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After Fame: The Epigrams of Martial
After Fame is a discursive rendering of the Roman epigrammatist Martial's Book I. Its 118 poems, on themes such as work, friendship and public life, are modelled after the source material through a variety of 'treatments' - most notably machine translation (for which Latin still presents near-insurmountable difficulties), employing the results as scaffolding for poems that quickly improvise their way clear of their originals. As it progresses, the book is increasingly interrupted by reflections on authorship, technology, cultural complicity and the privileged, mediating role of the poet: all fixations of Martial's work that still resonate today. Pitched between translation and new writing, After Fame challenges the integrity of both categories, dramatising the obscurity of its source, refraining from easy equivalences, while insisting on its contemporary relevance.
- GenresPoetry21st Century
ebook
Published March 31, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 1, 2020
this book kicked my ass!! It's funny and dynamic and keeps on reinventing itself - a real treat from start to finish
May 30, 2020
I loved Erotion in the three Martial epigrams and I love all of Erotion's manifestations here.
Everything from poetry about poetry, bionic sex slaves, humour, sci-fi, prose narratives, actual epigrams that could pass for real translations (or they are), LOLs and SOBs...
Everything from poetry about poetry, bionic sex slaves, humour, sci-fi, prose narratives, actual epigrams that could pass for real translations (or they are), LOLs and SOBs...
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May 30, 2022I want to see more in this vein of refashioning the classics - Luke Kennard's Notes on the Sonnets is a very available comparison with After Fame but it's interesting to me that whereas most people that read poetry have a decent enough familiarity with Shakespeare's sonnets, not nearly so many people know the poet Martial. Riviere embarks upon a similar project to Kennard and it must be said that they do vie for preference. I think LK is interested in consistency within his prose poems whereas SR is keen to experiment - footnotes proliferate in experimental formal arrangements which include a multi-page short story wherein a Roman woman appears to murder her robot sex slave and I don't think I'm a huge fan of that one
Want more Riviere and I want more poets taking up the crusties - but especially the underread, such as Martial, in preference to the perpetual marionetting of Shakespeare's dusty bones
Want more Riviere and I want more poets taking up the crusties - but especially the underread, such as Martial, in preference to the perpetual marionetting of Shakespeare's dusty bones
March 13, 2025
NOT A TRANSLATION of Book I of Martial's epigrams, let's emphasize--maybe an "imitation," along the lines of Alexander Pope's Imitations of Horace or Samuel Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes." Apparently some of it was translated using a digital translation program, the kind of program which at the time the book was published (2020) was still capable of producing refreshingly odd results, but still, very far from a translation. Martial in a wobbly 21st century mirror, we might say.
For example, number 47 in Martial's Book I is about a contemporary of his who has switched careers from being doctor to being an undertaker, and Martial makes the joke that he has not really changed his work at all, as he is still putting people underground. Riviere's 47 reads:
This is to acknowledge
that poets do admin
in 2018: received
I think the joke here is that poets who get jobs in academia find themselves saddled with stultifying tasks, but perhaps in some cases their poetry was already stultifying, so no major change has occurred. So the relation between Martial's poems and Riviere's is more oblique and through-a-cloud-darkly than that between Pope and Horace or Johnson and Juvenal, but still discernible and sometimes wickedly funny.
After Fame certainly aligns with Riviere's 2021 novel, Dead Souls, a picaresque trip through the institutions contemporary writing inhabits. Martial is an urban poet whose short, sharply pointed poems conjure up a setting of ill-gotten wealth, literary sophistication, intoxication, sexual adventurism, and plagiarism, a setting which (mutatis mutandis) is an awfully close match for that of Dead Souls.
I wondered whether Riviere himself had had to bat away any accusations of plagiarism, since Martial accuses a few people of appropriating his work and Solomon Wiese, a key character in Dead Souls, has his own troubles on that score. Riviere's early poetry had incorporated random search-engine finds (like what the USA called "flarf") and that may have led to the kind of sticky intellectual property questions that Wiese deals with in the novel. (Working with Martial is risk-free in that regard; he has been dead for about 1900 years, and that may be part of the joke.)
The irony is, though, that Riviere is about as original poet as you are ever going to encounter these days. Reading him is a continuing surprise.
For example, number 47 in Martial's Book I is about a contemporary of his who has switched careers from being doctor to being an undertaker, and Martial makes the joke that he has not really changed his work at all, as he is still putting people underground. Riviere's 47 reads:
This is to acknowledge
that poets do admin
in 2018: received
I think the joke here is that poets who get jobs in academia find themselves saddled with stultifying tasks, but perhaps in some cases their poetry was already stultifying, so no major change has occurred. So the relation between Martial's poems and Riviere's is more oblique and through-a-cloud-darkly than that between Pope and Horace or Johnson and Juvenal, but still discernible and sometimes wickedly funny.
After Fame certainly aligns with Riviere's 2021 novel, Dead Souls, a picaresque trip through the institutions contemporary writing inhabits. Martial is an urban poet whose short, sharply pointed poems conjure up a setting of ill-gotten wealth, literary sophistication, intoxication, sexual adventurism, and plagiarism, a setting which (mutatis mutandis) is an awfully close match for that of Dead Souls.
I wondered whether Riviere himself had had to bat away any accusations of plagiarism, since Martial accuses a few people of appropriating his work and Solomon Wiese, a key character in Dead Souls, has his own troubles on that score. Riviere's early poetry had incorporated random search-engine finds (like what the USA called "flarf") and that may have led to the kind of sticky intellectual property questions that Wiese deals with in the novel. (Working with Martial is risk-free in that regard; he has been dead for about 1900 years, and that may be part of the joke.)
The irony is, though, that Riviere is about as original poet as you are ever going to encounter these days. Reading him is a continuing surprise.
January 27, 2025
“there’s nothing else / the soliciting of happiness can cost you”... Sam Riviere’s After Fame is every bit as good as I hoped it would be. Hailed as the third in a “loose trilogy of process-derived works”, these partial translations of Martial’s epigrams follow on spiritually from his earlier work, from his austerity critiques to his brilliant dismantling of Kim Kardashian’s 72-day marriage and her make-up regimen. In this collection of 118 poems, everything is chaos: from the machine rendered basis of the translating process, to the missing section of poems 81-98 and accompanying footnote, which expounds on the death (and theoretical poisoning) of Brittany Murphy and her husband, to the footnotes-within-footnotes elsewhere. These are poems constantly interrogating their own form, their possibilities and limitations; concerned with Martial’s coinage of ‘plagiarism’ and the privilege and plight of poets and academics, the poems vary from gravitas to levity, from the dense and elaborate to the starkly simple, such as 75: ‘... I don’t believe anything / I half-believe everything...’ As ever, Riviere’s work brings me to confront the acts of writing + reading, and to want more from both of those.
October 18, 2025
I enjoyed some poems and plenty of lines, but I can't say that I really followed much of what was going on here.
The concept may be either quite clever or a bit of a red herring. I'm not the reader to judge that.
The concept may be either quite clever or a bit of a red herring. I'm not the reader to judge that.
May 22, 2020
Not for me, I’m afraid. Extra stars for each poem I’ve really enjoyed (#7 and #117).
January 14, 2022
2.5
Fame is such a sweet draught
dizzily it crashes the blood
or you can smoke it.
Fame is such a sweet draught
dizzily it crashes the blood
or you can smoke it.
April 7, 2025
Not my kind of book, but okay, didn’t make a further impression
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May 10, 2021A bit too clever for me but I found it very amusing and #relatable.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews