LATIN LITERATURE AN ANTHOLOGY Translations from Latin Prose and Poetry chosen by Michael Grant Contents General Introduction SELECTED TRANSLATIONS (with Introductions to each author) : The Republicans PART I PLAUTUS TERENCE CICERO LUCRETIUS CATULLUS CAESAR SALLUST : The Augustans PART II VIRGIL HORACE LIVY PROPERTIUS OVID : The Early Empire PART III PHAEDRUS SENECA LUCAN PETRONIUS : The Imperial Peace PART IV QUINTILIAN MARTIAL PLINY JUVENAL TACITUS SUETONIUS : The North Africans PART V APULEIUS TERTULLIAN ST AUGUSTINE List of Dates A Few Books on Latin Literature Sources and Acknowledgements Follow Penguin PENGUIN CLASSICS LATIN LITERATURE AN ANTHOLOGY M G was born in 1914. He served as an intelligence officer during the ICHAEL RANT Second World War, and subsequently held academic posts at the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Khartoum and Belfast. Over his lifetime, he published nearly fifty books on the ancient world, ranging from studies of Roman coinage, to biographies of Caesar, Nero and Jesus, to books on Ancient Israel and the Middle Ages. Many of his translations were published in Penguin Classics. Professor Grant moved to Italy in 1966, where he spent most of the rest of his life until his death in 2004. General Introduction Good translations rank high among the necessities of our times. Peoples and nations need them to escape from the Tower of Babel, and to understand the past. Yet translation has often, and rightly, been called impossible to achieve. For the ideal translation is required to fulfil hopelessly contradictory sets of conditions. It would need (a) to give the words of the original and (b) to give its ideas; (a) to reflect the style of the original and (b) of the translator. There are likewise clashing views about the legitimacy of adding to the original or omitting from it.1 The profound conclusion is that two translations are four times as good as one. A translator must start with some sympathy with his author, but he must also do a lot of work to find out what that author says, how he says it, and what he means. Even in modern languages words and phrases do not always have equivalents – not to speak of proverbs and the like. If you are translating Mit Wölfen muss man heulen, are you going to offer a mysterious ‘with wolves must one howl’, or will you settle for ‘when in Rome do as the Romans do’? The gulfs of time make the task harder still. Scarcely a single ancient Greek word can be matched in English; the emotions and the sounds are an immeasurable distance away. Latin is more deceptive. We recognize words and moods, but they are rarely reliable equivalents. This problem particularly applies to prose translation, an exacting art of which the theory is gravely neglected; there are a thousand words written about verse translation to every one about prose. Yet it is worth considering, for example, how Cicero’s rhetoric slides with catastrophic ease into an outdated English which, being unreadable, cannot be called a suitable rendering. The nineteenth century wanted the classical ‘best thoughts’ in modern languages, but its versions – and indeed even those of a generation or two ago – now seem to have a mouldy semi-Latinized stuffiness. A new version is needed for every generation; how and what are equally important all the time. Robert Graves, in attempting to translate the perfumed lateish Latin of Apuleius (p. 429), remarked that ‘the effect of oddness is best achieved in convulsed times like the present by writing in as easy and sedate an English as possible.’ The word sedate does his own style injustice, but it is true that any attempt to reproduce Apuleius’ flamboyant elaborations (or the pregnant point of Tacitus), would be unacceptable nowadays. It worked with the Elizabethans and Tacitus), would be unacceptable nowadays. It worked with the Elizabethans and the readers of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, but it will not work with us. Greek or Latin poetry are equally or even more difficult to translate, because their diction is more elevated than anything produced today. The Romans had nothing so densely charged or grandiose as Aeschylus, but the bemusing effects which Virgil and Horace create by arranging quite ordinary words set perilous snares for the translator. Matthew Arnold believed that a suitable vehicle was poetic prose, but Walt Whitman, speaking as one poet about another, said this reminded him of hangings, curtains, finger-bowls and chinaware. And indeed poetic prose all too often meant words like eftsoons and forsooth, and other such poisons which give people wrong ideas about the ancient classics. So the only alternative media for translating poetry are poetry and plain (that is to say non-poetical) prose. Prose tours de force such as E. V. Rieu’s Odyssey have rightly caught people’s imagination; yet a prose rendering discards the chief feature and resource of its original. The translation of a poem must have the characteristics of a poem. Certainly, no ancient poem can be