After Fame: The Epigrams of Martial
Sam Riviere
Faber & Faber
Sam Riviere is one of the most contemporariest of contemporary poets: his debut, 81 Austerities, was published during the Con-Dem coalition’s austerity government; Kim Kardashian’s Marriage appeared the year following the Kardashian-West nuptials. So it’s initially surprising that his latest is a translation of the first book of epigrams by Martial, a first-century Roman poet.
Actually, Martial is a logical choice for Riviere: his best poems are witty, often crude, and poke fun at his own tempora and mores. But few of the poems in After Fame are straightforward translations, or even modernisations (compared with those of—for instance—Brooke Clark). Versions in a loose sense, they might best be described as riffs on themes from Martial. Some retain the epigrammatic punch, just changing the details, but others diverge from their sources—some so far as to be unintelligible without the original as a point of reference, e.g. ‘61’: ‘No one has bought cilantro, my arse. / Your lie, my boast. / I will not keep silent in the lawsuit, Bilbo.’ Quite a few are in prose, including ‘62’, a satirically sadistic pornographic sci-fi story (closer in spirit to the Satyricon of Petronius than Martial’s coy epigrams). Many poems are furnished with quasi-scholarly footnotes, some with footnotes of their own. Riviere can be genuinely funny, as in the gloss on ‘64’:
Free machine translation repeatedly suggests ‘recipe’ for fabula, raising the possibility of a more problematic version, like maybe a poem in ugly prose that instructs the cast of Made in Chelsea to fuck, slaughter, prep, cook and devour each other in a televised Bacchanalian orgy-type event-ordeal / fixed-rig cookery contest cross-over / season finale. The host (me) bastes himself while turned on a spit.
Rather than an imposition, though, the playfulness finds its justification in the source text. Martial wrote around a century after the Golden Age of Roman poetry (Catullus, Virgil, Ovid, et al.), roughly the same interval between Riviere and the high modernism of Ezra Pound (whose epigrams were influenced by Martial’s) and others. Riviere’s Martial is thus postmodern by analogy; even to talk about the ‘original’ from which he departs would mistake the derivativeness that is part of its appeal. So, where Martial boasts in the five lines of ‘7’ that his friend Stella outdoes Catullus ‘as a dove is greater than a sparrow’, Riviere spins out forty-six lines on how ‘The movie is better than the book / which is better than the experience’ and ‘cliché is better than truth / truth is just something that hasn’t become a cliché yet / but inevitably will’. Martial’s concern with being plagiarised becomes a recognition that all writing is copied—and so is living.
—Henry King