Petrarch's Canzoniere with A. M. Juster

Petrarch's Canzoniere — 366 poems written over 40 years in pursuit of a woman named Laura — introduced the sonnet to European literature and helped move poetry from Latin into the vernacular. It is also, as A.M. Juster's new translation makes plain, a deeply Augustinian collection: raw, confessional, and unresolved. Nadya Williams talks with Juster about the art of poetic translation, the discipline it demands, and why Petrarch still matters.

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Chapters
0:13 - Introduction to Petrarch's Canzoniere.
0:42 - Discussion on the arc of the story.
1:26 - Overview of Petrarch's themes.
2:23 - Introduction of Petrarch's work.
2:51 - Introduction of Mike Jester.
4:31 - Definition of a Classic.
5:42 - Petrarch's influence on European poetry.
6:41 - Challenges in translating Petrarch.
9:39 - Mike's journey with Petrarch.
15:16 - Mike's personal journey with poetry.
22:51 - Discussion on translation and Latin.
27:14 - Petrarch's confessional poetry.
30:15 - Importance of poetry for Christians.
33:13 - Spiritual aspect of poetry.
40:39 - Translating challenging poems.
46:40 - Upcoming Propersious collection.
53:23 - Final question about classic literature.

Christians Reading Classics is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. If you would like to support this work, become a Mere Orthodoxy Member today at http://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.

Apply for fall 2026 admission to Beeson Divinity School's MDiv and be considered for a full-tuition scholarship. https://bit.ly/beesonscholarships 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:19

In the 14th century, over the course of 40 years, the poet we know today in English by the simple name Petrarch wrote, rewrote, arranged, and rearranged a collection of 366 poems, inspired by his love for a woman he calls Laura. Today we know this collection as the Consonniere. Heavily influenced by Roman love poetry, it is nonetheless something very new and Petrarch's own. Welcome to Christians Reading Classics podcast from Mirror Orthodoxy. I am Nadia Williams, books editor for Mirror Orthodoxy. And today it is an incredible delight to talk about Petrarch with Mike Juster. Or you may have seen his name also as A. M. Jester. He is a modern poet who loves a very real Laura, in fact, for almost 52 years. He happens to have just published a new translation of Petrarch's Canzonere. Clearly, the Laura connection made it just fate. For many years, he also lived a double life. In his public life, he worked in senior positions in the federal government for four different presidents, including serving as the commissioner of the Social Security Administration from 2007 to 2013. But all the while, he was writing original poetry, poetic translations, and criticism under the pseudonym A.M. Jester, and winning a stream of prestigious awards for this poetry. No one gets awards for operating the Social Security Administration. His previous books include Girlity, which is a delight for the children in your life, and Wonder and Wrath, a delight for the grown-ups. And of course, now Petrarch, which when I wrote about it briefly for the dispatch recently, I described it as a book that demands a party. Just call together your friends and read poems together. Mike, thank you so much for joining me.

SPEAKER_03 2:21

No, I'm happy to be here. Thank you for having me on board.

SPEAKER_02 2:24

So before we jump to Petrarch in more detail, because this is a podcast on classic books, I would love to hear your definition of what is a classic.

