古罗马诗人Martialis诗选

古罗马诗人Martialis诗选-讽刺诗

　　1.32

　　Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare.

　　Hoc tantum possum dicere, no amo te.

　　我不爱你，萨比杜，也说不出为什么。

　　反正是不爱你，我能说的只有这些。

　　1.47

　　Nuper erat medicus, nunc est vespillo Diaulus.

　　Quod vespillo facit, fecerat et medicus.

　　昨天是把脉的，今天是抬棺材的，

　　抬棺材时干的事，把脉时早已干过。

　　5.43

　　Thais habet nigros, niveos Laecania dentes.

　　Quae ratio est？ Emptos haec habet, illa suos.

　　泰小姐的牙齿黑得像炭，莱小姐的牙齿白得像雪。

　　你问为什么？一个是嘴里长的，一个是店里买的。

　　1.38

　　Quem recitas meus est, O Fidentine, libellus；

　　Sed male cum recitas, incipit esse tuus.

　　你背的是我的小书，费登提努；

　　可是你一背坏了，就不再是我的书。

　　5.9

　　Languebam： sed tu comitatus protinus ad me

　　Venisti centum, Symmache, discipulis.

　　Centum me tetigere manus acuilone gelatae：

　　Non habuit febrem, Symmache, nunc habeo！

　　我病了：可是很快，你的一百个学生

　　就簇拥着你来到我的床前。

　　啊，一百只北风一样冰冷的手啊：

　　我本来没发烧，可是现在你看！

　　7.3

　　Cur non mitto meos tibi, pontiliane, libellos？

　　Ne mihitu mittas, Pontiliane, tuos.

　　为什么不送你一本我的诗集？

　　因为我怕，怕你送我你的。

　　10.54

　　Mensas, Ole, bonas ponis, sed ponis opertas.

　　Ridiculum est： possum sic ego habere bonas.

　　你摆了丰盛的酒席，却用桌布遮盖。

　　真是好笑：连我这样的穷鬼都吃过好菜。

　　11.59

　　Nil mihi das vivus； dicis post fata daturum：

　　Si non es stultus, scis, Maro, quid cupiam！

　　你活着的时候不肯给，说死后再给我：

　　只要你不是笨鸟，你总知道我在盼着什么！

　　11.59

　　senos Charinus omnibus digitis gerit

　　nec nocte ponit anulos

　　nec cum lavatur. Causa quae sit quaeritis？

　　Dactyliothecam non habet！

　　他每根指头都套着六枚戒指，

　　就连睡觉、洗澡的时候

　　都不曾取下。你问我怎么回事？

　　他一个戒指盒也没有！

马尔提阿利斯（马希尔） 　　Marcus Valerius Martialis (约40～约104) 　　古罗马诗人。以铭辞著称。生于西班牙的比尔比利斯，受过语法修辞教育。青年时期来到罗马，他的一些 　　西班牙同乡，如小塞内加、卢卡努斯等给他以帮助，并使他有机会接近贵族名门。此后他成为富人的门客，同时写作诗歌,获得不小声誉。晚年经高卢回到西班牙,死在那里。 　　他的第一部诗集《斗兽场表演记》于80年问世，诗集包括30多首小诗，赞扬罗马弗拉维乌斯半圆形剧场落成时举行的斗兽、角斗等表演，献给罗马皇帝提图斯。数年后发表礼品铭辞两卷，前卷主要咏食品，后卷主要咏玩具、书籍、家庭用具、化妆用品等，备节日时向朋友、客人赠礼之用。大约从 1世纪80年代中期开始，他的其他铭辞集陆续出版，共12卷，近 1,200首，最后一卷写于西班牙。他的铭辞中，除传统的墓铭、献辞、宴席诗外，大部分为带有一定讽刺色彩的幽默小诗，发展了铭辞传统，成为古代铭辞体的典范。他的诗同现实生活联系紧密，嘲讽各种社会恶习，展现了不少鲜明生动的现实生活画面。他在诗中对下层人民的生活表示同情，对门客的卑微地位表示不满，但作为门客，他不得不经常赞扬主人，吹捧皇帝、廷臣和富豪，以图获得赏赐和恩宠。诗集中除幽默小诗外，还有一些诗赞扬大自然的美和乡村生活的恬静，带有抒情色彩。他在一些谈论文学问题的诗中强调诗歌要写人，反对那些以神话为题材的文学作品脱离现实生活的倾向，并且挖苦那些剽窃他人创作的文人。他的铭辞思想内容虽然并不深刻，但机智敏锐，简短生动，别具特色。在古代，他的铭辞流传很广，中世纪时仍然引起不少人的兴趣，对后代欧洲讽刺小诗的发展有一定影响；著名诗人拉辛、席勒等对他的铭辞也很推崇。

