435 I am not in love (Poems of Exile)

      I am not in love

A certain someone (if you would believe it) is in love with me,

not only a little, She dies of love: she is consumed.

And thus, she will grant me favours I shouldn’t ask –

I would show her love always, but believe me:  I am not in love.

Perhaps Seneca can offer an antidote to too much chocolate and excessive sweetness?

x

239 Well, look at Xerxes! (Poems of Exile)

It is far too long since I've posted one of my 'translations' of Seneca.  Remember, if you have been set a translation task, my Latin is much worse than yours.

Well, look at Xerxes!  Everybody is watching his procession!

Why do you hesitate, Greece, to take on your yoke?

Europe – and every land – follows his orders; the arrows of debt cover the sky

New regulations hide the bright web of day

The people are buried in disbelief,  while

The tears of the Aegean carry mercenaries.

Who is the new Master of land, of sea, of every commerce?

Certainly, the old order has lost its way in this world.  

Adapted from Lucius Annaeus Seneca (or pseudo-Seneca) to reflect modern concerns.

448 Could you seal your heart? (Poems of Exile)

 A taste of the romantic side of the philosopher Seneca/pseudo-Seneca.  Do not be fooled by his cynical disguise.

448-449 Could you seal your heart? 

Could you seal your heart, living with her captive sweet youth?

Could you live and love and know?

Could you keep your heart free from the tender torch,

Watching love die and her consumed?

You could defeat your heart with undiluted wine:

If remorse strikes, repress it, drive out the dark clouds.

If night-love seizes you, dare not to succumb

Unless –          your prudent heart is safely numbed

415 Deceitful Hope (Poems of Exile)

The following poem is part of my Poems of Exile, loosely translated from the Latin of Seneca (or if you prefer pseudo-Seneca).  There is a long explanation about the origins of the project in my post Exile II.

The original poem was probably written sometime during the first century, and thus reflects many concerns of that day - the life of a gladiator, a soldier, the difficulties of farming and fishing and the risk of famine.  It offers a miserable view of life in general, but also has some surprising topical notes, given the events in North Africa this week.

Deceitful Hope  does not offer optimism for the future in an overt way, but given Seneca's words have endured for nearly two thousand years, I suspect there must be something to hope for.  



415    Deceitful Hope  (Spes fallax)

Deceitful Hope, sweetly evil Hope, in truth most wicked,

Hope, the relief of miseries, who allows the Fates to drag us

to unsuspected ends.  She makes us slaves to Fortune’s whim:

dutiful Hope stands with evil to the utmost.

Hope forbids you to accept death’s restful embrace.

she ignores defeat, all Hope values is tomorrow;

while cheating, she begs for a loan against the future.

Hope alone never perishes, she comes and returns

stronger, her evil is often most charming;

and whomever she ensnares, they are trapped all the same.

She is an inconstant lover, wildly moody at times,

and thinks it nothing to be bold and lame.

The gods wink at her promises:  nothing is fixed

and she begs misfortune to be light.

In this fashion, the summoned, shipwrecked man

swims through fate’s stormy seas:

he may see a raft before sinking

by Hope’s trickery, the captive endures severe chains

and thinks he will prevail on the path of life;

at the stake, with limbs torn asunder

he hopes and by fixing to Hope, clings to his torment.

Hope commands us to hold up our heads, even tied to a stake

with lights flashing before our eyes.

The gladiator hopes in the shifting arena life,

that when the sword goes down his throat, he is murdered.

He hopes, captured by force, to be released by death.

Hope rescues the prisoner by melting bronze walls,

and Hope dwells alongside him in the pit.

Hope leads wars and the soldier’s secret wish to live;

It is Hope that orders the living shore of Libya be penetrated;

and O! by the gods, who is there but fair Hope

to see the ruin of Carthage! – all but a third was destroyed.

Swearing great hope, the exiled risk across the globe,

and dream of riches and revenge. 

Of all, only Cato did not cling to hopeful words,

and the lies of the goddess Jove did not deceive him.

What does Hope not dare?  Priam lives to mourn Hector;

Protesilaus’ wife had Hope.

Orpheus hoped to snatch his love out of the underworld,

and by singing hoped to distract the dogs.

With Hope his leader, Daedulus succumbed to mid-air breezes

and his new wonder frightened the birds.

