On Saturday I saw the first hummingbird of the season in our front garden. I’ve counted eight butterfly species there this summer and found a monarch chrysalis hanging from a tropical milkweed plant. Brown and green anoles have densely colonized the garden, which has never been so lush.  Because of the ample lighting I usually read while seated on the couch by the oversized front window. The garden is a comfort. Framed by the window, it’s like a slow-motion movie. The appeal is less aesthetic than – what? Metaphysical? I like to be reminded of life’s profusion and persistence, the opposite of sterility. There’s little difference between “weed” and “flower.” I like Louise Bogan’s endorsement of weeds in “The Sudden Marigolds” (A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, 2005): “What was the matter with me, that daisies and buttercups made hardly any impression at all. . . . As a matter of fact, it was weeds that I felt closest to and happiest about; and there were more flowering weeds, in those days, than flowers in gardens. . . . Yes: weeds: jill-over-the-ground and tansy and the exquisite chicory (in the terrains vagues) and a few wild flowers: lady’s slipper and the arbutus my mother showed me how to find, under the snow, as far back as Norwich. Solomon’s seal and Indian pipe. Ferns. Apple blossoms.”   A reminder that poets ought to know the names of wildflowers, according to Seamus Heaney. Not every poet would agree. I was looking for something in Zibaldone, Giacomo Leopardi’s 2,500-page commonplace book kept between 1817 and 1832, when I happened on a passage from April 1826 that only Leopardi could have written:   “Go into a garden of plants, grass, flowers. No matter how lovely it seems. Even in the mildest season of the year. You will not be able to look anywhere and not find suffering. That whole family of vegetation is in a state of souf-france [suffering], each in its own way to some degree. Here a rose is attacked by the sun, which has given it life; it withers, languishes, wilts. There a lily is sucked cruelly by a bee, in its most sensitive, most life-giving parts.”   Leopardi’s understanding of biology is limited but his Zeitgeist remains consistent. He goes on for a full page turning a mini-Eden into a raging Hell:   “The spectacle of such abundance of life when you first go into this garden lifts your spirits. And that is why you think it is a joyful place. But in truth this life is wretched and unhappy, every garden is a vast hospital (a place much more deplorable than a cemetery), and if these beings feel, or rather, were to feel, surely not being would be better for them than being.” It's almost as though Leopardi had read the crackpot bestseller The Secret Life of Plants (1973) by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. I first encountered Leopardi more than half a century ago in Samuel Beckett’s Proust (1931). The Irishman refers to the Italian’s “wisdom that consists not in the satisfaction but in the ablation of desire.” Beckett quotes two lines from “A se stesso” (“To himself”): “In noi di cari inganni, / Non che la speme, il desiderio e ’spento.” (“Not only our hope / but our desire for dear illusions is gone.” Trans. Jonathan Galassi, Canti, 2010).   Melville, too, found a kindred spirit in Leopardi. In his 18,000-line Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), Part I, Section 14, “In the Glen,” he writes:   “If Savonarola’s zeal devout But with the fagot’s flame died out; If Leopardi, stoned by Grief, A young St. Stephen of the Doubt Might merit well the martyr’s leaf.”   [Zibaldone was edited by Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino, translated into English by seven translators, and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2013.]

“ordinary sanity in extraordinary prose”  The phrase is the American poet David Mason’s in his essay “The Freedom of Montaigne.” In characterizing the Frenchman and his essays, Mason describes an ideal seldom attained and occasionally scorned. Today, extreme, sweeping statements seem to get all the attention. You don’t attract readers by being, as Montaigne’s biographer Donald Frame puts it, “basically conservative, not radical, an accepter, not a reformer, seeking harmony, not conflict, within.” A New Immaturity has taken over. Intensity of expression is confused with human truth. We’re all back on the playground again, taunting and bullying our playmates, leaving little room for understanding and empathy.   Mason seems especially taken with the essay “Of Cruelty” (1578-80), in which Montaigne writes: “Among other vices, I cruelly hate cruelty, both by nature and by judgment, as the extreme of all vices. But this is to such a point of softness that I do not see a chicken’s neck wrung without distress, and I cannot bear to hear the scream of a hare in the teeth of my dogs, although the chase is a violent pleasure.”   Typically, Montaigne is honest, a perennial adult. Like some of us, he’s a softy, even with the wars of religion raging around his home in France. He acknowledges the thrill of the hunt while feeling pity for the game. His age, like our, was barbarous – that’s merely human nature, which hasn’t changed. Only the scale of cruelty during the twentieth century and after would have surprised him, not its lingering impulse. For one example, he lived through the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and wrote about the public executions he witnessed.   Mason knows Shakespeare read Montaigne and found him useful, as we do. He describes Montaigne as “the Shakespeare of the essay form” – the highest critical praise possible. Both writers can never be exhausted. We read and reread them across a lifetime and they remain new and vital, as though we were reading them for the first time, even at an advanced age. Frame writes in his biography of Montaigne:   “I believe it is above all his sturdy, honest independence, his cheerful self-acceptance, that draws the crowd of readers to his book today. Our love of moral independence is ambivalent; our anxiety and sense of guilt make us often hanker rather for an ‘escape from freedom.’ And here we have a man, not the best that ever lived no doubt but assuredly far from the worst and better than most of us, who with scandalous serenity lays himself on the line and says in effect, quite simply, Here I am.”   [Mason’s essay is published in the Autumn 2017 issue of The Hudson Review and collected in Incarnation & Metamorphosis: Can Literature Change Us? (Paul Dry Books, 2023). The Montaigne passage is from the translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, 1957). Frame is also the author of Montaigne: A Biography (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965).]

On this, the tenth anniversary of poet-historian Robert Conquest’s death at ninety-eight, let’s recall the sonnet he wrote about the treachery of biographers, “Second Death”:  “A ten-pound Life will give you every fact -- Facts that he’d hoped his friends would not rehearse To a condign posterity which lacked Nothing of moment, since it had his verse. Or so he thought. But now we come to read What his more honest prudence had held in: Tasteless compulsion into trivial deed, A squalor more outrageous than the sin,   “Piss on that grave where lies the weakly carnal? . . . – Hopeless repentance had washed clean his name, His virtue’s strength insistent on a shame Past all the brief bravados full and final. Without excuses now, to the Eternal, He makes the small, true offering of his fame.”   According to his widow, Elizabeth “Liddie” Conquest, her husband wrote the poem after reading Charles Osborne’s W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (1979), which he found disgraceful. I read it when first published and remember it being a workmanlike assemblage of facts with no revelations of character and little understanding of the poetry and prose. Osborne reported on Auden’s homosexuality, which wasn’t exactly news to attentive readers. The book reminded me of Joseph Blotner’s two-volume biography of William Faulkner, published five years earlier – a transcription of isolated facts, a practice that has become predictable in recent decades. The biographer becomes an indiscriminate vacuum cleaner. Liddie, who reports her husband modeled his sonnet on Auden’s own “Who’s Who,” is presently collecting and editing a large collection of Conquest’s letters.   [Thank you, Cynthia Haven. Find “Second Death” in New and Collected Poems (1988) and Collected Poems (2020). Conquest died on August 3, 2015.]

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.”