Martial / The epigrams

 

The epigrams

There are all kinds of ways of grouping and categorising them, starting with the 12 books which Martial himself used as a structuring device. Very broadly there are two types of Martial epigram – ones you ‘get’, which have an appealing twist or sting or point which you can understand; and those which don’t have such an obvious payoff, which presumably made sense in their time but seem flat or pointless or even incomprehensible to us today, even with extensive notes. If a joke needs extensive notes to explain it, it isn’t a very good joke.

Themes

The poet as celebrity and showman

May I present myself – the man
You read, admire and long to meet,
Known the world over for his neat
And witty epigrams? The name
Is Martial. Thank you, earnest fan,
For having granted me the fame
Seldom enjoyed by a dead poet
While I’m alive and here to know it.
(Book 1, poem 1)

Insufferable amateur poets

Whether or not Apollo fled from the table
Thyestes ate his sons at, I’m unable
To say: what I can vouch for is our wish
To escape your dinner parties. Though each dish
Is lavish and superb, the pleasure’s nil
Since you recite your poems! To hell with brill,
Mushrooms and two-pound turbots, I don’t need
Oysters: give me a host who doesn’t read.
(3.45)

To Domitian, pleading his moral probity

Caesar, if you should chance to handle my book,
I hope that you’ll relax the frowning look
That rules the world. Soldiers are free to mock
The triumphs of you emperors – there’s no shame
In a general being made a laughing-stock.
I beg you, read my verses with the same
Face as you watch Latinus on the stage
Or Thymele the dancer. Harmless wit
You may, as Censor, reasonably permit:
My life is strict, however lax my page.
(1.4)

Heterosexual sex

Lesbia, why are your amours
Always conducted behind open, unguarded doors?
Why do you get more excitement out of a voyeur than a lover?
Why is pleasure no pleasure when it’s under cover?
Whores us a curtain, a bolt or a porter
To bar the public – you won’t find many chinks in the red-light quarter.
Ask Chione or Ias how to behave:
Even the cheapest tart conceals her business inside a monumental grave.
If I seem too hard on you, remember my objection
Is not to fornication, but to detection.
(1.34)

‘inside a monumental grave‘?

Gay sex

I think what’s going on is the narrator is buggering a boy who, as a result, is on the edge of orgasm. I’m happy to be corrected if I’ve misunderstood.

When you say, ‘Quick, I’m going to come,’
Hedylus, I go limp and numb.
But ask me to hold back my fire,
And the brake accelerates desire.
Dear boy, if you’re in such a hurry,
Tell me to slow up, not to worry.
(1.46)

Slave or paedophile sex

The eroticism of being blocked or prevented is taken a step further in this poem:

The only kisses I enjoy
Are those I take by violence, boy.
Your anger whets my appetite
More than your face, and so to excite
Desire I give you a good beating
From time to time: a self-defeating
Habit – what do I do it for?
You neither fear nor love me more.
(5.46)

Heterosexual smears

Lesbia claims she’s never laid
Without good money being paid.
That’s true enough; when she’s on fire
She’ll always pay the hose’s hire.
(11.62)

Thumbnail sketches

Diaulus, recently physician,
Has set up now as a mortician:
No change, though, in his clients’ condition.
(1.47)

Or:

You’re an informer and a tool for slander,
A notorious swindler and a pander,
A cocksucker, gangster and a whore…
So how is it, Vacerra, you’re so poor?
(11.66)

Chaucerian physicality

Hoping, Fescennia, to overpower
The reek of last night’s drinking, you devour
Cosmus’ sweet-scented pastilles by the gross.
But though they give your teeth a whitish gloss
They fail to make your breath any less smelly
When a belch bubbles up from your abyss-like belly.
In fact, blended with the lozenges, it’s much stronger;
It travels farther and it lingers longer.
(1.87)

His cheap lodgings in a block of flats

Lupercus, whenever you meet me
You instantly greet me
With, ‘Is it alright by you if I send
My slave to pick up your book of epigrams? It’s only to lend:
I’ll return it when I’ve read it.’ There’s no call
To trouble your boy. It’s a long haul
To the Pear-tree district, and my flat
Is up three flights of stairs, steep ones at that…
(1.117)

