Antipholos
When Tereina was just a child,
I said, ‘This one will break a few hearts
when she grows up.’
Everyone laughed – me too –
but now it’s all come true.
Just to look at her
burns me up,
and look at her
is all I can do.
When I beg her
to put me out of my misery,
all she says is,
‘I’m a virgin.’
This will be the death of me.
Bassus
Turn into a shower of gold, a swan,
a bull, a bird? That’s too hard.
I’ll leave such fancy tricks to Zeus,
and woo Corinna with a credit card.
Lucilius
All this stuff you buy –
exfoliating scrub,
moisturiser,
foundation,
highlighter,
lippy,
eye-shadow,
eye-liner,
mascara,
coloured contacts,
wash-in hair dye –
wouldn’t a new face
work out cheaper?
Notes on this poem
These very free versions of poems from The Greek Anthology began as an excuse to avoid doing more serious work. In a spirit of playfulness I began recasting Greek lyrics into a world of one-bar electric fires, credit cards, and charity shops. The result was a curious hybrid of ancient and modern – the Attic and the attic – which made me laugh. And so I carried on until I had written around a hundred, from which these are selected.
I began in each case with the literal prose translations in the Loeb edition (I did study Ancient Greek at school, but what shaky grasp of it I acquired then has deserted me now) and then re-cast them in the spirit of a be-bop musician riffing on a standard melody. The resulting verses are therefore the opposite of respectful word-for-word translations. Some of them do remain fairly close to the source poems, but others veer so far away as to be practically new creations. So I call them ‘glosses’, hoping to convey the spirit in which my texts both attend to and diverge from the originals.
