R.L. Barth has been translating the epigrams of Marcus Valerius Martialis – the first-century Roman poet Martial, as we know him – for more than forty years and now has self-published a collection of 104 of his translations (of the 1,561 Latin originals extant): Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial. Bob and Martial share similar sensibilities. Both are tough-minded, skeptical of authority figures and human duplicity, not even remotely “poetic,” and they value concision in their poems perhaps more than any other quality. Their epigrams are pithy and barbed, and there’s nothing stuffy or academic about Bob’s translations. The poems are classical, the translations are contemporary, all-American and never genteel. Here is II.83:  “Catching the cuckhold, you unsheathed your knife And went to work on him who screwed your wife, Lopping his nose and ears. Pure vengeance gained? No, one of his appendages remained.”   As an epigraph to the collection, Barth takes a line from “The Undeceived,” an essay on Martial by his late friend Turner Cassity published in the Winter 1990 issue of Chicago Review: “If Martial is minor we had better re-define major . . .” The passage continues:   “ . . . and I for one am perfectly willing to. Martial offers no vision, advances no program, embodies no archetype. He hoots at philosophy, is too uninterested in religion even to mock it, mocks at love, enjoys violence, ignores landscape, refuses to sentimentalize sex. He flatters the Emperor Domitian in the exact spirit and in the exact degree of honesty with which present day academics fill out grant applications. He understands the social and behavioral dimensions of money better than any writer before Edith Wharton, his fellow in pornography; he penetrates further into the mystery of death than anyone before or since, stripping away veil after veil to reveal it as, finally, the handmaiden of inheritance. What he gives us, stunningly undiminished across nineteen hundred years and the barriers of a language embalmed, is self-recognition. The Romans were not like us: they were us. Now that our own era, so far out of the closet and so close to Elagabalus, can no longer plead his obscenity, we shall have to come to terms with him.”   For Barth and Cassity, Martial is a poetic precursor, a sort of unholy father figure and unwelcome guest at the party. The two dozen Martial epigrams cited by Cassity in his essay were translated by Bob, who includes a poem of his own, “To Martial,” in the new collection:   “After your death, Pliny wrote praising you For genius, satire, wit, and candor too. Now, take this note across the centuries: Tribute from one of your lesser legatees Who, Pliny-like, would also recommend Your poems, you—good company, good friend.”    Bob takes the title of his collection from Martial’s IX.81:   "Readers and listeners praise my books: You swear they’re worse than a beginner’s. Who cares? I always plan my dinners To please the diners, not the cooks.”   The collection concludes with “Martial in Bilbilis to Juvenal in Rome.” Martial was born in Bilbilis, located in what is now Spain. Bob appends a note to the poem: “I would say of my use of Martial XII.18 what Samuel Johnson said of his two great versions of Juvenal [“The Vanity of Human Wishes,” “London”]: ‘a kind of middle composition between translation and original design, which pleases when the thoughts are unexpectedly applicable, and the parallels lucky.’ Or simply call it riffing on Martial XII.18.” I think it’s one of Bob’s finest poems:   “Know what, dear Juvenal? While you are slogging Across the racket of Suburra or dogging Diana’s hill, jostled by pimps and whores, Catamites, muggers, thugs in darkened doors, Property speculators, politicians And lawyers, Romans without inhibitions— All those types who activate your spleen— Your good friend Martial’s nowhere to be seen. My friend, stand in your toga drenched with sweat (However much you flap it, it stays wet) Waiting at thresholds of your high-powered friends. I’m back in Bilbilis, making amends For all the sleep lost. I’m a gentleman; After the long years gone, my city can, And does, take to her bosom her lost son. I have no clients here nor anyone Disturbing peaceful sleep, at least till nine! I wear no toga, any old clothes of mine Suffice when I awake. There’s a fire burning In the hearth, laid by my steward, and my yearning For a good breakfast’s quickly satisfied By his wife’s breakfast, almost countrified. A little later comes my housemaid, who’d Have you, friend, drooling to end her maidenhood As she cleans up the bowls and sweeps the floors. My young attendants start their daily chores. Thus home, city of iron and gorgeous gold! (You know, if you will let me be so bold, I’d say that epithet describes my epigrams.) I hear you snarling a long string of damns! I’m sorry, Juvenal, but this is why Delight crowns all my days, and here I’ll die.”   Cassity writes in his essay: “As the entire tradition of English poetry runs directly counter to the characteristics I have enumerated, he is very difficult to translate, though he is frequently honored by plagiarism. There is no Martial famous as Pope’s or Chapman’s Homer is famous. The translations I shall quote here have been newly done by R.L. Barth, aiming for both the precision of thought and utterance, and the absolute freedom of expression. Martial’s concision has been a brake on his reputation as on his translators. Criticism tends to equate brevity with triviality, and in nine out of ten literary eras it is flatulence that carries the day. Epigrams will never have the attention epics have, inflating the racial consciousness being outside their scope.”

