Hooray ! Hooray ! It's a Holi- Holiday

I understand that it is customary for some people to travel to far off countries by aeroplane for holidays and while there undertake such activities as dancing, sight-seeing, scuba diving or transient relationships. I have for some time been in agreement with Philip Larkin's remark that he wouldn't mind going to China if he could come back the same day. But since I can have the sort of varied and hugely enjoyable few days as I had in Swindon, Oxford and Cheltenham, I have no need of further afield. Only a train ride away, I benefitted from a programme of unremitting excellence.
On Saturday I didn't even have to miss the Grand National on my way to Jesus College, Oxford because the train arrived in time for me to find a bookmaker's before proceeding to Daisy Dunn's talk on Catullus. I have reviewed Daisy's recent books here most favourably, as is proper, and was able to include her appearance at the Oxford Literary Festival in my itinerary. It might have been a minor disappointment not to find the event by sauntering through an historic quadrangle to a venerable hall- it was through an entrance between two shops and turn right, as indeed Boris Johnson might, into a modern place with flipcharts and other C21st facilities- but that doesn't matter. Daisy's obviously accustomed to these promotional appearances now and she does it all very well, even being polite enough not to have me thrown out for maybe not looking quite the debonair academic but something obviously disreputable that is trying to get away with it.
One disadvantage of having a book published is having to promote it because I gather that publishers like to know that the author will do such things to shift a few copies. I wouldn't want anybody to think I am self-published because I can't find anybody to do it for me. Oh, no, it's easier for me to do it myself and give them away. Only the most commercial of writers would write if only for money.

The questions I had for Daisy were answered completely to my satisfaction. Is that picture on the back of Catullus' Bedspread really him? Well, at least she was honest. Top marks to the lady. I don't suppose the translation of Ovid I gave her to look at will be forwarded to her agent with a note recommending that I be offered a lucrative advance to do more.
One changes trains at Didcot to get from Swindon to Oxford and back, right by the power station where the explosion was. At 7.45, on the way back, with the sun setting behind the mangled wreck of metal and concrete, it made for a sinister post-apocalyptic tableau that didn't seem right to be taking pictures of and the camera I have isn't good enough at that distance anyway.
--

A new event in our family sport of Bag Boggling, The Spring Open, was held on Sunday at a new venue, Market Lavington, where my neice hosted this special, early season warm up in a year that will see the Olympic title played for again in August.