Knowledge of his origins and early life are derived almost entirely from his works, which can be more or less dated according to the well-known events to which they refer. In Book X of his Epigrams, composed between 95 and 98, he mentions celebrating his fifty-seventh birthday; hence he was born on March 1 (x. 24) 38, 39, 40 or 41 AD, under Caligula or Claudius. His place of birth was Augusta Bilbilis (now Calatayud) in Hispania Tarraconensis. His parents, Fronto and Flaccilla, appear to have died in his youth.
His name seems to imply that he was born a Roman citizen, but he speaks of himself as "sprung from the Celts and Iberians, and a countryman of the Tagus;" and, in contrasting his own masculine appearance with that of an effeminate Greek, he draws particular attention to "his stiff Hispanian hair" (x. 65, 7).
His home was evidently one of rude comfort and plenty, sufficiently in the country to afford him the amusements of hunting and fishing, which he often recalls with keen pleasure, and sufficiently near the town to afford him the companionship of many comrades, the few survivors of whom he looks forward to meeting again after his thirty-four years' absence (x. 104). The memories of this old home, and of other spots, the rough names and local associations which he delights to introduce into his verse, attest to the simple pleasures of his early life and were among the influences which kept his spirit alive in the stultifying routines of upper-crust social life in Rome.
He was educated in Hispania, a country which in the 1st century produced several notable Latin writers, including Seneca the Elder and Seneca the Younger, Lucan and Quintilian, and Martial's contemporaries Licinianus of Bilbilis, Decianus of Emerita and Canius of Gades. Martial professes to be of the school of Catullus, Pedo, and Marsus, and he admits his inferiority only to the first. The epigram bears to this day the form impressed upon it by his unrivalled skill.
The success of his countrymen may have been what motivated Martial to move to Rome, from Hispania, once he had completed his education. This move occurred in AD 64, in which Seneca the Younger and Lucan may have served as his first patrons.
Not much is known of the details of his life for the first twenty years or so after he came to Rome. He published some juvenile poems of which he thought very little in his later years, and he laughs at a foolish bookseller who would not allow them to die a natural death (I. 113). Martial had neither youthful passion nor youthful enthusiasm to precociously make him a poet. His faculty ripened with experience and with the knowledge of that social life which was both his theme and his inspiration; many of his best epigrams are among those written in his last years. From many answers which he makes to the remonstrances of friends—among others to those of Quintilian—it may be inferred that he was urged to practice at the bar, but that he preferred his own lazy Bohemian kind of life. He made many influential friends and patrons and secured the favor of both Titus and Domitian. From them he obtained various privileges, among others the semestris tribunatus, which conferred on him equestrian rank. Martial failed, however, in his application to Domitian for more substantial advantages, although he commemorates the glory of having been invited to dinner by him, and also the fact that he procured the privilege of citizenship for many persons on whose behalf he appealed to him.
The earliest of his extant works, known as Liber spectaculorum, was first published at the opening of the Colosseum in the reign of Titus. It relates to the theatrical performances given by him, but the book as it now stands was presented to the world in or about the first year of Domitian, i.e. about the year 81. The favour of the emperor procured him the countenance of some of the worst creatures at the imperial court—among them of the notorious Crispinus, and probably of Paris, the supposed author of Juvenal's exile, for whose monument Martial afterwards wrote a eulogistic epitaph. The two books, numbered by editors xiii. and xiv., and known by the names of Xenia and Apophoreta—inscriptions in two lines each for presents—were published at the Saturnalia of 84. In 86 he gave to the world the first two of the twelve books on which his reputation rests.
From that time till his return to Hispania in 98 he published a volume almost every year. The first nine books and the first edition of Book X. appeared in the reign of Domitian; Book XI. appeared at the end of 96, shortly after the accession of Nerva. A revised edition of book X., that which we now possess, appeared in 98, about the time of Trajan's entrance into Rome. The last book was written after three years' absence in Hispania, shortly before his death, which happened about the year 102 or 103.
These twelve books bring Martial's ordinary mode of life between the age of forty-five and sixty very fully before us. His regular home for thirty-five years was Rome. He lived at first up three flights of stairs, and his "garret" overlooked the laurels in front of the portico of Agrippa. He had a small villa and unproductive farm near Nomentum, in the Sabine territory, to which he occasionally retired from the boors and noises of the city (ii. 38, xii. 57). In his later years he had also a small house on the Quirinal, near the temple of Quirinus.
At the time when his third book was brought out he had retired for a short time to Cisalpine Gaul, in weariness, as he tells us, of his unprofitable attendance to the bigwigs of Rome. For a time he seems to have felt the charm of the new scenes which he visited, and in a later book (iv. 25) he contemplates the prospect of retiring to the neighbourhood of Aquileia and the Timavus. But the spell exercised over him by Rome and Roman society was too great; even the epigrams sent from Forum Corneli and the Aemilian Way ring much more of the Roman forum, and of the streets, baths, porticos and clubs of Rome, than of the places from which they are dated.
His final departure from Rome was motivated by a weariness of the burdens imposed on him by his social position, and apparently the difficulties of meeting the ordinary expenses of living in the metropolis (x. 96); and he looks forward to a return to the scenes familiar to his youth. The well-known epigram addressed to Juvenal (xii. I 8) shows that for a time his ideal was realized; but the more trustworthy evidence of the prose epistle prefixed to Book XII. proves and that he could not live happily away from the literary and social pleasures of Rome for long. The one consolation of his exile was a lady, Marcella, of whom he writes rather as if she were his patroness—and it seems to have been a necessity of his being to have always a patron or patroness—than his wife or mistress.
During his life at Rome, although he never rose to a position of real independence, and had always a hard struggle with poverty, he seems to have known everybody, especially every one of any eminence at the bar or in literature. In addition to Lucan and Quintilian, he numbered among his friends or more intimate acquaintances Silius Italicus, Juvenal, the younger Pliny; and there were many others of high position whose society and patronage he enjoyed. The silence which he and Statius, although authors writing at the same time, having common friends and treating often of the same subjects, maintain in regard to one another may be explained by mutual dislike or want of sympathy. Martial in many places shows an undisguised contempt for the artificial kind of epic on which Statius's reputation chiefly rests; and it seems quite natural that the respectable author of the Thebaid and the Silvae should feel little admiration for either the life or the works of the bohemian epigrammatist.