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Propertius and the Outsiders

2016; Boston University; Volume: 24; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/arn.2016.0017

2327-6436

Theodore Ziolkowski,

Samuel Beckett and Modernism

Propertius and the Outsiders THEODORE ZIOLKOWSKI Arecent study of Propertius opens with the statement that “interest in Sextus Propertius in the twentieth century has been immense.”1 The author supports this claim with references to translations by Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell, an apparent imitation by James Joyce, and what amounts to two book reviews by Benedetto Croce.2 Pound’s highly controversial Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919) is of course well known. Benediktson (135) clarifies his allusion to Joyce by arguing that the description of Stephen’s dream of his mother in the opening pages of Ulysses is reminiscent of Propertius’s dream of Cynthia’s ghost (4.7: “Sunt aliquid Manes”). He discusses (135–42) Lowell’s accomplished translation of Propertius 4.3 in “Arethusa to Lycotas ” (Day by Day, 1975). His final example (142) is poem XVI from A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1932) although the eight lines on a lover who “hanged himself for love” more precisely suggest an epigram than a full elegy. Benediktson’s brief list has been slightly expanded by others . J. P. Sullivan analyzed Lowell’s earlier poem “The Ghost (After Sextus Propertius)” (from Lord Weary’s Castle, 1946) as a “highly successful, ‘free translation’“ of Propertius 4.7.3 And he added (178–80) the further example of William Butler Yeats’s “A Thought from Propertius” (in The Wild Swans at Coole, 1919), whose brief eight lines amount to little more than an epigram inspired by Propertius 2.5–10. Other scholars have cited Derek Walcott’s “A Propertius Quartet” (in The Arkansas Testament, 1987), in which the poet styles himself Propertius and his lover Cynthia: “she whose first syllable was Sin, as yours was Sex.”4 In the four brief (mostly arion 24.3 winter 2017 21-line) poems, which are set in the present on St. Lucia Island in the West Indies, the poet informs us that “this summer I simply repeated him” although “he writes in another language, your venerable Propertius.” Like his Roman model “I wanted no empire, laurel, no palm / but yours” and is content with his own Cynthia. Still others have mentioned Joseph Brodsky’s poem “Anno Domini,” which though set in Christian antiquity, is spoken by “a writer who has seen the world” and has a wife named Cynthia.5 Although the poem has nothing to do with Propertius , the allusion is not altogether farfetched. Brodsky, as we know from his “Letter to Horace” (1995) and other essays, was well acquainted (in Russian translation) with classical Roman literature, to which he alludes frequently in his poems. The name Cynthia occurs again in Brodsky’s cycle of twelve “Roman Elegies” (274–80) set in contemporary Rome, where it is simply one in a list including “Lesbia, Julia, Cynthia, Livia, Michelina”—names familiar (mostly) from Roman poetry and history—but the only poets mentioned are Horace and Catullus. Another poem, “Vertumnus” (374–82), reminds us of Propertius’ aetiological elegy (4.2) on that god of change, consisting of a monolog by his statue on the Roman Forum. Brodsky’s poem is neither a translation nor an adaptation but the poet’s conversation with a statue of Vertumnus—”My field is metamorphosis”—which comes to life and for the next quarter century accompanies him on journeys of the imagination. Indeed, Raoul Schrott recollects a remark by Brodsky, in which he playfully compared Seamus Heaney to Virgil, Czeslow Milosz to Horace, Derek Walcott to Ovid, and himself to “Prrpöhschs.”6 Yet all these literary examples—with the exception of Pound, to whom we shall return—are passing allusions rather than profound engagement. This is especially perplexing in the case of Housman, who as a professional classicist was deeply engaged with Propertius, about whom he published his earliest papers. Yet, to the dismay of his fellow scholars, he never produced the edition that his colleagues propertius and the outsiders 118 hoped for and anticipated, nor did he incorporate Propertius more deeply into his own poetry. Similarly, Lowell’s two translations of Propertius do not suggest the same impact on the poet as that of Virgil, say, in “Falling Asleep over the Aeneid” (in The Mills of...