festival procession with Bacchus, by Freytag

‘Festal Flourish’: Translation of a Poem by Tibullus, by Margaret Coats

The Society

July 27, 2024

Beauty, Poetry, Translation

24 Comments

24 Responses

1. 

   Roy Eugene Peterson July 27, 2024

   As one who has worked in three other languages, I am constantly amazed by someone like you who finds an ancient manuscript, selects it for translation, and provides such beautifully written lines. My mother majored in English and Latin in her university, and I know she would have loved to read this. You may remember my thoughts about poetry that does not rhyme; however, such a skilled translation like yours is better and stronger without forcing words to rhyme in English, although from my limited observations there was little to rhyme in the original. These is such beauty in your choice of words that I just had to praise your work regardless,

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     Margaret Coats July 29, 2024

     Thank you so much, Roy! The beautifully written lines correspond to those of Tibullus, and he allows me English word choices that I hope would please him. The choice of a poem to translate is crucial to success. The translator needs to love it and be challenged by it. I am very glad to hear your mother, like yourself, would have enjoyed reading this one. You are correct that the Latin lines don’t rhyme, and there’s not much potential for rhyme while preserving the meaning.

     There is plenty of rhyming poetry in Latin, especially Church Latin. Artistic fashions change. Tibullus is a Roman Golden Age poet, and because that era is high on aesthetic charts, people sometimes consider its practices most natural and suitable for Latin verse. Later medieval poetry may be thought vulgar and decadent–but Father Joseph Connelly, a splendid scholar who knew Latin poetry of the ages right up to our own, denies this unequivocally. And he supports the natural quality of rhyme in Latin by sturdily declaring that the very first Latin poems rhymed. It’s quite easy to rhyme grammatical endings.

     You saw and liked (thanks again) one of the most artistically elaborate Latin sequences, which I consider a masterpiece of the Middle Ages–and written by a backwater Englishman!

     https://classicalpoets.org/2023/10/05/with-a-smile-of-the-heart-circa-1200-translated-by-margaret-coats/

     Latin contributes inestimably to all the languages deriving from it or (like English) borrowing heavily from it. I’m glad you found fine poetry in this piece even without rhyme, though I’ll agree with you that it’s a beauty we shouldn’t leave aside without very good reason.

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2. 

   Cynthia Erlandson July 27, 2024

   This is such flowingly beautiful blank verse, with so many lovely phrases, such as “When earth lets down her yearly flaxen hair” (which reminds me of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “The Sheaves”, in which are the lines, “As if a thousand girls with golden hair / Might rise from where they slept, and go away.”)

   The phrase “plows devoutly pause”, as well as the lush description of this day of rest and celebration, seem to echo humanity’s universal need to have a festival sabbath rest, in honor of a power higher than ourselves (“Let everything be occupied with god”) — “the sacred lamb”, for many of us.

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     Margaret Coats July 30, 2024

     Thank you, Cynthia. I’ve been interested in comparative religion since college, and I treasure this poem as a picture of early Roman religion. Tibullus is not an early writer, but from the beginning of this elegy, he displays a backward-looking perspective, telling us that the ritual he describes comes down from ancestors. Even more during the course of the work, he speaks of how festival customs first came about. And yes, he definitely speaks of important universal practices honoring deities–with rest from labor, personal purity, and the requirement for all to take some part in observances. There is not just a recognition of a higher power, but a realization that human beings depend on that power for life and happiness and civilization. The sacred lamb clearly reveals the sacrificial aspect of these rites. The poet even includes “Sunday best” in prescribing festival attire! Glad you found my flow and phrases as beautiful as I found the Latin.

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3. 

   Monika Cooper July 27, 2024

   Thoroughly enjoyable and fascinating on a first read. I am trying to place the season, with grapes and grain, but also plowing: some early harvest? The liturgical blessing of the fields looks backward and forward in time. I love especially the lines about “Minerva’s work” (“artful turns of thumb!”) and the “furtive girl” guided by Eros. This poem comes at us glowing from the real world, the perma-world one might say, the one we’re so often at risk of forgetting in the unrealities of the modern. Beautiful minor ending on the note of “uncertainty” (on which neither moderns nor post-moderns have monopoly).

