A Personal Anthology, by Melissa Beck
Libellus, libelli, m. noun. (Latin) a little book; a small work written for publication; a pamphlet; a notebook.
When thinking about short fiction my mind immediately gravitates to the ancient, specifically to the first century Latin poet Catullus. As part of the novi poetae of his generation, he rebelled against the long, drawn-out epic and strove to write smaller, succinct, personal pieces. In the first poem of his collection, he calls his masterpiece a libellus: his “little book” which, he tells us, is highly polished, new, and charming. In the Tradition of Catullus I present my list of libelli – “short books” – with nods to Latin, Ancient Greek and the survival of myths through the 21st Century. It is my hope that anyone who wants an introduction to classics, without committing to reading an epic, will use this list as a touching off point. (All translations from Latin and Ancient Greek are my own, by the way.)
‘La Jeune Parque’ by Paul Valéry (First published in 1917 in French. Translated into English by Alistair Elliot, Bloodaxe Books, 1997)
In Roman myth the three Fates — Parcae in Latin, Moirai in Ancient Greek — are referred to as sisters: Clotho, the youngest, is the spinner of a person’s life thread, Lachesis measures the final thread of life, and the dreaded Atropos cuts the thread of life. Because of their absolute and unpredictable authority over all life—even Jupiter is subjected to their decisions—they are feared and rarely spoken about except in passing references. Valéry writes this 512-line poem about Clotho, the youngest of these fates. After a successful career as a poet he suddenly takes a break from publishing his works for more than 20 years. La Jeune Parque, a poem as perplexing and enigmatic as the Fates themselves, is the first piece of writing that he publishes after this extended period of silence.
‘Neptune’ by Franz Kafka (Written in 1920 in German but never published during the author’s lifetime. Translated into English by Peter Wortsman, collected in Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka,Archipelago Books, 2016; also by Michael Hofmann in Investigations of a Dog and Other Creatures, New Directions, 2017. Hofmann’s version is available to read online in the Paris Review, here)
In this story Kafka imagines the god Poseidon sitting at his desk under the waves and crunching numbers. Kafka presents us with a Poseidon whose job as god of the sea no one truly understands. Because he is so busy in his management position, he never gets to enjoy the sea over which he rules. Poseidon would love to find a new job, but what else is he really qualified to do? Kafka ironically and humorously concludes his story, “He liked to joke that he was waiting for the end of the world, then he’d find a free moment right before the end, after completing his final calculation, to take a quick spin in the sea.” I read this story in a new translation of Kafka’s prose done by Peter Wortsman and published by Archipelago Books. Wortsman has chosen a wonderful selection of shorter writings that showcase the range of the author’s brilliance.
‘Trimalchio’s Dinner’ by Petronius (Written in Latin in 65 A.D. and widely translated into English since the 17th Century. Available to read online at Project Gutenberg here)
The Satyricon, written by the emperor Nero’s arbiter elegentiae (judge of style), Petronius, in the first century B.C.E., is one of the most interesting pieces of realistic fiction that has survived from antiquity. The work, estimated to be the size of a modest modern novel, is highly fragmentary so that the plot as a whole can only be loosely reconstructed. The narrator, an amoral yet educated man named Encolpius, has done something to offend the Roman god of sexuality and fertility, Priapus, and as a result has been stricken with a horrible case of impotence. He travels around Italy with his companion and young lover Giton looking for a cure, for the Roman equivalent of Viagra. The work has been described as a satire, as a mock epic, and a picaresque novel; it is lewd, it is bawdy and it is funny.
