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  • The Elegies of Maximianus ed. by A. M. Juster
  • Scott McGill
The Elegies of Maximianus
A. M. Juster, ed. and trans.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. viii + 240. ISBN 978-0-8122-4979-8

The sixth-century poet Maximianus’ Nachleben has long been on life support. Little known and less read, he stands as a faint presence in literary history, a shadow in the twilight of classical Latin poetry. A. M. Juster has produced a book which should help to change this. His translation, with a facing Latin text, a commentary, and an introduction by Michael Roberts, is a welcome effort to open Maximianus to a wider audience. It provides an essentially good English version of his poetry, and it deals well with a range of issues that bring the author and his work into clearer focus. These include his historical identity; his place in the tradition of Latin love elegy; his contortionist’s approach to that and other literary genres; his echoes of earlier language and imitation of predecessors; and his relationship to Boethius.

A particular virtue of Juster’s book is the form of the translation: he turns Maximianus’ verse into alternating couplets of iambic hexameter and iambic pentameter. This successfully reproduces the feel of Maximianus’ elegiac couplets—a stated goal in Juster’s preface (p. vii)—and Juster handles his meters very ably. Of course, the crucial test of a translation is how well it balances fidelity with the need to adapt the source text to a new language. Often, Juster is good on this front. Especially accomplished is his version of Maximianus’ fifth elegy, a kind of nightmare De senectute (like much of his corpus) that deals with the narrator’s impotence. Juster accomplishes the first task of a translator by being fundamentally accurate, but at the same time he creates a text that reads as a good English poem while capturing the fierce energy and tonal variety of the original.

At some points, however, Juster’s translation is less successful. One problem is that he on occasion falls into the uncanny valley of translationese, producing lines of awkward, stilted English. More serious is the number of mistranslations. The first elegy contains several: some are forgivable, because Maximianus’ Latin is obscure, but others are hard to defend. An example of the latter occurs at line 102, et quod tunc decuit iam modo crimen habet. The subject is old age, and Maximianus states that what was fitting/appropriate then (in youth) now (when he is old) carries guilt—a point he varies in the next couplet (103–4), diversos diversa iuvant: non omnibus annis / [End Page 258] omnia conveniunt: res prius apta nocet. Strangely, Juster translates line 102 with “and what occurred back then keeps its verdict.” Other examples include taking iacet at line 162 as if it were iacit (“one throws away”) and rendering line 170, quondam pulcer fit modo turpis equus, as “someday a fine horse becomes repulsive” when of course Maximianus means “a horse that was once fine now becomes ugly/repulsive.”

Still, on the whole Juster’s translation is basically sound and enjoyable. The same can be said for his commentary. Juster offers details that help to make difficult moments in the text more legible, and that deepen the reading experience by illuminating significant features of Maximianus’ poetry and by discussing relevant contextual material. Among the valuable items in the commentary are the frequent citations of echoes in Maximianus of classical poetry and prose. In some instances, Juster interprets the function and force of a parallel; at other points, he simply cites the echo, thus opening a way to further exploration of how the poet worked with and in the classical literary tradition and adapted it to his own purposes. Juster also engages productively with other scholarship on Maximianus, even if at times his approach is too fine grained and concerned with specialist arcana; the general reader might feel as if he is getting fragments of an ongoing conversation that does not involve him.

To defend Juster on this last matter, it is a challenge for any commentator to determine what to include and what to omit, and...

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