It is difficult to imagine a more upstanding literary citizen than A. M. Juster. His work as an editor, lately of First Things and now at Plough, has been first-rate. He has taught poetry both in and outside the academy. As a translator, he seeks to broaden the body of work in English, saying in an interview that he tries to find “really interesting writers who have slipped outside the canon, or writers who need to be brought in for the first time.” This project has included the Satires of Horace, Saint Aldhelm’s Riddles, and most recently John Milton’s Latin Elegies. And this while not publishing an original collection of serious verse in nearly twenty years. He has set his own work aside in service to the broader literary world. All this to say that this year, having published a new collection, Wonder and Wrath, we would do well to pay attention.
As we might expect, Wonder and Wrath includes an ample selection of translations. These range from versions from the Chinese, to Welsh, to fragments of Rilke’s French, which Juster has, provocatively, “completed.” Juster seems to have a special affinity for Latin poems composed by English poets and has included two of them in this collection, both valuable additions to the canon for those of us who do not read Latin. “To my dear friend, M. J. Jackson, disparager of this treatise,” by A. E. Housman, is thought to be the last Latin poem by a major English poet and is significant for that reason. Typically, Housmanian, it adds little to his extant body of work—it is one more poem about death and unrequited homosexual love.
Come now, accept: that day we join the dead is coming
Which gives the dirt our bones as they decay,
With spirits not destined to live eternally
And bonds between dear friends that fade away.
Juster imitates Housman’s English quite well and retains the Latin metrics insofar as they can be carried over into English.
More significant to the collection is Juster’s translation of Christopher Marlowe’s one extant Latin poem. It is a straightforward elegy on the death of a magistrate (who, not incidentally, had recently dropped murder charges against Marlowe.)
rejoice, you sons of crime
mourn, guiltless one, neck bowed with tangled hair;
the court’s bright light, the pride of precedent
has died. Alas, great virtue has fled with him.
This again appears to be a fairly strict translation. Juster handles these poems very carefully. He has to because he understands the danger of poetry. Much as it is touted as a “truth-telling medium,” Marlowe’s poem, in gingering up the language to laud a corrupt judge, shows us poetry’s power to lie. So Juster handles it almost as if it were a piece of evidence, which he seeks to turn over with as little corruption as possible.
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