Behaviour of a hanger-on and dinner cadger

When Selius spreads his nets for an invitation
To dinner, if you’re due to plead a cause
In court or give a poetry recitation,
Take him along, he’ll furnish your applause:
‘Well said!’ ‘Hear, hear!’ ‘Bravo!’ ‘Shrewd point!’ ‘That’s good!’
Till you say, ‘Shut up now, you’ve earned your food.’
(2.27)

Or this poem about not only being a client, but being a client’s client.

I angle for your dinner invitations (oh the shame
Of doing it, but I do it). You fish elsewhere. We’re the same.
I attend the morning levée and they tell me you’re not there,
But gone to wait on someone else. We make a proper pair.
I’m your spaniel, I’m the toady to your every pompous whim.
You court a richer patron. I dog you and you dog him.
To be a slave is bad enough but I refuse to be
A flunkey’s flunkey, Maximum. My master must be free.
(2.18)

Miniatures of abuse

You ask me what I get
Out of my country place.
The profit, gross or net,
Is never having to see your face.
(2.38)

And:

Marius’s earhole smells.
Does that surprise you, Nestor?
The scandal that you tell’s
Enough to make it fester.
(3.28)

Crude humour

If from the baths you hear a round of applause
Maron’s giant prick is bound to be the cause.
(9.33)

Or:

Why poke the ash of a dead fire?
Why pluck the hairs from your grey fanny?
That’s a chic touch that men admire
In girls, not in a flagrant granny…
(10.90)

Sarcasm about his readers

Caedicianus, if my reader
After a hundred epigrams still
Wants more, then he’s a greedy feeder
Whom no amount of swill can fill.
(1.118)

Self portrait in retirement

Poor morning client (you remind me
Of all I loathed and left behind me
In Rome), if you had any nous,
Instead of calling on my house
You’d haunt the mansions of the great.

I’m not some wealthy advocate
Blessed with a sharp, litigious tongue,
I’m just a lazy, far from young
Friend of the Muses who likes ease
And sleep. Great Rome denied me these:
If I can’t find them here in Spain,
I might as well go back again.
(12.68)

---

Credit

The Epigrams of Martial, translated by James Michie with an introduction by Peter Howell, was published by Penguin Books in 1973.

ASTROFELLA

 

Maya C. Popa Interviewed by Mandana Chaffa

The poet on writing about and welcoming the modulations of joy, grief, transcendence, and reckoning.

Dr. Maya C. Popa is the poetry editor for Publishers Weekly, an educator, and an exceptionally generous poetic citizen on social media and elsewhere, with interests as diverse as the classics to the contemporary, across languages and cultures. She’s also an accomplished poet, whose Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton) considers the origins of human pain and how that may lead us to find wonder in our complicated lives. There’s a notable first-person narrative that reflects a thoughtful interiority equally engaged with the world, embracing love despite the certainty of loss.

Nature is as much a character in the poems as is love, and winter and spring are often our companions. In the poem “Prayer” Popa writes: “[…] I swam in perpetual / end of spring knowing no summer could come of it…” In the poem “Year,” these lines stand out:

Any day now, autumn. Winter any day.
I’ve shot my arrow and lived by its arc
and still, the hours won’t acquit.
The first time we met we said goodbye,
then we never stopped saying it.

It’s a beautiful, evocative image, exploring the dualities of endings even on the eves of beginnings. The ending of the collection offers another beginning: “When joy comes, will I be ready, I wonder.” Calling back to the title, this time with “wonder” but no “wound.” It also calls back to one of the epigraphs, from the late Eavan Boland: “If I defer the grief, I will diminish the gift.”

In the same way, though the word “wound” leads in the title, ultimately, wonder surpasses, urging us to look within and without for what will sustain us through the winters of our lives, until the spring. The following are excerpts from our conversation.

