I guess I haven’t completely wasted my life

Thirty-two years ago, shortly following my first scholarly publication (“On The Seafarer, line 34b”), after spending an idyllic summer in the Lucanian countryside helping to dig up a ruined Roman villa – a summer which a quarter century later inspired the twenty-four wee paintings which seem to have made me into some sort of “artist” – I sat down in a small upstairs room in a tiny house in the London suburb of Watford and translated a Latin love poem (Catullus 3) into English verse and wrote that translation out on the rear flyleaf of the little book of Latin poetry I was just now perusing once more.

I guess I haven’t completely wasted my life.