Frank Hecker

Time for Sunday night poetry! This week I’m leaving Greece and Rome and traveling to England around the turn of the (first) millennium, where the poem we know as Beowulf was put to paper. Here the monster Grendel comes to the hall where the hero Beowulf lies in wait for him, in the translation by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney:

The poet I’m featuring this Sunday night (the last of those from Rome) is Publius Vergilius Maro, known to us as Virgil (or Vergil). Virgil is best known for his epic the Aeneid (well, and also for being Dante’s guide to Hell in his Inferno). I’ve read parts of the Aeneid but never the whole thing from start to finish, and having just finished reading all of Ovid’s Metamorphoses I was looking for something less substantial.

So instead here’s an excerpt from Virgil’s Eclogues (“Selections”), a series of ten poems featuring the lives, loves, and songs of shepherds. Here are the beginning and ending lines of the second poem, in which the older shepherd Corydon vainly longs for the young shepherd Alexis; the translation is by Len Krisak:

This Sunday night’s poem is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a book-length compendium of Greek and Roman myths that has been tremendously influential in Western culture, from Shakespeare to Xena: Warrior Princess. His aim was “to speak now of forms changed into new bodies,” of people transformed into animals, trees, flowers, rock, springs, or (on two occasions) other genders.

Here’s an excerpt from the famous tale of Narcissus, translated by Charles Martin; it begins after Narcissus rejected the advances of the nymph Echo (she who could only repeat the words of others):

Time for my regularly-scheduled Sunday night poem — or poems in this case. I’m moving up in time to the Romans, and Gaius Valerius Catullus, one of the many later poets who translated Sappho or wrote poems in emulation of hers. Unlike with Sappho, we have almost all of Catullus’s poems, many of which are concerned with his on-again off-again only-partially-requited love for “Lesbia,” the sister of one of Catullus’s fellow Roman aristocrats. This is one of his more famous ones, in a translation by Charles Martin: