Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English (Classical Presences)

LIVING CLASSICS

This page intentionally left blank

Living Classics Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English

Edited by S . J. HA R R I S ON

1

3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Oxford University Press 2009 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Living classics : Greece and Rome in contemporary poetry in English / edited by S. J. Harrison. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–19–923373–1 (acid-free paper) 1. English poetry—20th century—Classical influences. 2. American poetry—20th century—Classical influences. 3. New Zealand poetry—20th century—Classical influences. 4. Classical literature—Influence. 5. English poetry—English-speaking countries—20th century. I. Harrison, S. J. PR508.C68L58 2009 821
.9140935838—dc22 2009016664 Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–923373–1 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Christopher Nicholson 10.4.2008

This page intentionally left blank

Editor’s Preface The initial stimulus for this book derives from a conference on the same theme held in Oxford in September 2005 at the Third Passmore Edwards Colloquium. Chapters 1–3, 5, 8, 9 and 11–14 are revised versions of talks given on that occasion. My thanks go to Corpus Christi and Oriel Colleges, Oxford, for hosting the conference, and to their respective staffs (especially Sam Cunningham at Corpus) for their assistance. The conference was generously funded by the Passmore Edwards Fund of the Faculty Board of English at Oxford, which sponsors academic activity linking Classics and English: I thank the Board and its then administrator, Paul Burns. Thanks are also due to all the speakers and attenders, especially Helen Eastman and Floodtide for their performance of Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy and Yopie Prins (whose paper will appear as part of her forthcoming larger project ‘Ladies’ Greek’) for making the transatlantic trip. My warm thanks also go to Emily Greenwood, Isobel Hurst, Anna Jackson and Oliver Taplin for their positive responses to subsequent invitations to contribute to the volume. Thanks are also due to Hilary O’Shea of OUP for her encouragement towards publication, to Lorna Hardwick and Jim Porter for their acceptance of the volume in their ‘Classical Presences’ series, and to Tom Chandler for his copy-editing. Acknowledgements of origins, copyrights and permissions to reprint are due as follows. In the case of poets citing their own work, I am most grateful to Maureen Almond (Chapter 1), Josephine Balmer (Chapter 2), Robert Crawford (Chapter 3), Anna Jackson (Chapter 4), and Michael Longley (Chapter 5) for permissions to reprint. An earlier version of part of Chapter 3 was published in the Yale Review (95.1) in January 2007; I and Robert Crawford are both grateful to the editor of the Yale Review for allowing the re-use of some of that material. Chapter 4 is a revised version of a piece published in Antichthon 40 (2006). Chapter 6 reprints the preface to Tony Harrison, Euripides: Hecuba (Faber and Faber, 2005); I am most grateful to Tony Harrison for permission to reprint. The quotations

viii

Editor’s Preface

from Michael Longley’s work in Chapters 8–10 are reprinted by the author’s kind permission. Chapter 7 reprints Seamus Heaney’s 2004 Jayne Lecture from the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 148, no. 4 (December 2004); I am most grateful to Seamus Heaney and the American Philosophical Society for permission to reprint that lecture, and also to Seamus Heaney for permission to reprint the extracts from his work in Chapters 10 and 14. The quotations from Sylvia Plath’s ‘Electra on Azalea Path’ in Chapter 12 are reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber. The illustration in Chapter 13 is used by kind permission of The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne (full acknowledgement is made in the caption). In Chapter 14 (where individual publication details are cited in each case) acknowledgements are due for kind permissions to reprint to Fleur Adcock, Eavan Boland, U. A. Fanthorpe, Rachel Hadas, Medbh McGuckian and The Gallery Press, Faber and Faber (for that of Paul Muldoon) Carcanet Press Limited (For that of Anne Ridler and Louise Glück) and HarperCollins (for that of Louise Glück); likewise to Jorie Graham for Chapter 16. The work of James K. Baxter quoted in Chapter 17 is reprinted by the permission of Oxford University Press, that of C. K. Stead cited in the same chapter by the author’s permission. All other copyright work quoted in this book is cited in conformity with the guidelines for ‘fair dealing for criticism and review’ proposed by the Society of Authors. This volume is dedicated in honour of his seventieth birthday to Christopher Nicholson, who first opened up for me the world of poetry. S. J. H Corpus Christi College, Oxford September 2008

Contents List of Contributors

xi

Introduction: The Return of Classics Stephen Harrison

1

PART I POETS AND PRACTICE 1. Horace on Teesside Maureen Almond 2. Jumping their Bones: Translating, Transgressing, and Creating Josephine Balmer

19

43

3. Reconnecting with the Classics Robert Crawford

65

4. Catullus in the Playground Anna Jackson

82

5. Lapsed Classicist Michael Longley

97

PART II POETS IN THE THEATRE 6. Weeping for Hecuba Tony Harrison

117

7. Title Deeds: Translating a Classic Seamus Heaney

122

PART III SCHOLARS ON POETS 8. The Argippaei (Herodotus 4. 23) in Belfast Maureen Alden

143

x

Contents 9. Michael Longley Appropriates Latin Poetry Brian Arkins

10. The Homeric Convergences and Divergences of Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley Oliver Taplin 11. Is ‘the Frail Silken Line’ Worth more than ‘a Fart in a Bearskin’? or, how Translation Practice Matters in Poetry and Drama Lorna Hardwick

152

163

172

12. Electra in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry: A Case of Identification Anastasia Bakogianni

194

13. The Autobiography of the Western Subject: Carson’s Geryon Edith Hall

218

14. ‘Purple Shining Lilies’: Imagining the Aeneid in Contemporary Poetry Rowena Fowler

238

15. Shades of Rome in the Poetry of Derek Walcott Emily Greenwood 16. ‘We’ll all be Penelopes then’: Art and Domesticity in American Women’s Poetry, 1958–1996 Isobel Hurst

255

275

17. Catullus in New Zealand: Baxter and Stead Stephen Harrison

295

Bibliography Index

325 345

List of Contributors Maureen Alden is Senior Honorary Research Fellow in Ancient Greek at The Queen’s University of Belfast. She is the author of two books on Mycenean archaeology, and of Homer Beside Himself: Para-narratives in the Iliad (2000). Maureen Almond has published six collections of poetry—Tailor Tacks (1999), Oyster Baby (2002), The Works (2004), Tongues in Trees (2005), Recollections (2008), and Chasing the Ivy (2009). Brian Arkins is Professor of Classics at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Among his books on classical literature and its reception are Builders of My Soul: Greek and Roman Themes in Yeats (1990), Greek and Roman Themes in Joyce (1999), and Hellenising Ireland: Greek and Roman Themes in Modern Irish Literature (2005). Anastasia Bakogianni is a post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Open University, UK. She is currently working on a book project on the modern reception of the Electra myth, and is editor of a forthcoming publication on the reception of Ancient Greek and Roman Drama. Josephine Balmer has published four collections of translations and poems—Sappho: Poems & Fragments (1992), Classical Women Poets (1996), Chasing Catullus and Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate (both 2004). Her new collection, The Word for Sorrow, based around Ovid’s Tristia, will be published by Salt in spring 2009. Robert Crawford is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews and the author of seven collections of poetry in English (and co-author of one in Scots), most recently of Full Volume (2008); his Selected Poems was published in 2005. His editions and versions of Scottish Neo-Latin poetry, Apollos of the

xii

List of Contributors

North, appeared in 2006. He has published a number of volumes of literary criticism on English and Scottish literature and poetry. Rowena Fowler was formerly Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol and is now an independent scholar studying ancient and modern Greek at Oxford. She is the editor of two volumes of the Oxford Works of Robert Browning (1988, 1989), and author of a range of studies on Victorian and modern literature. Emily Greenwood was until 2008 Lecturer in Greek at the University of St Andrews. She is author of Thucydides and the Shaping of History (2006) and co-editor of Reading Herodotus (2007) and Homer in the Twentieth Century (2007). Edith Hall is Professor of Classics and Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London, and co-founding Director of the Archive for Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford. Her books include Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1914 (co-authored with Fiona Macintosh) (2005), The Theatrical Cast of Athens (2006) and The Return of Ulysses (2008). Lorna Hardwick is Professor of Classical Studies at the Open University and Director of the project ‘Classical Receptions in Late Twentieth Century Drama and Poetry in English’. Her books include Translating Words, Translating Cultures (2000) and Reception Studies (2003), and she is co-editor of the Blackwell Companion to Classical Receptions and Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds (both 2007). Stephen Harrison is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has published widely on Latin literature, and has also written on the modern reception of Virgil, Horace, the ancient novel, and ancient epic. Tony Harrison is Britain’s leading dramatic poet. His theatre poetry on classical themes includes The Oresteia (1981), The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (1990), The Common Chorus (1992), Euripides’

List of Contributors

xiii

Hecuba (2005), and the film-poem Prometheus (1998); he has also published nine collections of poems, most recently Under The Clock (2005). His Collected Poems and Collected Film Poetry were both published in 2007. Seamus Heaney has published eleven collections of poems, most recently District and Circle (2006), together with verse versions of Beowulf (1999) and of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (The Cure at Troy, 1991) and Antigone (The Burial at Thebes, 2004). Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 was published in 1998, and Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 in 2002. In 1989–94 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Isobel Hurst is Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of Victorian Women Writers and the Classics (2006). Anna Jackson is Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Theatre, and Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. She has published four collections of poetry—The Long Road To Teatime (2000), The Pastoral Kitchen (2001), Catullus for Children (2003), and The Gas Leak (2006), and is co-editor of The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders (2007). Michael Longley has published eight collections of poetry including Gorse Fires (1991) which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and The Weather in Japan (2000) which won the Hawthornden Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Irish Times Poetry Prize. His most recent collection Snow Water (2004) was awarded the Librex Montale Prize (Milan). His Collected Poems appeared in 2006 and Wavelengths, a chapbook of uncollected translations, in 2009. In 2001 he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He is the present Ireland Professor of Poetry. Oliver Taplin was until his retirement in September 2008 Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Magdalen College, Oxford and

xiv

List of Contributors

Professor of Classical Languages and Literature in the University of Oxford; he remains a co-founding Director of the Archive for Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford. Amongst his books are The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (1977), Greek Tragedy in Action (1978), Homeric Soundings (1992), Comic Angels (1993) and Pots and Plays (2007).

Introduction: The Return of Classics Stephen Harrison

This volume offers an eclectic account of engagement with the literatures of Greece and Rome by some contemporary poets writing in English. It includes both pieces by poets themselves, reflecting on their own use of classical texts, and analyses of these and other living poets (and of one no longer alive) by scholars of classical reception, showing how such poetic interactions work in detail and reflecting on some broader intellectual and cultural contexts. This introduction sets out a contextualizing sketch of the re-emergence of classical literary texts as a significant source for poetry in English since 1960 as a context for the pieces in this book. It is an interesting but comprehensible paradox that classical texts have achieved a high profile in contemporary literature at a time when fewer people than ever can read these works in the original languages. 1 Since 1960 numbers learning Latin and Greek at school in the UK and elsewhere have declined substantially, and students are increasingly learning Latin and Greek (if at all) in universities rather than in secondary education. On the other hand, classics is perhaps livelier than ever as a set of intellectual disciplines, and study of the classical world in general continues to be vigorous in many schools and universities throughout the Anglophone world. In this same period, poets writing in English have shown an interest in classical material unparalleled since the nineteenth century, and certainly much more marked than in the period 1920–1960. Indeed, the 1

For this and for some of the other ideas here see Taplin (2002).

2

Stephen Harrison

main poetic tendency of the 1950s, the Movement, 2 combined ironic realism with an antipathy not only to Romanticism but also to the ‘myth-kitty’ of classical literature. This taste was notably articulated by Philip Larkin: ‘To me, the whole of the ancient world, the whole of classical and biblical mythology mean very little, and I think that using them today not only fills poems full of dead spots but dodges the poet’s duty to be original’. 3 The return to classical texts in the poetry of the 1960s and afterwards may thus seem surprising; but it can be set against a broader cultural context which offers several strands of explanation. The general decrease in the effective knowledge of classical languages marks a change, from a situation in the UK and elsewhere where the educated classes would have functioning Latin, to a position where few have Latin and a microscopic minority Greek. This development has necessarily placed the first-hand knowledge of classical texts on the cultural margins rather than in the centre of modern intellectual life. This might have led to the establishment of classics as an inaccessible subject for a self-regarding conservative in-group, as in the fictional US college of Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History; 4 but as recent historians of the subject in the UK have documented, classics has reacted dynamically to the marginalisation of its languages with a vigorous process of outreach. 5 The book trade has played an important part here: when it could no longer be assumed that the educated classes could read these authors in the original and despised or did not need translations, enterprising publishers moved into the production of readable and inexpensive versions of classical texts for the general public. This tendency was aided by the revolutionary introduction of the mass market paperback in the 1930s, appropriated for classical translations by the Penguin Classics from 1946 6 and substantially augmented a generation later by the World’s 2

Morrison (1980). Cf. Hamilton (1964), cited by Taplin (2002) 9–10; Griffin (1986) is a classicist’s response to Larkin’s views. 4 5 Tartt (1992). See Stray (1997) and (2003). 6 Beginning in 1946 with E. V. Rieu’s prose Odyssey but now with dozens of classical titles: for a brief history see http://us.penguinclassics.com/static/html/history.html (accessed 5/6/2008), and for a celebratory volume see Radice and Reynolds (1987). Dr Ika Willis at Bristol is currently engaged in a research project on the history of the Penguin Classics using the Penguin Archive. 3

Introduction: The Return of Classics

3

Classics of the Oxford University Press. 7 The classics of Greek and Roman literature (and especially poetry) were thus made accessible to a wide audience for the first time, in versions which had claims to be literary works in their own right rather than mere aids to deciphering the originals. 8 This process of cultural diffusion has continued through the recent prominence of Greek and Roman topics in the broadly consumed media of film and television, itself now a major object of scholarly study. 9 This ‘democratization’ of classical literature through widely available translations and other forms of diffusion has been matched by increasing interest in classical material from left-leaning and/or experimental writers, who might previously have been deterred by the canonical and establishment status of Latin and Greek. It has recently been argued that from the 1960s the ‘non-establishment’ area of poetry raised subversive issues of class, colonialism, and gender in order to challenge traditional classics as a perceived preserve of elite culture. 10 Though poetry has never been a mass medium in modern British culture, this argument has something to commend it, and writers such as Tony Harrison, from the northern English working class, Margaret Atwood, Canadian feminist, and Derek Walcott, from St Lucia in the Caribbean, can indeed be seen as figures from the margins of ‘traditional’ Anglophone intellectual culture, engaging adventurously and provocatively with the central authors of classical literature. But it can also be argued that the interest of such writers shows that the ‘establishment’ aspect of classics was already beginning 7 The series was established in 1901 but first published paperback translations of classical texts in 1980, beginning with (amongst others) Walter Shewring’s prose Odyssey and Robert Fitzgerald’s verse Iliad. 8 That had been the main purpose of the translations in the bilingual Loeb Classical Library (founded 1915), and of the wide range of translations published by H. G. Bohn from 1848. 9 Of course, classical topics have been prominent in cinema since its inception, and flourished in the late 1950s and early 1960s (e.g. Spartacus 1959, Cleopatra 1963, The Fall of the Roman Empire 1964), but the recent revival since Gladiator (2000) has been striking. On classics in popular visual culture see e.g. Wyke (1997) and Nisbet (2006); ‘Rome in film’ is now a major research topic in reception studies (see Joshel et al. 2001, Solomon 2001, Winkler 2001, Cyrino 2005) and we now have academic treatments of individual classical films (Winkler 2004, 2006 and 2007, Lane Fox 2004) and of the 2006 HBO/BBC TV series Rome (Cyrino 2008). 10 Merten (2004)—see my comments in Harrison (2007b).

4

Stephen Harrison

to weaken in the 1960s, and that classical texts could be more widely available and adaptable in the literary world. Some of these writers (e.g. Harrison) have the classical learning to work with the Greek texts, but increasingly it was felt unnecessary to have or show such expertise, usually acquired by a traditional elite education. It is indeed interesting to observe that many of the most striking engagements with classical texts since 1960 in Anglophone poetry have come from writers who are in some sense on the periphery of the ‘traditional’ English metropolitan cultural world. 11 To those already mentioned we could add Harrison’s fellow-northerner Ted Hughes, whose long history of engagement with the classics through translation (though without real working knowledge of the classical languages) effectively began with his extraordinary 1968 version of Seneca’s Oedipus, written for the avant-garde director Peter Brook in a style which brought out the primitive, violent, and ritual aspects of the play, effectively ‘declassicizing’ it. 12 Here indeed we find a nonestablishment figure producing a very non-establishment version of a classical text. The same marginality is shared by another famous experimental version of a Greek tragedy by an African writer, Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite (1973) 13 and more recently by the working-class Scots poet Liz Lochhead, author of a forceful Medea: after Euripides (2000) and Thebans (2003, based on all three great Greek dramatists). Staged versions of ancient drama, indeed, have played a key role in the broader diffusion of classics in Anglophone literature since the 1960s. The founding moment of renewed interest in the performance of Greek drama is often said to be the production in New York in June 1968 of Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69, an adaptation of Euripides’ Bacchae, closely contemporary with Hughes’s Oedipus (premiered in March 1968) and similarly radical in its interpretation of a classical play at a time of considerable political instability. 14 Equally epoch-making in the UK was the production in London in 11 I here omit discussion of the USA, though similar things might be said—see Isobel Hurst’s chapter in this volume. 12 For Hughes and the classics see now the full material in Rees (2009). 13 See e.g. Budelmann (2005); for more African adaptations of Greek tragedy see Goff and Simpson (2007), and for the post-colonial context see Hardwick and Gillespie (2007). 14 See Hall et al. (2004).

Introduction: The Return of Classics

5

November 1981 of Tony Harrison’s version of the Oresteia, 15 which combined Harrison’s forceful translation influenced by Anglo-Saxon verse with the music of Harrison Birtwhistle and the direction of Peter Hall, and Greek tragedy has since then been a regular feature on the British and Irish stage. Ted Hughes’s late versions of Euripides’ Alcestis and of Aeschylus’ Oresteia have had less impact on stage than as quasiautobiographical meditations (alongside his simultaneously written Birthday Letters to the dead Sylvia Plath) about marriage and familial dysfunction. 16 These versions have (again) often emerged from directions which could be considered marginal from a metropolitan perspective. Especially important here has been the use of poetic versions of Greek tragedy by Irish writers to deal with the distress and issues of the political ‘Troubles’ of Northern Ireland since the 1960s. 17 Amongst versions of Greek texts (usually accomplished by using translations rather than the original) are Tom Paulin’s protest plays Riot Act (1984) and Seize the Fire (1989), which respectively adapt Sophocles’ Antigone, the classic confrontation between oppressed individual and authority, and the Prometheus Bound traditionally attributed to Aeschylus, another drama about power and (in)justice. Seamus Heaney has taken on Sophocles’ Philoctetes in The Cure at Troy (1990) with its celebrated intercalated lines about hope for a resolution of the Troubles, 18 and the Antigone (again) with Burial at Thebes (2004), where the connections with Northern Irish politics are less overtly displayed but equally strong, as his chapter in this volume notes. Derek Mahon has written a witty and disturbing Bacchae (1991) and a more sombre Oedipus (2005, conflating Sophocles’ two Oedipus plays), two slightly looser adaptations, while Desmond Egan (unusual in knowing Greek) has produced interesting close versions of Euripides’ Medea (1991) and Sophocles’ Philoctetes (1998). 19 This processing and negotiation of major political issues through the mythical plots of Greek tragedy has been taken up by writers in England, especially in response to the Second Gulf War in Iraq from 15

16 Taplin (2005). See the treatments of these works in Rees (2009). See McDonald and Walton (2002). 18 See the discussion by Taplin (2004). 19 His Medea even has a version of the Greek text in an appendix. On Egan and the classics see Arkins (1992). 17

6

Stephen Harrison

2003, for example in two prose versions of 2004. The publicity for Katie Mitchell’s production of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis (a play in which a general sacrifices his own daughter in order to pursue an Eastern war of conquest) in Don Taylor’s translation made its political overtones clear (‘Just how far will a leader go in order to save face and secure a military victory in the East?’), 20 while Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender presents a contemporary version of Sophocles’ Trachiniae which explores a general’s complex motives for fighting antiterrorist wars in the developing world. This was the context for Tony Harrison’s verse version of Euripides’ Hecuba (2005), discussed in his contribution to this book, in which the victorious Greeks engaging in atrocities against the largely defenceless women prisoners from Troy clearly reflect the actions of the Western coalition in Iraq (and the play repeatedly uses the word ‘coalition’). Classical epic as well as Greek drama has been a focus of recent poetic interest in English. For Homer, American verse translators have been especially prolific since 1960, reacting to a university environment where few knew Greek but where comparative literature flourished and core curricula often required the reading of ‘great books’. 21 After Richmond Lattimore’s highly influential translations of the two Homeric poems in the 1950s we have the important versions of Robert Fitzgerald (Odyssey 1961, Iliad 1974), Robert Fagles (Iliad 1990, Odyssey 1997) and Stanley Lombardo (Iliad 1997, Odyssey 2000). In the UK the chief contributor to modern Homeric translation in verse has been Christopher Logue, whose five volumes War Music (1981), Kings (1991), Husbands (1994), All Day Permanent Red (2003) and Cold Calls (2005) together represent a unique and striking modern account of the Iliad. 22 Logue’s versions vary between fairly close poetic paraphrase to widely allusive poems with an increasingly loose relationship to the original narrative, with a free, forceful, vividly colloquial and quasi-cinematic approach which lays 20

‘Just how far will a leader go in order to save face and secure a military victory in the East?’: from the advance publicity, now archived at http://www.nationaltheatre. org.uk (accessed 25.3.2008). 21 Cf. e.g. the celebrated ‘Literature Humanities’ course at Columbia, established 1936: see further http://www.college.columbia.edu/core/classes/lh.php (accessed 25.3.2008). 22 The last volume remains to be published at the time of writing (June 2008). For a modern account of Logue see Greenwood (2007).

Introduction: The Return of Classics

7

bare the ignoble human urges and motives behind the war and its fundamental brutality (Logue is a pacifist and founder-member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament). He does not know Greek and indeed regards that as an advantage, since as he sees it the more Greek a verse translator knows the less effective is the version produced. 23 Another poet who does not know Greek but has produced an extensive version of Homer is the Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage. Having adapted Euripides’ Heracles for the theatre (Mister Heracles, 2000), 24 in 2004 he wrote a radio adaptation of the Odyssey which was published as a full verse version of the poem in 2006. This is an interesting adaptation which reshapes the plot and uses a witty and colloquial idiom (often specifically Northern in tone) especially for the lively language of Odysseus’ crew, which is given a much larger part in the story; this is something partly necessitated by the need to narrate the plot wholly in dialogue, but also provides the voices of ordinary people in this generally most elite of ancient genres. Margaret Atwood’s recent The Penelopiad (2005), a clever novelistic version of the Odyssey in prose (with brief verse choruses), should also be mentioned here. As its title implies, the work tells the plot from Penelope’s point of view, and is particularly concerned with the perceived injustice of Odysseus’ execution of Penelope’s maidservants for their collaboration with the suitors. An interesting point of comparison with a similar feminist slant is Louise Glück’s 1998 collection Meadowlands, where a sequence of poems on the return of Odysseus and his reunion with Penelope (voiced by various Homeric characters) is interlaced with another sequence on the dissolution of a modern American marriage voiced by the female partner. 25 Quite different as a modern renewal of Homer is Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990). This now celebrated long poem (for which its author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992) sets Homeric plot-elements on the Caribbean island of St Lucia (Walcott’s own birthplace), where the poor fishermen Achille and Hector compete for the love of Helen, a servant of the British settler family the 23 Cf. Taplin (2002) 6–7. For Logue’s method (using a basket of verse translations) see Logue (1981) vii–viii, (1999) 223. 24 For a discussion of his adaptation see Riley (2008) 312–23. 25 See Isobel Hurst’s treatment of this collection in her chapter in this volume.

8

Stephen Harrison

Plunketts, and Homer/Omeros memorably appears as an adviser to the poet/narrator who is a version of Walcott himself. The Homeric material is combined with much more literary allusion (e.g. the Sophoclean fisherman Philoctete and his wound, and echoes of Dante’s Inferno), but this is a work which moulds Homeric allusion into a brilliant artistic whole in the manner of Joyce’s Ulysses, using the sea and islands of the Caribbean as a vehicle for many allusions to the complexities and injustices of its colonial history. Classicists have naturally engaged in extensive analysis of this great and rich poem, one of the few successful verse epics of its century. 26 Another diverse approach to Homer in modern poetry is that of Michael Longley. Longley (as he explains in his chapter in this book) had always been interested in classical literature and engaged with Homer early on, 27 but it was in 1989–90 that he found Homeric vehicles for some important poems about key topics such as the deaths of his parents and the politics of his native Ulster: ‘passages in the Odyssey enabled me to write belated lamentations for my parents and to broach nightmarish aspects of the Troubles.’ 28 The result was a series of beautifully expressed short pieces (often sonnets) which encapsulated great scenes in the Homeric epics in what Longley has called ‘freeze-frame’ technique: ‘I wade in against the narrative flow and freeze-frame telling moments to make what I hope are self-contained lyric poems.’ 29 Longley lyricizes Homer’s epic, making exquisite miniatures which nonetheless reflect the emotional power of the original scenes. 30 Longley (as he also narrates in his chapter) was also involved in one of the great poetic projects of classical reception in the 1990s, Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun’s After Ovid (1994) in which forty-two poets writing in English (including many distinguished names) offered one or more specially commissioned poems based on episodes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ranging from close translations 26 For a recent study which provides convenient bibliography see Goff and Simpson (2007) 244–70. 27 For his engagement with Herodotus and love elegy see the chapters by Maureen Alden and Brian Arkins in this volume. 28 29 Longley (2007) 64. Randolph (2003) 294. 30 On Longley and Homer see further Macdonald (2000) and Oliver Taplin’s chapter in this volume.

Introduction: The Return of Classics

9

to meditations on Ovidian stories. 31 As the editors of that volume point out, Ovid had clear renewed appeal in the late twentieth century: Such qualities as his mischief and cleverness, his deliberate use of shock— not always relished in the past—are contemporary values. Then, too, the stories have direct, obvious and powerful affinities with contemporary reality. They offer a mythical key to most of the more extreme forms of human behaviour and suffering, especially ones we think of as peculiarly modern: holocaust, plague, sexual harassment, rape, incest, seduction, pollution, sexchange, suicide, hetero- and homosexual love, torture, war, child-battering, depression and intoxication form the bulk of the themes. 32

One might add to this that the contemporary popularity of Ovid’s epic also reflects postmodern concerns with change and illusion, and that its division into shortish narrative sections sanctions the production of self-standing brief imitations without attempting the whole work. 33 The After Ovid collection had further repercussions in 1990s poetry; Ted Hughes was inspired by his four contributions to it to produce a collection of twenty-four Tales from Ovid, a volume which won the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1997, while Carol Ann Duffy’s brilliant collection The World’s Wife (1999) included her After Ovid contribution ‘Mrs Midas’ alongside several other debunkings of Ovidian male heroes. Ovid’s Metamorphoses was generally prominent in the 1990s, a decade in which two new poetic versions of the complete poem by Allen Mandelbaum (1993) and David Slavitt (1994) also appeared. 34 But it was not only Ovid’s epic which has attracted the attention of recent poets. Ovid’s status as the most celebrated of poetic exiles attracted Joseph Brodsky, another Nobel Literature laureate. 35 Brodsky’s own experience of persecution and internal exile in Brezhnev’s Russia, drawing perhaps on his awareness of the similar exilic 31

For further comment see Henderson (1999) and Harrison (2004). Hofmann and Lasdun (1994) xi. 33 For the best discussion of 20th-cent. reception of Ovid see Ziolkowski (2005a) 149–225. 34 Since then we have had a further version by David Raeburn (2004); for discussion of all these see Harrison (2004). 35 For Brodsky’s interest in Ovid and in his exile see his essay ‘Letter to Horace’ in Brodsky (1995) 428–58, especially 433. 32

10

Stephen Harrison

sufferings of Osip Mandelstam under Stalin, 36 led to his poems ‘A second Christmas’ (written at Yalta on Ovid’s Black Sea) and ‘Letters to a Roman Friend’, both drawing on the motifs and frameworks of Ovid’s exile poems and published in English translation following Brodsky’s enforced move to the USA in 1972. 37 Derek Walcott too used the figure of the exiled poet in his ‘The Hotel Normandie Pool’ (1981), where an imagined epiphanic Ovid, the ‘invisible, exiled laureate’, converses with the poet in his divorce-driven hotel exile, bringing out Walcott’s concerns as a Caribbean poet about his relationship with traditional European culture. 38 The 1990s also saw several verse translations of Ovid’s exile poems which had received little attention earlier: that of 1990 by David Slavitt, of 1992 by A. D. Melville (Tristia only) and that of 1994 by Peter Green. This wave was surely partly stimulated by the revival in Ovidian scholarship on the exile poetry since 1960 which had gathered pace in the 1980s, 39 as well as by the cultural centrality of exile in a post-1945 world full of physical displacement. 40 Peter Green’s translation had the further distinction of being used by a legend of popular culture: classicists have spotted that Bob Dylan has adapted some lines from Green’s translation of Ovid’s Tristia and Ex Ponto in several tracks on his 2006 album Modern Times. 41 This revival of poetic interest in the exile poetry continues in Josephine Balmer’s collection in progress The Word for Sorrow, which (as she tells us in her chapter in this book) poignantly sets translations from Ovid’s Tristia against poems concerned with the military service at Gallipoli (en route to Ovid’s own Black Sea) of the young man whose old Latin dictionary she used in her work on Ovid’s text. 42 36 Brodsky translated Mandelstam’s 1916 Ovidianizing exile poem ‘Tristia’ into English in 1984—see Brodsky (2001) 499–500. 37 Both in Brodsky (2001) at 10 and 58, written respectively in Russian in 1971 and 1972 and originally published in English translations (by George L. Klein) in 1977 and 1974. 38 For Walcott’s use of Ovid and other Roman poets see Emily Greenwood’s chapter in this volume. 39 Green’s second edition (2005) sets his translation in the context of this scholarly revival (viii–xii). 40 For this centrality see Said (2001); for its influence on the study of exile literature in classics see Gaertner (2007) 1–2. 41 See Thomas (2007). 42 For some poems from the intended collection with author’s introduction see Balmer (2005).

Introduction: The Return of Classics

11

Another Roman poet enjoying a recent revival in versions and the like is Horace. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Horace had been seen as the ultimate gentlemanly poet, personifying the ‘establishment’ aspect of classics, 43 but like other poets he has been adapted in the twentieth century to culturally broader purposes. 44 One aspect of Horatian reception in modern poetry has been his use for commemorative verse: a group of late poems by Auden use the tight metrical forms of Horatian odes, especially Alcaics, 45 and the Irish poet Michael Hartnett has written a version of Odes 4.7 (the famous Diffugere nives translated by A. E. Housman) as a memorial for the Latin teacher David Hayes. 46 Most notably, Seamus Heaney in 2004 published ‘Anything Can Happen: after Horace Odes 1.34’, in which (as Heaney made clear in an accompanying essay) Horace’s ode is made to commemorate the events of 9/11/2001: ‘Anything can happen, the tallest things | be overturned’. 47 A broader view of the Odes is found in the 2002 collection edited by J. D. McClatchy, Horace, The Odes. New Translations by Contemporary Poets, which follows the successful framework of After Ovid (above) in using thirty-five different poets (mostly from the USA and a distinguished group including four former US Poet Laureates) to translate Horace’s 103 odes (plus the Carmen Saeculare). The complete nature of the volume brings out the variety of the Odes, while the presentation of the Latin text on the opposite page (a gesture to Horace’s canonical status) ensures that these pieces are firmly conceived as translations rather than pieces loosely related to the classical author (a contrast with the greater flexibility of After Ovid); 48 other complete verse versions of the Odes by single hands have done the same. 49 That Horatian versions can be successful in unlikely contexts is proved by 43

44 See Harrison (2007c ). For a good survey cf. Ziolkowski (2005b). See Talbot (2003) 152–6. 46 Hartnett (2003) 116–17. It is worth quoting the last stanza: ‘Loyola can’t save from darkness | Father Hopkins pure and mild; | nor can the Sphinx break off the chains | from her beloved Oscar Wilde’, which like Housman’s version picks up the homoerotic hints of Horace’s last stanza (see Harrison 2002). 47 Heaney (2004b); the poem is included without overt reference to 9/11 in Heaney (2006). 48 For a fuller discussion see Talbot (2003). 49 e.g. West (1997), Ferry (1997), Lee (1998), Krisak (2006) and Lyons (2007)—all interesting versions which I have no space to discuss here. Ferry has also produced a relaxed version of Horace’s Epistles, including the Ars Poetica (Ferry 2001). 45

12

Stephen Harrison

the recent work of the English poet Maureen Almond, whose own account of her engagement with Horace appears in her chapter later in this volume. Her 2004 collection, The Works, uses the framework of a new version of Horace’s Epodes to chronicle the world of her own upbringing in 1950s industrial Teesside, while her collection in progress, Chasing the Ivy, is using the first book of the Odes to provide an ironic commentary on the world of the contemporary aspiring poet. 50 Another interesting Horace for our times is to be found in The Commonplace Odes of the New Zealand poet Ian Wedde (2001), complete with stanzaic forms and addressees, but attracted by Horace’s talent for combining the everyday and the grand as ‘unheroic master | of the commonplace’. 51 Amongst other Latin poets, Virgil has not been neglected in the recent fashion for verse translations. Following only two significant examples since 1945 (that of C. Day Lewis in 1952 and that of Allen Mandelbaum in 1972), five major poetic versions of the Aeneid have appeared since 1980 and three in the last few years: by Robert Fitzgerald (1983), C. H. Sisson (1986), Stanley Lombardo (2005), Robert Fagles (2006), and Frederick Ahl (2007). These provide a variety of tones and metres from the four-stress line of Fitzgerald to the neohexameters of Ahl, and show that as with Homer modern literary culture has a keen appetite for Virgilian epic in demanding and artistic translations. Virgilian themes and episodes have also been much in evidence elsewhere: in her piece in this volume, Rowena Fowler shows that the Dido story and the account of the Underworld have been especially powerful for modern poetry by women. The Underworld of Aeneid 6 is also an ongoing project for Seamus Heaney: having provided a sample in ‘The Golden Bough (Aeneid Book VI, lines 98– 148)’ in Seeing Things (1991), he is currently working on a version of the whole book. This would follow on his fascinating engagement with the Eclogues in Electric Light (2001), where a series of poems explore Virgil’s pastorals by both translation and relocation to the modern world: ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ brilliantly applies the millennial concerns of Eclogue 4 with the end of strife to the millennium of 50 For information on this collection see her website at http://www. maureenalmond.com/. 51 Wedde (2001); the quotation is from p. 7.

Introduction: The Return of Classics

13

2000 and the cessation of the Troubles. 52 The Georgics have not been neglected either, with two distinguished modern verse versions by Robert Wells (1982) and Peter Fallon (2004). One Latin poet who has been consistently appropriated as modern since the 1960s is Catullus. 53 Already in 1957’s America Frank Copley’s lively modern versions had presented Catullus as a kind of James Dean figure (‘a rebel, a radical, an experimenter, an innovator, a pioneer’) and this language of revolt was taken up by Kenneth Quinn in his presentation of The Catullan Revolution (1959). After Quinn, Catullus was seen as a radical youth poet questioning the accepted values of Roman society in life, love, and poetry, a figure highly congenial for a 1960s intellectual readership; only this freewheeling Catullus amongst Latin poets was perhaps ready for the famous 1969 homophonic versions of Louis Zukofsky (cf. e.g. his version of poem 8, Miser Catulle, ‘Miss her, Catullus?’). 54 Removal of censorship and greater toleration of obscenity meant that Catullus’ frank invectives could be closely reproduced in translation: this is one of the virtues of C. H. Sisson’s 1967 complete version, and indeed of the recent version by Peter Green (2005), and Anne Carson has some quirkily amusing imitations in her Men in The Off Hours (2000). The hotly debated issue of whether or not the poems in the Catullan collection we have follows the intended order of the poet 55 has added the possibility of rearrangement for modern versions: thus Josephine Balmer’s Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate (2004) reorders the shorter poems to group them by theme and make them more approachable to contemporary readers, 56 and the thirty Catullan versions in Michael Hartnett’s Translations (2003) invert the transmitted order of the two Lesbia poems 11 and 51 and make other rearrangements in the interests of a coherent poetic narrative. Balmer’s Chasing after Catullus (2004), as she discusses in her chapter in this volume, takes a different tack, using poems stimulated by Catullus and other classical sources to deal with some poignant events in her own 52

For a convenient treatment see Harrison (2007a), with further bibliography. For helpful surveys see Ziolkowski (2007) and Vandiver (2007). 54 For bibliography on the Zukovsky versions see http://www.ofscollege.edu.sg/ z-site/notes-to-poetry/Catullus-1969.php (accessed 26.3.2008). 55 For a recent summary of the question see Skinner (2007a). 56 Cf. Balmer (2004a) 26–7. 53

14

Stephen Harrison

life. Catullus has also been strikingly popular in the poetry of New Zealand, ranging from the liberated and bohemian 1960s versions of James K. Baxter through the witty transpositions of C. K. Stead to Anna Jackson’s recent and splendid catullus for children. 57 A strong tendency in the modern translation and reception of Greek and Roman poetry is the exercise and recovery of women’s voices. Here again Josephine Balmer has been an important figure with her Sappho: Poems and Fragments (1992) and her Classical Women Poets (1996), which present versions of the few poems by women known from the ancient world; Sappho has also been translated with Greek text and notes by Anne Carson in If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002), and continues to be a focus of feminist reception, 58 though male poets use her too: both Michael Longley and Robert Crawford have done versions of the famous fragment 104a on the evening star, as they discuss in their chapters in this volume. There is an even greater paucity of surviving Latin female poets from the classical period; 59 the resulting prominence of Sulpicia, the only female poet surviving from the great period of the first century bc, has led not only to intense modern scholarly scrutiny of her brief surviving poems 60 but also to a significant recent version of them by John Heath-Stubbs (2000). Modern poetic female responses to Greek and Roman texts in fact constitute a key part of this volume: Anna Jackson looks at her own striking transposition of Catullus’ vers de société to the children’s playground; Anastasia Bakogianni considers the extensive use of the tragic figure of Electra by Sylvia Plath; Edith Hall analyses Anne Carson’s extraordinary verse novel loosely based on Stesichorus’ story of Geryon, Autobiography of Red; Rowena Fowler examines the close concern of women poets with the Aeneid; and Isobel Hurst discusses the tensions between domesticity and the career of poetry for American women writing on classical subjects. The emergence of women to centre stage as both writers and critics, and their recovery and revoicing of their occluded 57 The first two of these are discussed in my own chapter in this volume, the last by Anna Jackson herself in her chapter. 58 See e.g. Greene (1996), Snyder (1997) and Reynolds (2001; 2003). 59 Though Jane Stevenson reminds us that there were more than we thought with much quality output: see Stevenson (2006). 60 For a splendid account of the reception history of Sulpicia see Skoie (2002).

Introduction: The Return of Classics

15

historic sisters, is a welcome feature of this volume which matches the parameters of modern Western culture. Contemporary poets now turn to ancient material not so much in a spirit of homage as in a spirit of appropriation. The modern ‘deconsecration’ of great poetic figures such as Homer and Virgil, in the sense of removing their cultural centrality as canonical and immutable texts generally known and read in their original languages, allows contemporary poets such as Derek Walcott or Seamus Heaney to create new classic works using classical material and a sophisticated intertextual approach, just as Virgil and Horace created great Latin works through the substantial and subtle reuse of Greek models in a Roman context. Poets can now safely appropriate what they need for their own work and their own contemporary concerns. This framework can be linked with a key idea in modern reception studies, that the meaning of a work of literature is realized at least partly at the point of reception: 61 such reception can be simply reading the original text in a modern context, or reading it into a modern context through literary refashioning. After two millennia the classic texts of Greece and Rome cannot in any case be read unmediated: we are all children of our own time, with the accumulated cultural and literary assumptions of our era, and the remaking of ancient literary texts by contemporary poets is merely a particularly creative form of this continual reprocessing of the ancient through the modern. What this volume celebrates is the continuing life of classical literary texts, indeed their revival and renaissance in poetry in English (and in the case of Robert Crawford, some Scots) in the last halfcentury or so. The texts engaged with range from Homer to the masterpieces of Scottish Neo-Latin; 62 the means of engagement can be as broad as common themes and concerns or as focused as the kind of echoing of classical languages dealt with by Lorna Hardwick in her chapter in this book. Also marked here is the interaction between scholars and poets. This is not only a matter of advice on the contents of the original texts to poets without classical languages, though that 61 For the debate on this point see the essays in Martindale and Thomas (2006), Hardwick and Stray (2007) and Martindale (2007). 62 For these see Robert Crawford’s chapter in this volume.

