vii. Burning Books
Take my laurels, such as you’ve endowed,
for I am a poet no longer:
Unwreathe the ivy from my stone brow;
sadness veins my verse, lines are sorrowed -
my friends, feel it, and then conceal it
as you sigh over my insignia
for you look on the face of exile.
‘How many miles,’ you say, ‘divide us,
our far-dweller friend, comrade Naso.’
Your dedication is most welcome
yet find me now, for better or verse,
only in my ever-changing forms,
mercurial Metamorphosis.
Look for quality, though, and not width -
opus interruptus by my flight;
I burnt my books - and my bridges -
on my departure, that last night.
Like Althaea, the worst of mothers,
I destroyed my offspring, my own branch,
sacrificed my undeserving poem,
threw my own entrails on searing pyre.
Did I hate my Muse, my betrayer,
or my own rough work, verse in progress?
(It still survives, of course, is extant:
some copies have been made, so I think.)
I pray it can live for me, be studied
for me, charm for me, remind of me.
Yet who can read it without misgiving
if they don’t know revision is missing -
ripped from forge before anvil had finished
not hammered, filed or fine-polished?
So now I don’t seek praise but pardon
(for praise will come with patient readers)
offer six new lines for frontispiece:
‘Take these orphaned books, give them house-room
grant them, at least, your city’s freedom.
Indulge them the more, unedited,
rescued from fire, their parent’s death-bed -
the small faults he would have corrected,
all of them, had he been permitted.’
(from Tristia I.7)
Translated by Josephine Balmer
Page(s) 66-67
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