11 Comments

I’m reading in between many tasks during Thanksgiving prep, but I wanted to let you know how much I appreciate your scholarship!

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Thank you Zina and I empathise! I wrote this around making and icing a birthday cake for my eldest.

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Here’s Basil Bunting’s version - an ‘overdraft’, not a strict translation - unpublished in his lifetime:

Like a fawn you dodge me, Molly,

a lost fawn.

A breath of wind scares her.

Leaves rustle, or a rabbit

stirs, and her heart flutters,

her knees quiver.

But it’s me chasing you, Molly,

not a tiger, not to tear you.

Let mother go,

you’re old enough for a man.

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Thanks Harry! In an early draft of this post I included the Latin and in fact precisely this translation, but in the end I thought the piece was probably long enough already. Glad to have it in the comments though thank you.

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I presented it with some trepidation - it isn’t exactly the cosiest of love poems!

By the by, I noticed that the Jonson IV.i - which I did not know, thank you - preserves the vocative ‘Ligurine’, making it look almost like a feminine ending/name. I was struck, in a reverse manner, by the gender ambiguity in Bunting’s ‘Molly’…

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Yes, very many early modern translations of Horace do this -- make the erotic poems addressed to boys either ambiguous in their address or outright switch it to a female name. I don't read 'Molly' as ambiguous re: gender though, I've only ever heard it for a girl. Interesting that you did not have this impression. Odes 1.23 is indeed certainly not a cosy poem, I wouldn't personally describe it as a love poem at all, but then I wouldn't call *any* of Horace's erotic odes love poems to be honest. I think I wrote briefly before about the edge of predation which is quite marked in both Horace and Bunting's erotic verse.

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I have once seen it the other way round too -- a version of Horace Odes 4.11, to Phyllis, addressed to a male friend ('Phil'). Quite funny and tender!

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The sophistication of this analysis, and its tangents, is a pleasure. It may be possible, and I am not sure, that a response as a "reader" that is not strictly personal, or is personal, but is "universally" personal if I might put it that way, may "trump", if I dare use that word, a critical analysis, which can only later hope to understand that initial emotion, but not relive it. Having said this, the critical function is also vital, so lone as it does not later kill the living thing!

This reminds me, if I might add this here, of a famous European poet living in America - his name escapes me at the moment. One day he found a book of the Odes of Horace in a book shop, I believe in New York. This was quite a few years ago, and the book was published originally in about 1900, though this was a reprint. The poems were only in Latin, though the introduction was in English. According to the poet telling the story, somewhere in the introduction, in 1900, the writer wrote something like, "I won't go into detail here about the poems themselves, as generations of schoolboys know them by heart." Of course, this kind of intimate knowledge was only for the few, but still, imagine having access to all that, and more in Latin, Greek, and perhaps English poetry, or classical poetry from any tradtition, or several, in one's head and heart, both to live with, and as models to negotiate with and rethink for one's own time. That's rare today, and should be less so.

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What a wonderful poem by Ben Jonson. I've just read it out loud, and it's very moving by the end.

I enjoyed this post: you are your best, ranging over contemporary French poetry, Horace, and Ben Jonson, and the bible in French...we don't know quite what's coming next (yes, where WAS the sanskrit this time, for goodness sake), and I love that.

Also, much better than posts making sweeping dismissals of contemporary poetry in English...though that one started with a paragraph like a manifesto that I did like.

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I enjoyed learning about Gerard Bocholier. In one of those private, not-meaningful associations you write about, I think of Volubilis, famous Roman ruins in Morocco, always sun-drenched. By coincidence Volubilis in Roman times was an area of viticulture too, and the scent of jasmine (a twisting vine, though I think not technically convolvulus) hanging over the place is very strong.

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Thanks again for Gerard Bocholier. The haunting gaps in his poems, and your personal insights into the reading process across life and languages, reminds me of the validity of Wolfgang Iser’s reader response theory, and the importance of reception theory more generally. Hesitancy and indeterminacy are so present in literature that they should be part of our sense of what reading is too.

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