SPEAKER_03 2:36

Oh, well, I think a classic for me is a book that continues to move people over time. We have a lot of fairly ephemeral books, and sometimes they're very good books, but for one reason or another, they stop capturing people's imagination. So I for me, it's it's a test of um both how it connects with readers and its durability over time. And you know, this this book, while I think um in English has gone in and out of favor a little bit, has always been a very important part of um our culture and both directly and indirectly. I mean, it it introduced the sonnet um to European literature, uh, it introduced other forms of experimentation. And one of the other important things I think a lot of people overlook or or or forget or didn't know is that this is part of a movement with two other giants to move European poetry out of Latin and into the vernacular. Um, and that was very liberating in lots of ways for the poets involved. And so you have a trio, um, Dante and uh Chaucer, who both Mylor and I wrote our senior essays at Yale on Chaucer, um, and Petrarch. Um, and that was a very radical thing to be doing at the time. Um, I've translated John Milton's Latin um elegies, and um he was he he was sure at a very early age that he not only wanted to be a great poet, but that he would be a great poet. But he was agonizing for a long time over the choice of writing in Latin or writing in English, you know, as late as um the early 18th century. And he hedged his bets for a while. The reason I got to translate some of his Latin is he wasn't at all sure that that was how he would make his mark, you know, over time. So it's um it's a terrific and important book um that has engaged people over time. And I think what I'm what I hope is, I mean, I as a translator, I try to go for the low bar. You know, I I I guess I've done that in politics and stuff. So you you go where the opportunity is. I mean, there's some wonderful writers who I love, where from my vantage point, there's no point in trying to translate them myself because they've been done well. And there's nothing from my tool in my toolkit that would allow me to do something sort of new and different and really worthwhile and worth, you know, my my limited time left on this planet. Um, so you look for things that either haven't been translated into English, um which, you know, I did some late antique Latin poetry that falls into that category, or where you feel that the translations leave something to be desired. And in Petrarch's case, the first half of the 20th century, there was a lot of uneasiness about the rawness of the sexuality and the spiritual struggle. And as with a lot of classical poetry, the scholars of the time wanted to bouldarize that and and sanitize it so that it would be acceptable for the broader masses. And so it was a there was a habit of translating him as a foppish, poorly love poet, and leaving a lot of stuff out, injecting a lot of things that really weren't there, and making him something different than what he was. And then there was a remarkable translation in the 1970s out of Harvard University Press by Robert Derling, which is a very good, very precise literal translation. It is impossible to read for pleasure, but simulated um a lot of attempts to try to put Petrarch more into poetry. Um, and in in my view, and I think a lot of people's use, there were admirable attempts, but people could not pull off the density of the rhyme. And if you're trying to do Petrarch, who is just, I mean, literally, he's known for the way he rhymes uh the sonnet in Italian, you're losing a lot of the essential music, and it's just it's just not the same. Um, and it is very difficult to do, and it is very time consuming. And and I took one crack at it uh with my friend Catherine Tufariella, um, who we were kind of cornered by Dana Joya at a conference and said this was a good idea. And we spent about a year and a half trying to take the whole thing on, and we finally gave up in frustration. You know, that was almost 30 years ago. Um, but then we finally decided that I had a bigger toolkit. I also had more time because I was retired. Um, and um so I decided to take another crap at it and was actually, I I I sort of feel like I got help by God because I was just making the decision to go ahead. You know, I said if I said to myself, if I can do the first 30 in a row and not leave any out, then I'm gonna go for it. And I had just done that and the pandemic hit. And and I had to be even more walled away than normal people because I'm fighting two autoimmune diseases. So I didn't I didn't leave the house very much for about two and a half years and basically um worked eight to fourteen hours a day, pretty much every day for two and a half years. Took some breaks for grandchildren, and and that was pretty much it. And it it took that kind of time and intensity, you know, to try to do justice. And you can't completely do justice. I mean, you know, every time I pick it up and read it, there's some compromise I remember, and I wish that I could have done it better. And uh I mean translations are always failures, you just have to decide which ways you're gonna fail and how much. Um but I'm pretty happy still with it at the whole. I don't think I could have done an awful lot better um that I done. We've only found one typo so far, too, so that's good too.

SPEAKER_01 8:58

I have not seen that one. Didn't notice it.

SPEAKER_04 9:02

You'd have to you'd have to look real, real carefully because the line makes perfect sense. So, you know, it's it's it's a tough one to find.

SPEAKER_02 9:12

I I love this. Um, and I I'd love for you to let us in a little more into this sort of behind the scenes of like the making of a poetic translation. Because writing original poetry is hard enough, but in some ways it actually sounds like writing a poetic translation is even harder because you are making poetry in a different language from someone else's poetry that is not only like there's not only the language barrier, there's a cultural barrier. So you mentioned that there's a great translation of Petrarch uh that is not readable. So walk us through this process.

