work, but it does not lie in a couplet lost from his first elegy. It comes years later, at the very end of his second book, when he once again reflects upon the situation of Cornelius Gallus, who has recently (modo) been forced to commit suicide by the emperor. Propertius tells a polite lie, implying that it was from the wounds of love that he perished, then passing on the baton of love elegy to Propertius; this is where Pound ends his ‘Homage’. In Stoppard’s play, the fictional Housman also quotes this couplet as he reflects upon the ‘invention of love’, which is to say the inception of the Western tradition of love poetry, by Catullus, Cornelius Gallus and Propertius: ‘Lately. Modo. Just recently. They were real people to each other, that’s the thing … Apollo there in person, but you can trust it, that’s what I mean …’ This is the paradox of Propertian elegy. It is profoundly rooted in the everyday experiences of real people living lives, but the poems describe highly arch, theatrical scenarios. Myth is often the point where the apparently breathless earnestness of the first-person lover meets the ironic artifice of the poet.

The raw material of Propertian elegy consists of the emotions, situations and difficulties in love affairs that are common to humankind, but the particular scenarios depicted in the elegies are highly wrought fictions in which the first-person narrator is often of dubious reliability. The relationship between art and life in Propertius is illustrated by a famous painting Propertius alludes to in an elegy (II.3) in which he tries to give an impression of the beauty of his Cynthia. Zeuxis was one of the most famous painters of ancient Greece, and his masterpiece, a portrait of Helen of Troy, later came to hang in Rome. The story of its genesis, as told by Cicero and others, is that the painter could not find one woman beautiful enough to be the model for his Helen, so he painted a composite portrait, combining the most beautiful features from a multitude of models. This, hints Propertius, is the way he created Cynthia, the woman and the poetry about her: as a composite fictional synthesis based upon fragments of reality. Propertius was not only involved in the ‘invention of love’, as one of the founders of the most influential genre of love poetry in the history of Western literature; he was also one of the inventors of autobiography as a genre of poetic fiction.

Peter Heslin

Professor of Classics, Durham University

BOOK ONE

 

I.1

Cynthia was first, her eyes

made me her abject prisoner-of-war.

I had till then been untouched by Amor,

who now pulled down the vanity of my glance,

trampled my head with his feet.

That villain taught me to despise

respectable girls and lead an aimless life.

It’s a year now this lunacy won’t leave me,

the whole pantheon ranged against me.

Tullus, you’ve read that Milanion shirked nothing

to break down the contempt of Atalanta.

He roamed demented through Arcadian wilds,

killed beasts, was wounded by the centaur’s club,

made the rocks echo with his moans …

And so tamed the girl sprinter,

such is the power of word and deed in love.

My slow-witted passion can think up no such tricks,

the map from the past is forgotten.

But you who claim you can bring down the moon

and appease spirits with magic fires,

now’s your chance! Change the mind of my beloved,

let her pallor exceed mine!

Then I’ll believe you can summon

stars and ghosts with your witches’ songs.

And you, my friends, too late to stop my fall,

fetch first aid at least for a sick heart.

Scalpel, cautery, I’ll bear it all

with fortitude – just give me

the freedom to say what anger dictates.

Take me across the sea, to the furthest lands,

where no woman will know where I travel.

But you stay here, whose prayers the god has heard,

live for ever in safe, requited love.

The Venus I know torments me through the night,

a love never unemployed or absent.

Shun this malediction, I tell you:

let each hold to his own, and though

the feeling grows familiar, not move on.

Listen to my advice. Don’t hesitate,

or you’ll recall these words with pain. Too late!

I.2

What’s the sense, darling, going out

in a fancy coiffure, swinging the sheer pleats

of an outfit from Kos, plastering your hair

with oriental ‘product’? Imported finery

makes you the product.

Commercial artifice ruins nature’s assets,

masks your body’s innate lustre.

No concoction will enhance your figure,

believe me. Amor is naked, unadorned,

and has no love for beauty salon contrivers.

Undug earth still sends up

a profusion of colours, ivy comes better

left to its own devices, finer specimens

of arbutus grow in remote valleys, streams

don’t have to study what course to follow.

Common pebbles dot the prettiest beaches.

Ever hear of birds taking singing lessons?

It wasn’t their dress sense that caused Leucippus’ daughters

to give Castor and Pollux the hots,

or set lustful Apollo and Idas

at odds over Marpessa;

Hippodamia needed no cosmetics

to catch the eye of the foreign suitor

and get driven away in his chariot.

