THE MICHIGAN DAILY MAGAZINE I -(I - -i - Page Six Sunday,'November 17, 1957 Sunday, November 17, 1957 THE MICHIGAN DAILY MAGAZINE From the University Press value .. .until they are symboliz CATULLUS-THE COMPLETE POETRY. Translated by Frank 0. Copley. Ann Arbor, 1957: University of Michi- gan Press. 141 pp. $3.75 By RICHARD E. BRAUN MOST HONEST translators of classical poets are accustomed to preface their work with some simile that defines and deprecates "translation." Dryden's dedication to his Aeneid shows the following: Raphael imitated nature; they who copy one of Raphael's pieces imitate but him, for his work is their original. They translate him, as I do Virgil; and fall short of him, as I of Virgil. . . . Lay by Virgil, I beseech your Lordship, and all my better sort of judges, when you take up my version; and it will appear a passable beauty when the original Muse is absent. Presupposing that art is imitation of nature, art must fail, but the imitation of art is not even noble failure; so, whether a translation has obscured the original with brilliance or eclipsed it with dull- ness, it fails sadly through a feebleness of desire. Two and a Reviews of Four Noteworthy Volumes from the Fall List Of a Rapidly-Rising Publisher half centuries of academic publi- cation, however, have made Dry- den's deferential remarks seem to be quaintly in excess. Today one should expect the poetic, as the prose, version of a classic poet to be a gloss; that is, a form of literary criticism. Mod- ern translators are consequently inclined to use the les§ philosophic simile of musical reduction to de- fine their task: the English Virgil or Catullus is like a piano-reading of a symphony for antique flutes and fiddles and tympani. A scholar of Latin and Greek is sometimes a virtuoso, as it were, of this performers' art. Like the violinist or vocalist he daily improvises English sounds for the silent nota- tion of a standard-work before him; possibly he records these im- provisations, but then, with the only humility a virtuoso dares dis- play, he opens with reservations such as: "This much I shall have shown you. Then let us all, in studious silence, venerate the Text." The translation is literary criticism. It is paraphrase, first of all, by definition; second, it is commentary. In a poetic version, the "comments" are tacit and con- tained in the structure of the new poem: but expansion, interpola- tion, new tropes, and devices of sound are used instead of the boring terminology of formal exe- gesis. GAIUS VALERIUS Catullus was a younger contemporary of Julius Caesar, Cicero, Lucretius, and the many less amusing figures of the end of the Roman Republic. He is the earliest writer of the short poem in Latin whose work has survived, and the 113 poems and fragments show that his man- ner exerted considerable influence upon Virgil, Horace, Martial, and others of the Empire. In the Mid- dle Ages, Catullus was (not sur' prisingly) kept out of sight and eventually lost; about the year 1325, Benvenuto Campesani, a crony of Petrarch and Boccaccio, unearthed him for a new period of notoriety in the Renaissance. The newest English translation of Catullus by Prof. Frank 0. Cop- ley of the Latin department is the most learned and affectionate ver- sion available. The title Catullus The Complete Poetry is rather misleading, even for a poetic trans- lation, but is, I assume, intended to avoid confusion with the paper- back reissue of Horace Gregory's execrable Poems of Catullus (1931). There is really little danger of confusion; even the un-Latined will quickly sense, on approaching Gregory's Catulus, an inappropri- ate odor of formalin. See CATULLUS, page 17 AUBREY'S BRIEF LIVES. Edited from the original manuscripts and with a life of John Aubrey by Oliver Lawson Dick. Ann Arbor, 1957: The University of Michigan Press. 341 pp. $5.95. By VERNON NAHRGANG Daily City Editor OHN AUBREY, for the greater part of the seventeenth cen- tury, wanted to know everything about everybody. He was an avid listener when an individual was under discussion; he was a thor- ough and pressing questioner when the discussion did not bring out all the facts about the person in question. Aubrey's reputation for gossip was strong among friends who "expected to hear of Aubrey's breaking his neck sorieday as the result of dashing downstairs to get a story from a departing guest." His efforts, however, were not meant to satisfy his personal curi- osity nearly so much as they were intended to build extensive vol- umes of biographical information and related data concerning any and all persons of whom the sev- enteenth century knew anything at all. AUBREY'S habit was to come home from a hard evening's work at some party, sleep off the after-effects, and then, while his head was still throbbing, attempt to remember the anecdotes and details he had heard and the people he had seen, recording his impressions in whatever might be the most convenient place at hand. But his thoroughness and in- stinct for editing was too often subdued by his spirit of curiosity and the urge to learn more, for although he began many books and made numerous scattered en- tries in as many scattered places, he never quite drew together enough of his jottings to build the final literary