[Previous: lines 505-540]
Joseph narrates.
“Forte recognoscens populos numerare iubebat------------
Augustus Caesar, rerum cui summa potestas.
Ipse igitur veteris repetebam mœnia Bethles,
unde genus duco; quô me quoque civibus urbis
insererem, nomenque meum, nomenque meorum: [545]
sponsa sequebatur Nazarœ ab sede profecta.
Vix patriae intrâram muros, et rara domorum
tecta, soporiferis cùm nox cœlum abstulit umbris.
Est sedes deserta humilem ingredientibus urbem,
horrenti culmoque et carice tecta palustri, [550]
agricolis olim statio gratissima, si quos,
rure procul patrio, nox deprendisset in urbe:
namque aliis procul à tectis summota recedit.
Huc igitur fessi pariter succedimus ambo,
seu casu, seu sic rector sorti tus Olympi, [555]
ut potiùs reor, et potiùs fas credere duco.
Natum etenim non solùm extrema per omnia vitam
ducere, et in terris indignos volvere casus;
verùm etiam tecto voluit sub paupere eundem
nasci, humilique domo miserabilem, et omnium egenum. [560]
Principio in stabulis pandum ad prœsepia sisto
quadrupedem, auxiliumque viœ, onerumque levamen;
quem iuxta in stipulis sese locat inclyta virgo:
quippe alia interior domus ulla haud parte vacabat.
Bos erat à laeva tepidum flans ore vaporem; [565]
quem pauper campis luce exercebat arator,
pauca soli curvo suspendens iugera aratro;
nec, sera nisi nocte, domum repetebat ab agro
conducto, vitam ut posset tolerare labore
ipse suo, atque famem parvis avertere natis. [570]
Et iam nox medium spatium confecerat horis,
cùm mihi, qui saxo haerebam iam lumina victus,
somnus abit, neque enim mersum tune me altus habebat.
Ecce, oculos fulgore novo lux occupat ingens:
diffulgent intus latè magalia; quaeque [575]
stramina tetra modo horrebant, nunc aurea cernas.
Exurgo. Aspicio, iuxta prœsepia, nudum
infantem, radiis illustrem ac luce coruscum;
quem virgo tenerum in duris modo pauper avenis
ediderat nullo nixu, nullo aegra dolore. [580]
Astabant taciti bos hinc, hinc tardus asellus,
pabulaque obliti pariter capita alta tenebant.
Ipsa etiam radiis fulgebat mater, utroque
poplite subsidens; oculos demissa nitentes.
Ah! nudum lacrymis parvum spectabat obortis, [585]
tendebatque manus suffuso lumine iunctas.
Astrorum qualis facies rorantibus umbris
post imbrem, siccis Boreas ubi frigidus alis
ingruit, ac cœlum populans cava nubila differt;
talis virgineo species accesserat ori. [590]
Quid facerem? partem subieci ambobus amictûs
ipse mei, atque olidae substravi terga bidentis,
pro picturatis cunis, pro murice, et auro;
caetera pauperies, noxque intempesta vetabant.”
“Then the order came for a census, from------------
Augustus Caesar, the world’s most powerful man.
So I returned to my birthplace, Bethlehem
my ancestral home; to add to the city roll
my name and the names of all my family. [545]
My wife followed as we set out from Nazareth.
Entering the town walls, passing its scattered
houses, the sleepiness of night possessed us.
On the way in we passed a deserted hut,
roofed with shaggy thatch and sedge from the marsh, [550]
a refuge for farmers, who found themselves
far from their homeland, in a strange town.
It stood away from most of the other houses.
Wearily we made our way there together,
either by chance, or because Olympus’ lord [555]
wished it so—which I consider more likely.
He wanted his son to live a life of hardship
to experience indignities on earth
truth born beneath a simple pauper’s roof:
raised in humbleness, deprived of all wealth. [560]
First I stabled our old donkey, who had
lightened our load and helped us on our journey;
then the noble virgin lay close by, on straw:
there was no room for us in any inn.
An ox stood on our left, warm breath steaming. [565]
A poor farmer used him during the day,
dragging a curved plough through his meagre patch
of rented ground, only stalling him here at night;
in this way he eked a living from his labour
on his own, and kept hunger from his children. [570]
It was the very middle of the night
when, lying exhausted on the stone floor,
sleep left me—I hadn’t quite sunk in slumber—
Behold! A mighty burst of light filled my eyes.
The inside of the hut shone, and the straw [575]
bed which looked so wretched before now was gold!
I rose and saw, beside the stalls, a naked
baby, radiating light and glittering:—
the poor virgin had just delivered the child
in the rough straw, without the pains of labour. [580]
There stood the silent ox, there the slow ass,
looking-on in wonder and forgetting to feed.
The mother herself seemed to glow, sitting
cross-legged; her brilliant eyes looking down.
Ah! she wept to gaze on that naked baby, [585]
and clasped her hands in prayer, suffused wth light.