SPEAKER_03 9:50

So what I think a good translation requires is a personal quality that people that who know me from my other lives probably doubt that I have, which is humility. Um you have to subjugate your own voice and try to capture uh the voice of someone else. Um and that actually runs very counter to the way a lot of poets are trained. You know, we have this real elevation of the self and the psyche, and and an awful lot of our poetry these days is sort of a form of self-therapy and that type of thing. So a lot of them don't have the mindset, I think, to go in and really do, you know, good translation. So um you have to find work that you love for some reason or another, and then you have to be dissatisfied with the translations that are out there in some shape, fashion, or form. And then you have to work, you need to read the literature and and kind of make sure you understand the poet and where the poet um is coming from. And and then, and you can do that in an analytical sense and still not be ready because you know, the the voice is, you know, you have to fuse that analytical stuff with the emotional things and try to really imagine where it's coming from. I I've always enjoyed that. I mean, I that that process, I mean, and I've I've done it sort of in other ways too. I wrote um a book of satirical imitations of Billy Collins, and I I took fragments from an a lost Aristophanes um comedy and um patched them together, and then where there were holes, just kind of went wild and and did what I thought Aristophanes would say in the in in the way that he would say it. So I I enjoy that kind of thing. I I did political speechwriting when I was um young and um had to sort of capture the voice of very different politicians. Um, so I think it comes relatively naturally for me. Um, and for a while I was kind of keeping a list of poets I thought I might want to get to at some point in time. And then when I had some time, I went through my list and I'd think about it a little bit harder. I'm nowhere near as disciplined about that now. Um, and I'm not sure I'm gonna take on many more long translations. Um, they do take a lot out of me. They do keep me from doing other things. Um, I've been having increasing tech problems with Windows when they move to Windows 11. And um for this the project I'm working on now, I've lost big chunks of the manuscript because of the ineptitude of of Microsoft. So um um, but I think I'll be happy sticking to maybe some shorter stuff. There's some wonderful shorter things around that that I think do need some work. But it's for me, it's fun. Um, and it was actually how I first broke into publishing because I think editors of the journals I wanted to be in initially found the translations much more compelling than the the early original work. And then I was able to ramp it up a little bit. So it's been great for me. And about half my publications or translation my original.

SPEAKER_02 13:06

So I'd love for you to tell us more about your relationship with Petrarch, how you got um just sucked into this project. You gave glimpses already, but just walk us through what was it like the first time you read Petrarch? Did you read him in the original to begin with or translation and all of that?

SPEAKER_03 13:23

Well, I've actually been trying to remember exactly. So um, and I may have this a little bit wrong. I've gotten old enough that I'm forgetting about things that are important. So um I was a double major in English and philosophy at Yale in the 70s. And I believe that my first exposure to Petrarch was in my Renaissance literature class survey that was semi-required or semi-required at Yale at the time. Um and I don't remember what version they had us read. I think that was right before the Derling came out. So I don't think it was the Derling, um, but I can't remember which one it was. So he was kind of on my radar screen a little bit. I mean, I knew who he was, I knew who he was, why he was important, and that type of thing. But um it wasn't the revelatory experience that sometimes your first um read of poet is. So then what happened is um I gave up poetry for about a decade. I had a a horrible um conversation with a semi-famous poet um who ran a workshop at Yale, who said to me, right, right point blank, son, you have no talent for poetry, you should find another hobby. Um and um it made it a lot easier when I discovered um he was there on an ad-junct basis because it was getting too uncomfortable for him pursuing the undergraduate women at his place of employment. Um but in the meantime, I got was pretty busy trying to build a career, a marriage, a family, um, and um, you know, we were we weren't impoverished, but we were kind of stretched right on the edge, you know, a lot. So poetry kind of went away for a little while. And then I I came back to it uh when I was about 30. One of the things I decided, you know, I had I had originally when I was little had written formal poetry, that was all they were teaching. And then I had gotten caught up with the trendy stuff in the 60s and 70s, and and essentially was writing very bad imitations of that. We're clearing out the house for a move to Virginia, donating my papers to Boston College. So I'm finding some things that I wish that I had not found, including my high school notebooks um and and college notebooks. So I was writing a lot of bad imitative free verse. And we were in Washington when I went back to poetry and um Dana Joya's review of the um selected uh Philip Larkin poetry was really important to me. Um and then very shortly after I found Dana's Can Poetry Matter uh essay. I said to myself, I I think I can teach myself to write like that. And of course, that was pre-internet. It was a lot harder to find kindred souls and sources of feedback and and that kind of thing. So it was it was sort of hard. And so one of the things I started doing is I started doing translations as an exercise. And at some point I had picked up the Derling um Petrarch because I was interested. And so I was doing Hetarch in Marshall and Baudelaire uh and a few other poets, really just to teach myself how to write original poetry. And then a little bit to my surprise, when I finished some of these and I lined them up against ones that had been published in fancy parents' basis, I said, you know, I I think I think this stacks up pretty well. And in fact, I got into the formalist pretty quickly, which was my uh, you know, wish for desire at the time was to break into the the formalist and and other places as well with the translations. And I found that I enjoyed it. And then after a while, as I was doing more of it, I started thinking that I could contribute more to people, that if I tried to be a little bit more ambitious and started going for books. So I started doing that. I think the first one was about 2005. Um, and um, I picked up a copy of Horace's satires while I was taking my daughter on a college tour at Brown and really love satires. And so that was what really set me off. From there on, I just started looking for other things I wanted to do. People misunderstand sometimes. So, you know, I've done more Latin than anything else, and so people put the label classicist on you, which I don't think I really deserve. So, one thing I don't know H Greek, and second, my Latin's not that good. I I took no Latin in college, I took no graduate school Latin. I have high school and junior high school and high school Latin, which I had no choice about taking. Um, and and kind of ramped up, you know, on my own. But a lot of the opinions that real classicists have, I I don't have. Um, so uh I am very critical of the classical establishment for deciding that the classics in Latin end when they become Christian. Um, and so I've been a big proponent of late antique poetry, early medieval um poetry. And it's you know why I I have a book Waldhelms Riddles and Maximianis' Um elegies. Um I also am not a big fan of some of the books that are the cornerstones, and and I respect them as books. I know why they're important, I think they're extremely well done. I don't read uh the Aeneid or uh the Iliad for enjoyment. I've been asked three times I've seen translations of the Aeneid, but I I don't really enjoy an Iliad. Um and I don't and one of the things I just think I read about I say I don't like war poetry in particular. And it's it's not out of uh uh pacifist philosophy. It's just I I I I don't enjoy it. Um and so I I've picked off things that others tend to consider less important. So I've enjoyed doing humor, I've enjoyed doing love poetry, um, you know, a few other, you know, odd things. So I'm I'm a little bit of an outlier because I'm not not a real class.