—Mandana Chaffa

Mandana Chaffa Since I’ve known you, you’ve lived in different time zones. Can you talk to me a bit about place? Both in these poems, and in your own life, and what that does to and with your creative impulses?

Maya C. Popa I’ve traveled between New York and the UK since 2011, when I began my studies there. Many of the poems in the collection were drafted in England—“Ghost Crabs,” for instance, which thinks about the Atlantic shores of the US, rather curiously came to mind at early dawn in the car from Heathrow into London. “Fife” and “The Scores” are about the stunning, ghostly landscapes of east-central Scotland, while “In the Museum of Childhood” refers to a museum in Edinburgh. “Margravine” is about a London cemetery. “M40” is the motorway linking London and Oxford. The English poetic tradition was invaluable to my early study of poetry. William Shakespeare, John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Philip Larkin. And, of course, there are phenomenal poets writing there today, including Alice Oswald, Zaffar Kunial, Anthony Anaxagarou, Caroline Bird, and Hannah Sullivan, to name only a few.

MC There’s a friction in many of these poems I really respond to. The language you use is lyrical, beautiful, and descriptive. Yet many of the poems also express the most difficult of human emotions: grief, loss, thwarted love. How much were you thinking about that contrast? Was it deliberate or did you see it after the fact, once you had a sheaf of poems?

MCP The contrast is there—I mean, it’s the truth of the matter of our lived experience as one (love, moments of ecstatic joy) guarantees the other (grief, moments of hardship and reckoning). This isn’t at all to say that I’m pessimistic or cynical about the longevity or frequency of happiness or joy in a life, but rather that I’m aware of those modulations. I welcome them, in fact.

Yeats said that “poetry is the clear expression of mixed feeling,” which seems about right to me. I narrowed my focus on mixed feeling, on moments that were luminous while having a sense of loss at the outskirts or edges. Moments that, upon closer examination, suggested more than what was being said outright or that intimated, as Woolf would say, “the unspoken at the edge of the spoken.”

Photo of Maya C. Popa by Bill Wadman.

MC Especially when it comes to poetry collections, I’m curious about when the work was conceived, created, and edited. I have a fascination with how the pandemic has altered our brains, our ways of perceiving. Some of these poems were clearly written after the pandemic, but when considering the entire collection, how does time and history weave its way into your perspective and work?

MCP This collection will, in many ways, always feel tied to the pandemic. I have very vivid memories attached to drafting certain poems. I spent many long afternoons in the grass of Central Park editing “Pestilence,” which contains notes I took daily from the first weeks of the pandemic through the spring.

Other poems were revised on Stratton Mountain in Vermont, where the experience of the pandemic differed starkly from what I had been witness to in NYC. Stratton Mountain was, by comparison, isolated and remote, and being in nature was, as it always is, a balm.

Being at last at ease in my surroundings—being able to take a walk unmasked, for instance—afforded me the clarity I needed to return to drafts I had started before the pandemic. There are no “post-pandemic” poems in the book, really. The majority of the writing came in a compressed period of isolated life, but that had the effect of offering me a larger view.

MC You have more than one poem named “Wound is the Origin of Wonder.” It’s a great title of course, because the reader starts conjecturing and inhabiting the statement before even reading the first line. I know I did. Where did that come from?

You italicize the word Wound, which suggests an emphasis on pain or at least the memory of pain, a scar, and there’s a poem with that title in each of the three sections. Would you talk a bit about that? Also, it goes without saying that I love each iteration, but I keep coming back to this:

A cross-breeze between this life
and the imagined one.
I am stuck in an almost life,
in an almost time.

This feels both grounded in this present moment, yet looking outward, beyond what the eye can see—what the heart may feel—and who is to say which is the imagined life, of course! Each time I read it, I focused on a different aspect. I consider the idea of parallel lives a lot, but this last time, I got stuck on “stuck.” Life on this plane is stuckness, isn’t it? We may have a few moments of transcendence, but we’re affected by gravity, we’re directed by time that only seems to go in one direction, we’ve very little control over anything.