Warm up might have been the best words for it as, like other summer sports such as cricket and cycling, an April date doesn't always bring with it summer conditions. On a soft pitch, with a wind to bring into calculations when assessing one's optimum throw, it gave the players more to think about and more than one fell over, for different reasons. But it is a picturesque venue with potential to host further tournaments as the sport grows and extends its franchise.
The handicap event finally proved the worth of the handicapping system and provided a new final, my sister Pam v. my father, the inventor of the sport (in Nottingham, late 1970's) and it went to Pam in a close match which is what the handicapper wants to see.
The Open itself served its purpose by giving the recently deposed World Champions, my nephew, Chris, and myself, a chance to chip away at the confidence of Ollie who took it last year in the best game ever played in the history of the sport. And that is what we did. It might be said that Ollie had more on his mind, renovating a whole house, than concentrating on his boggling but world titles are not easily come by and even less easily retained and so not even such an important diversion can be allowed to distract a top player. I knocked him out in the semi-final and then Chris came back from 2-0 down to become the first winner of the Spring Open (10-8, I think it was) and is installed as outright favourite for World and Olympic glory in August. But everyone played well and the old game has never been better. Thanks to Laura for pictures...
One of the fallers was me, overcome by the celebrations and biggest ovation of the afternoon when Ron took an early lead against my dad with a spectacular, and very unexpected, 2 point hit. His interests, and talents, are more practical and tool-based than my own and if he is the perennial outsider in any boggling event, he is the consummate groundsman and prepared a superb playing surface last year. But I came away reflecting on the difference between those who can, will and even enjoy renovating a house and those, like me, who are horrified by the idea. There were all kinds of activity going on there- in the garden; stripping paint off one room or removing fireplaces in another and I realized that none of them had given any thought to poetry, books, Catullus, which novel to read next and how the world is so very different for all of us. But, gladly, Ollie has more of a soul than I am giving him credit for and, with two adjacent rooms that have their ceilings removed, has invented Demolition Tennis, a very difficult sport in which you throw the ball over the wall from one room to the next and the other player either catches it or, generally, doesn't.
Tremendous. I can't see how you could refurbish a house without getting some poems or a whole new sport out of it.
--
And then, Wednesday. It has been said that Heaven is a Place on Earth, not originally by Belinda Carlisle but she made a reasonable job of saying so. She must have been to Cheltenham races on a bright, Spring day- the nice, quieter meeting in April, not the madding crowd of the festival- and backed almost nothing but winners. There is nothing I'd rather do. I only took photos of the horses I was backing and came back with pictures of nearly all winners.
I know the racecourse can be a lonely and desolate place when it all goes wrong but it helps if you do your homework. Ruination is only a few weeks away for the obsessive but, if it doesn't matter and you can stand a loss if and when it happens, it is a great feeling to have when you think you've unravelled the mystery of this esoteric sport and find that, actually, the bookmakers have paid for the whole holiday.
I could expand upon minute detail of each and every race but will save you that and explain that the best moment, by far, was when the screens had been put round a faller at the last (when one fears the worst), who was beaten anyway, but then the screens were removed and the horse was led away, no more than winded, to a gentle round of applause. One of those moments, and I do have them from time to time, when one embarks upon a sentence but finds one can't finish it. Not for the want of words (oh, no, not me) but because your voice fails you.
Otherwise, hats off to Richard Johnson, two winners and champion jockey de facto to add to all those titles he won betting without A.P. I don't call him Dickie because he's very reliable. Here he is returning on Fox Norton from the novice chase that made me richer than I imagined it had until I got home, looked at the account and saw how all those fiddly, little combination bets can multiply up once you have 4 winners lined up in a row.
I'll stick at it, then. I've promised myself that when the year's profit gets high enough and I can see Ton Koopman's  Buxtehude Opera Omnia, 30 discs of it, at a price that coincides with the ostensible surplus cash, that's what I'm having because that's what I want and I'll deserve it. The defintion of luxury would need to include ownership of such a thing and having the time to review it. And I could do that without going anywhere.

 

Catullus translated by Daisy Dunn

The Poems of Catullus, a new translation by Daisy Dunn (William Collins)

There's a bit more to translating Latin than my grounding in the discipline from 40 years ago allows for. Having been told quite categorically that amo, amare was the verb for both 'to love' and 'to like', I immediately wondered, in Catullus 72, how a translator could differentiate two meanings from the same word in a line like,
                               Because such a wound compels a lover
To love more, but to like less.

So I go back to my Bristol Classical Press edition, with commentary by Kenneth Quinn, to see if amare was the word used both times. This remarkable volume was clearly a mistake purchase because it has Latin text only but the poems begin on page 1, the commentary on page 88 and the index on page 457, such is the magnificent detail of the notes.
Of course, the original line does not use the same word for both senses but we have,
sed bene uelle minus

which the note tells us has the sense of 'being fond of' before providing much further enlightenment.

It is a brilliant poem that captures a complex emotional contradiction but the eternal problem with poetry in translation is that, unless one is fluent in the original language (in which case you don't need a translation), one only has the translator's word for it. Poetry can only exist in its first language and the translator has to choose between a number of options how to render the poem into another.
Our versions of Ovid at school were accurate prose translations of the meaning of the words. Our aim was to get good marks in exams rather than create an alternative poetic masterpiece so we learned the whole set book in translation and in the exam only had to recognize the beginning, write down our version from memory and realize when we had to stop. That part of the exam was more a memory game than a test of translating ability but it worked and the results achieved by Mr. Winstanley's class were tremendous.
Nevill Coghill's Canterbury Tales reproduce Chaucer's couplets but such a strategy can lead one into needing a rhyme and not having any available word, and Peter Dale's versions of Francois Villon surely reduce the medieval French poetry in places to a condition of doggerel somewhat below the quality of the first-hand text. The other option is to make a whole new poem from the author's but that seems to me to make the translation more the poem of the translator than the poet. It is a difficult subject and one needs to be careful. When I wrote about Tomas Transtromer a few months ago, I found myself re-tweeted by a poet who does some translating and she said I was a 'poetry translation sceptic'.
Well, yes, I am. But having enjoyed Daisy Dunn's life of Catullus and finding that my edition of the poems didn't have translations, I thought I'd better get her versions. I was convinced there was a book of translations here somewhere because I thought I had a book so old and prudish that it refused to even Bowdlerize poem 16. But I can't find it and I don't know how anybody could produce a version of 16 in any other terms anyway although it must be said that Kenneth's Quinn's commentary is more than somewhat circumlocutory, and eventually decides,
We may translate line 1 with Copley, 'Nuts to you, boys, nuts and go to hell'. But the literal, obscene meaning, though submerged, remains available...
Oh, really.

