'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.