The Satyricon, however, also has an underlying moral message and a serious side for which William Arrowsmith argues in his seminal paper, entitled ‘Luxury and Death in the Satyricon.’ The central episode of the novel, which is also the most extant part of the work that has survived, is the Cena Trimalchionis—‘Trimalchio’s Dinner.’ Encolpius and Giton, along with a third friend they pick up somewhere along the way named Ascyltus, are invited to an elaborate dinner at the home of a ridiculously wealthy freedman named Trimalchio. The themes of luxury and death are meticulously and deftly blended together in the dinner party scene during which Trimalchio’s ostentatious wealth is fully on display alongside his obsession with his own mortality. He is rich enough, for instance, to hire a trumpeter that does nothing all day but sound his horn on the hour. He has a water clock in his dining room, a very expensive and rare item for a Roman, which also marks time for him. And the symbol, for me, that best displays the juxtaposition of the wealth and death is Trimalchio’s elaborate fresco that depicts the fates measuring and cutting the thread of his life—Trimalchio’s thread, of course, is painted in gold.
‘A Terrace in Rome’ by Pascal Quignard (Originally published in French as Terasse a Rome, Gallimard Editions, 2000. First translated into English by Douglas Penick and Charles Re, Wakefield Press, 2016)
To read any work by Pascal Quignard, whether fiction or non-fiction, is to experience philosophical and literary reflections on sex, love, shadows, art and death. A Terrace in Rome, his novella which won the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française prize in 2000, explores all of his most favored themes and images via the fictional story of Geoffroy Meaume, a 17th Century engraving artist whose illicit love for a woman causes him horrible disfiguration, pain and suffering. The year is 1639 when twenty-one-year-old Meaume, serving an apprenticeship as an engraver, first lays his eyes on Nanni, the eighteen-year-old blond beauty who is betrothed by her father to another man. For a while Meaume is happily absorbed in this secret affair and playing in umbra voluptatis (in the shadow of desire.) Each of the forty-seven chapters in the book are succinct – most are only a page or two—as Quignard is a master at composing a tightly woven narrative which lends the feeling that every word, every character, every image has been carefully placed on the page and is of the utmost importance. For those who are new to Quignard’s philosophical and roving style of writing, A Terrace in Rome is a perfect first, short piece to begin an exploration of his writings.
‘Ovid’s Banquet of Sense’ by George Chapman (Originally written in 1595, available to read online here)
I have long been familiar with Chapman’s translations of Homer, but he is a brilliant poet when he is composing his own verses.
‘Ovid’s Banquet of Sense’ is a description of the first century Roman poet’s feast of senses that is trigged when he sees Corinna, the woman of his dreams, bathing naked in her garden. Chapman explains that Corinna is a pseudonym for Julia, the Emperor Augustus’s daughter, who has walked into the courtyard where she proceeds to bathe, play the lute and sing, all of which Ovid observes hidden by an arbor. His first sense that is stimulated by her is his sight:
Then cast she off her robe and stood upright,
As lightning breaks out of a labouring cloud;
Or as the morning heaven casts off the night,
Or as that heaven cast off itself, and show’d
Heaven’s upper light, to which the brightest day
Is but a black and melancholy shroud;
Or as when Venus strived for sovereign sway
Of charmful beauty in young Troy’s desire,
So stood Corinna, vanishing her ‘tire.
Although there are multiple allusions to the Metamorphoses, Chapman’s ability to capture the sensuality, atmosphere, and tone of the Amores is what impressed me the most about his short, narrative poem.
‘House of Asterion’ by Jorge Luis Borges (First published in Spanish as ‘La casa de Asterión’ in Los Anales de Buenos Aires, 1947 and collected in El Aleph, Editorial Losada, 1949. First translated by James Irby and Donald Yates and collected in Labyrinths, New Directions, 1962)
In the preface to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Borges’s Labyrinths, André Maurois writes: “His sources are innumerable and unexpected. Borges has read everything, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound—he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas—but it is vast.”
My favorite story in the collection is ‘The House of Asterion’, which gives Minotaur a background story that is compassionate and sympathetic. He is lonely and isolated and wants to be put out of his solitary misery. Borges is influenced by Ovid’s Theseus and Ariadne story, but gives us the Minotaur’s point of view. He tells us that every nine years a group of men enter his home but fall and die on their own. One of them prophesies Asterion’s escape:
“Since then my loneliness does not pain me, because I know my redeemer lives and he will finally rise about the dust. If my ear could capture all the sounds of the world, I should hear his steps. I hope he will take me to a place with fewer galleries and fewer doors. What will my redeemer be like? I ask myself. Will he be a bull or a man? Will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man? Or will he be like me?
