Volume 35, Number 17 · November 10, 1988
Members Only
By Hugh Lloyd-Jones
Priapea: Poems for a Phallic God
translated and edited by W.H. Parker
Routledge/Croom Helm, 216 pp., $27.00
At a time when obscenity has been so long the rage that it is becoming as big a bore as prudery was a century ago, there was bound to be a new translation of the Priapea, which are widely regarded as the most obscene poems in Latin surviving from antiquity. In 1931 A.E. Housman, who was then generally recognized to be the most distinguished living Latin scholar, offered to the leading classical journal of his own country a set of notes about problems in various obscene poems, mostly from this collection. Although presented in what Gibbon calls 'the decent obscurity of a learned language,' to wit Latin, his contribution was rejected, and had to be published in Germany, whose scholars he had so often excoriated. Only two translations into English have been made before. Of that which appeared under the pseudonym Outidanos, a Greek word meaning 'worthless,' but came from the pen of the famous traveler, explorer, and translator of the Arabian Nights, Sir Richard Burton, W.H. Parker truly says that it is 'often clumsy, stilted and unnatural'; I have not seen the version (in a limited edition of 150 copies) of the American M.S. Buck (1937).
Review, 3369 words
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