The Satires of Juvenal

Translated by Richard George

Published by Amolibros at Smashwords

Translation copyright © Richard George 2012 | First published in 2012 by Baikal Press, 27 St Peters Road, St Albans, Herts, AL1 3SA

Published in ebook format by Amolibros 2011 | Amolibros, Loundshay Manor Cottage, Preston Bowyer, Milverton, Somerset, TA4 1QF | http://www.amolibros.com

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Table of Contents

About this Book

About the Author

Introduction

Satire 1

Satire 2

Satire 3

Satire 4

Satire 5

Satire 6

Satire 7

Satire 8

Satire 9

Satire 10

Satire 11

Satire 12

Satire 13

Satire 14

Satire 15

Appendix: Satire 16 (a fragment)

About this Book

The Roman poet Juvenal is widely regarded as the greatest satirist who ever lived. He is also one of the most politically incorrect writers of all time. In spite of this, he is one of the classical authors with most to offer to the contemporary general reader.

Juvenal’s descriptions of dictatorship and poverty are compelling. His portrayals of depravity in a teeming ancient city are disturbingly – some would say disgustingly – vivid, and his assassinations of character devilishly delicious. His bêtes noires – such as unconventional women, opportunistic Greek immigrants and the Egyptian-born political heavy Crispinus – leap defiantly from the page.

In his later poems, savage indignation is integrated with deeper philosophical insight, culminating in his celebrated Tenth Satire, adapted by Dr. Johnson as The Vanity Of Human Wishes, and Satire Fifteen, an account of violence in the Middle East which anticipates events today.

Whatever you think of Juvenal, he will not leave you unmoved.

Richard George’s dynamic new translation is a Juvenal for the twenty-first century, and also reconnects him to the Iambic tradition of English verse, the medium of John Dryden and Alexander Pope. It can be read alongside any other Juvenal translation or commentary, by students or by those who have never read a classical author.

In the words of Juvenal scholar Gilbert Highet:

We do not live, as yet, in an age like that which he described… . But if it should ever descend on us, we must hope that rebels and satirists will arise among us to attack it; and we can be sure that, when they do, they will draw strength from the harsh and powerful voice which has sounded among men for eighteen centuries and is still not silent.

About the Author

RICHARD GEORGE was born in 1965, and studied classical languages at The Queen’s College, Oxford, gaining a Double First, the First De Paravicini Prize and his college’s Jodrell Scholarship and Taberdarship. His Doctorate was a commentary on Book 3 of Martial.

Since leaving Oxford in 1994 he has published two collections of his own verse, Vertigo Swimming (2004) and A Pocket Of Mice (2006).

He also has a lifelong interest in stories of the supernatural, and has had articles and letters published in Fortean Times.

Introduction

This translation of Juvenal is intended to revive the Iambic Pentameter. With a very few exceptions, it is meant to be read in strict rhythm.

My lines in English outnumber those in Latin by a ratio, very roughly, of 3:2. Any scholar of post-Ovidian – or, less respectfully, Silver – Latin will know what a plastic and compressive medium it can be. I simply found it impossible to render line for line and do justice to the nuances of Juvenal’s Latin.

My guide for much of this project has been the magisterial Loeb edition of Juvenal and Persius by Professor Susanna Morton Braund, now, after seven years, beginning to shed its red cover. If I have one reservation about her translation, it is that she slightly mitigates Juvenal’s dark side. I disagree with her statement in the introduction that Juvenal’s chauvinism is a persona. I believe Juvenal was prejudiced, and his misogyny, Hellenophobia, Aegyptophobia and opposition to what we would call gay civil partnerships, not to mention the scabrousness of his sexual descriptions, should give us long pause. Few authors are less politically correct.

If he achieves redemption, it is in the astonishing vividness and brilliance of his portrayals. The female bêtes noires of his sixth satire vault from the page, and give us a glimpse of a world where women of a certain social class achieved, within certain limits, liberation. These are real women, albeit behaving badly. Contrast Virgil, who diverts the Feminine onto two mythic figures inimical to the birth of Rome – Juno and Dido.

Likewise, the Middle Eastern self-made businessman in Satire One, who refuses to concede his place in the queue to Roman worthies, is a vibrant character (a touch of Alan Sugar, perhaps?) He speaks, to our ears at least, a lot of sense. Juvenal loathed such men. And yet, by a kind of paradoxical empathy, he gives him a cogent voice, where few Roman authors would. In such cases Juvenal’s characters share the satirist’s normal prerogative, the last laugh.

And Juvenal is capable of more congenial, and strikingly modern, political ideas: the aftermath of empire (2.159ff., 6. 292f); a green concern for the environment (3.15ff); and the desirability of what we would call upward mobility (3.164ff, 8.47ff). Even in the midst of the sexist leviathan that is Satire Six we find the striking phrase facies non uxor amatur (143), which is not far from a central concept of our feminist movement, sexual object.

Setting out his stall in Satire One, Juvenal despairs of much Roman poetry. It is ossified, and in thrall to Greek mythology and cultural models. What he wants, passionately, is verse that reflects the Rome he lives in, a city that reduces him to hopeless, boiling indignation.

