Sunday Salon (and CCSpin Number Reveal!)

 

Last Week

Posted Chicago poet Keith Preston on 'Reading in Bed As A Fine Art'.

Blogged about Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, a book from my Classics Club list.

And signed up for the latest Classics Club spin #33. The spin number is 18,

which means Honoré de Balzac's Cousin Bette for me. A good choice!

Some other books, including The Songs of Kabir, tr. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra:

The mind's a shortchanging

Huckster with a crafty 

Wife and Five

Scoundrel children.
It won't change its ways.

The mind's a knot, says Kabir,

Not easy to untie.

On The Stack

In addition to the Balzac, that's Early Irish Myths and Sagas, the Rae Dalven translation of Cavafy, and a volume of selected David Slavitt poems I'm making my way through.

Bookish

I went to see the Eleanor Catton at the main Toronto Public Library talk about her new book Birnam Wood. Except there's apparently some suspense, so while she read from it, she didn't necessarily talk about it much. Not so long ago she wrote the screenplay for a version of Emma, so she mostly talked (very astutely) about that. She's impressive.

But now I do want to read the book. The Toronto library system bought a hundred copies, but I'm afraid I'm only five hundred on the list, so it will be a while...

I was going to post the video of the talk, but it doesn't seem to be available yet, though the library usually does post them here. I've also got tickets for Rebecca Makkai in May.

Eleanor Catton was born in Canada and lived here until she was six. (Her father was a grad student at the University of Western Ontario.) The Luminaries won the Canadian Governor General's award for fiction, as well as the Booker. The interviewer tried to absorb Catton into the Canadian borg, a thing which has been tried before and which I knew from some interview I read earlier, she politely resists. But based on her vowels, she's definitely a New Zealander, which you could check for yourself, if I could post the video... reflict, attintion, togither. 😉 

Chocolate Pots-de-créme, all gone now sadly...

How was your week?

The Dance of the Intellect among Words, or Thinking about Propertius

 Round, round, the roof does run;
  And being ravished thus,
Come, I will drink a tun
  To my Propertius.

-Robert Herrick, from 'To Live Merrily, and to Trust to Good Verses'

The only literary celebration of the spins that I know of.

But anyway, Propertius:

The word around town these days is that I've become lazy
  and that Cynthia must be the reason. Alas, not so.
She is as far away from my bed as the River Po
  is from...What's out there, remote and exotic? The Bug!
Cynthia hasn't been feeding my passion lately. My soul
  is starved for her kisses. My ear thirsts for her whispers.
It's not the way it was when we pleased each other, defying
  Envy itself. It's as if some god had decided
I was in need of a little refresher course in human
  pain. Or is it some herb from Prometheus' peaks
that Medea kept in her kit to interfere with lovers?
  Whatever it is, I'm sadly diminished. Distance
changes a woman's heart, and the great strength of our passion
  is undermined. I spend my nights alone,
morose and full of self-pity. (I begin to bore myself.)
  That man who, in his pain, can complain to his mistress
who is there with him in the room, ought to be

counting his blessings,

  for love, when it's sprinkled with tears, will grow like a weed.
At the worst, he can work himself up to a kind

of righteous anger,

  enough to give him the nerve to break it off
and look somewhere else for love. I'm unable to do that.
  For me, it's Cynthia, first, last, and always.

That's Ode 12, from Book I, translated by David Slavitt. W. A. Camps, Pembroke College, Cambridge, writes, "Very little is known of Propertius' life beyond what he tells us himself in his works." What Propertius tells us, the last line of that ode, is, "Cynthia prima fuit, Cynthia finis erit." He was in love with a girl. Cynthia. First, last, and always. (Though more literally: Cynthia was first, Cynthia will be the end.)

We can piece together a few other details. Propertius was born around 57 BC, in Umbria, probably close to Assisi. The Roman civil wars were ongoing and this was a region not yet fully absorbed into the Roman state; Propertius' family lands were confiscated for the benefit of Augustus' (still Octavian and not yet Augustus) veterans in 41 BC. His father died while Propertius was in his teens, his mother somewhat later. Still there was money enough left for him to go to Rome where he was no doubt supposed to study law or oratory or something useful, but spent his time writing poetry instead. He meets Cynthia around 30 BC.

In fact, poetry could be a paying gig at the time. His poems, all written in the elegiac meter, are divided into four books. The first, called the Monobiblos, is the one most absorbed with Cynthia, and seems to have become famous already while Propertius was still young. Which meant he caught the ear of Maecenas, Augustus' cultural commissar, and voilá, Propertius' fortune was made. Once you were in with the new hegemony...

