I.i
He courts love, expects death
With her eyes she caught me like an animal,
one who had never known the touch of eyes.
And I, who had set my sights in the world's hands,
felt the world set feet upon my head, and pull.
Now no woman whom I cannot touch
means anything, and I can yield no reasons.
It is a year today—the madness keeps—
and still the gods, gone silent, turn away.
There have been martyrs to the cross of Love:
wayfarers without way or boots to tread it,
knights-at-arms who have parted willingly
with compass, shelter, destination, mind,
bedded with beasts and worn their fur, absorbed
lashings of sleet and whip and human speech
only to stand at a rock-face in the hills
and watch the stone at the cave-mouth roll away.
For faithful service Love has that in store:
say your prayers; keep up with her flying feet.
But my heart, slowed to stopping, can call forth
no path—nor memory, no image of a path.
Sorceress, who claims to magnetize
the moon, whose chants can keep an altar clean,
change my lady to a lover kind,
make her face sweat, slacken, pine with desire,
and I will vouch for your divinity—
your poetry's power over any star.
But you, my childhood friends, know next to nothing:
the heart is not a well you may pull me from.
It is a grave—and you do surgery.
Keep your anesthetic. Let me scream.
Last will and testament: While I still breathe,
send me by trackless ocean toward utmost rings
of latitude: let no woman follow,
nor you, my executors, but stay where you are,
where what you pray for you receive, where love
gives you her ear, her smile, and says yes.
For me never, not one night, will she quit
looming, an empty case, crueler than dreams.
My epitaph: Lovers, take care, I warn you,
find a room with walls and curtains, press her close.
But if you read these words, you are too late—
you have my words instead of her, and pain.
I.iii
He comes to her in sleep
Like Ariadne sleeping on the shore,
or a female Crusoe left to pine away;
like Andromeda, freed from her rock, splayed out
on mattresses befitting a true princess;
or like a dance-mad maenad of Dionysus,
exhausted into dream by the rite of spring;
like, most of all, Eurydice, your face
a pebble skimming between death and life—
in and out, in and out, you breathed,
your head pillowed on hands half giving way.
Sick-drunk, exalted, tottering, I entered.
Through gallons of wine, through distorting eyes, I saw you.
Behind me, beyond the open doorway, torches shivered:
slave-boys, like mourners, processing down midnight streets.
Of the few faculties left me, one was stealth.
I crept on hands and kneees to where you lay,
a hare in your form, and couched there with you.
In double vision, urged by a double voice,
—Desire, Liquor—each a masterful god—
extended one hand, lightly, lightly, as if
to touch, to take a kiss, but could not do it,
dared not shatter your rest or risk your anger.
With eyes and eyes only I took hold, drank deep,
as a beast enchanted guards an enchanted beauty.
And now I undo the leaves they have crowned me with,
and wreathe your temples; now I almost weep
to straighten your hair that's fallen; now I put
ripe apples, lightly, into your hollow hands,
and lavish your sleep with gifts, though it will not thank me,
bowing here over your body like a ghost.
Now and again your breath catches, you spasm
in dream: I freeze, as if an ominous wing
threw me in sudden shadow, as if you too
felt some unusual fear, an unwelcome guest.
At last, to break, the moon came in a window,
a guardian moon, late lingering lightless light,
and opened, lightly, the seal of hypnotized eyes.
You saw me, raised yourself on an elbow, said:
"At last, someone had sense to throw you out.
Some door slammed your behind back here to bed.
The night belongs to me! Where did you spend
these hours? Ours? The stars are bleached from the sky,
And you're a rag-doll, dead to the world and me.
I hope one day you know a night like this,
sewing to keep awake, pretending the voice
across the way is Orpheus, and your exhaustion
only his great enchantments. You left me here,
(I put new words to his song) And I will swear
(I cried myself to sleep in singing them)
You linger in some other arms elsewhere."
from Elegies
Propertius
translated from the Latin by Henry Walters
Listen to Elegy I.i read in the original Latin by Henry Walters:
The subjects of Propertius's poems—despite our ignorance about their author—are clearly of a piece: the pangs, toils, and ecstasies of romantic love, and the line they demarcate between this present, palpable world and another. The poems are known as Elegies not in the modern sense of mourning the dead (although they often do), but because they are written in elegiac verse—an alternation of paired hexameter and pentameter lines. Propertius was well known in his lifetime; Maecenas, patron of the arts at the court of the Roman emperor Augustus, took the poet under his wing along with Virgil, his more famous contemporary, and others. Fragments of Propertius' verse show up as graffiti on the walls of Pompeii.
But history, on the whole, has not been kind to him. Classical scholars have had no patience for the twists and turns of his consciousness, much less his moods, and modern readers have found his poems either too dense with mythological allusion or adulterated by a sentimentality they seem to know all too well. At first blush, one thinks, Haven't we heard this sighing, pining, miserable, unrequited voice before? What we now know as romantic love, however, was not Propertius' inheritance. For the Romans, love was more likely to be portrayed as an affliction, a madness, or a regrettable adolescent phase than as an honorable pursuit of a noble heart. This came later, with the devotions—religious, feudal, artistic—of the Middle Ages. In Propertius we find a forerunner of the lover in all his many guises: earnest seeker, ecstatic devotee, jealous prosecutor, groveling scoundrel, haunted and haunting ghost. Here, in one body, is the Proteus of exasperating proportions who works his changes through all the rest of our literature. And where something new begins, one should be able to hear, if one listens closely enough, the urgency and scope of its human feeling.
But history, on the whole, has not been kind to him. Classical scholars have had no patience for the twists and turns of his consciousness, much less his moods, and modern readers have found his poems either too dense with mythological allusion or adulterated by a sentimentality they seem to know all too well. At first blush, one thinks, Haven't we heard this sighing, pining, miserable, unrequited voice before? What we now know as romantic love, however, was not Propertius' inheritance. For the Romans, love was more likely to be portrayed as an affliction, a madness, or a regrettable adolescent phase than as an honorable pursuit of a noble heart. This came later, with the devotions—religious, feudal, artistic—of the Middle Ages. In Propertius we find a forerunner of the lover in all his many guises: earnest seeker, ecstatic devotee, jealous prosecutor, groveling scoundrel, haunted and haunting ghost. Here, in one body, is the Proteus of exasperating proportions who works his changes through all the rest of our literature. And where something new begins, one should be able to hear, if one listens closely enough, the urgency and scope of its human feeling.
Propertius lived in the decades just before the birth of Christ, a Roman at the dawn of the Roman Empire. Practically no historical facts about his life come down to us, neither the year of his birth or death, nor his full name, nor the real name of the beloved whom he praised, cursed, and mourned as Cynthia. Perhaps ninety or so of his Latin poems survive—even where these poems begin and end is uncertain.
Henry Walters is a naturalist, teacher, and practicing falconer. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming from publications as various as The Old Farmer's Almanac, Tuesday: An Art Project, The Literary Bohemian, Kindred, and Hawk Migration Studies. He lives and writes in the woods of New Hampshire, where he acts as steward of a large tract of conservation land. He is currently at work on a selection of translations from Propertius.