16

Stephen Harrison

is an important scholarly function in the modern era; 63 it is notable how several of the poets in this volume themselves have considerable linguistic competence in Latin and Greek (Josephine Balmer, Michael Longley, and Tony Harrison would certainly fall into that category). In an era when poets often work in universities or have close university contacts, 64 the traffic is not just one-way: modern poetic receptions, like modern critical treatments, can be genuinely illuminating about key features of the ancient target texts, and this is one of the paybacks for the many classical scholars who now engage in the study of these contemporary works. Likewise, poetic versions of classical texts are a steady feature of classical reception journals such as Arion as well as of more poetic and literary journals such as Translation and Literature and Modern Poetry in Translation. 65 As envisaged here, the study of the reception of classical texts in modern poetry encompasses both the ‘push’ exercised across time by the original text and its culture and the ‘pull’ by which the ancient source is appropriated for the receiving modern text and culture. 66 To turn in conclusion to the poets themselves, it is thus possible to concur both with Tony Harrison’s forceful statement of the vivacity of the power of ancient texts in the modern world, ‘From long ago the Gorgon’s gaze | stares through time into our days’ and with T. S. Eliot’s view that ‘The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.’ 67 63 E.g. the literal translation by the Glasgow classicist Ian Ruffell of Euripides’ Bacchae used for David Greig’s hit version of the play at the 2007 Edinburgh Festival— see David Greig, ‘Lord of the Dance’, The Guardian, 8.9.2007. 64 For this connection and its effect on poetry see Crawford (2001). 65 See http://www.bu.edu/arion, http://www.eupjournals.com/loi/tal and http:// www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/respectively for details (accessed 5/6/2008). 66 For this convenient formulation see Goff (2005) 12–14. 67 From the poem ‘The Gaze of the Gorgon’ (1992), and the essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) respectively.

Part I Poets and Practice

This page intentionally left blank

1 Horace on Teesside Maureen Almond

The poems I present here are from my collection, The Works (Almond 2004) which is the story of one community in working-class Teesside set against the backdrop of the end of the Second World War. Of the fifty-two poems in the collection, seventeen are recontextualizations of the Epodes of Horace. I was introduced to the work of Horace in 2003, while reading my Ovidian poems from Oyster Baby (Almond 2002) at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. It was an opportune time because I was looking for a theme for my next collection. Over the years, I had written several poems which were largely autobiographical, but I had resisted pursuing these on the basis that I should perhaps be moving away from the autobiographical and on to poems which I could regard as more creative. Tentatively and with Professor Stephen Harrison’s scholarly advice, I started engaging with Horace’s Epodes (in David West’s translation 1 ). The more I read these poems the more I felt they were, as Professor Harrison puts it, ‘a kind of concealed autobiography for Horace—what I did in the 30s bc’. 2 It was very liberating and I realized that what I regarded as personal did nevertheless contain universal experiences. The Epodes, with their worldly wisdom and gritty mix of characters, resembled for me a world I recognized from my childhood. I began seeing in characters such as Maecenas, Horace’s patron, people 1

West (1997).

2

E-mail to author, 14/7/2003.

20

Maureen Almond

like my Mrs L. who was regarded as a kind of community leader, someone to look up to, part and yet not a part of us. Alfius, the money-lender with no money worries, telling others how lucky they are (Epode 2, Beatus ille) reminded me of the rent man who owned the house in which I was raised. At this early stage I was still not convinced that I could recontextualize all seventeen Epodes, but at least I had given myself the necessary permission to investigate the possibility. I wanted the poems to be more than a nostalgic walk through the past, to act as a tribute to the characters and community that helped form me. By now I was wallowing in that world, remembering feelings, people, smells, noises, friendships, and conflict. I had great fun creating modern curse poems, substituting pigs’ trotters for example, for Horace’s garlic in ‘Grown Up Girls Below the Railway’ (discussed below). Slowly but surely during the writing, other characters began to emerge. Some, like Billy, who throughout the collection carries the mantle of helpless fatalist, are based on several characters rolled into one. The collection became a mix of true memory and creative thought. By the time I came to look at Epode 13, Horrida tempestas, which predicts the death of Achilles, I felt creative enough to equate this prophecy of the death of an individual with the death of an industry and a whole community. The Works then is a narrative. It chronicles the demise of Head Wrightson’s Iron Foundry in Thornaby on Teesside and the surrounding community. In a way, just as Horace’s Epodes explained who he was and where he came from, so too these poems explain who I am and where I came from. But more than that, these are experiences with which many people can identify. The lives of several characters are followed throughout the book: for example, we witness the lives of children through the eyes of ‘The Girls’ and watch them grow up through several poems. I have already mentioned Billy, the trade union leader who takes on the Horace mantle, but we also meet his long-suffering wife Aggie and Billy’s mistress, The Chapel Street Bike, along with Billy’s foil, Martin, who supported the idea of the Second World War, and of course Mrs L., Maecenas’ equivalent, and a rent-man in the role of Alfius from Epode 2. For me, the wonder of Horace is that his recurring themes remain as relevant today as ever. His wisdom is irresistible, which is why I am

Horace on Teesside

21

now setting the first book of his Odes in another world familiar to me, that of contemporary poetry. Horace says, ‘Take a subject, ye writers, equal to your strength’ (Ars Poetica 38–9). 3 This is what I try to do when working with Horace’s texts, for ‘why should I be grudged the right of adding, if I can, my little fund’ (Ars Poetica 55–6). 4 I believe that by attempting to capture the ‘soul’ of an ancient text rather than its literal translation, we can sometimes reach a deeper understanding both of that ancient world and of the parallel world of our own time.

MRS L. (AFTER HORACE EPODE 1, IBIS LIBURNIS) Shopkeeper, posh in pearls you ride in plush, hired charas among your customers, poor as church mice. Armed with a quip for the driver, you take the mike, give your instructions. What would we do without you? we’d not leave the street. You take over, and you make us forget the cheaper cuts of meat; the rent we haven’t paid; (when we’ve saved enough to cover our separate days), then we go along with your suggestions to learn about the world. We head out. Across Victoria Bridge and the inescapable railway line. To the crumbling cliffs of Scarborough’s furthest bay; without a care, we follow you. You wonder why somebody as reserved as us should want to join you on your trip Truth is, we’re better being taken for a ride, because if we stay at home we’ll worry that tongues will wag and jibe or gossip about who we think we are. They can’t whisper if we’re with them! So yes, we’ll gladly join you on the coach to fill the empty space. 3

Translation by Fairclough (2005) 453.

4

Ibid. 455.

22

Maureen Almond Don’t load any extra brown ale just for us, although we’ll probably be ready for a drink by the time we hit the moor road into Whitby. We don’t want to impose on you; we’ll bring our own. We won’t make pigs of ourselves. Your ingenuity has given us enough— We won’t take the experience and bury it at the back of our minds or treat it like just another day.

Commentary In the original, Maecenas, Horace’s patron, is making preparations for the Battle of Actium. Philip Hills describes the poem as starting with a ‘bon voyage . . . Maecenas has shown his concern for Horace by ordering him to stay behind. Horace, however, has other ideas’. 5 There is no great dramatic backdrop in my version. Mrs L. is about to set out on a chara (coach) trip and the narrator and her family have not been included. Her concern for the narrator, (an ‘incomer’) is somewhat more ironic than in the original. In the original Epode, Horace, having found out he’s not included, asks, ‘And what are we to do, since life is sweet for us | if you survive, and bitter if you die?’ 6 So too the narrator in ‘Mrs L’ having first praised her asks, ‘What would we do without you?’ Horace feels that it is better to go on the journey and face danger than be left behind, ‘I will be less afraid if I am at your side’. 7 In my version the narrator fears being gossiped about in her absence, and again there is an added touch of irony, not present in Horace, where the narrator makes a double play on words, ‘Truth is, we’re better being taken for a ride’. As in the original, the narrator seeks no immediate reward or recognition, ‘Don’t load any extra brown ale | just for us’, she says. Horace ends with a note of thanks and acknowledgement for past favours, ‘Your kindness has already given me enough and more’ 8 . 5 7

6 Hills (2005) 29. West (1997) 3. 8 Translation from West (1997) 3. Ibid. 4.

Horace on Teesside

23

Mrs L. is similarly acknowledged for providing relief in a tedious world of work and helping the community to ‘learn about the world’.

TRAFALGAR STREET MEN (AFTER HORACE EPODE 2, BEATUS ILLE) ‘It’s a lucky man who can follow his dad into the works, tread in his footsteps, use his know-how and not get into debt. Why would you need an education or little bits of paper? You won’t be buying and selling shares or knocking at Number Ten. No, you’ll be hammering at white-hot ingots welding them to each other dirtying your hands; doing something useful making the sparks fly, or you’ll shovel the crackling, curled filings to decorate fences, or store them for another blast, or sweep them into heaps. When the final buzzer of the week sounds, anointed with your sweat, you’ll clasp your pay packet; the fruit of your graft, rip the top off and pocket the small change. You will be king of the bar, ruler of the snug. In The Burton, or in The Commercial, your homage to the bitter god will know no bounds. You’ll love leaning your elbows on the smooth, hard wood; resting hob-nails on the kick-rail, watching while pumps keep the amber liquid flowing and cares start drowning in the foam and worries pop like bubbles on your lips and every swallow means a deeper sleep.

24

Maureen Almond When the low siren of Monday’s six-till-two calls workers back again, with a billy-can hanging from your side, you’ll march off towards the furnace, or run, so you won’t be quarter-houred; earning every halfpenny. You’ll pull your oily cap down over your eyes and clock on—save your pay. In the middle of such manly pleasures, you’ll forget your problem love life. But if you find a nice girl, get married have a couple of kids, settle down, someone like your Mam to look after you, a lass who’s not afraid of hard work, she’ll put a nice little home together, have your meals ready on the table, there’ll always be a clean starched shirt for you and the cupboard will be full. There’ll be a bottle of brown ale waiting, maybe a little rabbit pie. I’ll tell you this, if I had going what you’ve got, I wouldn’t bother with the fancy food even if it was handed to me on a plate, offered completely free of charge. Nothing complicated, exotic or foreign flavoured would pass across my lips, or taste as fine as good old fish and chips from Tubby Turnbull’s chippy or twopenny ducks from Metcalfe’s butcher’s shop or thickened, home-made chicken broth, pearled with barley or pigeon freshly trapped and wrapped in brown paper or ham bones from Bob Bartley’s. What a fabulous spread all that would be for me. How good to see your children thrive, your wives, up to their elbows in the flour bowl counting out the fadgies while little ones buzz round them waiting for ‘tasters’ straight from the oven.’

Horace on Teesside

25

When landlords said all this to Trafalgar Street men, pretending, trying always to be one of them, they’d call in all their dues; the arrears, and on the first of the following month put the rents up.

Commentary Reading Beatus ille for the first time I was ‘surprised by the undercutting revelation of the speaker’ 9 and this revelation urged me to ‘go back over the preceding sixty-five lines to look for the subtle clues which hint at the distance between speaker and the subject-matter’. 10 In the early 1950s in industrial Teesside few people owned their own homes. The rent man was both feared and respected. I equate Alfius the money-lender with the rent-man figure of my childhood. We knew as we watched him stash his money and listened to him telling us how he struggled to get his rent from people that he did not really inhabit our world. Our rent-man often admired my mother’s cooking, and told my father, (who regularly worked an eighteen hour day), how lucky he was! I replace Horace’s ‘like men of old still works | his father’s fields with his own oxen’ 11 with the idea that sons inherited their role in life from their fathers. This ‘inheritance’ was all fathers had to give, but at least it had a kind of certainty. The ‘Forum’ he avoids and ‘lofty doors | of powerful citizens’ 12 becomes 10 Downing Street in my version. As West points out in his explanatory notes, ‘Imposing doorways were a mark of wealth and importance, and clients paying daily respects to patrons would be well aware of them.’ 13 The characters in the world of The Works were similarly aware but would not be expected to know what life was like beyond those doors. Subconsciously we paid our dues to ‘Terminus; the God of Boundaries.’ 14 9 13

Hills (2005) 32 Ibid. 132.

10 14

Ibid.

Ibid.

11

West (1997) 4.

12

Ibid.

26

Maureen Almond GROWN-UP GIRLS BELOW THE RAILWAY (AFTER HORACE EPODE 3, PARENTIS OLIM) I’ve just heard of the best curse for those who don’t respect their dads, or give them cheek, let them eat pigs’ trotters, they taste like poison. Foundry-men must have strong guts because if I eat them they make me heave. I tell you, these trotters covered in dripping, should be in a cauldron, or else thrown to the dogs. You remember that night when the two-till-tens knocked off, and Aggie, an eye on her Billy, met him in the snug, gave him a pigs-trotter hug, made him stink from head to foot, then as she left to turn their bed down, caressed his shoulders, clasped her hands round the back of Billy’s neck? The whole of that snug smelled to high heaven, and poor Billy with it. You smell like Stockton Abattoir, Bill lad, was what all his mates said. Now Anne, if you get any ideas about my bloke, don’t be surprised if the next day, when you go to get your best dress from the wardrobe, it smells like the essence of pig.

Commentary Horace’s third Epode, ‘utilises the traditional iambic motif of the curse’. 15 The poem ‘dramatises an attack of indigestion suffered by Horace after eating a dish over-liberally seasoned with garlic at the house of Maecenas’. 16 By replacing Medea’s poison for garlic ‘The sheer force and gusto of Archilochean invective has thus been replaced by witty parody, firmly set once again in Horace’s own sociocultural context’. 17 Similarly, I replace Horace’s garlic with pigs’ 15

Watson (2007) 100.

16

Ibid.

17

Harrison (2001a) 175.

Horace on Teesside

27

trotters to produce a witty parody and in an attempt to capture my own sociocultural context. Pigs’ trotters when boiled up (giving off a pungent smell) formed the basis of stews; their meat scraped off and served with potato and other vegetables provided a cheap meal. ‘Horace’s riposte to his “poisoning” is to invoke upon Maecenas a minor sexual rebuff ’: 18 the poet says, ‘I do pray | your lover may put up her hand against your kiss | and lie far from you on the bed.’ 19 In my version the curse that her best dress should smell ‘like the essence of pig’ is invoked against Anne. The curse in Parentis olim is ‘remarkable for its toothlessness’, 20 and so here too; for how would the narrator gain access to Anne’s wardrobe in order to implant there the ‘essence of pig’?

KENNY’S CAPTURE (AFTER HORACE EPODE 5, AT, O DEORUM) ‘Oh God let me go! Please let me go it wasn’t me, honest. Whatever it is, it can’t be me you want so just you get off me right now. I swear on my mother’s life and on my brother’s, that I never laid a finger on your precious pal. In fact, I swear on the new school blazer I got last week, and on our cat’s life and on the Bible. Don’t stare at me with those beady eyes, our Sheila, like you were a mad dog.’ Kenny was getting hysterical in Sheila’s iron grip. Over and over he begged his older cousin to let him go. But Sheila was having none of it; she had the bit between her teeth. Maureen was her best friend. Kenny would have to squirm; 18 20

Watson (2007) 100. Watson (1995) 198.

19

Translation from West (1997) 6.

28

Maureen Almond a thump would be too good for him. This little episode was every cousin’s dream come true, something to blackmail him with for ages, something to tell Auntie Nellie later if he didn’t share his candies, or better still, hand over every one, in honour of the girls’ sweet friendship. But Maureen was circling the two of them, sprinkling encouragement over Sheila’s resolve. She looked like some wild half-breed bitch, or like a snapping terrier. Without a second thought, little Anne scooped mud in fistfuls from the common, threatening to cover him head to foot and leave him out to dry, said she’d check on him morning, noon and night, so he’d better just lie and take his medicine like a man while the Trafalgar Street girls met in Maureen’s yard and decided what to do with him. His pissing trick could not go unpunished. Excited they dangled a Bounty before him not letting him have even the smallest taste. And Barbara was there from Britannia Street, she knew all about lads, well that’s what everyone in Trafalgar Street said, and below the railway. Barbara could twist any boy around her little finger then make him look stupid. Sheila now, her teeth thoroughly on edge and chewing at her nails, what did she have to say? What didn’t she? ‘Anne, Maureen, Barbara, friends forever, hell’s fire, and you, Mary, of the crackling coal when the flames throw boy-shadows on your wall, come from your Prince Street scullery and cast a spell on my dirty little cousin Kenny, while curled up on your fender the black cats rest and stretch and sharpen their claws,

Horace on Teesside let The Rocket lasses bawl and the lads make fun of the one who dumped me, he still has the smell of my Coty— he’s definitely a sight for sore eyes. But hang on, it’s no good rubbing him with trotters, dad said it didn’t work when Aggie smeared Billy’s neck in The Commercial to scare his fancy-woman, instead, she bragged it was the smell of love— hung onto Billy ’til he lost his job. I won’t give up, I’ll root out all I know of our Kenny, tell his secrets. It’s his fault Dave and me broke up; he told him I was thick, no girl will have him by the time we’re done. I might not be able to get Dave back again now that he’s in the tight clutches of Patricia, but Dave, I’ll tell you this, I’ll get the last laugh yet, not by changing my perfume or lipstick— that won’t get you back. No, you’ll come to your senses, you’ll be more frightened of me than your gang, because I know all your little weaknesses; which bits of you don’t measure up, I can tempt you with that: and I’m sure, rather than risk your laddish reputation, you would turn your world upside down, ask me out again, tell me you love me, as Patricia’s eyes turn to green.’ Now Kenny stopped his pathetic pleading with the wild girls, although he didn’t have a clue what to say, he blurted out his empty threats: ‘You can torture me all you like, two wrongs don’t make a right; what you lot do, won’t change Dave’s mind. I won’t forget what you’ve done in a hurry; you’ll regret this; I can’t forgive you. Yes I’ll promise not to bully again, but I’ll haunt you; hide round corners next time. The threat of my piss will stick in your minds; long-distance attacks are what we lads are good at. Soon we will be joining forces,

29

30

Maureen Almond so let’s see if that turns you on. We’ll get you in the streets, the alleys, the common and when our call-up papers come we’ll go abroad; maybe we’ll have to fight for real; maybe that will satisfy you. But think; who’ll date you if we don’t come back? Our parents will live through that.’

Notes 1. The Rocket and The Commercial were public houses. 2. Coty was a brand of perfume popular with working-class girls in the 1950s.

Commentary Horace’s poem is set in ‘the elaborate and detailed world of lowlife magic’; 21 ‘a coven of witches led by Canidia has kidnapped a boy, whom they intend to starve to death before using his liver and marrow to make a love-charm to use on Varus, Canidia’s unfaithful lover.’ 22 In ‘Kenny’s Capture’ we have not exactly entered the world of magic, but the girls do attempt to exert their own kind of punishment and revenge. Kenny, not as innocent as the Roman boy of the original, asserts that he never ‘laid a finger’ on Maureen, suggesting some sort of sexual aggression, which then turns out to be pissing on her (the same verb in Latin (meiere) can mean ‘ejaculate’, hence the link between sex and urination). The ‘food | forbidden him’ 23 in the original becomes a chocolate Bounty bar. Kenny, Sheila’s cousin, is responsible for the break-up between Sheila and her boyfriend Dave. Intended to match Canidia’s threat to Varus, Sheila (Canidia’s parallel) casts a spell in the name of Mary of the crackling coal (a witch-like old woman who also appears in the collection). 24 Sheila curses her former boyfriend, Dave too, by threatening to let everyone know which bits of him ‘don’t measure up’. In Epode 5 ‘Canidia tries a spell to get Varus to return, which fails. She then returns to her initial gruesome plot and the boy, realizing 21 23 24

22 Harrison (2001a) 176. Hills (2005) 37. Translation from West (1997) 8. See ‘Old Mary’s Fire’ in Almond (2004) 22.

Horace on Teesside

31

that he is finished, issues a curse against the hags; he will haunt them as a ghost ’. 25 Kenny is not ‘finished’ as such, but sacrifice is implied by his reference to national service and he too promises to haunt the girls as a ghost.

BILLY DROWNS HIS SORROWS AFTER THE ’51 GENERAL ELECTION (AFTER HORACE EPODE 7, QUO, QUO, SCELESTI RUITIS?) Well, I tell you what, Neville Chamberlain was right. What was the point, we were at peace? There were enough of our lads killed in the first bloody lot (my own dad included), without any of us having to risk our necks. And what have we got out of it? I’ll tell you what we’ve got, bloody rationing, that’s what! A job for life my arse! We’re being starved by our own Government, still, what can we expect now Winston’s back? Bet the Germans are laughing their caps off at us. Even wild dogs protect their own; but not us British—we do for ourselves— the little man counts for nowt here. Don’t know why you all look so shocked, you know it’s true. Come on tell me, what’s Churchill done for you? four of you here have lost younger brothers. Someone needs to knock the bloody Bulldog’s teeth out before our kids end up in the same mess.

Commentary Hills suggests that Epodes 7 and 16 attack the ‘internecine feuding [which] pursues the Romans like an ancestral curse’. 26 Humanity in 25

Hills (2005) 37.

26

Ibid. 26–7.

32

Maureen Almond

general, it seems to me, never learns from its experiences of war. This realization leads to feelings of total despair and impotency. ‘Epode 7 elicits only despair and fatalism from its audience, apparently resigned to national disaster.’ 27 I try to avoid specific blame, and draw attention through Billy’s anti-war stance, to the notion that yet again our nation is too ready to go to war. This stance maintains Billy as an impotent figure, powerless in terms of effecting any change. The Second World War is the backdrop for this collection, but writing these poems at the time of our conflict with Iraq, it seems the sentiments expressed by Horace are as compelling today as ever they were. I hope that readers will pick up the intended irony contained within the last line, ‘before our kids end up in the same mess’ which points to the present and the future making us realize that our ‘kids’ have ended up precisely ‘in the same mess’. ‘Why this mad rush to join a wicked war?’ 28 Why indeed!

BILLY PUTS HIS CARDS ON THE TABLE (AFTER HORACE EPODE 8, ROGARE LONGO) Do you really have no idea, you silly tart, why I don’t fancy you? With your big tombstone teeth and your man’s voice, and furrows in your forehead so deep, I could plant leeks; and your hands stinking of trotters. Your arse is like a house-end and your jugs are all but down to your knees; honestly, I’ve seen neater cows. The last time I saw legs like yours, they were dangling from a nest. Never you mind though—God bless you, Aggie. I’ll see that you get a damn good send off, one that you would have been very proud of, decked in your Sunday best. 27 28

Harrison (2001a) 178. Translation from West (1997) 11.

Horace on Teesside

33

But tell me pet, what’s with all this reading by the fire at night? Book-learning does nothing in my trouser region; in fact, it’s a proper turn-off. So, if it’s action you want, there’s nothing for it but to take me in hand again.

Commentary ‘In the Epodes, Horace to an even greater extent than has been recognised represents himself as feckless, weak, and incompetent’. 29 In my versions of the Epodes I give Billy the mantle of helpless fatalist. His are the eyes through which we see the demise of Head Wrightson’s iron foundry and the surrounding community. As well as being a ‘sexually-orientated invective against an ageing woman’, 30 this poem represents other areas of helplessness, but unlike in the original, the person being attacked in my version is not anonymous; the subject of Billy’s attack is his long-suffering wife Aggie. Hills describes the eighth Epode as ‘the most infamous poem of the collection’, one in which ‘Horace responds to an ageing hetaera (‘courtesan’), who has apparently criticised him for lacking virility. His reply, which makes up the whole (brief) poem, is a ruthless dissection of the crone’s foul and decaying form’. 31 In my version Billy blames Aggie’s declining appearance for his own impotence. I maintain the animal imagery by reference to cows and birds. As in Horace, my narrator’s ‘thoughts then turn to her imminent funeral’ 32 (though not quite so imminent in my version). The unexpected, final turn comes with ‘Book-learning does nothing in my trouser region’, 33 as if the Aggie character would ever be into book-learning! The final phrase in the original, ‘If that is what you want from my fastidious groin, | your mouth has got some work to do’, 34 is replaced by the suggestion that Aggie get to work on him with her hands: ‘So, if it’s action you want, there’s nothing for it | but to take me in hand again.’ 29 31 34

30 Watson (1995) 201–2. Harrison (2001a) 178. 32 33 Hills (2005) 33. Ibid. See Almond (2004) 47. Translation from West (1997) 12.

34

Maureen Almond MARTIN AND MRS L. SHARE A GILL (AFTER HORACE EPODE 9, QUANDO REPOSTUM) When are people going to appreciate what Winston’s done, give toasts and stop moaning about rations? Will you join me, Mrs L.? What’s your favourite tipple, best sweet sherry is it? You’ll play won’t you; tinkle the ivories, but none of that slushy Mantovani stuff? It’s not all that long ago we gave Mussolini our bit of Jubaland and then what the hell does he do? Goes off and snuggles up with Germany and has the cheek to stand against us! We could all have been into Nazi tart by now; Adolf ’s Braun, instead of our brawn. We’d have ended up doing poncey exercises out in the fresh air. We’d not be sitting in here that’s for sure— drinking a pint of Newcastle. I tell you, if it hadn’t been for old Winnie we’d all be drinking vino, and tucking into spaghetti, and wearing black shirts, and kissing both cheeks; either that or sporting German jackboots. Rule Britannia—we’ll take anybody on eh? The bulldog won’t lie down. Rule Britannia—three cheers for Kitchener and Gallipoli and those who died in the first lot— as Lloyd George said, we squeezed the lemon ’til the pips squeaked, then thanks to Winnie, we’ve done it all again, by fighting them on the beaches in the fields, the streets and the hills. They just had to go with their tails between their legs when the Americans joined in. They say that Adolf shot his bloody self in a bunker; couldn’t surrender in person! Come on, drink up Mrs L. don’t listen to Billy’s whining; you’d think we lost to hear him talk. We should celebrate the peace we died for. Come on, let’s have a hair of the dog.

Horace on Teesside

35

Commentary In the original, following the battle of Actium, Horace and Maecenas ‘have just heard of the flight of Anthony and Cleopatra’. 35 Horace is asking Maecenas ‘When shall I celebrate great Caesar’s victory and drink | the Caecuban laid down for sacred feasts’. 36 My version is set in the Burton Public House, the war referred to is World War II and Martin wants to celebrate. Winston Churchill is cast as Augustus, Mussolini as Sextus Pompey, Hitler as Anthony and Eva Braun as Cleopatra. The racist abuse reflects the anti-Egyptian material about eunuchs in the original, ‘carrying arms and stakes for her, and at the beck and call | of wrinkled eunuchs’. 37 The scenario represented here by Mussolini, who was arrested while Italy attempted to change sides, reflects the Galli in the original, who came on ‘their snorting mounts to join with us’ 38 and are ‘Galatians from Asia Minor who came over to Octavian’s side just before the battle’. 39 Martin, is pro-war, despite there being no evidence he fought himself. He is a foil for Billy who throughout the collection, takes on Horace’s impotent and ineffectual mantle. Many of the Epodes ‘end with inadvertent declarations of weakness on the part of the speaker, or with the undercutting of his/her persona’. 40 The plea for more wine, ‘Bring more capacious goblets, boy, | and Chian wine and Lesbian, | or dose us with the Caecuban’ 41 is echoed by Martin, ‘Come on, let’s have a hair of the dog’. 42

THE CHAPEL STREET BIKE MAKES A SCENE (AFTER HORACE EPODE 12, QUID TIBI VIS) ‘What the hell do you want? Get back round to your own end. I don’t know why you’re here standing me pints, I have nothing for you; I’m no Rockaby donkey. Just take a look at yourself; you’re past it. You, with your peroxide hair and your cheap bloody scent; go on; go and pester the big fellas.’ 35 39 41

36 37 West (1997) 135. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 40 Ibid. 136. Watson (1995) 199. 42 See West (1997) 13. See Almond (2004) 45.

38

Ibid.

36

Maureen Almond Honestly, the state of that tart; she gets worse; old man won’t stand up for my Aggie now, so he won’t do for her. She’s always plastered with make-up; but she’ll need a lot more than Ponds to fill the cracks in her face; leaving her greasy stains all over the pillows, then moaning on at me later because I complain. ‘You’d no problems getting it up for her in Princess Street; three-times-a-night-man you were with that slut by all accounts; I can’t even get a one-off knee-trembler from you now. Bugger old Florrie; that madam sold me a right pup in you! And to think, I could have had Harry Chambers. Now his John Thomas was a sight for sore eyes, it was up every morning before he was! Why do you think I make all this effort to look nice; take the trouble to get my hair shampooed and set; wear my tightest skirt, my frilly blouse, seamed stockings? It’s for you, so your pals know I love you. To hear you, you’d think I was going to eat you alive. I’m miserable since you stopped our hot afternoons.’

Notes 1. The Rockaby was a public house. 2. Ponds was a popular face cream in the 1950s.

Commentary This Epode is ‘a conversation between man and woman in a sexual context, mentioning another woman as a candidate for the man’s favours’. 43 The opening allusion to bestiality, ‘It’s black elephants you should mate with!’ 44 is alluded to by the idea of ‘Rockaby donkeys’, well-endowed regulars who frequent the Rockaby public house. Billy, by contrast, is ‘no Rockaby donkey’. The implication is that the (wellridden) Chapel Street Bike is suitable only for large-size action, just as in Horace, the hag is directed to black elephants as more suitable mates. 43

Harrison (2001a) 179.

44

Translation from West (1997) 15.

Horace on Teesside

37

Horace describes how repulsive he finds the woman, ‘But I can sniff the polyp in your nose | or stinking billy in your hairy armpits. | The sweat and nasty smell get worse all over | her wrinkled body, as my penis droops.’ 45 The result of Billy’s repulsion is that his ‘old man won’t stand up’. ‘The hag is not simply propositioning the poet.’ 46 In my version the two also have a past, though as in the original, the first part of the poem is a denial of that. Billy is not only impotent at work and with his wife Aggie but also failing to satisfy his mistress. The third party, whom the hag attacks, is replaced by ‘Her in Princess Street’ and the madam (Lesbia) by old Florrie. Neatly ‘reversing the normal situation where the male is the predator and the female the prey’, 47 the Chapel Street Bike compares Billy with another lover, Harry Chambers, ‘Now his John Thomas was a sight for sore eyes, | it was up every morning before he was!’.

BILLY CALLS A UNION MEETING AT THE BURTON (AFTER HORACE, EPODE 13, HORRIDA TEMPESTAS) Listen up now lads, there’s a storm brewing, the rain clouds are gathering over our heads as I speak, rumours are rife, the bosses are in little huddles, nothing for it but to get another round in and try to drown our sorrows while we can still afford it. Short time’s on the cards, it’s up to God and Providence to get us out of this mess, so drink up. Come on then, who’ll give us a tune on the old Joanna, help to cheer us all up a bit? I know he’s a Job’s Comforter, but according to Martin, apprenticeships don’t count, we’re about to be fed to the lions; now’s the time we’ll be wishing we’d stuck in at school and got some decent qualifications for ourselves; everyone here is listed for severance, our weak spot is not having the right bits of paper, we’re virtually unemployable by anyone else. Cheers lads, tilt your glasses, it numbs the pain. 45

Ibid.

46

Watson (1995) 192.

47

Hills (2005) 34.

38

Maureen Almond

Commentary In the original Epode mythology and the weather are used to express particular themes: the narrator is predicting rough times ahead— ‘This fearsome storm has shrunk the sky, and rain | and snow bring Jupiter himself down on our heads.’ 48 In my version Billy, in similar mood, foresees rough times ahead. What Billy is trying to tell his workmates is that Head Wrightson’s iron foundry is at risk of closure. He recognizes that the men are not qualified to do anything else. As in the original where there is acknowledgement of things being in the lap of the gods, ‘Forget the rest; God will perhaps put all to rights again’. 49 Billy advises his colleagues, ‘it’s up to God and Providence | to get us out of this mess’. Here it is not Achilles’ death at Troy being prophesied, but that of the iron foundry and community life. ‘Be sure to lighten all your ills with wine and song, | sweet comforts for the ugliness of pain’, 50 says Horace. This ‘lyric exhortation to wine and song as a palliative for suffering’ 51 is repeated in my version. Billy cannot of course, call for ‘my Torquatus’ 52 (wine from the year of his birth), and has to make do with beer, but the message is the same; things are getting rough, maybe they need to drown their sorrows.

BILLY TALKS OF LOVE (AFTER HORACE EPODE 14, MOLLIS INERTIA) Beats me; I seem to be as soft as muck lately; some bloody union man who can’t win a rise! I try, but you don’t help, with your nagging; telling me how they’ve nothing to spend in your shop. I must be in love, Mrs L. You’d know about that; but guess who I
m stuck on? bloody Chapel Street tart! 48 51

49 50 Translation from West (1997) 16. Ibid. Ibid. 52 Harrison (2001a) 182. Translation from West (1997) 137.

Horace on Teesside

39

Despite trying to give her the elbow I can’t get her off my mind; reading my Aggie’s slushy love books—Me! of all people. No wonder I can’t concentrate on upping their wages; too busy writing soppy notes. Never quite saw myself as a soft-arsed poet. She’s made me lose the plot completely.

Commentary Horace is ‘tortured with love for Phryne’ 53 and the ‘poet’s professed infatuation with her is offered as an excuse to Maecenas for his inability to complete the Epodes’. 54 ‘It is the god, the god, I say, | forbids me reach the roller of these epodes.’ 55 In my version, the narrator is a union man. The idea of being diverted from finishing a project is key here. Billy is unable to concentrate his efforts into upping wages, because he is distracted. He finds himself made soft and ineffective by his love for the ‘bloody Chapel Street tart’ (see ‘The Chapel Street Bike Makes a Scene’ above): ‘some bloody union man who can’t win a rise!’ The double entendre suggested by ‘rise’ is deliberate and is meant to refer the reader back to Billy’s other shortcoming. Horace ‘contrasts his situation unfavourably with that of Maecenas, who is enamoured of an unnamed beauty’. 56 Similarly, Billy bows to Mrs L’s knowledge of being in love, acknowledging that Mrs L’s was a better love whilst he is in love with a ‘tart’. This reflects Horace’s Phryne which is a slave/prostitute name. Maecenas is pressing Horace to finish his current poetry book. In my version Mrs L exercises pressure on Billy by nagging him about the men not spending enough in her shop. In other words, he should get on with his trade union business.

53 55

54 Watson (1995) 194. Hills (2005) 36. 56 Translation from West (1997) 17. Watson (1995) 194.

40

Maureen Almond AGGIE SPEAKS OUT (AFTER HORACE EPODE 15, NOX ERAT ET CAELO) When I think of our first doorstep fumblings on that moonlit Burton night; why did you promise your undying love if you didn’t mean it? Why say I was the one? You swore down that you’d love me forever and not let anything come between us. We’re made for one another, you said, ignore all the baying women in the Top House, it’s their jealousy whipping up a storm, don’t believe a word, they’re just stirring it. But Billy, I’m a woman and sure as hell, you’ll pay for this. Your ‘little lamb’, your Agnes, has had enough, she will not stand meekly by while you have a fling, she’ll give you a taste of your own medicine. If it’s good enough for you, then it’s good enough for Aggie, she can be tough when she makes up her mind. And you lady, you might have won this time round; go on, laugh while you can. Keep your purse shut so he stands your Guinness and gin and pushes the boat out for you. It’s clear you see yourself as some sort of second Greta Garbo. You’re a good-looking woman, I grant you, but he’ll dump you just like he always does. Last laugh to me!

Notes 1. The Commercial Hotel was referred to locally as ‘The Top House’. 2. The Burton was a public house.

Commentary Epode 15 ‘confronts us with the phenomenon of the toothless iambist’. 57 My speaker is Aggie, Billy’s wife. She is his ‘little lamb’ 57

Ibid.

Horace on Teesside

41

(intended as a name-pun; agnus means lamb, suggesting vulnerability or weakness 58 ). Horace uses the same strategy in relation to his own name, Flaccus, meaning ‘floppy’, when in line 12 he makes ‘a straightforward declaration of weakness: ‘if there is any manliness in “Floppy”’. 59 ‘Horace holds out implicitly to Neaera the threat of divine retribution for breaking her oath of everlasting fidelity to the poet.’ 60 So too in my version, ‘But Billy, I’m a woman and sure as hell, you’ll pay for this.’ We get the distinct impression that this is, as in the original, an empty threat. Horace recalls how ‘the moon | shone out among the lesser stars, | when you first took your solemn oath to me’. 61 Aggie recalls the first time Billy declared his undying love, ‘When I think of our first doorstep fumblings | on that moonlit Burton night’. 62 Not only does this echo the beginning of the original and invite comparison, it also introduces a romantic cliché which was a cliché even in the first century bc (moonlit meeting of lovers). I use the storm-imagery of the original to describe the jealousy of female rivals. Horace’s narrator says to the unfaithful Neaera, ‘your turn will come to weep, /and mine to laugh’. 63 Aggie also ends with a warning, but this time to her female rival, ‘he’ll dump you just like he always does, | Last laugh to me!’

CONCLUDING COMMENTS I hope readers will not see my versions of these Horace Epodes as a painting in which the ‘painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse’ (Ars Poetica 1–2) but as a work both ‘simple and uniform’ (Ars Poetica 23). 64 So why did I not simply write 58 59 61 63 64

Suggested by Stephen Harrison in personal correspondence. 60 Watson (1995) 195. Ibid. 194. 62 Translation from West (1997) 17. See Almond (2004) 50 Translation from West (1997) 18. Translations from Fairclough (2005) 451.

42

Maureen Almond

this collection without any reference to Horace? The answer is that reading Horace helps me to see more clearly those traits which continue to attach to mankind. By recognizing Horace’s characters I can more easily understand characters in my own contemporary world, but I believe, too, that this is a two-way flow: ‘every interpretation teaches us something more about the content of the interpreted expression.’ 65 65

Eco (2004) 12 summarizing the view of C. S. Peirce.

2 Jumping their Bones: Translating, Transgressing, and Creating Josephine Balmer

To classicists, translation can sometimes be a dirty word, if not positively obscene—a crutch for those who cannot read the original. As Peter Green has declared of his own excellent translation of Ovid’s exile poetry: ‘[it] remains in the last resort, a pis aller. Those with the original do not need it.’ 1 Such self-denigration is disappointing but perhaps not surprising. Translators have long been subject to the assumption that their art constitutes ‘a task that does not occur in the realms of thought but between the pages of a dictionary’, 2 and that, as such, it is a secondary activity to other literary tasks. Within classical scholarship there is an additional intellectual hierarchy which ranks textual philology at the top and ‘translation cribs’ at the bottom, overlooking the interpretative revelations that translators, in their close readings of a text, can bring to an ancient work. 3 For where scholarship can be static, translation and reinterpretation is fluid, dynamic, a form of critical necromancy breathing new life into dead works. Yet, as Patricia Moyer notes, ‘classicists have yet to assimilate [such] emphasis on the poet-critic’. 4 1

2 Green (1994) viii. Maier (1980) 25. Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz notes how in 1987 the editorial board of the American Journal of Philology declared that the journal would remain: ‘philological in the sense that it is centred on languages and texts . . . while [it] will always have an interest in certain kinds of literary and philosophical interpretation, the emphasis is still on rigorous scholarly methods [my italics]’ (1993a: 4). 4 Moyer (1997) 109. Although, as contributions to the present volume prove, there is increasing interest in the field (see, also Hardwick 2000), if work often concentrates more on reception than on the issues of classical translation itself. 3

44

Josephine Balmer

Certainly from Chaucer through Golding and Chapman to Dryden, Pope and on to Ted Hughes and Michael Longley, creative expression and classical translation can be seen to have had a close, symbiotic relationship. Such poets’ versions of classical literature have not only enriched their own literary culture but our understanding of the classical world too, throwing us back to the original to look at it again with new insights. In recent times, as this volume explores, there has been an explosion of interest in classical literature from contemporary writers, perhaps, as some translation scholars are beginning to suggest, because its canonical works fill the gap vacated by the Bible for a cultural ‘foundation text’. But the reason might also be in the distinctive nature of classical translation itself, its unique challenges—and rewards.

BROKEN VOICES, LOST WORLDS When a modern-language translator embarks on the task of translating the work of a contemporary writer, they might well also embark on a fruitful and mutually beneficial relationship with that author, finding new ways together of transferring culturally specific references from one text to another; of rendering puns and word-play— one of the hardest things of all to translate—or the tricky resonance of place names and geographical context in a text. 5 For classical translators in the twenty-first century, however, working on long-dead writers more than two millennia later, there is no author to consult, no author to counsel. There is no opportunity to cross swords with Catullus about the exact English equivalence of one of his scurrilous Latin puns or to enter into discussions with Sappho over the resonance of her feminine endings, either in Greek or in English, as Myriam Diaz Diocaretz did with Adrienne Rich when translating Rich’s erotic lesbian poetry for a more machismo Latin American readership (1985: 40). And so, willingly or not, translators become not so much mediators but innovators, taking on works that are not just already well known but already translated, often many, 5

See e.g. Levine (1991).

