Friday 15 March 2024

Headlam limbers up

To set the scene for his own versions of the poems he considers decently Englishable -- 'half of them will hardly bear translation' -- Headlam offers a brief life of Meleager and then an excerpted rendition of the verse proem to that poet's Garland. I think it's rather lovely and I reproduce it here.

Sweet Muse, to whom this fruitage of singing hast thou brought?
who was it that the poets' garland wrought?
'twas Meleager made it, for noble Diocles
contriving a remembrance that might please;
of Moero many lilies enweaving in his posies,
and Anyte  of Sappho few, — but roses;
with daffodils hymn-teeming of Melanippides,
and young vine-tendril of Simonides…

With marjoram from fragrant Rhianus therewithal,
and sweet Erinna's crocus virginal.
The pansy, Damagetus, and of Callimachus
sweet myrtle, full of honey rigorous…


And, from the pasture, blossom from off that crisped thorn,
Archilochus, small drops from ocean borne…

With ever-golden branches of Plato the divine,
that everywhere do of their virtue shine…

And many shoots of others new-writ; and with them set
of his own muse white snowdrops early yet.

Headlam ends by assuring Greekless readers that they may trust his translation to be faithful to the Greek. With a final sign-off ('Florence, May 1890') we are under way...

... by way of yet another flourish of original and metrically various verse. 'Of every flower his garland did Meleager twine, | but he doth of the garland himself the garland shine...', and so on. With half of Meleager's 130-ish epigrams already written off as too hot to handle, even a slender volume may find itself in need of padding:

...
Sweet utterances we bring to thee
of Meleager's voice,
that are of all his poesy
the treasures of our choice.

Come, if thou canst, receive the gift;
but if thy learning fails
to rede the dulcet-sounding drift
of Grecian nightingales,
For thee the twitterings musical,
so hardly to be read,
in our outlandish phrases all
have we interpreted.
That last stanza... not great.




Friday 1 March 2024

Headlam's classical precocity

Walter Headlam's extraordinary gift for classical language was recognised early. At Harrow he won a great many prizes for poetic versions from, and into, Latin and Greek. I know of these from the memoir compiled by his brother Cecil: it ends with a thorough catalogue of works compiled by the Cambridge-educated art historian, Lawrence Haward.

Walter's prizewinning poems appeared often in the school magazine and were reprinted in a volume titled Prolusiones Scholae Harroviensis (I regre that I've not yet laid eyes on either source). By Haward's report they include an 1883 translation into Latin from John Addington Symonds's Studies of the Greek Poets, of which Headlam was clearly an early adopter; versions of passages from tragedy; and original Latin Alcaics, repeatedly. Clearly Walter was a whizz with metre. There were also a number of original Greek epigrams. The headmaster, George Butler, singled out one such epigram inspired by General Gordon's deeds at Khartoum for special mention on Speech Day. The Symonds translation may carry significance, to which I may return in another post.

Once at Cambridge, where we know he also worked on his translation of Meleager, Headlam contributed to the university's own Prolusiones Academicae. Haward records Latin and Greek odes, and versions from Catullus. Again there were prizes: Sir William Browne's Medal, repeatedly (and again I have Haward to thank for all of this). One such victory was for a patriotic Latin ode felicitating Queen Victoria on the fiftieth year of her reign.

Jebb fans may wish to follow up the following curiosity:

'A Private Oration.' The Cambridge Review, vol. xi. pp. 228,  229 {Feb. 27).

A mock-Demosthenic oration put into the mouth of Professor Jebb, who opposes the Town Council’s proposal to convert a portion of his garden at Springfield into Sidgwick Avenue. Reprinted in 'The Book of the Cambridge Review,' pp. 225-229 (Cambridge, 1898); and v. supra, Part FE. p. 29.
Headlam's early contributions to the school magazine at Harrow appeared under the nom de plume 'Echo', the nymph who loved Narcissus.


Friday 16 February 2024

Headlam welcomes his poet

Headlam's intro is of interest. His title page dedicates his translation to his slightly older contemporary and fellow Cambridge classicist, Hugh Vibart MacNaghten, just as (he goes on to say) Meleager had offered his Garland to his own 'friend' Diocles (MacNaghten, a big name at Eton, never married). And he begins with a sweet verse encomium:

With whatsoever skill is ours
we Meleager praise,
the amorous nature, fond of flowers,
the master of sweet phrase:

We Meleager praise, that well
of unkind Love's despite
could tell in song, in song could tell
of kindly Love's delight

Foreign of race are we, that own
too harsh a voice to sing,
music of more entrancing tone,
to praise him, borrowing.

