ON THE AVENUE: VINCENT KATZ’ DAFFODIL
REVIEW by Paul Vangelisti
The following is poet-translator Art Beck’s review of The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius, translated by Vincent Katz (Princeton, 2004). Beck, you might recall, is the author of two Magra chapbooks, his Martial translations Epigrams, 2017, and his own The Insistent Island, 2020.
This translation has much to recommend it. As a Propertius resource, it presents the complete Elegies along with the Latin text, helpful notes and a good introduction by the translator. But beyond its utile aspects, this is above all a literary interpretation that aims to translate poetry into poetry. It also seems to be the product of at least a decade of living with and internalizing this first century Roman poet, since Katz' previous smaller selection, "Charm", was published in 1995, with many of those poems reworked for this volume.
The review excerpts and blurbs on the Amazon site speak well to Katz' success at enabling Propertius' unique voice to come across in English. As does the 2005 ALTA National Translation Award. But I've only just read the volume and at this late date, I'd like to add some personal impressions. For me, Propertius seems a quirky voice, sometimes engaging, sometimes off-puttingly self-absorbed. An Augustan era poet unable to rise to the energy of his Golden Age contemporaries, maybe too bruised by the childhood trauma of the civil wars he was too young to take part in.
But there's' also another always engaging voice that Propertius enables. That of his turbulent, impossible to ignore mistress, Cynthia. As Martial put it a century later, in a gift tag couplet accompanying a volume of Propertius:
Cynthia, facundi carmen iuvenale Properti
accepit famam nec minus ipsa deditCynthia won fame in Propertius' young
songs. She bestowed no less on him.
Martial's Latin, above, is a bit more complex than my English rendering. "Famam" (fama) means simultaneously both fame and gossip, glory and scandal. Here, perhaps. an acclaim inseparable from notoriety? Propertius' muse wasn't an aristocrat like Catullus' Lesbia, or probably even someone near his own equestrian class. Rather, as far as we can speculate, the equivalent of a kept woman, if not an occasional, high-end call girl. He didn't aspire upward to some ideal, he "fell" in love in a relationship that, as he said, "taught me to despise chaste girls." It's in allowing Cynthia to really speak through Propertius, by giving Cynthia her own English cadence that Katz, I think, distinguishes his translation.
He takes some chances here. In one line Cynthia reproaches Propertius (who's been out half the night) for his jealously with the epithet "improbe" (a villain or dishonest person). I would have been tempted to suggest "hypocrite", but Katz lets Cynthia make her own case with "You asshole" - and she comes alive. The problem with "spin" in translation isn't so much what it adds, rather what it forecloses. But in this case, the translator's spin forgoes a rather pedestrian Latin exclamation and replaces it with the breath of the muse who inspired the poem.
Cynthia, paradoxically, is never more alive than when, in Book IV, 7, her ghost returns from the dead to both reproach and reminisce. This is an often translated and adapted poem that inspired a notable "after poem" by Robert Lowell. The stakes are pretty high in translating this one. And for me, it may be the crown jewel of Katz' volume. Propertius relates that, in his dream:
...She spoke with the voice and spirit of a living person,
and her delicate hands snapped their thumbs.
Then Propertius steps aside to give Cynthia center stage, and Katz replaces another dull opening epithet "perfide" (faithless) with:
"You bastard, since you're not waiting for some new trick,
does sleep already possess your manhood?
Had you forgotten already our all-night adventures in the Subura
and my window, worn down by nightly deceits,
from which I so often dangled, having let down a rope,
coming hand under hand to your embrace?
Many times we had sex, right there in the street, our hearts meshed..."
Some 80 lines later, her soliloquy ends:
"...For now let other girls possess you: I alone will hold you soon:
You'll be with me, and I'll rub my bones against yours, enmeshed."
So "five stars" for tormented old Propertius, of course, but mostly for forever young Cynthia who inhabits him and these poems, refusing not to live.
The notion of the poet-translator is noteworthy in the context of Vincent Katz’ new book of poems, Daffodil, which has just appeared from Knopf. Daffodil is a collection of lyric poems in the tradition of Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (often otherwise called “Daffodils”), as well as Katz’ own translations of Sextus Propertius. This collection wanders around New York City and environs, not unlike Propertius in his familiar Rome, or Wordsworth in the Lake Country.