Translating, Transgressing, and Creating

45

many times over, reimagining them for each successive generation, making them new. In this sense the art of the classical translation is not collaborative but intuitive: the art of absence, the art of silence. This silence can extend to every detail concerning an ancient author’s artistic life, details that one might take for granted when translating a living writer. And there are always more questions than answers. When was Sappho born? When did Catullus die? Why was Ovid sent into exile? Did he go into exile at all? Who was ‘Lesbia’? What was Sappho’s relationship to the women she addresses in her poems? 6 For the more scholars might try to pin down poets such as Sappho or Catullus or even Ovid, the more they disappear into thin air. The problem is not just the meagre biographical information available about a poet’s life, often only surviving from sources written centuries after their deaths, 7 but that the cultural context in which they flourished has also vanished. Not only are classical authors silent but their texts come from a silenced, long-dead world, a world that must be reconstructed in tatters from the rubble. And each generation’s reconstruction can be torn down and rebuilt to a completely different model by the next, often quite literally, witness the continuing debate over male and female quarters in classical Athenian houses—and the thorny issue of women’s ‘seclusion’. 8 Less concrete concerns, such as those surrounding ancient sexuality, are even more problematic, with each new interpretation over the years holding up a mirror to its own culture’s sexual mores rather than those of the past. 9 When Sappho sings ‘I once loved you, Attis, long ago’ (fragment 49 L/P), is it possible for us to understand how 6 As often cited, Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig’s 1979 Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, ‘devotes a full page to Sappho. That page is blank’ (Winkler (1981) 63). Holt Parker has suggested that rather than a blank page, a palimpsest for Sappho would be more appropriate, overwritten by every generation until the words beneath are obscured (1993: 309). 7 The most detailed biographical account for Sappho, for instance, occurs in the Suda, compiled in the 10th cent. ad. 8 Susan Walker points out that, given the bare structures of Athenian housing, very different to the city’s grandiose public spaces, there are many problems in interpreting the evidence where ‘much depends on the secure identification of rooms’ (1983: 91). 9 See e.g. Symonds (1901), Licht (1932), Dover (1978), Halperin (1990), and Skinner (2005).

46

Josephine Balmer

this statement would have been received by its audience, let alone conceived by its author? How, then, can any perception of Sappho the poetic persona be formulated, let alone of Sappho the person, despite the proto-lesbian construct she has since become? And yet, despite such a morass of shifting ground, the first question any translator of Sappho will face—and, indeed, any of their readers might ask—is still the perennial ‘is she or is she not?’ An added complication is the fragmentary survival of Sappho’s poetry: the silence of the text. We can never be sure that the speaker in her poems is ‘Sappho’, that is her own poetic voice, and not that of some other narrative protagonist, whose identity has been long lost along with the complete text. Indeed, the circumstances of the transmission of ancient poetry—whether by tattered papyri, through quoted scraps in other, later writers, or through the copying and recopying of a selected canon—mean that our working texts are often at best unreliable and at worst indecipherable. 10 In addition, of course, ancient lyric comes from an oral, pre-literate tradition; it was meant to be heard, to be sung aloud. Its voice—and its music—are now both lost to us.

BREAKING THE SILENCE: SAPPHO, CORINNA AND CATULLUS In such circumstances, classical translation is not simply about replacing or replicating a text, from one language to another, but recreating it, with the translator of necessity developing a creative relationship with the often incomplete source material. Yet as taxing as the fragmentary nature of ancient Greek lyric might be, it is also one of the most intriguing issues facing its translators, as poets such as HD or Ezra Pound discovered in the 1920s, inspired by the minimalism of Sappho’s then newly-discovered fragments, the reduction of a poem to a single crystalline image. In 10

As Page duBois comments: ‘the fact that Sappho is an aristocrat, dominant, if not “phallic”, may be more significant than the fact that in her discourse the adjectives that modify the “I” in her poetry have feminine endings’ (1995: 155).

Translating, Transgressing, and Creating

47

my own translations of Sappho (Balmer 1992), I wanted to continue in Pound’s Imagist tradition, using free, modernist verse forms that allowed lines to wander across the page like splintered conversations, incomplete declarations of love, echoing the broken nature of the text (see also below on Erinna’s Distaff ). For example: Love shook my heart like the wind on the mountain rushing over the oak trees

Or again: Love makes me tremble yet again sapping all the strength from my limbs; bittersweet, undefeated creature— against you there is no defence 11

If such short fragments required inventive translation strategies, then these were nothing compared to the challenge of even more truncated one or two word ‘poems’, such as ‘you burn us’ (fragment 38 L/P) or ‘as long as you wish’ (fragment 45 L/P). Do you fill in the gaps or let them stand? In my translations of Sappho, I decided on a policy of juxtaposition, grouping small, disparate fragments together in sections under headings such as ‘Desire’ or ‘Despair’, giving them a new resonance for the reader, even if this was, of necessity, ‘a highly subjective task, reliant on individual readings of ambiguous texts’ (Balmer (1996a) 20). Translating the fifth-century Boeotian poet Corinna for Classical Women Poets (ibid.), I went a stage further, knitting stray words together to build up a coherent whole out of a jumble of scraps. Take, for instance, the following six fragments: ‘of us’; ‘of houses’; ‘of myself ’; ‘chairs’; ‘chine-meat’; ‘I spoke’. 12 In my new version, these became parts of a single poem (although I used the standard textual notation of square brackets, dots and asterisks, to signify additions, fragment breaks and ends): 11

Fragment 47 L/P/Balmer (1992) fr. 1; fragment 130 L/P/Balmer (1992) fr. 2. Fragments 179a; 679b; 682; 683; 685; 687 PMG. It should be noted that Corinna’s date is disputed with some commentators placing her in the 3rd cent. bc (see Balmer (1992) fr. 33). 12

48

Josephine Balmer And I spoke . . . ∗ . . . of myself . . . ∗ [and for all] of us. . . . ∗ . . . of our houses . . . ∗ [of] chine meat . . . ∗ . . . and chairs . . . 13

The whole now suggested a hidden, almost subliminal commentary on the concerns of women’s poetry in the ancient world, highlighting its emphasis on women’s private domestic life. Even translating much longer fragments, creative strategies were still required. For example when I was working on Erinna’s Distaff for Classical Women Poets, I was thrown by all the different suggested emendations to the original text, a damaged fifty-four line papyrus fragment excavated from Oxyrhynchus and first published in 1929. The problem here was not so much how to translate but what to translate. 14 The first fifteen lines of the fragment, for example, appear as a string of seemingly unconnected words: Girls . . . brides . . . tortoise . . . moon . . . tortoise . . . leaves . . . into the waves . . . mad feet . . . from white horses . . . Ah, I’m caught, I cried . . . becoming the tortoise . . . yard of the great court . . .

Even after tackling Sappho or Corinna’s one-word fragments, it seemed difficult to know how to make this into a poem, although scholarship on the work, as with all classical translation, provided invaluable pointers. In an essay accompanying his version of the text, Bowra had suggested that the apparently puzzling ‘tortoise’ mentioned in the fragment was a reference to a children’s game rather like ‘What’s the Time, Mr Wolf ?’(ibid. 154). Following a thread of references from article to article, I also learnt much from Marilyn Arthur’s further discussion of the tortoise imagery in the poem, 13 14

401.

Balmer (1992) 44. See Bowra (1936) 151–3; West (1977) 97–100; Lloyd-Jones & Parsons (1983)

Translating, Transgressing, and Creating

49

which deftly illustrated how Greek myth linked it with childhood, virginity, female sexuality, punishment and finally death. 15 Such studies transformed my initial understanding of the piece; rather than an incomprehensible string of lost cultural references, here was a poignant and universal poem about two childhood friends—the games they played, the dreams they shared—and the poet’s adult grief, not only at the untimely death of her former playmate, but for the loss of childhood itself. 16 As I say, such studies gave me a basis for approaching the subject of the fragment. When it came, again, to devising a form for its translation, I noticed how the damaged state of the papyrus fragment reflected the theme of the poem—with one of the last words of the legible Greek section, the verb druptei or ‘tears’. This proved the inspiration for its new form in English; a series of fragmented memories falling across the page, of torn lines, broken conversations and dangling voices, a physical metaphor for the fragmentation of the entire work—originally 300 lines long according to ancient sources: . . . the rising moon . . . . . . falling leaves . . . . . . waves spinning on a mottled shore . . . . . . and those games, Baucis, remember? Two white horses, four frenzied feet—and one Tortoise to your hare: ‘Caught you,’ I cried, ‘You’re Mrs Tortoise now.’ But when your turn came at last to catch the catcher you raced on far beyond us, out from the great shell of our smoke-filled yard . . . . . . Baucis, these tears are your embers and my memorial, traces glowing in my heart, now all that we once shared has turned to ash . . . . . . My lost friend, here is my lament: I can’t bear that dark death-bed, 15 Arthur (1980). Other studies, such as Cameron and Cameron (1969), showed how the poem’s title, often thought to have been wrongly attributed to the poem by ancient sources, echoed these themes, linking women’s domestic tasks, such as spinning, with the ‘spindle of Fate’. 16 Ironically once the poem’s complexities were revealed, some scholars began to question Erinna’s authorship, attributing it instead to an unknown male poet writing in a woman’s persona, for instance West (1977).

50

Josephine Balmer can’t bring myself to step outside my door, won’t look on your stone face, won’t cry or cut my hair for shame but Baucis, this crimson grief is tearing me in two . . . 17

The Distaff provides a clear example of how the world of classical translation and creative writing can overlap; how walking along the one path can very easily lead to the other. As Paz has put it: ‘translation is an act of desire, love. And with love comes the desire for participation.’ 18 With far less damaged—and disputed—texts, the need for participation still remains urgent, as I discovered when I moved on from the fragmented verse of the women poets to the very different, male world of Catullus. Here, with such a well-known—and well-loved— poet, the greatest challenge was to make things new; to respond to the text as a creative stimulus to make it freshly minted again, make it my own. Yet again, previous scholarship can provide not only a useful but an essential springboard for the creative process. Take, for example, Catullus 5, perhaps his best known poem, in which the poet urges his married lover Lesbia to give him kiss after kiss. As T. P. Wiseman notes: ‘Catullus flicks his abacus like an accounts clerk.’ Although John Godwin adds: ‘the repeated number suggest a mathematical sum being aimed at—only to find the poet ending with a deliberate confusing of the figures.’ 19 Like many who approach the poem, I was struck here by the verb conturbare, literally ‘to mix up’ but with a particular economic sense of ‘confounding accounts’ or ‘becoming insolvent or bankrupt’. Such nuances provided a starting-point for my new version: Time to live and let love, Lesbia, count old men’s cant, their carping chatter, cheap talk, not worth one last penny piece. You see, suns can set, can rise again but when our brief light begins to wane night brings on one long unending sleep. So let me have a thousand kisses, 17 19

Balmer (1992) frr. 59–60 (condensed). Wiseman (1985) 139; Godwin (1999) 119.

18

Quoted in Honig (1985) 153.

Translating, Transgressing, and Creating

51

then a hundred, a thousand gratis, a hundred, a thousand, on increase. Then, when we’ve made our first million, we can cook the books, just smudge the sums, so no evil eye can spy, sully, by reckoning up our final tally. 20

Catullus’s poetry is not only passionate but also very funny. Unfortunately, humour can be one of the most treacherous things to translate; its currency goes out of circulation so quickly. 21 So how to approach two thousand-year old jokes? Certainly, translators need to be prepared to take the same risks, the same sort of liberties, as the original. Catullus 32, for instance, in which the poet is trying to arrange an assignation with one Ipsitilla, is packed full of sexual innuendo, much of it culturally specific to ancient Rome, which I was keen to replicate in English, if possible. The poem also contains a Catullan neologism: the mock-learned, polysyllabic verbal noun fututiones, based on the coarse Latin verb futuere. It ends with a sexual pun centred on pransus, originally a military metaphor which meant ‘having breakfasted (or lunched)’ and also, since soldiers march on their stomachs, ‘ready for action’. To translate such jokes in kind, it was necessary to adopt a mimetic rather than a semantic approach, following Paz’s dictum of reproducing the effect by changing the text: 22 Please, please me, dear Ipsitilla, my own sweetness, my so clever, invite me in for siesta and I’ll come—but at your leisure. Don’t block your passage, fold down flaps, slip off out for other pleasures. Hold on, get set, let’s fill the gap: 20

Balmer (2004a) 33. For example, an English joke, dating from the Second World War, tells of a man who rushes into a shop: ‘Quick, my chimney’s on fire! I need some salt!’ ‘Do you want a block?’ asks the attractive and inevitably buxom female assistant. ‘I haven’t got time for that now,’ replies the man, ‘my house is burning down.’ The pun relies on three given pivots: the 1940s slang ‘block’ for having sex, the fact that salt used to be sold in blocks and the use of such blocks of salt in putting out chimney fires. 22 Cf. Honig (1985) 155. 21

52

Josephine Balmer nine full-time, full-on, fuck-fuckings; just say you’re game, just say you will, you see I’ve eaten, had my fill, yet still my lunch-box is bulging. 23

SAYING THE UNSAYABLE: CHASING CATULLUS Here, again, it is clear how classical translation and writing are— and should be—interlinked. For writers, as the poet and translator David Constantine has noted, the craft of translation can have its own rewards; an educational task, helping them not only to perfect their own craft, but also to find their own voice by adopting others. ‘It’s the feeling,’ Simon Armitage comments, ‘that yes, I’ll have some of that.’ Of course, this process also works both ways with translations benefiting from a writer’s craft. 24 This was brought home to me during a particularly dark time in my life. Just as I began working on the Catullus translations, my sister’s young daughter developed terminal stomach cancer at the age of six. During a long period of visits to a children’s cancer ward and later in the black fog of bereavement, I found myself compelled to write about the experience, almost as a form of exorcism. Nevertheless, many of the poems I wrote were somehow connected with my work as a translator; versions—in some cases perversions—of classical texts or mythology, as if I could not write about such deeplyfelt, such disturbing emotions, except through the prism of classical literature. For instance, the poems in the central section of my subsequent collection, Chasing Catullus (Balmer 2004b), form a diary sequence, following, both directly and obliquely, the course of my niece’s illness. Many of these are based on classical texts, especially those describing the most private or difficult events. De Raptu Proserpinae, for 23

Balmer (2004a) 50. Constantine notes how Ronsard, for example, worked on Greek texts ‘the better to knead and manipulate his native French’ (2004) 19. Armitage in conversation with the author (Balmer 1996b). For the relationship between translating and writing see Bassnett and Bush (2006). 24

Translating, Transgressing, and Creating

53

instance, is a fairly faithful version of a short extract from Claudian’s fifth-century ad Latin epic (3.231–44). Self-explanatory, the extract describes the moment Proserpina is abducted by Hades, now remade into a new poem and recontextualized via a new, dated subtitle: (2/8: 6.47 am) Now she came to the hills wound round and round in grass. At first light she picked her flowers: the earth shivered with dew, violets slaked their new-born thirst. But as the Sun advanced on its high noon sky, night fell like a thief and our land trembled to the touch, trampled, dust-blown, under four sets of cloven hooves. Their horseman we didn’t know—harbinger, camp-follower, or even Death Himself— but now our soft meadows bruised, rivers stopped mid-flow, fields rusted like forgotten ploughs. To breathe was suicide: trees drained of green, roses shed their petals, lilies shrivelled before our eyes. And then He turned away, swinging round the reins like the gates of Hell grating to a close. Night scuttled after as the light seeped back into our black world —everywhere was light sun and sky and light— and your small daughter nowhere to be seen. 25

The next poem in this sequence, Niobe, takes as its starting point a few lines from a chorus in Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone (824–31) which allude, albeit briefly, to the legend of the mother turned to stone as she grieves for the death of her children. Sophocles locates these events in the remote mountainous region of northern Greece; I shifted the emphasis to Britain, to the equally remote far west of Cornwall, our family home: (2/8: 7.22 am) Like a cloud-burst on a Penwith day that had to come yet still startles, shocks; 25

Balmer (2004b) 28.

54

Josephine Balmer think of granite veined with pale-rose quartz, a fret of stone where the bracken’s frayed by aching, flint-pierced, moorland streams; the bind of ivy, the prick of gorse, hedged in with comfrey, helleborine; sob of rain, scar of hail, snow shrinking to sigh, the sound of words you can’t say. 26

Another poem here, Set it in Stone, is based on two versions of ancient epitaphs for small children, adding a new one of my own, so marrying translation with original poetry: I A new green shoot your strong, deep root but still I withered on the stalk my mother thought me flawless my family prayed for rain five summers— and then earth again (Egypt, c . ad 300)

II The gods are jealous of those who love I can’t touch you now, my daughter my words are stone my heart a fist against grey rock (Italy, c .100 bc)

III a seven year flowering and now I’m going back to bud the rose you cut for me that morning— yellow for my seedling hair— blooms on above my ashen head opens, closes, with each earth-bound eye my sun, my stars, my stars, my stretch of fire-scorched sky (Letchworth 1996) 27 26

Ibid. 29.

27

Ibid. 14 (texts from Peek (1955) 1243).

Translating, Transgressing, and Creating

55

In all of these poems, as in the Sappho and Corinna translations, context or recontextualization was extremely important, with new titles and subtitles claiming the translated texts for my own poetry. And when collecting these poems together for Chasing Catullus, as in my earlier translations, juxtaposition played an important part, as translation and original complemented each other, both in the structure of the collection as a whole, as well as in individual poems. As I noted in my preface, this offered ‘a poetic device in its own right, allowing translation and original to inform each other, tossing layer upon layer of meaning back and forth between the two’ (ibid. 9). We can see here, too, that classical translation provided a means for me to say things that might otherwise have been unsayable. That there was, as Simon Armitage claimed, much I could take for myself. Patricia Moyer also notes how ‘a personal voice can be lost or found in [classical] translation, particularly by writers who are also working in the forms of poetry, drama, fiction, journals, diaries, letters and combinations of these different discursive modes of literature’. 28 And yet, even so—or maybe because of this—I felt uneasy at the appropriation, even by myself, of such personal experiences; of turning such personal trauma into literature. While I was wrestling with the issue I came across a short passage from Plato’s Republic in which Plato explains that, while poets would be welcomed if they visited his Utopian city, they would not be allowed to live there: ‘So if we are visited in our state by someone who has the skill to transform themselves into all sorts of characters and represent all sorts of things, and he wants to show himself and his poems to us, we shall treat him with all the reverence due to a holy man and a giver of rare pleasure, but shall tell him that he and his kind have no place in our city, being forbidden by our code. And, after anointing him with myrrh and crowning him, we shall send him on his way.’ 29

Like so many of the other extracts from classical texts in Chasing Catullus, this passage provided a foundation for a new poem, Cancel the Invite, a poem that could not only translate but interact with 28

Moyer (1997) 109.

29

Plato, Republic, 398a, trans. Lee (1955) 137.

56

Josephine Balmer

its source text, not just voice but re-enact my unease. At the same time, I had been rereading T. S. Eliot’s poem Little Gidding from Four Quartets, a poem of reconciliation, of ‘the timeless moment’ beyond death, which formed a second root for the poem, another layer for the palimpsest. For all these interfaces between translation and original offer the opportunity to express not only personal grief but also to articulate uncomfortable truths. If you came, if you came this way to our city, taking the old road, the salt road, up from the harbour, and it’s early days, mid-morning, late September, sky an upturned limpet’s shell, flesh-scooped, chalk blue— or later, maybe, at dusk in depths of winter, with sky a pebble dropping to a shore-line pool; and if you came, if you should slip through our gates while our guards are down, dealing out their final hands— Proteus back from exile to walk our boarded streets, beggar, broken king, virgin trembling on the brink (for we know you can change face—and heart—at will); and if you reached, by chance, our marbled market halls to find some unclaimed spot, set out your same old stalls we’ve all seen, we’ve all heard too many times before (and besides could buy cheaper in our local stores), then we’d welcome you as a stranger, as a guest, wash your dusty feet, throw fresh garlands round your neck, commend your art, revere your turncoat trickster’s skill, and then, because poets are forbidden here by law— for we need doctors, surgeons, men to find the cure— we’d show you, so politely, to the waiting door. 30

There are many poems in the collection that do not address this grief. Its first section, for instance, includes lighter versions of Juvenal Satires 3 or C. P. Cavafy’s poem ‘One Night’, both playfully relocated to modern London. Feminine Ending takes a tongue-in-cheek look at some of the problems of survival and attribution facing the poets I had worked on for Classical Women Poets, often, as with Sulpicia, stripped of authorship of their own poems, subject to the double bind that if a poem is written by a woman it cannot be good and if it is good it is not written by a woman: ‘all right, you know the 30

Balmer (2004b.) 33.

Translating, Transgressing, and Creating

57

score, the same old caveat | your work can’t exist and if it does it’s trash.’ 31 A rather darker poem here, Philomela, based on one of the bloodiest of Greek myths, sees its protagonist raped by her brotherin-law, Tereus, who then cut out her tongue in order to stop her from revealing his crime. In response, Philomela sent a tapestry to her sister Procne, Tereus’ wife, depicting her ordeal. As a result Procne murdered their son Itys and served up his flesh to Tereus at a feast. But while the poem began as a response to the unspeakable—and often unspoken—trauma of violent sexual assault, it somehow ended on a different note: One way or another, I’d have done it myself. Let grief, guilt or prick-sharp shame wear down my tongue to a bloody stump; slit my own throat, sliced off my lips, in case my traitor speech should shape that place again. So now I weave my words with crimson thread, pick out my stunted songs in sacking cords— the music of the deaf, the music of the dead. And my soul frays at the plan I start to trace; homes blocked in by sex and strife and sword, the husband dropped, wife I’ll never make. And my heart knots at the thought of kids: they seem too soft, too sweet, too pure to stitch. 32

The third and final section of Chasing Catullus presents a sequence of poems based on, or inspired by, Homer’s Odyssey. Again, these represent different uses of translation in the volume. One poem, Three May Cottages, for instance, is based on the Sirens incident in Odyssey 12. Like Niobe, this is set in west Cornwall, where my mother’s childhood house was up for sale a few years ago. But although once a tiny and extremely basic cottage with no electricity, an outside bathroom, and a floor of grass and cobbles which my grandfather had subsequently concreted over, now, like much property in the area, its price was far beyond reach. Here, instead of using a passage from classical literature, the ‘translation’ is from an estate agent’s property details: 31

See n. 16 above on Erinna.

32

Balmer (2004b) 22.

58

Josephine Balmer Everyone has their Sirens, and this is mine. A For Sale sign on a snaking, seaside street dull, gull-racked afternoon in Marazion: trad. two-bed cottage of granite construction having beamed lounge with open fire and alcove seat, carpeted, with concrete-over-cobbled floor (N.B. when the work was done vendors can’t be sure), rarely available, glorious views, must be seen. So back home to plan: set expenses, rates, loans against rent from lets, tax, a holiday home— a place to heal the heart, repair damage done— while friends and family try to tie me down: strange what calls you back, drags you from the mast— not stars or sky, some high ceiling made of glass, but the floor my grandad sowed from weed-choked grass. 33

But as well as personal experience, as in the collection’s first section, personal grief also kept intruding in these versions, not least when I came to write about Odysseus’ visit to the Underworld, which forms the dark heart of the sequence, and indeed of the collection itself. This is a version of lines from Odyssey 11 (24–43) where Odysseus summons the ghosts of the dead, again recontextualized with a new title, Letchworth Crematorium: I dug my own hole: sword-scraped the pit, an elbow’s breadth, poured libations to the world below— milk first, mixed with honey, then fine wine, clear water; I sowed seeds, daily bread, got down on my knees and begged the dead, promised I would sacrifice it all, pile my worldly goods on pyres, scald shrines with entrails of my flocks, my best head— one black sheep, two barren cows, more ewes— whatever they wanted from my marble halls. And then, when I’d paid my Hades dues, I slit a throat, watched life blood flow out, dark clouds moving across dusk-dyed skies. 33

Iibid. 54.

Translating, Transgressing, and Creating

59

Now they came from the pit on each side, souls of the dead, souls of the dying with heart-stop cry. And my fear was green like creeping mould, damp, knotted, gnawing: soldiers, battle-slain and battle-stained, brides, bachelors, long-suffering old men and girls, seedling shoots, fresh for mourning. 34

THE WIDER PICTURE: THE WORD FOR SORROW Having filtered classical literature in this way to give voice to my own grief and personal tragedy in Chasing Catullus, my latest work, The Word for Sorrow, approaches wider, national tragedies, which can be difficult to write about without recourse to banality or cliché. This centres around a series of extracts from Ovid’s Tristia, written after his apparent exile from Rome in ad 8 to Tomis on the Black Sea at the furthermost eastern frontier of empire. I had always been struck by the depth of emotion its verse epistles seemed to portray; the one instance, perhaps, where the mask of classical literary artifice slips to reveal the man beneath the persona. Set alongside these versions are original poems exploring the history of the old secondhand dictionary I used to translate Ovid and in particular, the story of the dictionary’s first owner; as a schoolboy in January 1900 he had inscribed his name on the flyleaf and, a Google search revealed, later took part in the doomed Allied campaign on the Hellespont at Gallipoli in 1915, one of the bloodiest campaigns of World War I in which 50,000 allied troops and around 85,000 Turkish soldiers lost their lives. Here, as with all my other books, juxtaposition and recontextualization were crucial to the realization of the work, exploring an interplay between translation and original poem, text and translator. Yet, as a poetry collection rather than a ‘standard’ translation, The Word for Sorrow could not possibly include all of Tristia’s fifty poems, or indeed the further forty-seven poems in the later Epistulae ex 34

Ibid. 50.

60

Josephine Balmer

Ponto. I also realized that I would also need to be selective about what I used from each poem, as many ran to more than a hundred lines. Furthermore, the Gallipoli poems and Ovidian renditions had to spark off each other, to hold the dramatic tension between the two as each story progressed. For this reason I condensed Ovid’s originals here and there, or used extracts from longer poems. To distinguish my character from the ‘Ovid’ of literary tradition, my own construct from that of the western canon, I also referred to the Roman poet throughout by his cognomen Naso—the name he calls himself in his poetry. The following poem, Naso’s Last Night, for instance, is an extract from Tristia 1.3, 35 as Ovid describes the agony of his last night in Rome before leaving for exile: Let me tell you how it was, try to remember . . . So the hour had come. I could delay no further, the stars had whirled across the skies, Bear westered. What else could I do, held fast by love of country? Yet here it was: the night exile had been decreed. (How often had I rebuked those scurrying past: ‘reflect where we are going, what we leave, don’t rush’? How many times had I lied, mostly to myself, pretending I’d fixed the hour that I would set out? Three times I reached the door, three times I was called back as sluggish feet indulged slowed, reluctant heart. I made those ‘final’ farewells in my wretchedness, ran back for one more kiss—the last, I swore, the last. ‘Why rush?’ I asked again. ‘We’re headed for the East: as Carthage was destroyed, Rome must be relinquished.’) But even as I talked, still the day crept nearer; my morning star had risen, hate-bright Lucifer. Now I felt disengaged, raw, wrenched in two, limb hacked from limb, bone from bone, sinew from sinew. My wife clung around my neck as I tried to leave, our grief intermingled, hearts, and tears, on our sleeves: ‘Let me share your journey, an exile’s exiled wife, ride stowaway on your departing ship, light freight. 35

Lines 1–2; 47–100 (condensed).

Translating, Transgressing, and Creating

61

Caesar himself has commanded you to leave here, for me it will be love: love will be my Caesar.’ And so she pleaded, she tried, she tried to persuade but as so many times before, she tried in vain. I set out, a corpse too early for its own wake, carried out for burial, unshaven, unkempt.

But if poems such as these seemed to offer a raw expression of grief and loss, a moving exposition of the plight of the exiled artist, the more I translated Tristia, the more I realized that Ovid’s verse was far more complex, far more tricky, full of literary in-jokes, knowing mythological references, jokes and puns—a work constantly changing register, from high tragedy to high comedy in the blink of a line. Recent scholarship on the poet proved even more disconcerting, particularly the theory that Ovid’s account of his exile amounts to little more than an elaborate literary hoax, conjured up not in the wasteland of Tomis but from the comfort of the poet’s Italian country estate. 36 So how to square this revised impression of Tristia with the poems I was writing about Gallipoli? The more immersed I became in the project, the more I understood how Ovid’s lightness of touch, his constant changes in register, were exactly what might be required for these poems too. As I researched letters home from British officers in Gallipoli, I found the same sharp changes in tone, from horror one minute to jaunty, often inane, comments the next; making the best of it, not wanting to upset loved ones with too much reality. And so Naso’s Last Night is followed by an original sonnet, Malvern Road Station, Cheltenham, which describes the almost festive scene of the dictionary owner (now renamed ‘Geoffrey’ not just to preserve his anonymity but, as with Ovid, 36 Far-fetched, perhaps, but there are certainly inconsistencies in Ovid’s depiction of Tomis as war-torn, wintry, and uncultivated when in fact the city, like modern Constanta, would have been temperate and, as a former Greek colony, perhaps not entirely lacking in cultural life (see Hardie’s overview (2002) 235). I was also often taken aback by Ovid’s tongue in cheek asides: ‘Is it to be believed?’, as he writes of his hyperbolic description of a frozen Tomis, ‘Well, I can but ask . . . ’(from Naso Sees Hell Freeze Over (Tristia 3.10.35–6). Here Ovid’s description of winter seems reminiscent of Virginia Woolf ’s satirical depiction of the Great Frost in her 1928 novel Orlando).

62

Josephine Balmer

to create a new character of my own) and his regiment lined up at a country railway halt before leaving for the East. Its source texts are an old newspaper cutting containing photographs with typically cheery captions, as well as extracts from Geoffrey’s fellow officers’ letters and diaries (including the lovely expression ‘to talk Gloucs’, referring to their reminiscences together about home in the Cotswolds): 37 For once let’s not dwell on impending death, scan the thumbs-up rows of grinning faces like bone-starved worms grubbing out fresh flesh for those who got thumbs down, didn’t make it— Wilf Barton, Tom Honey, first from the ship, returned as cap, belt, identity disc— a merry bunch, pleased as punch to be off ; that day of fête then cheerful letters home, spry postcards from a holiday gone wrong: the men and I drink weak tea now, talk Gloucs, bullets seem like small birds at dawn chorus . . . But back on the platform, between the smiles, I spy Geoffrey, hesitant, stiff, crowd-shy, already out with the burying party.

I was also keen to use the device of the dictionary and its parallel lives as a jumping-off point for other themes, to explore other layers of narrative beyond a simple Gallipoli/Tomis or text/dictionary equation. For just as Ovid’s often ironic poetic voice interposes itself into his narrative, so could my own, offering a third story of discovery, a detective story running like an undercurrent beneath. And so I wrote a coda to this poem, describing my own trip to the site of the station, now demolished to make way for a industrial estate, adding another layer to the story—my own presence: I’d hoped for a single snowdrop hunched by the tracks— Catullus’ flower untouched, as yet, in the grass— 37 The Gloucester Journal, 17 April 1915; The Diary of Edgerton Tymewell Cripps, 1915–1918 (held in the Gloucestershire Archives (D4920/2/2/3/4)).

Translating, Transgressing, and Creating

63

a star-chipped bloom to soothe the scar of waste, stench of rot, almost sweet, smear of industrial estate. But there’s no hope, no art that can heal the past; walls have been levelled, diggers come and gone. The day fails, sky drags with unfallen snow; the hour, already, of the plough and of the crow. All we can do here is say nothing and move on.

In poems such as these past and present merge into one. And as throughout the work, translation and original spark off each other to create a new form, a new whole. Here translation is not just a means of expressing or exploring the process of narrative but becomes an integral part of that narrative itself. Such transformations, the links forged between ancient and modern, past and present, are made possible, I believe, by the unique qualities of classical translation; its textual uncertainties, its ambiguities, as well as its rigours. For if, as Eliot observed of Dante, ‘the experience of a poem is the experience both of the moment and of a lifetime,’ 38 then it is translation that moves the surviving poetry of dead languages out of the moment and into a lifetime. For translation can give silent poets back their voices or stale jokes back their humour, finding new possibilities in damaged, fragmented works, which scholarship, uneasy, perhaps, with absence or ignorance, might consider more problematic. This, as I have shown, is a mutual process; by transforming the text, the translator, too, can be transformed as a writer, finding their own voice by revoicing those of the past. In conclusion, I will leave it to the wry title poem from Chasing Catullus to articulate, more than any commentary, this distinctive, symbiotic relationship between classical translation and translator: It’s the rule of attraction, the corruption of texts, the way his corpus tastes of skin and sweat, that taint of decay, scent of cheated death. But then, I’ve always liked them old— parsed hearts, lost minds, redundant souls; 38

See Kermode (1975) 216.

64

Josephine Balmer just enough to get me fleshing ghosts, giving them tongue, jumping their bones. Yet sleep with the dead and you’ll wake with the worms—stripped down, compressed, a little accusative, slightly stressed—to find the code you crack, the clause that breaks, is no longer subordinate, it’s now your own. 39 39

Balmer (2004b) 21.

3 Reconnecting with the Classics Robert Crawford

The winter solstice, Maes Howe, Orkney. The sun is poised low in the sky, between the hills of the neighbouring island of Hoy. Every year on this day that winter solstice sends a beam of light along the low, narrow entrance passage of the great, beehive-shaped neolithic tumulus that is the Howe, so that the light shines through the Howe’s inner darkness against the back wall, lighting up the chamber and its smaller side-chambers, once the repositories of bones. People still treasure this. You can watch it over the internet, or you can go there in person to the heart of neolithic Orkney, now a World Heritage Site. In several similar Orcadian stone-age tombs animal artifacts have been found along with human bones: the quantity of eagle talons found in a tumulus on South Ronaldsay, for instance, has led to its modern name: Tomb of the Eagles. These tombs seem to have brought together tribal or perhaps familial groups and their totems, but we understand relatively little of their ritual significance, of the detailed meaning they may have had for their builders and users. Though they left us (at Skara Brae, for example) incised patterns, these preliterate people left us no writing, no literature. If we can trace back the history of poetry associated with the territory we now call England, and the territory we now call Scotland for around fifteen centuries, then these Orcadian sites, so sophisticated in their organization and in the arrangement of society and knowledge needed to build them, take us way back, some thirty-five or so centuries further.

66

Robert Crawford

Whether we use the language of architecture or engineering or religion, what we do know about Maes Howe is that, like much modern science, religion, and art, it speaks of alignment. Maes Howe is about attunement to planetary bodies, and an articulated relationship between the human and the cosmos, between related generations and the ordering of the known and unknown universe. These terms are ours, of course, but the persistent physical evidence of Maes Howe is hard to refute: not just the evidence of stone, but the repeating evidence of light and darkness, of how the thing is ordered, of its lineation of light. Whether the coming of the light impresses me, or the darkness impresses others, we are all responding to elements built into its making from the start. However different we and our family groups, our tribes, have become, we can and do still savour that sense of alignment and attunement, and have our own ways of articulating some sort of consonance between ourselves, our intimate groupings, and the universe that surrounds us. Though such patternings may be deconstructed, they seem to emerge from a deep need that recurs across generations, like a persistent internal rhyme, and poetry, this most nuanced way of making with words, is a way in which that need for attunement is repeatedly articulated through language. If prehistoric sites often appear to relate people to the stars and planets, then poems continue that impulse. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in talking of how we make sense of the world, makes much of the idea of family resemblances, pointing out that these are not always dependent on the same obvious features, but may be more subtly changing and reconstellated. We are increasingly used to the idea that although families are often biologically related, they need not be so connected, but can depend on other kinds of shared experience, patterns of acculturation. Sometimes, like nations or part-nations or tribes, families may share biology, upbringing, experience, commitments; sometimes they may share only one or some of these, or may share only part of one. The rhymes of families, if you like, need not be full rhymes, but may be pararhymes, internal rhymes, kinds of bonding that are slightly hidden repeats, mirroring the parental bond itself, the bonding and pulling apart between generations. Poetry is a great because a subtle way of articulating such bonds and of reaffirming through full and partial rhymes, repeated

Reconnecting with the Classics

67

and varied patterns, a sense felt in many generations and cultures of some attunement between parent, child, and wider cosmos. This, through the ages, is one of the things that poetry in all traditions is for, and we can detect it in the ritually aligned words of one of the great early lyric fragments of Western culture:

û ≈ÛÂÒ ‹ÌÙ· ˆ›Ò˘Ì ¨Û· ˆ·flÌÔÎÈÚ äÛÍ› ‰·Ûö ·h˘Ú ˆ›ÒÂÈÚ ZÈÌ, ˆ›ÒÂÈÚ ·r„·, ˆ›ÒÂÈÚ Ï‹ÙÂÒÈ ·E‰· Hesperus, ferrying home those sunrise scattered, You ferry home a sheep, you ferry home a goat, you ferry a child home to mother. (Crawford (2008) 46)

Sappho’s fragment (104a L/P) on the evening star—Hesperus—is so immediately beautiful because it offers us a sense of attunement between the intimately familial and the cosmic, even the cosmological—between mother love and Mother Nature. In its internal repetitions it lets us hear the bond with our own ears. The attunement is borne in on us by balanced repetitions of sound that are internal repetitions, rather than end-rhymes, end-rhymes being alien to ancient Greek poetry. This fragment on the evening star is in itself a wonderful sound system, and has been listened to as such for millennia. Anne Carson points out that these lines are ‘cited by the classical literary critic Demetrios who comments in his treatise On Style: “Here the charm of the expression lies in its repetition of “gather”” ’. 1 As far as I know, Carson is the first person to suggest that the word I’ve translated above as ‘ferry’, the Greek word ˆ›ÒÂÈÚ (which is used of bringing or carrying), might be Englished in this fragment as the word ‘gather’. The suggestion is in some ways attractive, since ‘gather’ may point towards such ordinary activities as fishing (casting and gathering) or knitting—the latter an activity conventionally gendered as feminine, and so ‘gather’ may fit the maternal note of this Greek fragment. Nonetheless, I am attached to my choice of the verb ‘ferry’ since it comes so close to catching the repeated ˆ›ÒÂÈÚ of the original Greek in these lulling, echoic lines. While Sappho (fl.c.610−c.580 bc) is celebrated as a passionate Lesbian, ancient accounts also record her own mother’s name and 1

Carson (2002) 373.

68

Robert Crawford

give Sappho herself a child. This Hesperus fragment, with its mother and child, in presenting the evening star as collecting the strewn things of the day, has the cosmos—or specifically Hesperus (mythically gendered as male)—participating in that most conventionally housewifely of tasks: tidying up. For readers brought up in a Christian culture, the image of the Madonna and child is hard to banish. As Margaret Reynolds and others have outlined, the history of Sappho’s texts involves both remarkable networks of influence and an attempt to return scattered fragments to their mother. 2 But this particular fragment (undervalued, perhaps, by Reynolds) may also appeal to modern imaginations because it presents and embodies several kinds of co-operative balance—between the sun and the evening star, female and male, animal and human, scattering apart and gathering in, morning and evening, opening and closure, fragmentation and wholeness, sibilants and fricatives. The first line of the Greek has six ‘s’ sounds, and five words in the two lines alliterate on ‘ph’, so that the most prominent consonantal ‘s’ and ‘ph’ sounds of the poem strike the English-speaking reader all the more forcibly as the consonants of Sappho’s name (though the original Greek version of her name is a little different). Carrying sound patterns from one language to another is at once desirable and dodgy. Desirable because part of the poem’s soundness lies in its sound system, so we want to seek ways to recreate that in the target language; dodgy because striving too hard to achieve such a re-creation will produce something distortedly mannered. Though my version has only five sibilants in the first line, and four ‘ff ’ sounds in the second, I wanted to try it, to play as much of the tune of this poem of attunement as I could in English. 3 There is a danger not least that use of the expression ‘ferry home’ for ˆ›ÒÂÈÚ, while it does give a sound close to that admired by the ancient critic Demetrios and others in the Greek, may summon up too readily in the ear of the Anglophone reader Charon the ferryman, so that it will appear that the evening star brings back only corpses. One reason for putting in the word ‘home’ is to try to modify or mollify that idea, 2

See Reynolds (2001) and (2003). I understand from my colleague Professor Stephen Halliwell that the phi sound in Sappho’s name was not pronounced originally simply as ‘ff ’ but as a plosive followed by an aspirate; so I suppose I must limit my sound-tracking to later pronunciations of her name. 3

Reconnecting with the Classics

69

though the more familiar refrain ‘coming for to carry me home’ may complicate things further for the Anglophone ear. If such a darker, Charonic or ‘swing low, sweet chariot’ implication is present in the Greek, it is surely not dominant, but as the poem passes to another language, it is recontextualized, resituated among English-language poems. It is undeniable that one of the most striking renderings of this Sappho fragment in recent poetry does speak directly of death. Michael Longley’s poem ‘The Evening Star’ is written in memory of the infant Catherine Mercer, who died in 1996: The day we buried your two years and two months So many crocuses and snowdrops came out for you I tried to isolate from those galaxies one flower: A snowdrop appeared in the sky at dailigone, The evening star, the star in Sappho’s epigram Which brings back everything that shiny daybreak Scatters, which brings the sheep and brings the goat And brings the wean back home to her mammy. 4

The powerful idiomatic fluency of this poem is all the more impressive for the way it blends with Sappho’s, and uses a translation of the Greek original to generate a peculiar pang through the deployment of Scots or Ulster Scots vernacular elements, subtly appropriate since Sappho herself sang in the vernacular of Lesbos, rather than writing in Attic Greek. Her lines, though, are neither an epigram nor ostensibly about a dead child. They simply include a child for whom being mothered is part of the daily routine of life. That sense of daily routine, and of the way the fragment seems to fan out and call back, is caught by the measured phrasing and layout of Anne Carson’s translation, which brilliantly departs from the lineation of the Greek: 5 Evening you gather back all that dazzling dawn has put asunder: you gather a lamb gather a kid gather a child to its mother 4

Longley (2000), 33.

