Derek Mahon was born in Belfast in 1941 and educated at Trinity College Dublin and the Sorbonne where he studied French literature. His poem A Disused Shed In County Wexford has been anthologised over a dozen times. Human Wishes is a translation of the tenth Satire of Juvenal.
Human Wishes
Derek Mahon
from the Latin of Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis),
c.AD 50-c.127, Satires X
No one in his right mind would want to be
a big fish gobbling up the smaller fry;
it’s the big fish who attract hostility
like Seneca and the rest in Nero’s day.
You’re better off to sit tight in your room
than be conspiring in the rising steam
among the towels of the baths and gym;
take change if you go out walking after dark,
avoid the war zones and the periphery
and keep your wits about you in the park
where a knife gleams behind each shadowy tree.
All pursue riches in our modern Rome,
gardens, a coach-house and a second home
bought with the revenue from untaxed income
at Capua, Aquinum, Trevignano or Tivoli;
but poison’s seldom served in the wooden cups.
Beware the crystal glass and the golden bowl,
be careful when you raise wine to your lips
dining with colleagues on the Palatine Hill
or old friends in the Caffè Giovenal’
or swan and flamingo, antelope and stuff.
So which philosopher would we rather know
- the one who, staring from his portico,
laughs, or the one who weeps? Easy to laugh,
if we started weeping there’d be no end to it.
Democritus would shake with continual mirth,
even in his primitive times, at life on earth
and showed that stoicism spiced up with wit,
some candour and good sense, can mitigate
even the thick air of a provincial city.
Binge sex and fiscal heroin, discreet
turpitude flickering in a brazier light –
all anyone does now is fuck and shit;
instant gratification, entertainment, celebrity
we ask, but mumbling age comes even so,
the striking profile thick and stricken now,
the lazy tackle like a broken bough,
the simian features and the impatient heir.
What else can you expect from your white hair,
your voice like cinders under a kitchen door?
What use to you the glittering cleavages,
the best box in the house above the stage
when blind and deaf? Now fever and disease
run riot through our waste anatomies,
the old mind dithering in its anecdotage,
the joints all seizing up with rheumatism,
seek guidance of the heavenly gods who treasure
our lives more than we do ourselves. Subdued
by protocol and the fear of solitude,
you wed in haste and now repent at leisure
even as your hands shake in their final spasm.
Ask for a sound mind in a sound body
unfrightened of the grave and not demented
by grief at natural declension; study
acceptance in the face of fate; and if
you want to worship mere materialism,
that modern god we have ourselves invented,
I leave you to the delights of modern life.
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24 comments:
Inspired by comments yesterday I decided to make semolina porridge today.
This is how I make it - its quite a bit different than the recipes in most books:
Pour a mug of full cream milk into a pan and put on a low heat...Take that mug and fill it a quarter full of semolina: so its four parts milk to one part semolina (most recipes will tell you something different). Gradually stir the semolina into the milk, stirring all the time, when all the semolina has been added, stir until the semolina is very thick. Add a pinch of salt, stir a final time.
Serve with fresh cream and raspberry jam or brown sugar.
Porridge. Also the name of a TV show that included a character called Godber, a Villa fan. Which leads me on to: "I'm not your mate, mate, and the Villa are shite."
The Villa are shite?! The Villa are shite?! That would hurt if it weren't true.
Thoroughly enjoyed the book, the characters, the setting, the lyrical violence - and I thought the ending in East Anglia was very clever.
David
Glad you liked it. Yeah I lived in that part of Cambridgeshire for a brief but happy time when I worked as a postman. Pints of Greene King, rolling fields of rape seed, the big airbase at Duxford...very pleasant part of the world.
I scored a goal once at Villa Park in circumstances that I have vowed not to reveal over the blog but I will when we go for that pint at the Local.
Well, we must arrange it soon. Give me a buzz on 0403 985 357 some time and let me know when you're free.
And yes, I had a colleague on The Mail on Sunday who lived on the Norfolk coast and we went up and ate fresh oysters, drank excellent beer and tried to work out what the locals were saying.
