Poetry: Marcus Valerius Martialis, born in Spain around 40 AD. Brendan Kennelly was born two millennia later is a kindred spirit to Martial, writes Theo Dorgan and shares with him a distaste for the pretentious and the cruel.
Marcus Valerius Martialis was born in Spain around 40 AD, went to Rome aged 25 and in the next 35 years wrote the 12 books of epigrams on which his fame rests. Some scholars credit him with inventing the form, though students of Catullus might disagree.
Brendan Kennelly, born two millennia later and in his own way gone to Rome, is a kindred spirit to Martial, sharing with him a distaste for the pretentious and the cruel, a robust (not to say scatological) interest in human doings, a belief, however beleaguered, in human love and a profound scepticism about human behaviour.
Kennelly, the Artful Dodger of Irish poetry, is frequently mischievous to a purpose; it is a profound mischief to suggest, as he does here, that he cannot tell if he is translating Martial or vice-versa. His purpose, or one of his purposes, since no Kerryman ever has only a single purpose in anything he does, is to decentre the "original" texts which he is translating in order to give maximum freedom of manoeuvre to his own texts. By telling us that some of these texts are translations, while others are new poems after Martial, he sidesteps the question of whether these are "good" translations.
The danger, nonetheless, is that the unwary may take the Kennelly poem for a reliable retelling of a Latin original, not always the case even with evident translations. For instance, Martial writes: "Semper pauper eris, si pauper es, Aemiliane./ Dantur opes nullis nunc nisi divitibus.
Kennelly has: "If you're a poor man now, Amos, a poor man you'll remain./ Riches are given only to rich men."
Why Aemilianus becomes Amos I don't know, and perhaps it doesn't matter; what does matter is that "nunc", meaning "now", is shifted from that second line, thereby weakening its power. A literal translation might be: "Riches are given to none, nowadays, but the rich." There is an implied fall away from an earlier, more open-handed era, which points the bitterness of the epigram.
Since we aren't given the original of this or any of the other poems on the facing page (a convention which should be mandatory), it is best to enjoy this book for the inventive exuberance with which Kennelly, magister ludi, makes Martial's Rome into Dublin, the Roman into an Irishman. Wherever he sleeps tonight, let Martial not be surprised to wake wearing green and gold.
Theo Dorgan is a poet, scriptwriter, broadcaster and editor, most recently (with Malcolm Maclean) of An Leabhar Mór/The Great Book of Gaelic
Martial Art. By Brendan Kennelly, Bloodaxe, 96pp, €11.50