Those of us who remember the outrage summoned up by some of the less literary daily newspapers when Channel 4 broadcast Tony Harrison's v, in 1985, can only guess at how many burst bloodvessels they would have suffered had Catullus been writing then.
It's no big deal, is it. Daisy's Catullus is a laugh out loud collection. I refer you to 15, 32 and 33, among any number of others but I'm not going to quote the highlights here because my mother and father sometimes look to see what I've been writing about. Catullus is forthright, frank and unabashed in such poems and probably best known for them but he can also be exquisite and when one sees, in 70, 
         'But what a lady says to a lover in the moment
Ought to be written on the wind and running water.'

one remembers that poems are made out of other poems, books out of other books, everything comes from somewhere else and either Keats' epitaph was not as original as we thought or great minds do think alike.
But Daisy is clearly a poet in her own right as well as a classical scholar. These new translations are elegant, very thoughtfully made and highly readable. In an inspired piece of translating, she uses modern French, as she explains in the introduction, to recreate Catullus' use of Celtic words where the usual Latin wouldn't do because his native Verona was 'a part of Gaul for as long as he lived'.
Poetry-in-translation-sceptic I may be but the point I was making about Transtromer, and it applies again here, is that a translator with both a complete grasp of the original and a genuine talent for poetry of their own can make hugely satisfying versions that represent the poem authentically in another language.
And, for those who get beyond the shorter poems, those pieces of reportage from his social life in which he was never backwards in coming forward or prepared to call a spade anything less than a combine harvester, there are the magna opera with titles in the 60's. It's as if Shakespeare was known for having characters called Bottom, some innuendo in Twelfth Night about 'her C's, her U's and her T's', and the range of insults that emanate from Thersites and was never given credit for the profundity of Hamlet or Lear but a genuine bad boy is only convincing if he can show he can do the proper job as well (let's have a footnote here to make it look more academic). Catullus was the real thing and as translator, scholar and poet in her own right, so is Daisy Dunn.
My own few versions of Ovid were 'poems' made into 10-syllable lines, to at least acknowledge that Ovid wrote in strict metre, but they were done from other translations and I only glanced back at the Latin to see if I hadn't strayed too far from the primary source. I wouldn't claim to belong anywhere in the same league as Seamus Heaney or Sean O'Brien but I suspect they had a similar strategy in their respective Aeneid's and Dante's if we really knew. I doubt if Daisy needed as many artificial (sic) aids, though, and that is evident from the freshness of these poems.
I've never had a book of translations on my shortlist for Best Collection of the Year before and I usually include only books of poems first published in the year, rather than poems written over 2000 years ago,    
but I'll begin this year's notes towards a shortlist with this book and make up a rule about that later.   

NOTE. Just attaching the 'labels' to this effortless exercise in shallow name-dropping, I did at least swerve the opportunity to list such names as George Best, Pete Doherty and Alex Higgins as examples of 'bad boys who could do the proper job as well'.

Catullus' Bedspread

Daisy Dunn, Catullus' Bedspread (William Collins)