   Congratulations on your prize for this work of translation. It’s wonderful!

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     Margaret Coats August 1, 2024

     Monika, thank you for your comments and questions! I quite agree that it is impossible to assign a single season to this poem. The festival described is sometimes identified as Ambarvalia (later May), but the account by Tibullus varies a great deal from what is otherwise known about it. With his contradictory allusions to various times of year, I get a feeling that the poet was reflecting on customs in his own locality to create a significant georgic poem, rather than outlining exactly how festival observances happened. It does, however, start with a call to agricultural fertility rites.

     Here’s my outline:

     Lines 1-26 tell about the festival, and how to behave and what to expect, ending with a hopeful view of good omens.

     Next ten lines takes a break for festive drinking and praise of the poet’s patron. These date the poem after Messalla’s exploits in Aquitania in 30 BC. There is a touching appeal to the absent patron to be near Tibullus and even sing with him.

     The next 30 lines are the heart of the poem, telling how the rural gods have helped country folk in their many-faceted culture. I start by translating “Rura cano rurisque deos” as “The country and its rural gods I sing,” suggesting Vergil’s “Arma virumque cano” (“Arms and the man I sing”) to begin the Aeneid. These poems were being written in the same era.

     The last portion considers Cupid–who must have been born in the country! After acknowledging him, it then moves to complete the poem by taking up the opening theme, implying the festival day ends with dancing and (maybe) love and (definitely) sleep. These people are practical farmers who need to care for herds; thus the final scene is not a communal fertility orgy–though the poet suggests it will be sensuous for some who succumb to Cupid’s flames. Realistic touch.

     You are right, Monika, about the ending on a minor note of uncertainty. Agricultural and personal outcomes ever depend on higher powers. And you are also correct about the Roman poet portraying the perma-world, with the festival representing activities in sacred time that try to turn the real world of conscious participants into a propitious sacred place.

     Thanks too for congratulations on the translation prize. Completing translation of an extensive ancient classical lyric was a self-satisfying prize to myself!

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       Monika Cooper August 5, 2024

       “When Chris and Hurley arrived at the Ritz to see Hilda they found her admiring an enormous bunch of flowers of every conceivable kind, in season and out of season.”

       This sentence from a book I just read (Muriel Spark, Symposium) brought to mind “Festal Flourish” and its jubilee jumbling of the temperate seasons. I will have to admire it all over again.

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       Margaret Coats August 6, 2024

       Thanks again, Monika. I never managed to finish “The Mandelbaum Gate,” but I hope you found “Symposium” a poetic novel. I’ve heard Dame Muriel said writing novels was a lazy way of producing poetry.

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       Monika Cooper August 6, 2024

       That’s hilarious. I do have the impression that some of the best novelists are “failed” poets.

       “The Mandelbaum Gate” is my absolute favorite of Sparks’s novels but I’ve come to realize it’s not for everyone. For me, Spark is usually somewhat difficult to find rapport with. “Symposium” was an exception to that (but it was no Mandelbaum Gate either).

4. 

   Warren Bonham July 28, 2024

   Unlike Roy, I don’t know any other languages so I can only guess at how difficult a task it was to produce this poem that stands on its own and does not in any way feel like it was forced. Someday, two thousand years from now, when a gifted multi-lingual poet selects which of the many poems from our day that deserve to be translated into whatever language they will be speaking, yours deserve to be on the top of the list.

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     Margaret Coats August 1, 2024

     Thank you so very much for that opinion, Warren, especially because this one is itself a translation. I felt a certain affinity with the Roman poet and gave his work my best effort. His original is already 2000 years old, and has earned different versions in many languages. Translations need updating as the language used by the translator passes out of currency, but my mostly formal and careful work here may last a while!

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5. 

   Brian A. Yapko July 28, 2024

   Thank you, Margaret, for this splendid translation of a Roman poet I do not know. I’m intrigued by your work — and his — on many levels. First, the poetry itself is charming, entertaining and informative. Your blank verse and your use of language and imagery are stellar. I imagine blank verse was the most respectful option for keeping fidelity to the original. Now how does that blank verse compare to the Tibullus original? What was standard in terms of meter and structure for this type of poetry? Also, I notice that you divide your translation into multiple stanzas but that the original was not so divided. Is this to assist the reader in terms of keeping focused on subject matter or is there a deeper reason for this poetic choice?

