|
The poems of Sulpicia are the only extant female literary text from the Augustan period (1st century BCE) of ancient Rome. They offer unique insight into a woman’s life and mind at a time when most women remained not only illiterate but, in the male-dominated world of elegiac poetry, also silent. More than for these semi-postured, proto-feminist, torch-like conjectures, I’m drawn to Sulpicia for entirely personal reasons. I like her. Or rather, I like who I imagine she might have been – a smart, coquettish, young literary brat. Sulpicia’s poems are found at the end of Book 3 of Tibullus’ manuscript, and total no more than forty lines. They follow the conventions of elegiac poetry, exploring desire and the unattainable through the alternating hexameter and pentameter lines of the elegiac dystich. Sulpicia’s pithy, mercurial emotions are inheritors of Catullus’ epigrams, but her use of language is of its own idiosyncratic cast. For example, poem 3.16 opens with convoluted, circumlocutory syntax, which translates literally, “Love comes at last, of which kind it would be a greater rumour of shame to me to conceal than to reveal,” while elegiac catchwords like pudor (shame), cura (concern, anxiety, girlfriend), and gaudia (pleasure), words that have established particular connotations when expressed by the male lover/poet, tailspin onto their heads when Sulpicia uses them to speak about herself: Is it a moral shame, or is she blushing? Does she think of herself as cause for anxiety, or is she paying homage to the topos? Poem 3.18 runs amok in fits and starts with its single rambling six-line sentence, rushing past the limit of the traditional end-stopped couplet. Situated after the dozens of Sulpicia translations that have appeared over centuries, my approach to these elegies is first that of a poet. I aim for Sulpicia’s sense with contemporary, at times syntactically erratic, language and sensibility, questioning the conventions and traditions of Latin translation into English, and writing our Latin poet as if she were writing here and, perhaps most importantly, now. --AH
Adrienne Ho is an MFA candidate in literary translation at the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in Canada and the US, and is forthcoming in Burnside Review, Circumference, Denver Quarterly, and Ninth Letter. |
Sulpicia, translated by Adrienne Ho Poems III.xiii—III.xvi, III.xvii and III.xviiii
Download printer-friendly version
|
