Diary: Michael Robbins on the nearly vanished Penguin Classics Poets in English Anthologies

A window on the changing life of English through how it reads the past

Hear the stately rhythms of mighty Homer:

… the carver was wont to sit withal,
Dealing much flesh to the Wooers as they feasted in the hall.
This then to Telemachus’ table as now Eumaeus drew,
And thereon sat over against him, and the henchman came thereto,
And took and dealt him his share, and bread from the basket withal.

Lie quiet, Morris. I mean, that is William Morris, out of Homer. His unfortunate translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey withal are excerpted in Homer in English (1996), edited by George Steiner, part of Penguin Classics’ Poets in Translation series.

Anthony Madrid turned me on to this series back when we were young and easy under the ivy. Each volume presents a selection of English translations of the poet’s work, as well as poems inspired by it, arranged chronologically, with an introduction and commentary. The ones I have at the moment are: Homer in English, Virgil in English, Horace in English, Martial in English, Dante in English, and Petrarch in English. I used to have Psalms in English and Baudelaire in English, but I got rid of them before I really understood the point of the series. If you haven’t read Homer or whomever, you shouldn’t start here. Go here if you love Homer or whomever and want to learn something about how his stuff has been transmitted and received in English—the changing standards, criteria, emphases, and judgments of different historical eras.

Homer in English, for instance, presents selections from six and a half centuries, Chaucer to, uh, William Logan. Everything you’d expect is included. Here is George Chapman, who spoke out loud and bold to Keats, and here is Keats. People have been overrating Pope’s Iliad for centuries, William Morris should have stuck to wallpaper, and Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is as good as you remember it. So are Pound’s first Canto and Christopher Logue’s reimagining of Homer as Sam Peckinpah. But here, too, is D. H. Lawrence’s lovely “The Argonauts,” which ends:

The dawn is not off the sea, and Odysseus’ ships
have not yet passed the islands. I must watch them still.

A motto for us, the readers.¹

Lawrence’s poem suggests the secret of this series, which is less about the translation of great poets than about the development of English verse. Shelley picked up Dante, but Keats reached for Homer. Tennyson heard Homer while Dante spoke to Browning. And Shelley is, in fact, much more a spiritual quester in the hidden world than Keats, who never seems at home. This facet of the series is clearest in Petrarch in English (2005), since the reception of Petrarch in England is also the birth of the English sonnet. Wyatt was the first to write sonnets in our language of brick (it remained so till Dryden “left it marble,” according to Dr. Johnson), and we get twenty pages from his versions of the Canzoniere in Tottel’s Miscellany (the first printed anthology of English poetry), including sonnet 47, “How the louer perisheth in his delight, as the flie in the fire”:

Other reioyce, to se the fire so bryght,
And wene to play in it, as they pretend:
But find contrary of it, that they intend.
Alas, of that sort may I be, by right.

To find the contrary of love that we intend and get burned—who isn’t of that sort? It’s a Chris Isaak song.

The Dante volume, edited by Eric Griffiths (2005), makes a similar case, though it unaccountably excludes (to wax Steinian) the single finest Dante translation in the language, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sestina beginning “To the dim light and the large circle of shade” (“Love sits down there in the shade,— / Love who has shut me in among low hills / Faster than between walls of granite-stone”). At least Shelley’s version of Rime 52, the sonnet to Cavalcanti, is included:

Guido, I would that Lapo, thou, and I,
           Led by some strong enchantment, might ascend
A magic ship, whose charmèd sails should fly
           With winds at will where’er our thoughts might wend …

The alliterative quickness of that fourth line, flying at the monosyllabic speed of thought, is Shelley through and through (Dante’s ship stays on the water)—think of the “Ode to the West Wind.” We also get Robert Creeley’s loose version of the same poem:

Guido
I would that you, me & Lapo
                                             (so a song sung:
                                                sempre d’amore …)
were out of this
                           had got to the reaches
of some other wood.

The colloquial “me” in the nominative is Creeley through and through (sempre d’amore is taken from line 12 of the sonnet: “And there we’d always talk of love”). And here once more is Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” since the Inferno is the source for the aged Odysseus, weary of kingship, who sails off again to “drink / Life to the lees,” though Dante could not read Homer (he didn’t read Greek and there were no translations). So we see the uses to which Dante has been put.

And then there’s Horace, sweet Horace, whom I want to love more than I can, ignorant as I am of Latin, that “most severe and compendious language” (Dryden). Horace in English (1996) gives us, besides more Pope, three of Dryden’s versions of the Odes—I.3, I.9, III.29 (the same three provided by the Penguin Classics edition of Dryden’s Selected Poems, two of which are also the only Odes in both Longman’s Selected and Oxford’s John Dryden). III.29 contains these famous verses:

      Happy the Man, and He alone,
           Who Master of himself can say,
      To-day at least hath been my own,
          For I have clearly liv’d To-day:
      Then let To-morrow’s Clouds arise,
Or purer Suns o’erspread the chearful Skies.

The final stanza is also very fine:

     Then in my little Barge I’ll ride,
          Secure amid the foamy Wave,
     Calm will I stem the threatening Tide,
         And fearless all its Tumults brave;
     Even then perhaps some kinder Gale,
While the Twin Stars appear, shall fill my joyful Sail.

Are the rest of Dryden’s Odes this good? Who knows. The Oxford World’s Classics edition has been out of print for years.

The greatest joy of Horace in English is A. E. Housman’s “Diffugere nives” (Odes IV.7), one of my five favorite poems in any language:

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
   And grasses in the mead renew their birth,
The river to the river-bed withdraws,
   And altered is the fashion of the earth.

The internal rhymes tickle me: fled / mead / bed. I sometimes find myself reciting the fourth stanza as I wash the dishes or drive to campus:

But oh, whate’er the sky-led seasons mar,
  Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams;
Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are,
  And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.

River to the river-bed, moon upon moon. The seasons refresh anon, but we come to dust and dreams, the reaches of some other wood.

I’m out of space, and I haven’t got to Virgil and Martial (more Dryden and Pope in both). Well, neither is in print, anyway. In fact, most of these volumes are out of print. An announced Rilke in English never appeared (we dodged a bullet there, in my view). If someone would let me publish my own Golden Treasury of the poems that have meant the most to me, it would start with the Housman and close with the Lawrence quoted above. But I’d settle for having this series back in circulation.

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Michael Robbins is the author of three books of poems, most recently Walkman, and a book of essays, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music.

Read Michael Robbins in Book Post on Rilke, Ovid, and Baudelaire, as well as Bomarzo, Marcel Proust, Paul Muldoon, Allen Ginsberg, apocaplypse by fire, trash, “Nancy,” the destruction of animals, and cheesy reading.

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1. George Steiner, a foppish mandarin, is the only blemish on this volume. He introduces Robert Fitzgerald’s Odyssey as “one of the major achievements in the canon. It is the work of a distinguished poet, who attains to the first rank in this act of translation.” He says things like “Observe the formidable placement of the adverb.” So we learn that 1996 was the last year in which someone could write such sentences with a straight face.