5

Carson (2002) 213.

70

Robert Crawford

The word ‘kid’ here mediates between the animal ‘lamb’ and the human ‘child’—either as a stroke of genius or a trip-up—but the word ‘its’ at the end is awkward; to call a child ‘it’ sounds too unmaternal. Still, the play of ‘Evening’ against ‘dazzling dawn’ emphasizes like the impressive teetering out and stepping back of Carson’s lineation the motion of balanced release and recall that makes the fragment so arrestingly patterned. I think it is a pity to lose the sense of the precise star that û ≈ÛÂÒ suggests, and to lose its sound when ‘Hesperus’ is available as a proper name for the English-language reader. The only other phrase that survives from the Sappho poem—IÛÙ›Ò˘Ì ‹ÌÙ˘Ì O Í‹ÎÎÈÛÙÔÚ—‘of all stars the most beautiful’ (fr. 104 b L/P)—very much suggests that the poem is about the evening star rather than more generally about ‘Evening’. However hard Sappho’s lines are to translate, there is little doubt about their magnetic appeal—not predominantly to the eye, but to something nearer than the eye: to a sound system, to the sense of internal repetition and sound patterning, and to the sense of the protectively parental that most people can feel, if only through its absence. The two lines conclude with a moment of mother-child bonding older than depictions of the Virgin and Child but, like those, linked to a sense of rhythms of the universe itself. Even readers far distant from the life of shepherding and goat-herding can feel the nearer-than-the-eye connection between child and mother, so that the fragment has an emotional immediacy even in translation. It moves so easily across the gap of twenty-seven centuries between its composition and our hearing of it. It is so familiar as well as so familial. We can welcome it so unfussily because it brings with it its own sense of intimate homecoming, of parental homing. In their subtle and immediate appeal, these two lines of Sappho speak as eloquently as Maes Howe about the deep and continuing human need for attunement with the wider patternings of creation. In so doing they remind us straightforwardly and talismanically what poetry at its most vital in all languages, in all cultures, is for. That’s why, a few years ago, I spoke about these two lines of Sappho when I was invited to address the topic of ‘Why Literature Matters’. Hugh MacDiarmid once wrote, ‘It’s soun, no sense, faddoms the herts o’ men’. Deep down, every poet has to believe that. Poetry seeks the sounds that will fathom the heart—not just ideas to excite the brain.

Reconnecting with the Classics

71

Lineation, that additional form of balance and punctuation available to verse but not to prose, lets sounds dance in measure. Pondering this often takes me to poems I first read in my teens and over the last few years I’ve been recalling, revoicing, and reconnecting with some classical poems I studied once, but which have since composted in my imagination. For me this reconnecting with the Classics remains an ongoing process: something I am in the middle of, rather than something I can look back on with detachment. At school I studied Latin for six years, Greek for five. The Latin class was big, the Greek small—just four pupils as I remember. Still, the Classics department was strong. In literature what impressed me most was reading Tacitus’ Agricola: what Scottish schoolboy could resist Calgacus? I also enjoyed parts of Herodotus, Xenophon, and Thucydides. We read for different examinations books 4 and 6 of the Aeneid, but best of all were book nine of the Odyssey and books 6 and 24 of the Iliad. Read at different times and with different teachers, these provided an incalculable sense of story. In particular they showed me that poetry, however lost, mangled, or mistranslated, might carry with intimate power across times and cultures. I felt, like Heinrich Schliemann in his famous telegram, that I had gazed upon the face of Agamemnon. Also, in my teens I read a fair amount of classical material in translation. I was never a great linguist, so translations helped. Everyman’s Library; the black Penguin Classics; the small hardback World’s Classics: I collected these, buying them in Grants or John Smith’s Glasgow bookshops. At seventeen I read (almost entirely in translation) Constantine Trypanis’s Penguin Book of Greek Verse. Most of all I was attracted to the short ancient lyrics in it, and to the modern poems. Trypanis saw ancient and modern Greek poetry as linked, so his volume asserts kinds of cultural continuity as well as demonstrating disruptions. I studied almost no Scottish literature at university, but the form of that Greek anthology was still in my mind much later when I co-edited what is now The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse. Around the time I was studying Greek in my first year at Glasgow in 1977–8, I bought the collected poems of Seferis (in parallel text) and Cavafy (in English only). I went to hear a visiting speaker in the Greek Department whose parallel text handout on Cavafy I kept because the poems so impressed me.

72

Robert Crawford

In my own first collection, A Scottish Assembly (1990), the first poem plays on the Latin as well as the English sense of the word ‘Opera’. No doubt there are other glances at Latin or Greek elsewhere: a poem called ‘The Humanity Classroom’ 6 uses ‘Humanity’ in the old Scottish sense of ‘Latin’; another includes some Greek declension. While editing the magazine Verse, I was hugely impressed with Michel Deguy’s classically-derived French poem, ‘Passim’, which my co-editor, David Kinloch, drew to my attention. 7 Still, it was not until my sixth collection, The Tip of My Tongue (2003), that I began to publish any versions of poems from classical languages. These were a partly accidental, partly longed-for reconnection with the Classics. If, like me, you are preoccupied by the literature of your own small country, then it is particularly important to love and read literature from elsewhere too. Tunnel vision helps nobody. I sensed, I suppose, an imaginative need to maintain, or reconnect with those classical angles of vision to which my upbringing had given me access and which had little or nothing to do with Scotland. Yet almost as soon as I began to do this, I realized that Latin, at least, was as much a language of Scotland as English, Scots, or Gaelic. Latin has tended to be airbrushed out of anthologies of Scottish poetry. The same thing has happened in anthologies of poetry from England and many other European countries. Scotland, though, was my particular focus. Round about the time I came to make a few versions of Greek lyrics from Trypanis’s anthology (using his prose translations as cribs), I also began to make versions of some poems by the seventeenth-century Scottish Latin poet Arthur Johnston. A few of these appeared in the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, before being published in The Tip of My Tongue. These then formed the starting point for my book of Scottish Latin, Apollos of the North. For twenty years I have lived and worked in St Andrews where, if you are interested in literature, it is hard not to be aware of the traditions of Scottish Latin poetry. There is, for instance, a street and a building named after the former St Andrews student, poet, and professor George Buchanan (1506–82), though relatively few people, even in St Andrews, could say who Buchanan was. My early 6

Crawford (1992) 52.

7

Deguy (1984) 154–7.

Reconnecting with the Classics

73

efforts to make versions of Buchanan’s work involved a quatrain, ‘Ad Henricum Scotorum Regem’ (To Henry Darnley, King of Scots). This little poem has grown in power over the centuries. It must have been written around the time when Buchanan returned to Scotland from his beloved France and was working as Principal of St Leonard’s College, St Andrews. The poem probably dates from just before Darnley was killed in an Edinburgh bombing in 1567. Caltha suos nusquam vultus a sole reflectit, illo oriente patens, illo abeunte latens: nos quoque pendemus de te, sol noster, ad omnes expositi rerum te subeunte vices. 8

Philip Ford ((1982: 175) whose work I used as a crib) translates this into prose: ‘Nowhere does the marigold turn its face away from the sun, opening when it rises and closing when it sets. We also depend on you, our sun, and are exposed to all the vicissitudes which you undergo.’ My versification relies heavily on Ford, but tries to stand on its own as a poem. For me it was essential that the poem be turned into a poem, or, at the very least, something that clearly worked as verse. So I looked and listened not only to Ford’s prose, but also to the Latin original. Trying to make an English-language poem, however, was my aim. The appeal of Buchanan’s quatrain is in part historical, but also acoustic, especially in the beautifully balanced, internally-rhyming second line. I used sentence structure, caesura, and alliteration, rather than full rhyme: 9 The marigold nowhere turns from the sun. Opening at dawn, it closes in the dusk. We too depend on you, our sun. To all Your turns of fortune we are left exposed.

About the same time, I made a few versions of short Greek poems from Trypanis’s anthology. On occasion, though my Greek had lapsed, there was the attraction (present in Sappho’s Hesperus fragment) of a verbal repetition, a clear element of sound patterning that seemed to have a beauty in the original which could also work in translation. So, in Meleager’s tiny poem on Heliodora from the Greek 8

Latin text cited from Crawford (2006) 62.

9

Crawford (2006) 63.

74

Robert Crawford

Anthology (5.143), I could see and hear that the way the poem started and finished with the word ‘stephanos’ (garland) was something to build on in English: ‘úœ ÛÙ›ˆ·ÌÔÚ ÂÒd ÍÒ·Ùd Ï·Ò·flÌÂÙ·È ú«ÎÈÔ‰˛Ò·Ú’. ·PÙc ‰ö KÍ΋ÏÂÈ ÙÔF ÛÙˆ‹ÌÔı ÛÙ›ˆ·ÌÔÚ.

Trypanis turns this into English prose as ‘The garland is fading round the head of Heliodora; but she glows brightly, a garland for the garland.’ 10 I wanted to go further and enhance the cadence, making a three-line poem: Though the garland round Heliodora’s head Fades now, she sparkles, she is herself A garland to garland the garland. (Crawford (2003) 14)

Clearly this takes advantage of the fact that in English the word ‘garland’ is a verb as well as a noun. Poems need to follow and work with the grain of the language. I chose the verb ‘sparkles’ rather than Trypanis’s ‘glows’, because in English not just inanimate objects but conversation can sparkle. Anyway, to ‘glow’ in slightly old-fashioned polite English can mean to perspire. According to Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English Lexicon the verb ‘eklampo’ can mean ‘shine’, ‘beam forth’, or ‘be distinguished’. When I was making my version, though, I didn’t look the word up; I just went with what I felt was the grain of the poem in English. Sometimes this works. When in my collection The Tip of My Tongue I grouped three little English versions of a poem by Alcman, a poem by Sappho, and a poem by Meleager together under the title ‘Cicadas’, I wasn’t aware ‘cicadas’ was a word the Greeks had used of little poems—it just sounded right. On other occasions, though, acting intuitively in accord with one’s own sense of another culture or of one’s own language may go against literal translation. For poets seeking to make poems in English and who, in order to do so, may bloody-mindedly sacrifice aspects of the original, the word ‘translation’ seems wrong; ‘version’ is both fairer and more liberating. Similarly freeing and just is to describe the poem as ‘after’ the original 10

Trypanis (1971) 347.

Reconnecting with the Classics

75

poet, rather than claiming it is a translation of his or her work. ‘After’ makes clear that, though it owes a substantial debt to the original, a modern poem or version is not claiming to offer the accuracy which ‘translation’ implies. There is also an ethical question where, as often happens, poets use translators’ work as cribs. Some poets avoid this question entirely. Others choose not to mention the translators: to do so might suggest that a translator is responsible for riffs on or departures from the original which the modern poet has deployed. In his versions of Machado and Rilke, Don Paterson appends a discussion that reveals at least some of the translations he has consulted. 11 Where a poet and translator have sat down together to make an English version, it seems only right both should be credited, especially if what is produced is some kind of ‘agreed text’. Yet often what a poet wants is a ‘disagreed text’ where both the original and a prose translation have been used as springboards for the ‘version’ that results. This may be a version that neither the original poet nor the literal translator would endorse. It may be a poem ‘after’ the original, rather than a representation of that original. There is no one correct solution to all this, but, where a prose crib is specially provided for the poet to work with, an appropriate gesture may be simply to dedicate to the provider of the literal translation the version made ‘after’ the original poet. That way a debt of gratitude is expressed without the provider of the literal translation being held to account for the poem or ‘version’ that results. Prose translations are usually better to use as cribs than verse translations. Making a poem is easier if one does not have to fight off a translator’s sense of lineation, cadence, or rhyme. A prose crib is, or at least seems, a neutral starting point. Using it, the poet (with reference to the original work, but without the distraction of another Englishlanguage poet’s immediate presence) can get to work making poetic measure and music in his or her own language. Accurate translators may be appalled at such an approach; I grew up reading Ezra Pound’s Cathay and Robert Lowell’s Imitations, and still admire them. In making a modern poem, there is something particularly attractive about a prose crib in old-fashioned English: it allows you more space to cut

11

Paterson (2006).

76

Robert Crawford

loose with a sense of nourishing freedom as well as the confidence of having had the original glossed. That is what I found when I came across the Musa Latina Aberdonensis. This remarkable three-volume anthology of neo-Latin poems connected with Aberdeen was edited at the end of the nineteenth century by Aberdeen University Principal Sir William Duguid Geddes. There, among the ‘Encomia Urbium’ of Arthur Johnston—surely the most beguiling collection of poems of place produced by any poet from Renaissance Britain—I found poems like the one on St Andrews which begins, Urbs sacra, nuper eras toti venerabilis orbi, Nec fuit in toto sanctior orbe locus. Iuppiter erubuit tua cernens templa, sacello Et de Tarpeio multa querela fuit. Haec quoque contemplans Ephesinae conditor aedis, Ipse suum merito risit et odit opus. 12

Geddes (1895) translates this as into prose as, Venerable erstwhile wert thou, O sacred city, in the whole world’s eyes. No more holy spot in all the world. Jove, when he saw thy shrines, blushed for his own chapel on the Tarpeian hill, and the builder of the Ephesian temple, contemplating thine, had smiled at and scorned justly his own performance.

However, a modern verse version can give this more of a sense of shape and energy: Sacred St Andrews, the whole wide world Saw you as the burgh of God. Jove, eyeing your great Cathedral, Blushed for his own wee Tarpeian kirk. The architect of the Ephesian temple, Seeing yours, felt like a fake. 13

Realizing that I enjoyed working with these Scottish neo-Latin poets, I went on to produce the parallel text Apollos of the North: Selected Poems of George Buchanan and Arthur Johnston, published by Polygon in Edinburgh in 2006. The book has a substantial introduction which includes a polemic about the decline of Latin in the 12

Latin text cited from Crawford (2006), 92.

13

Ibid. 93.

Reconnecting with the Classics

77

Scottish educational system. Apollos of the North also has biographical accounts of Buchanan and Johnston, but its individual poems are deliberately not footnoted. This meant that references unfamiliar to a general reader needed to be made clear within the poems themselves. Sometimes this was straightforward. Where, for instance, in a poem about Mary, Queen of Scots, and Queen Elizabeth, Buchanan has simply ‘Cum Scipione Laelium’, it was easy enough to say in English ‘those proverbial friends, | Laelius and Scipio’. 14 More fun, but sometimes harder to do, was to convey a sense to the reader that the poems could have an immediacy, and yet retain a sense of Latinity. Trying to do this in Buchanan’s ‘Coming to France’, for instance, where Buchanan calls France ‘patria gentium omnium’, I invoked in English ‘France, alma mater of the universe’. (Crawford (2006) 30, 31) From time to time, making versions of this poet, I sounded a Scottish accent. At the start of ‘Coming to France’, written just after Buchanan’s release from his arrest by the Portuguese Inquisition, where the Latin has: 15 Jejuna miserae tesqua Lusitaniae, Glebaeque tantum fertiles penuriae, Valete longum.

I begin the English-language version of the poem, Badlands of Portugal, bye-bye Forever, starving crofts whose year-round crop Is lack of cash. 16

The word ‘crofts’ Scotticizes this, though perhaps Buchanan’s Latin is already in tune with Scots: the Scots word ‘glebe’ (meaning a field belonging to a manse) is simply the Latin ‘gleba’. Among the versions of Buchanan in Apollos of the North, many are reasonably close to the Latin, but the most free is also the most performative. When making a version of some of the poems and part-poems from the ‘Beleago’ sequence in which Buchanan (a dramatist as well as a poet) attacks Beleago, the colleague at Coimbra University whom he believed had denounced him to the Inquisition, I pick up on hints and puns in 14 16

Ibid. 56, 57. Ibid. 31.

15

Latin text cited from Crawford (2006) 30.

78

Robert Crawford

the Latin, then try to riff on them in a spirit informed by Buchanan but also by the Scots poet William Dunbar, some of whose work Buchanan is known to have admired. The Beleago poem trashes your Sub-King Co-ordinator of Commercialisation, your Head of Advanced, Enhanced Entrepeneurship, that wee Master Beleago, MBA (Monster of Bestial Accumulation) . . . 17

This is very free. ‘Beleago’, in mentioning such things as the ‘Nobeleago Prize/For out-Cretaning Cretans with his Courses in Creative Lies’, is clearly anachronistic, but I hope it captures a vitriol in keeping with Buchanan’s. In an essay in another book 18 I have discussed Buchanan’s afterlives and made clear my wish to try to keep him in touch with popular and radical as well as scholarly traditions in Scottish culture. Suffice it to say here I have not tried to conceal moments of what seem to me anti-semitism, misogyny, or anti-Catholicism in this Neo-Latin poet whose epithalamium for Mary Queen of Scots was later followed by his turning against her, and whose impressive elegy for John Calvin has in it all the anti-papal invective one might expect from a Moderator of the Kirk just a few years after the Scottish Reformation. Working on Buchanan and Johnston for Apollos of the North, and writing in Scotland’s Books, The Penguin History of Scottish Literature (2007) an account of Scottish Literature which ranged across fifteen centuries and several languages has made me all the more aware of the significance of Scottish Latin. This internationally oriented body of work produced by writers inside and outside Scotland is attuned both to local and to international affairs. While it can be dismissed as dusty, at its best it seems to me exemplary and surely worth attending to when the relationship between literature and Scottish independence is a live, lively topic. There is a political as well as a poetic point in reminding readers of the internationalism of this literature of an independent Scotland, heard not just in Buchanan’s Francophilia, but also in the Admirable Crichton’s poem on his arrival at Venice: 19 17 19

18 Ibid. 9. Ford and Green (forthcoming). [Johnston] (1637), 268.

Reconnecting with the Classics

79

Dum procul a patria, Hadriaci prope litora ponti, Consedi, mediis celsam miratus in undis Stare urbem . . . Far from my homeland, by the Adriatic I stopped, stunned by that city rising there Dead-centre in the waves . . .

I found Crichton’s poem in the principal anthology of Scottish Latin poetry, the Delitiae poetarum Scotorum huius aevi illustrium (Delightful Productions of the Illustrious Scottish Poets of this Age), sponsored by Sir John Scot of Scotstarvit, edited by Arthur Johnston, and published in Amsterdam by John Blaeu in 1637. The poem looked interesting, but knew I would need a prose crib in order to work on it. Eventually, after taking soundings among various groups, I gave a talk about Apollos of the North to the West of Scotland Classical Association, after which an Italian-descended Classicist in the audience, Ronnie Santangeli of Renfrew, said he would be willing to make a literal prose version of James Crichton’s sixteenth-century Latin. Ideally, I would like to produce as a companion to Apollos of the North another book which provides modern versions of Crichton and further Scottish Latin poets, many never translated into English. It seems wisest to begin in a small way. When my friend the Italian poet Marco Fazzini, who lives and teaches in Venice where he has edited a history of Scottish literature, came to St Andrews to read at the StAnza poetry festival in 2007, I took him to see the house where Crichton lodged as a student in the 1570s. I also showed him Crichton’s Venetian poem. We hope to work with an artist to produce an artist’s book featuring the Admirable Crichton’s Latin with verse versions in English and Italian. If it comes off, this is likely to be the first appearance of Crichton’s poem in either of these modern languages. So largely forgotten, Scottish Latin poetry can still interest a modern audience. Sometimes simply because the original seems far removed from our own culture, versions of it can speak in a way that oscillates between apparent historical neutrality and alert contemporary engagement. If there is opportunism involved in finding poems in Latin or Greek which can do this, there is also a sense of confirmation in discovering ways the language of material dismissed

80

Robert Crawford

as ‘dead’ can find new life. I was aware of this recently in making the version of a Latin poem by Florentius Wilson of Elgin (c .1500– 1547) which I called ‘Wool and War’. As I write, the poem is due in the London Review of Books, and might be seen as having a bearing on the conflict in present-day Iraq. The point is less that Wilson’s poem prefigures events almost five centuries after it was written than that it signals kinds of commonality, division, and rhetoric which we sometimes too easily view as peculiar to our era. Making versions of Latin and Greek poems, however, is not just about ways in which they may be recreated to speak to specific moments in our time. It is about taking pleasure in crafting poems. I have just started working with John Taylor’s classical community drama group Theatre Odyssey, developing a production around the figure of Simonides. This is aimed at primary and early secondaryschool-age children in Scotland. For me the basic pleasure comes from something in the Simonidean fragments which seemed to call for the acoustic of the Scots tongue. Part of the attraction of that tongue may be that some aspects of it are very familiar, others strange. The sounds and rhythm may be recognizable, but elements of Scots vocabulary are odd to many readers or listeners. Somehow, this parallels the status of Greek. It’s foreign—‘all Greek to me’—but deeply embedded in our culture through stories, myths, and applications. The vernacular side to Scots gets round concerns about Greek as somehow ‘elitist’ in a country where most schools no longer teach it. The pithiness of Simonides (which I reconnected with in making versions of one or two of Buchanan’s Latin translations of him) fits well with a Scots sometimes associated with the nous of proverbs. Whether or not he really made them, epitaphs attributed to Simonides go well in Scots: I, Brotachus, lig here, a Gortyn Cretan, I didnae come tae die, jist tae sell shaes.

lie shoes

Or, to take the best known such epitaphs, the one on the Spartan dead at Thermopylae: Ootlin, tell oor maisters this: We lig here deid. We did as we were telt.

stranger told

Reconnecting with the Classics

81

It’s possible to build acoustic effects in Scots which help give the poems a body they could not have in English. That strengthens their sense of specific identity; they are largely comprehensible, yet retain enough to resist smooth assimilation. At times a direct classical presence in Scots can be used: The city is the dominie o the man.

teacher

This Simonides project is still in gestation. I hope it may introduce young children to poems short enough to memorize easily, to questions about what a ‘dead’ language might be, and to issues from their own culture as well as that of Greece. Simonides is about memory and remembering; most of all he is about the art of poetry. The poems and fragments attributed to him are as short and scanty as those of Sappho. Yet Anne Carson has demonstrated for our time just how powerful the fragments of Sappho can be, while Michael Longley in particular has made distinguished use of Greek in contemporary lyric poetry. For all the political and ideological patina which poems in Latin and Greek carry, the attraction of reconnecting with them is ultimately about locating a particularly clear sense of that attunement vital to poetry and to our sense of ourselves in the greater order around us. I want to reconnect with both in a fragment on Orpheus which attracted me some years ago when I saw it in the Loeb Simonides edition (567 PMG), and which, some time later, I recast as Scots: Abune his heid fleed coontless birds. The fush Flang theirsels up oot o the daurk-blae wattirs Jist for the drap-deid brawness o his sang.

above; head flew; fish flung; dark blue drop-dead beauty

4 Catullus in the Playground Anna Jackson

Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry . . . its continual labour of reassembling what has been scattered. John Berger. 1

In his manifesto Personism, Frank O’Hara celebrated his own work with the announcement: ‘the poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.’ 2 In fact, he says, he was about to write another poem when he realized he could just pick up the telephone instead. Perhaps it is lucky telephones hadn’t been invented when Catullus was writing his poems, which also seem to belong between two persons instead of two pages. Yet despite the address to a ‘you’ that characterizes many of Catullus’ poems, readers do not, as they do when reading a letter addressed to them, typically place themselves in the position of the person addressed. Rather, readers identify with Catullus himself. As G. T. Wright puts it, with full awareness of the a-historicity of such an identification: It’s strange to think of Catullus as having my feelings without my background. He’d hardly read anything, not a line of the Romantic poets or Shakespeare, 1

Berger (1984) 96–7. ‘Personism: A Manifesto’ Frank O’Hara, written in 1959 and first published in 1961; this quotation from O’Hara (1995) 499. 2

Catullus in the Playground

83

didn’t even know English, which is almost a prerequisite for a poet whose subject is me. Somehow he managed, in spite of these classical failings, to blunder into our song. 3

Wright here acknowledges difference, even as he insists on identification. George Steiner argues, paradoxically, that this awareness of difference is necessarily concomitant with a sense of contemporaneity: The true translator is he or she who . . . plunges us into the strangeness of the archaic world, into its distance and darkness and who almost blinds us with the contemporaneity, with the actuality of ‘a light that screams across three thousand years’ (Logue’s talismanic image). 4

It is of course more usual for translation theory to posit faithfulness to the original text and its original context on the one hand, and a contemporary style and readability on the other hand, as opposites, between which the translator somehow must negotiate a compromise. As Sarah Maguire summarizes the dilemma in an article ‘Translation’ in Poetry Review: Debates about translation have been raging since the Romans, and, crudely, they all come down to the same decision: whether to ‘domesticate’ the translation or to ‘foreignise’ it. In other words, as a translator you have to take a decision—a decision which is as much ethical as it is aesthetic—as to whether your translation should be as close as possible to a poem in English, or whether it should clearly announce its different, foreign qualities. 5

Although she discusses the possibility of negotiation between these two positions, it becomes clear that essentially she is in favour of ‘foreignising’ the work as the more ‘ethical’ approach, asking: Does the translator wish to negotiate with, or to dominate, the poet she’s translating? Is her main aim to enhance her own reputation, or does she want to introduce a new voice into English poetry by attempting to render the poet’s own ‘living body’ as vitally as possible?

Concluding that the aim of translation ought to be ‘to engage as fully as possible with the poet you’re translating, and her culture’, 3

Wright (1975) 174.

4

Steiner (1999).

5

Maguire (2004) 54.

84

Anna Jackson

she looks back on the Roman translation of the Greek poets as an appropriation. She quotes Friedrick Nietzsche’s unequivocal condemnation of this tradition (which would include Catullus’s use of the verse of Sappho) in terms of imperial conquest: In those days, indeed, to translate meant to conquer . . . in the sense that one would delete the name of the poet and insert the translator’s name in its place. And all this was done with the very best conscience as a member of the Roman Empire, without realising that such actions constitute theft. 6

However rather different associations are suggested by the term ‘domesticate’ than are suggested by the term ‘conquer’, and it is this term ‘domesticate’ which caught my attention as a way of considering what I myself was doing, when I was writing new versions of Catullus poems for my collection Catullus for Children. ‘Domestic’ is the term critics have used, in one review after another, to characterize the poetry of my two earlier collections, The Long Road to Tea-time and The Pastoral Kitchen, noting the references to my children, and the kitchen or household settings of many of the sequences. So if I were to domesticate Catullus in a way that would make my versions of his poetry really my own, this would have to involve not just a rendering of his work into a contemporary idiom, or a New Zealand setting, but a bringing home of the poetry into my own life and the lives of my children. The Catullus I have encountered has always been someone else’s Catullus. Even before I read translations of his work that aimed for accurate rendering of the original, I was familiar with the various versions of his poetry written in English from the Renaissance onwards. These versions have always brought Catullus home to the time and place in which the poet was writing, using local imagery and contemporary verse forms. From the beginning, I was writing Catullus for Children as a response not just to the work of Catullus himself but to the whole tradition of translating Catullus, and reworking Catullus into new versions of the originals, adapting them to fit different historical, geographical and cultural contexts. 7 It could be understood as

6 7

Nietzsche (1882), cited from Schulte and Biguenet (1992) 69. Jackson (2003).

Catullus in the Playground

85

a project of making myself at home in a tradition to which I wanted to belong. In New Zealand, one poet in particular has made Catullus his own, the acclaimed poet and academic C. K. Stead. Stead has returned to Catullus again and again, publishing a ‘Clodian Songbook’ as part of his collection Geographies in 1982, a second ‘Clodian Songbook’ in Between in 1988, as well as further individual versions of Catullus poems in Straw Into Gold (1997), The Right Thing (2000), Dog (2002), and, most recently, The Red Tram (2004). 8 Just as Renaissance poet Ben Jonson, when he translates the Catullus poems 5 and 7 as ‘Song to Celia’ and ‘To the same’, works with English metres and rhyme schemes to craft very English lyrics, so Stead works with the twentieth-century poetic convention of playing with the layout on the page, making good use of the tab key. Where Jonson relocates his verses beside the sands of Chelsey fields and the banks of the silver Thames, Stead sets his on the black sand beaches of Auckland’s west coast. Where Jonson translated Catullus’ references to ‘evil tongues’ and the ‘evil eye’ into the class-conscious English society anxiety about the gossip of those ‘house-hold spies’, the servants, Stead refers simply to the ‘old old’ who might disapprove of these young lovers: Clodia do you care does it chip at you that the old old should frown? Sundown over the lake beyond the etceteras bush-spike burned black on it on the red flush but we know where and when it returns Not so our youth light in the eye fire in the thigh and is it 8 For discussion of some of these poems see Stephen Harrison’s chapter in this volume.

86

Anna Jackson are you wanting when darkness knocks perpetual dormitory?

With the shifts in location and time has come a whole shift in sensibility. Stead’s versions of the poems are coloured all the way through by his awareness of the ‘old old’ and the whole long history between his post-modern lovers and the lovers Catullus and Lesbia. These are cynical, laconic, knowing poems, conscious of their place in a tradition. The landscape dissolves into ‘etceteras’, the poet and his lover know ‘where and how [the sun] returns’—this is after the age of Galileo— and in the next poem, his Clodian poem number 5, the countlessness of the stars and sandgrains is reduced to the conventional answer to Clodia’s conventional question: ‘Countless’ as they say also of stars / sandgrains— ask a conventional question, Clodia . . . . . . and you get another version of the same old, old poem.

Stead’s versions have always seemed to me to answer quite definitively the question of how Catullus might be translated into a New Zealand setting today. To domesticate Catullus further, so as to make my response to his poetry and the whole tradition of translating it a part of my own poetic practice, I brought the poems back in from the wild coastal settings of Stead’s versions, and gave them the domestic settings of my earlier collections of poetry. Yet the truth is that domesticity itself has always felt somewhat foreign to me. The domesticity of my earlier collections always centred less around the house than around my children, or centred around the house only because that is where my children live. Catullus for Children centres directly on the child, reworking poems by Catullus to present them from a child’s perspective. It was interesting to find that taking on a child’s sensibility seemed to bring me closer to the Renaissance versions than to Stead’s more contemporary versions of Catullus. In particular, the Renaissance versions nearly all pick up on Catullus’s strategy of exaggeration and excess, and this is a rhetorical strategy that I am very familiar with

Catullus in the Playground

87

from living with my son Johnny, who was seven when I was writing these poems. The poem ‘Homecoming’ seems the obvious choice for my first example of this ‘domestication’ of Catullus I am describing. It is a celebration of homecoming, and a celebration both of the child at the centre of the poem, and the child’s point of view more generally. I borrowed another useful strategy from the Renaissance poets, in this and other poems in the sequence, and that is the strategy of combining elements from more than one of the Catullus poems. The poem ‘Homecoming’ combines Catullus’ poem celebrating his homecoming to Sirmio, poem number 31, with the poem that takes the point of view of the person welcoming someone home, Catullus’ poem 9 welcoming home his friend Veranius. I have included, too, a reference to poem 51, Catullus’ own free reworking of the famous Sappho poem. When I wrote the poem we had recently returned to Auckland from a year in Hamilton, and Johnny’s return home truly was celebrated with this kind of excitement by the neighbouring children: Homecoming Look at you, home from Hamilton like a god! All the children of the cul-de-sac come running, as if you were bringing back dust from the moon, or had at least travelled by aeroplane and eaten off plastic trays. In your vivid narratives, Hamilton might as well be the moon, or a comic-book Mars where anything might happen. And the sun has come out! And the tui is singing! And even the grass is rolling about in waves and waves of laughter!

88

Anna Jackson How glorious to be you, home from Hamilton like a god! Though I’d rather be Theresa, Jason, Punam and Aman, falling down laughing into the laughing grass, limbs sprawled out to soak up the celebrating sun, ears roaring with rapture and eyes gazing on you, dazzled. . . .

The poem ‘Deer’ is my version of Carmen 5, picking up on the incessant quotation through the ages of the hundred, thousand kisses in the original poem by Catullus. Here the playground setting seemed to really work for me. In fact, the playground might be the last place left in our culture where anyone really is still anxious not to be caught kissing. I borrowed a bit of metamorphosis from Ovid too, about turning into a deer, which also seems to describe what I have seen of the effects of the playground setting on childhood behaviour: Deer Look at you! As soon as we touch the school grounds, you start to change—your legs lengthen, your whole body quivers, are you turning into a deer? You flee from me, who used to seek me out—wait just a minute! I only want a thousand kisses and then a hundred more, and then just one more thousand and a hundred added to that, and if we add some thousands more,

Catullus in the Playground

89

who would be able to count? We could kiss a million times and no-one could tell! A billion and the whirl of mouths would make such a force field it would propel you into class invisible, but on arrival, such a star. How did you do that? You wouldn’t have to tell.

‘Bomber Star’ is my version of Carmen 8, one of many Catullus poems where the fierceness with which he steels himself against Lesbia is just further evidence of the love. Childhood passions can be powerful too, and rejection felt very keenly. In our neighbourhood, there were constantly shifting friendships and allegiances. ‘Rufus’ who makes an appearance in this poem is the only invented character; the other neighbourhood children go by their real names. I used the name ‘Rufus’ for versions of a few of the invective poems, creating an amalgam character, around which I made up a sort of story for the sequence, not unlike the story of courtship, jealousy, betrayal, and anger that can be pieced together in a reading of the Catullus poems. Unlike Catullus I ended with reconciliation, since this is, after all, Catullus for children. But with ‘Bomber Star’ we are still at the betrayal stage: Bomber Star Look at you, on your bed, listening to the Beatles. Yesterday, the sun shone on you—you knocked on Theresa’s door and she came running— it was a good game you made up, and she wanted to be Bomber Star’s assistant, yesterday.

90

Anna Jackson Today, she wants to play with this boy Rufus, and you wouldn’t beg to join in for all the Pokemon figures ever catalogued, your tears wouldn’t wet a bacterium, you’re not playing with her till every grain of iron sand on Karekare beach has been washed away to America and back. She’ll be sorry. It was a good game, Bomber Star. She’ll be begging to play it with you.

In ‘Smiling’, Rufus is given the habit of Egnatius, in Carmen 39, of smiling inappropriately. This poem belongs to the jealousy stage, where all smiles seem out of place: Smiling Who is this boy, Rufus, anyway, and why is he always smiling? Here you are ready for war and what does he do but smile at you with his nice white teeth. And Theresa and Jason and Punam and Aman are all smiling too, as if they were in some dumb photograph! But there’s no photographer and no happy occasion,

Catullus in the Playground

91

just some dumb boy Rufus, calling out hello as if you too were going to run over, lick his boots and play with him. Would he smile at a funeral? Probably—if it was your one.

Rufus first appears as a character in ‘Poet’ and at this stage he is introduced as quite a compelling character. The closeness of hatred and attraction that characterizes Catullus’ relationship with Lesbia is apparent in many playground rivalries as well. ‘Poet’ is based on Carmen 22, where the prolific but mediocre poet Suffenus is mocked for his vanity. Carmen 22 is a subtle poem, with the complex turns the argument takes. It is an ironic twist that the poetry writing you might expect would enhance a wit’s reputation is precisely what lets him down (ironic, yet not unlikely—I can think of contemporary examples of the same phenomenon). Yet the ending of the poem adds another twist, with Suffenus’ obliviousness to the way his poetry blots his reputation as a wit acknowledged as just one example of the kinds of blind spots we all have to our own flaws. At the same time, the poem itself shows off both self-awareness and precisely the poetic skill and intellectual subtlety that Suffenus so embarrassingly lacks. I haven’t attempted to translate this kind of self-awareness and degree of subtlety into my version for the playground. I have however appropriated Suffenus’s poetry habit for this character Rufus, and, while I’ve kept the poor quality of his poetry-writing, I’ve turned the poem into more of a celebration of his love for poetry. The poem can even be read as a celebration of poetry more generally, though this involves dropping the emphasis placed by Catullus, as a poet of neoteric school, on the wit and technical skill that is so lacking in the verse of Suffenus. Poet There’s this boy Rufus in your class and he is so cool, everyone wants to play with him. But half the time, he is writing poetry,

92

Anna Jackson not just on scraps of paper but in handmade books all bound together with bits of leather and ribbon. Ribbon! Everyone wants to play with him, but he is writing poetry. And the poems are so bad, a new entrant could do better. But he is never happy, unless he is writing poetry. And you should see him then, the sun shines on him, his eyes go all cloudy, his ears are all deaf, he chews pencils into shreds, stares through walls, through the teacher, and when he writes, his hand whirls across the page like a swarm of locusts, he breathes in great gusts of air, his hair flops over the page, he’s like some sort of god! Who cares about the poetry, you all want to be poets.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the departure from the original made in this version should centre on this question of self-awareness. In ‘Poet’, as in Carmen 22, the attention that is on Rufus/Suffenus and his poetry-habit for most of the poem turns, at the end of the poetry, back to the point of view of the child-Catullus figure in my version, Catullus himself as the speaker in Carmen 22. The difference is, of course, that my child-Catullus figure doesn’t speak directly for himself, but rather his point of view is narrated by another speaker, addressing the child (and, here, his peers as well) in the second person. This is a significant departure from Catullus’ placement of the poem between two people, Frank O’Hara-style. At the same time,

Catullus in the Playground

93

it removes the possibility of the kind of passionate identification G. T. Wright describes himself feeling for Catullus when reading the original poems. So I probably do need to explain why I would address the child, as my Catullus-character, in the second-person and remove the other characters addressed as ‘you’ in the originals to a thirdperson position. In fact, when I began working on these versions of the Catullus poems, I found myself wanting to begin every poem ‘Look at you’. This phrase seemed essential every time to give the poem the initial momentum it needed to get going. Without it, the situations and images seemed static and inert. I didn’t really think I could write up a whole collection of poems all beginning with the same first line, but I began to think I would have to write first drafts of each of the poems starting with that line which I could then erase later. In the end, I alternated poems in loose couplets, beginning with that phrase ‘Look at you’, with poems running a single stanza down the page, which I either began differently, or revised later to take out the ‘Look at you’ opening. This odd compulsion, as well as the use of the second person pronoun generally, and even the focus on the child’s perspective that was my starting point, can all be understood in terms of Douglas Robinson’s representation of the translator as a kind of ‘seer’, channelling the work of the original poet. 9 As Robinson describes this channelling process in his book Who Translates?, the translator, or ‘seer’, becomes a kind of intermediary figure between two texts, one in each language. The translator, therefore, has a kind of doubled vision, reading two texts at once. This sense of the new version of the poetry as having a separate life of its own, corresponding to, but different from, the original, is reflected in my representation of the child as a figure corresponding to, but different from, the historical poet Catullus who wrote the original texts. My impulse to start my versions of the poems ‘Look at you’, can perhaps be understood as an impulse to acknowledge my position as a ‘seer’ who simply provides a link between the two voices, or two visions, of the two versions of the texts.

9

Robinson (2001).

94

Anna Jackson

As a ‘domesticating’ translator, not really a ‘translator’ in the usual sense at all, my attention is not so much on the original text as on the figure of my own imagination, a child in the position of the speaker in the original Catullus poem. The point of view therefore shifts in most poems to take up the point of view of the child, looking at the child’s relationships in the child’s own terms. Two of the poems alter the balance of point of view somewhat, and in both cases, this can be seen as a further reflection of the kind of domestication that is taking place. While most of the sequence takes the point of view, or looks at the point of view, of a seven-year-old boy, at the very end of the sequence I have included one last poem, ‘Catullus for Babies’, which is much less about the child’s experience of the world than about the mother’s. It is a poem, you could say, about the child’s domestication of the mother. ‘Catullus for Babies’ picks up on image of the rising sun, the aspect of Catullus’s Carmen 5 that I left out of the version ‘Deer’, with its focus on the hundreds and thousands of kisses. This image of the rising sun (and its contrast with the ‘perpetual dormitory’ of our own mortality) has, of course, its own history of borrowings, but the rising and setting of the sun looks very different after the birth of the baby which may well be the result of the reckless love-making that most versions of the poem invite. Indeed, mortality itself looks different to a tired mother: the idea of never having to get up again can seem very appealing at times. Catullus for Babies Look at you, balled up asleep like the sun. You have lived your whole life. You have hardly begun. You rise up not just in the mornings but again and again through the night— a sun out of sync, a mad dawn that repeats

Catullus in the Playground

95

days running up and over the screen like a tv with the tracking on the blink— How many sleeps till the morning? Let’s roll it all up into one.