Jewellery was superfluous to their faces,

their complexions out of Apelles’ paintings.

They put no thought into winning lovers worldwide,

their beauty enough to shed their virginity.

I worry you might rate me lower than rivals:

pleasing one man is all

the make-up a woman needs,

seeing how Apollo gave you his gift of song,

Calliope skill on the lyre in abundance,

and how grace and wit roll off your tongue,

and Minerva and Venus would give you their seal of approval.

Such arts ensure you my undying love

(so long as you quickly tire of cheap luxuries).

I.3

On Naxos, Ariadne

comatose on the empty sand

while Theseus’ ship dwindles into nothing;

Andromeda gorging on her first sleep,

free now from the unforgiving rock;

a Thracian maenad, danced out,

tumbled on the grass beside the river.

Cynthia, head on outsplayed fingers

and breathing quietly, could be one of these

as I stumble in, the worse for drink,

and the servants’ torches gutter. It is late.

Not yet incapable, I weave

towards the couch her body lightly imprints;

Eros and Bacchus – neither to be denied –

fill me with their respective fires: just tuck

your arm, they order, gently beneath her frame,

press lips to lips, take sword in hand and …

Can’t do it. Daren’t disturb her rest.

She can be savage. I know her tongue’s lash.

Instead I hover, gawping like Argus

at the horns that sprang from Io.

And, Cynthia, I put my garland on your brow,

amuse myself arranging your stray hair,

balance apples furtively on your cleavage,

only to see my largesse roll away:

sleeper’s ingratitude!

Your every sigh,

every slight tremor has me terrified;

it means bad dreams trouble your head

– someone taking you by force …

The moon marching past the shutter slats,

the busy moon, its light lingering too long,

opens her eyes. She speaks, propped on one elbow:

‘Back home to bed with me? She turned you out, then?

How nasty of her! So, where was it,

the place you spent the night you’d promised me?

Look at you, fit for nothing and the stars set.

You bastard! I’d like you to pass

a few nights the way you expect of me.

I tried to stay awake with needlework,

playing snatches of music as I drooped.

Just the occasional complaint, sitting alone,

that you were quite so long in that woman’s arms.

That was my last thought as I lay back crying,

before sleep nudged me with its soothing wings.’

I.4

Why with your paeans for multifarious girls

are you trying, Bassus, to force me

to dump my own true-love and find another?

Why not allow me the rest of my life

in familiar servitude?

You could laud Antiope’s profile,

sing the praises of Spartan Hermione, perhaps;

the finest examples of that Age of Beauty

are undistinguished next to Cynthia.

So how could she lose in the harshest court of judgment

against the third-rate ‘lovelies’ that you mention?

Her figure is the least part of my passion;

there’s other things to die for, Bassus:

her fresh complexion, the grace of her body movement,

the pleasures I enjoy discovering

beneath the reticence of her dress …

The more you seek to sabotage our love,

the more we frustrate you with our constancy.

Your comeuppance looms: she’ll be livid when she hears;

you’ve made an enemy, one who won’t be silent;

Cynthia won’t let me see you, or look you up

herself; she won’t forget this outrage;

she’s going to go round all the girls in town,

bad-mouthing you: every door will be slammed shut.

There’s no altar she won’t weep on,

no sacred stone.

There’s nothing that tries Cynthia more sorely

than her beauty going to waste because love is stolen –

especially mine. May it always be so,

may I never find anything to complain of in her.

So basta! with your envious, spiteful jibes:

we’ll keep on the road we’re travelling, side-by-side.

I.5

Are you off your head, Gallus?

You actually want the purgatory I put up with?

Prepare, then, to know ultimate hardships, my friend,

walk through unimaginable fires,

drain all the toxic potions in Thessaly.

Cynthia’s not one of those easy-come, easy-go girls:

she’s not one to get angry with you nicely.

Even when she’s ready to gratify you,

she’ll have a thousand hassles up her sleeve!

She won’t let you sleep or take your eyes off her:

she ties men down with her moody fits.

I can see you now at my door when she’s turned you away,

your words of bravado failing as you snivel,

hands shaking, fear

leaving its ugly mark upon your features,

not able to spit out your sorry story,

not knowing who you are or where!

You’ll learn then the harsh terms of my girl’s service,

and what exclusion means.

You’ll understand the whiteness in my face,

why I seem shrivelled in my body.

Don’t imagine your ancestry can help your love life.

Love has no time for dusty oil-paintings.

Let the slightest hint of your folly go public,

and your noble name’s an instant piece of gossip!

