CORVO AND MELEAGER
he Songs of Meleager. Made into English with designs by Frederick Baron Corvo (Fr. Rolfe) in collaboration with Sholto Douglas. (The First Edition Club. x5s.)
IT was perhaps inevitable that Corvo, eccentric and exotic son of the 'nineties, should have been drawn to the Greeks. But the Greeks whom he sought and found were neither the blithe, reposeful figures of Winckelmann nor the fierce bar- barians of Hoffmansthal. In protest against an unsympathetic and ugly age he sought for colour and freedom, and he found it in Meleager, that true child of the late Greek world, half Hellenic and half oriental, full of passion and rhetoric and romance. In the deeply loaded verses of the Gadarene poet Corvo found something, as he thought, " truly Hellenick," and, though no professional scholar, he translated all Meleager's poems into stately, elaborate and poetical prose. In his own lifetime the translation remained unpublished, and after his death it was thought to have been lost, until Mr. Maundy- Gregory discovered it, and now it is given to the world in a handsome and eminently readable form with the Greek text accompanying it as Corvo would have wished : for he intended it " for those whose moderate or rusty knowledge seeks assist- ance by the way."
In the last few decades there have been several translations of Meleager both in prose and in verse, and it is pleasantly surprising to see how well Corvo's holds its own against them. In spite of certain mannerisms which- now seem a little anti- quated, it is direct and musical. The short words and short sentences give to these prose versions some of the crispness which comes from their metrical form in Greek : the occasional poetical phrases, smacking as they do of The Yellow Book, are not 'out of place in the translation of a poet whose language was far removed from any conversational speech. Both in
his passion and in his pathos Meleager gave full play to his fancy and showed no traces of Hellenic under-statement. And Corvo, who liked something highly coloured, usually gives a true impression of his original, falling with a just instinct into the right words and the right rhythms when, for instance, he translates into " Asclepias, Lady of Love, with Eyes that are Eyes of Joy, like a Calm on the Waters, biddeth all Men sail on the Sea of Love " or " Within mine Heart, himself Love moulded a Soul's Soul, the sweet Singer, Heliodora." Meleager was a poet after Corvo's own heart and indeed not unlike him. Modern taste may prefer something colder and more intellectual : it may feel that there is something " dago " about Meleager. But Corvo would have thought such a judgement wrong, and for those who are interested either in him or in the late flowers of Greek verse this book is full of
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