MCP Those lines were drafted in a car within a few weeks of the pandemic shutting down the city. I had been reading in Connecticut (my last in-person reading for over a year), and coming back into Manhattan, I drove against a blinding sunset that made the surrounding highway palette—steel, bridges, bare trees—particularly stark. There were no intimations of spring in sight, and despite the movement of the vehicle, I felt that psychic stuckness that was amplified by the details the poem includes: the litigation signs, the abandoned playground. But, like many, those moments just preceding March 2020 still hold a strange weight, as though in their unsettling detailing, they were prescient. The figurative stuckness became a physical stuckness. I knew spring was around the corner, though of course, not the grief the spring would bring.

MC “Pestilence” is the longest poem in the collection, and because of that there’s a difference sense of time: the time we spend with the words, with the images, with the experience. It also provides the kind of specificity that I think you excel at: pestilence ostensibly is a synonym for plague, but it isn’t the same thing, is it? The way it rolls in the mouth, the sibilance, it feels longer than three syllables, I hear the word silence in it, the word sentence and it feels more disquieting than plague.

MCP You read that title so beautifully, Mandana. Thank you. It was a challenging poem to write; parts of it felt entirely immediate, the lines appearing unbidden throughout the course of the very strange days and weeks that I did not leave my apartment. But it was a difficult poem to wrangle into a sort of shape that exceeded the sum of its parts. It’s an arrangement of glimpses and reflections on the oddities and discomforting psychic landscape of those early weeks of March and April 2020.

Albert Camus’s The Plague is called La Peste in French. The archaic nature of the word pestilence appealed to me, as did the qualities you note above, though I hadn’t consciously noted the affinity with silence, which is apt. Sentence too—quite. I fully believe and defer to the unconscious mind that hears what the poem needs or calls in (that sibilance). If we hold too tightly to the reigns of logic or control, we diminish the possibilities for mystery that, after all, are the truth of the matter, being at the heart of the human experience.

MC Tell us about your new, terrific Substack, Poetry Today. Both the broader aspects of what you’re hoping to be able to expand upon that other venues don’t allow, as well as your doctoral research into wonder and poetry? That combination is endlessly delightful.

MCP Thank you so much for reading my newsletter. I wanted to serialize my research on wonder, partially to debunk the notion that academic research or writing has to be inaccessible or riddled with jargon. That is not the kind of research I wish to write, and I didn’t undertake a PhD to simply move bones from one graveyard to another, as the expression goes. My aim was to find ways to make the writing feel as immediate as the subject of wonder itself, and my approach is often conversational. So, my Wonder Wednesday posts are designed to give readers a short lesson on what philosophers, critics, and writers have said on the subject of wonder over the ages. The posts take only a few minutes to read but will hopefully linger with the reader as the week unfolds.

The rest of the newsletter is devoted to curations of poems and discussions on more practical aspects of writing. It’s a passion of mine, speaking about the setbacks and so-called failures underlying achievements. I’ve been teaching high school and college students for nearly a decade, and I think those conversations are what makes the single greatest difference in how students show up in academic spaces.

We know that our physiologies work in particular ways that either assist or detract from learning, from how we take in information. It is hard to learn when we are anxious or frightened. If getting students, readers, strangers to set aside their shame at not fully understanding and their self-doubt will help them process more, leading to better results, then it is worth establishing that culture up front—one in which our fallible humanness leads, and where pretentions and affects are dismissed for a kind of basic connection and support.

BOMB

Lyuba Yakimchuk / Died of Old Age

 

Died of Old Age

by Lyuba Yakimchuk

granddad and granny passed away
they died on the same day
at the same hour
at the same moment —
people said, they died of old age

their hen met its end
and so did their goat and their dog
(their cat was out)
and people said, they died of old age

their cottage fell apart
their shed turned into ruins
and the cellar got covered with dirt
people said, everything collapsed from old age

their children came to bury the granddad and granny
Olha was pregnant
Serhiy was drunk
and Sonya was only three
they all perished, too
and people said, they died of old age

the cold wind plucked yellow leaves and buried beneath them
the granddad, the granny, Olha, Serhiy and Sonya
who all died of old age


