Translator's Note

Whenever he took a break from his day job of professionally praising politicians and generals, the poet Claudian exhibited an active mind with a serious interest in science and nature. He wrote poems about such subjects as magnetism and the electric eel and, here, the porcupine, a strange creature the Romans encountered as the empire expanded north. We shouldn’t blame Claudian too harshly for thinking that porcupines throw their quills—it is an ancient and persistent idea. (When I moved from the southern United States to northern Ontario and reported to family and friends on my encounters with porcupines, some of them asked, seriously, about quill-throwing. No, porcupines do not launch their quills into the air like arrows, though Claudian makes good use of the belief that they do.)

Claudian’s poems are, generally speaking, didactic in the tradition of classical Roman poets. That is, they attempt to impart useful information, in addition to exploiting the aesthetic potentials of poetry—as did Lucretius—or they pretend to do so, as an excuse for creating an aesthetic object—as did Vergil in the Georgics. When I was first coming into consciousness as a reader and writer of poetry, during the last gutterings of the dominance of so-called New Criticism, “didactic” served mostly as a term of condemnation, frostily blighting any new composition that strayed beyond certain narrow artistic bounds. The Romans (and, indeed, most poets before the late nineteenth century) had fewer qualms about writing poems that would also teach. In the case of this poem, in addition to providing a helpful physical description of the porcupine, Claudian implies that a rather sophisticated philosophical and anthropological argument is available in the encounter: culture is rooted in nature, since the human arts have developed by imitation of natural processes. Furthermore, while the arts of nature, like the porcupine’s defences, are perfect, human imitations are inevitably less perfect.

My process as a translator is, I suppose, conservative and even a little naive. I begin by making as straightforward a prose translation as I can (though I realize that even a “straightforward” translation is full of  interpretive choices) and then attempt to form this into an English poem with some resemblance to the formal qualities of the original, hoping to represent the original sense, be clear, and find some pleasure in the language of the translation—while knowing that this pleasure is likely to be of a different sort than that of the source. The (sometimes approximate) blank verse of my version of “The Porcupine” is a traditional, though not uncontested, solution for representing Latin hexameters in English. I am particularly pleased with what seems to me the Teutonic gravitas of phrases like “hornish hackles fringe / his brow” or “belly hairy, with legs like a pup’s stubs,” appropriate for describing an animal that came to the Romans’ notice as they pressed northward into the forests of Germany.  

Note on line 1, “Stymphalian swamp fowl”: According to mythology, the swamp at Stymphalia was infested with deadly, man-eating birds that had beaks of bronze, poison dung, and sharp iron feathers that they could throw at adversaries. Hercules defeated them and drove them away as his sixth labour.

James Owens

In the Classroom