Two New Translations of Lucretius and a Companion

"Many sparks of genius yet much artistry"—so Cicero cryptically assessed the work of his contemporary Lucretius. Genius and artistry, certainly, but the word yet (tamen) seems to hedge the bet. Since antiquity a certain ambivalence has dogged On the Nature of Things— now available in two new translations and the subject of a recent Cambridge Companion—not without reason. There is, to begin with, the subject matter: this is no epic in the manner of Homer or Virgil, with battles and voyages and fickle gods, but instead a six-book explication in verse of the universe's material basis. And then there is the style: alongside some of the most sublime passages in all of Latin literature (the harrowing depiction of Iphigenia's sacrifice, for instance) are found lengthy descriptions of natural phenomena in the recondite language of Epicurean atomism. Lucretius's tone ranges from the detachment of a scientist to the derision of a satirist, yet always the poem retains an archaic elegance.

The variety of ways in which the Western cultural tradition has interacted with this unique opus—as a philosophical text, as a document in the history of ideas, as a literary masterpiece—are well laid out in the fairly new Cambridge Companion to Lucretius. Cambridge has displayed an almost inexhaustible appetite for volumes of this sort in the last two decades, and a roll of the eyes is understandable at the appearance of yet another; but this companion is truly a rewarding piece of work with excellent chapters on Lucretius and Roman politics, the sublime, Victorian Britain, et cetera. In a contribution devoted to early translations of the poem, David Hopkins discusses the range of writers who "from the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth century sought to give Lucretius an English poetic voice." There are many nuggets in this literary history, including the expanded rendition of the opening invocation to Venus (a passage Yeats once called "the finest description of sexual intercourse ever written") by the irrepressible Rochester, for instance, or the fact that the first full English translation was done by a Puritan woman, Lucy Hutchinson, whose version of the invocation is tamer.

As the Companion's editors, Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie, write in their introduction, On the Nature of Things is "a manifesto of modernity in the sonorous voice of an Old Testament prophet." Replicating that sound is no easy feat, as is evident from two new translations appearing in just the last year. Penguin has replaced its old prose version with a brand-new rendition in verse by A. E. Stallings, while David R. Slavitt has now added On the Nature of Things to his already long list of classical translations. Slavitt's Lucretius speaks with a colloquial American accent in unrhymed lines of six beats (a meter first devised by Richmond Lattimore for his translations of Homer that Slavitt often employs); he has shortened the work by about 10 percent, making cuts "for dramatic purposes" or in those instances in which subsequent scientific discovery would make it "embarrassing … [to] dwell too long on those specifics where Lucretius who was mostly guessing and making up plausible stories got it wrong." Stallings opts for a fuller rendering into rhyming fourteeners in the hopes of getting across "something of the archaic flavour of Lucretius' Latin without resorting to a fusty prose of Thees and Thous."

Stallings's commitment to a more rigid formality and Slavitt's relative freedom from it point up the complexities involved in translating Lucretius for a twenty-first–century readership. An example or two will spell out the matter. Lucretius explains, for instance, that even should the random groupings of atoms that make up our bodies miraculously reassemble in the future, we would not...