This is the delivered version of my 20-minute paper for Sex in Translation, an excellent conference organised by Will McMorran and Maddalena Italia at Queen Mary University of London this July. I'm giving you the handout as a separate post.
-----
The Playboy Anthology
– GN script
Intro
·
[thanks
to organisers Will and Maddalena, and chair ______________ ]
·
My
subject this afternoon is one close to my heart: the reception of the Greek
Anthology, a Byzantine compilation of more than four thousand ancient
epigrams.
·
Over
the last few hundred years, these little poems have been cherry-picked as,
variously:
o
a
mainstay of elite education, (alongside Lucian – Hannah’s paper),
o
an
antidote to being French,
o
a
model for War poets,
o
and
a touchstone for literary Modernism (alongside Sappho – Marina’s paper).
·
The
Anthology’s rich store of homoerotic content has also offered a found family to
gay rights activists,
o
Notably
in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
o
But
also continuing sporadically into more recent times,
o
[PowerPoint]
o
As
in this appearance of Strato of Sardis in Gay Journal of 1979,
o
In
translations by Michael Kelly. (Jousts of Aphrodite)
§
(drawings are by Ian
David Baker)
·
Ten
years earlier, though, erotic content from the Anthology had met a much
wider audience,
·
When
translations of eight heterosexual epigrams appeared in the Christmas 1969 issue
of Playboy Magazine,
·
With
eight more following at Christmas 1970.
The translator
·
The
translations were by Harry Brown,
·
[PowerPoint]
·
Not
the elderly vigilante played by Michael Caine,
·
But
the veteran poet, novelist, and Oscar-winning screenwriter,
o
responsible,
for instance, for The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and the original, ‘Brat
Pack’, Ocean’s Eleven (1960).
·
[PowerPoint]
·
Critics
noted with approval that his work was steeped in classical allusion,
o
As
here, in Sapphic mode;
o
Though
his great inspiration was Homer’s Iliad,
o
Which
he echoed in verse, and rewrote as a Western novel, turning Greek and Trojan heroes into gunslingers. (The Stars in
their Courses, (1962) later filmed with John Wayne)
The venue
·
Classically
allusive poetry was his first love –
o
I
give a further example at the top of your handout, from 1940 –
·
But
his published books of verse cluster early in his career.
o
Screenwriting
paid more, and paid reliably, with novels on the side.
·
Playboy,
though, paid enough to attract the top talent of its age,
o
Even
if (in Brown’s case) they’d married well, and semi-retired to Mexico years before.
·
In
the 1970 Christmas issue that’s circulating,
·
You’ll
see household names including Michael Crighton, Paul Theroux, William F.
Buckley, Jr., and the celebrity sexologists, Masters and Johnson, plus an
interview with Robert Graves.
o
This
was excellent company in which to circulate.
·
The
previous year, Brown’s first consignment of versions from the Anthology had
rubbed shoulders with – among others – Joseph Heller, Graham Greene, Timothy
Leary, Woody Allen; science fiction greats Robert Sheckley and Ray
Bradbury; and the Black Panthers leader, Eldridge Cleaver.
o
All that, plus Sugar
Ray Robinson’s thoughts on the boxer then still known as Cassius Clay.
·
Playboy
was at that time the highest paying magazine in the world,
o
And
you can feel it in the inventive layouts and the quality of the paper stock.
o
As
academics we can only dream of our work being treated so well,
o
[PowerPoint]
§ Though I concede that advertisers of
premium spirits, colognes, hi-fi, and cutting-edge menswear do not flock to the
presses that publish us.
·
Playboy’s
editors especially pushed the boat out for these ‘gala’ Christmas issues,
·
And
it’s important we see Brown’s versions in this context of special volumes that
crowned the year,
·
Above
and beyond their placement within a long-running feature that already marked the
magazine as above its smutty imitators –
o
The
‘Ribald Classics’.
The
Ribald Classics
·
Playboy
marketed itself as ‘Entertainment for Men’, a total lifestyle package,
·
And
invoking a global history of sexy hijinks helped underwrite that aspirational
vision.
o
Tweaked
extracts from Boccaccio, Rochester, Apuleius, or the tantric scriptures,
welcomed the magazine’s readers to an elite brotherhood of sophisticated
men-about-town, spanning continents and centuries.