‘Sparrow (as told by Elvira)’ shifts the balance of point of view in the opposite direction, not just looking at the child’s point of view but giving the child’s own account in the child’s words. I had in fact written ‘Sparrow’ some time before starting on the Catullus project, copying down as closely as I could remember it a real conversation my daughter, then aged four, had held with me about a dead bird’s wing she had found. What I found so interesting was the way she talked about life and death in terms of reality and pretence, with death being the reality she wanted to pretend not to believe in. Her complicated syntax and odd weighting of details reflect the difficulty of this imaginative work. It seems to me that her project really is the project of poetry, the project Catullus was working on, and the project the Renaissance translators of Catullus picked up, the project I continue to work on myself. So when I came to the two sparrow poems of Catullus, which have been so often, so variously, and so beautifully reworked over the centuries, I could see there was nothing I could write that would be better than using Elvira’s own words. My own role as ‘seer’ here is less important than her role in ‘domesticating’ the most foreign of concepts to a small child, the concept of death. The emphasis in her discussion of the death of the sparrow on the positioning of the breadbin, which acted as a coffin, on the deck of the house, and the exact layout of the deck in relation to the house, is itself an expression, I think, of the work of domestication in which she is engaged. So I would like to conclude this chapter by letting Elvira’s own words serve as a commentary not only on the death of a bird, in Hamilton, New Zealand, 2001, but also on this whole project of

96

Anna Jackson

domesticating the work of Catullus, a project only undertaken on the understanding that the original poetry of Catullus, in all its foreignness, could never be conquered, any more than we could conquer death. Sparrow (as told by Elvira) ‘I found a couple of some feathers from a bird. I pretended it was a real bird. But we saw it was a pretend bird. It looked like a real bird but it was a pretend bird. So we put it in my breadbin. It looked like it was a real bird. It was by the grass near the hole that we put the tadpoles in. So we put the breadbin somewhere else by the wall out on the front deck. And the breadbin was on the wood that was far up. It wasn’t low down, it was up. Under the other deck, it wasn’t on there, it was on the front deck, not the back deck. We had two decks. That’s the end of the story.’

5 Lapsed Classicist Michael Longley

I I have been Homer-haunted for fifty years. I treasure my battered copy of W. B. Stanford’s edition of the Odyssey. Charlie Fay, our Classics master at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (‘Inst’ for short), encouraged us to write the date at the end of each book when we had finished reading it. I completed my first, Book 10, just before Christmas 1956. There in the pernickety hand of the classical annotator is the date: 17. xii. 56. I was just seventeen, but like some elderly scholar I filled the margins with notes about the unseen digamma, the gnomic aorist, epexegesis, synizesis, sociative datives, and other technicalities that now mean little or nothing to me. During each class we would slowly translate ten or twenty lines, and then read the Greek aloud. Somehow the Homeric sunshine broke through all that cloudy donkeywork. I loved the sound of the Greek, the bumpy hexameters, the clash of the broad vowels, the way lips and tongue are vigorously exercised, hammer and tongs. And of course I adored the stories. An intimidating and often cruel figure, Charlie Fay pushed me to the limits of my abilities. The Classics for him were character-forming like long-distance running. Thanks to the drilling I received at Inst, I was able to survive my first two undergraduate years at Trinity College Dublin without doing much work. My career as a lapsed classicist had begun. My Greek professor, the great W. B. Stanford, believed that the Odyssey and the Iliad had been sung or chanted, and bravely gave us a demonstration. He deepened my love of Homer as much

98

Michael Longley

through the speculations in his study The Ulysses Theme 1 as through the scholarly notes at the back of his edition. I became obsessed with James Joyce’s Ulysses. It was intoxicating to wander from a Stanford lecture on, say, the Circe episode, to the dilapidated Turkish bathhouse on the street behind Trinity College and other nearby sites that Joyce used as settings for his great novel. My earliest Homerinfluenced poems were filtered through the shabby Dublin fanlights of Ulysses. In 1965 I wrote three such pieces and included them in my first collection No Continuing City: 2 ‘Circe’, ‘Nausicaa’, and ‘Odyssey’. In this youthful work Odysseus takes on the characteristics of a seedy Leopold Bloom: When I sight you playing ball on the sand, A suggestion of hair under your arms, Or, in shallows, wearing only the waves, I unpack strictly avuncular charms— To lose these sea legs I walk on land . . . 3

And Nausicaa is overshadowed by Gertie McDowell: ‘Pavilions, those days-off at the seaside . . . ’. The Homeric influence is not apparent again in my work until 1975 when I wrote and abandoned another poem called ‘Odyssey’. Although it is a failure, I quote from it here because it looks forward to the Homer-inspired and, for me, epiphanic sequence which was to emerge much later in 1989 and 1990 (‘Homecoming’, ‘The Butchers’, and five poems about Odysseus’s complicated reunions: ‘Eurycleia’, ‘Laertes’, ‘Anticleia’, ‘Tree-house’, and ‘Argos’): The last piece of that sexual Jigsaw puzzle which includes Circe, Nausicaa, Calypso, Is not Penelope his wife Whose shadow had been embroidered On all those other nightdresses, But the old nurse who bathed him And touch-read his identity 1

2 Stanford (1954). Longley (1969). From ‘Nausicaa’. Unless otherwise indicated, all poems are cited from Longley (2006). 3

Lapsed Classicist

99

By the braille of a boyhood scar And said that he was the baby She hadn’t recognised before Feeling her master all over. 4

Eurycleia returned a decade later, this time in prose and disguised as my nurse, Lena Hardy, a country girl who came from County Fermanagh to Belfast in 1939 to help my mother look after her twin babies while my father was off at the war. Lena became a surrogate mother. When she left at the end of the war, I was disconsolate. I celebrated her in a short memoir called Tuppenny Stung: ‘I began by loving the wrong woman.’ 5 It took me some time to realize that Lena was my Eurycleia. The opening line of my memoir did not require much adjustment: ‘I began like Odysseus by loving the wrong woman.’ When the old nurse recognizes Odysseus, loving-kindness irradiates the story: Such pain and happiness, her eyes filling with tears, Her old voice cracking as she stroked his beard and whispered ‘You are my baby boy for sure and I didn’t know you Until I had fondled my master’s body all over.’

Perhaps ‘Eurycleia’ relies too much on the reader knowing Tuppenny Stung. But although it is unresolved, the poem still matters to me because it sparked off the Homeric adventure of my fifties and sixties, my return to the Classics after a quarter of a century. From the outset, in my Homeric poems I pushed against the narrative momentum and ‘freeze-framed’ passages to release their lyric potential. To take a slightly later example, at the end of ‘Homecoming’: . . . they lifted Odysseus out of his hollow Just as he was, linen sheet and glossy rug and all, And put him to bed on the sand, still lost in sleep.

The intimation of shroud and swaddling clothes, birth and death, is given more time and space in which to resonate. A week after I had written ‘Eurycleia’ I was holidaying in a mountaintop village in Tuscany. Leaning out of the bathroom window to admire the surrounding mountains I spotted an elderly neighbour 4

See Brearton (2006) 160.

5

Longley (1994) 15.

100

Michael Longley

tending his vines beyond the last houses. Old Cesare reminded me of my father, then of Odysseus’s father. I had brought with me to Cardoso the two Loeb volumes of the Odyssey 6 and E. V. Rieu’s underrated translation. 7 With these to assist my creakingly unpractised Greek, I wrote ‘Laertes’ quickly and with a sense of release: When he found Laertes alone on the tidy terrace, hoeing Around a vine, disreputable in his gardening duds, Patched and grubby, leather gaiters protecting his shins Against brambles, gloves as well, and, to cap it all, Sure sign of his deep depression, a goatskin duncher . . .

The longer lines let loose new rhythms in my head. And ‘duncher’, the quaint Belfast dialect word for a flat cap (which caused some alarm among the fact-checkers of the New Yorker when the poem was published there) fixed for me the tone of this fairly free version: . . . Laertes recognised his son and, weak at the knees, Dizzy, flung his arms around the neck of great Odysseus Who drew the old man fainting to his breast and held him there And cradled like driftwood the bones of his dwindling father.

The last line is my invention, proof for me that the liberties I took were justified, a silversmith’s hallmark. The eighteen lines make up one long swaying sentence. For reasons I don’t fully understand the syntax of many of my poems unwinds through a single period (a substitute for end-rhyme perhaps?). I also seem obsessively reliant on symmetry. Three weeks after ‘Laertes’ I wrote a companion piece about Odysseus meeting his mother in the underworld. Another eighteenline poem in one continuous sentence, ‘Anticleia’ begins with two long conditional subordinate clauses and ends as a question: And if, having given her blood to drink and talked about home, You lunge forward three times to hug her and three times Like a shadow or idea she vanishes through your arms And you ask her why she keeps avoiding your touch and weep Because here is your mother and even here in Hades You could comfort each other in a shuddering embrace, Will she explain that the sinews no longer bind her flesh 6

Murray and Dimock (1995).

7

Rieu (1991).

Lapsed Classicist

101

And bones, that the irresistible fire has demolished these, That the soul takes flight like a dream and flutters in the sky, That this is what happens to human beings when they die?

‘You’ represents the reader or the speaker talking to himself. Here I do not attribute to Circe the advice and assistance she gave to Odysseus, nor do I include Odysseus’s questioning of Teiresias. I was not concerned with the narrative. I was looking for an intense lyric to set beside ‘Laertes’. The poems turned out to be the same length and that felt like an endorsement. I compressed the stories to release the personal meaning. Homer enabled me to write belated lamentations for my mother and father. Homer also empowered me to comment obliquely on the Northern Irish Troubles. I wrote ‘Anticleia’ when I was on holiday in a remote townland in south County Mayo. The landscape often looked like a sodden Ithaca. Odysseus would have recognized the whitewashed farms and outbuildings. He would also have understood the sticky intimate violence of our tawdry little civil war that was to drag on for thirty years. In Carrigskeewaun, with a cardboard box full of translations and commentaries, I started work on the episode where Odysseus slaughters the suitors. I had recently read The Shankill Butchers, 8 a study by Martin Dillon of a psychopathic loyalist gang who tortured and murdered many Catholics. These horrors haunted the composition of ‘The Butchers’. I admit to this with some reluctance because I do not want to be seen as the literal-minded besmircher of a great literary masterpiece. Lyric treatment of Book 22’s bloodthirsty ferocity demanded tumultuous syntax, twenty-eight fleet-footed alexandrine-like lines straining to the limit in one long sentence. I focused on the similes—‘like fish’, ‘like a lion’, ‘like longwinged thrushes’, ‘like bats’—and Hibernicized my version with such details as the ‘bog-meadow full of bog-asphodels’ and ‘sheughs’ (the Bog Meadows are in west Belfast and ‘sheugh’ comes from the Irish for ditch). My biggest liberty was to skip Book 23 and reconnect the frenzy of the bloodbath with the eerie opening of Book 24 where Hermes accompanies the suitors’ ghosts down into the underworld (I include the souls of the housemaids whom Homer seems to have overlooked). I felt very close to Homer. Writing ‘The Butchers’ was 8

Dillon (1990).

102

Michael Longley

an electrifying experience. I was shaking when I read it aloud to my wife in the small hours: And when they had dragged Melanthios’s corpse into the haggard And cut off his nose and ears and cock and balls, a dog’s dinner, Odysseus, seeing the need for whitewash and disinfectant, Fumigated the house and the outhouses, so that Hermes Like a clergyman might wave the supernatural baton With which he resurrects or hypnotises those he chooses, And waken and round up the suitors’ souls, and the housemaids’, Like bats gibbering in the nooks of their mysterious cave When out of the clusters that dangle from the rocky ceiling One of them drops and squeaks, so their souls were bat-squeaks As they flittered after Hermes, their deliverer, who led them Along the clammy sheughs, then past the oceanic streams And the white rock, the sun’s gatepost in that dreamy region, Until they came to a bog-meadow full of bog-asphodels Where the residents are ghosts or images of the dead.

Sometimes wordplay on its own can inspire a translation—the hidden depths of a pun. In ‘The Butchers’ there was no room for Phemios the poet and Medon the toastmaster, a pair of clowns among the sinister suitors. I wanted to give them a poem of their own. In UlsterScots the word for ‘clean’, ‘set in order’ is ‘redd’ (still widely used in Ulster). I visualised white walls splashed with blood. The act of cleansing is a bloody one. ‘Redd’ sparked off the poem ‘Phemios & Medon’. Pleading for mercy the cringing poet Makes a ram-stam for Odysseus, grammels his knees, Then bannies and bams wi this highfalutin blether.

I truffled through various Scots—English dictionaries (including the recently published A Concise Ulster Dictionary 9 ) and unearthed some marvellous words—‘scoot-hole’, ‘gabble-blooter’, ‘belly-bachelor’. For the wily Odysseus ‘long-headed’ sounded like just the right epithet. Homer’s language is an amalgam of dialects, I reassured myself. There are three registers in the poem. Telemachos is the Ulster-Scots narrator, Phemios and Medon sound orotund and theatrical (I kept Micheal Mac Liammoir’s fruity delivery in my head) and Odysseus 9

Macafee (1996).

Lapsed Classicist

103

speaks like an educated (but far from deracinated) Ulsterman. At the end of the poem Odysseus tells the sorry pair to go out ‘And sit in the haggard away from this massacre, You and the well-spoken poet, while I redd the house.’ They hook it and hunker fornenst the altar of Zeus, Afeard and skelly-eyed, keeking everywhere for death.

Again, when Teiresias foretells Odysseus’ death, he uses the phrase ex halos which can mean ‘out of the sea’ or ‘far from the sea’. This suggested the word ‘exhalation’ and inspired ‘The Oar’: I am meant to wander inland with a well-balanced oar Until I meet people who know nothing about the sea . . . ... ... And death will come to me, a gentle sea-breeze, no more than An exhalation, the waft from a winnowing fan or oar.

My little Joycean moment! The violence towards the end of the Odyssey brings us back full circle to the warfare of the Iliad. The Iliad inspired my next translations. I produced five reflections of the great epic in 1994, mirror fragments: ‘The Helmet’, ‘The Parting’, ‘The Campfires’, ‘The Scales’ and ‘Ceasefire’. ‘The Parting’ is only two lines long and depends for its existence on its six-syllable part-rhyme. The pathos is in the brevity, I hope: He: ‘Leave it to the big boys, Andromache.’ ‘Hector, my darling husband, och, och,’ she.

‘The Helmet’ too has a Northern Irish intonation. (The loyalist paramilitary leader Johnnie ‘Mad Dog’ Adair of the UDA who referred to his son as ‘Mad Pup’ did, alas, come to mind while I was writing it.) When Hector’s helmet frightens his baby son: His daddy laughed, his mammy laughed, and his daddy Took off the helmet and laid it on the ground to gleam, Then kissed the babbie and dandled him in his arms and Prayed that his son might grow up bloodier than him.

The magical simile with which Homer compares the campfires on the plain of Troy to the night sky has often reminded me of county Mayo

104

Michael Longley

where in the light-free darkness one can gaze up into the depths of the Milky Way. When I translated this passage in ‘The Camp-fires’ it seemed natural to include some place names and features from my corner of the Mayo landscape: There are balmy nights—not a breath, constellations Resplendent in the sky around a dazzling moon— When a clearance high in the atmosphere unveils The boundlessness of space, and all the stars are out Lighting up hill-tops, glens, headlands, vantage Points like Tonakeera and Allaran where the tide Turns into Killary, where salmon run from the sea, Where the shepherd smiles on his luminous townland.

In August 1994 there were strong rumours that the IRA were about to declare a ceasefire. I had been reading in Book 24 the account of King Priam’s visit to Achilles’ tent to beg for the body of his son Hector. Power shifts from the mighty general to the old king who reminds Achilles of his own father and awakens in him suppressed emotions of tenderness. Psychologically it feels pretty modern. I wanted to compress this scene’s two hundred lines into a short lyric, publish it and make my minuscule contribution to the peace process. I got started by tinkering with the sequence of events. Priam kisses Achilles’ hand at the beginning of their encounter. I put this at the end of my poem and inadvertently created a rhyming couplet. Three quatrains followed. I sent my sonnet to the then literary editor of the Irish Times, John Banville, who called ‘Stop Press’ and published it on the Saturday immediately following the IRA’s declaration of a ceasefire from midnight on 31 August 1994. i Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and Wept with him until their sadness filled the building.

ii Taking Hector’s corpse into his own hands Achilles Made sure it was washed and, for the old king’s sake,

Lapsed Classicist

105

Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak.

iii When they had eaten together, it pleased them both To stare at each other’s beauty as lovers might, Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed:

iv ‘I get down on my knees and do what must be done And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.’

The sort of lyric I write almost always makes its occasion in private. ‘Ceasefire’ was an exception. Priests and politicians quoted from it. In her survey of Irish poetry in the 1990s for the anthology Watching the River Flow Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill says: ‘Its effect was dynamic and rippled right through the community, both North and South.’ 10 Peter McDonald on the other hand writes of ‘Ceasefire’ that ‘the poet’s ability to keep at a distance from the parallels which his material suggests is crucial to the poem’s success’. 11 In other words it was Homer who spoke to us across the millennia. I was only his mouthpiece.

II My first sustained attempt at translation was from the Latin. As an undergraduate I was drawn to the neurotic and strangely à la mode poetry of Sextus Propertius (‘Propertius, my soul mate, love’s polysyllabic | Pyrotechnical laureate reciting reams by heart’ as I described him decades later in ‘Remembering the Poets’). Three versions from the early sixties have survived the wastepaper basket, each a different strategy for capturing in English the ebb and flow of the Latin love elegy. 12 In ‘A Nightmare’ I used a decasyllabic line (with risky enjambments) and a straightforward rhyme scheme: 10 12

In Duffy and Dorgan (1999) 222–3. Now in Longley (2008).

11

McDonald (2000) 45.

106

Michael Longley Had they seen you then, the mermaids for envy Would have scolded you, so beautiful and One of them, a white girl from the blue sea, Loved by mermen and by men on the land.

The line lengths vary and the rhyme scheme is more demanding in ‘Cupid’. If he is destroyed by Cupid, the poet says, and with him The little genius which is all I have to show, Who will celebrate the face and curls, The fingers and dark eyes of my girl, And who will sing of how softly her footsteps go?

The ten-line freely rhymed stanza that evolved as I worked on Propertius’ great death-poem ‘Cornelia’ was, formally, a break-through for me. (I used it later for ‘In Memoriam’, the first of my poems about my father’s experiences in the Great War): Because forefathered by Achilles, By Hercules who cracked whole palaces, You, Perseus, took heart, please witness that Paullus in his ordinance as magistrate Never favoured me, nor by a single sin To redden his fireside with embarrassment Did Cornelia disgrace his name. A model wife in his establishment, She lived, unchangeable, beyond all blame, Praiseworthily from marriage-bed to coffin.

I intended the unpredictable spacing of my rhymes to echo the unsettling alternation of pentameter and hexameter in the Latin. And I felt that eccentric usages like ‘forefathered’ and ‘praiseworthily’ had a Propertian ring to them. ‘Cornelia’ helped me to discover the sort of noise I was looking for in a line of verse. Thirteen years later, in 1976, I met Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan in a Belfast pub shortly after they had won the Nobel Peace Prize. I congratulated them on their great honour and on their movement’s newspaper Peace News, but suggested they were publishing feeble poems in it. ‘If you don’t like the friggin’ poems, why don’t you write one for us?’ Betty Williams demanded. That evening in a kind of Sortes Virgilianae I opened my Loeb edition of Tibullus at Quis

Lapsed Classicist

107

fuit, horrendos primus qui protulit enses? (1.10). 13 The coincidence galvanized me and over a few intense days I wrote ‘Peace’: ‘Who was responsible for the very first arms deal–| The man of iron who thought of marketing the sword?’ As with ‘Cornelia’, I chose a tenline stanza and risked being left with too few lines at the end, or too many. Again, my gamble paid off. Superstitiously, I believe that this points to some kind of formal and spiritual accord: I want to live until the white hairs shine above A pensioner’s memories of better ways. Meanwhile I would like peace to be my partner on the farm, Peace personified: oxen under the curved yoke; Compost for the vines, grape-juice turning into wine, Vintage years handed down from father to son; Hoe and ploughshares gleaming, while in some dark corner Rust keeps the soldier’s grisly weapons in their place; The labourer steering his wife and children home In a hay cart from the fields, a trifle sozzled.

In ‘Peace’ each stanza is a self-contained argument, which perhaps compensates for the absence of rhyme. I have been end-rhyming less over the years, relying more on internal rhyme, assonance and syntactical reach. Here the hexametrical line looks forward to my later collections. I end ‘Peace’ with a flourish that stretches but does not, I trust, distort the Latin: As for me, I want a woman To come and fondle my ears of wheat and let apples Overflow between her breasts. I shall call her Peace.

In 1992 I was invited by Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun to contribute to a collection of versions from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. For After Ovid 14 I translated one of the loveliest stories in the world, the tale of faithful Baucis and Philemon’s encounter with the gods and how Jupiter rewards their hospitality and generosity of spirit. I began at the end of the poem and worked backwards with occasional glances towards the opening. I wanted the climax–whatever the number of lines—to provide the overall stanzaic pattern. Again, as with ‘Cornelia’ and ‘Peace’, I was in luck. The story in my version 13

Postgate in Cornish et al. (1913) 244.

14

Hofmann and Lasdun (1994).

108

Michael Longley

progresses through eighteen self-contained five-line stanzas, many of them little chronicles of workaday metamorphosis: the embers that turn ‘leaves and dry bark’ into flames; the cabbage and smoked bacon ‘simmered in bubbling water to make a stew’; the sofa and mattress that a simple coverlet transforms into a throne for the gods. The old couple’s humility and loving-kindness light up the story and throw a halo around mundane objects. These ‘everyday miracles’ set the scene for the poem’s supernatural wonders: the wine jug that ‘filled itself up again’; the cottage that ‘became a church’; and, finally, the old couple’s transfiguration: ‘As tree-tops overgrew their smiles they called in unison | “Goodbye, my dear”.’ Happy to follow the original more closely than usual, I did not leave out one of Ovid’s affectionate details. And at the close I added a couple of my own: Two trees are grafted together where their two bodies stood. I add my flowers to bouquets in the branches by saying ‘Treat those whom God loves as your local gods–a blackthorn Or a standing stone. Take care of caretakers and watch Over the nightwatchman and the nightwatchman’s wife.’

It is surprising to find in Metamorphoses this unironical celebration of a long happy marriage. In their introduction Hofmann and Lasdun give us an astonishing list of what we can normally expect: ‘holocaust, plague, sexual harassment, rape, incest, seduction, pollution, sexchange, suicide, hetero- and homosexual love, torture, war, childbattering, depression and intoxication.’ 15 I now wanted to explore the weirder zones. From February to October 1993 I wrote six more versions (all of them included in After Ovid): ‘Perdix’, ‘Spiderwoman’, ‘A Flowering’, ‘Ivory & Water’, ‘Phoenix’, and ‘According to Pythagoras’. I took considerable liberties with three of these. ‘A Flowering’ touches on ageing and sexual ambiguity, and is the most personal. I combined myths surrounding the anemone (or ‘windflower’) and the wild hyacinth which sprang up from the blood of ‘Ovid’s lovely casualties’, Adonis and Hyacinthus. And I invoked ‘my own son’s beauty’: ‘Youth and its flower named after the wind, anemone’. Highhandedly perhaps, I made ‘Spiderwoman’ fifty percent Ovid’s invention and 15

Ibid., p. i.

Lapsed Classicist

109

fifty percent my own: ‘Arachne starts with Ovid and finishes with me.’ Into five lines I concentrated Ovid’s scary account of Arachne dwindling to a spider. The next five lines were influenced by my general reading about spiders: ‘I avoid the spinnerets—navel, vulva, bum—| And the widening smile behind her embroidery.’ By the last line I have become, I hope, Ovid’s apprentice: ‘She wears our babies like brooches on her abdomen.’ I bring three mythological figures together in ‘Ivory & Water’: Arethusa who turned into a spring to protect her virtue, Cyane who dissolved herself in her own tears, and Pygmalion who made a beautiful girl out of ivory and fell in love with her. Fran Brearton suggests that ‘Ivory & Water’ is ‘about mortality and creativity, and about the tension between the two’. 16 I agree with the editors of After Ovid when they say that the stories ‘offer a mythical key to most of the more extreme forms of human behaviour and suffering’. 17 I quote the whole poem: If as a lonely bachelor who disapproves of women You carve the perfect specimen out of snow-white ivory And fall in love with your masterpiece and make love to her (Or try to) stroking, fondling, whispering, kissing, nervous In case you bruise ivory like flesh with prodding fingers, And bring sea-shells, shiny pebbles, song-birds, colourful wild Flowers, amber-beads, orchids, beach-balls as her presents, And put real women’s clothes, wedding rings, ear-rings, long Necklaces, a brassière on the statue, then undress her And lay her in your bed, her head on the feathery pillows As if to sleep like a girlfriend, your dream may come true And she warms and softens and you are kissing actual lips And she blushes as she takes you in, the light of her eyes, And her veins pulse under your thumb at the end of the dream When she breaks out in a cold sweat that trickles into pools And drips from her hair dissolving it and her fingers and toes, Watering down her wrists, shoulders, rib-cage, breasts until There is nothing left of her for anyone to hug or hold.

In ‘According to Pythagoras’ I further compress the selection Ovid made from the philosopher’s teachings. What by modern experimental standards would be judged bad science works wonderfully well as 16

Brearton (2006) 196.

17

Hofmann and Lasdun (1994) xi.

110

Michael Longley

surreal poetry: ‘There’s a theory that in the grave the backbone rots | Away and the spinal cord turns into a snake.’ Occasionally, as in the reference to the hyena’s genitalia, an uncanny scientific accuracy takes us by surprise: ‘the female mounted by a male | Just minutes before, becomes a male herself.’ (The female does indeed flaunt false male genitals: a power game.) Both the scientific and the surreal appealed to Ovid, and to me. When I had finished I counted, to my dismay, twenty-nine lines. With an extra line the poem would have divided perfectly into three ten-line stanzas: my hunger for symmetry again. My wife reminded me of a leitmotif from Douglas Adams’s glorious post-Ovidian Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, 18 and for reasons numerical and poetical I appropriated it: ‘The fundamental interconnectedness of all things / Is incredible enough, but did you know that . . . ’.

III Translation has been fundamental to my imaginative development. Versions that reflect my preoccupations at a deep level feel to me like my own poems, especially when, as is usually the case, I combine free rendition of source texts with original lines. My best example is ‘The Evening Star’, written in memory of Catherine Mercer (1994–96): The day we buried your two years and two months So many crocuses and snowdrops came out for you I tried to isolate from those galaxies one flower: A snowdrop appeared in the sky at dayligone, The evening star, the star in Sappho’s epigram Which brings back everything that shiny daybreak Scatters, which brings the sheep and brings the goat And brings the wean back home to her mammy. 19

18

Adams (1987). For relevant lines of Sappho (and some comment on my poem) see Crawford, Ch.3 above, pp. 67–9. 19

Lapsed Classicist

111

Without Sappho’s exquisite fragment, lightly Hibernicized, and the loveliest word I know for evening, ‘dayligone’ in Ulster dialect, I could not have broached this heartrending subject. Sulpicia, Virgil, and Horace have also sparked off a handful of poems. Although I love the Georgics, I have so far translated only one short passage from Book 3. It pleases me that in ‘Hippomanes’ Virgil’s description of mares in heat sounds rather Ovidian: Randiest of all, taking in their stride mountains And rapids for sex, biting your hand off, mares Kindled in springtime, gonads ablaze, silhouetted On a cliff where they turn as one to face the wind, Snuffle the air and often–not a stallion in sight— Are impregnated . . .

Two free adaptations from the beginning and the end of Horace’s Ars Poetica allowed me to be self-conscious about poetry without drawing attention to myself: 20 We postmodernists can live with that human head Stuck on a horse’s neck, or the plastering of multiColoured feathers over the limbs of assorted animals . . .

‘The Mad Poet’ is my most outspokenly Northern Irish translation. How many versifiers wondered if the duncher fitted them? His mad-dog shite has everyone–the poetry-buffs And the iggerant–shit-scared: he grabbles you, then He reads you to death, a leech cleeking your skin Who won’t drop off until he is boke-full of blood.

A group of Greek poets and a group of Latin poets provide me with a coda. In my most recent collection Snow Water 21 I included a poem called ‘The Group’, a suite of seven short pieces derived from the Loeb Greek Lyric series. 22 Each stars a minor poet—Lamprocles, Myrtis, Telesilla, Charixenna. The obscurer the poet the more I was attracted. Next to nothing is known about most of them. Teetering on the verge of almost total oblivion, they hold out in a few fragments, or as a 20 For the Latin originals (the opening and closure of the Ars Poetica, lines 1–3 and 472–6) see Fairclough (2005) 450 and 486. 21 22 Longley (2004a). Campbell (1992).

112

Michael Longley

one-liner in Aristophanes, or a footnote in some ancient critic’s essay. I chose the title mischievously, as ‘a red herring which is meant to put researchers of the Belfast Group off the trail for as long as possible’. 23 Some readers will look for Seamus Heaney behind ‘Ion of Chios, the prize-winning poet’ or Medbh McGuckian behind ‘hypochondriacal Telesilla’. But they will be missing the point. In its light-hearted way, ‘The Group’ is concerned with the poetic trade in general and what it involves: careerism, fashion, fame, obscurity, integrity, contamination, factionalism, camaraderie, intrigue, idealism, transitoriness, failure. Groups of poets do not change all that much over the centuries. The last poet in ‘The Group’ represents us all: Oblivious to being out of date, Which of us will not appear as dopey As Charixenna, oldfashioned pipe-player And composer of oldfashioned tunes And, according to some, a poet too?

In contrast, most of the poets in my Latin group are very well known indeed. In Tristia 4.10 the exiled Ovid gives us a tantalizing glimpse of his poetic friends far away in Rome. 24 He writes warmly about Propertius and Horace and regrets that Tibullus’ early death thwarted their friendship. Virgil he only saw, he says (Vergilium vidi tantum) but, yes, they all knew each other! In addition to these immortals he names three other members of the coterie (sodalicii) who have completely faded away: Macer, Ponticus, and Bassus. Three busy literary careers, and hardly a word survives. 25 I used Ovid’s lines as the basis for ‘Remembering the Poets’, a playful sonnet about the friendship of poets. The personalities of my own brilliant contemporaries kept crowding in from the back of my mind. The poem expresses brotherly love for them and for the poets I converse with across the millennia: As a teenage poet I idolised the poets, doddery Macer trying out his Ornithogonia on me, And the other one about herbal cures for snake bites, Propertius, my soul mate, love’s polysyllabic 23

24 Longley (2004b). For the Latin text see Wheeler (1996) 201. For the exiguous fragments of Macer see Hollis (2007) 93–117; nothing is extant from the other two. 25

Lapsed Classicist Pyrotechnical laureate reciting reams by heart, Ponticus straining to write The Long Poem, Bassus (Sorry for dropping names) iambic to a fault, Horace hypnotising me with songs on the guitar, Virgil, our homespun internationalist, sighted At some government reception, and then Albius Tibullus strolling in the woods a little while With me before he died, his two slim volumes An echo from the past, a melodious complaint That reaches me here, the last of the singing line.

113

This page intentionally left blank

Part II Poets in the Theatre

This page intentionally left blank

6 Weeping for Hecuba1 Tony Harrison

What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her? Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2

Though no doubt the original Athenian audiences wept for Hecuba in the two plays in which she is the principal figure—Hecuba of about 423 bc and The Trojan Women of 415 bc—the first named person we know to have done so was a notoriously cruel tyrant, Alexander of Pherae, in the fourth century bc, and he was ashamed of it. Plutarch tells his story in two versions, and in one it seems that the monster shed tears at a performance of The Trojan Women and in the other at a performance of Hecuba. The tyrant was so moved to pity by the spectacle of the Queen of Troy reduced to slavery—without husband, sons, or city—that he jumped up and ran from the theatre as fast as he could. He said it would be terrible if, when he was killing so many of his own subjects, he should be seen to be shedding tears over the sufferings of Hecuba and Polyxena, the daughter of Hecuba sacrificed after the Trojan War was over to appease the ghost of Achilles. Alexander almost had the actor who played Hecuba severely punished for having softened his heart ‘like iron in the furnace’. 1 A version of this piece was first published in The Guardian, 19 May 2005; this revised form was published in Tony Harrison, Euripides’ Hecuba (London, 2005). Tony Harrison’s Hecuba was first staged at the Albery Theatre, London, on 26 March 2005.

118

Tony Harrison

What the man of iron had been surprised by was that bond of empathy and compassion that can cross centuries, and which, along with the imagination that needs to be primed to experience both, was dangerously undermining for the tyranny and oppression that upheld Alexander’s power. Tyranny and empathy can’t coexist. In these two plays of Euripides, set in the immediate aftermath of the Trojan war, the poet creates one of the great archetypes of suffering. For an actress it is a role of the tragic grandeur of King Lear, except that for the Queen of Troy the play begins by cutting straight to Shakespeare’s Act III: the storm and the heath—and the sense of total deprivation. Hecuba enters deprived of everything she had—husband, sons, city, wealth, status—reduced to ending her days as a Greek slave scrubbing Agamemnon’s latrines. This reversal of fortune was the theme that appealed to the earliest appreciators of Hecuba in the sixteenth century, when it was translated from Greek into the more accessible Latin by Erasmus and Philip Melanchthon, who put on his version acted by students of his University at Wittenberg, where Hamlet was said to have studied. The other theme was revenge; though it is a strange play about revenge that begins with the ghost of a murdered Trojan boy asking simply for burial and a last embrace from his mother, Hecuba. But he also tells us of another, angrier, unresigned ghost: that of Achilles, who can’t rest without the shedding of more innocent blood. We are encouraged to cheer Hecuba on to her revenge against Polymestor, who has murdered her son Polydorus for gold, though we are chilled by the action when it happens. Euripides never makes it easy for us, tears or no tears. It took the twentieth century’s horrors and the rediscovery of The Trojan Women to turn the moralist of fate and the vicissitudes of fortune into an almost modern political playwright. Once discovered, it revealed that Hecuba was about the corruption of both power and powerlessness. The range of compromised violence it covers, even from a distance of twenty-five centuries, is from computerized aerial bombardment to the suicide bomber. Three months after Franz Werfel, the Austrian poet and dramatist, translated The Trojan Women in 1914, the Serbian nationalist Princip assassinated Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. In his preface to his version of Euripides’ play, Werfel had written prophetically: ‘Tragedy

Weeping for Hecuba

119

and hapless Hecuba may now return; their time has come.’ In fact, Hecuba’s time had already come at the beginning of the century, since when her glaring spotlight has never been dimmed. Gilbert Murray, early idealist of the League of Nations and (despite the later rejection of his Swinburnian poetic ear) the great popularizer of Greek drama, did a version of the same Trojan Women, which Harley Granville Barker, who was responsible for ground-breaking productions of Greek Tragedy, directed at the Royal Court Theatre in 1905. The production was seen as ‘pro-Boer’. Murray was outspoken in his opposition to the Boer war. He saw inevitable parallels between the suffering of Hecuba and the women of Troy and the Boer women and children whose homesteads were burnt to the ground and who were interned by Lord Kitchener in concentration camps—a phrase coined then to describe this British invention. The Edwardians were made to squirm uncomfortably with guilt at the obvious similarities between Greek and British imperialism. Euripides no doubt deliberately made his audience squirm when in an almost blasphemous parody of a democratic process he shows the assembled coalition army debating whether to sacrifice Polyxena, the daughter of Hecuba. The principal proposers of the motion are Athenians, the two sons of Theseus. He allows Odysseus, the ‘molasses mouth’ master of spin, to win over the coalition vote for sacrificing an innocent girl. The girl, Polyxena, is to be sacrificed to the ghost of Achilles by Achilles’ son, the notoriously psychotic Arkan-like Neoptolemus. Neoptolemus’ notoriety is given graphic detail on some extant vases. On a red-figure vase in the Archaeological Museum of Naples, Neoptolemus is shown hacking savagely at the old King Priam, the husband of Hecuba, who has their grandson on his knees, also hacked to death. There are numerous slashes and gashes on the body of the child and on the old man’s head, to show the fury of the assault. On a cup in the Louvre, Neoptolemus is shown braining Priam with the hacked body of his dead grandson. He is also shown, nearer home in the British Museum, sticking his sword into the gullet of Polyxena, who is held over the sacrificial tomb by three soldiers. It is one of the most brutal of amphorae. It makes us think of Nietszsche’s description of the Greeks as ‘civilized savages’. Euripides knows the track record of Neoptolemus but he deliberately gives another version, which shows him moved for a moment,

120

Tony Harrison

like Alexander. Pity wells up in him and has to be suppressed. The Greek coalition’s messenger, Talthybius, who goes further and weeps for the daughter of Hecuba, in a great descriptive speech tells how Polyxena requests that no one should restrain her and that she will die ‘free’. He describes her being lifted on to the tomb like a stage from which she makes her speech and then, of her own will, rips open her robe and bares her breast and throat to the executioner’s sword-thrust. Even Neoptolemus is impressed at the bravery of the victim’s performance and for an instant holds back his sword. But only for an instant. There are tears in the Greek coalition ranks and they throw tokens of regard on the body of the girl, though they’d roared assent at the decision to sacrifice an innocent. Behind it also lies Euripides’ questioning of the use of tears and, by implication, of tragic drama itself, at a time when Athens was in the process of a bloody and ultimately self-destructive war. Or at any time since for that matter. In my notebooks, where I glue pictures among the drafts of translations from the Greek tragedies I’ve done, is the recurring image of an old woman appealing to the camera that has captured her agony or the heavens that ignore it, in front of the utter devastation that had been her home, or before her murdered dead. They are all different women from many places on earth with the same gesture of disbelief, despair, and denunciation. They are in Sarajevo, Kosovo, Grozny, Gaza, Ramallah, Tbilisi, Baghdad, Falluja—women in robes and men in hard metal helmets, as in the Trojan war. Under them all, over the years, I have scribbled Hecuba. My notebooks are bursting with Hecubas. Hecuba walks out of Euripides from 2,500 years ago straight on to our daily front pages and into our nightly newscasts. She is never out of the news. To our shame she is news that stays news. When Granville Barker took Gilbert Murray’s version of The Trojan Women to New York in May 1915 and played in the Adolph Lewisohn Stadium, an effort was made to persuade President Woodrow Wilson to write a special preface to the published text, but he replied that he must ‘detach himself from everything which seems to bear the character of an attempt to make opinion even in the interest of peace’. I wonder what President Bush would reply if the RSC asked him to write a preface to my version of Hecuba to coincide

Weeping for Hecuba

121

with its visit to the Kennedy Centre in Washington. And would he weep for Vanessa’s Redgrave’s Hecuba if he could be somehow tricked into attending a performance? Just after the First World War, in 1919, Sybil Thorndike played Hecuba at the Old Vic, in order to raise funds for the newly founded League of Nations (Gilbert Murray was the chairman of the League of Nations’ Union). She tells of a tough Cockney barrow-woman saying to her, ‘Well, dearie, we saw your play . . . and we all ’ad a good cry— you see, them Trojans was just like us, we’ve lost our boys in this war, ’aven’t we, so no wonder we was all cryin’—that was a real play, that was, dearie.’ Sybil Thorndike describes a later performance at the Alhambra Theatre in Leicester Square as the most moving she could ever remember: ‘All the misery and awfulness of the 1914 war was symbolized in that play, and we all felt here was the beginning of a new era of peace and brotherhood.’ Many had a good cry, but the League that Hecuba’s tragic fate raised funds for didn’t prevent the Second World War, and the four Doric columns used in this setting for the sufferings of Sybil Thorndike’s Hecuba were destroyed in a German bombing raid on the RADA theatre in the London blitz. Nor did the UN, the institution that succeeded the League, manage to prevent the ‘coalition’ invading Iraq. We may still be weeping for Hecuba, but we allow our politicians to fill the streets of Iraq with more and more Hecubas in the name of freedom and democracy. The audience might weep for Hecuba in Washington when the tragedy plays there, but will they squirm with regret for Iraq, or the re-election of George Bush, or pause a moment before going for the gullet of Iran?

7 Title Deeds: Translating a Classic1 Seamus Heaney

Twenty-three years ago, in May 1981, there was a gathering at once solemn and dangerous in the village of Toomebridge in Northern Ireland. The name of the place comes from the Irish word tuaim, meaning, as you would expect, a burial mound, and in the circumstances that meaning was most appropriate. The bridge at Toome links County Antrim, on the east bank of the River Bann, to County Derry, on the west bank, and a lot of the crowd that were gathered in the main street of the village on this particular occasion had crossed from the County Derry side. They were there to meet a hearse that contained the body of a well-known County Derry figure, and once the hearse arrived they would accompany it back to a farmhouse on a bog road some six or seven miles away, where the body would be waked in traditional style by family and neighbours. They had come to Toome to observe custom and to attend that part of the funeral rite known in Ireland as ‘the removal of the remains’. But before the remains of the deceased could be removed that evening from Toome, they had first to be removed from a prison some thirty or forty miles away. And for that first leg of the journey the security forces deemed it necessary to take charge and to treat the body effectively as state property. The living man had, after all, been in state custody as a terrorist and a murderer, a criminal lodged in Her Majesty’s Prison at the Maze, better known in Northern Ireland as the H Blocks. He was a notorious figure in the eyes of Margaret Thatcher’s 1 This piece was originally read as the Jayne Lecture to the American Philosophical Society on 23 April 2004.

