Customer Reviews

Epigrams (Modern Library Classics)

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This book is a pleasant and often amusing read, a nice mix of day to day observations, occasional spice, certainly cheap at twice the price.

Martial, like many of the Latin poets, was born in Bibilis, Spain, probably around 38-41 AD. He appears to have lived in Rome for nearly thirty-four years, under the patronage of the great Spaniard Senaca the Younger. He belonged to a class of intellectuals who were in resolute opposition to the emperor Domitian, so many times figures like Cicero, Brutus, and Pompey are used as literary devices against the crazed tyrant. Martial's poems are definitely modeled off of Catullus' epigrams and elegiac verses, although they are different in meaning and theme. These poems are hilarious and audacious, cruel, lewd, charming, spiteful, and creative; and they bring to life the social and political milieu of Rome. Martial's poems make for great bedtime reading and they are at their best when read in small doses. Michie's Anglo-cized translation, with a parallel Latin text, is good, however the rhyming couplet certainly does Martial's epigrams a grave injustice. The poems are excellent, although another translation is recommended; but another one will be hard to find which remains faithful to the original. The Loeb editions are always great, but the translators nearly always kill the original poetic song with dry early-twentieth-century prose.

Firstly, let me say that I am not an expert in Latin, though I am certaintly able to read it, understand it, and also know a little about its literary techniques. One of the most grating errors I have found in this translation is the continual rhyming of its lines. Latin, being a language of often mutable word ending but even more amorphous word order, had no need to rhyme its verse, and therefore any translation, in English, that insists on rhyming for any purpose usually obfuscates the original meaning so much that it is, in of itself, a whole different poem.

I have also seen the ommission of many names in the work, which I find unappealing. While I do enjoy that it is able to combine the original latin with the english translation, I would recommend searching for a similar book with a better translator: it will make the epigrams far more enjoyable.

This is a very poor translation. Martial is a lively, urbane poet with a razor-sharp wit; his language is precise and powerful. James Michie's translation is insipid as poetry, and often unrecognizable when set next to the Latin. A single example: Mr. Michie has a penchant for translating simple Latin words like "terra" into configurations like "turf and dew," rather than the obvious and elegantly simple "earth." In Michie's translation, Martial's more beautiful elegiac lyrics are made gaudy and his urban bullets of observation become flaccid. Get the Loeb Martial and a good dictionary and work through the epigrams yourself. You will be better served by Loeb's literal translation than something that sounds as if it were written by a mediocre pre-Raphaelite poet.