When in Rome

1. The Satires of Horace, translated by A.M. Juster

Horace, the First Century BC poet (not the First Century BCE poet, mind), is not as well known as his contemporary, Virgil, and for good reason.  Virgil is much better, which is undoubtedly why Virgil gets to be Dante’s guide (though they do meet Horace hanging out with Homer in the afterlife).  The Satires are a mixed bag.  The satire here is the imitation of a lofty poetic style in poems about the most mundane facts of life—it is akin to reading a play in the style of Shakespeare all about a trip to Wal-Mart. (But, soft, what light in yonder isle breaks?/  It is reflection of fluorescent lights/ On shining purple plastic bottles/ Encasing products used by Lily/ To brighten up her hair.)  (Yeah, the meter and rhythm are all wrong, and there is no Shakespearean echo after the first line, but you get the point—well actually you may have missed the primary point that this is the sort of thing Horace does in noting the secondary point that I have no ability to write a decent line of verse—but let’s pretend that you got the primary point and move along asserting “there is nothing to see here, folks.”)  Now translating something like Horace is a bit of a trick, since the whole point of the satire hinges on the epic form coupled with humdrum matter.  Juster does it by going with heroic couplets (rhymed iambic pentameter).  It works pretty well, though some of the satires are much better than others.  There is a regular return to a self-deprecating manner that works well—this from Satire 4 in Book 1:

Come listen to a bit of my reply:

to start with, I do not identify

myself as a real poet.  You’d opine

that it is not enough to write a line

in meter, and a person such as me

who writes a chatty sort of poetry

could never be regarded in your eyes

as a real poet. You would recognize

a person who is brilliant, with a mind

that is far more inspired and the kind

of voice that resonates.  Based on that thought,

some doubted whether comic verses ought

to count as verse because they can’t convey

great force and energy in what they say

or how they say it.  Though arranged in feet

(unlike prose) that incessantly repeat,

it’s still just prose.      

                        “And yet the father raves

because his spendthrift son who madly craves

his slutty girlfriend doesn’t take a deal

to marry for a dowry that’s unreal,

and shames himself by marching drunk through town

with torches though the sun is not yet down.”

If you find that sort of thing witty, then you’ll like Horace.  I like the abrupt example of a silly plot to illustrate the point just being made.  Is something like that good poetry?  Indeed, is it poetry at all?  That is an interesting question, and obviously one that has been debated for literally a few thousand years.  It’s related to the problem of witty verse in general—it is much out of fashion in today’s age of the Poetry of Angst—well actually the Age is worse than that—let’s call it the Age of Prose of Angst Written in Broken Lines Having thus the Appearance But Not the Substance of the Poetry of Angst.  I come down on the side of it being poetry, and good poetry at that, but then I like Comic Verse.

2. William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

T.S. Eliot said this is better than Hamlet  Coriolanus is one of the Roman plays—taking place long before Julius Caesar.  Coriolanus was a great general, who was about to become head of all Rome, but he hated the commoners—well, hated them may understate his feelings a bit.  And in a  bit of “what were you thinking?” he doesn’t bother to hide his feelings, the commoners run him out of town, he joins up with Rome’s biggest foe, marches on Rome, and then things go really bad for him.  True story—right out of Plutarch.  Shakespeare rips it off and wrote a pretty good play.  But, then that’s what Shakespeare does better than anyone.  What I can’t figure out is why this play is not more widely read—I can’t see anything in it that makes it significantly worse than Julius Caesar, and I like it much better than Antony and Cleopatra (which has the lowest ratio of all Shakespeare’s work in (How much I like it) divided by (How much well-read people in general like it)—I really don’t like Antony and Cleopatra—I find it quite dull (yes, this is certainly a critical failing on my part, but even still...).)  Anyway, if you have never read Coriolanus, indulge yourself some evening.