·
Ribald
Classics was, then, a prestige project, in which Playboy reached beyond the ephemerality
of the monthly production cycle,
o
To
embrace, and assert continuity with, centuries of literary tradition, and often
with undisputed high culture.
·
It
had been part of Playboy since the very beginning in 1952 and lingering into
the 1980s,
·
And
we can see its importance to the brand in the editorial policy of republishing
the cream of the instalments in three volumes, initially in hardcover and then
with wide dissemination in paperback. (first hardback 1957, paperback 1966-72)
·
The last of those three books includes
all sixteen of Brown’s versions.
o
Some or all of them also
made it into volume 7 of a more general paperback series titled The Best of
Playboy, though my research has not yet extended so far.
·
In
what follows, I cite the epigrams as presented in that volume, which is easier
to find than the individual issues in which they first appeared.
o
Let
us call it the editio minor.
The illustrator, and a plan
·
Before
I continue, I must make one apology: [PowerPoint]
·
I
will not be discussing the illustrations by Brad Holland.
o
They’re
fabulous,
o
He
went far beyond his brief (as quoted on your handout),
o
And
he’s a crucial figure in the development of commercial illustration,
o
But
I don’t have the time or expertise. I regret this, and we could always come
back to it in discussion.
·
What
I plan to do in my remaining time is twofold.
1. I’ll relate Harry Brown’s Playboy
Anthology to a trend in American reception of its epigrams, setting the scene
as concisely as I can;
2. And I’ll then invite you to consider
a few of its versions as adaptations that aimed to give readers what Brown, and
Playboy, thought they wanted.
·
If
you wish to go further, know that Playboy Magazine has an online archive of
vintage issues for subscribers,
·
And
that its archivists, so-called, do not reply to queries from academics.
·
On
with the show.
The recent American
reception context
·
Now,
we all know that the cultural meanings of classical and other canons depend on
where and who you are at any given time:
·
Local
reception traditions pick and choose the bits that work for them,
·
And
that is nowhere more true than in the uses found for Greek epigram,
·
Which,
as I said at the outset, has ended up signifying all sorts of things in
different times and places.
·
In
twentieth-century America the Anthology went stag,
·
Beginning
in 1916 in Philadelphia with Mitchell Buck, who made the first complete
translation of the Anthology’s heterosexually erotic fifth Book into English. [PowerPoint]
·
Buck
relied on (Friedrich Jacobs’s) an old facing-text edition for Hachette (1863),
o
Which had put most of the poems into French,
and a naughty few into Latin;
o
French and Latin alike now became English,
with very little reference to the Greek.
·
Buck
covered Lucian’s Dialogues of Courtesans that same year, I imagine on
the same method,
o
and
would later have a go at Bilitis (for which there was no Greek) and the Carmina
Priapeia.
·
His
Book 5 was a limited private edition, (750 copies),
·
But
it established an American stake in Greek epigram as a carnal playground for
red-blooded men of letters.
·
[PowerPoint]
·
Buck
loved his archaisms; here is his Meleager 5.175, an epigram we will meet agai
in looser guise when we circle back round to Harry Brown.
·
A
decade later, the heterosexual allure of the Anthology found a more effective
publicist in Wallace Rice.
·
Rice
was a Chicago newspaperman and literary jack-of-all-trades, educated like Brown
at Harvard,
o
And
known for such timeless classics as Heroic Deeds in our War with Spain
and 75 Years of Gas Service in Chicago.
o
...Also
various anthologies, because they were quick to do.
· One of his standout works is Pagan
Pictures, published in 1927 through the avant-garde firm, Boni &
Liveright, in a purportedly limited edition. (1600 copies) [PowerPoint]
·
It
bills itself as a volume of Greek epigrams... more or less.
o
The
compendious subtitle admits that this is an omnium-gatherum, ‘Freely translated
and fully expanded from the Anthology & the Greek lyrical poets, variously
augmented by modern instances.’
o
In
other words, Pagan Pictures was bits of whatever Rice fancied, under the
pretext of translating the ancient Greeks,
o
...
