Arrived home yesterday after a week’s holiday in Derbyshire. Making last-minute decisions about what I wanted to take to read, I grabbed a Latin dictionary and Helen Waddell’s
Medieval Latin Lyrics. I planned to reread some of the wonderful spring love songs from the Carmina Burana. However, the poem I ended up translating is a poem of high summer and the harvest. It is also pre-medieval, dating from classical times. (It was once ascribed to Virgil, but no one now thinks he was the author.) Long ago as a sixth-former I read it in Waddell’s collection, guided by her translation, and loved it: especially the final lines. Now, at last, I have worked my way through it properly with care and, in the end, several dictionaries (Derbyshire isn’t far from where I live; I had to come back for a few hours mid-week, so I took the opportunity to collect my big dictionaries). And I hope my translation does it some justice.
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mantua_maker who recognised that the innkeeper, moving her ‘quivering sides’, is dancing a Middle Eastern belly dance: a point that I would otherwise have missed.
The Innkeeper’s Words
The Syrian hostess, head wrapped in a Greek turban,
expertly moving her shimmying sides to the beat of her castanets,
dances, tipsy, sexy, in the famous tavern,
slapping her noisy reed clappers against her elbows:
“What is the use of being elsewhere, fagged by the dust of summer?
Isn't it better to lie on a drinking couch?
Here there are landscaped gardens, and wine cups, ladles, roses,
music of flute and strings,
and a reed-thatched arbour, cool and shady.
Listen! out of a cavern worthy of Pan
a shepherd warbles a tune on his rustic pipes.
And here is thin wine, just poured from a pitch-sealed bottle,
and a clamouring brook with its noisy chatter.
Here too are garlands made out of flowers, violet with saffron,
and wreaths of roses, crimson combined with yellow,
and lilies picked by a nymph from the runnel that flows from the spring,
which she fetches in osier baskets.
Then there are little cheeses, draining in rush-work containers,
and waxy plums of the autumn’s crop,
and chestnuts, and sweetly reddening apples.
Here is Ceres in fine array, here is Love, here is Bacchus!*
Then there are blood-red mulberries, and grapes in sticky clusters,
and a dark-green cucumber dangling from its stalk.
Priapus is the guardian of this hut,
but he and the sickle he’s armed with are made of wood:
he’s not alarming, for all his giant prick.**
This way, cottager, come over here: your donkey’s tired by now, it’s sweating;
give it a rest; donkeys are Vesta’s favourites.***
Now with repetitive chant the cicadas shatter the trees;
now even the spotted lizard hides in a chilly corner.
If you have sense, you’ll lie back and sluice yourself with a summer glass,
or we’ll fetch new cups of crystal, if that is what you’d like.
Come on, tired as you are, rest in the shade of the vines;
twist a chaplet of roses to place on your heavy head,
and harvest with nibbles the lips of a pretty girl.
To hell with the person who raises old-fashioned eyebrows!
Why keep the sweet-smelling wreaths for ashes that give no thanks?
Or maybe you’d like them to cover a garlanded tomb?
Set out the unmixed wine and the dice.
To hell with the person who worries about tomorrow!
Death tugs at the ear, says to us, ‘Live: I am coming.’ ”
*Ceres: goddess of corn and agriculture; Bacchus: god of wine
**Priapus: a fertility god, statues of whom were often placed in gardens
***Vesta, goddess of the hearth and the household, often depicted with a donkey
Anonymous (before the fourth century AD)
trans. Gillian Spraggs
( Original text )
translation © Gillian Spraggs, 2008
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exhausted
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