SPEAKER_02 20:24

I love this. And it's impressive that you have been able to do so much with translation, essentially teaching yourself or beefing up your Latin on your own. And that's really that's really impressive. And it's a testament to the quality of instruction you received in junior high and high school, which doesn't exist anymore for the most part.

SPEAKER_03 20:43

Um, I really I've actually reconnected with my seventh tenth grade Latin teacher who's been a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas for many years. Um, and I think he's a little freaked out by it all. Because I think, you know, he's been way too polite to sort of say this or hint this. But I think if you had him on the broadcast and you asked him about me and he were being honest, he he would say, you know, he's not really one of the ones I would have picked out, you know, as in making any kind of mark in the classics. But you know, the world evolves in funny ways.

SPEAKER_02 21:21

I love this. Well, and that's again like your um, I do appreciate humor, and I think of it as kind of your trademark that you bring humor subtly, like even girlity. It had that there's so much gentle humor in stories like that that you write. Um so let's get to Petrarch now in a little bit more detail. Um could you walk us through this collection? So imagine somebody picks up your book, they've never read Petrarch, and we're not judging here, like we don't judge someone for never having read Petrarch before, but they've repented, they're about to read this collection. What do you tell them? Walk them through.

SPEAKER_03 22:01

Well, to use a m much recently debated phrase from Aeneid translations, Petrarch was a complicated man. And he probably was like me in certain ways. He was arrogant. He was uh broadly interested in things. He was involved in the politics of the time. He studied law for seven years, basically, I think because his father made him do it. I did it for three years and hated every minute of it. But um uh so there's there's certain, you know, and and and and the the the affection for the sonnet. So there's certain similarities there, um, not to mention, you know, the love of Laura. Um so it's sort of a natural connect in in certain ways. He was very vain. He he worked very hard to get himself named as Poet Laureate of Rome. And he was a bit of a hypocrite. So he took minor orders in the church. And I keep trying to get a real good description of what that meant at the time. I don't think I've ever been able to do it, but it wasn't like being a full priest, but maybe a little bit more than being a deacon, you know, today. And despite that, and despite the um the longing for Laura, um, he fathered two illegitimate children. Um, a son that he was um estranged with um and and died fairly young. I think the son died in his mid-twenties, and a daughter who was apparently very faithful and loyal and tended for him in his old age, um, Petrarch having lived to um about the age that I am now. Um so um I think he knew that he was a hypocrite in certain ways, and it bothered him. And it's and so he spent a long time trying to reconcile his lustful desires with his commitment to the church. Um, and I think one of the things a lot of people have missed about this because of the some of the bodlarization of earlier translations and that kind of thing is is this is a collection that's very Augustinian. Um confessions are uh all over this book. And that also means that in addition to um laying the you know, bringing the son into European literature, in a large, to a large degree, he brought confessional poetry into European um literature. I mean, there are some roots in Latin, and particularly prepertius, um uh who I've been uh translating recently as well, but um uh uh it's it's very raw confessional in the key moments and putting, I think, the emotions on the page in order to help himself reconcile it with the things that those emotions were inconsistent with. Um and I think that's part of what makes the book timeless, because um particularly when you spend time in large organizations, you know, human relations departments and things like that. Um it it it surprised me when I started doing that, how messed up people who seemed perfectly normal that I was working with, how messed up they were about you know their sexual desires and and that kind of thing. Um and it's um so it's a very common human issue. Um and you know, watching somebody interesting struggle with that and at least to some extent surmount it. Um, I think it's probably appropriate to have some slight skepticism when you get to poem 366 as to exactly how successful he'd been. He made progress for sure. We can give him points for progress. Um, but that's something, you know, uh in the same way that you know, the uh the poems of Plath and Sexton and and and uh I don't like Lowell, but um you know some some of the others from that time period helped a lot of people at that time and popularized a certain mode of poetry. Um, you know, in a lot of ways, Petrarch's the the father of that mode of poetry.