The morning sun reverberated from the bronze sword. There was no long even a vestige of blood.
‘Would you believe it, Ariadne?’ said Theseus. ‘The Minotaur scarcely defended himself.”
‘Theseus’ by André Gide (Originally published in French as Thésée, Gallimard, 1946 and in English by Pantheon the same year. Newly translated by Andrew Brown, Hesperus Press, 2002)
André Gide, in his short story ‘Theseus’ reimagines the myth of the Greek hero and fills in the gaps where the ancient narratives are lacking. Gide adeptly captures the pressure to perform that each hero experiences. In the first chapter, Aegeus, Theseus’s father, says to his son: “Your childhood is over. Be a man. Show your fellow men what one of their kind can be and what he means to become. There are great things to be done. Claim yourself.” After Theseus defeats various, local monsters, he is eager to take on his biggest challenge yet, defeating the Cretan Minotaur.
In Gide’s story, when Theseus lands in Crete he visits the artist Daedalus who explains to him how his labyrinth works and the only way to defeat it. This passage showcases Gide’s brilliance as a writer, an artist, and even a philosopher:
“I thought that the best way of containing a prisoner in the labyrinth was to make it of such a kind, not that he couldn’t get out (try to grasp my meaning here), but that he wouldn’t want to get out. I therefore assembled in this one place the means to satisfy every kind of appetite. The Minotaur’s tastes were neither many nor various; but we had to plan for everybody, whosoever it might be, who would enter the labyrinth. Another and indeed the prime necessity was to fine down the visitor’s will-power to the point of extinction.”
A relevant story for the 21st Century, where many are caught up in a labyrinth of their own choosing, a labyrinth composed of people and things that induce a “delicious intoxication” and are “rich in flattering delusions.”
‘Kings: An account of Books 1 and 2 of Homer’s Iliad’ by Christopher Logue (Originally published by Faber & Faber, 1991. Collected in various editions of War Music, Jonathan Cape, 1981; University of Chicago Press, 2003; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017)
Logue’s style is fast-paced, poetic, graphic, and shocking as he brings Achilles’ extreme form of rage to the forefront in just a few words. Logue captures the spirit, the essence and the central concepts of the first two chapters of Homer’s war poem, The Iliad, and he does it with his own unique poetic style that, at times, is quite startling. An example is Logue’s handling of Agamemnon’s character with a focus on Agamemnon’s mouth. “Mouth, King Mouth,” Achilles shouts to Agamemnon when they are fighting over Agamemnon’s unacceptable and dangerous behavior. The king listens to no one, he is brash, and he is all mouth. By contrast Nestor says about Achilles: “Your voice is honey and your words are winged.”
‘Achilleid’ by Statius (Originally written in Latin, and most recently translated by Peter Heslin, Hackett, 2015)
Writing during the reign of the Emperor Domitian, Statius composed two epics on lofty, ambitious topics: the Thebaid, which describes the violent war between Oedipus’s sons (or brothers) and the Achilleid, which fills in the early years of the Homeric hero Achilles. The Achilleid is tragic without being overwrought, balanced and even playful at times. Unfortunately the epic is unfinished and contains only two of the four books that Statius had intended to write but what we do have is a very important part of the tradition of the Trojan cycle. For instance, the story of Achilles being anointed in the river Styx by his mother who holds him by the heel which is the only vulnerable part of his body, is first mentioned by Statius. In only 1100 lines (it can be read in under an hour), Statius fills in the gaps of the Achilles story that makes the hero of those other epics seem more human, and more tragic.
‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ from The Georgics Book 4, by Vergil (Originally written in Latin and published in 29 B.C. Widely translated into English since the 17th Century, it can be read online here)
One of my favorite short narratives in all of Latin Literature is the Orpheus and Eurydice story in Vergil’s fourth Georgic. In my very early days as an undergraduate, when taking a Vergil course, I was given these lines from the Georgics and asked to produce a polished translation and commentary; I carefully and lovingly labored over this Latin text for weeks. A farmer named Aristaeus chases Eurydice through a field where she is bitten and killed by a serpent. Orpheus, in his intense grief, asks the ruler of the Underworld to allow him to bring his wife back to the living. However, by not following the only rule—not to look back at his wife on the journey up from Hades—he is unsuccessful.