Title Deeds: Translating a Classic

123

government, but during the months of April and May 1981 he was the focus of the eyes of the world’s media. His name was Francis Hughes and although I did not know him personally, I knew and liked other members of his family. They were our neighbours and during the 1950s I had walked the road to Mass with his sisters and had worked in summertime in the bog side by side with his father. Now, however, his world and mine were far apart. For the last fifty-nine days of his life Francis Hughes had been on hunger strike, one of a group of IRA prisoners ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for what were known at the time as the five demands. Basically these demands constituted a claim by the prisoners to political status, a rejection of the demonizing terminology of criminal, murderer, and terrorist, and an assertion of their rights to wear their own clothes, to abstain from penal labour and to associate freely within their own cell block. Faced with all this, Margaret Thatcher and her government were predictably inflexible and between 5 May and 30 August 1981, ten hunger strikers died, resulting in a steady issue of emaciated corpses from the gates of the prison and repeated processions of miles long funeral crowds through the gates of cemeteries. It was a cruel time, but especially so for those on the nationalist side of the Northern Ireland divide, all those who sought fundamental political change, who wanted to break the Unionist Party’s monopoly on power, but who nevertheless did not think it an end worth killing for. It was possible for them, as for everyone else, to regard hunger strikes both as an exercise in Realpolitik and an occasion of sacred drama. Undoubtedly there were huge propaganda rewards for the IRA in the spectacle of their volunteers fasting to the end for a principle. Even so, many on the nationalist side still felt cautious about expressing public support for them, however noble their sacrifice. Support for their fast could be read by the IRA and others as support for their violent methods, so many people hesitated. But in their hesitation they were painfully aware that they were giving silent assent to the intransigence and overbearing of Margaret Thatcher, who stated with a too brutal simplicity that ‘Crime is crime, is crime. It is not political.’ And Thatcher greeted the news of the death of the first hunger striker, Bobby Sands, with a statement in the House of Commons to the effect that ‘Mr Sands was a convicted criminal. He

124

Seamus Heaney

chose to take his own life. It was a choice that his organization did not allow to many of its victims.’ 2 This was the context in which the crowd of sympathizers waited for the hearse at Toomebridge, a crowd that naturally included family members, friends, and neighbours in great numbers, and an even greater number of political supporters, enraged at the hijacking of the body. Who owned it? By what right did the steel ring of the defence forces close round the remains of one who was son, brother, comrade, neighbour, companion? If ever there was a dramatization of the contest between what Hegel called the ‘Instinctive Powers of Feeling, Love and Kinship’ and ‘the daylight gods of free and self-conscious, social, and political life’, 3 it was that evening when the hearse with its police escort arrived on the village street and the cordon that surrounded it was jostled in fury and indignation by the waiting crowd. The surge of rage in the crowd as they faced the police that evening was more than ideological. It did of course spring from political disaffection, but it sprang also from a sense that something inviolate had been assailed by the state. The nationalist collective felt that the police action was a deliberate assault on what the Irish language would call their dúchas, something that is still vestigially present even in English-speaking Ulster in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The Irish critic Brendan Devlin has remarked that dúchas is as untranslatable a term as virtù or honnête homme, but he still offers this account: In an effort to explain it in English, the Royal Irish Academy’s dictionary of the common old Gaelic languages uses such terms as ‘inheritance, patrimony; native place or land; connection, affinity or attachment due to descent or long-standing; inherited instinct or natural tendency’. It is all of these things and, besides, the elevation of them to a kind of ideal of the spirit, an enduring value amid the change and the erosion of all human things. . . . 4

If we wanted a set of words to describe the feelings that motivate the heroine of Sophocles’ Antigone, we could hardly do better than that, for Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, is surely in thrall to patrimony, connection, affinity, and attachment due to descent, to longstanding, to inherited instinct and natural tendency, and for her all these things have been elevated to a kind of ideal of the spirit, an 2

Coogan (1995) 237–8.

3

Deane (2002) 154.

4

Devlin (1986) 85.

Title Deeds: Translating a Classic

125

enduring value. If we wanted, what’s more, to find a confrontation that paralleled the confrontation between her and King Creon we could hardly do better than the incident on the street in Toomebridge that I’ve just recounted. No doubt many of you recognized that the quotation from Hegel I employed in relation to that incident comes from his discussion of Sophocles’ tragedy. In particular, it applies to the conflict between Creon, who represents the law of the land, what Hegel calls ‘the daylight gods of free and self-conscious, social, and political life’ and Antigone, who embraces by contrast the law of the gods, what Hegel calls the ‘Instinctive Powers of Feeling, Love and Kinship’. And no doubt you further recognized that all this has a bearing on the title I gave to my own translation of Antigone, which was The Burial at Thebes. From beginning to end, Sophocles’ play centres on burial. First, it is a matter of a burial refused. Refused to Antigone’s brother Polyneices whom Creon, the king of Thebes, makes anathema because he was a traitor to his native city and came to attack it with an army from Argos. As a ruler responsible for security and good order in the polis, Creon’s concern is the overall thing and he can tolerate no exceptions. ‘This,’ he declares, ‘is where I stand when it comes to Thebes’: Never to grant traitors and subversives Equal footing with loyal citizens, But to honour patriots in life and death. 5

And this unbending attitude brings out the resister in Antigone, whom the Chorus calls autonomos, a law unto herself. She defies the order and gives ritual burial to her brother. The laws of the land, she avers, cannot overrule the laws of the gods. And from this fundamental opposition the whole action and catastrophe follow. Creon will not yield to any counsel until he is admonished by the prophet Tiresias and by then it is too late. For burying her brother, Antigone is herself buried alive inside a rock-piled mound and hangs herself. Her prudent sister, Ismene, who refused to help her in her transgression, survives, but Creon’s son, Haemon, Antigone’s beloved, the man she was to marry, kills himself in order to be with her in the land of the dead; and in grief at all this self-murder, Haemon’s mother, Eurydice, 5

Heaney (2004a) 17.

126

Seamus Heaney

Creon’s wife, also dies by her own hand. The result is a play that the ancients could well have entitled Creon, since Creon’s suffering weighs equally in the tragic Sophoclean scale. And the many observations to this effect gave me the idea of changing the title of the version I myself eventually produced. At the beginning of 2003, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin invited me to do a version of Antigone for the centenary of the theatre, which occurs this year [2004]. I was honoured and attracted, but unsure if I could take it on. For a start, the play had been translated and adapted so often, and had been co-opted into so many cultural and political arguments, it had begun to feel less like a text from the theatrical repertoire and more like a pretext for debate, a work that was as much if not more at home in the seminar room than on the stage. Tragedy for Aristotle had been the imitation of an action, but in the culture wars of the last half century, Antigone had become an accumulation of issues. You didn’t need to have read George Steiner’s book on the subject to know how often the play or its heroine could be adduced in the cause of liberation movements of many different kinds, in the cause of civil disobedience, of feminist resistance to the patriarchy, of prisoners of conscience, and even, as we shall see, of law and order reactions to all these things. In Ireland alone, inside the past twenty years, we have seen and heard versions by five writers, three by poets, one by a playwright, and one by a classical scholar, produced in collaboration with the distinguished South African playwright Athol Fugard. 6 Still, in a perverse way, this constant revisitation of the play made the Abbey’s invitation a tempting one. The fact that so many other versions are now in existence has become part of the play’s meaning, and can be understood to constitute a guarantee of the work’s classic status. Italo Calvino gets this and much, much else right in his sprightly but intellectually substantial essay ‘Why Read the Classics.’ He writes there: The classics are the books that come down to us bearing the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through (or, more simply, on language and customs). 7 6 7

For an account of the evolution of Fugard’s play, see Fugard (2002) 128–47. Calvino (1989) 128.

Title Deeds: Translating a Classic

127

In the case of Antigone, we have amongst others French traces and German traces, Polish traces and South African traces. In South Africa, for example, Athol Fugard’s originality and his political sympathies were clear when in his play The Island he reimagined the circumstances of an actual production of Antigone that had taken place in a maximum security prison. And when he looked back on the circumstances of the first production of The Island, in a venue in Cape Town called simply the Space, Fugard had this to say: Something else that contributed to our unwavering and unanimous determination to proceed with the performance is the fact that the windows of the Space looked over Table Bay, with Robben Island in the distance, where Nelson Mandela . . . [was] no doubt at that moment dreaming of a new South Africa. 8

No doubt also the French members of the audience at the first night of Jean Anouilh’s adaptation of the play in Paris in 1944 were dreaming of a newly liberated France, just as the German censors who passed it for performance must have been dreaming that this time Creon’s rule would be more perfectly realized in the ongoing dominance of the Reich. Antigone now bears traces of these former readings, and of Brecht’s, and of Andrzej Wajda’s, whose production was mounted in Poland in 1984 and pointed up analogies between the heroine’s resistance in Thebes and the resistance of the Solidarity workers in the shipyards of Gdansk. It is all a far cry from the way I first encountered the play, in undergraduate lectures about the difference between Classical and Shakespearean tragedy, all those old discussions of Greek plays in relation to Aristotle’s poetics, much ado being made of the unities and the hero’s flaw, the central importance of plot and the precise meaning of the word catharsis. And to remember that necessary early schooling is to concede the truth of Calvino’s very first cheerful and slightly cheeky definition of a classic, namely a book ‘of which we usually hear people saying, “I am rereading . . . ” and never “I am reading . . . ” ’. 9 My own rereading of Antigone began in earnest in 1968, in the month of October. On the fifth day of that month, in the city of Derry, 8

Fugard (2002) 146.

9

Calvino (1989) 125.

128

Seamus Heaney

a civil rights march which had been banned by the Unionist authorities was baton-charged by the Royal Ulster Constabulary. It was a nakedly repressive reaction and set in motion a chain of events which are still unfolding. Other large protest meetings followed, including one in Belfast a week and a half later, basically a student march from Queen’s University where I was then a lecturer. I remember us sitting in the street, having been halted by a cordon of police who were there because the main city square had been occupied by a counter protest organized by the Reverend Ian Paisley. In those days, Paisley’s law and order bully-boys could call the tune, the police would fall into line and the rest of us could like it or lump it. It was humiliating and enraging and as we sat in the broad glum reaches of Linen Hall Street, there came a point when I had to act the academic Creon and restrain some students from making a charge at the police lines (and it is probably worth mentioning here that among those I restrained was a student who would go on to be the Antigone of that time in Northern Ireland, the passionate young protester Bernadette Devlin). One result of this was an article I contributed to the BBC’s current affairs magazine, The Listener. In the issue of 24 October, I wrote about that student march and other matters, including the demands of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association for reform of the local government situation and an end to discrimination in the allocation of houses and jobs. I ended with an allusion to the song, ‘Danny Boy,’ which is also known as ‘The Londonderry Air’, although for me and for many others—because of what we might call the dúchas factor—it was better known as ‘The Derry Air’. ‘The new “Derry Air”, ’ I concluded, at any rate, with words that revealed my sympathy for the Antigone party, ‘sounds very much like “We Shall Overcome”. ’ 10 It was in that same issue of The Listener that Antigone was finally sprung from her old place in the syllabus and took her place decisively in all future thinking about the developing political situation in Northern Ireland. She and all she stands for were invoked in an article of seminal importance by the writer and former diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien, at that time still holder of the Schweitzer Chair of Humanities in New York University. Three years earlier, in December 10

Heaney (1968).

Title Deeds: Translating a Classic

129

1965, O’Brien had been arrested for time he too had spent sitting down in the street, in the distinguished company of Dr Benjamin Spock, in what his wife, Maire, has described as ‘a highly respectable protest’ outside the Induction Center in Manhattan. 11 This protest was meant to obstruct the progress of recruitment for the war in Vietnam, a protest that O’Brien could hardly have avoided, given that he was then speaking and writing on the theme of America’s ‘Counter-Revolutionary Imperialism’. This, at any rate, was the man who was now observing sit-downs by students in the north of his own country, highly aware of the righteousness of their cause and highly sensitive also to the ominousness of the situation. O’Brien’s article, I should remind you again, was written in 1968. It begins with a résumé of the plot of Sophocles’ tragedy that emphasizes how the consequences of Antigone’s non-violent action emerge in acts of violence. O’Brien then goes on: The role of Antigone attracts the young, though those capable of playing it to the end will always be few. Creon continues his interminable series of rash engagements: suppression of communism in Asia, suppression of freedom in Czechoslovakia, white supremacy and every other form of the supremacy of the supreme. In the press and the pulpit, Tiresias admonishes Creon, Ismene seeks to restrain Antigone. And the rest of the tragedy unfolds, since Creon and Antigone are both part of our nature, inaccessible to advice and incapable of living at peace in the city. Civil disobedience is non-violent, but everywhere attracts violence. 12

The piece continues with examples of such violence, in particular the murders of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and then rises to Tiresian heights in declaring that the American anti-war protests have ‘elicited a powerful counter-movement—for the restoration of full white supremacy and the extension of imperialist war’. O’Brien is a provocative writer and this world-sweeping survey would have been thrilling in itself, but when it proceeded to focus on the situation in Northern Ireland, and in particular on the gerrymandered city of Derry, the argument became even more compelling and more complicated. The search by the Catholic majority of the city for full civil rights, for a release from the status of second-class citizens, 11

O’Brien (2003) 289.

12

O’Brien (1974) 151.

130

Seamus Heaney

he says, means that these people will have to brace themselves against what he calls ‘shocks to come’. He goes on: these people know that much more is involved than the correction of an electoral anomaly: it is a question of changing historic relations between conqueror and conquered—something not likely to happen without violence. The subordination of Catholic to Protestant in Derry is a result of force and the threat of force. The condition of Derry may be thought of as one of frozen violence: any attempt to thaw it out will release violence which is at present static. 13

This was a stark statement of the realities of the situation and a true premonition of what was indeed to come, and it allowed O’Brien to ask the kind of question that Ismene asks: would the removal of the disabilities of Catholics in Northern Ireland be worth attaining at the risk of precipitating riots, explosions, pogroms, murder? Nevertheless, having raised this doubt, O’Brien went on to allow Antigone to have her say: Antigone will not heed such calculations: she is an ethical and religious force, an uncompromising element in our being, as dangerous in her way as Creon, whom she perpetually challenges and provokes. Peace depends upon the acceptance of civil subordination, since the powerful will use force to uphold their laws. . . . We should be safer without the troublemaker from Thebes. And that which would be lost, if she could be eliminated, is quite intangible: no more, perhaps, than a way of imagining and dramatizing man’s dignity. It is true that this way may express the essence of what man’s dignity actually is. In losing it, man might gain peace at the price of his soul. 14

Some time ago, in answer to a question about the use of the classics at the present time, I said that consciousness needs co-ordinates, we need ways of locating ourselves in cultural as well as geographical space. If I’d had time, however, I could have given the interviewer this rather long account of Cruise O’Brien’s discussion of Antigone, because this was something that did indeed give me co-ordinates that have been helpful ever since. But I could equally well have answered by quoting two other definitions of the classics offered by the ever resourceful Calvino, as follows:

13

Ibid. 152.

14

Ibid. 152–3.

Title Deeds: Translating a Classic

131

The classics are books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to be eradicated from the mind and when they conceal themselves in the folds of memory, camouflaging themselves as the collective or individual unconscious. 15

And furthermore: A classic does not necessarily teach us anything we did not know before. In a classic, we sometimes discover something we have always known (or thought we knew), but without knowing that this author said it first, or at least is associated with it in a special way. And this, too, is a surprise that gives a lot of pleasure, such as we always gain from the discovery of an origin, a relationship, an affinity. 16

And with that, I am sorry to say, I come to an end of my citation of Calvino’s cheerful QEDs. Still, if I have finished with Calvino, I have not yet finished with my topic, the translation of a classic. I have said enough, I am sure, to indicate that my agreeing to provide a new version of Antigone was more than a conditioned response to a venerable work of antiquity, more than a reverential bow to the cultural authority of the Western canon. But I also hope I have said enough to substantiate my earlier claim that by now the play has been translated and adapted so often, has been co-opted into so many cultural and political arguments, that it has begun to function less as a text from the theatrical repertoire and more as a pretext for debate. And this became even more the case in Ireland after Conor Cruise O’Brien came back to the topic and published a famous revision of his earlier salute to Antigone as the representative of human dignity, recommending instead to the Northern Irish minority the peaceable compromise adopted by Ismene. In 1972, four years after he wrote his first article, at a time when the Provisional IRA, the British army and the Loyalist paramilitaries were all fully in action, O’Brien wrote: after . . . all those funerals—more than a hundred dead at the time of writing—you begin to feel that Ismene’s commonsense and feeling for the living may make the more needful, if less spectacular element in ‘human dignity’. In any case the play has been moving—like so much else in Northern

15

Calvino (1989) 127.

16

Ibid. 129.

132

Seamus Heaney

Ireland—backwards, away from the ceremonial act of non-violent disobedience, and into the fratricidal war, which precedes the action of the play. 17

O’Brien himself had been also moving in the meantime, back from New York to Dublin, out of the chair of humanities and into the cabinet of Irish government, a move which for many of his early admirers amounted to a U-turn from the front line of protest to the back room of Creon’s palace. And while it would be fascinating to trace O’Brien’s subsequent actions and influence, enough has been said in these flashbacks and contextualizations to make two simple facts crystal clear: first, Antigone is a play that has had a deep and abiding purchase on me and my generation in Ireland; but second, this long-standing concern with Antigone as our own special allegory is the very thing that made me disinclined to return to it. Besides, conditions in Northern Ireland have changed. The allegory doesn’t quite fit the situation that pertains there now, since what has been happening over the past decade is thankfully more like a squabble in the agora than a confrontation at the barricades. Nevertheless, if the local row has abated, the global situation has worsened. Things that were once the preoccupation of an embattled and apparently historically retarded population in Northern Ireland have now come inescapably to a head for everybody. People in liberal democracies now find themselves forced to take a position on conflicts where God is invoked by both sides and where the great challenge that W. B. Yeats once posed for himself, namely, ‘to hold in a single thought reality and justice’, 18 is the challenge faced by us all. The question of dúchas and dignity, the scandal of ‘the supremacy of the supreme’ exercised without check or embarrassment, the fact that one man’s criminal or murderer or terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter or martyr, none of these complicating and distressful realities has gone away. On the contrary, the fundamental crisis has deepened and the voltage generated even in the mere discussion of these matters has increased to a degree that is explosive and often destructive of all civil exchange. The world no longer looks with liberal dismay at the polarized sectarian ghettoes of Belfast: on the contrary, those ghettoes look out with eagerly partisan eyes at the polarized world, to the extent 17

O’Brien (1974) 153.

18

Yeats (1962) 25.

Title Deeds: Translating a Classic

133

that some loyalist enclaves in Belfast now fly the Israeli flag and the Republicans answer from their roofs and chimneys with a display of the Palestinian one. Night after night we watch on TV the crowds surging around biers borne shoulder high, carrying the dead through the streets of Fallujah or Ramallah, and watch the military with their cordons and snatch squads and armoured vehicles as they wait tensely in position or go fiercely into action, and as we watch it is impossible not to think that passions of a sort which were barely contained when the hunger striker’s body changed hands at Toome have now been let loose to apocalyptic effect in the world at large. Sophocles’ presentation of the domestic and civic troubles of ancient Thebes has great staying power and in the midst of the aftershocks running through the post-September 11 world his play still functions in the way Wallace Stevens said poetry functions, as the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. In certain moods, however, even the incontrovertible steadiness and clarity of Greek tragedy can seem almost too Apollonian: we may want Goya instead of Sophocles, the Goya of The Disasters of War, the Goya of The Shootings of the Third of May, the Goya who looked aghast at the Napoleonic liberation of Spain with the same shock as the artists of Iraq must have watched the bombs begin to fall in Baghdad. In our time, acts of terrorism committed against those who wield the equivalent of Napoleonic power have driven them to a point where the impulse to retaliate is in danger of overwhelming all need to understand what lies behind the terrorism. It was possible to feel, for example, that there was something not so much Napoleonic as Roman about the images of the prisoners in irons being marched in front of the world to their cages in Guantanamo Bay. It was as if we were witnessing a triumph on the Via Appia. Respect for the dúchas and dignity of the defeated had been set at nought. When the Abbey asked me to do the Antigone, President Bush and his secretary of defence were forcing not only their own electorate but the nations of the world into an either/or situation with regard to the tyrant of Baghdad. If you were not for state security to the point that you were ready to bomb Iraq, you could be represented as being in favour of terrorism. If you demurred at the linking of Al Qaeda to the despotism of Saddam Hussein, you were revealing yourself as

134

Seamus Heaney

unsound on important issues, soft on terrorism. If you demurred at the suspension of certain freedoms, you were unpatriotic. And all this circumstance would have made it easy to proceed with a treatment of Sophocles’ play where Creon would have been a cipher for President Bush and the relationship between audience and action would have been knowing and predicated on the assumption of political agreement. But to have gone in this direction would have been reductive and demeaning, both of Sophocles’ art and of the huge responsibility the White House must bear for national security. The issues of loyalty and disloyalty are real, both in the play and for the American legislature. Creon has to decide what to do with Polyneices, whom he calls in my version An anti-Theban Theban prepared to kill His countrymen in war, and desecrate The shrines of his country’s gods. 19

Basically Creon turns Polyneices into a non-person, in much the same way as the first internees in Northern Ireland and the recent prisoners in Guantanamo Bay were turned into non-persons. By refusing Polyneices burial, Creon claims ownership of the body and in effect takes control of his spirit, because the spirit will not go to its right home with the dead until the body is buried with due ceremony. When Antigone refuses Creon’s ruling and performs the traditional rites, her protest is therefore a gesture that is as anthropological as it is political, and it was only when I saw it in this light that I found a way out of the cat’s cradle of political arguments and analogies the play has become and could re-approach it as a work atremble with passion, with the human pity and terror it possessed in its original cultural setting. The eye of the needle I passed through in order to re-enter the kingdom of Thebes was an Irish one and I found it in the nick of time, the night before I was due to give my decision to the Abbey Theatre’s artistic director. I was paging through other translations, one older and one more recent. I’ve never studied ancient Greek so I was going to be relying on scholars such as Richard Claverhouse Jebb, who did a standard translation in accurate if by now slightly 19

Heaney (2004a) 17.

Title Deeds: Translating a Classic

135

fusty Victorian English, and on the current edition of Antigone in the Loeb Classical Library. In Jebb’s prose, Antigone’s first speech turns out like this: Sister Ismene, my own dear sister, do you know of any ill, of all those bequeathed by Oedipus, that Zeus does not fulfil for us two while we live? There is nothing painful, nothing fraught with ruin, no shame, no dishonour, that I have not seen in your woes and mine. 20

And in Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s version, done for Loeb and also in prose, the lines are rendered thus: My own sister, Ismene, linked to myself, are you aware that Zeus . . . ah, which of the evils that come from Oedipus is he not accomplishing while we live. No, there is nothing painful or laden with destruction or shameful or dishonouring among your sorrows and mine that I have not witnessed. 21

The sense conveyed by both translators is the same; we know there is a sisterly relationship, a shared awareness of family history, and it soon becomes clear that some impending event is causing them anxiety and panic, yet the anxiety and panic are not there in either the pace or the diction or the rhythm of the prose. The prose, moreover, construes lines that were originally in verse, and verse drama—even in translation—surely needs the meaning to be transformed into a metrical and musical register: unless I could get the panic into the pace of the speeches, I felt I could not proceed. I might be able to convey the content of the text but I would remain doomed to be what the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam once described as a mere purveyor of the paraphrasable meaning. Then suddenly, as if from nowhere, I heard the note. Theme and tune coalesced. What came into my mind, or more precisely, into my ear, were the opening lines of a famous eighteenth-century Irish poem, called in the original ‘Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’: Mo ghrá go daingean thú! Lá da bhfaca thú Ag ceann tí an mhargaidh, Thug mo shúil aire duit, 20

Jebb (1967) 117.

21

Lloyd-Jones (1998) 5.

136

Seamus Heaney Thug mo chroí taitneamh duit, D’éalaíos óm charaid leat I bhfad ó bhaile leat. 22

I say I heard this in my ear as if from nowhere, but in fact the listening posts of the unconscious had been attending all along and had come up with exactly the right register, one that sprang moreover from circumstances similar to those in which Antigone found herself. ‘Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’ means in English ‘The Lament for Art O’Leary’ and it is a poem uttered by O’Leary’s widow, Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill, over the dead body of her husband. And this body, like the body of Polyneices, had been left exposed, unattended to, cut down by enemies and abandoned. O’Leary, who was killed in 1773, was a sassy pre-Emancipation Catholic, a strutter of his Gaelic stuff, a provoker of the English squirearchy in his home district of County Cork. He was set upon by a group of soldiers and left dead on the roadside, after which his horse had run on home with his blood on the bridle. Here is the opening of Eibhlín Dhubh’s poem in English, in Frank O’Connor’s translation, as well as some other lines from the later sections: My love and my delight, The day I saw you first Beside the markethouse I had eyes for nothing else And love for none but you. I left my father’s house And ran away with you, And that was no bad choice. You gave me everything . . . My mind remembers That bright spring day, How your hat . . . became you. Your silver-hilted sword, Your manly right hand . . . The English lowered their head before you, Not out of love for you But hate and fear . . . 22

See O’Tuama and Kinsella (1981) 200.

Title Deeds: Translating a Classic

137

My love and my mate That I never thought dead Till your horse came to me . . . Till I found you lying By a little furze bush Without pope or bishop Or any priest or cleric To whisper you a prayer, Only an old, old woman And her cloak about you And your blood in torrents . . . 23

Because of the pitch of that voice, because the lament was for a beloved left lying without the last rites, and because I needed a metre to make the love and panic of the two sisters pulse with a certain ritual force, I picked up the note of Eibhlín Dhubh’s threebeat line—‘Mo ghrá go daingean thú, | Lá da bhfaca thú |Ag ceann tí an mhargaidh—’ and got started on Antigone’s first speech: Ismene, quick, come here! What’s to become of us? Why are we always the ones? There’s nothing, sister, nothing Zeus hasn’t put us through Just because we are who we are— The daughters of Oedipus. And because we are his daughters We took what came, Ismene, In public and in private, Hurt and humiliation— But this I cannot take. 24

Admittedly, there is nothing very distinct about the language here, the thing is plain and bare of figures of speech, but the three-beat line established a tune that I could carry, and that the sisters could carry. And with a first tune established, it was easy enough to play variations. The speeches of the chorus, for example, almost spoke themselves in an alliterating four-beat line, one that echoed very closely the metre of Anglo-Saxon poetry and that seemed right for 23

O’Connor (1962) 110–12.

24

Heaney (2004a) 5.

138

Seamus Heaney

the enunciation of proverbial wisdom and the invocation of gods. So the hymn to Victory, which is the first utterance we hear from the Chorus, came out as if it had been fetched up from the word-hoard of some Athenian Caedmon: Glory be to brightness, to the gleaming sun, Shining guardian of our seven gates. Burn away the darkness, dawn of Thebes, Dazzle the city you have saved from destruction. Argos is defeated, the army beaten back All the brilliant shields Smashed into shards and smithereens. 25

And so on. And then, needless to say, the traditional iambic pentameter, with its conventional tee-tum, tee-tum, tee-tum, seemed right for Creon, who must in every sense hold the line, so I tuned his speeches to a fairly regular blank verse form: March to the rock vault, wall her in and leave. After that it’ll be up to her to choose. She can live there under dry stone or can die. There’s no blood on my hands here . . . 26

Moving in and out of the strict iambic is one way of signifying adherence to tradition and convention, but it also confers a certain dignity, so when Antigone rises to her final heroic utterances, I moved from trimeter toward pentameter and tried to make the pitch of the lines rise with her: Stone of my wedding chamber, stone of my tomb, Stone of my prison roof and prison floor, Behind you and beyond you stand the dead. They are my people and they’re waiting for me And when they see me coming down the road They’ll hurry out to meet me, all of them. My father and my mother first, and then Eteocles, my brother—every one As dear to me as when I washed and dressed 25

Ibid. 13.

26

Ibid. 53.

Title Deeds: Translating a Classic

139

And laid them out. But Polyneices, When I did the same for you, when I did What people knew in their heart of hearts Was right, I was doomed for it. 27

In poetry, we only believe what we hear. Antigone is poetic drama, but commentary and analysis had dulled it. I wanted to do a translation that would be true to the original in so far as it would be as much musical score as dramatic script, one that actors could speak as plainly or intensely as the occasion demanded, but one that still kept faith with the ritual formality of the original. I have talked a good deal here about the political and cultural resonances which the text possessed for us in Ireland, because these resonances constituted my title deeds, as it were, my claim to be somebody with a right to do a version of it. But the real title deed was written when I changed the name of the play from Antigone to The Burial at Thebes. Putting ‘burial’ in the title signals to a new audience what the central concern of the play is going to be. But because it is a word that has not yet been entirely divorced from primal reality, because it recalls to us our final destiny as members of the species, it also reminds us, however subliminally, of the solemnity of death, the sacredness of life and the need to allow in every case the essential dignity of the human creature. Wherever you come from, whatever flag is draped on the coffins of your dead, the word ‘burial’ carries with it something of your dúchas. It emphasizes, in other words, those ‘Instinctive Powers of Feeling, Love and Kinship’ which authority must respect if it is not to turn callous, powers which will nevertheless also continue to inspire the one whom Cruise O’Brien called ‘the troublemaker from Thebes.’ 27

Ibid. 53–4.

This page intentionally left blank

Part III Scholars on Poets

This page intentionally left blank

8 The Argippaei (Herodotus 4. 23) in Belfast Maureen Alden

‘THE SETT’ (13 AUGUST 1999) AND ‘ASCHY’ (23 FEBRUARY 2002) (MICHAEL LONGLEY, SNOW WATER (LONDON: CAPE 2004)) Herodotus’ information about the peoples of Scythia derives from the Arimaspea, a poem by the shaman, Aristeas of Proconnesus (Hdt. 4.14.3). 1 Everyone who has read book four of Herodotus remembers the Argippaei, who are bald from birth, both men and women. 2 They have snub noses and long chins (or perhaps long beards) and speak their own language, although they wear Scythian dress (Hdt. 4.23.1–5): Up to this point the territory of the Scythians I have been describing is all level and deep-soiled, but from here on it is stony and rough. After traversing a great deal of the rough terrain, the foothills of high mountains are inhabited by men said to be all bald from birth, both men and women alike, with snub noses and long chins (long beards?), speaking their own language, but wearing Scythian dress, and living from trees. The tree from which they live is called Ponticum, about the size of a fig-tree: it bears a fruit the size of a bean, but with a kernel. When this fruit becomes ripe, they strain it through cloths and the juice runs from it thick and black, and the juice is 1

Tzetzes Chil. 7. 686, Bolton (1962). The ‘baldness’ suggests a refined way of life in contrast to the nomads: see Tomaschek (1895) 719–21. These people are probably to be identified with the Arimphaei of Pliny, NH 6.14.34, and the Aremphaei of Pomponius Mela 1.117. For other variants of their name, see Phillips (1960), followed by Lindegger (1979) 65 n. 5. 2

144

Maureen Alden

called aschy. They lap this up and mix it with milk and drink it, and from its thick sediment they make cakes and eat them. They do not have many flocks, for the pastures there are not good. Every man lives under his tree, in the winter when he has covered the tree all round with thick white felt, and in the summer without felt. No one wrongs them (for they are said to be sacred) nor do they possess any weapon of war. And they are the ones who decide quarrels for those who dwell round about, and whoever flees to them for protection as a suppliant is harmed by no one. And they are called the Argippaei.

It looks as if the Argippaei are found at the furthest limit to which Greek merchants penetrate inland from the Black Sea, more than twenty-one days’ journey, perhaps 500 miles inland. 3 Beyond them to the east are the Issedones, whom the Greeks know, because they come to the Argippaei to trade. The Argippaei live on stony and rough terrain at the foot of high mountains after a district of deep-soiled plains, and have been located on the east slopes of the Urals 4 or on the slopes of the Altai mountains, near Pazyryk. 5 They may even have been forced to move from the Altai to the Urals. 6 For those of us defeated by ancient geography, they represent a pastoral utopia: 7 they have few sheep, since the pasture is poor, but they live mainly from ‘ponticum’ trees, which produce a fruit the size of a bean, with a hard kernel. A ‘ponticum’ tree is a tree from Pontos, from the Black Sea region: we know it as the prunus padus, or bird cherry. The earliest reference to the ÍÂÒ·Û¸Ú or cherry, seems to have been in the sixth century bc, when Xenophanes of Colophon mentioned it in his –ÂÒd ˆ˝Û¢Ú. 8 It was reputed to have been brought to Italy from Cerasus in the Pontus by Lucullus in 73 bc (680 ab urbe condita): 9 this must have been a special cultivated specimen, as the tree was already known. 10 Cherries must be harvested in a short 3

Hdt. 4.101 gives a day’s journey as 200 stades. Hermann (1916) 2235–46; Phillips (1955) 167–9 and (1960) 128. 5 Tomaschek (1895) 719–21, Bolton (1962) 104–18, Rolle (1980) 56–7. Near Kara Tau: Lindegger (1979) 78–9. In the Ili valley: Haussig (1980) 16–17. 6 7 Phillips (1955) 164–73. Hadas (1935) 116. 8 Pollux 6. 46. For later references, see Thphr. HP 3.13.1 and Hdn. Gr. 1.209. 9 Pliny NH 15.102; Tertullian Apolog. 11.18; Ammianus Marcellinus 22.8.16. 10 Athenaeus 51 a–b mentions a reference by Diphilus of Siphnos in the time of king Lysimachus, a successor of Alexander, in contradiction of the introduction of keravsia by Lucullus. 4

The Argippaei in Belfast

145

space of time, and then there is the problem of how to preserve the highly perishable fruit. We would freeze them or preserve them with sugar, but these techniques were not available in the ancient world. Herodotus describes how the fruit is strained through cloth to make a thick dark drink which can be mixed with milk, and the sediment made into cakes. 11 The name of the drink is àÛ˜ı. 12 Even today the Bashkirs in the Southern Urals make from the bird cherry a drink which they call atchi (sharp). The word is close to Tatar aˇcy, eˇce, and to Bashkir asy, ese (sharp). 13 The technique of straining the juice through a cloth must be accurately described, and must have spread westward with the cultivation of the cherry. Mühlestein 14 describes how his wife’s family in Simmental in Switzerland placed their cherries in a sack suspended from the ceiling: a vice of two stout planks tied above and below enclosed the sack, pressing on it, and two men also pressed the sack from each side, so that the juice, and even the flesh of the cherries ran into a tub below. The juice would be boiled for about eight hours, to make it thick and dark, lasting ‘as long as you live’. Herodotus does not mention this stage, but the Argippaei must have boiled their juice, or it would not have become thick. In Simmental the resulting Chirschi-mues was sold at the same price as honey, and was spread on bread, or even mixed with thick cream. This is delicious, and not surprisingly, the Argippaei take great care of the trees which provide it, wrapping them in felt in the winter, and living under the resulting tent, and living under the tree without felt in the summer. Each man stays in this idyllic paradise under his ponticum tree. 11 Tomaschek (1895) 719–21 records the Dzungars mixing the juice with milk and making a viaticum with the pressed fruit. He mistakenly thought ÔÌÙÈÍ¸Ì (= panthika) was Scythian, and meant zum Wege gehörig. The Ossetians mix the cherry the cherry juice with milk to make akhsir, using the pressed fruit to make a fruit pastille (Dovatur et al. (1982) 250 n. 234: the Bashkirs to the south of Ekaterinberg use the fleshy part remaining after pressing out the juice in the same way as Herodotus describes (Dovatur, ibid.): see also Corcella and Medaglia (1993) 252. 12 Pollux 6.46. For later references, see Thphr. HP 3.13.1 and Hdn. Gr. 1.209. 13 The Kasan Tatars make a drink called Atschi: Hennig (1935) 246. Askhu is a Turkic word meaning ‘bitter’ or ‘acid’: Phillips (1955) 169 followed by Dovatur et al. (1982) 251 and Chlenova (1983) 55. 14 Mühlestein (1986).

146

Maureen Alden

The Argippaei are said to be sacred, and no man wrongs them, perhaps because they are actually a priestly caste dedicated to the goddess Argimpasa, 15 who may be represented in the bald seated figure wearing a furry hat in a fifth- or fourth-century felt textile from the fifth royal grave at Pazyryk in the Altai mountains. 16 Sacrosanct and inviolate, they offer asylum to the fugitive, and settle disputes for their neighbours. 17 The poet Michael Longley is also a peacemaker: in the mid-seventies he published a long poem called ‘Peace’ based on Tibullus 1.10. ‘Peace’ was inspired by, and written for, the Northern Irish Peace People shortly after they won the Nobel Peace Prize. 18 In case he should sound like a plaster saint, it should perhaps be pointed out that Longley has on occasion used his poetry to attack an enemy, imitating the blistering invective found in the poetry of Catullus and others, as in the savage pastiche ‘Damiana’: 19 Forget about Damiana, Rome’s one and only Self-appointed hermaphrodite poet/poetess, Too lily-livered to publish but blasting others, Especially the girls—Sulpicia, for instance, Amorous elegist supreme—taunting Tibullus, Poetry’s true lover among cassia and roses, Jeering at Propertius’ desperate intensity, Taking the piss out of schoolmasterly Macer For poems about ornithology and snake bites— Yes, shooting at song birds while plugging himself/ Herself, his/her name derived from the dried leaves Of Turnera diffusa—damiana—a quack Medicament for spleen, club-footed iambics, Blocked bowels, and even sexual impotence.

Like the Argippaei, Longley stays put in Belfast, a founder member of the Cultural Traditions Group established in 1988 to substitute cultural pride for tribal belligerence. 20 In Longley’s garden 15

Phillips (1960). For the etymology of Argimpasa, see Herzfeld (1947) ii. 516–17. Corcella and Medaglia (1993) pl. 62. The textile is now in the Hermitage. 17 The Arimphaei of Pomponius Mela 1.117, and the Aremphaei of Pliny, NH 6.14.34–5 are sacred, bald (or short-haired), offer asylum etc. 18 Longley (1979) 35–7 = Longley (2006) 134. See p.106 above, Allen (2000) 132. 19 Longley (2000) 12 = Longley (2006) 251. 20 To promote what Roy Foster called ‘varieties of Irishness’: (1989) 5–24. 16

The Argippaei in Belfast

147

is a 270-year-old beech tree, 21 whose ‘tassels and prickly cups’ are celebrated in ‘The Beech Tree’: 22 Leaning back like a lover against this beech tree’s Two-hundred-year-old pewter trunk, I look up Through skylights into the leafy cumulus, and join Everybody who has teetered where these huge roots Spread far and wide our motionless mossy dance, As though I’d begun my eclogues with a beech As Virgil does, the brown envelopes unfolding Like fans their transparent downy leaves, tassels And prickly cups, mast, a fall of vermilion And copper and gold, then room in the branches For the full moon and her dusty lakes, winter And the poet who recollects his younger self And improvises a last line for the georgics About snoozing under this beech tree’s canopy.

Trees are a major theme in Longley’s poetry, 23 and ‘The Branch’, ‘The Blackthorn’, and ‘A Sprig of Bay’ are more tree poems in The Weather in Japan. ‘Blackthorn and Bonsai’ in Tuppenny Stung 24 (four brief essays in autobiography) explains his efforts as Arts Director with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland between 1970 and the late 1980s/early 1990s to give a proper place to the ‘blackthorn’, his term for the indigenous talent of Irish musicians, writers, and artists, the reason why Northern Ireland enjoys a cultural reputation abroad, instead of simply looking to the metropolis and importing ‘tinsel’ from outside. Imported culture has long been associated with Unionism’s focus on ‘the Mainland’, producing a kind of cultural apartheid which impoverishes the community. 25 The Cultural Traditions Group, which Longley helped to found, attempted to promote the arts without regard to national, sectarian, or party interests. It supported the John Hewitt Summer School, also founded in 1988, to bring together literature, local history, social and anthropological studies, languages, archaeology, the visual arts, topography, and music, under 21 22 24 25

The poem says 200, but Longley has pointed out it is about 270. 23 Longley (2000) 62 = Longley (2006) 281. Johnstone (1985) 14. Longley (1994) 43–76. Longley to the Citizens’ Enquiry: see Pollak (1993) 332.

148

Maureen Alden

an ecumenical regional umbrella. The summer school, held in July at St MacNissi’s College, Garron Tower, on the coast of County Antrim, was intended to celebrate the poet, John Hewitt, and his contribution to these things. Michael and Edna Longley were founder members of the summer school, and Edna Longley served as its Academic Director for eight years. The school flourished and gained an international reputation, accommodating the complex web of cultures in the north, and its links abroad. Longley is a twin, and his poems are often geminated, so that a poem relates closely to the poem on the facing page. On the page facing Aschy, is a poem called ‘The Sett’: 26 A friend’s betrayal of you brings to mind His anecdote about neighbours in Donegal Who poured petrol into a badger’s sett, that Underground intelligence not unlike your own Curling up among the root systems. Oh, why Can the badger not have more than one address Like the otter its hovers at Cloonaghmanagh And Claggan and Carrigskeewaun, its holt A glimmering between us at Dooaghty? I safeguard a bubble-rosary under ice.

