To fire-the things they name can also change Just as the letters that make the words can Slavitt, though, borrows the French solution-simply quoting ignis and lignis in the first mention of the fire and the wood-and then switches to Rouse’s fire and fir: Rouse’s 1924 Loeb edition hits on “fires and firs” as an approximation and José Kany-Turpin’s 1993 French translation keeps close with the cognates igné and ligneux.
Different translators have handled this moment differently: Cyril Bailey’s 1947 edition abandons any pretense of coming up with an English equivalent, simply giving “beams or flames” W. The challenge for the translator comes when Lucretius cashes out the wood-fire-letters analogy in the form of the near identity between the words ignis (fire) and lignis (wood). Lucretius elaborates the idea through an analogy: Think of atoms and their compounds, he says, as the building up of different words from the rearrangement of the same letters. Rather than holding the view that logs contain fire and smoke, he thinks that all of it-logs and fire and smoke-is built up from constituent particles. It’s an ideal example for Lucretius, allowing him to make his point about atoms. Anaxagoras thinks that since fire can be seen shooting out of logs, the logs themselves must contain fire. It’s a hypnotic effect, and the English hexameter (practiced in different ways by everybody from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Gerard Manley Hopkins) gives off its own weird music.Ī crucial moment in the poem’s argument is Lucretius’s rejection of Anaxagoras’s physics. But as Slavitt explains in a brief preface, his lines are “slower” you can hear how the sixteen syllables of the first line-“ Humana ante oculos foede cum vita iaceret”-flit in quick succession, while the Saxon-based beats take heavy steps. Two sets of triple accents balance out the English lines-the first foot an anapest with the accent falling on “long” followed by two iambs with accents on “case” and “men,” the second set falling on “grov- ,” “-on,” and “earth”while the syntax of the Latin (always artful and deliberate in Lucretius) has been cunningly rearranged.
Taking a stand against the fables and myths of Until Epicurus of Greece dared to look up and Loomed in the heavens, glaring down with her It was long the case that men would grovelĬrushed beneath the weight of Superstition
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