There's not much evidence, and anyway, I'm probably entirely wrong, but I imagine Maecenas as having good taste in literature, not necessarily political, but feeling obligated to support the new way of things. By 27 B.C.--when Octavian becomes Augustus--Rome has suffered fifty, almost a hundred, years of civil war, and everyone is just so damned tired. Sure, Augustus is a square, daddy-o, but he's got the money, and he's fixed everything up real sweet, and if you just would write a few poems about how things now are cool, like it was a return the good old days, well...you know, it would help...Vergil did it, Horace did it, too. So it's OK for you, too. Propertius does appreciate the new calm, writes some 'Roman odes' in honor of the new politics, but can't quite pull it off, or maybe doesn't entirely want to. He just wants to write about a girl.

Anyhoo, that's a bit what I like about Propertius. There's a whole world there you can only get glimpses of; real people, half seen, half filled out by your imagination; people interacting with the events of the day, but not enslaved by them, still living their own romantic lives. These characters feel like real people, well, they are real people, but characters, too: Propertius himself, and Cynthia, that learned girl, but also Lygdamus, Propertius' slave--we all know about tricky servants, the Leporello type--his poetry-writing friends show up here and there, maybe some rivals in his worship of Cynthia, of whom he could be jealous--should he be jealous?--, other romantically possible girls. A whole circle. It goes on until it fades; some die; some just abandon poetry. It's Bolaño telling the story of the Visceral Realists in The Savage Detectives.

Enough for now. I've slogged at this post a while. And still I didn't get to Dante or Goethe and Ezra Pound is no more than an allusion in the title of the post. Housman. Housman remains to be considered. Imagery. Ears and boats. Maybe more Highet. I also didn't babble on about elegiacs, Goethe or Schiller or Coleridge or Clough, though I had every intention of doing so...

Thinking about Propertius:

Dates, and other 'facts', taken from the introduction to Propertius' Elegies, Book I, edited by W. A. Camps, Cambridge University Press, 1961, shown above. They're reasonable, but not to but to be taken as gospel truth. The year of his birth is particularly doubtful.

Poem For A Thursday

After finishing David Slavitt's translation of Orlando Furioso--and commenting that I had liked translations of his I'd read earlier--I went and looked up those translations. The one I really remembered was Ausonius, and while he may be helped by the fact nobody actually reads or translates Ausonius, I'm glad he did:

Epigrams: LXXXIX

Give me a mistress cute and pert,
quick to quarrel, and common as dirt,
not too truthful, moody, vain
an exquisite balance of pleasure and pain.
Otherwise, if she be good,
modest, always cheerful in mood,
and an ornament to any man's life,
I'm apt to want her to be my wife.

The mistress comes off rather better than the wife, as Ausonius, or certainly Slavitt, realized. I didn't go read the Latin, though in theory I could, but it strikes me as Very Roman. There are others in the volume equally amusing.

From Slavitt's introduction:

"Decimus Magnus Ausonius was born about A. D. 310 in Bordeaux to Julius Ausonius, a physician, and Aemilia Aeonian, the daughter of one Caecilius Argicius Arborius. He was educated at Bordeaux and then Toulouse, where his maternal uncle Aemilius Magnus Arborius was a professor. When this uncle was summoned to Constantinople to become tutor to one of the sons of Constantine, Ausonius accompanied him....After thirty years or so of [our Ausonius'] teaching, he was summoned by the emperor Valentinian I to be the tutor to the young prince Gratian...The exact date of his death is not known but it was probably toward the end of 393 or in 394, there being nothing any later from his pen."

Be sure to go see the ur-Poem For A Thursday at Holds Upon Happiness.

Ariosto's Orlando Furioso

Orlando Furioso (Crazy Orlando) is one of those sequels more famous than its precursor. Matteo Maria Boiardo wrote a poem Orlando Innamorato (Orlando In Love) which was published, unfinished, after his death in 1495. Ariosto said I've got to finish that, and so he did, publishing his final version in 1532.

The simple part of the story is this: Orlando, the top knight in Charlemagne's court, falls in love with the beautiful pagan Angelica. She mostly dodges him, but for a long time doesn't tell him no definitively. But when she meets Medoro, who needs her for more than her beauty, she falls in love with Medoro; Orlando goes nuts when he finds out--not wearing any clothes and wandering the countryside.

But that's just one thread in this monumental work, which can't be easily summarized. There's also the love of Ruggiero and Bradamante, the mythical ancestors of the house of Este, dukes of Ferrara, Ariosto's patrons. There's war between Islam and Christianity, with the Muslim army on the verge of sacking Paris. (Hmm, not very historical, that.) And there's magical armor, lances, and swords. For you Quixote readers out there, the actual helmet of Mambrino makes an appearance. There's even a hippogriff, that various people fly around on, including the English knight Astolfo, who heads up to the moon to get the cure for Orlando's insanity. So, you know, stuff happens.

