THE COMPLETE ELEGIES OF SEXTUS PROPERTIUS
(Princeton University Press, 2004)
Translated, with an introduction and notes, by Vincent Katz

Review by Michael LALLY

I only remember three things from my schoolboy Latin, learned in Catholic schools of the 1950s. First, Caesar’s famous lines “Veni vidi vici”, (“I came I saw I conquered”).  Second, Mad magazine mascot Alfred E. Newman’s motto rendered in schoolboy Latin: “Quid Me (pronounced “may”) Vexari?” (“What me worry?”). And third, what I was taught by one of my Latin teachers was the shortest poem ever written, “Odi et amo”, (“I hate and I love”), by Catullus—although it turns out that’s only the first line of a slightly longer poem, and definitely not the shortest poem ever written.

But that wouldn’t have been the only obvious omission in the Latin lessons I endured throughout my Catholic high school years. For not much later, in the 1960s, a new translation appeared of Catullus’s poems (in the Penguin paperback series) containing all the unbridled bisexual lust of his odes to women and boys, startling me, and many others I’m sure, into a re-evaluation of everything we’d learned in Latin classes.

But since the ‘60s there’s been little to disturb the complacency that classic Latin texts have fallen back into—until now. With the publication of Vincent Katz’s translations of the complete elegies of Sextus Propertius, we are given a new jolt out of our old ideas about our common history.

The raw sexuality of the 1960s version of Catullus became a necessary part of a general sexual awakening of the time, a recognition of what had been repressed for many decades in our culture, the reality that lust has always been a strong component of not only human creation and creativity and recreation, but honesty about how that common human drive can liberate and humanize what had been up to then often criminalized.

The elegies of Sextus Propertius are full of expressions of his own lust, though more romantically expressed than Catullus’s, but it is the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, anti-war message inherent in Propertius’s elegies that is as equally necessary to our times as the exposure of the sexuality of Catullus was in the 1960s.

If everyone agreed to sail through life like this,
laying down their limbs, hammered from plenty of unmixed wine,
the cruel iron and the fighting ship would not exist,
nor would the Actian sea toss our bones,

and Rome, attacked on many fronts, would not be so often exhausted
from letting down her hair in victories over her own.
My descendants will justifiably be able to praise these acts:
our cups have offended no gods.
                                                                     (Book 2, Poem 15, lines 41-48)

The sexual liberation experienced in the 1960s has since been co-opted and corporatized into just another capitalist fetish, whereas the anti-war spirit of the 1960s has been repressed and demonized and even criminalized, much like sex had been before the ‘60s.

To see, through these brilliant translations, the connection between an ancient war-centered culture, in which aggression and violence were justified by the state and the powers that be, and opposition to that was belittled and dismissed and even destroyed, much as we are experiencing in our own country today, is to be enlightened in ways that are much needed now.

The secret to the vitality of these translations is Katz’s ability to make the unfamiliar seem familiar, much as in a possible influence on his tone and even some of the language in these translations, the poet Frank O’Hara’s references to obscure art and writing and personalities were made familiar by his tone and persona.

Father Mars, and the fateful lamps of holy Vesta,
may that day arrive, I pray, before my death,
when I may see Caesar’s axles weighed down with spoils,
the horses pausing frequently to the crowd’s applause,
and lying in my girlfriend’s lap, may I watch
and read the names of captured towns on placards…
Let them have their reward, whose labors earned it:
for me it will be enough to be allowed to applaud on the Via Sacra.

                                                                      (Book 3, Poem 4, lines 11-22)

Katz has taken the best of what is post-modern about contemporary poetry and melded it with straightforward literalness when necessary to create a combination that is at once classic and contemporary, learned and completely accessible. In fact, he has created a new classic, and just in time.


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