TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

passing from hand to hand, becomes a metaphor of the successful
poet's fame. Thus what is most a cause for the character
Propertius's shame – his being betrayed by his mistress – is the
sign of the poet Propertius's glory. (Subjecting Verses: Latin Love
Elegy and the Emergence of the Real. Paul Allen Miller 63-4)
Miller confirms the association between ―Cynthia‖ and ―poetry‖ by reminding us that the
correspondence would have been granted by the coterie of elegy readers Propertius wrote
for. ―Cynthia‖ was a name linked to the poetry of Cornelius Gallus, the first Roman
Elegist. It stood as a metonym for the genre. Gallus‘s work mentioned Mount Cynthius
on the isle of Delos as being Callimachus's (the Alexandrian pater familias to the Roman
Elegists) proper home. ―That association was reproduced by Vergil's sixth Eclogue where
the god directing Vergilian discourse away from epic material was given the cult title
Cynthius‖ (64). Miller traces the use of the masculine form, Cynthius, through Meleager
and Catullus. The opening lines of the Monobiblios are a direct imitation of lines from
Meleager.
The imitation of Meleager, however, contains ironies that have not
been noted. Cynthia is prima, but the announcement of her
firstness is a quotation and hence already secunda. If we recall the
literary significance of Cynthia being the first (prima) word of the
poem, then the programmatic nature of this statement becomes
clear. It also indicates that the poetry that follows will be organized
around polarities and inversions such that the surface meaning is
often at odds with that contained in the subtext. Cynthia might be
first but only in a way that announces her as second. The poem
itself, rather than having a stable centre, functions as the locus for a
series of tensions between a set of analogous polarities and their
inversions. (Miller 85)
Pound's translation, then, takes these series of textual tensions and relations and recasts
them in a new idiom. Hooley finds this modernizing gesture in the initial lines of the
homage where Pound takes:
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