   I’m also very intrigued by the sociology and theology of the poem. You give us a fascinating window into the thinking of the late Roman Republic and the early Roman Empire. There are so many gods referenced — Bacchus, Ceres, Eros, that country boy and his Lares. How scattered must have been the thoughts that went into festival worship — who to appease, who was favorite, etc. Notwithstanding that interesting window into the mind, this is a fun poem full of the joys of harvest, productivity and procreative pleasures. I especially like the transition from the “whoops and gallops” to the dreams’ uncertainty. There is indeed a sense of uncertainty in the spirit behind the poem. In worship throughout the ages, answers and certainty are hoped for. That hasn’t changed. That humanity shared with a poet 2000 years old is what gives this poem its greatest charm.

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     Margaret Coats August 3, 2024

     Brian, thank you for your richly inquisitive comments and for the praise of my work. Tibullus wrote in elegiac couplets, which in Latin are pairs of a dactylic hexameter line with a dactylic pentameter one. Meter is based on quantity of vowels rather than on accent, and this is too complex to explain here. Suffice it to say that I hear sixes and fives as I read the Latin, but because the translation must be an elegant equivalent in English, the choices come down to blank verse or heroic couplets or abab quatrains as in the English poem I find most comparable, which is Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard. I decided against hexameter/pentameter couplets in English because I have written English hexameters, but they are neither as smooth nor as full as Tibullus deserves. Rhyming heroics or quatrains take away much of the freedom to translate very precisely, so blank verse is best.

     But as you see with my line spaces, Tibullus does often compose in four-line units of meaning. The lines spaces separate his content in easy-to-read portions. As you can see from what I wrote to Monika Cooper above, I find three or four main parts to this finished and polished poem, but I think they’re better subdivided.

     I too find the theology and sociology intriguing. It is one poet’s answer to how Romans lived out the most significant portions of their existence before Christ changed the world. As Joseph Salemi notes below, the gods were those important to rustic religion. They had showed ancestors how to live, and this festival was an important means of imploring them to continue their favor. As you say, there is both ritual and pleasure–and everyone is responsible for appropriate acts. No one enforces the prohibition of sexual relations the night before the festival, but you can imagine what might happen if the harvest turns out to be a poor one, and the community wonders whether anyone caused that by failure to maintain the required ritual purity.

     As you also say, human beings seek certainty in an uncertain world. These Roman country folk could look back to their ancestors for guidance in doing whatever they honestly could to assure themselves prosperity and happiness.

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     Margaret Coats August 3, 2024

     With regard to theology, there are gods named and unnamed, as if they and their powers could be noticed everywhere, But the god who gets the most attention is Cupid or Amor or the “holy one” whom I give the Greek name Eros. The festival honors principally the great gods of earth, Ceres and Bacchus, who provide food and drink. Cupid, though, is the only one with three names and many lines. He’s also the focus of complaint, because of his uncontrollable attacks on old and young, male and female. I think the loveliest line in the poem is the one I’ve translated, “Happy one on whom Love lightly breathes.” So many are oppressed by miseries of love–and yet he is a “holy one” who can be implored to put aside his arrows and flames, and bring banquets instead.

     One bit of sociology that I decided to translate precisely is that about the slave children. I could have just pointed to children as good signs of wealth, but a word there specifically means “slaves born in one’s household.” Who of us would write an original poem about slavery without condemning it? We would certainly not look on the possession of slave children as a positive good; this would regard the institution as acceptable in the long term. Yet this is how things were in the Roman Golden Age. It was still a long while before Saint Paul, accepting the institution, begged Philemon to free a slave out of Christian charity, and recognize him as a brother.

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6. 

   Joseph S. Salemi July 28, 2024

   It’s not easy translating a poet like Tibullus. His Latin is smooth, highly polished, and “terse and elegant” as the critic Quintilian says, calling him the best of the Roman writers of elegiac meter. A similarly elevated style of English is required to do justice to him, and Margaret certainly pulls it off here.

   Normally a Latin poem will take less space on the page than its English equivalent, due to the high level of inflection in Latin. But here Margaret uses exactly ninety lines of English to give us the ninety lines of the original, with very little sacrifice of detail. That is very tough to do!