What a tremendous book. Daisy Dunn is a young classical scholar who it would be no surprise to see on telly reporting back from the ancient world as soon as a production company can scribble out the contract for her to sign. This life of Catullus appears alongside a volume of her new translations of the poems, which are quoted generously here, too.
It's not as if Latin poetry is short of compelling personalities with Horace, Ovid and Juvenal but Catullus is the most provocative, forthright and, in many ways, 'colourful'. Daisy's account of him is confident, hugely informed by a wide range of sources, and joins the poet to the history of his times through the poems vividly and with panache. Her detailed description of his appearance is taken from a portrait found painted on plaster on the site of his family home in Sirmio (pictured) but she doesn't entertain any doubt that this is him even though there is no title by which to identify him.
Catullus hasn't long been in Rome, from Verona, using family connections to invite himself to some select gatherings, when he sees and immediately becomes obsessed by Coldia, the wife of Metellus Celer, he

watched her- and watched her husband watching her- and almost passed out

and there begins a story in poetry to put alongside Petrarch's Laura, Shakespeare's Dark Lady or any such journal of love's trials and tribulations. I don't think poets feel these things any more deeply than anybody else but, by definition, the best of them make them the most memorable in poems. However, I do think that the cause is in the capacity of the admirer to feel such admiration and not necessarily always in the suitability of the beloved. But there's not much we can do about that. This particular lady, who it seems wasn't all that particular, wasn't the only object of desire for Catullus but she was well ahead of any other in his preferences. However, the senator, Celer, is found dead at his house which one might think - or Catullus certainly did- gave them the opportunity to make their unofficial relationship more official but Clodia was not quite so enamoured of such an arrangement or, solely with Catullus.
A further bombshell - and I don't want to ruin the whole book for any potential reader- comes with the death of his brother on foreign shores, across the Aegean Sea in Rhoeteum and the poet is compelled to travel there full of complex feelings of bereavment, family, his insufficiently requited love and correspondances with history.
Catullus' bedspread itself is the subject of poem, no. 64, that Daisy Dunn makes the book's central motif. A long poem, featured in her translation in an appendix, makes a similar tapestry of historic events (beginning with the Argo and including Prometheus and the loss of the Golden Age) and personal themes. The book might not need such a device to hold it together unless it is in parallel to her own sewing together of history and Catullus' life and work but her literary criticism is as impressive as her biographical research. Included in it are such telling insights as how the Latin for 'business', negotium, which I see can also mean pain, trouble, annoyance or distress, is simply the direct antonym of otium, for 'leisure'. And we also learn how fashionable Romans would adopt accents from other regions to give themselves a more plebian image, if need be, for effect.
Part of the political background is the rise of Julius Caesar, the machinations of the triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus, the end of the Republic and the establishment of the dictatorship but Catullus' father was a friend of Caesar's and it is suggested here that somehow that is why Catullus could even include Caesar in his targets for derogatory remarks in his poems with impunity. It is hard to imagine any literary author now having quite the licence to produce work like that but none of it would be available to us now had copies not been made by admirers that by various very unlikely circumstances allowed them to be rediscovered and that part of the Epilogue is the most astonishing part of the story.
Dead by the age of 30, Catullus could hardly have wished for quite such longevity for his poems. Daisy Dunn makes a good case for how great his poetry reads in the Latin and he was clearly admired by subsequent generations but, with a poem being a literary event not necessarily the sincere words of the author, there is no telling if Catullus was quite as bad and dangerous to know as his finely crafted verses make him out to be. If he was one of the first poets to be a different person in his poems to what he was in real life, he wasn't going to be the last.
Slightly discouragingly, the first piece of blurb on the back cover of this book is by that well-known classical scholar and statesman, Boris Johnson. It is recognizably Johnsonian in its composite verve and grandiose overstatement but, for once, I can see what he means. Any book that can make me agree with him must be a good one. On a scale of 1 to 10 on which 1 represents a book you have to abandon because it's not worth the effort and 10 means you can't put it down, Catullus' Bedspread is close to a 9. I hope Daisy's getting down to work on Ovid or Horace.

 

Tibullus Elegies

Tibullus, Elegies, a new translation by A.M. Juster (Oxford)

The original Augustan Age in poetry included Vergil, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid. Among other things, it idealized a life of leisure in the country rather than going to war. But one comes away from reading Tibullus feeling that he never quite got his way in his short life.

He does not have Ovid's self-possession. Where Ovid seems to know what he wants and knows how to get it, or else he will dramatize his destitution, Tibullus paints himself most often as a victim of love and its situations. He is a meeker and less expectant personality although precisely how autobiographical these poems are can't be said for certain.

Book 1 of the Elegies might remind the reader of the shadowy story behind Shakespeare's Sonnets with their fair youth and dark lady and triangle of rivalry. Most of the book is devoted to Delia but, in a second episode, Tibullus appears to suffer when, in 1.9, his boy betrays him with an older, rich man whose wife dresses herself up for another younger man.