Plus some stuff he outright made up, though ‘variously augmented’ is as close
as he comes to admitting it.
·
His intro invokes ‘the ancient Grecian manner
of thought’ – echoes of A.L.H. (Hannah’s paper) – but this is mere pretext.
·
He finds a kindred spirit in the ancient epigrammatist, Xenos
Palaestes...
·
[PowerPoint]
·
...Who
does not exist. This is just Rice under a pseudonym.
·
The
name is a giveaway to readers who share his classical training: it means
foreign wrestler.
o
As
Xenos Palaestes, Rice strips down and grapples with the ancient poets whom he
wishes to emulate.
·
Often
he gives an epigram by a real ancient epigrammatist, and then a tweaked version
by Palaestes –
o
An
exercise in call-and-response that is very much in the spirit of Meleager, the
first of the great anthologists...
§ If Meleager had been obsessed with breasts,
and indeed, exclusively and insistently heterosexual.
o
Sometimes
the real ancient epigrammatist in these pairings is made up, too,
o
This
example being a case in point.
·
Both
of these epigrams are fake;
·
Both
of their authors are figments of Rice’s imagination, sowing their wild oats in
a Pan-infused Hellenic pornotopia that’s pure twentieth-century fantasy.
.
·
I
don’t doubt Wallace Rice had read and been inspired by Buck’s version of
Anthology Book 5,
·
But
it was his Pagan Pictures that crystallised a distinct American vision
of that work,
·
And
that proposed that this one book, out of the sixteen, effectively was,
or deserved to be, the Greek Anthology for modern American purposes.
·
35
years later it was the turn of Kenneth Rexroth, the self-declared
polymath who was famously dubbed ‘Father of the Beats’.
·
Demonstrably
inspired by Rice, Rexroth put together a 1962 Poems from the Greek Anthology
for the University of Michigan Press
o
(subsequently
an Ann Arbor paperback)
·
In
which he more-or-less translated a bewildering array of originals, ranging from
actual Greek epigrams to a snippet from Carmina Burana.
·
The
work was rapturously received – even now he has his groupies –
·
And
it must be what Harry Brown in turn was measuring himself against in 1969,
·
Seeing
if he still had it in him to show that he still had it,
·
In
a distinctly American and insistently virile reception tradition,
·
That
claimed the Greek Anthology as a game preserve of sexually available womanhood,
·
Turning
ancient Greek epigrams into modern one-night stands (or, in Rice’s case, tumbles
in an Arcadian shrubbery).
·
[PowerPoint]
·
Rexroth
continued Rice’s habits in several important ways:
1. He brought in material from outside
the Anthology, and from outside epigram entirely – even once, by accident, from
prose;
2. And he never told his readers exactly
where he was getting it all, asserting merely that it was by such-and-such a
poet,
3. Which covered for his slapdash way
with genre, and let him get away with inserting material of his own invention.
·
The
approximate version of anonymous epigram 11.8 that I have shown you
here is a case in point. Rexroth has simply made up the second half,
·
And this longer poem [PowerPoint] appears to have
no original at all. Rexroth presents a hipster fantasy of priapic Hellas by way
of the San Francisco scene.
·
In
fairness I should say that Rexroth extends his coverage beyond the erotic, with
some nifty versions of epitaphs and such,
·
But
in all the important ways, he is Rice’s successor.
·
As
I’ve mentioned, both translators mask the extent of their liberties by
neglecting to cite exact sources,
·
And
they justify both this neglect, and those unspecified liberties, by emphasising
their human connection to the text. They are poets, not pedants,
o
And
to care about detail is not true to the authentic Greek spirit.
·
What’s
more, they make these claims in terms so similar that it’s clear Rexroth has
read Rice and alludes to him. [PowerPoint]
o
I
would certainly never imply that this Colossus of the avant-garde is ripping
him off.
·
However,
Rexroth also departed from Rice’s practice,
·
In
a way that aligns with, and may well have been inspired by, the format of Playboy’s
Ribald Classics,
o
And
thus anticipates Brown’s escapades several years later.
