'Love-Epigrams', part five: the girl in the library

                       XXIX

HIMS ANCIENT AND HERS MODERN

        ΗΣΙΟΔΟΥ ΠΟΤΕ ΒΙΒΛΩΝ

    [MARCUS ARGENTARIUS: ix, 161]

My Hesiod book one day while I was thumbing,
I saw young Pyrrha suddenly a-coming:
Cried I, my folio flung upon the floor,
'Old Hesiod, of thy Works & Days why more?'

This is a perfectly fine translation, line for line, of an epigram by Marcus Argentarius (he wrote satirical epigrams before Lucillius and I really should find out more about him). Woodward updates the terminology of book-reading: the poem's speaker is scolling (ἑλίσσων) through a papyrus book-roll, not thumbing the pages of a 'folio' (in the Greek simply βίβλον both times). But this is fair play.

There are two small amplifications. Pyrrha is not explicitly 'young' in the original, but youthful beauty is the built-in presumption (epigram treats old women as hags). Specifying his Works & Days helpfully reminds a modern readership of the stuffy moral precepts for which Hesiod was best known. Otherwise Woodward is unusually close to the Greek: 'Old Hesiod' is indeed ὦ γέρον Ἡσίοδε.

Why pick out this poem? Because it chimes with some of Woodward's own, original verse. I know this thanks to John Barnes's biography, a helpful source that I've mentioned before. Barnes quotes the following from Wooodward's Miscellaneous Verse Sacred and Secular of 1928, some years before Love-Epigrams:

If e’er ye be found
In the Reading-room Round,
   Remember the bachelor Preedy,
Whose forefoot was lamed,
And his heart-string unframed,
   By the fall of an Encyclopedy.

’Twas Edna the fair,
With flaxen-fine hair,
   Was studying under the dome,
When, out of command,
Dropt out of her hand
   A weighty historical tome.

‘So sorry’, said she:
‘No matter’, said he:
   But mark, a few days after those,
On her finger a ring,
All along of the thing
   Let fall, as befel’t, on his toes.

There was nothing irregular about a woman using the British Library in Woodward's day but the idea of women around books seems to have bemused him. Though probably he liked women well enough, in contexts unscholarly; at any rate, he had been married to one.