‘The Sett’ was written on 13 August 1999 and addressed to Edna Longley. In an uneasy, four-beat blank verse, the flooding of a badger’s sett under a tree’s roots with petrol becomes a metaphor for betrayal by soi-disant friends. ‘Poems and plays do not drop from the twisted branches of civil discord’ as Longley points out in Tuppenny Stung. 27 ‘The artist needs time in which to allow the raw material of experience to settle to an imaginative depth where he can transform it . . . He is not some sort of super-journalist commenting with unfaltering spontaneity on events immediately after they have happened.’ The events which have been transformed in ‘The Sett’ concern the John Hewitt Summer School: they began in the last months of 1995, coming to a head on 18 February 1996 at a meeting of the summer school committee in Ballymena. 26

Longley (2004a) 16 = Longley (2006) 295.

27

Longley (1994) 73.

The Argippaei in Belfast

149

As the Academic Director, Edna Longley had put together provisional copy for a programme flyer, but could obtain no response to it from the other committee members, who could not be contacted when she tried to find a lift to the committee meeting. She had to go to Ballymena in a taxi on her own, only to find the committee was demanding her resignation on the alleged grounds that it wanted a more populist summer school (or perhaps just wanted power). As the meeting wore on, she gradually understood that a conspiracy had been carefully planned. She resigned on 19 February 1996, and Michael Longley resigned on 27 February. They took it particularly hard, since they had given personal friendship and support to the conspirators, some of whom had benefited considerably from their association with the Longleys. The Hewitt summer school had embodied everything they both believed Northern Ireland was capable of, and the coup was emblematic of everything they had opposed as citizens and artists. The matter refused to go away, and became a scandal of international dimensions. Crucial people withdrew from the summer school, strongly criticizing the committee. Many letters arrived from all over the world to express support for Edna Longley and outrage at the treatment she had received. One humorously explained that ‘the school had been a partial failure, and the part which has failed has seized control of it’. 28 Another pointed out that it was absolutely clear that Edna Longley would manage very well without the summer school, but less clear how it would manage without her. 29 ‘Aschy’ is about coming to terms with all this: 30 We are both in our sixties now, our bodies Growing stranger and more vulnerable. It is time for that tonic called aschy, Shadowy cherry-juice from South Russia. The Argippaei who are all bald from birth, Snub-nosed and long-chinned, lap it up With lip-smacking gusto or mix it with milk Or make pancakes out of the sediment.

28 30

29 Douglas Carson (12.3.96). Britta Olinder, Göteborg, 14.3.96. Longley (2004a) 17 = Longley (2006) 295.

150

Maureen Alden In bitter spells they wrap the trunks with felt As thick and white as the snowy weather. A weird sanctity protects you and me While we stay under our ponticum-tree.

Written on 23 February 2002, it is a love poem, even if the image of the lovers in the second stanza doesn’t conform to conventional stereotypes. It was first published in Snow Water in 2004, and appears again in The Rope Makers, a volume of forty-six love poems, where it is followed by ‘Mars’, another poem featuring the beech tree in the garden: 31 Mars was as close as this so long ago It reminded us of the Neanderthals. We were stargazing under a beech tree That could have sheltered United Irishmen. We were squinting at Mars through binoculars. ‘The tree is getting closer to the house.’ ‘I hope it touches the house before it dies.’ ‘I hope it touches the house before we die.’

‘Aschy’ is arranged formally in three stanzas, rounded off with a couplet whose line-ends, ‘you and me/ponticum tree’, echo the completeness and self-sufficiency conveyed by Herodotus’ account of the relationship between the Argippaei and their trees. The Herodotean passage colours the poem in other ways too, even if these are not spelled out. The poet and his wife are growing older and more vulnerable. As well as the physical frailty which comes with age, they have found themselves vulnerable to personal betrayal by the young Turks (and the occasional older Turk) who wish to supplant them. Nevertheless, despite the physical changes which make the body stranger (and the Argippaei are certainly strange to look at) the middle stanza is a celebration of life, and what sustains it, and makes it worth living: aschy, and the cakes you can make with it, even if it is a bit sharp. The trees in Longley’s poems are images of stability and permanence, or what passes for permanence in the material world. I am thinking of poems like ‘Tree House’, 32 whose point of departure is Odysseus’ bed built round a growing olive tree (Od. 23.184–202), and ‘Laertes’, 33 in 31 33

32 Longley (2005) 49. Longley (1991) 25 = Longley (2006) 177. Longley (1991) 33 = Longley (2006) 182.

The Argippaei in Belfast

151

which Odysseus identifies himself after an absence of twenty years by naming the fruit trees his father had given him as a child when he followed Laertes about in his garden (Od. 24.336–44). In winter the Argippaei protect their ponticum trees by wrapping them in thick felt, rather like the holiness which protects the trees’ owners from harm. The holiness of the Argippaei is thought to derive from their priestly status. As long ago as 1985, Longley thought one of the functions of an artist was to suggest the sacerdotal values of life in a secular way, and he used Horace’s phrase ‘Musarum sacerdos’ (Odes 3.1.3) to explain how poetry was for him a kind of religion, a religious vocation. 34 Horace is saying that poets are the ‘priests of the Muses’ and their interpreters to men. The sanctity which protects the priestly Argippaei under their ponticum trees and enables them to settle disputes for their neighbours protects also the Musarum sacerdos and Edna Longley under their beech tree in Belfast. Personal betrayal has in no way damaged their reputations, and they can continue to work at affirming the pluralism of Irish cultural identity, and oppose the negation and exclusiveness which would destroy it. 35 34

Johnstone (1985) 28. I am indebted to Professor M. C. C. Wheeler, who kindly translated Chlenova (1983) and Dovatur et al. (1982) for me from Russian. 35

9 Michael Longley Appropriates Latin Poetry Brian Arkins

Michael Longley 1 is not only one of Ireland’s leading contemporary poets, but, in the words of John Burnside, ‘one of the finest lyric poets of our century’ (the twentieth). 2 A significant part of the achievement of Longley, who studied Classics at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and at Trinity College, Dublin, is his appropriation of material from the Graeco-Roman world. 3 Eliot said ‘mature poets steal’; 4 Longley concurs in regard to Homer’s image of a poppy: ‘an image Virgil steals . . . | . . . and so do I’ (CP 255). The two Classical areas specially prominent in Longley are Homer and Latin poetry. Crucial here is the fact that poems from an apparently remote past contrive both to register a distancing effect in relation to the present, and simultaneously to offer commentary on that present. Hence Longley’s iconic sonnet ‘Ceasefire’ (CP 225), which was first published in The Irish Times just days after the first IRA ceasefire in 1994, owes its undoubted power to its spectacular use of what linguistic critics call underlexicalization, the refusal to name names: we all know that the poem is about Northern Ireland, but it is nowhere mentioned. 5

1 For comment on Longley see Peacock and Devine (2000), and the preceding essay by Maureen Alden (Chapter 8); references to Longley’s poetry in this piece are to his Collected Poems, Longley (2006), in the form CP plus page number(s). 2 Burnside, quoted on back cover of Longley (2000). 3 See Longley’s own account in Chapter 5 above, and the use of Herodotus detailed in Maureen Alden’s essay in Chapter 8. 4 Eliot (1966) 182. 5 As noted by McDonald (2000), recorded by Longley himself (p. 104 above).

Michael Longley Appropriates Latin Poetry

153

This chapter analyses Longley’s appropriation of Latin love elegy as written by Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Sulpicia, and of Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses. Asked what poets matter to him, Longley included ‘Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, the Roman love elegists’; 6 these poets count in regard to both theme and style. The central Latin elegist is Propertius, whose commitment to art, vein of humour, and striking use of language are brilliantly captured by Ezra Pound in his poetic sequence Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919). 7 Longley writes of ‘Propertius’ desperate intensity’, and of ‘Propertius, my soul mate, love’s polysyllabic | Pyrotechnical laureate reciting reams by heart’ (CP 251; 280). Expressly written ‘After the Latin of Sextus Propertius’, Longley’s poem ‘Altera Cithara’ relates to Propertius 2.10, in which the Latin poet states that Cynthia has been exhausted as a topic (she is ‘written up’ [scripta]), and that he is now proposing to move on to political and military themes (only in Book 4 is this fully achieved). But in Book 2, this is not really the case, because the immediately following poems 11, 12, and 13 deal with Cynthia. Hence Longley can bring into question Propertius’ assertion that ‘My Muse teaches me now a different cithara’ (CP 74): A change of tune, then, On another zither, A new aesthetic, or The same old songs That are out of key, Unwashed by epic oceans And dipped by love In lyric waters only?

This question is answered by Longley in his third stanza that is written independently of Propertius, ‘without his permission’; committed to the theme of love, and to lyric, the elegist rejects the epic themes of Augustus, politics, war: Loaded the dice before He put them in his sling And aimed at history, Bringing to the ground 6

Longley (1986a) 22; see also Longley, p. 105 above.

7

See Arkins (1988).

154

Brian Arkins Like lovers Caesar, Soldiers, politicians And all the dreary Epics of the muscle-bound.

Longley’s early poem ‘Cupid’, 8 which is written ‘after Sextus Propertius’, offers an accomplished translation of Propertius 2.12 that deals with a visual representation of the god of love, Cupid, and with Cupid’s power. Propertius here allows Longley to achieve a tone and metre that seem made for him; as McDonald says, ‘With hindsight, we can see that this material was always as it were, meant for Michael Longley; the extremely delicate balance in the English poem’s tone, in which Cupid’s menaces must seem simultaneously more and less threatening than those his methods imitate, is maintained in a supple and delicate metrical arrangement.’ 9 Part of the tone in Longley’s translation lies in the fact that he is less literal and more idiomatic than such an important translator of Propertius as Guy Lee. Two examples will make the point. For Lee’s ‘Don’t you think he had marvellous hands?’ Longley has he ‘Had a marvellous touch, don’t you think?’ For Lee’s ‘we are tossed about on alternating waves’, Longley has ‘To fan our pulses with his blowings | Hot and blowings cold’. 10 Like Webster, Propertius was much possessed by death and saw the skull beneath the skin. Longley’s poem ‘An Image from Propertius’ (CP 80) relates to the imagining of the aristocratic woman Cornelia of her cremated remains: ‘I am a burden five fingers can collect’: My head is melting, Its cinder burnt for this: Ankle-bone, knuckle In the ship of death, A load five fingers gather Pondered by the earth.

The poem cleverly manipulates the four basic elements: the speaker’s head melts into the air; fire burns the body, whose pieces 8 9

Quoted by McDonald (2000) 37 and now printed in Longley (2008). 10 McDonald (2000) 37. Translated by Lee (1998) 39.

Michael Longley Appropriates Latin Poetry

155

enter the realm of water in the ‘ship of death’; and earth receives its insignificant burden that nevertheless requires attention. Tibullus is the poet most privileged in Longley’s poem ‘Remembering the Poets’ (CP 280), being allotted more lines than any other and placed in a prominent position at the end: and then Albius Tibullus strolling the woods a little while With me before he died, his two slim volumes An echo from the past, a melodious complaint That reaches me here, the last of the singing line.

Earlier, the quotation in Latin, on a single page at the end of Poems 1963–1983 of two lines of Tibullus’ plea for mercy to his beloved Delia points to one of Longley’s central concerns, love: parce tamen, per te furtivi foedera lecti, | per venerem quaeso compositumque caput ‘by the treaty of our secret bed, I beg you, | By the love we made and our two heads side by side’. Longley’s poem ‘Peace’ (CP 134), which is written ‘after Tibullus’ and is a version of Tibullus 1.10, was composed in response to a request for a poem from the Peace People of Northern Ireland. 11 Tibullus castigates the military violence of war and the sexual violence of men against women, opting for the reign of Peace (Pax) in his typically idyllic countryside. Longley in ‘Peace’ makes palpable his own acute awareness of violence and death in the modern world by the use of contemporary reference, while preserving much of Tibullus: we have ‘the barricades or ghettos’ of Northern Ireland; the ‘battered wife’ of today; the ‘goose-step’ of Nazi soldiers. It is precisely this complex interaction between ancient Roman material and new Irish material that brings about the power of the poem, a power that a wholly direct treatment of the situation in Northern Ireland might not achieve. And Longley goes well beyond Tibullus in the conclusion of ‘Peace’: the personified deity Peace remains feminized, maternal, and botanical, but her realm becomes the preserve of women and she now becomes overtly sexual. As though Longley seeks to remind Tibullus that he subscribes to that slogan of the Sixties ‘make love, not war’, a point stressed by Longley’s substitution for the 11 For this context and some authorial comment on the poem, see Longley, Chapter 5 above, p. 106.

156

Brian Arkins

generic noun ‘fruit’ of ‘apples’, token of love in the Graeco-Roman world: As for me, I want a woman To come and fondle my ears of wheat and let apples Overflow between her breasts. I shall call her Peace.

In recent decades, considerable critical attention has been devoted to the female elegist Sulpicia, 12 who was the niece of Messalla, the patron of Tibullus and of Ovid. Sulpicia wrote six poems in intricate syntax about her love for a man called Cerinthus at about the same time as Propertius and Tibullus. Already, Ezra Pound, who had a largely unerring eye for the best in Greek and Latin literature, held that ‘it would be worth ten years of a man’s life to translate Catullus; or Ovid; or perhaps Sulpicia’ (Pound (1970) 187). Regarding Sulpicia as the ‘Amorous elegist supreme’ (CP 251), Longley has written a sonnet called ‘Sulpicia’ (CP 137–8), which he describes as ‘a collage of original lines and free translations of lines and phrases from the Latin’. 13 Crucial here are questions of gender. Sulpicia acts in a daring way for a Roman woman by usurping the almost entirely male role of writing love poetry. Longley, writing as a man, shows how Sulpicia is both the passive beloved who awaits her man—‘dressed myself up for him, dressed to kill’—and the active lover who pursues the man: ‘I will seduce him, tangle his hairs with my hairs.’ Writing of Longley’s volume The Weather in Japan, Sean Lysaght stated that ‘it confirms Longley even further as a poet in possession of that greatest of artistic attainments: style’. 14 Style in this sense is not some extraneous matter brought to bear upon pre-existing material; rather, style and content are inextricably linked, so that each mirrors each other. The style of Catullus and of Tibullus contributes, in varying ways, to Longley’s mature style. What Catullus offers is an overwhelming brevity. Over half of Catullus’ poems—63—consist of ten lines or less, and 39 poems— more than a third of the total number—consist of five lines or less. Longley’s later volumes likewise espouse brevity: 31 poems out of 56 12 See e.g. Flaschenriem (1999), and the bibliography gathered at Lyne (2007) 341–8. 13 Longley (1986b) 206. 14 Sean Lysaght, quoted on back cover of Longley (2004).

Michael Longley Appropriates Latin Poetry

157

in Gorse Fires have ten lines or less; 28 poems out of 63 in Snow Water have ten lines or less; the opening eleven poems of The Weather in Japan all have ten lines or less. Like Catullus, Longley demonstrates a very firm commitment to brevity, to pungency, to saying what has to be said in the minimum of space; hence his invention of the ‘lowku’. Horace says est brevitate opus, ‘we need brevity’ (Satires 1.10.9); Longley concurs: ‘Sometimes the brevity is a kind of tact, the only way I have of dealing with momentous subject matter without being offensive or impertinent’. 15 Quintilian famously views Tibullus as ‘the most polished and elegant’ of the Roman elegists, a verdict that can, mutatis mutandis, be applied to Longley. As Dunlop says, ‘The achievement of elegance in Latin is in effect the liberating of its virtues of simplicity, conciseness, clarity, niceness of emphasis, directness of expression . . . by the elimination of its corresponding vices.’ 16 So Longley writes in a mode that is lucid, precise, direct, elegant; a mode that can demonstrate a mastery of syntax that he associates with Latin (the poem ‘The Butchers’ is spread over a single controlled sentence of 28 lines); a mode that can use the long line to powerful effect. Longley’s poem ‘Laertes’ (CP 182) about Odysseus’ father well illustrates his unique style, his idiolect: When he found Laertes alone on the tidy terrace, hoeing Around a vine, disreputable in his gardening duds, Patched and grubby, leather gaiters protecting his shins Against brambles, gloves as well, and, to cap it all, Sure sign of his deep depression, a goatskin duncher, Odysseus sobbed in the shade of a pear-tree for his father So old and pathetic that all he wanted then and there Was to kiss and hug him and blurt out the whole story, But the whole story is one catalogue and then another, So he waited for images from that formal garden, Evidence of a childhood spent traipsing after his father And asking for everything he saw, the thirteen pear-trees, Ten apple-trees, forty fig-trees, the fifty rows of vines Ripening at different times for a continuous supply, Until Laertes recognised his son and, weak at the knees, 15 16

Longley, quoted in Peacock and Devine (2000) 164. Dunlop (1972) 44.

158

Brian Arkins Dizzy, flung his arms around the neck of great Odysseus Who drew the old man fainting to his breast and held him there And cradled like driftwood the bones of his dwindling father.

A further important aspect of Longley’s appropriation of Latin literature lies in his seven contributions to the volume of newly commissioned translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses called After Ovid: New Metamorphoses, which was edited by Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun in 1994; 17 these contributions are also contained in Longley’s Collected Poems and in the 1995 volume The Ghost Orchid. Of the 60 passages in ‘self-contained narrative sections’, 18 are by 9 Irish writers, the single biggest number (7) by Longley, ‘who kept coming back for more’. 18 If Virgil was the Latin poet most favoured in the late nineteenth century (as in Tennyson’s eulogy), Ovid became the darling of the late twentieth century (as previously of the Renaissance, and not least of Shakespeare). Noting Ovid’s popularity at the moment, Hofmann and Lasdun think their book is an idea ‘ “whose time has come”, that Ovid describes forms of behaviour and suffering we think of as peculiarly modern: holocaust, plague, sexual harassment, rape, incest, seduction, pollution, sex-change, suicide, hetero- and homosexual love, torture, war, child-battering, depression and intoxication’. 19 These states are all experienced by what Longley nicely calls ‘Ovid’s lovely casualties’ (CP 205), and he does not shrink from describing them. Indeed in another poem entitled ‘After Horace’ (CP 199), Longley rejects Horace’s 20 neoclassical view that poets should not depict hybrid creatures, and accepts contemporary chaos: ‘We postmodernists can live with that human head | Stuck on a horse’s neck.’ He is indeed intensely aware that his versions of Ovid are of his own time: ‘Arachne starts with Ovid and finishes with me’ (CP 205). Longley’s engagements with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a long (though not continuous) epic poem, are marked by brevity, so that two 17 Hofmann and Lasdun (1994). For comment see the review by Jones (1994) and McDonald (2000) 46–50; Lyne (2002) 259–63; Arkins (2005) 193–95. 18 Hofmann and Lasdun (1994), xiii. See further Longley, Chapter 5 above, p. 107. 19 20 Hofmann and Lasdun (1994), xi. Horace, Ars Poetica 1–5.

Michael Longley Appropriates Latin Poetry

159

pieces—‘A Flowering’ and ‘Spiderwoman’ fit on the same page of his Collected Poems (205); the exception here is ‘Baucis and Philemon’ from Metamorphoses 8, which takes up four pages (CP 212– 15). Longley himself adverts to this pervasive brevity at the end of ‘According to Pythagoras’ (CP 202): ‘I could go on and on with these scientific facts. | If it wasn’t so late I’d tell you a whole lot more.’ The subject matter is not restrained, the style is. But a style that always employs an effective modern register of language that contrasts with the archaic diction used to render Ovid by the priest who teaches Stephen Dedalus Latin; ‘who taught him to construe the Metamorphoses of Ovid in a courtly English, made whimsical by the mention of porkers and potsherds and chines of bacon’. 21 Longley’s seven contributions to After Ovid treat of a wide variety of incident in an often poignant way: 22 the stories of Arachne, Perdix, Baucis and Philemon, Pygmalion, Adonis, Phoenix, together with the doctrines of Pythagoras. So Longley provides a poignant treatment of the story of the old couple Baucis and Philemon who, without knowing it, entertain the gods Jupiter and Mercury with a humble, but ample meal over what is for him considered space (Longley’s interest in this story is shown by the fact that he published it in separate form with drawings by James Allen). 23 Yet this unusually full narrative still contrives to be both precise and concise (CP 195): She put on the table speckly olives and wild cherries Pickled in wine, endives, radishes, cottage-cheese and eggs Gently cooked in cooling ashes, all served on crockery. Next, she produced the hand-decorated wine-jug And beechwood cups polished inside with yellow wax.

We move on now to consider some of Longley’s short pieces based on Ovid. The most remarkable of these is ‘Ivory and Water’, which

21

Joyce (1969) 179. Lyne (2002) 260: ‘Michael Longley’s several contributions to After Ovid strike a note of poignancy more than once.’ 23 Longley (1993). See also Longley, Chapter 5 above, p. 107. 22

160

Brian Arkins

is based on the myth of king Pygmalion, and which has rightly been seen as ‘extraordinarily good’ 24 (CP 240): If as a lonely bachelor who disapproved of women You carve the perfect specimen out of snow-white ivory And fall in love with our masterpiece and make love to her (Or try to), stroking, fondling, whispering, kissing, nervous In case you bruise ivory like flesh with prodding fingers, And bring sea-shells, shiny pebbles, song-birds, colourful wild Flowers, amber beads, orchids, beech-bells as her presents, And put real women’s clothes, wedding-rings, ear-rings, long Necklaces, a brassière on the statue, then undress her And lay her in your bed, her head on the feathery pillows As if to sleep like a girlfriend, your dream may come true And she warms and softens and you are kissing actual lips And she blushes as she takes you in, in the light of her eyes, And her veins pulse under your thumb to the end of the dream When she breaks out in a cold sweat that trickles into pools And drips from her hair dissolving it and her fingers and toes, There is nothing left of her for anyone to hug or hold.

Previously of little significance, the story of Pygmalion was turned by Ovid into a classic case of wish-fulfilment: he fell in love with a beautiful statue that Aphrodite turned into a woman, whom he then married. This shows how a man may shape a woman to his own ends (as Henry Higgins turns the Cockney girl Eliza Doolittle into an English lady in Shaw’s play Pygmalion), and how men may experience sexual desire for statues, a perversion termed Pygmalionism by Havelock Ellis. 25 Longley captures well these aspects of the myth, as well as adding a note of pity for Pygmalion; as Lyne says, ‘he transforms Pygmalion into a figure for pity, humorous condescension, and (to some extent) for revulsion as the statue resembles a kind of pornography.’ 26 Furthermore, Longley alters the sexual success of Pygmalion to sexual failure, so that the heat of passion is replaced

24

Jones (1994) 61. H. Ellis, quoted in Brown (1985), 85. For this theme in Irish literature see Arkins (2005), 211–14. 26 Lyne (2002) 260. 25

Michael Longley Appropriates Latin Poetry

161

by the coolness of insubstantial water. 27 This is ‘after Ovid’ with a vengeance. Another major success for Longley is the poem ‘A Flowering’ (CP 205) that deals with the death of Adonis, the young lover of the goddess Aphrodite. In terms of style, this is single, powerful, concentrated sentence of just eleven lines that changes narrative to lyric. In terms of theme, a great deal is contained in this short space: the disastrous nature of love and its link to death (Eros and Thanatos); perpetual transience, plus a metapoetic naming of Ovid, whose great theme that is; a celebration of flowers, and not least the anemone (from the Greek for ‘wind’, anemos) into which Adonis is changed. Here the detachable nature of Ovid’s stories (which so appealed to Shakespeare) is stressed in a spectacular way: Now that my body grows woman-like I look at men As two or three women have looked at me, then hide Among Ovid’s lovely casualties–all that blood Colouring the grass and changing into flowers, purple, Lily-shaped, wild hyacinth upon whose petals We doodled our lugubrious initials, they and I, Blood dosed with honey, tumescent, effervescent —Clean bubbles in yellow mud–creating in an hour My own son’s beauty, the truthfulness of my nipples, Petals that will not last long, that hang on and no more, Youth and its flower named after the wind, anemone.

To conclude. The opening line of Longley’s poem about Trinity College, Dublin (CP 236–38) is ‘I am walking backwards into the future like a Greek’, while in the last stanza of that poem he writes that he is ‘Walking forwards into the past’. Here the linear concept of time is abandoned, as D. H. Lawrence advocated: ‘To appreciate the pagan manner of thought, we have to drop our own manner of onand-on-and-on, from a start to a finish, and allow the mind to move in cycles, or to flit here and there over a cluster of images. Our idea of time as a continuity in an eternal, straight line has crippled our consciousness cruelly.’ 28 Ovid at the end of the Metamorphoses endorses 27 Derek Mahon in Hofmann and Lasdun (1994) 237–9 keeps Ovid’s ending of the Pygmalion myth, in which the king marries the statue turned woman. 28 Lawrence (1932) 97–8.

162

Brian Arkins

this when he prophesies in ringing terms his own leaping across the ages (15.877–9: ‘wherever Roman power holds sway over conquered lands, I will be read by the tongues of men, and for all the ages, if the prophecies of poets have any truth in them, in my fame I will live.’ Equally well, Longley’s appropriation of Latin poetry allows our consciousness to roam freely through the ages; as Kennedy-Andrews said about him, ‘The past is not another country, merely another version of the present.’ 29 29

Kennedy-Andrews in Peacock and Devine (2000) 96.

10 The Homeric Convergences and Divergences of Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley Oliver Taplin

Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley are, I do not hesitate to assert, two of the finest poets of our times in the English language. Moreover, they are a pair, twins—yet, like Amphion and Zethos, contrasting twins. It is an extraordinary fact that they were born within four months of each other in 1939 (the year of W. B. Yeats’s death), and within forty miles of each other, Longley in the city of Belfast and Heaney on the family farm in County Derry. Yet divergences are there from the start. Heaney came from a practising Catholic family (what might be termed ‘Irish Irish’); he won a scholarship to a select school, run by priests, and went on to read English at the local University, Queen’s Belfast, where he duly attained the prize for the best first class of his year. Longley’s parents were English, Anglican but not particularly religious: so he was not a ‘Protestant’ in the local sense of ‘non-conformist Scots Irish’. He went to a prestigious Belfast school, much like an English Grammar School, and on to read Classics at Trinity College, Dublin, which was still in some ways a little patch of England in the heart of Ireland. 1 He did not work hard on his Classics, 1 In the mid-twentieth century 40 per cent of the student intake was well-off British. Longley, who was dubbed ‘the culture vulture from Ulster’, has recalled how ‘Etonians on Commons cut our accents with a knife’ (Longley (2006 [1995]) 236–7). (All quotations from Longley are cited from the Collected Poems (2006), with the date of the original publication in square brackets.)

164

Oliver Taplin

and devoted his energies instead to poetry. He none the less admired the great W. B. Stanford (of The Ulysses Theme), and the admiration was to some degree reciprocated. 2 After these very different backgrounds and educations, the paths of Heaney and Longley converged, remarkably, in Belfast in 1962, where they were two central members of the labile confluence known as ‘The Belfast Group’, much publicized and much downplayed ever since. 3 Throughout the 1960s the two of them shared and criticized their poetry, published together, did reading tours together, and simultaneously admired and resented each other. There can be no doubt that the period was formative for both. Then as the civil war in the 1970s—‘The Troubles’—worsened, they grew apart. The Heaneys moved in 1972 to a cottage they had been offered at Glanmore in County Wicklow, south of Dublin; Edna Longley, Michael’s wife, herself a powerful personality and intellect, was fiercely hostile to Heaney’s volume, North (1975). The twins have remained at arm’s length ever since, although there have been conciliatory gestures from a distance. 4 The curious thing is that both of them have in the last twenty years—quite independently and differently—brought Homer into their poetry, during their fifties and sixties, that is. And that supplies my subject here. It will emerge that their Homeric affiliations, while more or less synchronic, are far from symmetrical. Heaney has occasionally included Greek allusions throughout his poems, although Latin poetry, which he studied to a good level, has meant more to him. 5 His two Sophocles versions, along with two vividly experienced journeys to Greece in the 1990s, have, however, brought Greek landscape and poetic associations more within his 2 ‘The Homeric head of Stanford | Who would nearly sing the first lines of the Odyssey’, Longley (2006 [1995]) 238. There is a nice anecdote in Clark (2006) 25: ‘He summoned me for missing lectures . . . he could have failed me my year. I was terrified. He scolded me, then smiled: ‘I suppose you think because you’re a poet I’m going to let you off?’ ‘Of course not, sir.’ ‘Well I am. I very much liked those recent poems in the magazine.’ 3 Now the subject of an excellent study by Heather Clark (2006). 4 See, for example, the messages quoted in Clark (2006) 206–7. 5 He has been working intermittently on a translation of Aeneid 6. He told me, in the course of a public interview at the Oxford Playhouse in October 2007 that, if he had chosen to take Greek at school, this would have amounted, in effect, to the declaration of a vocation for the priesthood.

Homer in Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley

165

poetic scope. 6 In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1995), for example, he cited the simile of the captive woman, likened to Odysseus’ weeping at the telling of the sack of Troy, saying ‘Even today . . . as we channel-surf over so much live coverage of contemporary savagery . . . Homer’s image can still bring us to our senses. The callousness of those spear shafts on the woman’s back and shoulders survives time and translation. The image has that documentary adequacy which answers all that we know about the intolerable.’ 7 The translation used there is that of Robert Fitzgerald—and Fitzgerald was, I suspect, the key that opened Homer for Heaney. Fitzgerald befriended him when he first became a Professor at Harvard (1982 onwards), and after Fitzgerald’s death (1985) Heaney wrote an ‘In Memoriam’, 8 in which he evoked the shooting-through of the axeheads in Odyssey 21. The moment picked out there—‘After the bowstring sang a swallow’s note’—is recalled again, more than ten years later, in one of the sequence ‘Sonnets from Hellas’, entitled ‘Pylos’ 9 : he exhorts himself to: key the understanding To that image of the bow strung as a lyre Robert Fitzgerald spoke of: Harvard Nestor, Sponsor and host, translator of all Homer . . .

It was surely while reading Fitzgerald that Heaney wrote ‘I swim in Homer’ in the course of his ‘Glanmore Revisited’ sequence. In two adjacent sonnets he recalls the bed of Odysseus and Penelope that was integrally conjointed with a living tree so that it could not be dismantled. This becomes an emblem for the resilience of his own marriage now that his family returns, in happier times, to the cottage they had rented nearly twenty years earlier. 10 All these poems are, in various ways, concerned with homecoming, but the Homer-related poem of Heaney’s that is, arguably, his best, 6

I am here only discussing poetry related to Homer. Greece has, in different ways, infused two of his (in my view) finest recent poems, ‘Mycenae Lookout’ in Heaney (1996) 29–37, and ‘Out of the Bag’ in Heaney (2001) 6–10. 7 8 9 Heaney (1995) 27. Heaney (1987) 22. Heaney (2001) 40. 10 Heaney (1991) 35–6. In 1992 Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey was reprinted with an Introduction by Heaney. This is, on the whole, a rather conscientious pedagogic piece, except for the last pages (xvii–xxiv) where he vividly brings out Fitzgerald’s particular poetic affinity with Homer.

166

Oliver Taplin

turns instead to the katabasis in Odyssey book 11: ‘Damson’. 11 Here he recalls a bricklayer from his childhood, and notices the similarity between blood on his grazed knuckles and the stain from a damson jam sandwich in his lunch-pack. Suddenly, and without explanation, after two sections of fond remembering, the third part turns sinister, alluding to some involvement of the bricklayer in violent times: Ghosts with their tongues out for a lick of blood Are crowding up the ladder, all unhealed, And some of them still rigged in bloody gear. Drive them back to the doorstep or the road Where they lay in their own blood once, in the hot Nausea and last gasp of dear life. Trowel-wielder, woundie, drive them off Like Odysseus in Hades lashing out With his sword that dug the trench and cut the throat Of the sacrificial lamb. But not like him— Builder, not sacker, your shield the mortar board— Drive them back to the wine-dark taste of home, The smell of damsons simmering in the pot, Jam ladled thick and steaming down the sunlight.

So Heaney recoils from Odysseus ptoliporthos: he wants only one of the two sides of the Homeric hero, the craftsman not the city-sacker. In the same vein, he transposes the signature-epithet ‘wine-dark’ to the kitchen instead of the dangerous seas. 12 This would seem to connect with another rejection of Homeric warfare in Heaney’s latest volume (to date), in the course of a poem called ‘To Mick Joyce in Heaven’. 13 It transpires that Mick Joyce was a relation by marriage who was not a farmer but a bricklayer. In the first stanza he recalls him as: A demobbed Achilles Who was never a killer, The strongest instead Of the world’s stretcher-bearers, 11

Heaney (1996) 15–16. Although the epithet was coined earlier, its now familiar association with Homer is owed to the hugely popular translation of Butcher and Lang (1879). 13 Heaney (2006) 8–10. 12

Homer in Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley

167

Turning your hand To the brick-laying trade.

Heaney maintains, then, a somewhat selective attitude to Homer, and tends to recoil even as he alludes—‘like Odysseus . . . but not like him’, ‘Achilles . . . never a killer . . . instead . . . ’. Homer, the poet of war, is not welcome. 14 The story of Michael Longley’s engagement with Homer is completely different. It was only at the end of a period of serious writer’s block during the 1980s that he arrived at what he himself has called ‘the Homer-inspired, and, for me, epiphanic sequence which was to emerge . . . in 1989 and 1990’. 15 This sequence was published in his 1991 collection Gorse Fires, and consisted of six poems arising from the Odyssey. There have been Homer poems in all of the three further collections he has published since then: I make the tally of Odysseybased poems thirteen, along with nine based on the Iliad. These all have in common that they are short, seldom more than twenty lines, and that they are close-ups of a particular moment or episode plucked from the broad epic flow, what Longley himself calls ‘freeze-framed passages to release their lyric potential’. 16 They nearly all include some lines that are fairly direct translation, 17 but they also nearly all involve some reordering and/or trimming and/or patterning to make them into shaped and self-contained pieces. That description may make them sound all rather similar and homogeneous: but, in fact, there is much variety—variety of tone and emotion, of the degree to which each is personal or public, of the bearing on the present (especially The Troubles), to Ireland or to the world at large. Thus, for example, ‘Anticlea’ and ‘Laertes’ enabled Longley, as he has himself put it, ‘to write belated lamentations for my mother and father’; 18 ‘The Campfires’, made out of the simile at 14 Some distaste for the Iliad emerges in the Introduction to Fitzgerald (1992); for example, ‘much more violent poem’ (xii), ‘the merciless narrative’ (xiv). 15 Longley in this volume, p. 98. He also mentions some early poems, but observes that they are more affiliated to Joyce’s Ulysses than to Homer. 16 See p. 99. 17 Longley says that he lays out in front of him the text, Liddell and Scott, and a range of translations and commentaries (personal communication). 18 p. 101.

168

Oliver Taplin

the end of Iliad 8, alludes directly and affectionately to the remote coast of County Mayo, where the Longleys have a cottage. 19 ‘A Poppy’, based on the Gorgythion simile, also in Iliad 8, evokes the First World War, while ‘Ceasefire’ was a response to the negotiations in the weeks leading up to 31 August 1994, when it was simultaneously published in the Irish Times. 20 The closer you look at Longley’s Homer-poems, the more you see how varied they are also in form and diction. Thus, while several have a sonnet-like form without rhyme, ‘Ceasefire’ has an unusually tight construction, three four-line stanzas with rhyme followed by the final memorable couplet: I get down on my knees and do what must be done And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son. 21

‘The Parting’ 22 consists of just two chiastic lines with a haunting halfrhyme and powerfully concise use of inverted commas: He: ‘Leave it to the big boys, Andromache’. ‘Hector, my darling husband, och, och,’ she.

Most of the poems have, like this, a characteristic scatter of dialect words. ‘Phemios and Medon’, 23 however, is mainly in broad dialect, with comic touches, and this is juxtaposed with the high-English diction of the pleading poet and the seer. A sample: . . . Phemios the poet In swithers . . . Makes a ram-stam for Odysseus, grammels his knees, Then bannies and bams wi this highfalutin blether: ‘I ask for pity and respect. How could you condemn A poet who writes for his people and Parnassus, Autodidact, his repertoire god-given? . . . ’

In Longley’s 2004 collection Snow Water, there are only three Homer-related poems, forming a cluster. 24 Two of these are, it seems 19

See Taplin (2007) 189–90. The poems cited in this paragraph are (in order) Longley (2006) 182, 183 [1991]; 224 [1995]; 255 [2000], and 225 [1995]. 21 A play on ‘Achilles’ and ‘killer’ again; cf. 167 above. 22 23 Longley (2006) [1995] 226. Longley (2006) [1995] 229. 24 Longley (2006) 310–11 [2004]. 20

Homer in Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley

169

to me, interestingly different from the earlier instances in that they stick very closely to the Homeric original, introducing hardly any shifts of tone or locality or dialect, nor of the characteristic ‘timedislocations’ (‘anachronism’ is the wrong word). 25 Yet they still achieve that ‘freeze-framed’ lyric economy and form. ‘Interview’ plucks some well-known lines from the meeting of Odysseus and Achilles in the underworld at Odyssey 11.482b–491, lines which, arguably, subvert in a few words the entire heroic ethos of the Iliad. The poem translates into two four-line snatches what are also sets of four lines each in the original. If there is a ‘timedislocation’ it is the literate use of inverted commas: ‘No one has ever lived a luckier life than you, Achilles, nor ever will: when you were alive We all looked up to you as one of the gods, and now As a resident down here you dominate the dead.’ ‘Not even you can make me love death, Odysseus: I’d far rather clean out ditches on starvation Wages for some nonentity of a smallholder Than lord it over the debilitated dead.’

Beyond the typically fresh choices of wording for the translation (‘resident’, ‘make me love death’, ‘clean out ditches’, ‘smallholder’), the effectiveness of this poem comes from the shaping cadence achieved by ending both the stanzas with the noun ‘dead’. This picks up the use of ÌÂÍ˝ÂÛÛÈ(Ì) governed by a word meaning ‘ruling over’ in both lines 485 and 491 of the Odyssey passage. By playing on the double d-sound in ‘dead’ the supposed glory of ‘dominate the dead’ is contemptuously rebutted by the kind of sound-jingle in ‘debilitated dead’. Finally, ‘Sleep and Death’. This is an almost ‘word-for-word’ translation of the haunting passage in Iliad 16 (666–83) where Zeus, authorizes the removal of his son Sarpedon’s corpse from the battlefield, calling on the services of the winged twins Sleep and Death. 25 ‘War and Peace’, made round the springs of Scamander in Iliad 22, is more like Longley’s previous Homer-poems. Take, for example, the addition of the word ‘washdays’: ‘Used to rinse glistening clothes in the good old days, | On washdays before the Greek soldiers came to Troy.’ Commonplace washdays unobtrusively assert hope for the future, a belief that the families will be there to wear the clean clothes.

170

Oliver Taplin

The first eleven lines of the Longley, giving Zeus’ instructions, closely follow the Iliadic 16. 666–75 (with the expansion of one line about ambrosia into two). A couple of nice Longleyesque lexical touches immediately emerge: ‘out of the line of fire’ for ÂÍ ‚ÂΛ˘Ì and ‘in no time at all’ for tÍ·. And there is the distancing oddity of ‘speedy chaperons’. 26 But what is most striking about this poem has to be the way that the third-person report in the last eight lines repeats, with the necessary slight changes, the direct-speech instructions of the previous ten. This is exactly as in Iliad 16.676–84 (with the omission of one line). Students of Homer are, of course, familiar with the phenomenon of whole blocks of lines repeated verbatim, incorporating small changes, as needed, from second to third person, or from direct to indirect speech. We think of this as a standard technique of the oral poet—indeed it is often cited rather patronisingly as exemplifying a sort of laziness, the poet’s autopilot falling back on routine mental cut-and-paste. The alert audience will, however, be listening out for a purpose to the repetition, for example, as here, the weight of a message from Zeus, or a significant variation amidst the repetition (such as Agamemnon’s ill-judged additions in Iliad 2, or Odysseus’ omission of four provocative lines from Agamemnon’s message in book 9). 27 What Longley does is to take over the oral technique and then exploit it to create a kind of lyric rituality. Everything has to be precisely right. This is nicely brought out by the translation of the litotes ÔP‰’ . . . IÌ ÍÔ˝ÛÙÁÛÂÌ (676) by ‘did exactly as he was told’. And the most delicate touch is taken straight over: after the lengthy verbatim repetition Homer does not repeat the last two lines about the family burial and monument 28 —Zeus has already explained that, and it goes without saying, an unspoken observance. And so the Longley poem ends with the earthy flÔÌÈ ‰fiÏ©˘—‘abundant farmland’. The 26 I had to go to the OED to discover that ‘chaperon’ (no ‘e’) need not be female, and that the word can be used of a little cap on the forehead of a horse in a funeral cortege. I wonder if Longley had that in mind? Or was it the p-sounds, echoing the sounds in pompoisin . . . kraipnoisi, that led to this strange wording? 27 For an alert discussion of such passages see Kelly (2007) 325–9. 28 Hera had already introduced this notion, when she suggested the retrieval of Sarpedon’s body earlier at 16.453–7.

