Love Roman Style: The Best of Catullus, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid in Modern Verse

By Howard Felperin

Several generations of Roman lyric poets are brought together here, freshly translated into modern English verse. What links them is the theme of love in all its variations, as much in the air then and there as it is here and now. These great poets knew each other, were conversant with one anothers work, which they echoed, parodied, and paid homage in the forms and figures they deployed. Its a classic case of influence, the process by which poetry propagates itself through all ages and cultures.

Bawdy, delicate, offbeat, and often sublime, love is represented here in all its modes, thanks to the craft and tact of the translator. Catullus passionate intensity, Horaces worldly wisdom, Propertius metaphysical wit, and Ovids stylish flippancy are all on display in a disciplined English verse that might have been--and was--written yesterday. If, at school, you found Latin an affliction, here is your remedy. If you loved for its austere simplicity, here is your chance to take up with it again at a reunion banquet. If youve never studied it, its time to make its acquaintance.

The full scope of love poetry is here on view in the work of these Roman masters, and their background and technique explored in their translators vivid introduction. His point is simple: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Dec 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9781546285823

Howard Felperin

Educated at Columbia and Harvard, Howard Felperin has lectured on Shakespeare and literary theory on four continents, published several books on both, as well as a volume of his own poetry, An All But Perfect God, and a monumental verse translation Virgils Aeneid. Shakespearean and classicist, he lives on the Isle of Wight, where he walks the beach and continues to write. His first publication, more than fifty years ago, was a translation of Catullus for the Columbia Review. Its much improved on here.

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© 2017 Howard Felperin. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 12/15/2017

ISBN: 978-1-5462-8583-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-8584-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-8582-3 (e)

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Cover is a photo of Neptune and Amphitrite Mosaic.

Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgements

I. Gaius Valerius Catullus (84-54 BC)

Presentation Copy

A Soupçon of Solace

Requiem for a Sparrow

Love and Kisses

Confession Time

How Many Kisses?

Catullus Agonistes

Come Dine with Me

Homecoming

Let’s Make a Date

Wanderlust

Sitting Across (After Sappho)

A Woman’s Words

Love’s Contradictions

Hail and Farewell!

Surprised by Joy

II. Quintus Horatius Flaccus 65-5 BC

A Prayer for Virgil, Bound for Greece

Sharp Winter Melts

Two Close Calls

Distraction

Midwinter Musing

Carpe Diem

Jealousy

Glycera the One and Only

Let’s Have a Drink

Righteousness

The Doe-Like Chloe

How Lydia’s Gone Off!

Master of the Revels

The Measurer Measured

The Pen is Mightier

A Poet’s Prayer

Advice for Albius Tibullus

Horace’s Conversion

Cleopatra’s Exit

Oriental Excess

The Great Leveler

Another Great Leveler

Be Patient

A Friend Reprieved

The Golden Mean

Forget Politics

My Thing

Out of Body

Death Comes to All

Changing Times

Peace of Mind

Apotheosis

Chin Up

An Anniversary

Reconciliation?

A Hard Challenge

Neobule’s Plight

Bandusian Fountain!

Time to Reform

Rivals in Love

In Praise of Fine Wine

A Farewell to Love

Here’s to Neptune

Immortality Achieved

A Farewell to Arms?

