Guest post: Duncan Wu (1 of 2)

This one is from Duncan Wu, Professor of Literary Studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC, a formidable expert on Wordsworth and Romanticism. He was for a while at the University of Glasgow, where I spent three highly enjoyable years. And he is collecting poems about dogs.🐶 💖

"Thanks in very large part to Shackleton Bailey and Gideon Nisbet I offer my rendering of Martial Epigrams i.109":

Issa is a bigger scamp than Catullus’s 

 Sparrow—purer than the peck of a dove; 

More seductive than any louche slave-girl;  

More precious than strings of Indian pearls: 

Issa, darling lapdog of Publius.  

He hears her speak in her croons; she knows when 

He’s happy or sad; she slumbers, her snout 

On his neck, so soundly he can’t hear her  

Breathing. When her bladder’s full to bursting,   

She won’t let a drop touch the sheets, instead  

Nudging him with her pawpad so that, when 

Roused, he sets her on the floor, and lifts her 

Back on the bed when she’s done. Innately  

Chaste and modest, she’s a stranger to love,  

No mate being equal to the tender  

Young bitch. Lest the Grim Reaper remove all  

Trace of her, Publius paints her portrait  

Which is more lifelike than the dog herself: 

Place them side by side, and you would suppose 

Both the real thing or both works of art.

Professor Wu also proposes a looser version that takes Issa's story further, here.