by Ann Patty
accept these sad gifts
made in tribute to the shades
take them, dripping with a brother’s many tears.
and forever, brother, hail and farewell.
As Nox continues, each word of the poem is translated on the verso; as words repeat, their definitions become longer, and darker, and nox (night) encroaches on them. On the recto are vestigia (traces) of Carson’s brother—photos, drawings, stamps, and bits of letters. It is a collage of memory, meditation, speculation, and mourning.
“Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light,” Carson writes. “The luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.”
Like Catullus’ poem, Nox is Anne Carson’s munus (service) for her brother. The book is metonymy and synecdoche: Every dead person is a dead language, and every memory a translation.
When I returned home, I pulled out from its bookshelf Private Parties, a book Humphrey wrote while a senior at Yale, in 1969, as a birthday gift to his mother to help her understand his music. It pictures the vestigia of Humphrey. Nox had brought it vividly to mind. Like it, Private Parties is sui generis, utterly original and formally inventive. The now-tattered, black-leather-bound, 5x8-inch artist’s notebook holds a story composed in the spatial manner of a musical score, with calligraphy, pictures, drawings, and musical notation. Lively, funny, filled with Humphrey’s singularly sweet absurdist humor, it is the story of a journey he takes with his friends, enlivened by the visual personification of his musical intelligence. Erudition as play, dazzle, and spark. Private Parties is the dead language that was Humphrey.
When The Toast and BuzzFeed articles were posted, there was, finally, my munera for Humphrey M. Evans III, written back into the story: three handfuls of dust for my dearest dead friend.
CHAPTER 9
For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow; it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it slowly.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
In my next class, transformation replaced possession and loss. The spring semester, which began in late January when spring was still two or three months away, I would be taking a class at Bard, studying Ovid, and I knew that Ovid was all about transformation: He was the poet of love, and what is love but transformation?
The evening I returned from Florida, George presented me with my belated Christmas present. I had been disappointed when he had told me at Christmas, “I have something very, very special for you, but it’s not ready yet. I promise it will be when you get back from Florida.” I had badgered him to tell me what it was: I always want to know surprises immediately and have a hard time not leaking hints and more hints if I’ve found a present I think the recipient will especially like. As a teenager, I used to sneak open my Christmas presents under the tree.
It was a cold, sunny day. “You have to come outside with me to get your present,” George insisted. “It’s hidden.”
I was skeptical; last Christmas George had given me thermal socks and a chair that tilted back for sky- and stargazing. The year before I’d been presented with a headlamp for night hiking and a pair of cleats that strapped on to boots for safe navigation over ice. His presents were suggestions of activities we might do together. Mine were likewise trying to work a transformation on him. One year I bought him a $600 New York–style briefcase to replace his tattered brown one. He tried it once, and ever since it’s been stowed under the upstairs bed; he still uses the old one, now even more tattered. I have, however, used my stargazing chair, my headlamp, and cleats. I live here now. I’ve learned to buy my own jewelry.
“Put on layers, it’s cold,” George said. He wears lots of layers; sometimes, when he’s working outdoors in winter, three or four. I’ve resisted giving in to the country necessity of long underwear and instead simply stay indoors most of the winter. Augie misses his walks, but often the roads we walk are icy, Augie’s paws get cold, he soon insists we turn back, and I don’t really mind.
Skeptically, I donned undershirt, sweater, wool pants, socks, boots, jacket, hat, scarf, gloves, then George ushered me out the kitchen door and up the rocky rise past the abandoned playhouse in the woods. Sophie used to play there, but it’s been a brambly unused part of the property for years: The stone bear that once guarded the playhouse is a crumbling relic, the door off its hinges, the glass long gone from the windows. Beyond the ramshackle structure, a rock seam rises and tapers to a narrow ledge, with a steep drop to a vernal stream far below.
George had cut a path through the brambles to the top of the cliff. He insisted I close my eyes as he took my hand and led me up the rock seam. I was already cold when he finally said, “Okay, you can open your eyes.”