Poetry and Praise

To the Muse

The Snows Have Gone Away

Your Time Will Come

A Birthday Party

A Proposition

Come Join Us, Virgil

Poetic Justice

Rome under Augustus

III. Sextus Propertius (c. 50—c. 15 BC)

Love’s Victim

Her Mind’s Made Up

She’s Changed Her Mind

In the Doldrums

Let’s Make a Pact

Back Stories

Cynthia Deified

Do the Right Thing

The Iconography of Love

Make Up Your Mind

Age Is Irrelevant

Cosmetic Madness

Country Life

A Dream of Cynthia

A Man of Substance

Only the Lover

Under Arrest

Reality Bites

No Escape

Living Together

In Apollo’s Honour

The Cult of Isis

Party Animal

I Did It My Way

My Claim to Fame

It’s War

My Kind of God

Tough Love

Cynthia’s Birthday

A Faithful Wife

La Dolce Vita

A Midnight Summons

A Prayer to Bacchus

Female Libido

A Proposition

Last Resort

My Lost Tablet

The End of the Affair

Free at Last

To Her Husband at the Front

Up to Her Old Tricks

The Ghost

Cornelia from the Depths

IV. Publius Ovidius Naso (43BC-17AD)

My Unmaking

A Prayer to Love

Afternoon Delight

Message Returned

Sexual Confusion

Live Without Love

Victory at Last!

Corinna Aborts

Circle of Love

Ovid Agonistes

Introduction

I. The Permutations of Love

Ezra Pound, polyglot doyen of poetic modernism and no mean latinist, once remarked that he’d tried—and failed—forty times to translate Catullus. I’m not convinced he had much more success with Propertius, for all the celebrity his Homage to that great poet has enjoyed for almost a century. But Pound’s sense of inadequacy before Catullus is telling, because of all Latin poets, he is linguistically the easiest, the one to whom students are likely to be introduced first and captivated by forever. (As a pupil at Eton, Ian Fleming would never forget the word solaciolum, ‘a soupçon, a quantum of solace,’ from Catullus II.) Ol’ Ez’ problem with Catullus seems to me part of his larger problem with love poetry per se, with which he had little affinity. When he set out the themes of The Cantos, his latter-day epic, as de litteris, de armis, de ingeniis viris (‘of letters, wars, and gifted men’), love was conspicuously absent, as it is from his oeuvre as a whole.

From the beginning and in all its modes, poetry has embraced love as pretext, justification, and theme. Foregrounded in Attic tragedy and the Greek anthology, there in the background in Homer, love is central to Roman poetry as well, and not only in the lyric poets represented here. It’s at the center of Virgil’s epic, and Ovid built a career upon it. Throw in the great tradition that followed in the works of Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, the Elizabethans, Metaphysicals, Romantics, even many a modern. In poetic emperies, love has traditionally conquered all. So much so as to raise the question, why? Why should love have become poetry’s, not to mention popular song’s and opera’s, ‘natural’—virtually ‘default’—position, when so many other themes and topics are available? Poetry and love seem to sustain each other in an ongoing symbiosis.

Not every poem translated here has love as its theme, though most do; and the love variously invoked, celebrated, and sometimes deplored, is the kind named eros in ancient Greek; amor, cupiditas, or libido in classical Latin. There were of course other varieties available to antiquity, as there still are, and many names for them: philia and agape in Greek; amicitia and caritas in Latin. A few of the poems offered here venture upon these ‘higher,’ more virtuous domains: Horace, for example, in Odes, I.iii, ‘A Prayer for Virgil, Bound for Greece.’ But these Roman poets, Horace certainly, were worldlings, and the love they poetically explore is, in the main, erotic. Some of their poems verge on pornography. (Vide Catullus, XXXII, ‘Let’s Make a Date’; Horace, III. xxxvi, ‘A Farewell to Arms’; Propertius, III.xxiii, ‘My Lost Tablet;’ Ovid, I.v, ‘Afternoon Delight’ and II. xv, ‘Circle of Love,’ though even these have their ‘romantic’ side.) Make no mistake, Roman love poetry is anything but ‘politically correct’ by contemporary standards. But why on earth should it be? It was written over two thousand years ago. Why, for that matter, should poetry ever be ‘politically correct’?

In theory and practice, poetry can be about anything and address it from any angle, as Pound certainly understood: ideas, war, death, politics, gardening. Several of the poems translated here actually do take up such themes. But most focus on erotic love; and in so doing, form the template and chart the course for European poetry to come. So why love? These four poets help us to answer that question. And the answer they triangulate has as much to do with poetry as love. The fact is they generate each other. The emotional intensities and complexities of love require the expressive resources of poetry; and poetry, the intensities and complexities of love. Symbiotic indeed. Of all human experiences, love has traditionally offered the widest scope for poetic exploration.

