A Momentary Taste of Being

Pervigilium Veneris in a translation by Thomas Parnell Excerpt: She paints the purple Year with vary'd show, Tips the green gem, and makes the Blossom glow. She makes the turgid Buds receive the Breeze, Expand to Leaves, and shade the naked Trees.

Paul Among the People is subtitled The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time , and, as a fairly orthodox Catholic, I approached it with a little frisson, wondering what in the world I might encounter in this reinterpretation by a Classical Scholar and Urban Quaker.  I can report to any who care, the concern was needless. While some of Ms. Ruden's own feelings and ideas bleed through--she remains resolutely on task--interpreting Paul in his own time. What exactly does that mean?  Well, I think many of us have a great many misconceptions about "the Glory that was Greece, the Grandeur that was Rome."  Even today, in the face of relentless historical reinterpretation, there is about the ancients a kind of veil of romanticism under which most of the worst scars and deformities are hidden.  Ms. Ruden helps to remind us of what life was really like during the time period. She juxtaposes "problematic" portions of Paul's letters against classical ...

From Suetonius to Garrison Keillor--the comb-over then and now

The Masters tell us of procrastination

Nice translations of a couple of Martial's more safe-for-work epigrams.

The Epistles of Horace tr. David Ferry from To Numicius (Book I) When you have a pain in your belly or in your side, You work on getting rid of it, don't you? Therefore, If you want to live right (and who doesn't) and if You agree that the only way to do it is To learn to be good, then patiently settle down To the work of getting rid of the faults you have. But if you think tht goodness is nothing more Than a matter of words, no more than that, and if When you look at a forest, all you see is the wood, Be very careful lest a competitor Make it to port before you, taking away The custom you had hoped for for your lumber. While this is an interesting excerpt, the more interesting thing (an exercise left for the student) is to see how this passage compares to the whole and on what side Horace emerges at the end of his argument.

from The Epistles of Horace Book I "To Lollius Maximus" Tr. David Ferry Take a long, cold, intelligent look at pleasure: It hurts you if you purchase it with pain; The avaricious man always feels poor; Set limits to what your desires make you long for: When his neighbor grows fat the covetous man grows thin. The worst Sicilian tyrant couldn't invent A torment worse than envy. The letter is filled with wonderful notes like this earlier in the letter we hear: If your life is governed By cravings for what you lack, or else by fear Of losing what you have, then what you have, Your house and your possessions, give you as much Pleasure as a picture gives a blind man, Or an elegant pair of shoes gives a man with gout Or music gives to an ear stuffed up with wax. A glass that isn't clean will guarantee That whatever you pour into it will sour. What wouldn't I give to have a correspondent who wrote to me in such terms.  And the more I read this select...

There is so much genuinely good, wise, and surprising in these that it's hard simply to select.  What comes as great comfort to me is that I'm hearing some two thousand years later exactly the same plaints that I might have made myself last Wednesday.  People simply don't change all that much.  There's a nice f airly archaic, formal, perhaps more literal translation of Horace's epsitles online ; however, I want to share from the brilliant work of David Ferry.  It is instructive to compare the two. from The Epistles of Horace Book I "To Maecenas" tr. David Ferry Different people go in for different things, For this, for that, or the other; that doesn't mean They won't change their minds an hour later and Go in for that, this, anything else instead. "No place more beautiful that Baiae Bay." The minute the rich man says it, that minute you know His pleasure in Baiae Bay has spent itself, And you know his libido will take him ano...

I was lucky enough to find on the library shelves several translations of major works of Roman poets by David Ferry.  Among these were the Odes and the Epistles of Horace.  I must admit to the fact that I have not much indulged in the writing of Ancient times.  I've read my share of the Greek playwrights (though not all, and not tremendously extensively), Ovid, Catullus, Martial, and most of the Major Historians: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Livy, Tacitus, Suetonius, Procopius, etc.  I've dipped into the Aeneid (mostly through Purcell's Dido and Aeneas) , and Ovid's Ars Amatoric a and Metamorphoses but for the most part I've left most of the serious Roman poets alone. I've read their derivatives in 17th and 18th century English poetry and felt that was enough of an acquaintance. How very wrong I was.  As usual.  The blindspots in my education are really quite vast, and I can only hope to repair them as I discover them.  It is a pleasure to find...