product. At his death in 1697, he left behind Aubrey's Brief Lives, a collection of manuscripts under 426 headings, mostly biographical. The material, however, was often repetitive, since Aubrey told his favorite stories again and again, occasionally lacking in specific in- formation, with blank spaces pro- vided for the missing data, and sometimes strained one's credu- lity. (Continued from Page 14) fine artist can match the articul- lation of his brushes in writing but Shahn has done that, and in words that for expressiveness, for sheer high quality, will attract "not . . . only the customary art public" but, one hopes, "a new kind of public, a great influx of people . .." It is the images we hold in common, the characters of nov- els and plays, the great build- ings, the complex pictorial im- ages and their meanings, and the symbolized concepts, princi- ples, and great ideas of philoso- phy and religion that have cre- ated the human community. The incidental items of reality remain without value or com- mon recognition until they are symbolized, recreated, and im- bued with value. The potato field and the auto repair shop r e m a i n without quality or awareness or the sense of com- munity until they are turned in- to literature by a Faulkner or a Steinbeck or a Thomas Wolfe or into art by a Van, Gogh. Or quite simply and truthfully and profoundly, by a Ben Shahn. BEN SHAHN: HIS GRAPHIC ART. Text by James Thrall Soby. Nqw York, 1957: George Broziller, 140 pp. $10.00. T HE GRAPHIC ART of Ben Shahn,,.with a prefatory es- say by his friend James Thrall Soby, is not only a superbly pro- duced art work, it is one for which there was real need. It makes available in small compass a selec- tion of the work Shahn has done as cover artist, book illustrator, poster maker, record sleeve decor- ator, and pamphlet and advertis- ing designer. Shahn is perhaps the only American artist in this century to achieve a significant body of high quality graphic art. Graphic art executed for mass media in Amer- ica generally has been at an ap- pallingly low level, the nadir,.being the folksy covers of the Saturday Evening Post and the anatomical- ly, but not erotically, preposterous Esquire girls. Recent years have seen a gradual shift-Shahn, Fras- coni and Baskin have all been commissioned by magazines- largely because Shahn has car- ried to his work for mass media the same exacting standards found in his museum Work. Following Shahn's example has become an artistic necessity. SHAHN'S OWN high - quality work has, in fact, become ac- cepted to the extent that readers sometimes have to be reminded that an isolated illustration or cover is his. This is partly because many readers fail to look at what they are seeing, partly because Shahn's style and techniques have been so widely copied, partly be- cause his graphics fit appropri- ately whatever is at hand. A draw- ing of Shahn's in, say, the New York Times amid many uniformly undistinguished makes his virtues stand out. Soby says rightly, "It would be hard to think of an American artist whose signature is more his own. Shahn has only to touch pen or pencil to paper to make his personality felt as clearly as in the most ambitious of his paintings." Shahn's compassion, superbly clear in the portrait sketch of J. Robert Oppenheimer, has been widely discussed. Compassion is, indeed, a distinguishing quality of Shahn's work. To see the Oppen- heimer sketch is to know a great deal about what harrowing experi- ences this man was forced to en- dure. What is implicit, of course, is an estimate of the whole shoddy affair in the form of a question, What brings man to this? Compassion is so apparent a quality in Shahn's work because of another element - elegance, born from that human mastery over material called craft. Craft never makes a man a great artist, for there are his mind, emotions, and in Shahn's case at least, his capacity for moral fury, still to be considered. But craft enables a man to develop a style and a style is made elegant, in the best sense, when the artist's control over his ideas and his ability to express them fuse completely in what he produces. Shahn's control - over line, rhythm, form, typography- is never in question. HAHN FINDS the contrast be- tween the heavy hands of a man in a field of wheat and the delicate stalks he reaches to touch; he makes social satire Hof no more than a tangle of television an- tennae by opposing them to a profuse natural growth of Easter lilies; he imbues his black and white drawings of architectual fa- cades with a strange eloquence, perhaps because they are so clearly facades; lie brings a marvelous upswing to his chorus of singing angels who respond to an angelic organist's pipes of ecstatic praise. The essay provided by James Thrall Soby is excellent, for un- like the text in most art books, it does not stand in the way of the plates but complements them. It is a model of art criticism by a writer who admires his subject and knows how to do a most difficult thing, express praise: ':47n 2'~~ ;.;.r; ri: :S~ ii %s:: %::? i :".: i %%i}:" : ; :":""4 '. r ... .....i . r t'%., ::;: .::-..; :% ::::! ;.; .;: :i"& :, "4., .S is;: ?:is:....?4i:i:::} ........: ..+....... ..4.iv' s i~v i. o~s;ac i~:: Sii:6tS:atii: ; : :>::G6 :::; ;! :;<"