Cheeky blinder

‘‘IT IS A PRETTY POEM, MR POPE,” said Richard Bentley, after reading the poet’s version of the Iliad, “but you must not call it Homer”. Translation and travesty, parody and piety intertwine endlessly in rescriptions of fundamental texts. Why not? Mona Lisa is none the worse for an odd moustache. A century ago, Ezra Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius both bent the knee and, so Robert Graves insisted, twisted the ear of the great Roman lyricist. On the other hand, my late friend, the classical scholar John Sullivan, saluted Pound’s alleged howlers (he rendered the Latin “minas”, meaning “threats”, as “Welsh mines”) as enlivening renovation. Ole Ez wrote to John, in memorable green ink, to thank him for his endorsement.

Usually quicker to derision than to collegial applause, Roman poets of his day were all but unanimous in saluting Gaius Valerius Catullus as an original who, at the same time, pillaged and promoted Greek poets,