Origins of Vincent Katz’s Translation

I became fascinated by Sextus Propertius at first glimpse, in a class on Roman Love Elegy at the University of Chicago in the Autumn of 1980. I had read and liked Vergil and Horace, and Catullus seemed like somebody I might meet at a drunken party in Manhattan. But reading Propertius was like receiving a high-voltage shock through my body. Partially, it was the shock of recognition. Propertius was a poet who, although he was courted by Maecenas and entered the Emperor Augustus’ literary circle, wrote very different poetry from his social counterparts. Where Vergil wrote an epic poem on the founding of the Roman Empire, and Horace wrote many poems praising it, Propertius wrote a poetry of dark encounters with untrustworthy figures, focusing most of all on his tortured, obsessive, relationship with a woman he called Cynthia. He gave her that name in reference to her musical and poetic skills, as Cynthius was an epithet of the god Apollo, a god of music and poetry, among other things. It wasn’t only the matter of Propertius’ and Cynthia’s fluid relationship that took place in a vivid urban setting that captivated me. The style of the poetry perfectly fit the subject; it too was dazzling, inventive, improvising, almost off-balance, veering from passages of high-flown erudition, often on obscure mythological subjects, to the most down-to-earth, contemporary, and on occasion, vulgar language.

About 10 years later, in conversation with Douglas Messerli, the publisher of the Los Angeles-based Sun & Moon Press, I proposed doing an anthology of Greek and Latin poems. Douglas replied that he would rather do a book that had existed as a book in antiquity, and I then proposed we do the first book of Propertius’ poems, originally published in c. 30 BCE and sometimes referred to as the monobiblos. My translations of this first book were published in 1995, with a foreword by W.R. Johnson. I’m not sure when I decided to translate Propertius’ three other books of poetry; it was just something I enjoyed doing, and did. Richard Howard was instrumental in shepherding these translations to publication as The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius, published in 2004 by Princeton University Press, as part of their Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation series. In 2005, this book was awarded the National Translation Award, given by the American Literary Translators Association.

I never quite identified with Propertius; he allowed himself to be too abject for my taste. But I have always related to his verve, his sense of the energy possible in any moment, any syllable, any glance or movement. As he wrote, in a poem on a visit from Cynthia’s ghost:

Spirits do exist. Death doesn’t end it all:

A pale ghost has escaped the conquering pyre.