Introducing F. A. Wright

'Noteworthy as perhaps the feeblest verse translation of any ancient poet'

-- so wrote Peter Whigham (1975) as he surveyed the predecessors to his own Meleager. Whigham himself, though, was reliably dreadful, so let us not prejudge. Who then was 'F. A. Wright', and what can we make of his Complete Poems of Meleager of Gadara (1924)?

Frederick Adam Wright (1869-1946), F.A., LL.D., was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. He taught classics at Birkbeck for an astounding thirty-seven years (1898-1935) and seems to have thrown himself into the role of affable don. In the 1910s he had published a small handful of classical notes, giving his address as 'Katoombah', Thorpe Bay, Essex. Then came a flurry. He wrote a History of Later Greek Literature and translated later Greek authors: Alciphron's Mimes, Heliodorus' Ethiopian Story, and what he called the Complete Love Poems of the Palatine Anthology, all in the same year, 1923. His Meleager of 1924 will have been spun off from that last one. The same year he had a full Martial out, though at least for that there was a co-author.

Frankly I don't understand his publication history at all. Look on his (online) works, ye research-active, and despair:

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Wright%2C%20F%2E%20A%2E%20%28Frederick%20Adam%29%2C%201869%2D1946

How did he possibly cram in so much between 1923 and 1925? A trickle before his mid-fifties, and then all this. Had he been stockpiling it all in a trunk under his bed? Actually that is my least hopeless guess. Roger Pearse has done better digging than I, on his excellent blog.

When Wright comes to the Anthology -- and we may presume he comes in a hurry -- he accepts the erroneous tradition that Meleager had arranged his Garland alphabetically, finds no trace of that arrangement in the Greek Anthology today, and concludes that all traces of it must have been obliterated by its 'later editors' (one would not go to him for the details). Accordingly he is free to devise an arrangement that respects the evident trajectory of Meleager's career, and in this too he follows a known though misleading path. We will look into that next time.

Headlam's sphragis, and self-censorship

Headlam signs off his selection with -- what else? -- an epigram of his own devising, as follows. 'Transformed' in line 1 scans as three syllables, olde-worlde-style:

Transformed fifty blossoms are of Meleager's soul,
   all with the Muses and the Graces grown:
Let these suffice thee; for by far the half exceeds the whole,
   say we to whom is Hesiod's wisdom known.

The second couplet invokes line 40 of Hesiod's famously pious Works and Days, where the poet propounds exactly this axiom: πλέον ἥμισυ παντός. It has the ring of something already proverbial, or on its way to becoming so.

Fifty is rather less than half of the Anthology's 134 Meleagrian epigrams -- but then, so many are ruled out already by being addressed to beautiful boys. Headlam has preceded his own sphragis with two of the self-epitaphs with which Meleager wound up his collection (and indeed 'Muses and Graces' riffs on the first of them). He excludes the third such epitaph, in which the poet dedicated his Garland to a current or former lover, Diocles. Here is the second:

Tread softly, stranger: here at rest among pure souls below
An old man, Meleager, sleeps the sleep that all men owe:
The son of Eucrates; that did together of his wit
Muses and Love the sweet in tears with merry Graces knit:
Whom Tyre divine to manhood reared, and Gadara's holy land;
Cos of the Merops nursed his age upon her lovely strand.
If thou art Syrian, then Salaam! Naidios! if Phenician:
Prithee to me return the same, or Chaere!, if a Grecian.

The selection came out in 1890. A very few years later (I do not know exactly how many) Headlam pulled the book from the market: I wonder how that conversation with his publisher went. The memoir says he was embarrassed at his juvenilia, and that may well have been true. I wonder also if growing public awareness of Oscar Wilde's sexually dissident Hellenism may have fed into his thinking, though I guess it would now be next to impossible to find out. Headlam's selection was decorous, but his introduction and notes had repeatedly exalted the fine remarks on Meleager in Studies of the Greek Poets by John Addington Symonds, whose idealising view of Greek love so strongly influenced Wilde. The posthumous and bestselling third edition of Studies came out in 1893, praising Meleager as a paragon of healthy bisexuality in terms it was hard to ignore.

Wilde on trial (1895) subsequently invoked Symonds's Uranian vision of a love that dared not presently speak its name but that had always been there, inspiring humanity's most sublime artistic achievements. He won over the crowd but not the court, and blew the cover on the nineteenth-century gay elite's favourite hanky code as he did so.

Two on Zenophila

 

In the Anthology these two poems are AP 5.174 and 171. Headlam invents his own numbering system, reordering the poems to imply a life-story in which Meleager moves on from one romantic prospect to the next, making a clean break each time. Zenophila is his first love; then Timarion, who is not a boy! honestly! Last comes the great and defining love of the poet's life as the Victorians liked to imagine it: Heliodora.

The translations are faithful enough, though padded. Some of the rhymes set my teeth on edge.

VII

Zenophile, my tender bloom,
thou sleepest. Oh the guise
of gliding slumber to assume
and enter on thine eyes!

That thereby might not even he
have unto thee access
who lulls the lids of Zeus, but thee
I only might possess. 

VII

The cup in bliss rejoiceth much
because, so boasteth he,
'tis his the prattling mouth to touch
of sweet Zenophile.

O happy cup, to be so quaffed!
would she her lips might strain
to my lips now, and at a draught
the soul within me drain!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.