In Book 2 Tibullus is reluctantly involved in a military campaign and his ideals are compromised by necessity and civic duty. In love, he is also reduced in ambition, apparently more desperately in thrall to Nemesis but in 2.4, locked out by her madam, and given any excuse as to why he can't see her,

Whichever God gave beauty to a greedy girl,

alas, he brought much evil with the good,

and so the sobs and brawls resound; in short, it's why

Love is a god who's disrespected now,

Although Ovid is equally capable of theatrical tantrums in despairing moods, he is also bullish and confident whereas Tibullus only seems to cherish his dreams rather than believe in them and then they become tainted and degraded. But one can't help but like Tibullus even if he is overshadowed by his brash successor.

This translation by A.M Juster achieves a fine, lucid expression while maintaining the metrical pattern and so covers more than one of the several options and responsibilities of the translator. Robert Maltby's introduction and notes are also exemplary in this convenient and clear edition. As a compact version of the poet with useful context and background, one couldn't hope for any more. Highly entertaining, enjoyable and excellent.

Amores I iv

Whatever great works they go on to create or are eventually best known for, it is often the early work that is in some ways essentially the real artist. Their first ideas being what they first wanted to express and their original style being how they thought it best put. Fame and recognition inevitably change them and so it is the early pieces in which we find them unspoiled. Ovid is probably best known for the Metamorphoses but I'm sure I prefer the Amores.
Also, as might be suspected of Donne, the poets that write about love and their amorous adventures might be those who spent more time thinking about it than doing it. While both fancy themselves as 'ladies' men', one could think that a real philanderer might have spent so much time gallivanting that they would hardly stop to write so much of it down for posterity. I don't know. But I was taken by this little episode re-reading Ovid this weekend and thought it might be strong enough to stand even my hack re-working,

Amores I iv

I’ll see you there. And, with you, your husband
Who can put his arm around you and rest
Your head upon him while across the room
We share secret glances that will murmur
Between us our furtive wordless nothings.
Read my meaning from my moving fingers
Or from the idle shapes I trace in wine.
And when you bring to mind a thought of love
Between us you should brush your glowing cheek
But if you need to chide me then perhaps
You’ll touch your earlobe so that I will know.
Don’t take the wine he offers you but say
That he should drink it and then ask the slave
To bring you some that you say you prefer.
I will drink from that glass so that my lips
Will have touched the part that you will drink from.
Don’t let him get too intimate with you,
And, above all, please don’t let him kiss you
Or I will announce that we are lovers
And the kisses that he’s stealing are mine.
But it’s the unseen lovemaking I fear
More than any because I cannot know
Of it but know of it for myself
On my own account when I have enjoyed
It with you in other public places
But discreetly, hidden under clothing.
Remember to keep his glass charged, keep him
Drinking strong wine with no added water
The sooner we can have him taken home
To sleep it off and, when it’s time to go,
Leave like the others do and blend yourself
In with the crowd, for I will be a part
Of it and meet you there. I’ll see you then.

How wretched I am to ask for only
These few short hours with you, when all night long
You will be back at home with him while I,
Desperate and tearful, watch you to your door.
And your husband will then take your kisses
As a right and take for himself the love
You give me more naturally. Might I ask
You let him do so without your response.
Don’t let him enjoy it or, at the least,
Don’t take any pleasure in it yourself.
But whatever happens during the night,
Tell me what I want to hear tomorrow.

Ovid- Baucis and Philemon

A great debt is owed to John Winstanley, our Latin teacher at school, not only for providing the version of this poem that got us all through O level but also for somehow passing on an enthusiasm that made me want to make my own version of it 30 years later.

It's not actually as easy as it might look to make a whole new poem out of the Latin and so my first intention to produce a Baucis and Philemon of my own became really just another interpretation of Ovid, sticking closely to the original.

Ovid's lines are in Metamorphoses, Book VIII, lines 624-724.