SPEAKER_02 26:59

I like this, uh, the reminder that this is very Augustinian in themes. And indeed, this podcast is called Christians Reading Classics. So talk to us a little bit more about how Christians can read poetry like this one, and also why it's important for Christians to read poetry.

SPEAKER_03 27:17

Well, I I think it's um good poetry as a general matter spawns serious introspection. And if you're a committed Christian and you are provoked to introspection, that's usually a good thing. Um and it it may provoke you down a very uh unexpected doctrinal route, and that's fine. But I think generally what poetry does is it it takes you back to the basics that spawned a lot of those doctrines. You know, you you you you wrestle with faith in a real way. You um you you consider death and afterlife um in a very much more primal way. Um you know, there's there's nothing doctrinal, in my opinion, about Gerard Manley Hopkins, for instance, or Christian Wyman today. Um you know, he's talking about great religious poets. So I I think it's it's an adjunct to more formal religious training. It it's something that brings you back to the mist. If you're doing it well with the right poets, it brings you back really more into the mysteries that are the foundation of religion as opposed to the the fine points of what people often argue about and focus on.

SPEAKER_02 28:49

I was thinking your own experience of trans basically shutting yourself up for a couple of years and translating this collection sounded borderline monastic, like a retreat.

SPEAKER_03 29:00

Yes, yes. Yeah, I I I I hadn't really thought about I actually that just crossed my mind right before you said it. And I don't think I really thought about it before. Um and um, you know, I I tried not, I don't know, I don't know why. Um, but yes, I I think there's something to that. Um, and there have been other times too. Um when I was translating St. Aldhelm's riddles, um I somehow found it soothing and helpful to be playing Gregorian chants in the background. Um, I don't usually listen to music anymore when I write. Um when I was young I did, but I mostly I found it distracting. But um there is something sort of soothing and uh, you know, that just sort of draws you into the sublime and and in particular with Altham, into sort of the right sort of centuries and that kind of thing. So I I actually enjoyed that um, you know, quite a bit. I don't usually though listen to music when I'm I'm translating.

SPEAKER_02 30:06

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SPEAKER_00 30:44

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SPEAKER_02 31:40

It's interesting to think of this practice of reading poetry, or in your case, writing and translating poetry as a spiritual practice almost. Or maybe, yes, downright spiritual practice.

SPEAKER_03 31:52

Yes, and I think it's become more so for me over time. Um and I think that the original poetry has started to change a little bit. Um I think when I first started publishing, I was a little bit more of a narrative poet. And then I think I became a little bit more of a lyrical poet, um, although still with a pretty heavily narrative element. And I think um maybe the last 20 years, I mean, it's it's it's there's I think there's more spirituality um in it. There's more uh wrestling with religious issues. Um and uh you know, particularly some of the most recent ones, I think that's that's more pronounced and and and I don't know why. You know, that's that may be you know starting to wrestle with one's own mortality and that type of thing. Yeah, that's sort of been the evolution. You know, I've tried to maintain the sense of humor through it all. You have to be a little careful about that if you're getting into religious issues and and you're wise cracking. So, you know, you gotta be a little careful about that. But um yeah, that's kind of been the evolution.

SPEAKER_02 33:08

So for Petrarch himself, we also see an evolution through this collection, assuming, and you do caution us that we don't totally know for sure the order of the poems, but assuming this is more or less that, it does seem like he's thinking more and more about his mortality and of course Laura's mortality as we get further in the collection.