Passiphae hoped to placate the Minotaur by scolding.

What won’t men be fooled to hope for?

He hopes the curved plough will break the furrows,

he hopes the winds will carry his sail.

Hope teaches to chase fish with hooks, birds with snares;

then Hope is followed by tyranny:  heavy rakes and poor fields,

and she prepares a cheating account.

Hope always flatters, always spreading dishonesty;

she seizes the religion of the populace.

Hope never forsakes an illness deserted by doctors;

once a wish has been granted by Hope, it is never put aside.

Hope leads an unknown man to seek political life and

Her greed raises men to arms.

Hope says ‘endure! they would not touch your person:

fickle chance changes fortunes rapidly.’

Fortune plays with chance all over the world:

Hope always remains, never releases us, always returns renewed.

(Cato – Roman senator who took his own life rather than surrender, Priam – king of Troy, Hector – his son, Protesilaus – destined to be the first Greek killed at Troy, Daedalus – Athenian craftsman and inventor, Passiphae – mother of the Minotaur)

Willingness or Otherwise ...

My friend Seneca says a slave is not a slave, cannot be forced to see himself as a slave, if he does things willingly, with pleasure and care.  One is only a slave -- from boot boy to Emperor -- if one does things unwillingly, begrudgingly, because one 'has to'.

Freedom is a state of mind.

427 If you could love me (Poems of Exile)

This poem is from my collection The Poems of Exile, inspired by Seneca, or pseudo-Seneca.  An explanation of their genesis is posted in The Madness of Exile.  Poem 427 is one of the most corrupt in the original collection, which has given me plenty of leeway to interpolate. 

After the grim and unappealing 'Horrid Corsica' I want to show a different side to the imaginary poet.

If you could love me…

my sweet love, if you could love me like this:

alone to bed (Hesperus would see this)

alone (Lucifer would see this) to arise

no passage of time would cease our borrowed love

and in return you would always be loved

if only you would deny that you surrender, so often, to others

if only you would surrender, more often, to me

and your betraying snare, squeezing my soul, my heart, my pride

I want to give you my nights complete:

            you are unavailable

            you condemn the wasted night

and my empty bed is hostage to your cruel fear

once, you promised me, for life:  no more

            one senseless quarrel leaves me alone:

            when I was down with the ‘political illness’

            you flirted with your entire body

and then you denied our love

surely, you gave a thousand kisses to senators

            they say you were generous

you ensnared me so slowly:

            briefly, you were my dear woman

            eternally dear, in truth

your love affairs defeat me so quickly:

            jealousy stretches the night to endless torture

            I am always awake

The Madness of Exile (Exile II)

This is a rather long post, introducing a poem.  Skip to the bottom if the whys and wherefores are of no interest.

What to do with enforced retirement, a life distributed amongst several far-flung continents, what I like to think of as an active mind, and what I must admit to as social reluctance?  How to pass time in a fruitful (the work-ethic background) fashion that is not counting the shadows crossing the tiles?

I immersed myself in a study of the poet, dramatist, philosopher and statesman, Lucius Annaeus Seneca.  I think the stoicism appealed to me.  The man was maligned by near-contemporary historians such as Tacitus and Suetonius, partly in response to political expediency, I am sure; and further damned by the later Greek historian, Deo Cassius.  At the same time he was acknowledged as a Stoic teacher, and an exemplary of the ‘noble death’.  How could such disparate views be reconciled?  How could the man who wrote On The Shortness of Life be guilty of condemning Agrippina, his former patron, to death, and then assisting in a cover-up of the murder?  

We have an enormous amount of written material ascribed to Seneca, transmitted it is true, through various voices and cultures, and thus suspect to tampering.  We have some dozen philosophical essays, the moral epistles to Lucilus, a scientific treatise, nine tragedies of unremitting horror and the Apocolocyntosis, a satirical play on the pumpkinfication of the emperor Claudius.  For a person who doesn’t ‘do’ living people very successfully, I felt I could know more about this man, through his writing, than I could about many of my contemporaries.  I thought, perhaps if I could write my way into his head, I would be able to understand both the violent and the meditative parts of his persona.

