a simple prop

Viewers of The Tudors may remember that last week Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, recited his translation of one of Martial‘s epigrams (specifically X:47). By coincidence, this week I ran across the translation made by the real Henry Howard and here it is:

MARTIAL, the things that do attain
The happy life be these, I find:—
The richesse left, not got with pain;
The fruitful ground, the quiet mind;
The equal friend; no grudge, no strife;
No charge of rule, nor governance;
Without disease, the healthful life;
The household of continuance;
The mean diet, no delicate fare;
True wisdom join’d with simpleness;
The night dischargèd of all care,
Where wine the wit may not oppress.
The faithful wife, without debate;
Such sleeps as may beguile the night:
Contented with thine own estate
Ne wish for death, ne fear his might.

Eagles of coral
adorn the ebony bed
where Nero lies fast asleep—
callous, peaceful, happy,
in the prime of his body’s strength,
in the fine vigor of youth.

But in the alabaster hall that holds
the ancient shrine of the Aenobarbi
how restless the household gods—
they tremble, the little Lares,
and try to hide their insignificant bodies.
They’ve heard a terrible sound,
a deadly sound coming up the stairs,
iron footsteps that shake the staircase;
and now faint with fear, the miserable Lares
scramble to the back of the shrine,
shoving each other and stumbling,
one little god falling over another,
because they know what kind of sound that is,
know by now the footsteps of the Furies.

C.P. Cavafy

Arthur Rimbaud

(C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992)

Honor to those who in the life they lead
define and guard a Thermopylae.
Never betraying what is right,
consistent and just in all they do
but showing pity also, and compassion;
generous when they are rich, and when they are poor,
still generous in small ways,
still helping as much as they can;
always speaking the truth,
yet without hating those who lie.

And even more honor is due to them
when they foresee (as many do foresee)
that in the end Ephialtis will make his appearance,
that the Medes will break through after all.

(C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992)

I was listening to June Tabor‘s version of “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” tonight and quoting the following seemed apt:

And now every April I sit on my porch
And I watch the parade pass before me
And I watch my old comrades, how proudly they march
Reliving old dreams of past glory
And the old men march slowly, all bent, stiff and sore
The forgotten heroes from a forgotten war
And the young people ask, “What are they marching for?”
And I ask myself the same question
And the band plays Waltzing Matilda
And the old men answer to the call
But year after year their numbers get fewer
Some day no one will march there at all.

The last ANZAC survivor of Gallipoli, Alec Campbell, died in 2002. He led Hobart’s ANZAC Day parade three weeks prior to his death. There ain’t that many survivors of the War to End All Wars left.

The days that are to come, they stand before us
like to a row of lighted little candles, —
brilliant, and warm, and lively little candles.

The other days, the by-gone, lag behind,
a mournful row of candles that are quenched:
a few of them, the nearest, smoulder still,
but most are cold, and crooked, and reduced.

I dread to look on these: their shape is grievous,
and grievous the remembrance of their light.
In front, my lighted candles I behold.

I dread to turn, lest I perceive, affrighted,
how fast the sombre row is lengthening,
how fast the extinguished candles multiply.

C.P. Cavafy.

(Translated by John Cavafy)

That we’ve broken their statues,
that we’ve driven them out of their temples,
doesn’t mean at all that the gods are dead.
O land of Ionia, they’re still in love with you,
their souls still keep your memory.
When an August dawn wakes over you,
your atmosphere is potent with their life,
and sometimes a young ethereal figure,
indistinct, in rapid flight,
wings across your hills.

C.P. Cavafy.

I alone have been dispatched to the Danube’s outflow
to shiver beneath the dead weight of northern skies
only the river (scant barrier!) lies between me and countless
barbarian hordes. Although
other men have been exiled by you for graver offenses
none was packed further off:
beyond here lies nothing but chillness, hostility, frozen
waves of an ice-hard sea.

Ovid, Poems of Exile

Voices, loved and idealized,
of those who have died, or of those
lost for us like the dead.

Sometimes they speak to us in dreams;
sometimes deep in thought the mind hears them.

And with their sound for a moment return
sounds from our life’s first poetry—
like music at night, distant, fading away

“Voices” by C.P. Cavafy from Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992

Since Nine O’Clock

(From: C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992)

Cavafy has become one of my favorite poets. Occasionally, I’ll post a poem by him.

PZ has advertised my upcoming talk on Ben Stein and in the comments, “Cuttlefish” pens this little ditty:

Like shooting flies with howitzers
Or fighting ants with mines
John Lynch will take his intellect
And decimate Ben Stein’s.

The program claims the topic
Will be “Why Ben Stein Is Wrong”.
Condensed, of course–the unabridged
Is several days too long.

No matter how it’s edited,
I have a nagging hunch,
It’s going to be a long one, so
You’d better pack a lunch.

(Ok, I’ve said what PZ said
And took so little time–
I wonder–how come Myers never
Writes his posts in rhyme?)

Sweet.

Seamus Heaney, Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner is 70 today. To celebrate here is his poem “Strange Fruit,” one of a series of poems about bog-bodies.

Here is the girl’s head like an exhumed gourd.
Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.

They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair
And made an exhibition of its coil,
Let the air at her leathery beauty.
Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:
Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,
Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.
Diodorus Siculus confessed
His gradual ease with the likes of this:
Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible
Beheaded girl, outstaring axe
And beatification, outstaring
What had begun to feel like reverence.

Some more of Heaney’s poetry is available online here.