R.L. Barth, our finest living epigrammist (admittedly, not a vast job description), has sent me his translation of a well-known epigram by Martial, the Roman master of the pithy form. Bob found it among his papers and doesn’t remember making it. “[T]ranslating something [Ben] Jonson had translated?” he writes in an email. “Not to mention other famous names? I must have had a touch of hubris. (I think the first one I ever read was [Henry Howard, Earl of] Surrey's, back when I was an undergraduate.)” Here is Bob’s version of X.47 by Marcus Valerius Martialis:  “The things which make a life of ease, Martial, my dearest friend, are these: The patrimony’s easy yield; A thriving fire and fertile field; Neither the courts nor formal dress; Good health; a wise judiciousness; Some friends whose conversation’s able To dignify your simple table; A wife with neither forwardness Nor prudery; deep sleep to press Over the shadows in swift flight; Ability to see you’re right When you’re content; and, with head clear, Face death without desire or fear.”   The epigram is addressed to the poet’s friend, Julius Martialis. It reminds me of the “gratitude list” an old friend urged me years ago to draw up periodically, an exercise to reduce one’s fondness for whining. I’ve experienced many of the things in Martial’s catalog of gifts, at least briefly. That’s remarkable considering he wrote two-thousand years ago. I have no “fertile field,” but do have a flower garden – with accompanying lizards, butterflies, squirrels and hummingbirds -- that I meditate on each morning. I do miss “Some friends whose conversation’s able / To dignify your simple table,” though email and the telephone help.   Bob passed along a link to the original Latin of Martial’s epigram and thirty-three translations into English made across almost half a millennium.

“Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river,” Borges wrote in his timeless “refutation” of time. “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Nietzsche wrote a century earlier in his directive on how to find yourself. But rivers are not just metaphors for life — they are its substance and sinew. They vein this rocky planet into a living world, a world whose mind is nerved and axoned with rivers. The planetary consciousness we call civilization bloomed on their banks and went on… read article

“You say truly, that death is only terrible to us as it separates us from those we love, but I really think those have the worst of it who are left by us, if we are true friends. I have felt more (I fancy) in the loss of Mr. Gay, than I shall suffer in the thought of going away myself into a state that can feel none of this sort of losses.”  If Alexander Pope is read today, he’s read as a manufacturer of elegantly barbed witticisms, a crafter of technically perfect verse. What is The Dunciad but an assault on his sorry contemporaries, exemplars of “Dulness”? Pope himself  wrote “The life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth."   Pope writes above in a letter to Swift on April 2, 1733. John Gay, the poet and playwright, had died less than four months earlier. The letter continues:   “I wished vehemently to have seen [Gay] in a condition of living independent, and to have lived in perfect indolence the rest of our days together, the two most idle, most innocent, undesigning poets of our age. I now as vehemently wish you and I might walk into the grave together, by as slow steps as you please, but contentedly and cheerfully: whether that ever can be, or in what country, I know no more, than into what country we shall walk out of the grave.”   Pope would live another eleven years; Swift, another twelve. As a boy, tuberculosis of the spine left Pope stunted and in pain. He never grew taller than four feet, six inches. If his physical suffering accounts for his satirical gift, it also helps explain his love for and dependence on Swift and his other friends. They “help me thro’ this long Disease, my Life.” He also faced the English laws banning Roman Catholics from teaching, attending university, voting and holding public office. Pope to Swift on September 15, 1734:   “I have ever thought you as sensible as any man I knew . . . When the heart is full, it is angry at all words that cannot come up to it; and you are now the man in all the world I am most troubled to write to, for you are the friend I have left whom I am most grieved about. Death has not done worse to me in separating poor Gay, or any other, than disease and absence in dividing us. I am afraid to know how you do, since most accounts I have give me pain for you . . .”   My niece tells me she is reading Pope’s poetry and asked what I thought of him. In my private pantheon he is one of the supreme English poets and terribly unfashionable. Our age could use him. Hannah gave me a little hope.

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