For my most recent Classics coursework, I had to study the translation of Classical literature into English. If I'd felt like handing in something edgy, I'd have taken the suggestion that one should transform the original into the appropriate modern medium (poetry to poetry, prose to prose) to its logical extention. As I have been in my imagination for the entire duration of the essay.

So, Kings Classics department, what would you say to...

Homer translated by DC and Marvel Comics

The Iliad is one long fight scene, featuring superhuman heroes smacking one another. The canon for many of these figures is jolly dodgy, but their basic traits are universal making them relevant to generation after generation. So why not adapt it as a graphic novel, as a DC/Marvel crossover. One house can draw the Trojans, the other can do the Greeks. It would actually look just like this:

Much like comics, the Iliad is a long "what if?". Could Hera bitchslap Venus? What about Ajax vs. Paris? And that is the general principle of superhero comics, which always have time to abandon the plot and derail for Superman-controlled-by-Poison-Ivy vs. Batman, or similar tomfoolery for the sake of some hitting. They could play it straight, with swords and sandals; but hell, the archetypes in both graphic novels and epics are so grand that they could probably easily be analogised:

Achilles could be Hulk - unstoppably strong. BUT YOU WON'T LIKE HIM WHEN HE'S ANGRY. Actually, considering it's anger that makes Hulk green, possibly this is a bad pick. Superman, then - infinitely strong, but his human heart is his fatal flaw. Bow-wielding playboy Paris could be Green Arrow - or maybe Speedy.

Oh, I could do this all day! Frank Miller and Alan Moore can do the darker-and-edgier fall of Troy in the Aeneid...speaking thus:

Virgil's Aeneid translated by Ronald D. Moore (rebooter of Battlestar Galactica)

"o passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem..."
"You who have suffered worse, this also God will end..."

The Aeneid is the story of a dislocated people. After the destruction of their home, they take their remaining ships and found some failed colonies to no avail, with Carthage as their New Caprica. There is also a mutiny in which half the crew decide they won't follow Aeneas any more and attempt to burn the ships, before following prophecy to a big battle their promised New Home.

There is an obvious plot analogy here (made explicit by the show's use of Greek mythology), but I think the context in which the stories were made is even more interesting. Virgil is all about the contemporary Roman situation. The poem celebrates the peace which followed the horrific Civil War, with heroic Aeneas a figure for the new emperor Augustus, both of whom, in their own ways, "found" a Rome.

Critics disagree on exactly what Virgil meant by all this. You can read it as a ludicrously imperialistic poem, packed with prophecies of Rome's future greatness. Others have taken the scene where Aeneas leaves the Underworld through the door of Lies to mean Virgil regards the Roman Dream as a pack of bull, and the whole thing is very subversive. Certainly antagonists like Dido and Turnus are given buckets of sympathy; the final line of the poem features Aeneas succumbing to his basest human urges, not ascending to a throne. There is no one explanation, and probably more than one are at work. Magistra always said - and I like this - that she thought Virgil's message was "founding an empire requires terrible sacrifices, however they are ultimately worth it."

Battlestar Galactica is also a show intimately concerned with contemporary America - obviously critical, and yet at the same time often pretty flagwaving. Is it pro-military or anti-military? New Caprica is a criticism of the Iraq war, and it is effectively a long tale about the horrors of war. At the same time all our heroes are soldiers, and fight scenes and military apparel are presented for our enjoyment and consumption. Like in the Aeneid - 50% fight scene, with all the glory that entails, yet presented with a grace and pathos that assures you Virgil is a pacifist at heart.

I'd like to see RDM have a crack at this story. One trait the two do not share is an ensemble cast, and I think transplanting Galactica's squabbling bureacracy into the Aeneid would have possibilities.

And now for some jokes which no one will get, as the Galactica fans and Virgil fans on this blog don't overlap: Sinon is a Cylon. Ascates is a girl. The "trip to the Underworld" happens in a dream sequence. The Sybil of Cumae has tits the size of Mars' moons...

Horace translated by Woody Allen

The catchword which follows Horace is "detatched". "Wry" is another one. Horace was a Roman society man, and member of a considerable intellectual circle including Virgil. His pose within the love Odes is as a mature man commentingly amusingly on romantic follies, while doing it all the same himself. He is brilliantly self effacing - one of his poems, a quarrel between him and a girl, allows her to win and considerably insult him. Something about all this just screams "Woody Allen" at me, and it's a mental image I now keep in mind when analysing Horace.

This is my translation of 3.9. I can't stump up the energy now to make it rhyme, but the Latin has a nee-naw-nee-naw rhythm, like kids chanting in a playground. Note how every stanza, the girl trumps him, and how knowingly childish the whole business is. For its ending, this is one of my favourite poems.

"Once I was good enough for you,
no other white-armed chap around your neck
I thought myself richer than a Persian king!"

"Once, you did not burn for another,
for Chloe more than Lydia -
Many know the name Lydia, more famous than Rome itself!"

"Now slave-girl Chloe is for me,
clever at sweet melodies on the guitar
For her, I would not fear to die
if the fates allowed her to survive!"

"Calaius, son of a great man,
burns for me with an equal passion!
For whom, I would not fear to die twice,
if the fates allowed my boy to survive!"