   English iambic pentameter blank verse is perfectly proper for this translation of elegiac couplets, since iambic fives are standard in formal English poetry, and there are no rhymed endings in the Latin text. Dividing the translation up into smaller sections by line spacing is also a good idea, simply to allow for ease in reading on the page.

   This is a wonderful poem of older rustic Roman religion (not so much the official Olympian gods), and its intimate connection with the earth and agriculture. Venus, Minerva, Cupid, Ceres, and Bacchus are mentioned, but should not be thought of as their Hellenic counterparts. The poem is about labor, ritual, celebration, the abundance of a good harvest, deserved rest, and feasting.

   There is one typo in the Latin: in line 89, “circimdatus” should be “circumdatus.”

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     Margaret Coats August 4, 2024

     Thank you, Joe, especially for finding the style of the translation suitable in qualities for which Tibullus was recognized. You are right that blank verse is better than any outlandish attempt to render Latin quantitative meter in accentual English. I did, however, find that I could easily work couplet by couplet, and this is how I managed to have an equal number of lines in translation and original. There is just a little sacrifice of detail where the Latin could have been explained more fully, but there is also a slight padding of lines when a couplet was light on content. Tibullus allowed this procedure because he too manages content largely by two or four lines. In my line-spaced sections where there are odd numbers of lines, it is often because the Roman poet spilled over matter for one couplet into the next. This reminds me of the practice of Dryden and Pope in heroic couplets, where these English masters occasionally allow themselves rhymed triplets rather than rhymed couplets.

     Thank you for noticing the typo. I finally have the leisure to get our moderator to correct it.

     Very, very much appreciate your time and attention to this long work, as you may be the only one reading it here who has the ability to go from Latin to English and judge the quality of translation, in addition to giving a feel for the original.

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     Margaret Coats August 4, 2024

     Forgot to say that I chose the Greek name “Eros” as a near rhyme with English “arrows” because, though Tibullus doesn’t use it, he might have–if he had been able to make the same kind of wordplay. Literate persons in his time were certainly familiar with Greek to some degree, and he may well have read and appreciated Greek elegiac couplets before writing these.

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7. 

   Margaret Coats July 28, 2024

   Many thanks to all of you who have taken the time and effort to respond to this long classic! You’ve brought up questions the poem leads you to ask. I look forward to telling Roy about rhymed and unrhymed beauty in Latin, to reflecting with Cynthia on natural religion and grace that builds on nature, to explaining to Monika why I think there are many seasons in this piece, to speaking with Warren about timelessness in the poem, to discussing with Brian the form and the charm of Tibullus, and to appreciating specifically all Joe has to say on what the translation achieves.

   When I got the news about the Classical Association prize for translation, along with a note that the original poems I had submitted were also “well received,” I felt as if I had won a Double First (British name for highest honours in two areas). No such thing was allowed in the competition, but I’m satisfied that my “Festal Flourish” is a triumph of effort in a longer and more serious work than I’d yet done.

   Thank you as well to others who may say something when they’ve had time to read and think!

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8. 

   Maria July 29, 2024

   Dear Margaret , congratulations on your more than well deserved success.
   I have had to take time to read the English translation and even look up some of the words. It reads so well I had to keep reminding myself it is a translation
   and that it was originally written by someone else in another time. I don’t know if I can adequately express how that felt but I will have a go.
   It felt as if it was a brief but very vivid sojourn in a Time Machine!
   I always wish whenever I read your work that you might have been my teacher or mentor. What an amazing role model you are. You have rekindled a long lost interest in classical literature that I used to have but never pursued.
   Instead I did an MA in Education with the Open University whilst working and bringing up a family. It was a good exercise for me , it required a lot of work but I consider it pointless in substance.
   Thank you for showcasing what real education is. You and quite a few other Americans here do your country proud.

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     Margaret Coats August 5, 2024

     Thank you, Maria, I’m happy to give you and others an opportunity to travel back about 2000 years by way of this poem. The vividness belongs mostly to Tibullus, and I think it is long experience of poetry (in school and on my own) that enables me to bring it from one language to another. But just as you had to look up some words to fully appreciate my work, I had to think about the Latin words and expressions to become thoroughly familiar with them.

