By Wally Swist

Among my many favorite books of poetry in translation, including W. S. Merwin’s translation of Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Robert Bly’s translation of the “first modern Norwegian poet,” Rolf Jacobsen’s The Roads Have Come to an End Now, and Edmund Keeley’s and Philip Sherrard’s translation of C. P. Cavafy’s Collected Poems, there is a new addition: Art Beck’s translation of the Roman poet Martial (40 A.D.-104 A.D.) in a unique and refreshing selection just published by Shearsman Books, in England.

Beck’s selection of Martial is entitled Martial: Mea Roma: A Meditative Sampling from M. Valerius Martialis. As noted above, Beck has already been honored with a shortlist honorable mention in the 2018 American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) Cliff Becker Prize.  The Becker citation read: “Art Beck allows Martial to speak directly to the modern reader, artfully navigating the profound differences between contemporary English poetry and Latin poetry of the First Century C.E. Like Martial’s originals, Beck’s translations are funny, beautifully crafted, and, often, profoundly shocking to modern sensibilities.”

Beck’s Martial is, indeed, shocking to “modern sensibilities,” due to Martial’s compulsion to depict the blood sports of the Roman Colosseum in such gut-wrenchingly clear imagery.  So, why do we read Martial?  Beck’s answer in his introduction is insightful and worldly: “We never ask why we enjoy reading and watching dramatizations . . . of the early Roman Empire . . . even when he [Martial] makes us cringe.  We enjoy him in large part because he speaks so directly to us; timelessly honest as it were . . . The treat–or “illusion if you will–of being taken for a stroll around streets and posh villas of Martial’s “mea Roma.  A pleasure akin to historical fiction, or more properly, the historical resonance of a unique, primary source voice.”

What further separates Beck’s Martial from many other translators and translations is both his erudition and his sensibilities as a poet himself.  Poems such as Beck’s masterful “Fog,” from an early book of his, entitled “The Discovery of Music,” establish him as a major American voice, if not a “poet’s poet.”  Those poetic instincts are fully on display in “Mea Roma.”

And the contemporary era of Trumpian megalomania, excess and corruption also seems to be perfect timing for this new presentation of Martial’s Imperial Rome to arrive.  What better time to pick up Beck’s insightful translation and read:

“You dump your belly’s burden, Bassus, in a grimacing gold chamber pot.
And toast yourself with a water glass, while your money goes to shit.”

Or these vignettes from the Roman Arena:

“The way a seething bull, prodded around the arena by burning
goads, tosses one taunting rag dummy after another to the stars.

How it’s finished off by fervid tusks; finally enraged enough to imagine
an elephant might be tossed as easily.”

“That same elephant, who just now was so brutal to
a bull, piously kneels and reveres you, Caesar.

Believe me, no trainer coached or commanded this.
He just senses the presence of our god.”

These Arena “spectacles” are not the ones we see daily, in our era, but what we do observe is that certain human compunctions have not altered much in some 2,000 years.  We can, all too well empathize with the pain of being in submission to a hierarchal amoral chaotic government, as in these lines from “Sp. 36:” To submit to power and survive is also to win./ But the consolation prize weighs on the heart.

However, there is also the pure aesthetic and philosophic truth that Beck not so much captures but so perspicaciously exhibits, as in Book VIII, 51: “Asper’s picked a flawless beauty, but Asper’s blind.  Proof again,/ from a man in love: Beauty’s so much more than meets the eye.”

Beck’s Martial is cerebral, sophisticated, and urbane.  As we grapple with our own age of unreason and moral collapse, Beck’s Martial provides an uneasy mirror, and in so doing forces us to conclude and to re-conclude where we have been, as a human race, and where can we possibly be going.  However, in the interim, we, as readers, do get a moment to ponder our current circumstances, as Martial observes:

“The privileged, Auctus, rage and prosper.

Hate costs nothing, benevolence is expensive.”

Martial: Mea Roma: A Meditative Sampling from M. Valerius Martialis
Translated by Art Beck
Shearsman Books
ISBN: 978-1848616189