There were the two battered old chairs I’d been nagging him to take to the dump, positioned in a freshly cut clearing at the edge of the rock cliff. Just as I was about to say something less than kind, he rested his arm on my shoulder, and said, “Now, turn around.”
ECCE! Before me was a salmon-colored sunset sky with a thin blue cloud stretched like a Caribbean island above the distant, purple Catskills. Suddenly, we had a vista of sky and mountains! I was amazed.
“Sit down,” George beckoned to the chairs, “enjoy the view.”
“How did you do this?” I asked. Our property is surrounded by forest; its rock ridges and hollows, lovely as they are, limit any view of the sky, even in winter. I’ve always felt overly landlocked here, missing the expansive view of the Hudson and western sky I enjoyed from my New York City apartment. Now mountains and that same western sky were revealed in the middle of our forest!
“You know how I always walk around up here and you can’t figure out what I’m doing? I’ve been watching the course of the sun through the trees for two years, watching where it sets. In midsummer it sets there,” he said, pointing to the tree framing the vista on the left, “so we’ll only see the actual sunset in June, but we can enjoy the mountains and clouds and sky all year.” He was giddy with excitement and pride. “I made this for you, darling, because I love you.”
How he managed to figure out a way to expose this panorama by cutting down a minimum of trees and pruning a maximum of branches, all on our property, seemed a miracle. “See, you can see five peaks,” and he named them off, left to right, “Overlook, Sugarloaf, Twin, Indian Head, Plattekill.” He has climbed them all in winter, often alone with snowshoes or skis. I’ve never had the slightest urge to join him. “If you look closely, you can see the fire tower on the top of Overlook.”
What a transformation! “You are not just an arborist,” I told him, “you are an artist. Really, this is a classic Hudson Valley landscape scene!” The vista he had created and framed was more than worthy of a Thomas Cole painting. George was, in his own unique way, a Hudson River School artist: The landscape before him was his canvas; loppers, chainsaw, ladder, and rope, his tools.
All that winter, even when it was freezing and cloudy, George headed up to “the vista” every evening at sunset to gaze at the mountains. Sunset was early, before five, and I joined him only occasionally. Every morning George reported how many more minutes of sunlight we’d be treated to that day, as if it were his own doing.
On sunny mornings, he bundled up in layers and took his coffee there. I don’t know what he thought about, if anything, as he stared out at the mountains. I had a bell that I rang when I wanted him to come back to the house, like the bell at the end of a meditation session.
The day before class began, an e-mail arrived from Professor Ben Stevens:
Dear Ovidians, Tomorrow we begin, in a sense, as Ovid ended: far from the city, in what may seem to
be an excessively rural area, in what may seem to be blistering cold. This happy stance will help us to see more clearly certain things as Ovid did: from a sort of distance, with all the critical insight, irony, and complexity of inner experience such distance—spatial, temporal—can bring.
This seemed a propitious beginning. Most certainly I still felt an exile from my former life in the city. Even though it had now been four years since I’d moved away, my longing for the city was constant: a love I may never get over, a drug whose lure I may never entirely overcome. And god knows I could use some clarity on the past, which had so plagued me that autumn.
The Bard campus is a much shorter commute than Vassar, though it cannot compete with Vassar’s classic splendor. Founded in 1860 as St. Stephen’s College, it began as a theological college for Episcopal clergy. John Bard had donated the white brick Blithewood Manor mansion and the stone Chapel of the Holy Innocents, which were the oldest buildings on the campus. In the course of 150 years, the college metamorphosed into a nonsectarian coeducational liberal arts school, committed to progressive and classical education. It was the first college in the United States to give full academic credits for the creative and performing arts.
The mansion and the chapel are campus anomalies: Among them a hodgepodge of architectural styles has been constructed. Though several recent buildings were designed by world-renowned architects—the dorms, the science center, the Frank Gehry–designed performing arts center—all display their own vernacular and don’t seem to converse with one another. Nevertheless, it is a school devoted to the arts, and a great cultural institution for our region, bringing dance, opera, music, literature, slices of New York City culture to us rustics; it’s one of the primary attractions of our area for intelligent, sophisticated people, a country redoubt for burned-out New Yorkers such as myself.
