Propertius

This is an observation the Roman poet Sextus Propertius put into words about 2,000 years ago, when he included an early version of the adage “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” in one of his poems.

Excerpts of the work in progress were already impressing fellow-writers by the mid-twenties B.C., when the love poet Propertius wrote that “something greater than the Iliad is being born.”

Ezra Pound didn’t know Chinese and his Latin was not professional, but his versions of Chinese poetry and of Sextus Propertius are still read because they convey something important about the original and open up new ways of conceiving of this material.

A classics professor recently told me that he feels the same way about Pound’s “re-creations” of the elegies by the Latin poet Sextus Propertius: “I don’t even the think of the changes as errors,” he said.

Quite what these professors thought was going on between the sheets of Catullus and Lesbia, or Propertius and Cynthia, is one of the great mysteries of classical scholarship.