Gentle sex and free money

List the twelve things we need in order to be happy.

And which is the poem most often translated into English from another language?

A thoughtful friend in Washington has just sent me a copy of Joshua Weiner's new collection of poems, From the Book of Giants.

In it is a neat contemporary version of Martial's epigram (10.47) on the best way to attain a happy life, a dozen things which we all need at all times.

This is surely the one, the Latin poem (at least) that has most often found an English home - and all because it gives such good answers.

Martial, a Spaniard who came to Rome in the reign of Nero and survived his successors till early in the second century AD, set out a long list of necessities for happiness - from unearned income to fearlessness before death.

To cite his English imitators, they are:

'The richesse left, not got with pain. . .' (Henry Howard, c. 1540)

'A Soyle, not barren; a continewall fire. .' (Ben Jonson, 1640)

'City seldome, Law-suits never. .' (Richard Fanshawe, 1648)

'Quick wit, a Body well inclin'd. .' (Edward Sherburne, 1651)

'A prudent plainesse, equal friends. .' (Robert Fletcher, 1656)

'Thy active mind in equal temper keep . .' (Abraham Cowley, 1668)

'Discourse that may in Pleasure end. .' (Thomas Heyrick, 1691)

'A wife discreet, yet blithe and bright. . ' (Goldwin Smith, 1903)

'Of wine enough to banish care. .'      (A.E. Street, 1907)

'Sound sleep that makes the darkness fly. .' (W.J.Courthope, 1914)

'Contentment with your native gift. .' (Rolfe Humphries, 1963)

'Neither dread your last day, nor long for death. .' (Peter Porter, 1972)

A good list.

OK, it needs a little gender-adjustment. But the list for a happy human seems to have been much the same throughout the ages?

Weiner makes some additions of his own:

'Open affection with your wife and kids'.

And he borrows also from elsewhere in Martial, (Book 8, Epigram14):

'Clear pipes in winter, in summer screens that fit'

He praises:

'A bed in which to love, read, dream and re-imagine love'.

And he ends with a free grace that any of his predecessors might have appreciated.

'To know the soul exceeds where it's confined

Yet does not seek the terms of its release,

Like a child's kite catching at the wind

That flies because the hand holds tight the line.'

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[Dorian]

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[Gabriel Laguna-Mariscal]

Thanks for the post. T wrote a chapter of book on Martial 10.47 and his influence on Spanish poetry:

"«Cosas que procuran una vida feliz»: contenido y fortuna literaria del epigrama X 47 de Marcial", en Homenaje a la Profesora Carmen Pérez Romero, Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura, 2000, 321-337

That chapter is available on line, in a somehow abreviated version:

http://www.uco.es/~ca1lamag/Septiembre2003.htm

[V.Ravichandran]

Many thanks for directing me to Martial. Such a list works, I suppose, by pointing out what we feel and know but unconsciously.
But for the 21st century, is the ideal still an unearned income? For most, it would be a vocation much loved and well paid ; but poetry ascribes the needs of poets to all humanity.

[Bill Wilson]

The image of the kite deserves to be matched to Robert Frost's image of a tent, a structure which is held up by being held down, hence is like a woman tied down by loving, while also held standing by loving. In The Silken Tent, the tent, tied to stakes,

Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightlest bondage made aware.

Part of Frost's achievement is that the sonnet, in one complex sentence, is in its structure like both the tent and the woman, unified and whole because of submitting to constraints which free it to become itself.

[Lynne W. Scanlon]

Those last four lines are fabulous. Thanks!

[Candadai Tirumalai]

Martial is certainly less sententious than Polonius, and decidedly worth reading after all these centuries. "An unearned income" was undoubtedly a source of English leisure and culture for generations, but middle-class Victorians would have distrusted it, even when they profited from it.