Our class was given the “moon room” in Olin Hall—the nicest room on the top floor of a modern classroom building, with a large circular window at the apex of the roofline. Ben Stevens, a recent PhD from the University of Chicago, was young, extremely thin, and rather nerdy-looking, sporting a big smile and a polka-dot bow tie (why do classicists favor polka dots?). He was not what I’d expected: I’d heard rumors he was a lady’s man. I’d later learn that he was also a choral singer, a yoga instructor, and a science-fiction enthusiast.
Ben handed out a syllabus, at the top of which was a quote from Ovid:
Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis
nec mea Lethaeis scripta dabuntur aquis . . .
And perhaps my name will be associated with theirs
perhaps my writings will not be given over to the waters of Lethe . . .
Ovid was the youngest of the great poets of Rome’s golden age, a full generation younger than Catullus, half a generation younger than Horace and Virgil, so he had the anxiety, or in his case, the gift, of the influence of all three. His poetry has always been controversial even in his own day: Quintilian, the first rhetorician, said of him, Nimium amator ingenii sui (He is too captivated by his own genius), and the philosopher Seneca the Elder, who conceded that Ovid was the greatest wit of his time, nevertheless opined, Nescit quod bene cessit reliquere (He didn’t know when to stop being witty). Ovid, he tells us, was fully aware of his faults, even held fast to them. Once three of Ovid’s poet friends asked if they could remove three lines from his opus, which they believed were the most extravagant examples of his over-the-top style. Ovid assented, on the condition that he could pick three lines that were not to be removed under any circumstances. And, no surprise, the three lines picked by both sides were the same. Ovid was not about to kill his darlings.
Ovid has gone in and out of favor many times. When the Germans established classical scholarship as a modern pursuit, they dismissed Ovid as less significant than the other poets; his poems were considered by some scholars to be nugae, although others even then regarded him as the Roman Shakespeare. Recently he’s come back into fashion once again, not only with classicists but also with popular novelists and poets. The past changes, fortune’s wheel turns again, the future is overtaken by the latest past.
As with Horace, most of Ovid’s work has made its way through the millennia to us. The most famous is The Metamorphoses, an epic of transformation, from the world’s creation to the apotheosis of Augustus. But there are many more. Among them: Amores (Loves), Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), Remedia Amoris (Remedies for Love), and oddest of the lot, Medicamina Faciei Femineae (Medications for Feminine Appearance—a manual on cosmetics for women).
There were six of us in the class, the same proportion of male to female as at Vassar—two women other than me. Molly was just like Siobhan, shy and pimply and always hiding behind her hair; Hannah was afflicted with what seemed to be Parkinson’s or another disease of the nervous system, but her brain overrode her tics: She was sharp as a tack. There were three young men: Leo, a Leonardo DiCaprio look-alike; Guy, a Bert Lott type; and Mark, a typically thin, sweet Latinist. All were obviously cisgender, and every student, save me, came to class equipped with laptop or iPhone.
Over the course of the semester, Ben frequently made excursions (from the Latin excurro, to run out) on various words. My favorite of his explanations was how caelus (sky) gave birth to caeruleus (blue). Here not only the diminutive -ulus is used but also a rhotacism, with the l becoming an r for ease of pronunciation. And how wonderful is it to think of everything blue being a “little sky.” Blue has always been my favorite color.
Ben also stressed scansion. “You need to learn to hear the poetry, so for me, learning to read aloud is as important as translating.” We began with Amores I, written in elegiac couplets.
Elegiac meter is composed of a hexameter line of six metric feet followed by a pentameter line of five metric feet. In elegiac meter a foot is either a dactyl, one long syllable (dum) followed by two short syllables (dit-ty) or a spondee, two long syllables (dum, dum).