SPEAKER_03 33:28

Aaron Powell He was, I think, genuinely devastated by her death, which happened according to him. And there are doubters about this, although I actually believe him on this, on the same day of the year that he first saw her. And there are poems of both about when he first saw her in church and um and then many about her death, so um, which was on April 6th. Um this sort of a humorous aside, this book was launched on April 7th, and I tried to persuade um Norton to move it up one day and and kind of embrace the April 6th thing. And they said, no, we only we only release books on Tuesdays. So that that failed. But um yeah, he did change. Um he some of the earlier poems are the worst. Um, there are a couple sonnets that are basically poorly hidden, pleased for money from rich people. Um there are there's some experiments that fail badly. So, you know, you have to keep an open mind, you know, as you go through the first 50 poems or so. They're up and down. There, there's some glorious ones. Um, although some of those were written, and like the poem I read, one was not the first one he wrote. That was clearly written, you know, much later and then consciously put back as his way of kind of kicking off the story. I think that the later poems tend to be better. You know, you get into the 200s and 300s. I think the ego needs have been satisfied to some extent. I think he's made progress, tamping down the physical desires and and ramping up the spiritual desires. Although there's some moments of brilliance in the in several of the sonnets in the first hundred that maybe you don't see, you know, later on. So it's it's it's not a predictable thing. And it um it doesn't, even though it looks like he organized the order pretty carefully, it's not the way that our MFA programs today would train people to to do it. It it's it's messy, you know, it's not a clean art. Um and that's okay, I think. I mean, it doesn't bother me. It shouldn't bother a reader. There's probably professors out there who are bothered. You know, it but it's it's it's messy and it's a little unpredictable. And he's got side trips. Um, and some of those side trips are really interesting. I mean, he became suddenly topical a couple weeks ago after almost 700 years of obscurity, because um he broke the usual mode and did three very angry poems at the Avignon papacy um that are called the the Babylon sonnets. Um, and so when the Trump administration apparently invoked the Avignon papacy in some diplomatic discussions, I was thrilled. I this is a way to get attention to the book and you know that kind of thing. Avignon papacy here, you know, poems uh I think 136, 7, and 8. And um uh so he did that. You know, he also wrote what was kind of the rallying cry for Italian nationalism. I mean, a lot of us don't even appreciate how fragmented Italy was until the mid-19th century. So he wrote a very long canzone um that is I believe it's 140 in the Canzing area, that is um popularly known in Italy as as my Italy. Um and and that was a that was a major cultural thing for centuries in Italy. So he's there are side trips. Um and there's a lot of experimentation in addition to writing, you know, in the vernacular. Um he didn't create most of these forms. He often found interesting things that obscure poets were doing, you know, elsewhere, and then using them, building them, you know, that type of thing. But um, you know, he has a sonnet that was, I think the most difficult one to translate in a lot of ways. I think I think it's 17, is um it's all in rhyme reach, which means basically it's exact rhyme in that it's the same words, usually used in a different way, um, down uh uh you know the right-hand side of the column. And it's it was very tricky, you know, to find those words. But you know, eventually, you know, I found want W-A-N-T and want W-A-N-T, you know, and then that actually fit quite nicely. So, you know, it was doable, but that one sonnet probably took me weeks, I think.

SPEAKER_02 38:36

So I have a cure curiosity question about translating poems that you were thinking, like, these were not as good, because you were remarking, like, you know, the quality goes up and down. So, how do you handle that as a translator?

SPEAKER_03 38:48

Well, you do worry a little bit on some of these. Um, when you're translating a bad poem as part of the collection, that people will think it's you rather than the poet. So I'm I'm like Petrarch, I'm egotistical enough that that thought crosses my mind. I mean, you have to be very sure first that it really is bad. You know, you can't rely on someone else's bad translation. You really have to almost look at it harder to make sure that, you know, what you're seeing uh is what it really is. And once in a while, you know, you can rescue a poem that has been written off because there's something important that's been missed. And I think I've done that a few times. But for the most part, your original judgment tends to be right. And so um my view is you just try to render it as accurately to the um original intention um as you can. And it's not that much different from everything else. Um we live in an age where a lot of translators feel not only comfortable, but obliged to kind of infuse their um their own thoughts and creativity into um into poetry. And I'm I'm very opposed. I I I had a a little war uh with um David Slavit, a very prolific poet and translator who died recently, um, who lived right near me. Um and um I took him to task in a first things review um for putting a menstruation joke into Ovid's metamorphoses that is not in fact there at all. There's not like any hint of it at all. He's just going along and thinking, well, it would be funny to put this joke in here. And and I view that as a breach of trust. I mean, I, you know, this may be, you know, you know, like Patriarch, it's the legal training, that at some point I view this as a contract between me and the poet, and between me and the reader. And that the the goal is to try to put something on paper that is as close to what the poet would have said in English had they been writing in the English in our time. Now, that's obviously, you know, it's it's it's it's fiction on fiction. And so it's very easy for uh, you know, uh big poetry to be contemptuous of that. Um, but I think that's the right way to do it. And I think that we're turning more and more that way. And I think, you know, WW Norton has had a lot of success recently with poets that are out of that school. I mean, um with Emily Wilson and Dana Joya and Aaron Pachiki and um really all sharing a lot of the same um starting points that I use. Um, in addition to those being generally critically well acclaimed, they're selling better than most of them do because they are actually reaching and and connecting with people. So let's hope that that streak continues with this one.