"If, perchance, love returned
and we were lead again under the same fate,
if red-headed Chloe were to be thrown out
and the door again open to Lydia...?"

"Although he is more beautiful than stars,
and you sulky and lighter than a cork
I will live with you
With you I would willingly die"

Catullus as translated by Westlife

Or Boyzone, or Josh Groban, or any of them. Catullus was a sincere, if playful love poet, and his heartfelt elegies best suit the rhythms and swells of modern pop. "Odi et amo" basically is "tainted love".

Julius Caesar as translated by Alan Partridge

Or any sport commentator of your choice. Julius Caesar's military reports have been described as "lean, clean and mean". They are textbook-perfect Latin, informing the reader of what happened as expediently as possible in the dry manner of front page journalism. Despite this, they have a certain irresistable charm - once you get into the rhythm of his frumentiis collociis, obsidiis daris, legationem mittere and the rest, it's irrepressable stuff. Both diciplines require a quick way of expressing the movements of many men, and interpreting the reasons for victory. War, like sport, has to be accurately reported for the sake of those who weren't there - but like sport, it's not always the most fascinating thing.

Propertius 1.21 as translated by The Decemberists

The Decemberists are an acoustic guitar band who I wrote off as really, really boring because I hadn't listened to the lyrics. When you do, you actually discover a wellspring of macabre Victoriana - bloody revenges, rapes aplenty and a cathexis of dead love interests - which cheers me up in a very particular manner. I also admit that their use of instruments is far more various and proggy than I gave them credit for. I actually know very little about Propertius, but a single poem of his put the Decemberists in mind.

We've been studying Love and War, best expressed by Ovid's "crede mihi, Attice, Militat omnes amores". It's 100 lines of puns and picturesque ideas, of how a lover is just like a soldier. Very cute, but in a pacifistic moment I had the urge to write a response beginning and ending "No, Atticus, to be in love is nothing like soldiery" and pack it out with Wilfred Owen style scenes of muddy despair.

This is exactly when Propertius came along and picked me up. It is...unexpected. The Romans are rarely coarse. Even Virgil's bloody battle descriptions have a certain epic detatchment to them. This is all generalisation, so there are exceptions: you do get emotional honesty, and heartbreak, and viceral descriptions. But not often, and only (I think) because we, as a modern audience, expect them to be there. My impression of Roman literature is of it being far more studied and impersonal than our own, certainly too much so for properly brutal cynicism.

I stand corrected, and it's possibly the shock of the correction that has made me fall so hard for this poem. It's bitter, cruel and downright nasty. The context is a genuine Roman Civil War battle, in which Augustus successfuly starved the besieged into surrender before killing all the leaders except Marc Antony's brother, a battle in which Propertius lost a loved one. This poem is one of those "moments" for me when a Roman reaches out of the past and taps me on the shoulder. Have a read of the best translation I could make in two minutes:

You, man, rushing to escape the fate common to all,
fellow soldier wounded on Etruscan battlelines,
why do you weeping look away from my groans?
I am your closest brother-in-arms.
Thus let your parents rejoice to see you safe,
and let sister know what has passed only from your tears:
that surrounded, Gallus escaped the swords of Caesar
but could not flee the hand of a stranger;
and whatever bones she finds scattered over
Etruscan hills - let her think they are mine.

My English doesn't do his Latin justice.

Of course, an academic has toned it down by claiming it is a ghostly apparition (welling eyes can be a sign of fear), and it is true this makes a more obvious fit in the genre of Roman grave poetry - which often had sepulchral inscriptions coldly addressed from the deceased. The modern assumption is that it is a death scene. I actually believe this is supposed to be ambiguous. It plays as both, and I believe Propertius starts by making his audience think it is a tomb inscription in the first line, then smacks him with the immediacy of the scene by addressing a specific character instead of a generic passer by.

It's the unRoman weeping, and unRoman groaning - in Virgil, heroes give up a single groan as they are hit and then die. The implication from the verbs here is that Gallus is taking his time...it's the bitterness with which Gallus twice tells the listener that he too will die, and yet also noting that he will return to his parents (with the implication that he, Gallus, will not). Gallus gets to die an ignoble death in the retreat, without even the consolation of in the first unremittingly anti-military passage I have ever read in Latin. The last couplet is just a heartbreaker: hundreds of men are being left behind on those hills, so many that it is impossible to discover his, but let his sister decieve herself in consolation. The idea of unburied bones would strike proper horror in a Roman, but the sheer cynicism of this is still affecting.

I also like the dramatic ambiguity of the scene. Is the Miles a stranger who happens to pass Gallus? Or are they close friends or, heck, even rivals? Are they brothers, or cousins? Or maybe brothers in law - with the sister married, or about to be married to one of them? There is just-about enough evidence in "ignotos" to suggest Gallus was killed accidentally by his own side as he retreated, including by the listener himself - the sense of "unknowing" as well as "unknown" is there if you want it to be.

It reminded me of many of the American civil war songs, which is doubtless what put me in mind of the Decemberists. The beyond-the-grave-ness reminds me of many-a Decemberists song (Leslie Ann Levine for one, Yankee Bayonet is another), and other things too, but really...

...what a poem!