Wright's dirty old Meleager

Trigger warning for dubious sexual consent (old/young)

As we have noted before, Wright gives us three ages of Meleager: the adolescent, the grown man, and the senior citizen, like the Three Ages of Elvis in Father Ted. We have seen how fictionalised was the first; the last is even more so.

The scenario Wright has chosen will disturb many modern readers. Heartbroken by the loss of Heliodora, the poet has retired to spend his autumn years on the island of Cos, where

under the shelter of the great temple where the statue of Aphrodite was enshrined Meleager found peace. It was probably here that he wrote the lines for Heliodora's grave, and here, too, that he found the young girl Phanion, his 'Beacon-Fire', who was to be the light and comfort of his old age. (emphasis added)

The Phanion of the surviving epigrams is still very young. Meleager writes a touching epitaph for her pet hare (AP 7.207), much-loved by Victorian translators. She is also an object of the poet's desire in three epigrams that Cephalas, mistaking her name for that of a boy, put into the Boyish Muse. At 12.53 Meleager is in a hurry to rejoin her -- he sends a message telling her that Himeros, desire, is speeding him on. AP 12.82-3 play upon her name, which means 'Little Torch', lighting a fire in his heart. 

These are passionate poems and their narrating persona is energetic. Nothing in them hints that he is old: Wright has simply made that up. The 'light and comfort' of his introductory patter is probably meant to steer us away from confronting the poet's sexual intent, and at least one of his translation choices points the same way: his version of 12.82 concludes as follows, mangling the sense of the original:

Thou, Phanion, art the light | That cheers my winter's night | With joy unmingled

In the Greek there is no winter's night or joy, just a 'great fire in my heart', as befits a lover in the power of Eros. But such distractions can only go so far in disguising the erotic character of the poems.

Can Wright make it worse? You bet he can. Having committed to the narrative of Phanion as the great consolation of Meleager's old age, he is faced with the problem that there just aren't that many epigrams addressed to her: though a translator's favourite because of the hare poem, Phanion is a very minor figure in the surviving works. In fact, there are just the four poems I've already mentioned. So he picks two others to round his picture out. His Phanion sequence runs as follows:

12.80                    Meleager    pederastic (no named addressee)

12.83, 82, and 53  Meleager    on Phanion, discussed above

12.235                    Strato        pederastic (no named addressee)

7.207                    Meleager    epitaph for Phanion's hare, discussed above

So the four Phanion poems are padded with two pederastic ones, one of them (though Wright silently reascribes it) by the notorious Strato of Sardis. Even in his romanticised version it plainly importunes the addressee for sex:

If beauty falls away, | Then, 'ere it fade, | Give me my part. | If constant it doth stay, | Why be afraid | To yield, sweetheart?

This is not a good look, as the younglings might say on their social media.

 

'Farewell to Youth': Wright's version of AP 5.208

Wright claims in his introduction that he is the first to translate all of Meleager's genuine poems into English. We saw in my last blog post that he only gets there by declaring four poems to be spurious, on no grounds whatsoever, but he may well have been the first to publish a version of AP 5.208. Here is the Greek:

οὔ μοι παιδομανὴς κραδία: τί δὲ τερπνόν,Ἔρωτες,
   ἀνδροβατεῖν εἰ μὴ δούς τι λαβεῖν ἐθέλει;
ἁ χεὶρ γὰρ τὰν χεῖρα. καλά με μένει παράκοιτις:
   ἔρροι πᾶς ἄρσην ἀρσενικαῖς λαβίσιν. 

And here is the translation given in Paton's Loeb, six years before:

Cor meum non furit in pueros; quid iucundum, Amores, uirum inscendere, si non uis dando sumere? Manus enim manum lauat. Pulcra me manet uxor. Facessant mares cum masculis forcipibus.

Paton had signed on to translate the whole of the Anthology, and that's just what he did -- a magnificent achievement. He just didn't translate absolutely all of it into English: when the content got too dodgy he switched into Latin. Really I should have included a version in my World's Classics volume; here is an indifferent one now:

My heart is not boy-crazy, for what fun,

You Loves, in clambering upon a man

Unless the giver wishes to receive?

Let one hand wash the other. In my bed

A pretty girl is waiting; let each male

Whose clasps are masculine be on his way.

Labis in the last line (a handle, or a holder or gripper: 'tongs', 'forceps', 'clamp') is odd to find used figuratively for sex acts, but that's what must be going on there.

This is the poem Wright chooses to close the homosexual (and therefore immature) 'Gadara: Poems of Youth' before moving on to the heterosexual (and therefore mature) 'Tyre: Poems of Manhood'. It's a bold choice given its explicit content. His version works some ingenious variations on Meleager's original:

Farewell to Youth.

Farewell my youthful loves -- 'tis vain

To cast the reckoning of loss and gain:

    Those pleasures fugitive

    I take not now nor give.

A fairer image fills my heart:

A love where boyhood's fancies have no part,

    Escaped from their strong hold

    I fly the loves of old.

'Those pleasures fugitive', 'I take not now', 'boyhood's fancies', 'the loves of old' -- these concerted and thoughtful changes recast the poem entirely as Meleager's farewell to his university days, with labis now merely the emotional hold experienced in a passing phase.