2012 saw the publication of new Englishings of Tibullus by two American poet-translators. Externally, these resemble each other more than they differ: contextualising general introduction by a classical scholar (Gaisser's is superb); notes and other end matter aimed at the non-specialist reader; facing Latin text rendered line for line. Dictionally, both cleave broadly to the decorums of contemporary poetry's discursive middle style, occasionally swerving down towards the colloquial and mildly racy (‘horny’, ‘slacker’) or up towards the self-consciously poetical. Formally, both are shaped to the scheme that now counts as the standard Anglophone reflex of classical elegy: couplets, unrhymed, with odd-numbered verses tending towards six beats and evens towards five. Finally, each represents the work of a translator who looks biographically intriguing enough to make a reader curious to see just what kind of translation of Tibullus that particular human being would make.

By profession, D. served Houghton Library as its Curator of Manuscripts, retiring in 1991. He was the founding editor of the poetry journal Persephone, a passionate amateur musician, a lecturer in English and a beloved fixture of the Harvard academic community until his death in 2006. He had submitted a draft of the translation to the press, but it was P. who, his preface explains, made the necessary revisions to the manuscript, while adding his own versions, gracefully done in D.'s style, of all the poems in the Corpus Tibullianum traditionally attributed to Lygdamus (3.1–6) and Sulpicia (3.13–18). As for J., this turns out to be a pen name. Its owner has for some years now ridden in the vanguard of a counter-insurgency movement in American poetry called New Formalism by its practitioners, and described by some of its mainstream detractors as ‘yuppie poetry’. For his day job, he has served under the two most recent American presidents as Commissioner of the U.S. Social Security Administration.

As poem books and as renderings of Tibullus, both translations are uneven, but here resemblances end. Despite their shared project and instrument, each has a way of being uneven surprisingly all its own. J.'s Tibullus stands apart from most of his other poetic output (including a translation of Horace's satires) chiefly by the absence of rhyme, but otherwise bears his mark. Form has the force of law. His lines do not tend to six beats and five. They are everywhere impeccably proper iambic alexandrines and pentameters. Metrical inversions are confined all but exclusively to verse heads, anapaestic substitutions are rare and unambiguously scannable, and the occasional headless verse is always preceded by a feminine one to keep the beat pumping without a skip.

Where he succeeds as a translator of Tibullus, J. frankly sparkles. He succeeds nowhere better than in Poem 2.1 on the lustratio agri. Take its closing pair of couplets, where the speaker, announcing an end to the festal day, draws night's curtain over the amorous repose of its country revellers:

Throughout this elegy, J. delivers more of the Latin than you might have dared expect from the medium of contemporary verse, and makes it look easy in the doing. But ease might turn out to be the secret principle of J.'s aptness to the translation of this particular member of the collection. The elegiac speaker here officiates at a sacral socio-political ritual, a role to which birth and rank assign him as paterfamilias of a villa and patron of its villagers. His Olympian poise, sustained throughout the poem, ripens at the close into a classical (lightly ironised) sublime, as he contemplates a night of simple sexual pleasure enjoyed by simple people, celebrating it in a tone partly aloof, partly empathic and nuanced with a twinge of envy.

