review ends:
How to make Lucretius live on and preserve Dryden’s “perpetual torrent” of
poetry? Penguin has replaced its old prose translation with the rhyming verse of
A. E. Stallings. The flow is consistent, an impressive feat in itself. I looked
at her treatment of a favourite passage from Book One, where Lucretius
illustrates the invisible evaporation of water particles with an image of
laundry left out to dry. In the Latin, corresponding words – uvescunt (moisten),
serescunt (dry), suspensae (hung), dispansae (spread), in litore (on the shore),
in sole (in the sun) – are pinned on either side of eaedem (the same clothes):
the transformation leaves the original altered but intact. Stallings matches
this with symmetrical alliteration: “Moreover, clothing hung out by a breaker-
beaten shore / Grows damp, but if you spread it in the sun, it dries once more”.
But what comes outis lost in the wash is Lucretian intensitydiluted. Gone are
the archaisms and the radiance that beams off the page; in phrases like
“distribute [rhyming with “root”] / Nutrients”, the biblical strangeness goes
too. This is Lucretius made accessible, but the poet’s paradoxical
defamiliarizing of the world and his attempts at the places where words fail –
in short, the Lucretian sublime – have vanished. Contrast this with Tennyson’s
voyager hurtling through space:
A void was made in Nature; all her bonds
Crack’d; and I saw the flaring atom-streams
And torrents of her myriad universe,
Ruining along the illimitable inane,
Fly on and crashto clash together again, and make
Another and another frame of things
For ever.
Far from being serene, Lucretius’ language is positively effortful in the face
of contingency and unknowability. His poem should sound like a frail but
tenacious survivor, composed of what Italo Calvino called the “impalpable,
powder-fine dust of words”.
Emily Gowers teaches Classics at St John's College, Cambridge.
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