Baucis and Philemon

After Ovid

We are nearby standing water where once
Was dry, inhabited land but is home
Now to wading birds and the water fowl
That nest and thrive there. Jupiter came here
In human form with Mercury, his son.
They asked for lodgings at a thousand homes
And a thousand doors were closed against them.
But one house took them in, a humble one
I must admit, tiny and thatched with straw
And reeds but the kindly old woman there, Baucis,
And her equally elderly husband, Philemon,
Took them in, who when young had been married
In that cottage and grew old together,
So uncomplaining of their poverty
That they made light of it and were content.
Whether you call for masters or servants
There, it makes no difference. There is only
The two of them and they both give orders
And follow them. And so, when the Gods came,
Stooping to enter under the low beam
Of the doorway, the old man brought out chairs
While busy Baucis added rough-textured
Covers and they were asked to rest their legs.
She stirred the lukewarm ashes in the hearth,
Resurrected the day before’s embers,
Feeding them with leaves and dried bark and lit
The fire again with her old woman’s breath.
And she brought down stored brushwood from the roof
-dry twigs that she broke into small pieces
to put under the small bronze cooking pot
and prepared the leafy vegetables
that her husband picked from their lush garden.
A darkened back of pig-meat was lifted
Down from a roof beam with a two-pronged fork
and slices of it were cooked to tenderness
in boiling water. Meanwhile the time passed
in friendly conversation, the old folk
bringing a bowl of warm water to bathe
and soothe their guests’ dirty and aching feet.
And there was a wooden couch in the house
On which they spread a rustic covering
That was only brought out on special days.
The Gods sat down. Their table sloped one way,
Though, because one of its legs was shorter
Than the other two so it was shored up
With a tile and then made fresh with green mint.
They spread across it two-coloured olives,
Preserved cherries, salad with radishes,
A lump of fresh, sweet butter and some eggs
That were not over-cooked. All these were served
On earthenware dishes and, after these,
They set down matching engraved cups, cups
Made of beech wood whose insides had been polished
With golden wax. After a short delay
Hot meat was brought over from the fire-place
And, furthermore, before long there was wine.
When this was done with and taken away
There came another course, of nuts and dates,
Purple plums and grapes in wicker baskets
With a fresh honeycomb at the centre.
And this was all offered generously,
Without a thought of the cost to themselves,
And during this, they noticed that the cups
Of wine, which had been so often emptied,
Replenished themselves of their own accord.
Astonished at such strangeness, they trembled
And held their hands up to the heavens. Both
Baucis and timid Philemon offered
Prayers and asked for pardon for their banquet
And their inadequate preparations.
They only had one goose and that guarded
Their tiny house but they were preparing
To slaughter it to feed their guests, the Gods.
But the goose was too quick for them and tired
Them out in the chase who moved so slowly.
It evaded them for a long time then
Seemed to go to the Gods for protection
And the Gods forbade that the goose be killed.
We are Gods, they said, and this selfish town
Is going to suffer as it deserves to
But you two will be spared that misfortune.
You must leave your home and follow our steps
Up that steep mountain together. And they
Obeyed, struggling on their way with sticks
To support them. They were an arrow shot
From the top when they turned to see below
Them their village submerged in swamp water
And while they wondered at the spectacle,
And wept for those who had been their neighbours,
They saw that only their cottage remained
Which had been small though for the two of them,
But had now been turned into a temple.
Columns had replaced the gable supports
And the roof appeared to be made of gold.
The floor was laid with marble and the doors
Were engraved. And Jupiter said softly,
Say, O righteous old man, and woman fit
To have such a righteous husband, what wish
You would like granted. And Philemon
Spoke with his wife briefly before saying
What decision they had agreed upon,
We ask to be priests and keep your temple
And, because we have lived so happily,
That we may depart this life together
So that I never have to see the grave
Of my wife, nor she my burial place.
And their wish was granted. They looked after
The Gods’ temple for the rest of their lives
Until, weakened by their advanced old age,
While they were standing by the temple steps
Telling the fortunes of the place, Baucis
Observed old Philemon come into leaf
And Philemon saw Baucis do the same
And as the tree-top formed over each face
They both said, Farewell, Dear at the same time
And their mouths were covered over by bark.
And to this day, the Phrygians who live
There still point out the tree trunks side by side
Made from their two bodies. Some trustworthy
Old men told me this story (and there’s no
Reason why they would have made it all up).
I saw tributes hanging from the branches
For myself and, adding some of my own,
Said, Those who love the Gods are looked after.
Those who honour them are honoured themselves.