SPEAKER_02 42:09

I love that. And it's a good reminder that yes, like uh every now and then there are these hysterical headlines, like nobody's reading. It's like, well, uh maybe in your little corner of the universe, people are not reading, but the people I know, everybody is reading. And it's um good books that are selling well. So there's uh there's a desire to uh to read beautiful literature. And I think you've done that really well here, and the choosiness and projects you you take on and the idea of a contract, especially as a translator between you, the original author and the reader, I really like this vision of this is what the translator's job is.

SPEAKER_03 42:51

Yeah, yeah. But it's not it's not ever going to get you the place in the hierarchy that if you're writing, you know, if you're Dante yourself or you're Richard Wilbur or you're, you know, some other great poet, um, you know, you're never going to get the same uh acclaim and credit and whatnot. But that's that's okay. Uh, you know, I I mean I um I get a kick out of doing this. Um and I've also been blessed in a way, you know, I I made an ill-fated early attempt to go into academia, um, and Yale decided that was a a mistake and made sure that didn't happen. So I went and and had a much more interesting life and was able to come back to poetry with a very different perspective, but also the freedom to do what I wanted. Um so you know, if you it's a little different now, but when I started translating late antique Latin poetry, if you were you know a a rising aspiring professor in a classics department, you know, that's like that was like signing your your death sentence for your own career. You know? So I, you know, I had the freedom, you know, to do that. And and you know, I look at it now and consider it a blessing.

SPEAKER_02 44:18

Yeah. So you've you've translated both uh works that would be considered not part of the canon, but also now you're um you've you've done plenty to um translate the canon as well. Would you tell us a little bit about your uh upcoming Propertius collection?

SPEAKER_03 44:36

So yes. So um it's gone more so life has gotten very uh hectic and um distracting. So we're we're in a move um you know I've had some medical issues. Um the Petrarch publication process was longer and more tortuous than I anticipated. I mean it was four years almost from submission of the book. The book took a the final version of the book I mean I had I had translations you know pre-pandemic translations uh some of which I'd published in a small volume um but most of it I started at the beginning of the pandemic and it and so I did most of it in in about two and a half years. And then it took the book almost four years to actually get into people's hot little hands. And unfortunately for me that often seems to be the way that it takes a ridiculous amount of time to you know get my work into circulation. And so I started not too long after um finishing the Patriarch started on the Perpertius because you know they're related um I had done a little bit of individual um translation of Perpertius before there's a a a debated six line fragment that I think is his most beautiful um work. And when I started working on it um this next time through and got to it I had I had forgotten that the Loeb Harvard the Distinguished Harvard Loeb edition had dissed these six lines and and said well they've they've got to be a fragment because they don't stand on their own you know as a and and I said this is kind of like among the most beautiful six lines I've ever seen so as as a way to sort of send a signal to Harvard um I I actually changed my translation so it's it's it's you know mostly what I'm doing is I'm imitating the form. It's blank verse it's it's in the elegiac couplets. As best of my knowledge nobody's actually translated into elegiac couplets before so it's an iambic hexameter line followed by an iambic pentameter line and then you know you do it all over again and it gives it it gives it a little bit of a pulse that you don't see in um regular blank verse of just iambic pentameter iambic hexameter tends to really drag in English I've seen a few poets pull it off for short periods of time but it's the funny thing is if you pair it where you're just doing it every other line it seems to work fine. So I actually made the six lines rhyme exactly to make them more lyrical and more intensive and to try to make my point a little bit more emphatically than I have before. So the one place where I break from the standard for all the other poems is on book two poem 11 if I remember you know um I um I've discovered that academic classes have given up really on peer review at least given up on peer review poetry which I could rely on in the early days and and I need because I'm I'm not an athlete you know I I I make mistakes um so I finally have decided I decided with Petrarch and I decided with Perpertius um to hire my own you know reviewer number two um and and was able to pick these brilliant women who were both good scholars in the area but poets themselves um because it is annoying to work with a philologist that can't accept that you know you can't render it the philologist way because it's poetry it's supposed to be poetry so um I've been going through uh with Victoria Mall wonderful classes um the um second draft of the prepartius we were hoping to make it through the whole way last Wednesday but we didn't quite make it so we probably have one more um session so then um I've got at least four areas that I need to clean up where I it mistakes um and then um what I'll probably do is um share it with some friends who are in the area see if I get some additional feedback uh I've got my eye on a translation competition second half of the year that I'll probably submit it for it may be a little harder to get published than I thought because um a lot of the normal presses for this kind of thing actually have technically perpetuous volumes that were published 30, 40 years ago when he was Ezra Pound had made him much more popular. So they're not going to take those on. So I I got a narrower window for publication than uh than I I thought I might have but I think I'm gonna be okay. You know I I've never had the problem of finishing a long work and not been able to publish it. So I'm I'm keeping my fingers crossed on the on the perch. So probably it'll be ready to go by the end of the year. It will might take me 12 to 18 months to shop it and find someone and then it seems to take a very long time for most of these kinds of works to get them out.

