Why Roman Poets In Modern Guise? Reception Of Roman Poets Since World War I

Abstract

Why Roman Poets In Modern Guise? Reception Of Roman Poets Since World War I THEODORE ZIOLKOWSKI Nietzsche once remarked that translations provide a key to a society’s values. “One can appraise the degree of historical sense that an age possesses by how that age makes translations and seeks to incorporate past ages and books into itself” (La gaya scienza, bk. 2, §83).1 It might be argued that his observation applies a fortiori to adaptations, which unlike translations belong to the very substance of a writer’s oeuvre, offering alternative identities—masks or personae in Ezra Pound’s vocabulary—as a vehicle for the expression of different aspects of the writer’s personality. Indeed, one might well claim that without a knowledge of the classics we are unable fully to grasp or appreciate the achievement of many modern poets in different national literatures —from Ezra Pound to Raoul Schrott, from Paul Valéry to Durs Grünbein. Even writers in whose works the classics play a less predominant role—Thomas Mann, for instance —classical allusions often have a surprising relevance. Reception and adaptation of the classics is to a considerable extent a generational phenomenon. Writers educated in the first half of the twentieth century, when Greek and Latin still commanded a central position in American and European schools and colleges—Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Allen Tate, W. H. Auden, Rudolf Alexander Schröder, Bertolt Brecht, André Gide, Julien Benda—took the classics for granted, and received their training as a routine component of secondary and higher education, often as classics majors in college or university. They belonged to a generation for whom the classics , as E. H. Gombrich reminisced, had still been “profoundly arion 25.2 fall 2017 assimilated into the tradition of general knowledge.”2 Around the time of World War II the situation changed. “We are the first generation of poets not to study Latin,” observed Donald Hall (born 1928).3 Some writers of his and later generations, to be sure, such as Francesco Vagni in Italy and Raoul Schrott in Austria, and notably the novelists of Catullus—W. G. Hardy (The City of Libertines, 1957), Pierson Dixon (Farewell, Catullus, 1953), Benita Kane Jaro (The Key, 1988), Cornelius Hartz (Excrucior, 2008)—and Petronius —Volker Ebersbach (Der Schatten eines Satyrs, 1985), David Wishart (Nero, 1996), and Luis Antonio de Villena (La nave de los muchachos griegos, 2005)—studied classics, took degrees, and often taught in that field. Others, such as Durs Grünbein, got at least some Latin in secondary school and, while not pursuing it systematically, were motivated for various reasons to return to the classics. New York poet Estelle Gilson, who produced lively adaptations of Juvenal’s satires,4 reports that she was introduced to Juvenal by her husband, who was well read in the classics;5 James Wright came under the influence of John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College; Donald Hall found in Horace the paradigm both for his practice of obsessive revision and for his discursive poems; Robert Pinsky devoted himself to the translation of Dante, whose own indispensable mentor was Virgil; Joseph Brodsky, even though he repeatedly claimed his Latin “stinks,” read Horace’s odes in bed at night.6 Even in the less classically oriented society and culture of the late twentieth century these writers, and others who depended heavily on translations, appreciated the value of the Roman model and used it in their writing. why this often compelling obsession with the Roman past? It is grounded in the Rome analogy that has long dominated the national consciousness in the United States and often in Europe.7 Initially the analogy arose from the belief, still prevalent in the poems of Allen Tate and the Southern Agrarians , that the westering trend of civilization and culture—the why roman poets in modern guise? 16 translatio imperii—that began in Troy and moved with Aeneas to Rome, then continued its trajectory and arrived with the earliest settlers in America. The concept of Romanitas that was common in France and Italy had much the same effect in those countries. (In Germany, dominated since the eighteenth century by what E. M. Butler termed “the tyranny of Greece...