Latin literature : an anthology

680 Pages·2015·1.87 MB·English

by  Grant

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