The five sections of Katz’ book underline the peripatetic nature of the poet’s musings: “A Slight Breeze,” “Species,” “Again on the Avenue,” “Once in a Field” and “For Love.” At the same time, they emphasize the declarative nature of these lyrical verses, in which the “simple” English sentence provokes an often-arresting complex of thoughts. Here are the first four lines of the opening poem, the eponymous “Daffodil”:
If I imagine all time sequestered in the fold of a daffodil,
Close to the desire of sitting next to someone,
It’s like a trip uptown and then one downtown,
And my door is open to the revenge of snow.
The logic or impetus of the poem becomes inseparable from the cityscape and, in turn, with the lives of those who inhabit the place and poem. All of which in eight lines, as with the four concluding:
Clasp me as a trumpet seeks release,
I should see daydreams in eyes,
All aflutter and simplified down,
The stores and all the other places we settle down to.
Which brings me to another feature of these poems reminiscent of the Roman poet: the abrupt change of register not often found in the lyrics and shorter poems of the Augustan age. In Katz’ translations, there are many examples of dynamic shifts in diction occasioned by the poet’s wonder, elation and despair. The beloved Cynthia, throughout the four books of elegies, renders Propertius “insane” and subject to fits of passion, transporting the poet from mythical heights to the everyday banality of suffering in pursuit of his beloved:
Then my joys promise kings will yield to me!
May they remain till the Fates command my death!
Who enjoys wealth when their love is down?
Prizes ain’t worth shit with Venus angry! [1.14]
Or in the poet’s relentless promises of fidelity:
It’s a real bitch who fakes love for many men,
who can make herself up for more than one lover.
Don’t compare me with nobles, nor with the fortunate:
he’s hard to find, the one to gather your remains on the final day.
I’ll be that to you: but I’d prefer it of you beat
your naked breasts for me and let down your hair.
Like his Roman mentor, Katz revels in the quotidian, and in how it may overturn the most rhetorical inspiration:
ON HEARING THE STROKES OUTSIDE COMMONS
Music coming down again
A simple refrain
A little mournful but then
That is the tenor ultimately
And if it’s reminiscent
Of other music that too
Is a human trait
At the end we all just sit
With what we’ve got.
The everyday idiom in “New York Song” drives home the ordinariness of the poet’s celebration. How art may nurture and be nurtured by the commonplace, while never losing sight of its own character:
Types or just
Individuals
That artist harbored
Photographs of
Just people
No one thinks
Themselves a type
Again, in “Park Avenue South,” the ordinary involves a nostalgic fancy, as well as local history in most arresting detail:
The back entrances of banks
And the Metropolitan BuildingArchitectural detail Fitzgerald
May have passed out on
Another aspect of Katz’ work shared with Propertius is the community of friends and poets reflected in the many dedications throughout Daffodil. (In the Latin elegies, the recurring circle of friends and patrons are addressed by name within the poems.) Visual artists, poets, loved ones appear at the start of these lyrics, upholding, perhaps, the inevitable wonder of the undertaking.
Obviously, I could quote from Katz new book ad infinitum for the sheer pleasure of hearing the hard-won simplicity of the verses. This, however, is meant to be a notice, rather than a critical judgment of the book. Most telling for me is the conviction of the poet’s vision, a mature insistence on his subject enabling the poet to risk it all with the brevity of his compositions.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the book’s final section, “For Love,” borrowed in homage to Robert Creeley’s incomparable, 1962 collection (and poem). Katz begins the finale with his take on Creeley’s poem, a remarkable variation that condenses Creeley’s 16-stanza, 60-lines into four, two-line stanzas. Like Creeley, also an accomplished Latinist (see his youthful, 1954 “Riffing on Catullus,” as well as his book-length translations of Suetonius’ Lives and Apuleius’ The Golden Ass), Katz captures his subject in a most epigrammatic spirit:
Everybody’s looking for love
And hopefully finding itIf they do find it
They’re probably findingIt’s difficult to keep
Or maintainIt keeps shifting
Changing what it is
Perhaps, most daring in their directness, are the eight short poems (all under ten lines) with which Katz concludes the book. These brief pieces start off repeating the poems titles, and bring the reader to end up where she or he must:
WALK BESIDE YOU
I want to walk beside you
In this weather we could
Just walk anywhere, start
Here on this broad sidewalk
Then move to smaller streets
TWO CLOUDS
I saw these two clouds
And I wanted to see them with you
They were particular clouds
Almost exploding in a bright sky
Now the entire sky is covered
And it is windy and cold
Thus, full circle, Daffodil finds itself where it began, with another nod to Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” all the more poignant for our poet’s contemporary vision.
Paul Vangelisti
Pasadena, May 2025