     You’ve been able to move (I suppose) from modern Greek to English, and I think first learning a foreign language needs to take a long time with a lot of loving attention, in order to get a feeling for what language itself can do. I started with French when I was 12, studying it through high school and in college. I was able to go on quickly to Italian, then to earlier forms of English. Learning the ancient classical languages is a major step and a different process. In my last year of college, I chose Greek, and I was most fortunate that Professor James Day pushed us into reading while we learned grammar and vocabulary. A mentor makes a difference, and because of his method I was able to study Latin on my own that summer, then take Latin literature courses in graduate school.

     You are right that this kind of education is very different from classes in education that may focus on child psychology and how to run a classroom. As you say, they have a certain value, but the real preparation for teaching and writing is to know your subject as well as you possibly can. You may think of your master’s degree as “pointless in substance” because it added little to your stock of learning.

     Still, we all have things to do in life beyond learning. I was in the military for three years, and like yourself, I brought up a family. Because I homeschooled my children, I had to learn more along with them. It wasn’t until they went to college that I could devote myself to poetry and translation.

     Classical literature is still there for you to pursue. Read translations for pleasure, and satisfy that long lost interest!

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9. 

   Daniel Kemper August 3, 2024

   Late to the party. Ug. Still, I want to toss my appreciation on the heap already laid out. I’m particularly captured by your note about the importance of selecting a piece: the art, wisdom, intuition that go in before the obvious work are all key.

   Question (maybe for later): How do you, in the process of translation select the size of the chunk that you are matching with the original? (Matching isn’t the best word, but hopefully the gist carries.

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10. 

    Margaret Coats August 6, 2024

    Welcome to the party at any time! I’ve been in and out myself. The question about the amount of poem to translate while looking closely at the original is not one I’ve thought of before, but it’s easy to answer. It depends! I have to know the entire poem (but maybe not every nuance) and keep that in mind as I translate. When rhyming, one perforce works line by line, while holding in mind anything important that didn’t get into the line where it belonged. Those ideas can often be brought in elsewhere. Here where there is no rhyming, I rely on the dimensions used by the original author. It is quite obvious that Tibullus was working in couplets. That’s a comfortable chunk. Stanzas or other formal sections make good guides to convenient chunks, though some longer stanza forms need to be divided. French ballade stanzas can often be split where the rhyme scheme adds another sound. One thing I never do is to make a prose translation, pulling out all the ideas, and then try to versify it. That, to me, is an additional step that takes the translator too far from the original. He’s working with his own prose rather than another poet.

    You, Daniel, may wonder about the dactylic meter of this poem in couplets of a hexameter line plus a pentameter line. If I had tried to reproduce quantitative dactyls with English accentual meter, there would have been more syllables than content. As it is, with iambs, there are about 20 syllables per couplet. Nearly all the content was covered. With dactyls, the count would have been 33 syllables per couplet. Even allowing some space for the constraints of accentual dactyls, there would have been more space than meaning, requiring a lot of word padding. With your dactylic skill, the rhythm could have been pleasing, but the longer lines might risk sounding inflated or pompous to readers. I have tried exact reproduction of the meter in a canzone of Petrarch’s Italian hendecasyllables. This requires a lot of double rhymes in feminine endings. It did give a little more of the flavor of Italian to the piece, but was not entirely successful in English.

    Great party conversazione!

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11. 

    Tom Rimer September 30, 2024

    Margaret — I much enjoyed my first foray into classical Roman verse. My own personal experience and affection in reading poetry have largely been in the areas of haiku, modern Japanese poetry, and 20th century American and British poetry (I suppose T.S. Eliot is still the poet I most admire and profit from). So, at least by temperament, I am ill-prepared, both in terms of background knowledge and emotional sympathy, to respond to Tibullus. So your sprightly English version, when carefully read, has brought to me a new and genuine pleasure. Congratulations!

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      Margaret Coats October 3, 2024

      Thank you, Tom! I’m glad to know the translation is capable of drawing another excellent and appreciative reader to the Roman poet. The prize for it from The Classical Association of professionals in Greek and Latin studies, and other persons passionately interested in classics, was unexpected, but as you can imagine from your own experience, gratefully welcomed.

      Reply

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