Vergil also uses this as an etiological myth to explain the presence of bees. As a punishment for his indiscretion Aristaeus’s bee colony is destroyed and he is allowed to visit his mother and the other nymphs in their underwater lair to get advice on how to resurrect his hives. I vividly remember translating the part in which Aristaeus enters this watery, maternal realm—there were certain Latin words I keep thinking about and adjusting in my translation. My mother would call me every week and ask, “How are the bees coming along?” Although I had studied Latin in high school, I viewed translation as just another acquired skill, but it was due to this Vergil class and this short narrative I translated that made me decide to be a classicist.
‘Pygmalion’ from The Metamorphoses, by Ovid (Originally written in Latin and published in 8 A.D. Widely translated into English since the 17th Century, it can be read online here)
Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a narrative poem written in 8 A.D. and covers over 250 myths in 15 books. Each story, however, can be read individually as a stand-alone piece. My favorite short narrative is that of Pygmalion, an artist who cannot find a wife that matches his ideal of what a perfect woman should be. So as an artist and sculptor he decides to make his own ‘woman.’ Ovid says that the figure of a woman he sculpts is so flawless that one would think she is alive: ars adeo latet arte sua. (The art is especially hidden by its own skill.) In other words, the brilliance of Pygmalion’s art hides the fact that his sculpture is indeed art and not a real woman. Isn’t this the kind of seamless perfection towards which all artists or creators strive?
Although it is oftentimes viewed as a commentary about unattainable standards of beauty, I’ve always seen more in the Latin than this message. Pygmalion, in his daily solitude, uses the utmost care and love to gently coax a form out of the white block of marble that will become his beloved: “Pygmalion is amazed at his creation and drinks up with his heart the passionate fires of her simulated body.” Ovid demonstrates through Pygmalion’s sculpture the power that love, kindness, and, most importantly, patience can have on our relationships.
‘The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis’ Carmen 64, by Catullus (Originally published in the middle of the first century B.C.E. Catullus has been widely translated into English and it can be read online here)
Catullus actually gives us two short stories in this 400-line poem. It begins with the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, the parents of Achilles, who meet while he is sailing on the Argo. After their wedding the royal marriage bed is adorned with a dazzling tapestry that depicts the story of Theseus and Ariadne. In Catullus’ epyllion, Ariadne is given her own voice and tells her own side of the Minotaur story. After she falls in love with Theseus and helps him escape the labyrinth and the Minotaur, she sails away with him but is quickly abandoned by him on the island of Naxos. She immediately realizes her mistake in trusting this man who was supposed to be a hero; Ariadne speaks to a now absent Theseus and gives full vent to her anger, her heartache and her grief:
“From now on may no woman ever put her trust in any man who makes promises; from now on may no women believe that the words of any man can be trusted. While a man’s mind is set on getting something and his mind eagerly longs to gain that thing, then he will swear to anything, he will promise anything. But as soon as the desire of his greedy mind is sated, he remembers none of his previous words, he cares nothing about his false promises.”
Melissa Beck lives in New England where she spent 20 years teaching Latin and Ancient Greek to students at The Woodstock Academy. She now uses the copious amounts of money that she has earned as a teacher over the course of the past two decades to buy books for which she writes reviews on her website The Book Binder’s Daughter. Her reviews have also appeared in World Literature Today and 3:AM. She has contributed an essay about Epicureanism to the anthology Rush and Philosophy. She is online @magistrabeck.
* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 2,800 story recommendations, at www.apersonalanthology.com.
* A Personal Anthology is curated by Jonathan Gibbs, author of two novels, Randall, and The Large Door, and a book-length poem, Spring Journal. He is Programme Director of the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City, University of London.
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