Don’t expect any remedy from me then,

when I don’t have a cure for my own ailment;

fellow sufferers from a common love,

we’ll weep on each other’s shoulders …

So don’t ask, Gallus, what Cynthia is capable

of doing: when she says yes, it’s your funeral.

I.6

To cross the Adriatic with you, Tullus,

would be just fine, spread sail on the Aegean;

together we could climb Arctic mountain ranges,

or travel south to see the Ethiopians.

What holds me back? My girl’s arms and her tongue,

her white-faced rages, her insistent pleading.

She rattles on all night about her passion,

how my leaving would prove gods don’t exist;

I don’t love her, she says, running through the list

of what angry girlfriends do to ungrateful men.

One hour of this complaining is my limit:

A laid-back relationship? Forget it!

Why bother going to Athens to read philosophy,

or visiting Asia Minor’s monuments,

if as soon as anchor’s weighed Cynthia starts

madly scratching my face and abusing me,

claiming storm-delay’s the sole reason for my kisses

and the supreme evil is male fecklessness?

Go and pave the way for your uncle’s prestigious posting,

restore the rule of law to forgetful allies.

From your boyhood you never had much time for loving –

the nation’s defence topped your priorities.

Let’s hope the cherub spares you my troubles,

everything at the root of my distress.

Fate always wanted me horizontal:

let me resume perpetual profligacy.

Many have gladly lived and died as lovers –

may my headstone record me among their number.

I wasn’t born for glory or battle:

destiny drafted me into another army.

You, perhaps, will be in easy-living Ionia,

where the Pactolus washes the fields with gold-dust;

but whether you tramp the land or plough the sea,

you’ll be part of the imperial success story.

Think of me once in a while for a few minutes,

and know for sure that the stars frown on me.

I.7

You’re deep into ancient Thebes, Ponticus,

the horrors of fratricidal war –

rivalling old Homer, I would swear,

(if history’s as kind to your work as to his).

I’m grappling, as usual, with love poems, searching

for the mot juste for a demanding woman:

ten percent inspiration, ninety percent vexation,

as I chronicle the trials of my life.

That’s how I spend my days, it’s what I’m known for,

that’s how I hope to build a reputation.

The spurned lover can pore over my verse,

maybe learning something from my troubles,

impressed that I regularly pleasured a girl of letters,

Ponticus (and put up with undeserved tantrums).

If The Lad picks you off with a well-aimed bowshot

(you really shouldn’t have insulted the gods I serve!),

your camps, your seven armies will seem a world away,

unresponsive, immobile. You’ll be sorry then!

You’ll wish, vainly, you could write elegiacs,

but love will have come too late to prompt your pen.

You’ll be amazed I’m considered a leading poet,

the preferred reading of Rome’s literati;

young lovers will be bound to say as they pass my tomb:

‘Laureate of our passion, are you really dead?’

So don’t you scorn my songs so high-mindedly:

fame can pay a big bonus when delayed.

I.8a

You’ve gone mad, then.

Our love doesn’t hold you back?

The freezing Balkans are preferable to me?

This Mr. What’s-his-name is such a catch

you’ll leave me and go off wherever the wind blows?

You don’t mind hearing a furious sea howl,

tough enough to make your bed on a ship’s planks?

You feel like trampling frost with your delicate feet,

trudging through snow we don’t get in Rome,

Cynthia?

I long for the winter storms to rage twice over,

sailors killing time as the Pleiades loiter,

ropes not to be cast off from Italy’s shores,

my prayers not to float away on a hostile breeze,

leaving me rooted on an empty beach,

calling you cruel, shaking my angry fist.

But still,

however you’ve treated me, promise-breaker,

let the sea-nymphs not frown upon your journey,

favourable winds not die and becalm you once

your ship is under way;

and when you’ve safely rounded Karaburun,

let the placid waters of Orikum receive you.

Don’t worry: marriage torches won’t tempt me

to stop cursing my luck at your doorway,

darling.

I won’t stop asking sailors hurrying past:

‘Tell me the port where my girl’s being kept.’

‘She can follow Jason and the Argonauts

to the Black Sea and back, she’ll still be mine,’

I shall say.

I.8b

She’ll stay! She’s promised! Screw my enemies!

I’ve won: she gave in to my insistent pleading.

Malicious lechers, drop your gleeful fantasies:

Cynthia’s not going anywhere right now.

She’s crazy about me, and besotted with Rome

for my sake; for me, she’d turn down a king’s ransom.