His subject is to be quidquid agunt homines, Whatever people do (1.85), echoing the realist program of his elder Martial: hominem pagina nostra sapit, My page tastes of people (10.4.10). With authors of such brilliance, the contemporary speaks to the contemporary. I was drafting an earlier version of Satire Three on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. An insula (flat-block) falls; a load of marble is envisaged crushing a crowd in Rome’s teeming city centre, so that the corpses disappear like dreams. And then the Twin Towers come down.

No author has ever conveyed so powerfully life at the hub of a metropolis. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that ancient-modern parallels abound: a cursory trawl reveals dole fraud (1.123ff), exorbitant property prices (3.166f), a drunken late-night yob culture (3.278ff), depletion of stocks due to over-fishing (5.92ff), violence against schoolteachers (7.213f.) Next year – next week even – there will be more.

In this rendition I have included colloquialisms like bling and posh totty, not in order to be modish, but because I feel they most accurately express the meaning of Juvenal’s Latin to a contemporary reader. English vernacular is, in my view, a highly expressive medium, and I make no apology for using it. In the introduction to his Cassell’s Dictionary Of Slang (1998), Jonathon Green characterizes slang as a quintessentially urban language, the idiom of the marginal and mutinous. He traces the etymology of the word back to the Scandinavian root sleng – a slinging. Juvenal hurling words: I find few images more appropriate.

This book, like my two collections of original poetry Vertigo Swimming (2004) and A Pocket Of Mice (2006), is self-published, in the regrettable absence of other options. It is dedicated to Corpus Christi Professors of Latin Robin Nisbet and Michael Winterbottom, who supervised my Oxford doctorate on Book III of Martial. Few graduate students can have been so fortunate.

Thanks are also due to Angus Bowie and Professor Christopher Collard at my alma mater, The Queen’s College, Oxford, for encouragement, and to Amanda Saville at Queen’s Library for accommodating a flawed earlier draft from 2003.

Richard George

Verulamium, October 2012

Satire 1

Am I to be for ever just a listener?

Shall I, so often plagued by the Theseid

Of grating Cordus, never turn the tables?

One bloke’s afflicted me with costume farces,

Another with his elegies, a bloated

Colossus of Telephus has devoured

My working day, or else Orestes scribbled

On the flip side – scroll-end margin crammed already –

And still in progress. Won’t I get a chance

To settle scores? Nobody knows their house

In more minute particulars than I do

The sacred grove of Mars and Vulcan’s cave

By the Aeolian cliffs. What winds have brewing,

Which spectres Aeacus has on the rack,

What stone that other sod’s crawled out from under

To fleece that shaglet’s gold, the ash-trees’ heft

Monychus hurls – it’s this that Fronto’s planes,

His marbles and his columns cleft asunder

By constant recitations always thunder.

From Laureate to lowliest of poets

You can expect the same. I’ve whipped my hand

From underneath the rod no less than they have,

And recommended Sulla should retire

And have a lie-in. It’s moronic mercy

When everywhere you’re tripping over bards

And in such multitudes, to save the paper

That’s sure, whatever happens, to be squandered.

But why I’d rather take the field of war

Aurunca’s great alumnus steered his steeds on,

If you’ve got time, and the attention-span

To hear out my prospectus, I’ll explain.

When pansy eunuchs wed, when Maevia

Clenches her spear and sticks a Tuscan boar,

Dug dangling loose, when one under whose razor

My gritty stubble churred when I was young

Now rivals, on his own, the dough of all

The nobles put together, when a bubble

Of Nilot scum, an Abo of Canopus…

Crispinus hitches up his Tyrian cloak

And with his summer gold ring, up, down, fans

His sweaty finger (since he just can’t bear

The weight of something with a bigger jewel)

It’s difficult not to be writing satire.

I ask you, who’s sufficiently inured

To Rome’s iniquity, with the iron stomach

To restrain himself when past heaves the new litter

Of shyster Matho, with his frame farctate,

And in his wake the grass on a Great Confrère

Who’ll soon pick any scraps left off the bones

Of our blue bloodlines, one whom Massa fears

And Carus soothes with gifts – like Thymele

Being smuggled in by panicking Latinus

To bend the knee; when those thrust us aside

Who come into last wills and testaments

For what they do at night, pulled to the skies

By nowadays the peerless upward passage –

A rich old woman’s minge? One sorry twelfth

Is all that trickles down to Proculeius,

While Gillo scoops eleven: each inherits

According to the measure of his service!

And so they should! Let each one mine his vein,

And blanch like one who’s trodden with bare toes

Upon a snake, or at Lugdunum’s altars

Is waiting to declaim – with bated tongue.

Why say with how much bile my liver scorches

When that one, who’s rapined his orphan ward

So that he’s on the game, and that one there,

Found guilty by a toothless verdict, jostle

Salt of the earth with gangs of hangers-on?

What’s notoriety, if your bucks are safe?

The banished Marius hits the piss at two

And revels in the rancour of the gods –

While you, his province, win your case, and wail.

Aren’t I supposed to deem these subjects worthy

Of the Venusian lamp? Are they taboo?

But what’s more like it? Herculean epics,

Diomedes, that mooing in the labyrinth,

The sea smacked by that sprog, his Dad, the wingwright –

While one who rents his spouse out by the hour

(She can’t fall heir), takes largesse from her punters,

A graduate at staring at the ceiling

And snoring in his cups with both his nostrils

Pinned back and peeled; and when somebody thinks

He has the right