And yet no stranger he, nor dead,
for him among all men
the Muses have established
a deathless denizen.
The last stanza is a shout-out a famous self-epitaph (one of several) in which Meleager declares his cosmopolitanism, AP 7.417. Here are the relevant lines of my own translation of it:

And what surprise, good friend who passes by,
If MELEAGER is a Syrian?
For we are citizens of all the world;
It is one nation,
and the same expanse
Gives birth to all of us...
I recall how bittersweet it was to translate from Meleager for the World's Classics as my own nation turned its back on community with its neighbours. More on Headlam's introductory matter another time.



Friday 2 February 2024

Headlam's Meleager phase

The tail end of 2023 was a time when obscure old translations of Meleager fell into my lap. I've blogged recently about ur-Imagist Richard Aldington's version, and had been all set up to move onto Frederick Adam Wright (don't worry, we'll get there) when a casual mention in his preface sent me off on a tangent -- to Walter Headlam.

If you're not a classicist, take it from me that this is a famous name. Walter Headlam (1866-1908) was among the foremost British classical scholars of the 1890s and 1900s, a specialist in Greek verse and an expert composer of it as well. His university chums included M. R. James (Ghost Stories of an Antiquary) and was on close terms with the elderly John Addington Symonds (Studies of the Greek Poets). He merits his own Wikipedia page which I recommend you read.

Headlam's Fifty Poems of Meleager, with a Translation (1890) is a rare book. He made most of the versions in his student years and the rest soon afterwards. In a memoir written to introduce his posthumous edition of Walter's letters and poems (1910), his brother Cecil recalls the post-graduation trip that made a palaeographer of him:

I accompanied him in the autumn of 1889 when he visited Florence with this object in view. Work upon a new subject amidst new surroundings is always curiously more fatiguing than work of an apparently similar amount in a familiar place. I well remember how Walter used to work to the pitch of exhaustion at his manuscripts in the libraries, whilst I amused myself in the picture-galleries and in the lovely environs of the town. His spare moments he occupied in translating Meleager and writing amusing verses for his friends.

Among the collected letters are the following, written in 1905 to Gilbert Murray and asking him to look over the proofs of A Book of Greek Verse (1907), the work for which Headlam is now best remembered:

...I hope I am not trespassing on any preserves of yours; there’s no Euripides, but some choruses of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and what I think will be liked, the Φαρμακεύτριαι and Θαλύσια of Theocritus, and a number of epigrams—better, I hope, than some of Meleager’s which I turned off in my inexperienced youth and published, but soon withdrew because I thought them cheap and poor. You might strike out the worser of the variants...

Ten such variants made it into A Book of Greek Verse in modified form.

One can of course find Fifty Poems of Meleager online now, and I'll say a little about it in subsequent posts.


Friday 19 January 2024

Two versions by Aldington: Meleager AP 12.49 and 12.114

On Aldington's poetic career, see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/richard-aldington. He was a writer of influence. All I have read of him is his Meleager, of which I will say: this was a man who loved his exclamation marks.

Here for instance is his version of 12.49:

Be drunk, unhappy lover, and let Bromius, giver of forgetfulness, lull your burning love!

Be drunk, fill your cup with wine and drive hateful grief from your heart!

Contrast the Loeb, which we should remember was already out there in Aldington's day:

Drink strong wine, thou unhappy lover, and Bacchus, the giver of forgetulness, shall send to sleep the flame of your love for the lad. Drink, and draining the cup full of the vine-juice drive out abhorred pain from thy heart.

It looks to me as if Aldington has leaned on the Loeb, but then, who among us has not? His version is more concise than Paton's, but he gets there by ditching important details. Only the truly desperate resort to unwatered wine, and nothing makes a man more desperate than heartsickness over a lovely boy.

His version of 12.114 also loses a significant detail, this time the fact that the poem concerns a lovely girl:

Hail to you, Morning Star, O messenger of Dawn!

May the Star of Evening come swiftly and bring back the sweet joy you stole away!

 Compare again Paton:

Star of Morning, hail, thou herald of dawn; and mayest thou quickly come again, as the Star of Eve, bringing again in secret her whom [Gr. hēn] thou takest away.

Aldington's versions give us not a boy, not a girl, but whatever romantic object may most please.