It must be encoded there, in the childhood memories of our synapses and our cells — how we came out of the ocean 35 trillion yesterdays ago, small and slippery, gills trembling with the shock of air, fins budding feet, limbs growing sinewy and furred, then unfurred, spine unfurling beneath the bone cave housing three pounds of pink flesh laced with one hundred trillion synapses that still sing with pleasure and awe when touched by the wildness of the world. Even as the merchants of silicon and code try to render us disembodied intellects caged behind screens, something in our… read article

Fragments, vol. 5

I’ve learned with time that my mind has periods of attentiveness followed by drifts into passive, relaxed states of consciousness. I’m awake but almost empty. I might be taking a shower or staring out the window at nothing. That’s when I occasionally find myself in an old song or childhood memory or, more mysteriously, inhabiting a character from fiction, taking on his values. When I become conscious of this channeling, it disappears leaving a faint, lingering impression, like the afterimages left by bright lights.  Recently I found myself in Austin King, the Illinois lawyer, father and put-upon husband at the center of William Maxwell’s 1948 novel, Time Will Darken It. It’s the opening scene. King is in his bedroom getting dressed for a party for relatives visiting from Mississippi. His wife, pregnant with their second child, is not speaking to him. She resents the party and the presence of outsiders.   I wasn’t recalling the words but the setting, emotional and physical, which I had abstracted from the text. I’ve read Maxwell’s novel three or four times, starting in the late seventies. I know it well. Unintentionally, I had projected myself into King because his emotional state was familiar – conflicted, guilty, wanting to satisfy contradictory wishes and please everyone. I didn’t have to go looking for it. I carry it as a latent memory.   There’s a semi-popular theory floating around out there that we read fiction to boost our empathy quotient. In short, we read to learn to be better human beings, to feel the pain of others. That’s silly but also kind of obnoxious. How self-centered. Willa Cather would have snorted. My flashing onto the bedroom of Austin and Martha King lasted seconds. I enjoyed the sensation but made no effort to hang on to it. It was a fairly primitive mental event, not freighted with philosophical baggage. A handful of other fiction writers have done this for me, all in my private pantheon – Chekhov, James, Proust, among others. Part of the reason I value them is that they leave these phantom scenes in my subconscious mind, through no effort of my own.   Time Will Darken It, along with So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), is Maxwell’s finest novel.  In 1955, Maxwell delivered a speech at Smith College, “The Writer as Illusionist” (collected in the 2024 volume of the same title, published by Godine). He likens a novelist to a dog who dreams of chasing a rabbit. He writes:   “The novelist’s rabbit is the truth—about life, about human character, about himself and therefore by extensionh, it is to be hoped, about other people. He is convinced that this is all knowable, can be described, can be recorded, by a person sufficiently dedicated to describing and recording, can be caught is a net of narration. . . . . But what, seriously, was accomplished by these writers [Maxwell has just mentioned Turgenev, Lawrence, Woolf and Forster] or can the abstract dummy novelist I have been describing hope to accomplish? Not life, of course; not the real thing; not children and roses; but only a facsimile that is called literature.”     The finest writers of fiction, those we treasure most highly, work simultaneously in two mediums – words and human beings. William Maxwell died twenty-five years ago today, on July 31, 2ooo, at age ninety-one.

And create an interspecies future that benefits humans and ecologies alike.