Part One The unexpurgated Catullus is the most bawdy and profane of poets. He hurls insults with brutal candor and makes the reader feel like doing the same.
Two Poems in the Manner of Catullus
1. To a Critic
You made the mistake of praising my pain,
Flavius. This the connoisseurs of cool,
whose approval you seek and shall never gain,
could not condone. You should have known better.
They made you feel like a fool.
You joined in the laughter but it felt bitter.
And ever since you have panned
all work of my hand
with the result that I, too, despise you,
and I do not wish you well.
Yet I took no pleasure when I heard Junius tell
Calista your wife had cuckolded you
with her yoga teacher the same week
you faced a tax audit and ate a steak
with a side of fried poison, missed your train
and lost your job. I feel your pain,
Flavius. Not even a shmuck
like you deserves such lousy luck.
2. To a Rival
More beautiful than daffodils
in February or the face
that is always turned away
from the earth was Diana
a dance major at the High
School of Performing Arts
whose legs were long when
skirts were short, and what
was she doing with you
Junius, lecherous bastard who
tried to fuck every girl he met:
how could she fall for your shit?
Though I was born with a stutter,
Junius, I will denounce you yet
and win awards for my oratory
in a full session of parliament
When Ezra Pound translated Li Po, arguably the greatest poet in China’s Tang dynasty, he revolutionized two things at once: the craft of translation and the tone of modern poetry. He set the precedent that allows poets to translate from languages they do not know.
Poem in the Manner of Li Po
In the Tai-T’ien mountains
the master has gone who knows where
I search for his absence
With wine I, too, am absent
from the night
Petals fall after the storm
down secret streams I see
the ghost of a yellow moon
There are other heavens
than are known to you and me
When I read Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji in New York in 1973, what enchanted me most was the notion that you could punctuate a narrative with a haiku, a little like the way an aria punctuates an opera.
Poem in the Manner of Lady Murasaki
In the mist and gloom of twilight the prince, disguised in civilian clothes, approached Masuda Pond. Under a large gray rock glinting in the sunlight with brown, green, red, and blue layers of stone, he left a note for the young wife to decipher:
In the Eighth Month the nights grow long,
But the moon comes nearer than wind to the land.
Abandoned by her husband, who had traveled to the mainland on orders of his warlord, the Akashi lady blushed with an intensity of longing that surprised and frightened her. She thought:
I wonder who lives the fulfilled life:
The faithful wife or the ghost of her desire?
It was then that Genji remembered the shell of the locust: hollow, inanimate, yet it gave him the strength to confront a world of unrest. He gave the shell, attached to a long reed, to a boy who had earned his trust, and told him to bring it to the abandoned lady.
The wind carries my words to you,
Though you hear only the wind in the reeds.
And she of the white cheeks thought:
To be remembered is to be loved
If only until the frost nips the leaves.
Though the murmuring crowd expected him in Lotus Hall for the forty-ninth-day lamentations, Genji contrived to return to Masuda Pond. He dressed his lieutenant in his red satin robes and his ivory mask for the procession of scrolls. Then he trained the younger man for the ceremony, down to the minutest details. The apprentice imitated his master as a translator imitates a noble author of renown. When the day came, the congregants felt the spirit of Genji among them as they prayed for a bounty of grace. Disguised as a peasant Genji himself crossed the Uji River at daybreak and descended upon the bald scholar who had tutored him in Chinese poetry. To his mentor he confided his misgivings:
The lady has a single tear on her cheek, her husband gone,
But shall the prince reveal his love and not his name?
Slowly the elderly scholar and his eternal student sipped their Gyokuro tea. The prince said two words: “jade dew.” Delighted, his old professor ventured the opinion that the lady in question understood that the man comforting her had a secret identity. But (he added) “she is too well-bred to demand an explanation.”
In the house of the “evening faces,” the maidservants wondered what had happened to the Akashi lady. Had the wanton son of Chúko Province spirited her off to the “cloud of smoke”?
Genji suppressed a laugh. He wrote:
The lake is a cloud of smoke,
But there is no light in the mist of morn
On Masuda Pond, there followed three days of blissful serenity and no noise except the tunes of birds, the chirp of insects, the wind in the reeds, the belching frogs.
When Man and Woman speak without words
They hear the secret music of the world.
When the three days ended, the Akashi lady cried. Despite her protests, Genji returned her to her cabin and bade her swear to greet her husband with a feast upon his return from the wars.
The prince let no one see him weep. Disguising his handwriting he wrote on a fallen leaf:
Autumn will end, all things must end,
But when summer returns with her robes, shall I cease to cry?
Iago’s cunning use of the phrase “put money in thy purse” (Othello, act 1, scene 3) inspired these variations in the spirit of that cruel rhetorician.
Poem in the Manner of Iago
Put money in thy purse,
Thy purpose make money.
As brokers sell short
and buy on the dips—
As waiters wait for tips—
As litigants in court
rake in the chips—
Make money thy end,
By all means make money.
*
Let poverty be a curse
for others to bear
with dust on their lips
and ash in their hair
Let the buyer beware
Put thy trust
in no friend
even if he swear
Do what you must
But make money.
*
You will die
and when you lie
beneath the ground
you will hear no sound
Go ahead, right some wrongs,
write speeches or fatuous folk songs
Reserve an expensive hearse
Put money in thy purse,
I say make money.
The most famous statement of advice from a father to a son is Polonius’s speech to Laertes in Hamlet with its injunction “to thine oneself be true.” From Polonius’s “neither a borrower nor a lender be,” I derived “neither a follower ...