made to live its own life again. Ancient metre is one obstacle; efforts to reproduce these quantitative metres into modern stress-accent languages, though occasionally successful in sensitive hands, more often became gouty gallops and the setting of railway by-laws to dance music. Is rhyme a legitimate substitute, to reproduce part of the formality? In any case there really is no choice between poetry and prose for translating a poem; poetry is better. The beauty of the original can awaken phrases in another poet’s mind and so make a modern poem – not identical with the ancient work or even its formal parallel, but a significant echo and commentary and recreation in modern terms of the effect the original had exercised on people’s minds and feelings. Occasionally some happy sympathy of cultural climates and personalities almost achieves the impossible. Many a modern poet has had a shot – in America even more than in England, and at translating Greek more than Latin – and this twentieth century has been described as the most brilliant period of translation English literature has known since the Elizabethans. In their day, although Arthur Golding was not a poet of the calibre of Ovid, their attitudes of mind and style coincided closely enough to produce something which thousands enjoyed (p. 257). And then again, in Restoration times though no one can pretend that the two men lived under the same linguistic or social or intellectual conditions, Dryden showed an almost uncanny insight into the intricate, lapidary stanzas and quintessential temperament of Horace (p. 186) – adding enough of himself to bring the Odes alive for a second time. Dryden was also the first great theorist of translation, and the first to recognize and describe it clearly as an art. He distinguished between three ways of translating, the literal way, the looser paraphase, and the even looser imitation or adaptation. He himself uses 171 words where Horace used seventy-eight, and so by modern standards he is paraphrasing – though this is perhaps not a final criterion, since English is far more diffuse than Latin; thirteen words of Virgil have been said to need sixty of English, and even then the sonorous, plangent overtones of trumpet-calls like mortalia and lacrimae are lost. Paraphrases are also needed when the translator is trying to bring out a joke; Edward Marsh brings out Horace’s, but only by straying some way from a literal version (p. 201). The classic case is Ezra Pound, whose Homage to Sextus Propertius conveys ironic aspects of the poet which no other renderings have caught (p. 247). But its endowment of the original with ‘up to date aluminium crutches’ includes blatant mistranslations, which Pound brazened out, hinting that they were deliberate and even perhaps better than the original. Fifty years later opinion is still divided, sharply and at length, regarding the legitimacy of these tactics. Cecil Day Lewis’ versions of Virgil likewise include a certain number of anachronisms (p. 156). They were originally commissioned by the BBC, and he said he introduced these shocking surprises in order to keep the radio audiences awake. The Roman works and writers represented in this book belong to the central classical tradition. Horace, Ovid, Cicero and the rest were once admired a great deal, perhaps too much. Now, they are admired far too little. They are not widely or voluntarily read, and their names convey to many people a faded, fusty impression. To set right this ludicrous misconception is one of the aims of the present book. Another is to correct the wildly mistaken idea that Latin literature is just a second class reflection of Greek. What struck the Italian Renaissance about these Latin writers was their demonstration that man is significant and has a say in his own destiny. If we can bridge the gulf of time between ourselves and the ancient Romans, a whole civilization is spread out before us, abundant in warnings and guides and forerunners, in glorious achievements and tremendous failures, in marvels of literature as well as of art. Although the problems and perils of transmission from Latin to English are great, the attempts to overcome them have added new dimensions to every century in turn, and are exciting, comforting enhancements of life. The translations I have chosen are those which seem to me, in their own right and in our own day, comprehensible and enjoyable.1 I want to thank Professor J. H. Bishop, Mr Andreas Mayor and Professor Stuart Piggott for their previously unpublished contributions, and Professor Bishop for checking many references. I also appreciate the help of Professor W. L. Renwick, Dr E. V. Rieu, Mr G. H. W. Rylands, and Mr Ian Scott-Kilvert. At the end of this book there is a list of writers and publishers whose copyright permissions are gratefully acknowledged. My thanks are also due to Penguin Books Ltd for allowing me an advance view of three of their publications and for giving me much help with the preparation of the manuscript. M G ICHAEL RANT