Translated from the Ukrainian by Anatoly Kudryavitsky

---

Від Старості

померли дід і баба
в один день померли
в одну годину
в одну хвилину –
люди говорили, що від старості

здохла їхня курка
їхня коза та собака
(а кішки не було вдома)
і люди говорили, що від старості

розвалилась їхня хата
сарай став руїною
і погріб зверху присипало землею
люди говорили, що від старості розвалились

прийшли їхні діти ховати діда з бабою
Оля була вагітною
Сергій був п’яний
а Соня мала три рочки
і вони теж померли
а люди говорили, що від старості

холодний вітер обірвав жовте листя
і поховав під ним діда, бабу, Олю, Сергія, Соню
які померли від старості

вересень 2014

LYUBA YAKIMCHUK

Lyuba Yakimchuk was born in Pervomaisk, Luhansk oblast, in 1985. She is a Ukrainian poet, screenwriter, and journalist. She is the author of several full-length poetry collections, including Like FASHION and Apricots of Donbas, and the film script for The Building of the Word. Yakimchuk’s awards include the International Slavic Poetic Award and the international “Coronation of the Word” literary contest. Her writing has appeared in magazines in Ukraine, Sweden, Germany, Poland, and Israel. She performs in a musical and poetic duet with the Ukrainian double-bass player Mark Tokar; their projects include Apricots of Donbas and Women, Smoke, and Dangerous Things. Her poetry has been performed by Mariana Sadovska (Cologne) and improvised by vocalist Olesya Zdorovetska (Dublin). Yakimchuk also works as a cultural manager. In 2012, she organized the “Semenko Year” project dedicated to the Ukrainian futurists, and she curated the 2015 literary program Cultural Forum “Donkult” (2015). She was a scholar in the “Gaude Polonia” program of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (Poland). In 2015, Kyiv’s New Time magazine listed Yakimchuk among the one hundred most influential cultural figures in Ukraine.

    
WORDSFORWAR

 

How fake news, hoaxes and humbug are about race

BY COLIN DICKEY

NOV. 9, 2017 8:30 AM PT

In August, PEN Center USA withdrew its prize nomination of John Smelcer’s young-adult novel “Stealing Indians,” citing concerns that Smelcer’s claims to be a member of the Ahtna tribe were fraudulent, and that his writing was, in the words of one critic, “rife with stereotypes and riddled with errors.” As novelist Marlon James asked on a public Facebook post (more or less rhetorically), “Why does this always happen? Why do these people keep making the same stupid mistakes?”

Kevin Young’s new work of nonfiction, “Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News” offers a rich and thorough answer to James’ question. Chronicling the history of such fakers as Smelcer, Young offers a long history of the hoax, beginning with a series of famous humbugs from P. T. Barnum’s sideshow. Barnum began his career by exhibiting a woman named Joice Heith, whom he claimed had once been George Washington’s nanny (putting her age at 161 years old) — an early example in a long line of black Americans put on stage to be gawked at by whites for who they were and, crucially, who they were not.

Barnum’s humbugs set the stage for a long and winding tour of impostors and forgers: from 19th century Spirit photographers like William H. Mumler and Barnum, to Clifford Irving’s hoaxed “Autobiography of Howard Hughes” in the 1970s to recent newspaper fabulists Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, and on and on right up to Rachel Dolezal, who resigned her position at a local NAACP in 2015 when it was revealed she was a white woman who had been portraying herself as black. And while it can be tempting sometimes to see hoaxes as more or less victimless crimes (certainly Barnum thought they were), Young’s litany instead makes clear that there’s far more at stake here.

“Bunk’s” examples demonstrate that again and again, the archetypal hoax involves a white person adopting the posture of a minority figure. In literary (and sometimes literal) blackface, plagiarists ventriloquize voices from the hood that never existed: Margaret Selzer, for example, who renamed herself “Margaret B. Jones” in her fictionalized 2008 memoir “Love and Consequences,” transforming herself into an orphaned half-white, half-Native child raised in South-Central Los Angeles by a black foster family.