Friday 5 January 2024

Aldington's omissions

 'Two lines have been omitted from XII.33 and XII.41' (Aldington, p.3-4).

Omitting a whole poem a simple business, or ought to be: one simply does not translate it. Aldington declares three such poems as 'obscene' (p.3) and therefore not publishable in English in his day: they are 5.208, 11.223 and 12.86.

The book 11 poem is pretty rude, and, though Aldington doesn't say so, it definitely isn't by Meleager: it's about Favorinus, the eunuch sophist of the early second century AD. Here are the Loeb versions of the other two:

I do not have a boy-mad heart. What pleasure is there, Loves, in mounting a man, if he wants to take something without giving anything? For one hand washes the other. Let a lovely wife remain for me; begone, all you men with your masculine pincers.

It is Cypris, a woman, who casts at us the fire of passion for women, but Love himself rules over desire for males. Whither shall I incline, to the boy or to his mother? I tell you for sure that even Cypris herself will say, 'The bold brat wins.'

And that's a thing worth noting, isn't it: there are Loeb versions. When Paton made the Loeb he put quite a few of its saucier poems into Latin rather than English, but these by Meleager had not been among them. These poems had been available for decades now in plain English to anyone who went into a decent bookshop. Perhaps what was obscene to Aldington is simply that these poems are explicit about some men liking boys and others liking girls -- they flag up the issue too directly.

Anyway, let us look now at those two poems where two lines (each) have been left out. Here they are, with their prosaic Loeb counterparts. Both are at p.23 in Aldington's slim volume:

Heraclitus was once beautiful, but his youth has gone. Do not let that make you insolently proud, Polyxenes; Nemesis is swift.

Heracleitus was fair, when there was a Heracleitus, but now that his prime is past, a screen of hide declares war on those who would scale the fortress. But, son of Polyxenus, seeing this, be not insolently haughty. It is not only on the cheeks that Nemesis grows.

Theron is no longer beautiful and Appollodotus whose eyes were once bright is now a burned out torch.

I do not count Theron fair any longer, nor Apollodotus, once gleaming like fire, but now already a burnt-out torch. I care for the love of women. Let it be for goat-mounting herds to press in their arms hairy minions.

Aldington prefers a Meleager who keeps quiet about body hair.


Friday 22 December 2023

Aldington's Myiscus

A GIRL SPEAKS

He is lovely; sweet and dear to me is the name of Myiscus; what reason have I for not loving him? | For he is beautiful, by Aphrodite, all beautiful; and if he is cruel -- Love mingles bitter with the sweet.

So runs Aldington's version (p.34) of Meleager AP 12.154. He stays close to the Greek. Compare Paton's Loeb:

Sweet is the boy, and even the name of Myiscus is sweet to me and full of charm. What excuse have I for not loving ? For he is beautiful, by Cypris, entirely beautiful ; and if he gives me pain, why, it is the way of Love to mix bitterness with honey. 

 The big difference lies in the heading he has assigned: 'A GIRL SPEAKS'. What motivates it? Headings of this kind frame the reader's experience of the translated poem, and at many points in the history of epigram's modern exegesis they have helped steer readers away from disallowed truths around gender and sexuality in the Greek original. Their frequent allies are categorisation, creative ambiguity, and avoidance or outright alteration of pronouns -- any number of translators have thereby turned pretty boys into pretty girls.

De-gaying epigram is easiest when the Greek name of a male beloved rings ambiguously in modern ears, as 'Myiscus' does not. Any reader is going to know that he is masculine. Fallbacks in such a case can include rearrangement and recategorisation of poems, a game Aldington does not play; or occasionally refocalisation, in which paratext plays a vital role. That would be the easy thing to think about Aldington's 12.154 if we met it in some other context --  but literary epigrams are invariably encountered in some kind of sequence, and Aldington has already given us several Myiscus poems that are openly homoerotic. Here are a couple:

By Eros, Tyre brings forth beautiful lads, but Myiscus outshines the others as the bright sun outshines the stars. (AP 12.59, p.25)

One beauty is all I know, my keen eye sees Myiscus only; I am blind to all the rest. | He seems to me everything. Do the eyes see thus to flatter the heart? (AP 12.106, p.30)

So why does he title his final Myiscus poem 'A GIRL SPEAKS'? Is it that in this poem Myiscus gains a little agency, the power to say no? Once again, I am left wondering.