BOOK: Angelo Poliziano, "Greek and Latin Poetry"

Angelo Poliziano: Greek and Latin Poetry. Edited and translated by Peter E. Knox. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 86. Harvard University Press, 2018. 9780674984578. xx + 418 pp.

We've already encountered Poliziano in the I Tatti Renaissance Library before: his letters appeared as vol. 21 and his Silvae, a collection of minor epics/didactic poems, as vol. 14. The present volume contains the rest of his poetry, consisting mostly of numerous short poems and epigrams. Another work of his, the Miscellanea, a prose book about various philological questions, is apparently set to appear in the ITRL in the very near future.

The publisher's text on the front flap of the dustjacket, here as well as in the earlier ITRL volumes of his work, describes Poliziano as “one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance”, which struck me as a very suitable description while reading the poems in this volume. He is very keen to show off his learning and he includes some reference to classical mythology or history in almost every line of his poems; and he seems to hardly ever refer to any ancient god or person by his or her normal name when some obscure synonym or allusion is available. This sort of thing would be enjoyable in more moderate amounts, but here in Poliziano's work I found it to be mostly just a nuissance. The translator provided notes with explanations of such references, of course, but having to look them up still interferes with your reading.

Most of the poems in this volume are epigrams, generally quite short though a few are also longer. There are about 130 Latin ones and, a rare thing in the ITRL series, also 57 Greek ones. Poliziano seems to have been influenced by various anthologies of ancient epigrams. I had heard of the Greek Anthology before, but the translator's notes here also mention two others that were new to me, the Palatine Anthology and the Planudean Anthology. But they seem to all be more or less extensive editions of the same thing.

As usual with epigrams, they are on various subjects. There are several poems sucking up to Lorenzo the Magnificent, Poliziano's patron and employer (Poliziano worked as a tutor to his sons; p. x); epigrams about numerous friends and contemporaries, some quite famous (e.g. Marsilio Ficino, Bernardo Bembo); a number of short epitaphs and elegies for the dead (including e.g. several epitaphs for the painter Giotto, pp. 171, 287–91, one of which was inscribed on his bust in the Florence cathedral; n. 211 on p. 353); some translations of ancient Greek epigrams into Latin, and some of Latin ones into Greek (p. 237); and also a few love-poems, including a very pretty one praising his girlfriend in short verses that made me really regret the fact that it's translated into prose and that I can't read the original (pp. 137–43).*

[*But that poem also makes for a very drastic contrast with one that appears a little later, on pp. 159–61, in which the poet expresses disgust with and mockery of a woman who is old and ugly but still lustful (“her enormous breasts putrid from old age, full of cobwebs, pendulous and pointless [. . .] her cunt one big sore, her anus crawling with vermin” etc. etc.). And you can't help wondering, of course — did his girlfriend see both poems, and what did she think? After all, she would be an old woman one day herself, if she was lucky.]

There are several invectives against one Mabilio da Novate, described by the translator as an “itinerant poet” (p. 336), but Poliziano is not so delicate and euphemistic, he mocks the bum's appearance as well as his poetical efforts in very blunt terms (p. 77), and ends the series with an epitaph on Mabilio that suggests he was not one for not speaking ill of the dead (“This way stinks, for in this pit are buried Mabilio's putrid body and soul”, p. 105).

There's a nice poem in praise of two Greek printers (p. 63): “Why do you scoff, Turk? You destroy Greek books; these men produce them. You might as well try to cut off the Hydra's heads.”

There's an epigram about an olive tree entwined with grape vines: “O grapevines, why do you coil around me? I am Minerva's plant, not Bromius! Take away your grape clusters, lest I, a maiden, be called a drunk.” (P. 151. According to the translator's note, it's a translation of an ancient Greek epigram. We saw a similar one in the recent ITRL volume of Ariosto's poetry; see my post from back then.)

Speaking of trees, here's another good one, “On a prostitute's bed made of laurel” (p. 149): “I escaped one man's bed, only to become every man's bed.” This refers, of course, to the legend of Daphne, who was turned into a laurel to avoid being molested by Apollo. But perhaps it also illustrates how his keenness for clever classical allusions sometimes drove Poliziano to write improbable things: how likely is it that a prostitute's bed would be made specifically of laurel-wood, and that he would notice such a detail in the first place?

One or two poems in this book are filthy enough that they would not be out of place in the work of a Beccadelli, e.g. the poem about a prostitute with an unusually large clit, which prompted Poliziano to wonder who was fucking whom (“I demand payment in return: for you buggered me, Galla, I didn't fuck you”, p. 285), or one where he praises his cock for going limp when a prostitute demanded excessive payment (“you're pretty smart on your own, even when my actual mind is deranged”, p. 295).

His Greek epigrams are often addressed to various Greek scholars then living in Italy, such as John Argyropoulos and Theodore Gaza; and I was impressed by how young he was when he wrote many of them, 18–20 years old or so. There are also several poems in Greek to “Alessandra, the poetess”, i.e. Alessandra Scala, daughter of the humanist Bartolomeo Scala, some of whose books we've seen in the ITRL series before. Apparently Poliziano had a love interest in her, but she eventually married another poet, Michael Marullus. Interestingly, both men were about 20 years older than her.

A fine sentiment from one of his Greek poems dedicated to his friend Giovan Battista Buoninsegni: “The dawn rises in shadows for the man without a friend; honeycombs are bitter, the whole of life is death. Without friends I do not wish to be immortal, not even to be king of the immortals.” (P. 189.)

One of the longest and perhaps also oddest poems in this volume is the Silva on Scabies. It is about 350 lines long and describes in vivid and suitably disgusting detail the poet's sufferings under this afflication. No matter how much pain he's in, however, he still doesn't fail to provide the usual dosage of classical allusions throughout the poem. I just realized that I don't quite know what sort of poem the word silva is supposed to refer to here; considering what other poems of his Poliziano had also referred to as silvae, the idea perhaps is that it is a medium-length poem in the sort of verses that you would expect in epic poetry, but with a didactical content rather than about action. The wikipedia says that the use of the word was inspired by a collection of occasional poems by Statius. And I also realized that I didn't quite know what scabies are, and looking in the wikipedia a bit, it seems to be the same thing as mange, or perhaps a special case of it. In Slovenian we have the same word for both, garje, which would help explain why I didn't have scabies as a separate concept.

The translations, as usual in the ITRL series, are in prose, but apart from that I have no complaint about them. The style is often a bit less stiff and formal than we usually see in the ITRL, which I guess reflects the fact that Poliziano's style in some of these poems was probably a bit more informal as well. Perhaps the most extensive example of that is the preface he wrote for a new production of Plautus' Menaechmi (p. 155). And this may well be the first time I've seen “chutzpah” (p. 101) and “zilch” (p. 107), not to mention “piss-tippler” (p. 219) in the ITRL. The translator also made a good effort with Poliziano's occasional puns (p. 107).

This was a pleasant book and I liked it better than the previous volumes by Poliziano in the ITRL. I'm looking forward to seeing what his Miscellanies will be like.