An old move in scholarly apologetics around the Boyish Muse is to point out that not all its poems are gay anyway: some girls with potentially boyish-sounding names have ended up there by mistake. One such is the 'Phanion' of Meleager AP 12.53, included in Woodward's selection (his poem 102) and sentimentally semi-modernised:
...If haply on the shore ye see
My Fanny crafting wilful glance
This way o'er ocean's broad expanse,
Tell her, ye gallant keels, from me...
Not all names ending '-ion' were girls' names, which of course is why some such girls end up in AP12 by mistake, but translators could be tempted to expand the list, re-sexing homoerotic epigram's objects of affection by suggestion or outright fibbing. Woodward does not specify the sex of the 'Timarion' of Meleager AP 12.113 (his poem 78) but lets the poem's new heterosexual neighbours do the talking. I've elsewhere seen the same poem glossed with an explanatory note stating that Timarion is female, though the name is characteristic of pederastic epigram (Edmonds, Some Greek Poems of Love and Beauty (1937), p.30).
In his poem 19 Woodward leans on the potentially feminine sound of a boy's name to tweak his pronouns. His Christianising version runs to three stanzas:
When ’twas time to take my leave,
Moiris kist me yester-eve.
Whether soothly it were so,
Or a dream, I hardly know.
Though the rest is well defined,
And I bear it all in mind,
Everything whereof she spake,
Or did fond enquiry make,
But and if she kist me too,
Beats me; for, if this be true,
Once caught up to heavenly bliss,
That should be my world, not this.
A common English reader asked to guess Moeris' sex might well say female, by analogy with Phyllis or Doris. In fact the name is masculine. Here is my World's Classics version. The original is Strato AP 12.177.
Moeris at evening, as we said goodnight —
He took me in his arms? I cannot say
If it was real, or only in a dream.
Already I recall what went before,
In every detail: all the things he said,
All of the questions that he asked of me;
But did he kiss me, too? I can but guess.
If it is true, how can it be the case
That I am walking, feet upon the ground?
For last night surely I became a god.
There is no 'he' in the Greek, no adjectives or pronouns to give the game away, and I can see why Woodward might have wanted to slip this one in -- it's a fantastic poem. The choice may seem a little risky, since even readers with litle or no classical learning might recognise Moeris as a boy from Virgil, where he is set in pastoral dialogue with Lycidas (Eclogue 9). Then again, Woodward's audience was select, his print-runs tiny. One may picture him operating his home press at Highgate and anticipating his chosen readers' pleasure at how deftly he has re-touched a problematic source. Next post
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