The only trouble is, the qualities that count as virtues in J.'s rendering of Poem 2.1 – such as classical poise, showered-and-shaved punctuality, the agrément of an eye's mischievous twinkle – characterise his whole volume. These serve him ill when the speaker speaks to us in what the poems teach us to regard as his authentic and intimate mode: the private voice of Love's whipping boy, befuddled and dishevelled, regressed and depressed and addicted, and holding up the exquisite delicacy of his pain for our admiration. What jars harshest in J.'s Tibullus is a certain omnivorous opportunism of diction and lexicon. This, if motivated partly by reasons of craft, as licence taken in compensation for the hard press of his metrical constraints, is also clearly just a matter of J. having fun, venting the satiric-Byronic bent of his native wit. Sometimes, it is true, he scores a hit that makes you want to forget about decorum of tone and just admire his moves. Sometimes he does something more impressive still, as for example when he renders the phrase tenero facilis sum semper amori (1.3.57) as ‘I've always been a mark for gentle Love’. The sudden dictional thrust towards street-smart banter, while good fun, injects into the wilting tone of the original a chipper manliness that, on first reading, feels unmotivated and out of place. But J. has put a finger on something important and easy to miss: the ethical seriousness the poem's speaker attaches to his situation as a member of Messalla's ‘staff’ (cohors, 1.3.2) going on sick leave, absenting himself from a duty – ‘SERVING MESSALLA ON THE LAND AND SEA’ (1.3.56) – his imagination has just carved on his tombstone. J.'s translation of those other moments in the poem earns him the right to punctuate this enactment of the elegiac lover's traditionally akratic swoon into death with a momentary flash of something like thumoeidetic resilience. A sickbed show of spirit offers his commander assurance that, whatever protestations of weakness his genre may constrain him to make, he is no shirker for staying behind.

But if critical casting about can sometimes put a charitable construction on what looks like J. missing the tone of elegiac love poetry as a speech genre, more often what it looks like is what it is. A characteristic example is the beginning of Poem 1.2. Cast in the sub-generic mould of paraclausithyron, this poem breaks silence in a way that suggests (to the distress of scholars who want poems to have only one dramatic setting) that this lover's complaint before a locked door is also somehow being imaginatively situated, if only for a moment, as a mimetic performance sung at a symposium:

Read those first four couplets against the Latin. The sense is delivered, serviceably enough, but the tone is not so much left behind on the farther shore as sold down the river. ‘Overcome’ and ‘controls’ intellectualise. They describe, with clinical precision, someone else's experience not the speaker's. So does ‘Bacchus-bludgeoned’, but with the admixture of an ingeniousness lying somewhere between the malicious high spirits of Don Juan and the bland pleasure of doing a crossword puzzle. ‘Barren’ as an epithet for ‘passion’ annoys all the more for being a dictionary definition of infelix. ‘Hostage’ misses the tone if not the point of legitimate custodia. ‘Tough husband's door’ neatly renders the syntactic ambiguity of ianua difficilis domini, but is hard to imagine as an apostrophe uttered by human tongue. ‘Pummelled’ for uerberet strikes with a fat fist where a slender lash is wanted (a parable). And when the melodrama of pain rises to its closing fever pitch with the excluded lover's curse on the door, ‘sought’ and ‘launched’ effect a buzz kill that is exacerbated not excused by the cleverness of likening Jove's thunderbolt to a smart missile.

Now read the last two couplets. A wondrous change, though not so much in the translator as in his text. The tone has turned playful, a winking glance darts from behind the erotico-pathetic mask, cool wit flashes in every direction: J. is in his element. ‘Door, open just for me’ gets all the way into the wheedling tone and prosodic creaminess of ianua, iam pateas uni mihi. ‘Slyly’ for furtim, of the hinge's turning, is choice, and ‘while I was crazed’ hits the self-interested self-recrimination of dementia nostra in its sweet spot. The masterful gusto with which J. plays along with Tibullus, when Tibullus is in the mood to play, throws into relief what ails his translation elsewhere. It is no minor flaw. The thing happening in those opening couplets of Poem 1.2 is the thing most central and vital to Roman love elegy, and J.'s measured iambs will not beat in sympathy with it. Call this a failure to whine. However much the relentless elegance, the overwrought monotony of elegy's poetic form may ironise it, there has to open up in the imagination a level of experience at which the lover's complaint, his endless whining, feels honest and believable and therefore interesting. It is precisely the psychic energy activated in that mode of sick self-pity that constitutes the materia poetica of the genre, at least as Tibullus and Propertius practise it. But J.'s is a Tibullus so far removed from that morose delectation as to be very nearly fit for the education of the guardians of Kallipolis.

