Martial’s Epigrams: A Selection (review)

The pungency of Martial’s poetic commentary on the vice he sees around him is familiar to anyone who knows his name. Less commonly remarked are the streaks of self-irony, his inward-turning interrogative gaze, and acute sense of human fragility that in some poems (and not only the elegies) verges on the tragic. These, the signs of a poet plumbing the full psychological range of satirical expression, are visible in the mixture of wounded pride and despair in Persius’ rejection of praise in Satire 1; in the sunset landscape of the Aqua Marcia in Juvenal’s third Satire; and in Martial’s images of dead children, chronic self-deceivers, and the wry poet at work. The laughter Martial evokes is exemplary of Hobbes’ claim in his Elements of Law that we laugh out of a sense of “eminency” that derives not only from our comparison of ourselves with “the Infirmityes of others,” but also “with our own formerly.”

Wills is a prolific author known for his strong views and learned, straight-spoken style, and while I have admired a number of his (over forty) books and countless essays, especially on Thomas Jefferson and John Wayne, I suspect he laughs at others far more often than he laughs at himself. (See, for example, his scornful dissection of Sean Kelly’s and Hubert Dreyfus’ flawed but thoughtful All Things Shining in The New York Review of Books, April 7, 2011.) So it doesn’t surprise me that he sees Martial as a poet who “will always be best known for his insult poems, the dirtier the better.” Invective dominates Wills’ selection, not only in the number of poems but in the degree of fun he seems to have had translating them while comfortably situated (as he tells us) in the Grand Hotels of Rome and Siena. His partial index of subjects starts off with “adult homosexuality,” “artifacts,” “baldness,” “banqueting,” “body odor,” and “cunnilingus,” and ends with “tributes to the dead,” “wine,” and, a theme Wills especially revels in, “the writing profession.”

This last category displays Wills’ strengths and weaknesses as a translator. In one poem about invective (12.61), Martial writes to and about a man he calls Ligurra, who desires the perverse dignity of being Martial’s target (dignus cupis hoc metu videri, 3): he half fears, half hopes for it (4). But he waits in vain. Only a drunken poet in a filthy brothel could do Ligurra justice (8). Ending with a particularly cruel and evocative image, Martial concludes that Ligurra’s forehead is unworthy of his branding (frons haec stigmate non meo notanda est, 11).

Wills competently translates the gnomic humor of in tauros Libyci ruunt leones / non sunt papilionibus molesti (“Huge bulls are a lion’s prey, / The butterfly can flutter safe away”) but he totally ignores Martial’s interest in Ligurra’s psyche. The point of the poem is that Martial’s brief songs have the power to animate their sacrificial victims. Robert Louis Stevenson captures this idea in the last line of his version, where the poet-drunkard shall “immortalise your name for once and all.” We remember that the adjective vividum is related to vivere:

Versus et breve vividumque carmen in te ne faciam times, Ligurra, et dignus cupis hoc metu videri.

But in Wills’ rendering, the poem flattens out into a disdainful self-celebration of Martial’s power over his victim:

You cower, fearful of my caustic verse. You claim that you could suffer nothing worse. But fear not.

My worry here is not that Wills doesn’t understand the Latin, but that he’s too entranced by the power of the epigrammatic attack to bother with other facets of Martial’s poetics.

His insensitivity to nuance in Martial’s representation of human emotion emerges repeatedly—here, in an unsettling poem about sadism (5.46):

Basia dum nolo nisi quae luctantia carpsi   et placet ira mihi plus tua quam facies, ut te saepe rogem, caedo, Diadumene, saepe...