She prefers to cuddle up in my single bed,

she just wants to be mine – any old how –

even if offered all the riches horse-breeding

Elis won or the dowry of Hippodamia.

He gave her much and promised her the world;

greed did not make her, though, run from my arms.

It wasn’t gold or Indian pearls

that swayed her, just the eloquence of sweet poems.

Apollo speeds to the lover’s aid. Muses exist.

To keep precious Cynthia mine, I relied on them.

Mine, mine, mine, day or night!

I can touch the highest stars with outstretched palms.

No rival can filch a love as strong as this:

that will be my boast until my hair goes white.

I.9

Didn’t I tell you, Ponticus,

love would come for you, mocker,

ending your freedom of speech?

Look how, tongue-tied and obedient,

you bend to a girl’s orders,

she who had been in your pocket

can now make you do any bidding.

Dodona’s prophetic pigeons

can’t rival me in love forecasts,

which girl will subdue which boy;

tears of pain have made me

the expert; how I would rather

be shot of this love, and a novice!

So much for your weighty epic

lamenting Thebes’ lyre-built ramparts.

In affairs of the heart it’s Mimnermus

whose verses count more than Homer’s:

Love’s a softie and likes gentle poems.

File those tragic books in your top drawer,

write something a girl would enjoy!

No material at hand? Are you crazy?

You’re divining for water in mid-stream.

You’ve still got the pallor, the real fire

to come, all you’ve felt is the first spark.

Soon you’ll opt for India’s tigers

for company, your relaxation

being strapped to a wheel in hell,

rather than feel The Lad’s darts

coursing through your bone marrow,

‘yes, darling’ to her every tantrum.

Love gives you wings with one hand,

just to pin you to earth with the other…

Don’t be fooled that she seems compliant:

once you possess her, it’s claws out,

she’s filling your field of vision,

no other door to knock at.

Love steals on you unawares

until his hand’s on your windpipe:

whoever you are, beware

of his fast talk. The decent thing

is first to acknowledge your error:

putting a name to your malady

is often, in love, some comfort.

I.10

That magic night when you and she

made out, Gallus (I was there

to witness your erotic tears)!

Magic remembering that night

still summoned in my fantasy:

I saw her enfold you, saw you die,

your words becoming slow, strung out.

Sleep weighed my eyes down, the blushing

moon’s chariot halfway through the sky,

but I was transfixed by your sport,

such was the fire in your love-talk.

You took me in your confidence,

accept this gift for that pleasure:

not just a poem of your affair,

friendship can give something more.

I can splice parted lovers again,

open a woman’s slammed-shut door,

I can heal fresh amorous wounds

with the strong medicine in my pen.

Cynthia taught me what to shun

or follow: fruits my own love bore.

No fights with her when she’s down,

no harsh words or long silences,

denying her wish with a frown,

ignoring something kind she said.

A put-down rouses her resentment,

a hurt perpetuates her anger;

the more you’re loving and patient,

the more you will be rewarded.

To stay content with one lover,

wear the chains, fill your heart with her.

I.11

While you holiday in summery Baia, Cynthia,

where Hercules’ causeway stretches along the shore,

and admire how the sea in the Bay of Naples

has lately been channelled into Lake Averno –

do thoughts of me enter your head sometimes at night?

Does love flicker in some corner of your heart?

Or has a rival, pretending to adore you,

stolen you, Cynthia, from your place in my poems?

When the cat’s away … a girl tends to forget

those solemn pledges she made …

I’d rather you were idling in a dinghy

with tiny oars on Lake Lucrino,

or confined to that narrow pool at Cuma,

one arm after the other gliding through the water,

than draped languidly on a quiet beach, listening

in no hurry to some man’s plausible whispers.

Of course, I trust you, your reputation is ironclad …

but love always trembles in this situation.

Forgive me, then, if these lines bring you

any note of gloom: you can blame my fears.

I could not care more for my adored mother,

or take any thought for my life if you were not here.

You are my home, Cynthia, you are both

my parents, my delight all of the time.

If I’m happy or sad when I call on friends,

whatever I am, I say: ‘It’s Cynthia.’

Just leave rotten Baia as soon as you can:

those beaches will separate many couples,

beaches inimical to faithful girls.

To hell with the waters of Baia, an insult to love!

I.12

Ah Rome, stop charging me with idleness –

I’m just killing time while Cynthia’s not here.

She’s about as many miles from my bed

as the Volga from the Po;

without her embrace

my customary fires remain unfuelled,

none of her sweet nothings tinkling in my ear.

I was favoured before: no one was ever