I read scraps of biography – there is really not much known about his early life – and discovered he had been exiled to Corsica: another poet who committed an ‘error’.  Happily, Seneca was recalled before he succumbed to the horrid life of an exile.  I also discovered a body of work attributed to Seneca, or ‘pseudo-Seneca’, a collection of poems and epigrams allegedly written while he was exiled.  I was struggling to understand my own position and feelings and hoped that once again, by getting into Seneca’s head I might find some answers.

When I began this undertaking, pseudo-Seneca was not popular amongst scholars.  In fact he (or they?) was so unpopular I couldn’t find a copy of the poems, not in English or indeed in Latin.  Remember I had no access to a University library or journal collections, and very limited access to bookshops.  Even on the internet, especially on the internet, I struggled to find the poems.  I trawled websites of second-hand books, and the early days of Project Guttenberg, not quite sure what I was looking for.  Then triumph!  I found a copy of Christopher J Reagan’s Concordance.   Innocent that I was, I had hoped I was buying the original text and a commentary, perhaps a translation, I didn’t realise I was buying a collection of numbered lines, arranged alphabetically. 

In great excitement I ordered the book and waited the endless weeks for it to be delivered.  To make sure I really wanted it, the parcel spent a few weeks sojourn in the central post office of Jakarta, one of the few places I have never lived, before eventually arriving.  When I opened the book, I discovered single lines with a line and poem reference number at the end.  Being under-employed and under-stimulated and possibly quite mad, as well as stubborn, I set about re-constructing the 75-odd poems, line by line.

It took me months, but was oddly satisfying.  I kept a separate page for each poem and gradually added lines as I worked my way from  quam procul  a  te/aspicis heu cineres, Roma, iacere tuos! (413.3)  through to   Xerxes  magnus adest.  totus comitatur euntem/orbis  (239.1).

I came to know the Latin lines intimately, line by word by line.  I didn’t know what they meant, yet, but I began to recognise lines I’d already assigned (each line was repeated alphabetically, eg Xerxes magnus adest would appear three times, once under X, once under m, and once under a).  The four-line epigrams were quickly dealt with, while the monster poem Spes fallax, spes dulce malum, spes summa malorum, went on for 65 lines, and nearly defeated me.

Eventually I finished compiling and rebuilding and I had the completed text, with lacunae and corruptions.  I was almost disappointed when the task was over.

For my next trick, I set about translating them, with my clumsy school-girl Latin and my dictionaries.  Months later I finished what I called The Poems of Exile.  Some were more poetic and certain than others, while some were very scratchy indeed.  I go back to my raw text from time to time and try to turn my work into poetry, but many stanzas remain that do not make sense and are far from finished pieces.

Towards the end of my translation project – some 18 months after I had conceived the daft idea – I discovered that some kindly scholars in France had put both the Latin text and their French translations online.

My school-girl French is much better than my Latin ever was, yet comparing the odd Victorian translation I had stumbled upon, and the no doubt excellent, informed and scholarly French translation, I discovered something else:  I preferred my own imperfect, confused and clumsy efforts.  I began to see what an art translation really is, and how it is subject to the culture and mores of its day.  I realised that translation is quite a politically specific act, and the translator can colour the piece while still being ‘accurate’ to each word, to support quite different meanings.  We project our world view, our prejudices and our priorities onto the text.

Even the Latin I worked with was subject to the vagaries of transmission, to time, taste, censorship and all the dangers of physical corruption.  Some poems have missing lines, lacunae and disputed words.  Some versions join lines together into single poems that elsewhere appear as separate pieces or at least stanzas.

Any links between my Poems of Exile and the historical Seneca are ephemeral, imaginary and possibly indulgent.  Perhaps I am showing enormous cheek and hubris to refer to Seneca at all in connection with this work.

Let us agree instead that there is a fictional character, somewhere in my imagination, who has inspired these poems.

I hope to present some of these Poems of Exile on these pages from time to time, but being exile, I will begin with a grim reminder of our shared lot:

237    barbara praeruptus inclusa est Corsica saxis

Savage, rugged and isolated, the rude boulder of Corsica

is a place utterly forsaken and devastated.

No autumn fruit, nor summer crops are granted,

and old winter deprives the olive tree's gifts.

Spring showers bring no joyful growth

when only rank weeds emerge.

No bread, no fresh water, not remotest love:

only these two are here: the banned and banishment!