·
He
collaborated with an exciting contemporary artist, Geraldine Sakall,
o
Who
also illustrated Douglass Parker’s Wasps for Michigan that year.
o
Modern
reprintings sadly do not reproduce her images, which were very much part of the
original vision,
o
And
I echo that injustice by not discussing them now –
o
But
that would be a whole other paper,
o
And
I need to get back to the girlie mags.
§ I’ll just leave one here for you to
enjoy. [PowerPoint]
The 1969 sequence
·
Let
us now consider Harry Brown’s first batch of epigrams, from Christmas 1969.
·
I’ve
given you the titles he assigned, and the originals his versions correspond to,
on your handout... as best I can.
o
Like
Rice and Rexroth, he just asserts ‘X is by Y’.
·
Some
versions in both batches are very loose, but for 1969 we’ll look at two that
relate less tortuously to their models,
·
For
which I offer my own World’s Classics versions as placeholders.
o
We’ve
the Greek at the end of the PowerPoint if we want to come back to it in
discussion.
o
Till
then, please believe they’re quite faithful.
·
I’ve
picked out one poem by Philodemus, in which a comic dialogue between a courtesan
or hetaera and her prospective customer becomes a not-much-less
transactional chat-up in a Sixties nightclub;
·
And
one by Gallus, whom I’d like to be the Cornelius Gallus who went down in history for
founding Roman erotic elegy and getting on Augustus’s bad side –
o
We know he wrote
erotic epigrams in Latin and was biculturally fluent, so why not?
·
In
both versions, Brown puts the poet into the picture under a modernised handle –
o ‘Phil O’Demus’; ‘Oh, Gallie’ –
·
Turning these ancient epigrammatists into American
bachelors on the contemporary singles scene.
·
Philodemus,
or Phil, charms his hookup with the promise of ‘stereo, soft lights, [and] Jack
Daniel’s’ –
o
The
very accessories that Playboy told its readers would make nice young women want
to sleep with them, while asking no commitment in return,
o
And
that the magazine’s high-end advertisers were keen to sell them.
·
The
modern Philodemus purchases his pleasure with brand names, not coin.
·
[PowerPoint]
·
We
can note in passing that Brown’s version of Rufinus 5.43 similarly goes out of
its way to de-hetaericise its original, this time through framing:
·
Rufinus
in the original is an ironic erotodidact, deprecating the poor gamesmanship of
a less experienced player, but this adaptation has us eavesdrop instead on a
‘Snippet from an exchange of girlish confidences’ between nice young women on
the dating circuit.
o
The
Trigère of this version is the queen of prêt-à-porter, Pauline Trigère.
§
Her celebrity
clients included Jacqui Kenney and Liz Taylor.
§ She invented the jumpsuit.
§ In Classics you learn something new
every day.
·
Brown’s
version of Gallus, on your handout, is weird and gross, probably –
o
The
scenario takes some puzzling out,
o
Since
the original is atypically explicit, and Playboy wants to keep clear water
between its own product and hardcore pornography.
o
So,
Brown resorts to euphemism, if we can call it that, and gets all tangled up.
·
The
poem’s inclusion at least confirms that Brown was working from an up-to-date
edition.
o
William
Paton, who took on the Anthology for the Loeb Classical Library in the 1910s,
put sexually and scatologically explicit Greek originals into Latin rather than
English – a recurring motif of this conference;
o
a
mid-century update by series editor Brian Warmington quietly patched this.
·
There’s
a poem by Marcus Argentarius (5.104) in the next year’s batch that also
benefited from Warmington’s attentions.
·
We
may also note that Brown – who, after all, read widely in the classics – has
looked into more than one Loeb from the Anthology’s five-volume set:
o
He
gives a version of Automedon from the satirical Book 11, on male impotence,
o
Not
a theme we might have expected Playboy’s ethos to embrace, but one in keeping
with the picaresque tone of other Ribald Classics inclusions.
The 1970 sequence
·
Turning
now to the sequence from the following year, and aiming for contrast, I’ve
picked out two versions with more tenuous relations to their ancient
prototypes.
·
Let’s
look first at Brown’s 1970 Meleager epigram 5.175,
o
A poem we’ve already met in Mitchell Buck’s
quaint version of 1916.