Her face looked like the starry night after
a rainstorm, when dry Boreas blows cold
across the skies to banish the hollow clouds:
this was what the virgin’s visage resembled. [590]
What was I to do? I laid out my cloak
beneath them both, and arranged a dirty fleece
instead of a fine cot with purple-gold sheets:
poverty, and the cold night, constrained me.”
After such a long portion of the poem dedicated to the Assumption and the Visitation, Vida’s account of the Nativity seems rather truncated. Census, Bethlehem, straight into the stable (no messing about with the Joseph and Mary trying various inns and being turned away here). The actual birth is finessed too; the next thing is lots of light and the passing detail that Mary experienced no birth pangs (the doctrinal position is: Genesis specifies that the pain women experience when giving birth is a direct consequence of our original sin; Mary, immaculately conceived, is free of that and so doesn’t experience such pangs). Then at the end, with some nicely rendered tenderness, Vida gives us Joseph doing the best he can with his cloak and a dirty of sheep fleece to make mother and child comfortable.
There's some confusion (if that's not too tendentious a way of putting it) in the Bible account of this famous scene. Matthew's account includes the appearance of an angel to Joseph in a dream; the wise men from the East; the massacre of the innocents; and the flight to Egypt, none of which appear in Luke, who instead describes the appearance of an angel to Mary, the Roman census, the birth in a manger and the choir of angels. Wikipedia has this helpful infographic to summarise the divergences. Click, as they say, to embiggen:
Vida's treatment is more Lukean than Matthewesque, although he takes elements from both.
Gardner thinks the simile in Vida's line 589 is based on Vergil's battlefield simile in Aeneid 9:668-71:
quantus ab occasu veniens pluvialibus Haedis... which, ‘hollow clouds’ aside, seems a stretch to me.
verberat imber humum, quam multa grandine nimbi
in vada praecipitant, cum Iuppiter horridus Austris
torquet aquosam hiemem et caelo cava nubila rumpit.
‘[battle rages] mighty as the storm that, coming from the west, beneath the rainy Haedi lashes the ground thick as the storm clouds shower on the deep when Jupiter, grim with southern gales, whirls the watery tempest and bursts the hollow clouds from heaven.’
The way this passage finesses the actual birth bothers me, if I'm honest. If we wished to be generous I suppose we could say that Vida writes it this way to fold another miracle into the miracle-rich tapestry of his poem. Mary's pain-free birth is not specified as a miracle in the gospels, but it follows logically, if we think things through. Did the virgin suffer birth-pangs like a regular woman? Surely not. So in place of a believable scene of partuition we have this instant appearance, as if Scotty beamed the baby straight out of the womb.
All I am doing here, I know, is notating the difference in taste between Vida and myself. Still: I do think this is a misstep. It tends to leave Joseph lolling around, half-dozing, rather than helping his wife through this difficult and indeed dangerous procedure, which reflects badly on his character. But there's a bigger issue, I think. For the first time in the poem here, and even now in only the most glancing of ways, Vida touches on one of the most crucial aspects of the story of Jesus's life: namely that he was born into and lived his life in poverty. This core fact is brushed, rather, under Vida's carpet, since his Jesus is not only aristocracy but manifestly aristocratic, unmistakeably and gloriously noble and divine and princely. Here we have ‘[God] wanted his son to live a life of hardship/to experience indignities on earth ... deprived of all wealth’ [557-60] but we're not told why He wanted these things, or what bearing they have on His son's ministry. It almost as if this is something Vida feels he needs to explain away, or since he doesn't explain merely to brush aside, rather than one of the most important truths of the story he is retelling.
I'll stop, though. It's Vida's poem, not mine. As a pendant to yesterday's snippet, I posted a lengthy sort-of essay about the divergence between what Vida manifestly believed and what I do, and in doing so I could not but acknowledge the asymmetry between a believer (Vida) and an infidel (me) wrastling over these matters. So it goes. It seems almost paradoxical in me to say this, since translating Book 3 (unlike the first two books) is proving pretty onerous, but my problem with this description of Mary giving birth is that it is insufficiently laborious. Laborare est orare, after all.
It's a funny thing, actually. Posting yesterday's blog on this site left me, for much of the morning, nervous and unsure. Usually I post and move on to other things. After all, it's not as if anyone is actually reading all this stuff. It's a (small) discipline I have imposed on myself, for my own reasons, one of several ways I add shape to what would otherwise tend to be shapeless lockdown days. And yet, after yesterday's essay went live, I felt weirdly exposed, as if I had revealed something about myself to the whole world, something that would make manifest my fundamental foolishness and ridiculousness, my insufficiency. It is rare for me to write in (what amounts to) the confessional mode, or to reveal so much about what moves me, or makes me cry; and it felt ... weird and discombobulating doing it yesterday if I'm honest. Of course the world didn't care, or indeed notice, and so we go on. It probably has less to do with what I actually wrote yesterday and more with the accumulated psychological pressures of months of lockdown. Ah well.
The image at the head of this post is Bartolo di Fredi, Nativity and adoration of the shepherds (1383) presently in the Vatican Museums.
[Next: lines 595-646]
No comments:
Post a Comment