This is one of the best poems I know of (the original, I mean. The translation clunks and clanks and barely manages.) There is nothing more tender in the ancient world than Martial's grief and his concern that this child not be frightened in the underworld (she was, it seems, a real girl, not an imagined one). It occurs to me that this is also a gesture of love and piety toward Martial's parents, who must have died recently, if a five-year-old is going to recognize them. He sends her on ahead, trusting to his parents' kindness and letting them know that they are still in his mind.
On the Death of Erotion, a Slave Child
I commend this girl,
this sweet one, my delight,
Fronto and
Flaccilla, my parents, into your care,
so that with you
little Erotion might not take fright
at Cerberus's triple
roar or the phantoms there.
Had she lived six
more days of winter cold,
she'd have prided
herself on being six years old.
With such familiar
protectors, let her trick and play
and still lisp my
name, as she used to do.
May mellow sod veil
her brittle bones --- and weigh
Lightly on her, kind
earth; she was light on you.
(my translation)
Martial 5:34
Hanc tibi, Fronto pater, genetrix
Flaccilla, puellam
oscula commendo
deliciasque meas,
parvula ne nigras horrescat Erotion
umbras
oraque Tartarei
prodigiosa canis.
Impletura fuit sextae modo frigora
brumae,
vixisset
totidem ni minus illa dies.
Inter tam veteres ludat lasciva
patronos
et nomen blaeso
garriat ore meum.
Mollia non rigidus caespes tegat ossa
nec illi,
terra, gravis
fueris: non fuit illa tibi.
so much happens in Martial's poem, and then in your translation. while Martial enlivens Erotion through his grief, he also entombs her in a linguistic stone, a language of a time we no longer quite understand or thoroughly feel. your translation frees her (and Martial!) to walk with us again.
ReplyDeletei come upon this today and immediately think of what you (and Martial) have succeeded in doing.
To The Stone-Cutters
Robinson Jeffers
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
Yes, "pained thoughts found / The honey of peace in old poems." This is the real work, this inevitably small gesture of making something, and then recovery, placed against the vast dark, the work of writing and of reading. There is another epigram where Martial pleads with whatever unknown persons will own his farm after Martial's death, asking them, please, to maintain Erotion's grave, so that her memory lasts a little longer, though he knows the "square-limbed Roman letters / Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain" and cannot be forever. I wonder if he would be surprised that his poems have preserved her memory much longer than her grave marker was able to do?
Delete.