Why this persistent need among some white people to imagine themselves as marginalized?

Meanwhile, other whites adopt Asian guises (Michael Derrick Hudson publishing poetry under the name “Yi-Fen Chou”), or claim to have survived the Holocaust, as Swiss Gentile Bruno Grosjean did when he reinvented himself as child Auschwitz survivor Benjamin Wilkomirski in his faked memoir “Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood.” John Smelcer’s deceptions are hardly original in this regard.

Why this persistent need among some white people to imagine themselves as marginalized? Young suggests that these hoaxes, in some way, may be necessary for white supremacy: inevitably, it takes white people pretending to be black, Native American, and Jewish in order to fulfill the stereotypes that white people have about those communities. Take Archibald Belaney, for example, a white Briton who in the 1920s wrote a series of works as Grey Owl, either an Apache or Ojibwe (the story kept changing). Even after he was unmasked, defenders still claimed he was honoring the Native American tradition he was imitating, or that his environmental message was valid even if the messenger was not. But as Young points out, to render Belaney “an environmentalist ahead of his time, or his hoax as somehow honoring Native ways, is to ignore the ways in which Grey Owl’s very ideas of extinction and ‘the Wild’ are tied up not only with each other but also with white stereotypes about Indigenous peoples.”

Just as hoaxes like Jones’ play up ghetto stereotypes, a hoax like Belaney’s stokes “the suspicion that Natives are just fake whites.” The hoax, Young’s examples reveal, “is rather a kind of coded confession, revealing not only a deep-seated cultural wish … not of what’s true but of what we truly believe.”

But it is not just a history of hoaxes Young is after; “Bunk” also offers a tour of the “hoaxing of history”: how the hoax threatens to overwrite actual history in favor of its pablum and nonsense. “The history of the hoax is chiefly the hoaxing of history: a forgery pretending it has one, inevitably better and older than it really is; the plagiarist or impostor or spirit photographer insisting that no history exists except what I say there is.”

When Grosjean’s fabulism was called out, he responded by appending an afterward to “Fragments” stating that while his memoir may bear little connection to actual facts, there was value in it nonetheless — not as fiction but as a true picture of faulty memory. Such spurious contortions do real damage to how we see and understand the world, offering consolation to Holocaust deniers and those who are unwilling to face history as it is.

Young compares a work like “Fragments” to another Holocaust memoir, Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” noting that it, too, involved some deal of artistic license — but that “this is not the same as untruth.” As opposed to hoaxers, artists enlarge, rather than reduce the world: opening up possibility and imagination, breaking stereotypes rather than embodying them. “The hoax,” Young writes, “is the very absence of truth, which usually means art is absent too — hoaxes regularly substitute claims of reality for imagination, facts for form, acting as if artifice is the antithesis of art…. Besides the cost to truth, and to lived and lost lives, a collateral yet not insignificant cost is to the idea of fiction.” A hoaxer takes the strange and wondrous world and reduces it to pre-packaged goods, because the hoaxer knows they’re easy to swallow that way. By not risking anything new, “hoaxes actually diminish experience as not big enough to sustain us.”

Young is perhaps better known as a poet, his most recent collection “Blue Laws” was longlisted for the National Book Award, and he was named poetry editor of the New Yorker earlier this year. “Bunk,” like his previous nonfiction book “The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness,” which won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize in 2012, is long, overstuffed with anecdote and argument, a stylistic counterpoint to his spare, minimalist poetry. Its 477 some pages (plus another hundred of notes and sources) may seem daunting to some readers, but it’s a wild, incisive, exhilarating tour through Western culture’s sideshows and dark corners. Like a sideshow barker, Young writes with unbridled enthusiasm, a showman’s conviction, and a carny’s canny, telling a story that at times defies belief.

And every word of it is true.

Dickey is the author, most recently, of “Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places.”

“Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News”

Kevin Young

Graywolf: 480 pp., $30

LOS ANGELES TIMES