But, of course, nothing in Latin is ever that simple. The pentameter line always includes an ictus (break) in the spondee in the middle of the line, whose mate—or second long syllable—doesn’t appear until the end of the line.
Elegiac meter is expressed thus:
—ūū |—ūū|—ūū|—ūū|—ūū|——
—ūū |—ūū|— || —ūū|—ūū—|—
The hexameter line of most poems ends with dum dit-ty, dum dum (dactyl, spondee). The pentameter line always ends in dum dit-ty dum dit-ty dum (dactyl, dactyl, second half of spondee).
We quickly learned that like many things Latin and Roman, scansion was easiest figured out backwards, beginning with the final two feet of each line. Although we had read aloud some of Catullus’ and Propertius’ elegiac couplets a few short months ago, I had to relearn the meter and stamp out the pedes with my feet.
Ovid’s was a new and dazzling poetic universe. In the first poem we read, Amores I.1, Ovid declares he was trying to write of arms and war (like Virgil, Arma virumque cano), but Cupid laughed at him, stole a metric foot, shot him with a love arrow, and now it’s Cupid to whom Ovid’s poetry is beholden (Cupid being a metonym for love). Ovid argues with Cupid that he is invading others’ territories: He doesn’t belong in Cupid’s camp, he has neither boyfriend nor girlfriend—longas compta puella comas (a girl well arranged in respect to her long hair; remember the accusative of respect?). Nevertheless, he is burning with love: uror, et in vacuo pectore regnat Amor (I burn, and love reigns over my empty heart). Metaphorically, the poem describes the transition from heroic meter (dactylic hexameter) to elegiac couplet (the same except the second line lacks one foot) as a sly metaphor for the rising and falling of the male member: He’s not as crude in his language as Catullus, but it’s hard to miss his implications, with one line rising up (surrexit) then weakening (attenuat nervos) or subsiding (residat) in the next.
Ovid is playful, audacious, devilishly witty, even self-deprecating. His poetics rem
ind me of a song by Chubby Checker that has always accompanied feats of multilayered mastery in my mind: “Do You Love Me (Now That I Can Dance).” In the song Chubby calls out all he can now do: the Twist, the Shout, the Mashed Potato, the Jerk, the Fly, and the Watusi. I remember every one of them.
Ovid makes Latin dance, and he does so not only with rhythm and meter but also with internal rhyme, repetition, and visual effects that make each poem an act in a drama. By my count, he uses twelve different poetic devices in Amores I.1, a poem of thirty lines: metonomy, synecdoche, chiasmus, alliteration, assonance, anaphora, asyndeton, interlocked word order, hyperbaton, onomatopoeia, tricolon crescens, and word picture. Here are some lines from Amores I.1:
Quid, si praeripiat flavae Venus arma Minervae,
ventilet accensas flava Minerva faces?
Quis probet in silvis Cererem regnare iugosis,
lege pharetratae virginis arva coli?
Crinibus insignem quis acuta cuspide Phoebum
instruat, Aoniam Marte movente lyram?
What if Venus stole the weapons of blond Minerva,
would blond Minerva breathe the wedding torches to life?
Who would approve Ceres reigning over the hilly woods
or the arrow-bearing virgin having dominion over the planted fields?
Who would instruct Apollo, famed for his curly locks, to wield the sharpened blade
while Mars strummed the Aeonian lyre?
In the penultimate line of the poem, Ovid uses a device that for me is the summum of Latin poetry: The word picture.
Cingere litorea flaventia tempora myrto
Encircle your golden temples with shore-myrtle (or, as written, encircle of the shore golden temples with myrtle)
This most thrilling of all the Latin poetic devices surely deserves a better name than “word picture.” In Latin, because word placement can be anywhere and sense is determined by the inflection, poets can do this magic trick that doesn’t well lend itself to English. Thus the actual words “shore-myrtle” (litorea myrto) encircle the words “golden temples” (flaventia tempora). The chiasmic placement of the words enacts their meaning.