·
In
the original scenario, the elegiac lover remonstrates with a hetaera who
had verbally contracted to reserve her romantic favours solely for him, at
least, in his understanding.
·
But
all the signs betray her: she has been partying without him, at a symposium,
and a raucous one at that, segueing into the drunken late-night procession
called a kōmos.
·
Gunē pankoina,
he calls her – a woman who makes herself available to all comers.
·
Brown’s
version transmutes the scene. Bachelor Meleager now calls out an actress
girlfriend who has been sleeping with just one other man,
·
Amid
jumbled allusions to classical myth and to the theatrical avant-garde
o
(Peter Weiss’s German
play Marat/Sade (1963) was filmed by Peter Brook in 1967).
·
I
believe the name ‘Peggy’ is prompted by Meleager’s Sapphically charged word for
lyre, pēktis, but that’s about where contact with the original ends.
·
Turning
to Asclepiades 5.189, we find this Greek poet as well echoing a famous Sapphic
snippet (fr.168B
Voigt: Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα καὶ Πληΐαδες):
o
‘The
moon and the Pleiades have set, it is the middle of the night, time is going by,
and I lie down alone.’
·
This
allusion cues up a classic motif of erotic epigram: the paraklausithuron,
o
The
elegiac lover’s late-night lament outside the securely barred door of the
pretty young person on whom he has set his sights.
·
Again
the context is betrayal by a courtesan with whom the lover had believed he had
an exclusive arrangement – ‘her who lied to me’,
·
Leading
into a bundle of quintessentially Hellenistic tropes that figure Erōs as
an inner fire, a sickness, or an arrow-wound – and sometimes, as here, all
three at once.
·
Fire
and sickness are still part of the modern repertoire of love-songs, but Brown
takes a different line.
·
He
latches onto the storm of the first line – the single Greek word kheima,
wintry weather – and develops an elaborate thunder-and-lightning scenario,
·
That
turns Asclepiades’ loss into the modern bachelor’s unexpected win.
·
The
original kind-of-disappears into the mix,
·
But
further epigrammatic troping comes in, from Brown’s wider scoping of the
Anthology:
o
The
drunkenness of the elegiac lover on his kōmos, processing from the
symposium to the door of his beloved;
o
And
the foul weather that inevitably accompanies his ritual journey into
disappointment;
o
Including
the mortal threat of lighting – an epigram by Meleager, for instance, declares the
lover’s fatalistic fearlessness, and notes that Zeus, god of the thunderbolt, knows
what it is to lose his head over a pretty young thing (Meleager 12.17).
o
We
even find classical precedent for the thunderbolt as penis, in a smutty mythological
pastiche by Nicarchus amid the satirical epigrams of Book 11 (11.328),
o
Again
suggesting Brown has read more widely than he strictly needed to.
·
And
he has certainly looked at the Greek.
o
As
with Peggy and pēktis, I think Marcia’s name is a creative
mistranslation of the ‘long’ of ‘long night’ – makrē.
Conclusion
·
To
conclude: there’s lots going on. A lot of it’s not great:
·
Harry
Brown was in his fifties; he tries to sound ‘hep’, but he ends up the oldest
swinger in town,
·
To
the extent that we might be tempted to apply the Playboy Editors’ own
strictures and dismiss his versions as ‘jazzed-up travesties’.
·
But
he was working within, and servicing, a distinct local reception tradition,
o
To
which his wide classical reading brought some value.
·
Putting
together Brown with what had gone before, we may now say that Greek epigram’s
macho afterlife in twentieth-century America was a significant new chapter in
its reception,
o
Building
on older trends, but freshening the genre up, by decoupling it from weak ideas
like translating what was actually there.
·
[PowerPoint]
·
Typically
this approach turned a blind eye to everything beyond Book 5,
·
Turning
the Anthology into a classical paradigm for bachelor exceptionalism,
·
And
its poets into ancient chat-up artists,
o
A
fantasy which could run alongside others that centred around the same notional
source but were putting it to quite different uses.
·
I
look forward to hearing your thoughts on it all;
·
Thank
you for your time.
·
[PowerPoint – Brad Holland illustrations again]
