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.