Customer Reviews

Martial's Epigrams: A Selection

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I seem to be on a Garry Wills kick lately, not a bad thing to be on. Wills won two National Book Critics Award and has published numerous books, including translations (most notably of Augustine's Confessions), works of history and political criticism, and books about his own Roman Catholic faith.

Recently I ordered three books by Wills including his translation of portions of Martial's Epigrams (2008). I was disappointed in the Epigrams. I don't fault Wills's facility with language: he once taught classical languages (Greek) at Johns Hopkins. Neither do I fault his opting to go for rhyme at the expense of literal translation. But I fault him for modernizing the text when he didn't have to, inserting modern names in verses. Martial doesn't need modernizing. He isn't contemporary except in his preoccupations: Wills notes this in his introduction, which, though short, is helpful in understanding this late Roman poet of scurrility and (usually nasty) gossip. Martial was a moralist of the dirt. His poems, when they work, are like extremely short variants of the Satyricon, than which little in literature is more salacious. Is Wills's translation of Martial worth reading? Definitely yes, if only to gain insight into this most uncommon Roman and the debauched society he excoriated. Is the book completely successful? No. I'd give it a C grade.

As an admirer of Mr. Wills' writing on theology and history and politics, I was a bit shocked by the artlessness and childishness of these translations, though perhaps the fact that his real strength lies in those other genres explains why he is so remarkably fails in this one. The spark and wit and bite of Martial sounds, in Mr. Wills' hands, like a bunch of potty mouthed teens who've gotten together to spray paint graffiti on the bathroom walls:

Such sexy dances does she innovate
That purity itself must masturbate.

Mr. Wills would be better sticking to what he knows best. And it isn't poetry.

Translations of Martial's bawdy and bitchy epigrams, as pertinent today as they were in the first century AD, when he wrote them.