I was reading it in David R. Slavitt's verse translation, published by Harvard. I'd read it before in the prose translation of Guido Waldman. You need to know that the Slavitt translation published by Harvard is incomplete, with only a little over half included. Slavitt is discreet about this in his introduction, but apparently it wasn't his idea to publish only a partial version. The economics were such Harvard was unwilling to publish the whole as a two volume book. (A little over half is still 650 pages.) The rest of Slavitt's version came out eventually as Lacunae with a lesser-known press. I haven't read it.

I've liked other Slavitt translations I've read--he does a nice job with the obscure Latin poet Ausonius for instance--and when I saw he'd done Ariosto I thought I'd have to read it. And it reads well. It seems to demand the word brio; in any case Michael Dirda uses it in a review that gets blurbed on my paperback edition. Ariosto writes in ottava rima, the eight line stanza of iambic pentameter that rhymes ABABABCC, a meter that's trickier in English than it is in Italian. That's two triple rhymes per stanza. The most famous poem in English in this meter is Byron's Don Juan (deeply influenced by Orlando Furioso) and it opens like this:

I want a hero: an uncommon want,
  When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
  The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
  I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan--
We all have seen him, in the pantomime,
Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time.

You see that the triple rhyme allows some comic possibilities. (And yes, I'm quite sure Byron knows that Juan is not supposed to rhyme with true one.)

So in comparison how does Slavitt handle the verse form? (And yes, I'm comparing him to Byron. That is a high standard. He merits that.) Here's a couple of stanzas I picked out:

This is the very net that Vulcan made
of finest threads of steel, and with such art
that no one could untangle any braid
or pick the knots that held it together apart.
This is the one in which Venus and Mars laid.
(Lay, surely? No, no. One another! Start
paying attention. It's transitive. Use your head.)
But this is the net that caught those two in bed.

-Canto XV stanza 56

Women have achieved in every art
and craft the highest distinction, and their fame
is great indeed. They're strong and they are smart.
Without them history couldn't have been the same.
I rather think it is envy on man's part
that keeps concealed the honor and acclaim
they have deserved. If their work is not taught in schools
it is because men are jealous--or are fools.

-Canto XX stanza 2

Here's a couple of things I'd note: Slavitt allows more substitutions in the meter than does Byron. Well, he is a couple of centuries later and free verse has happened. 'But this is the net that caught those two in bed.' It's an anapaest for an iamb in that second foot. I guess that's fine by me. The scansion of the previous line in that stanza is even trickier.

There's also a lot more enjambment: "Start/paying attention," "fame/is great indeed." I'm less certain about this. That sort of thing really de-emphasizes the rhyme and, for me, makes it feel just a bit prosaic, especially used as often as Slavitt does.

Another minor grouse is that Slavitt continues to use the Italian version of everybody's name. Well, it wouldn't feel right to change Orlando back to Roland. But that so many names end in 'o' means he has to rhyme on them a little too often. Ruggiero could be Roger. Once or twice a triple rhyme like "hero/Ruggiero/hear: 'O!'" is amusing. That exclamatory 'O!' ends a lot of lines. There are perhaps too many of them because too many of them are required.

There are also liberties. The first stanza quoted above jokes about the trouble even English speakers have with lay and laid. That joke could not conceivably exist in Italian. Well, they say, Ariosto is funny in Italian. So how do you do that in English? Slavitt's way is one way, and you may or may not be comfortable with it. Also Slavitt uses anachronisms, though I suspect so did Ariosto. At one point The Other Reader picked up the book, saw a reference to Freud and Ferenczi (with two other rhymes on Ferenczi!) and exclaimed, "He's not even trying!" Well, yes, he was trying. And maybe you find him trying. You'll have to decide how you feel about that.

I took a bunch of notes about how Ariosto is also placing himself in the tradition of classical epic. Since I've reread the Aeneid relatively recently, that's the one that struck me the most. (Nisus and Euryalus become Medoro and Clorindo; Rodomonte does the Turnus in the walls thing, etc.) But there's also an Odyssean Cyclops episode. Had I read Dante more recently, I'm sure there would be a bunch of resonances there. However, this post is already long enough...and I've just made it that much longer with this sneaky bit of praeteritio...

Anyway, should you read Orlando Furioso? Would you like it? If you're the sort of person who's read to this point in my blog entry, 😉and you haven't read it, then the answer is almost certainly yes. It's funny, it's engaging, and it's important in Western literature. Should you read David Slavitt's translation, especially as your first approach to it? Hmm, I'm less certain about that. I liked the Slavitt,  but I'd read Orlando before. The Penguin is also in ottava rima, by Barbara Reynolds, and it's complete (though the second volume of that seems like it might be out of print.) Slavitt accuses it of being insufficiently funny, but now I'm inclined to make that my third reading of Orlando Furioso. Someday.

But for now I'm keen to go read The Faerie Queene from my Classics Club list, another of those works deeply influenced by Orlando Furioso.