What J. misses in Tibullus, D. gets, in spades. The opposite is in some measure true as well. Over long stretches D. rises and falls, couplet by couplet, in nearly precise contrary motion to J. Since I mean to praise D.'s translation, I begin by castigating. The conclusion of Poem 2.1, where J. shone so bright, offers as good an example as any of D.'s lamp going out:

Most obviously odd and annoying are the capitalised Latin words Nox, Somnus and Somnia. These stand for a whole regrettable class and its principle: any Latin word susceptible to being taken as a personification is capitalised and left untranslated. The Latinless reader looks up a dozen headwords like Sol in a glossary, to find instructive entries like: ‘For the Romans, the sun, often personified’. This does admittedly get at a thing, but only by missing another. One of the things poetry does is carry a mode of consciousness – ‘primitive’ and ‘shamanic’, but also interestingly close to certain modern scientific understandings – in which beings taken by ordinary consciousness as dead are experienced as alive. It is good to show that Latin poetry delivers this experience, but bad to pretend our own poetry does not. In Wallace Stevens, for example, the sun, ‘that brave man’, is alive and has a life. Let translators make use of their own inherited resources for enlivening and engoddening the world.

For the rest, comparison with J.'s polished version of these two couplets effectively brings out what rings dull in D.'s version. ‘Have your’ wants ‘fun’ not ‘play’ for an object, and J.'s simple imperative is sleek where D.'s sags. The sonic effect of ‘Nox now yokes’, obviously intentional, is hard to forgive. Possessive pronouns clog thought and muddle rhythm throughout (omit ‘his’ from ‘dark wings’ and the line about Somnus suddenly takes on power, with the first three syllables of ‘dark wings Somnus’ intoning a sombre molossus). And ‘unsure tread’ for incerto … pede, if lexically closer to Tibullus' probable intent (of presenting dreams as psychic arrhythmias, queering the beat of waking consciousness while dissolving the poem's world into oblivion) than J.'s lovely ‘spectral feet’, has the misfortune of directing the reader's attention to a certain wobbliness of gait that fairly cries out to be taken as iconising the passage the image concludes.

There is much to excuse in this book, as a published artefact (proofreading lapses in both Latin and English texts), as a teaching implement (no page headers with poem numbers) and as a translation. What makes me count these flaws and more as minor, what makes me prize this handsome poem book and want to put it into the hands of friends who care about poetry and might turn out to like a quirky dead poet who matters to me, is easier to show than to say. Take a look at the opening of Tibullus' Poem 1.2 as turned by D. into American poetry:

The twinned setting of this opening (sympotic couch and threshold) turns out to have its correlate in a layered pair of interestingly competing tones. I see this now, because D., doing what poetic translators do at their best, has trained my attention to something I had missed in the original. One tone of voice belongs to the lover speaking outside the door: a plaintive tone, all the more urgently so as he struggles to keep the recognition of his own absurdity out of his consciousness. But there is a further tone, placed outside the speaker's world but still inside the imagined world of the poem, in the voice of the sympotic singer of the paraclausithyron. There, all is order and beauty, luxury, calm and pleasure. At each new translation choice, D. (or the poetry in him) works to tune the harmonious tension between these two tonal tracks running simultaneously at nestled levels of fictionality. At the line ‘May lightning strike you, sped by Jove's command’, the speaker's melodrama peaks in intensity, but so too does the singer's noble mastery. The perfectly formed blank verse is both high and true in diction, believable on the lips of both the lover and the singer who represents him and merges with him. D. is not always this good, but he is this good often enough to have achieved a genuine rendering of an ancient poet into the poetry of our own language. A translation of this kind counts as a valuable addition to literary studies.

Suddenly, then, as if out of nowhere, we have two new translations of Tibullus made by fine poets, born of genuine poetic engagement with the poems, and instructive by their similarities and differences. I look forward to using them as a paired object of study and comparison in a course on translation. Together they offer a compelling set of reasons to read poetic translations, and to read Tibullus.