So enter poetry. Four individual geniuses of successive poetic generations; each inward with the work of his predecessors and faced with the task of finding his own place within that tradition. That means re-jigging it in such a way as to make his own work ‘new,’ as Pound would say, and in so doing, set a similar challenge for poets to come. For these Roman poets would become, in turn, points of departure for the poetry of late medieval and early modern Europe, for Francis Petrarch’s Rime, Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti, and perhaps most notably, Shakespeare’s own amazing Sonnets. The ‘mistress-muses’ of Catullus, Horace, and Propertius—‘Lesbia,’ ‘Lydia,’ ‘Cynthia,’ et al., not to mention the ‘Delia’ of Tibullus and ‘Corinna’ of Ovid—would populate the pages of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poetry with many a ‘not-impossible-she’—and the odd ‘he’—including Shakespeare’s own ‘Fair Youth’ and legendary ‘Dark Lady.’

The sonnet, arguably the dominant lyric form of renaissance Europe (and still alive, if not quite kicking, today) owes its existence to these Roman masters. They laid its foundations and threw up its architectonics: a sequence of poems expressing hyperbolic love for a very special woman (sometimes several and occasionally a man). A sequence with a storyline, a mythos, a narrative, however ticklish it can be to extricate, thanks to the corruption of ancient manuscripts, the craftiness of poets who might have had their reasons not to identify openly the objects of their passion, and the inherent tricksiness of literary-historical interpretation. In selecting from the three sequences represented, I’ve tried to retain some semblance of those implicit plots, sometimes (as with Propertius) altering the received order of his poems to convey the sense of a beginning, middle, and end.

Those plots, if not strictly tragic in shape, are certainly elegiac in mood. Here, Propertius must take the laurels with his very late ‘The Ghost’ (IV.vii). It registers his Cynthia’s death, funeral, and posthumous return and is surely among the greatest—and wittiest—‘metaphysical’ poems ever penned. It also marks a step-change in his style to what might be called the ‘metaphysical sublime,’ a term neither anachronistic nor inappropriate. For Propertius was in many ways—in his dramatic intensity, deep wit, and far-fetched conceits—the John Donne of his age. More on this later. But why only these? Why not Tibullus, or Martial, or others who wrote in the tradition of the love-elegy? After all, a course in ‘Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius’—irreverently nicknamed ‘Cat, Tib, Prop’ by Latin majors (and minors like me)—used to be a staple at universities. All wrote, at least some of the time, in the elegiac couplet, the form that gave its name to this tradition. Ovid offers a witty account of its genesis in his opening poem,.

But there’s something else that defines, more than a verse-form, the contents of this collection, namely, the shaping force of ‘poetic influence’ itself: the struggle for self-differentiation and pre-eminence within a poetic lineage. In the modern world—which Rome once was—great poets do not simply imitate past masters in order to create themselves. That would be self-defeating as well as logically contradictory. No, plagiarism, epigonism, servile imitation would never do, except for very minor poets. Better to displace, even quietly subvert, your predecessors through such devices as allusion, homage, even parody to make room for yourself; use their work as ‘foils’ for your own, to make it more vivid and set off its innovative brilliance: poetic practices illustrated here in rich abundance. ‘A true poet doesn’t borrow,’ as T.S. Eliot owlishly observed, ‘He steals.’ The difference? When you steal something, you make it yours.

Then there’s the system of patronage already well established in imperial Rome. It must have reinforced rivalries and alliances. The support of the arts by powerful public men came to maturity under Augustus. His own chief minister and right-hand-man, Maecenas, vastly rich in his own family right and a man of taste and discrimination to boot, was the perfect patron. So for provincial young men like these, all from the sticks and