SPEAKER_02 50:30

It may be I mean there's no reason why it couldn't get out probably by 2027 but 2029 2030 is probably more like well I'm looking forward to it I really I really enjoyed Propertius as part of the canon actually for my classics reading lists.

SPEAKER_04 50:50

So he's fun I'll I'll send you the draft if you want I mean give me give me another one and I'll I'll I'll send you the draft.

SPEAKER_02 51:01

I'd love that although I don't know how much help I'll be because I'm not a poet I'm just an appreciator of poetry.

SPEAKER_03 51:07

That's that's right. I'll send it to you just so you can enjoy it. You don't have to feel obliged to send me feedback just you know I'm looking for readers you know that's why you do it.

SPEAKER_02 51:18

So you know that's that's fair. Thank you. So final question that I always ask people on this podcast and it's been really fun to see answers what classic do you wish you had written and why well as I said before I think people put labels on people and then that creates expectations and um that's a stupid thing to do in the first place.

SPEAKER_03 51:48

And second most of the ordinary labels don't fit me terribly well in any way so um I think most people would expect that you know I'd answer with Virgil or Homer or somebody like that. And that's that's not my way. So I think for me it would probably be Melville. So one of my did not expect that work is I I started reading very ambitiously very young both in science and in and in literature um and a um a wonderful young librarian whose name I don't even remember kind of took me under her wing and then negotiated my way up into the adult section when it wasn't really you know called for um so I read I've read Moby Dick three times. I read Moby Dick when I was nine and missed a lot it was you know I but I enjoyed the big fish chase. I read it again at 20 when I was yell English major uh and then one of my many failures uh for one of my I read it when I was about 50 because I started a novel I've never written a novel but I started a novel that was kind of infused with Moby Dick um and the location of our summer house which is on a remote island in Buzzard's Bay uh 11 miles west of Martha's Vineyard and is the site of the first British attempt to colonize North America and in 1602. And the reason you don't know about that in all likelihood and you think well you know Plymouth Rock was 1620 and that kind of thing is it didn't go very well. So you know the the captain went by they they passed Martha's Vineyard probably because it was seriously inhabited but the captain named the island after his daughter and then kept going to our island which is called Cuddyhunk Island and um they stayed three weeks and then for reasons that aren't clear turned around went back to England and then most of the crew went to Virginia five years later and then that didn't go very well either and they you know disappeared you know down there. But I've been always been fascinated by islands and particularly New England island communities and we kind of tried out most of them before we we settled on Cuddy Hunk. So it's not really a Cuddy hunk novel but it's sort of a fusion of sort of you know New England islands and things like that. And of course um Moby Dick starts in New Bedford which is where we pick up the ferry to go to Cuddy hunk and um and then it goes to Nantucket. And so um I was looking to write a novel that was infused with a bit of the spirit of Moby Dick.

SPEAKER_02 55:11

So I read it again at the age of 50 in the hope that it would um help propel um this novel which is still on my computer over there but I didn't get very far it was not the answer I expected but this was this is so fun. That's the beauty of reading like it's unexpected.

SPEAKER_03 55:33

Yeah yeah no it's um uh it's been a strange thing to have uh my avocation become my vocation and I didn't really see it coming um and it took me a while to get it adjusted to it. You know a lot of writers who have real jobs to survive fantasize about having unlimited um time to write and and I guess I did a little bit too but maybe not as desperately as as most of them because I I I enjoyed you know my public service it was a bit difficult to have when you have unlimited time and opportunity to kind of use it in a productive way. I I found it a little bit more overwhelming in the first few years than I thought it would be and then kind of got the hang of it a bit more.

SPEAKER_02 56:22

Well Mike thank you so much for taking the time for this conversation thank you for inviting me I enjoyed it very much