I should be Marco at right about this point, but am not. It would be apt, because of the poem, too.
It's hard not to stick to porridge because porridge has a way of sticking to us.
But it's a very fine poem, and I don't know Juvenal nearly well enough to decide who to give the credit to.
David
I'll give you a ring around St Paddy's day weekend.
You werent at the Local last Saturday were you? It was insane. They were having an Australian microbrew beer tasting. There must have been 1000 people there.
Seana
That thing that Bittman is talking about in the article cold oats and water is actually called dramach in Scotland and gets mentioned quite a bit in Kidnapped. That stuff really does stick to your ribs.
I reread Kidnapped recently enough to remember dramach. Sort of. I think I kind of remembered it as summach.
Seana
Ah thats interesting, maybe it is called Summach. Its been 10 years or more since I read it.
No--safe to say that when we're down to the details, the bet is that your memory would be right and mine would be, well, somewhere else.
Nah, no such luck. Saturday's I start work at 7am and work through to midnight. The Local sounds like a much better bet.
But around St Paddy's is good.
What about this poem? What do folks think of it or about it?
I think, hey, enjoy your time on earth as it's happening, get involved, don't stay in your rooms, go out, dive in, have fun. Be with other folks wherever your choose.
Don't ruminate or rue or regret...just do it!
And, by the way, read Tana French's "Faithful Place," a novel or Irish life, a mystery and more, a love story for love lost, characters to think about.
Kathy
Yes I agree and stay out of politics. Its a very sensible Epicurian viewpoint.
Kathy, I picked up an old galley of Simon Critchley's The Book of Dead Philosophers that someone had apparently tossed back the other day, and though I haven't gotten much past the introduction yet, I think he would agree with Mahon and Juvenal in these lines:
Ask for a sound mind in a sound body
unfrightened of the grave and not demented
by grief at natural declension; study
acceptance in the face of fate.
It seems pretty stoic to me, but then I haven't a) read the book or b)accepted death, so there you go.
Seana
I read that book. Its not as good as you think its going to be, which I suppose is a bit like life too.
Yeah, I can tell it is pretty breezy, considering its subject, but on the other hand, I'll bet I can do with a crash course in dead philosophers more than you could, so I expect I'll profit.
And on the third hand, the sampler from Doomed Queens I read was quite good, and illustrates your point about not going into political life--not that most of these queens had a choice about the matter.
I differ on the politics--I say, get into it, think about it, enjoy it, but get out if you don't like it--or find somewhere else to go.
It's part of life.
My father, who loved politics--our dinner table was never void of political and news discussion in my childhood--said that when he was in Italy, everyone they went, people were heatedly discussing politics and news, in every cafe, important stuff. He enjoyed it.
I would, too, unless it were the Tea Party people; then I'd split and go elsewhere.
But it's just lifeblood.
And I don't know about this "acceptance of fate" stuff; people should go down reveling or fighting or something showing life is important, to be relished, even reading a good book.
Kathy
Yeah as long as you're raging against something you can actually do something about. Raging against the elements King Lear style is not very profitable.
No, you don't have to accept fate necessarily. But you do have to accept death--at some point. Everyone except for maybe Elvis.
Can't you come up with something relevant>
==========================
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"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
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Seana, why should people accept death? It happens. If people prematurely accept it, they lose out on enjoying life. They give up. People can ruminate and obsess about this.
And if they accept it, where would we be without some of the great plays, movies, art, poetry and music, which rail against it?
Well, I'm not saying you have to like it, or take it out to lunch. I just mean that it is a fact of our existence. I don't think this is a particularly gloomy position to take. You can enjoy a lot of life right up to the very end, but raging against the dying of the light is kind of pointless, despite what Mr. Thomas said.
Raging against death! But it's part of the human condition to rage against everything, to have opinions and feelings and get angry.
Why shouldn't people feel angry about this, especially if they're not in their 90s and have to face this finality?
And it has given us plays, books, poetry, art and more.
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