Homer in Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley

171

privilege for Sarpedon, unlike other war-dead, is to be buried in his own home-soil. Longley usually achieves his special points by lighthanded changes to the Homer: here the power, the lyric power, comes from sticking tenaciously close to the epic. Two very different poets, then, highly unidentical twins. Yet both come to Homer at about the same time, when they have already been publishing poetry for some twenty-five years. Both find very different things in the epics, yet, at the same time, both make Homer very much their own. One swims in Homer, yet rejects the sacker of cities: the other is enabled by Homer to lament his parents, and brings himself to kiss Achilles’ hand.

11 Is ‘the Frail Silken Line’ Worth more than ‘a Fart in a Bearskin’? or, how Translation Practice Matters in Poetry and Drama Lorna Hardwick

In his poem ‘Latin as a foreign language’, Michael O’Loughlin took the persona of an exiled Roman meditating on the relationship between the culture and power of Rome and the priorities and behaviour of the conquered peoples of the empire: Rome will someday crumble to dust Beneath the barbarian heel, and only our precious language Will survive, a frail silken line flung across the years. But I don’t know. Who among these barbarians Would give a fart in his bearskin For Horace or Virgil Or any of us? All they want is enough To haggle with a Sicilian merchant, or cheat The Roman tax collector out of his rightful due.

Then the speaker feels the power and indifference to Rome of the northern landscape and wonders whether: We are the galley slaves Sweating below Bearing the beautiful Princess who sits in the prow Across the ocean to her unknown lover. 1 1

O’Loughlin (2002) 126–7.

Translation Practice in Poetry and Drama

173

This essay takes up the image of the ‘frail silken line flung across the years’ and examines some of the ways in which contemporary writers, dramatists, readers, and audiences have gone beyond the narrowly instrumental, and have indeed cared more than a fart in their bearskins about the Latin and Greek languages and their impact on sensibility and thought. I aim to explore how translation is not only a means of communicating in non-classical languages but is also a significant means for transmitting knowledge of the conventions and idioms of the classical languages themselves. Taken together, these characteristics make translation a catalyst in creativity. I suggest that traditional polarities between source and target languages and between concepts of ‘translatable’ and ‘untranslatable’ need to be reviewed, and that the ambivalent image of the (then) ‘unknown lover’ is worth examining as both appreciator and progenitor of the continuously developing life of classical languages and culture. I shall approach this by discussing two different examples of ‘translation’ and the issues they raise, and at the end will draw some preliminary conclusions about how the discourse used for conceptualising translations from classical languages might be reformulated, and about the kinds of translation theory that might develop from this kind of practice-based analysis. My examples will focus on ways in which translation can be an integral part of new works, interacting with other kinds of creativity. Creativity is itself a problematic concept. There used to be a rather rigid polarity drawn between, on the one hand, ‘creativity’ as a type of originality that in some mysterious sense ‘arrived’ without specific or readily traceable literary or artistic antecedents and, on the other hand, ‘invention’ as a kind of new work that grew from encounter with and rearrangement of elements from literary and artistic tradition. 2 In the nineteenth century this kind of polarity provided a basis for notions of the creative ‘hero-artist’ and of literary property and literary propriety. 3 Such approaches were hostile to allowing ‘originality’ to writing that involved repetitions of various kinds— imitation, allusion, quotation, parody, and pastiche. 4 In contrast the Latinate concept of ‘invention’ (cf. invenire: to encounter) attracted 2 3

For discussion see Steiner (2000) 13–53 and Said (1983) 126. 4 Macfarlane (2007) 2. Discussed by Macfarlane (2007) 3.

174

Lorna Hardwick

approaches to literary and aesthetic theory that privileged metaphors of combination. This is an important issue for writers working with classical material; for example Derek Walcott has developed the metaphor of ancient texts and civilizations as ‘shards’ that enable the archaeology of culture to be explored and to be reworked into new patterns (Walcott 1998). Taken together with assumptions that language is a medium for community communication, the concept of invention implies that aspirations for a total lack of borrowing and reuse are not feasible and that ‘originality’ is linked to encounter and transformation, even if the precise routes cannot always be traced. 5 Ideas about creativity and invention are closely related to many debates about translation. Twentieth-century histories of the reception of classical texts in literature intensified the focus on various kinds of intertextuality, including direct quotation, with appropriation and recontextualization as related literary modes which might take the form of quotation, translation, or rewriting. Ezra Pound conceptualized this as a kind of ‘Apostolic Succession’ 6 while T. S. Eliot wrote of the ‘saturation which sometimes combusts spontaneously into originality’. 7 In the late twentieth century, postmodern approaches to literature revisited questions of originality and repetition, questioning fixed polarities and suggesting more fluid relationships. 8 The continuing role of classical texts as literary and theatrical catalysts throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first provides a point of reference and comparison for literary analysis, and brings translation issues to the centre of both descriptive and evaluative debates. In my discussion, I hope to show, firstly, that translation and literature are closely connected within the discourses of ‘invention’—and especially that translation of various kinds is one literary mechanism that derives its energy from the encounter between ancient and modern and in its turn brings about recombinations and rewritings. Secondly, I want to push that argument further and explore ways in which translation/invention and the creativity associated with the individual

5 8

6 7 Ibid. 4–5. Pound (1913) 707. Eliot (1919) 39–40. See e.g. Connor (1988) 3; quoted and discussed in Macfarlane (2007) 9.

Translation Practice in Poetry and Drama

175

and self-conscious literary artist do actually mutually enhance one another. My first example is Michael Longley’s poem ‘Spiderwoman’: Arachne starts with Ovid and finishes with me. Her hair falls out and the ears and nostrils disappear From her contracting face, her body miniscule, thin Fingers clinging to her sides by way of legs, the rest All stomach, from which she manufactures gossamer And so keeps up her former trade, weaver, spider Enticing the eight eyes of my imagination To make love on her lethal doily, to dangle sperm Like teardrops from an eyelash, massage it into her While I avoid the spinnerets—navel, vulva, bum— And the widening smile behind her embroidery. She wears our babies like brooches on her abdomen. 9

The poem is, appropriately in a discussion of these issues, in part a response to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It is a lyric and is based, as so often with Longley, on adaptation of the sonnet form. The discipline of the sonnet has been important to Longley as a means of uniting invention and focus in his work. Commenting on his early writing he has pointed out that ‘I would convert a big splurge of words into sonnets . . . the act of writing is an act of exploration . . . the form of a poem is like a map and compass showing you the way’. 10 ‘Spiderwoman’ consists of twelve lines with two quintets framed by opening and closing one line comments. The poem draws on the Arachne sequence in Metamorphoses 6.5–145. Although also published in the New Yorker, the poem was specially commissioned for the 1994 collection After Ovid: New Metamorphoses. In their introduction to that volume the editors, Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun, commented on the many reasons for Ovid’s renewed appeal—‘mischief and cleverness’, ‘deliberate use of shock’, ‘obvious and powerful affinities with contemporary reality’, 9 First commissioned for and published in Hofmann and Lasdun (1994) 146. Also published, without changes, in Longley (1995) and in Longley (2006). See p.109 above. 10 McSweeney ([1982] 1983), quoted in Clark (2006) 23.

176

Lorna Hardwick

and the offer of ‘a mythical key to the more extreme forms of human behaviour and suffering’. They also noted the influence of Ovid’s visual effects, characterized by modern critics as cinematic qualities: The Metamorphoses are above all the poem of rapidity. Everything has to happen at high speed, strike the imagination: every image has to overlap another image, come into focus, and then vanish . . . When Ovid wishes to change pace, the first thing he does is to change not the tense of the verbs but the person. 11

Hofmann and Lasdun also noted the comment of Frank Justus Miller, the translator of the Loeb Metamorphoses, that later English poets have tended to draw lessons from the myths in ways that range from rationalisation to burlesque. 12 Longley’s response to Ovid’s treatment of the Arachne myth has characteristics of both the cinematic and the exemplary. In practice, Longley’s poetics echoes the opening lines of Ovid’s poem: In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas) adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen! Changes of shape, new forms, are the themes which my Spirit impels me Now to recite. Inspire me O gods (it is you who have even Transformed my art), and spin me a thread from the world’s beginning Down to my own lifetime, in one continuous poem. 13

Just as Ovid Latinizes the Greek metamorphoseis into mutatas formas and stresses the continuity of poetic tradition, so Longley situates himself in relation to Ovid and, like Ovid, develops a poetics that utilizes words from everyday language. Raeburn comments in his Translator’s Note that since Ovid’s language is ‘not elaborately poetic’ he decided that the idiom of his translation should be ‘natural and spontaneous, avoiding archaism but without being over colloquial’. 14 Ovid’s return in his Epilogue to the themes of continuity and transmission brings him inadvertently into dialogue with O’Loughlin’s 11 13

Hofmann and Lasdun (1994) xi–xii, quoting Calvino. 14 Translation from Raeburn (2004) 5. Ibid. xxxviii.

12

Ibid. xii.

Translation Practice in Poetry and Drama

177

reflections on the impact of the Roman empire on the spread of literature: Wherever the might of Rome extends in the lands she has conquered, The people shall read and recite my words. Throughout all ages, If poets have vision to prophesy truth, I shall live in my fame. 15

This effect is activated by Longley’s opening line: ‘Arachne starts with Ovid and finishes with me’. This direct and trenchant statement of ownership both aligns Longley’s poetic status with that of Ovid and claims a direct relationship between the two works, a relationship that claims to bypass mediating poetic traditions, Ovidian or otherwise (or at least does not openly trace these). Longley had a classical education and engagement with classical material is a pervading feature of his work. 16 Longley’s control of the material extends to omission of the context of the episode in Ovid’s work. Thus he leaves out the competing ideological strands and makes the sequence an ‘image’ of a ‘scene’ rather than a narrative. This selective approach has two important consequences. First, as is generally the case with Longley’s rewritings of classical material, he omits the gods. So there is no reference to Pallas Athene (Minerva) and to her resentment of Arachne’s weaving prowess. The themes of envy and punishment are removed. 17 This has the effect of also removing Ovid’s perspective that the reason that Arachne’s tapestry is challenging is because it depicts the misdemeanours of the gods. 18 As Denis Feeney has pointed out, Arachne’s tapestry displays a world-view that is distinctly un-epic, even hybrid, and it is to this that Longley’s poem responds. 19 Longley also omits Ovid’s context of multiple metamorphoses and the propensity of the gods to change forms. The combined effect of these omissions is to support an image of Longley as a decisive shaping poet who can jump 15

Ovid Met. 15.877–9, translation from Raeburn (2004) 636. See Clark (2006) ch. 1 ‘Beginnings’ for Longley’s school and university experience of Classics and Longley, Ch. 5 in this volume on his working methods. For discussion of classical referents in Longley’s individual poems and poetic technique, see Taplin (2007), Hardwick (2006; 2007b) and Chs. 8–10 above. 17 lexque eadem poenae (Ovid Met. 6.137). 18 Longley’s own use of classical referents and episodes is, of course, also challenging, but to human rather than divine behaviour, see for example ‘The Helmet’ and ‘The Horses’, discussed in Hardwick (2007b). 19 Feeney (2004) xxiv. 16

178

Lorna Hardwick

across the literary and historical time gaps between Ovid and the present. This image allows him to exploit the verbal ruse of implicitly representing himself in the body of the poem as the equivalent of the god who changes form in order to seduce or rape. Longley combines an extreme self-consciousness about his own poetic origins with a formal and syntactical insistence on his own status as a poet alongside Ovid. This is a recurrent theme in Longley’s classically orientated poems. For example, in ‘A Poppy’ he explicitly aligns himself with a passage in Virgil Aeneid (9.435–7) in his transplantation of a sequence from Homer that depicts the death of Priam’s son Gorgythion (Iliad 8.303–8): Lolling to one side like a poppy in a garden Weighed down by its seed capsule and rainwater . . . . . . (an image Virgil steals—lasso papavera collo—and so do I), and so Gorgythion dies. 20

Ovid’s implied comparison of himself with Virgil can be seen in Tristia 1.7, in which he claims that at the time of his exile in 8 ce Metamorphoses was unfinished and he tried to burn it, as the story went that Virgil had instructed for his Aeneid. Longley’s self-alignment with his predecessors is much more direct. Longley exploits the image to link Homer, Virgil, the deaths of modern soldiers and the Irish poetic tradition of Patrick Kavanagh (which also has classical borrowings and is sometimes generated through encounter with translations). 21 In the first quintet Longley gives a close translation of Ovid’s lines in Met. 6.140–5: et extemplo tristi medicamine tactae defluxere comae, cum quis et naris et aures, fitque caput minimum: toto quoque corpore parva est: in latere exiles digiti pro curibus haerent, 20

‘A Poppy’, in Longley (2000) 20 and 2006 (255). For discussion of ‘A Poppy’ and its literary antecedents, see Hardwick (2008). Longley’s use in ‘The Horses’ (2000) of lines from E. V. Rieu’s translation of the Iliad probably also alludes to Kavanagh’s 1951 poem ‘On Looking into E. V. Rieu’s Homer’ (Kavanagh (2005) 184). This in turn links Kavanagh’s idea of Homer with Keats’s ‘On First Looking in to Chapman’s Homer’, 1817. 21

Translation Practice in Poetry and Drama

179

cetera venter habet, de quo tamen illa remittit stamen et antiquas exercet aranea telas.

Again, there is no contextualization or explanation. Longley leaps straight in with the grotesque image of Arachne’s physical change. No reason or cause is given. Athene’s sprinkling of Hecate’s herb on Arachne is not mentioned (‘post ea discedens sucis Hecateidos herbae | sparsit’, Met. 6.139–40) but Longley then follows Ovid’s description closely, including the reproduction of the sequence of events and their physical manifestation. However, because he leaves out the allusion to the poison, the verse structure and syntax refocuses Ovid’s narrative with an emphasis that situates the action in the present. Thus: Her hair falls out and the ears and nostrils disappear From her contracting face

This phrase remakes Ovid’s ‘fitque caput minimum’ into a process but retains the sequence of events. And Longley actually classicizes Ovid’s language; parva becomes ‘minuscule’: her body minuscule, thin Fingers clinging to her sides by way of legs, the rest All stomach . . .

The phrase ‘by way of legs’ jogs recognition of a metaphorical hint, perhaps in response to the association of crus both with crucifixion (which involved the breaking of the legs of the crucified person) and with structural supports to bridges. ‘Clinging’ as a rendering of haerent combines the associations of closeness and adhesion (with a suggestion of anxiety). The enjambment postpones the reader’s realization that the next grotesque image is of the belly but then gives it the place of emphasis at the beginning of the line. This sensitivity to syntactical structure was an early result of Longley’s interest in Latin poetry: From reading the Latin poets I was alerted to the possibilities of syntax, which is the muscle of poetry . . . I love stretching out over a stanza, a sentence, and

180

Lorna Hardwick

playing the pauses of meaning against the line endings and trying to make the sentence, the grammatical unit, coincide with the stanzaic unit. 22

The rhythm of Longley’s poem then allows the image of the thread to be immediately associated with the fecundity of the stomach rather than, as in Ovid, being postponed until the next line. Longley’s ‘from which she manufactures gossamer | And so keeps up her former trade, weaver, spider’ serves both as a more differentiated rendering of Ovid’s interweaving of the associations of spider, spider’s web and texture of what is woven (in aranea and telas) and as the link to the next five-line section, in which Longley moves from close translation of Ovid into a new sequence where he himself takes on the persona of a spider. The spider’s ‘eight eyes’ also represent Longley’s multifaceted imagination, an imagination which forms pictures in the mind (spiders rely on scent and vibrations to construct their perceptions of the world). He is both like Arachne and also a self-conscious poet. Arachne’s identity as weaver and spider, straddling past and present, has been Enticing the eight eyes of my imagination To make love on her lethal doily, to dangle sperm Like teardrops from an eyelash

The poet’s imagination is caught both by the brilliance of Arachne’s weaving and also by her physical vulnerability. 23 The ironic domesticity of the ‘doily’ that is represented by the patterns of her web is also potentially lethal, a fragile covering to the orifices that both tempt him and will consume him if he enters and himself becomes a victim of her weaving, part of a pattern in which she depicted gods who rape as changing their forms (Ovid, Met. 6.103–28). 24 Arachne’s 22 Johnston (1986), interview with Longley, quoted in Clark (2006) 18. On this interest in Latin poets see also Longley’s and Arkins’s chapters in this book (Chs. 5 and 9 above). 23 The impact of Arachne on artists and writers has also been explored by A. S. Byatt (2000) 131–57, a discussion that includes comment on art forms from needlework to Velazquez’s painting Las Hilanderas (The Spinners), c .1656, and emphasizes how Ovid gave Arachne the lively images and stories, as well as using his visual imagination to present her metamorphosis as an ekphrasis, an approach picked up by Longley. 24 A comparable elision of the worlds of nature and domesticity, but on an epic rather than a miniaturist scale, occurs in Derek Walcott’s long poem Omeros where

Translation Practice in Poetry and Drama

181

representation of the metamorphoses of the gods not only catalogues the animal forms they assumed but also inverts Ovid’s rape narratives in Met. 1, where it is the female object that changes form. 25 In Longley’s poem the metamorphosis is double edged. The ‘liberation’ of Arachne which in Ovid results from Minerva’s concession becomes in Longley’s poem a means of allowing her to flourish. The reader sees both Arachne and the poet as transformed. Both are rapacious and dangerous: While I avoid the spinnerets—navel, vulva, bum— And the widening smile behind her embroidery.

Spiders are carnivorous and predatory. The precision of Longley’s eroticism, enhanced by his sense of danger and his mingling of the vernacular alongside the classicized vocabulary, creates a sense of intimacy both with Arachne and with the reader. This leads into the final line in which he picks up again the opening to the poem in which Arachne, although starting with Ovid, is to finish with the modern poet: She wears our babies like brooches on her abdomen.

The line combines the homely and the grotesque. It also refines the metaphor developed in the poem for the intercourse between Ovid’s creation and Longley’s. The modern poet both needs Ovid’s image and is in danger of being entrapped by it. He desires Arachne but is conscious of the danger of being killed at the moment that he fertilizes her eggs. The poem thus interweaves with its surface text a commentary on the process of engagement with Ovid’s text and with the ideas that it encodes. Taken together, the two five-line sections enact in sequence the attractions and necessity of the ancient image and Ovid’s poetics and the imperative for the modern poet to take over Arachne from Ovid, to quote and repeat without losing creative life. The almost surgical precision of Longley’s physical and imaginative relationship with Arachne and with Ovid is grounded in the sequence of close translation that both enables and controls his the sea, which is both ‘mother’ and ‘mer’ in Antillean patois, ‘spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore’, Walcott (1990) ii.iii.13. 25 For discussion see Feldherr (2002) 163–79, at 175.

182

Lorna Hardwick

metapoetic eroticism. The babies/brooches are eventually displayed as emblems of the poet’s achievement. 26 Philip Hardie has pointed out how: Metamorphosis as a narrative device occupies an uneasy space between art and nature. The Metamorphoses is a gigantic repertory of aetiologies for phenomena in the natural world, a world that is at once an image of the one in which we live, and also a pointedly artificial and fictive remaking and doubling of that world. 27

Longley’s response to Ovid’s representation of Arachne plays with the idea of poetic aetiology in a way that simultaneously acknowledges and subverts its power. His incorporation of close translation into the fabric of the poem is a necessary but not sufficient part of the negotiation of his relationship with Ovid. At another level, Longley’s inclusion of the excerpt from Ovid is also a means of orienting the reader who may not know the Metamorphoses in detail or be responsive to less fully worked out allusions. The role of quotation and translation in setting the framework for the reader or spectator to construct meaning is, in a different way, essential to the dramatic structure of Brian Friel’s play Translations, which provides my second example. Friel’s use of quotation and translation from Greek and Roman texts moves the discussion into the theatrical context. However, Friel’s technique is primarily linguistic. 28 Seamus Deane has commented that: Brilliance in the theatre has, for Irish dramatists, been linguistic. Formally, the Irish theatrical tradition has not been highly experimental. It depends almost exclusively on talk, on language left to itself to run through the whole spectrum of a series of personalities, often adopted by the same individual . . . It is not surprising that his [sc. Friel’s] drama evolves, with increasing 26 A companion piece by Thom Gunn in After Ovid immediately precedes Longley’s poem. Gunn adopts a more gloomy and nostalgic approach to Arachne but also specifically associates the web with creativity: ‘And then again the thread invents the light’ (Gunn (1994) 145). 27 Hardie (2002) 7. 28 The original paper from which this discussion grew also surveyed the theatrical semiotics of translation of classical plays for and to the stage and discussed the role of close translations of ancient texts as mediations that provide the raw material from which modern dramatists create acting scripts. I hope to consider those aspects of ‘Living Classics’ in a forthcoming article.

Translation Practice in Poetry and Drama

183

sureness, towards an analysis of the behaviour of language itself and, particularly, by the ways in which that behaviour, so ostensibly in the power of the individual, is fundamentally dictated by historical circumstances. 29

The genesis of Translations is intimately connected with that of the Field Day theatre company. In the late 1970s and early 1980s there was a move towards decentralization of Arts Council funding. The playwright Brian Friel and the actor Stephen Rae were told that they would be eligible for funding if they were members of an existing regional company—so they formed one. The name of the Field Day company is actually a play on their combined names as well as the name for a festival. For the inaugural performance of Translations on 23 September 1980 in the Guildhall Derry (which premiered the company as well as the play), Friel and Rae obtained funding from the Northern Ireland Arts Council, the Arts Council in the Irish Republic and from the City Council in Derry itself. The cast was drawn from the north of Ireland with some well-known actors, such as Stephen Rae as Owen and Ray McAnally as the schoolmaster Hugh. A young actor called Liam Neeson was cast as Doalty. Neeson was later to become an international star in films but at that time his Northern Irish Ballymena speech was barely understood by theatre critics from the South. The audience for the opening night included literary figures such as Seamus Heaney, Tom Murphy, Seamus Deane, and Michael Longley (who at that time was working with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland). Also present was the Catholic Bishop of Derry, Dr Edward Daly, who told a reporter: ‘I have always emphasised the importance of culture as an antidote to violence: Translations could not have come at a better time.’ 30 At that time violence was a constant presence in the north of Ireland. The civil rights marches which had called for equal rights in housing and employment for Catholics had been succeeded by riots, the presence of British troops and the arrest and detention without trial (internment) of people thought to be political activists. There was paramilitary violence from both sides of the sectarian divide.

29

Deane (1984) 12–13. Quoted in Morash (2002) 239. Morash gives a detailed account of the context in which the play was commissioned and produced. 30

184

Lorna Hardwick

Yet at first sight, Translations may seem only a marginally political play. It is set in 1833 in an Irish-speaking community in Donegal, and much of it is devoted to the personal relationships between the characters. Yet the framework is strongly political. It is set in a hedgeschool in Baile Beag (Ballybeg). The hedge schools were a heritage from the time of the penal laws (enacted c .1690–1785), which prohibited an official education for Catholic children. So the informal hedge schools, which used whatever shelter or barns that might be available and taught through the medium of Irish, became a main source of education for Catholics. In the 1830s when the play is set, the British government, which still ruled the whole of Ireland, aimed to bring in a system of national schools which would be open to all children but would use English rather than Irish as the medium of learning. At that time the Irish language was also being marginalized by the Ordnance Survey which was mapping the country and substituting English place-names for Irish, using a process of translation or transliteration. In the cultural memory which the play both draws on and reshapes this represented eradication of the Irish place names and took on a symbolic status (‘an eviction of sorts’). 31 The linguistic structure of the play comments on the situation, then and now. The schoolmaster’s younger son, Owen, had gone to Dublin to seek advancement and was renamed ‘Roland’ by the English, thus signalling a change of identity. In the play Owen is the interpreter between the Irish and the English, but since all the cast are actually speaking in English, the audience is enabled to hear how translation attempts to mediate between two communities who do not understand one another and how the translations reflect gradually worsening relations and become unable to exclude the threats of violence that underlie the official jargon. The only time that English is not the language heard on the stage is when Latin or Greek is spoken. It is part of Irish cultural memory that classical languages, alongside Irish, were part of the hedge-school tradition. 32 Latin authors that were listed in some of the documents relating to the syllabus 31 For critical discussion of the contradictory historical evidence, see Klein (2007), esp. 90–5 and for the significance of places and their names in the work of writers in the north of Ireland, see Kennedy-Andrews (2008). 32 For discussion of the evidence and its interpretation, see Stanford (1976), Arkins (1991), Arkins (2005) 60, Hardwick (2000) ch. 5, Klein (2008).

Translation Practice in Poetry and Drama

185

include Ovid, Sallust, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, Cicero, Livy, as well as Aquinas and Erasmus. The list of Greek texts include Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus (although not Euripides), Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle ‘along with Irish and a small taste of Hebrew’. Of course we cannot know how much of this impressive list was aspirational or the standard that was actually reached (some of the surviving chapbooks suggest that the work done was very elementary). It is also the case that historians differ radically about the historicity of the hedge schools (as opposed to their standing in the cultural memory). Nevertheless, the conjunction of the Irish language, Classics, and Irish politics and identity associated with the hedge schools seems to have become a matter of history as well as cultural myth. A parish priest in County Kerry in 1868 could say that ‘Latin is almost our mother tongue’. 33 Apart from religious usage for Catholics, speaking Latin and Greek seems to have had two aspects—quoting from classical authors and composing for everyday use, what is usually called ‘bog Latin’. There are examples of both in Translations. 34 There is a certain amount of evidence for the persistence of the hedge schools and their curriculum. In the 1920s a Waterford rector reported that a Kerry goatherd addressed him in a Latin too fast and fluent for him to follow while in the 1920s in County Clare a peripatetic hedge schoolmaster called Matt Tuohy was said to have been ‘born before the famine years’. 35 The persistence of the image in Irish literary tradition culminates in Seamus Heaney’s reference in his poem ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ to ‘my hedge schoolmaster Virgil’. 36 There are several different types of classical referents in Friel’s play and each has a distinctive contribution to the dramatic action of the play and to building up the stratigraphies of meaning that accrue to it. The impact of the hedge school’s classical tradition means that in 33

Quoted in Stanford (1976) 27 n. 6. This ‘made-up’ Latin was a feature of Irish literary tradition, for instance appearing in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), discussed by Arkins (2005) 61. 35 Sources reproduced in the Programme Notes for productions of Translations at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 1983 and 2000. 36 Heaney (2001) 11–12, discussed in Harrison (2007a) and Hardwick (2006). 34

186

Lorna Hardwick

Translations the most linguistically restricted people are the English, who speak only English and do not understand Greek, Latin, or Irish. Thus the Irish characters have the possibility of dialogue with another language and culture and can use it to draw analogies and differences with their own. One feature of the play is the way in which Friel introduces individual figures from antiquity and develops their resonances for his characters. The introduction of the figure of Athena comes very near the beginning. She is brought into the play in a direct quotation from Homer’s Odyssey by Jimmy, who is, we are told in the stage direction, fluent in Latin and Greek and for whom ‘the world of the gods and the ancient myths is as real and as immediate as everyday life in the townland of Baile Beag’. 37 The line that Jimmy quotes is Odyssey 13.420— ÙeÌ ‰ö MÏÂfl‚ÂÙ ö äÂÈÙ· ËÂa „ηıÍHÈÚ ö¡ËfiÌÁ, ‘But the grey-eyed goddess Athene then replied to him’. 38 ‘He’ is Odysseus. Athene’s role at this point is not only to reassure Odysseus in his anxiety about the fate of Telemachus but also to transform his appearance, so that he takes on the disguise of an ancient beggar and thus becomes safer and able to observe what is happening in Ithaca when he returns home. The Homer passage quoted by Jimmy continues: After Athene had said this, she touched Ulysses with her wand. She withered the fair skin of his supple limbs and destroyed the flaxen hair from off his head and about his limbs she put the skin of an old man . . . 39

This passage is also introduced by Jimmy with a direct quotation in Greek. He comments on it enthusiastically, identifying his own appearance with that of Odysseus and continuing: She dimmed his eyes that were so beautiful and clothed him in a vile ragged cloak begrimed with filthy smoke . . . ’! D’you see! Smoke! Smoke! D’you see! Sure look at what the same turf—smoke has done to myself! (He rapidly removes his hat to display his bald head.) Would you call that flaxen hair? 40 37

Friel ([1981] 1984) 384. This is transliterated in the published text as ‘Ton d’emeibet epeita thea glaukopis Athene’, Friel (1984) 384. 39 Odyssey 13.429–32 SÚ àÒ· ÏÈÌ ˆ·Ï›ÌÁ Ü‹‚‰©˘ KÂÏ‹ÛÛ·Ùö ö¡ËfiÌÁ. Í‹Ò¯Â Ï›Ì Ô¶ ˜Ò¸· Í·ÎeÌ KÌd „Ì·ÏÙÔEÛÈ Ï›ÎÂÛÛÈ, Ó·ÌËaÚ ‰ö KÍ Íˆ·ÎBÚ ZÎÂÛ ÙÒfl˜·Ú, Iψd ‰b ‰›ÒÏ· ‹ÌÙÂÛÛÈÌ ÏÂΛÂÛÛÈ ·Î·ÈÔF ËBÍ „›ÒÔÌÙÔÚ, 40 Friel (1984) 385, which transliterates the Greek as Hos ara min phamene rabdo epemassat Ahene and Knuzosen de oi osse. 38

Translation Practice in Poetry and Drama

187

Jimmy continues to quote the passage: And about him she cast the great skin of a filthy hind, stripped of the hair, and into his hand she thrust a staff and a wallet’! Ha-ha-ha! Athene did that to Ulysses! Made him into a tramp! Isn’t she the tight one?

Friel’s technique is to move very quickly from direct quotation to translation—he does not assume that the audience will know the references by heart as Jimmy does. However, he does assume that something about Athene’s many aspects will be understood and that the audience will appreciate the significance of Odysseus’ disguise and his resulting ability for observing what is really happening in Ithaca. 41 The way that Jimmy identifies himself with Odysseus allows him to think of himself and his people as under the protection of Athene. This is underlined by the next citation of Homer in Friel’s play (again a combination of direct quotation and translation is used): 42 ‘Autar o ek limenos prosebe—’ ‘But Ulysses went forth from the harbour and through the woodland to the place where Athene had shown him that he could find the good swineherd who—‘o oi biotoio malista kedeto’—what’s that Manus? (Manus): ‘Who cared most for his substance.’ (Jimmy): That’s it! ‘The good swineherd who cared most for his substance above all the slaves that Ulysses possessed . . . ’

This excerpt also identifies Jimmy with Odysseus and his sense of place and home, triggered by the swineherd’s cottage (Odyssey 14.1–4). 43 The sequence as a whole ties Odysseus’ sensibilities to peasant agriculture. This association between the Homeric heroes and Irish rural life is a persistent theme in Irish literature, directly addressed in Patrick Kavanagh’s sonnet ‘Epic’ (1951) in which he 41

There are mistakes in the glosses on the languages in the 1984 Faber edition of Friel’s play. In Hugh’s remark (445) that ‘we got homesick for Athens, just like Ulysses’ the allusion is an anachronistic one to Joyce’s novel Ulysses, not to Odysseus, who was not an Athenian but was homesick for Ithaca. Furthermore, in the opening sequence (384) Telemachos does not sit at ease in the house of the sons of Athens but of the son of Atreus, i.e. Menelaus. 42 Friel (1984) 387. 43 ¡PÙaÒ ≠ KÍ ÎÈÏ›ÌÔÚ ÒÔÛ›‚Á ÙÒÁ˜ÂE·Ì IÙ·ÒeÌ ˜HÒÔÌ IÌö ïÎfiÂÌÙ· ‰Èö àÍÒÈ·Ú,© Áú Ô¶ ö¡ËfiÌÁ ›êÒ·‰Â ‰EÔÌ ïˆÔÒ‚¸Ì, ¨ Ô¶ ‚ȸÙÔÈÔ Ï‹ÎÈÛÙ· Ífi‰ÂÙÔ ÔNÍfi˘Ì, Ô ‡ıÚ ÍÙfiÛ·ÙÔ ‰EÔÚ ö œ‰ıÛÛ½Ú.

188

Lorna Hardwick

meditates on an agricultural dispute which occurs at the same time as the Munich crisis and is therefore inclined to dismiss it: Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind. He said: I made the Iliad from such A local row. Gods make their own importance. 44

The identification with Greece in the Irish literary and popular classical tradition is very strong. Troy, on the other hand, was associated with British power (overthrown by Greece), and by extension the Roman empire founded by the displaced Trojans was aligned with the British. 45 Furthermore, in Translations the self-identification of the poor labourer Jimmy with Odysseus carries an undertow of unspoken threat in that Odysseus eventually emerged from his beggar’s disguise to defeat the suitors who were occupying his home and destroying his land. However, Friel does not pursue the analogies with the Odyssey any further. Instead, he moves the classical thread to that of ‘dog-Latin’, and in the sequence that follows has Maire and Jimmy exchange everyday comments in Latin, with a specific contrast between Maire’s basic knowledge of that language and her ignorance of English. In the exchanges between Hugh, Jimmy, and Doalty, interpretation of Greek and Latin words is discussed via affinities with agriculture. This ranges from Jimmy’s detailed knowledge of Virgil’s Georgics to the humour of the links between ‘Baptizein’—to dip or immerse (says Jimmy), via Pliny’s ‘Baptisterium’—the cold bath (Hugh) to Doalty’s ‘I suppose you could talk then about baptizing a sheep at sheep-dipping, could you?’ 46 Latin also becomes the bridge into the questioning of linguistic security and tradition. In the closing sequence of the play Friel turns attention from Homer to Virgil and evokes the image of Carthage. The hedge-school master, Hugh, struggles to recite some lines from the opening section of Virgil’s Aeneid (1.12–22): Urbs antiqua fuit—there was an ancient city which, ’tis said, Juno loved above all the lands . . . Yet in truth she discovered that a race was springing 44

Kavanagh (2005) 184. For discussion see Hardwick (forthcoming). An 18th-cent. epigram translation from the Irish includes the lines ‘Tara is grass: and look how it stands with Troy | And even the English—may be they might die’, Kinsella (1986) 218, no. 152. 46 Friel (1984) 397. 45

Translation Practice in Poetry and Drama

189

from Trojan blood to overthrow some day these Tyrian towers—a people late regem belloque superbum—kings of broad realms and proud in war who would come forth for Lydia’s downfall . . . 47

However, Hugh’s memory fails him: such was—such was the course—such was the course ordained—ordained by fate . . . What the hell’s wrong with me? Sure I know it backways. I’ll begin again. Urbs antiqua fuit. 48

And as Hugh struggles with his memory and with the implications of Virgil’s lines, the lights gradually dim until all is black. There is a further analogy to be drawn between Hugh’s misremembering of Virgil and the dimming of the Irish language signalled by the Survey and the historical events represented in the play. In his despair Hugh describes Irish as: a rich language, Lieutenant, full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception—a syntax opulent with tomorrows. It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes, our only method of replying to . . . inevitabilities.

The comment could perhaps as well apply to his attachment to Latin. 49 The Irish classical and theatrical tradition has taken the greatness of the civilization of Carthage and its treatment at the hands of proto-Romans, and later of real Romans, as a locus for Irish engagement with the violent power of Rome and by extension that of the British. Hugh’s struggle in Friel’s play is with Virgil’s lines on the image of Carthage, a city that promised so much, and yet which was first betrayed in the relationship between Aeneas and Dido and then destroyed by Rome itself. Frank McGuiness’s play Carthaginians 47 Virgil, Aeneid 1.12, 19–22: urbs antiqua fuit . . . | quam Iuno fertur terris magis omnibus una| posthabita coluisse Samo . . . | progeniem se denim Troiano a sanguine duci | audierat Tyrias olim quae verteret arces; | hinc populum late regem belloque superbum | venturum excidio Lydiae. 48 Friel (1984) 447. 49 Friel (1984) 418–19. It is an open question whether the dimming of the lights and the comments on self-deception also link the fate of Irish with that of classical languages. I am grateful to the students of Bancroft’s School, Woodford, and their teacher Robert Tatam for stimulating discussion on this point and its relationship to the web of linguistic and cultural analogies in the play.

190

Lorna Hardwick

(1988) used the literary and historical associations between Rome and Carthage as a metaphor for struggles between Britain and Ireland, especially in the context of the North, thus drawing on and revising the historical, philological, oral, and written literary traditions that construct an oppositional identity for the colonized Irish in the work of Friel and Heaney. 50 Yet it seems simplistic to think that either Friel’s play or Irish literature in general merely casts the Irish as Greeks or Carthaginians (= good, victims) and the English/British as Romans (= bad, oppressors). Friel’s dramatic and literary imagination is more subtle than that and is refined in and by his use of quotations and translated excerpts from classical texts and especially the ways in which he relates Greek and Latin texts and contexts in order to refine insights and critique. After all, Latin is a spoken language for the Irish of Baile Beag. Some of their quotations are from Latin literature; some of their exchanges are in made-up dog-Latin. This provides a distinctive strand in communication, both between themselves as Irish people and across the gaps of time and place that differentiate between Roman and Irish. It is the Aeneid that was the chosen reading of Hugh and Jimmy when they went out in 1798 to resist British domination (‘Two young gallants with pikes across their shoulders and the Aeneid in their pockets’). 51 In the play it is the English who are the ‘barbarians’, unable to join in this conversation or even to understand how they might be situated, both morally and materially, in the long sweep of history. Jimmy is the poor tramp-like figure and scholar who, like the disguised Odysseus with whom he identifies, is able to observe and understand. It is he who makes the analogy between Ireland and Italy and he does this through the Georgics of Virgil. He quotes the lines about the ‘Land that is black and rich beneath the pressure of the plough and with—cui putre—crumbly soil is in the main best for corn’. 52 The context is of an aspirational agricultural model: 50 Published text in McGuiness (1996); see Cullingford (1996) for a detailed study of this metaphor and its anticolonial resonances in the work of Heaney, Friel, and McGuiness. 51 Friel (1984) 445. 52 Virgil Georgics 2.203–5: nigra fere et presso pinguis sub uomere terra | et cui putre solum (namquam hoc imitamur arando), | optima frumentis.

Translation Practice in Poetry and Drama

191

‘From no other land will you see more wagons wending homeward behind slow bullocks.’ Virgil! There! . . . Isn’t that what I’m always telling you about? Black soil for corn. That’s what you should have in that upper field of yours— corn, not spuds. 53

Nevertheless, once the Georgics come into the discussion Virgil’s poetry brings with it a context that conveys an underlying sense of how the problems of the events of the civil war in Rome actually resonate with the dilemmas of Ireland. The fall of Caesar and the consequent internal strife led to the destruction of the countryside with its continuing violence, the eventual emergence of OctavianAugustus, the reallocation of land to the victors. There is a strand in classical scholarship that sees Virgil, whose family farm was lost in the troubles, as actually exploring in his poetry the unidealized face of pastoral, the dangers and violence of the countryside and the intense rivalries and struggles for land that it conceals. 54 There is a corresponding strand in Irish poetry and drama that problematizes rural life and the violence and suffering that accompanied both the struggle to survive and the struggle for freedom and its aftermath. 55 Friel does not take the allusion further (as he similarly draws back from exploring the implications of Odysseus’ revenge on the invading suitors in the Odyssey), but his handling of the images of Rome and the quotations and translations from Latin poetry reflect something of the richness and depth of the cultural politics of ‘pastoral’ poetry in both ancient and modern contexts. These quotations and translations are crucial to the central issues of the play, to relationships among Irish people and between them and the English ‘other’, and also to the concrete and metaphorical issues of the potential of language and its relationship to place, people, and imagination. The Irish characters in Friel’s play did want the ancient languages and showed how and why they mattered to them. In exploring this, Friel opens up an understanding of their continuing resonances. In the examples that I have discussed, translation is opposed neither to the authority and aesthetics of the classical source texts nor to 53 non ullo ex aequore cernes | plura domum tardis decedere plaustra iuuencis (Virgil Georgics 2.205–6); Friel (1984) 392. 54 See further Thomas (2001a), with bibliography. 55 In various forms this permeates the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Patrick Kavanagh and the plays of J. M. Synge and Marina Carr.

192

Lorna Hardwick

the creative work of the modern author. It is a natural extension of the former and an integral part of the poetic and theatrical imagination of the latter. Once these different descriptive and explanatory frameworks are established there are, too, implications for the theoretical models of translation that might best describe such relationships. These may overlap with some previously influential models—for example, the first phase of George Steiner’s outline of hermeneutic relationships emphasizes trust in the value of the source text, while Kwame Anthony Appiah’s concept of ‘thick translation’ brings into the discussion the layers of cultural and literary context that underpin translation practice. Also relevant is the idea of translation as ‘commentary’. In this case the use of the idea of ‘commentary’ is less a speculative comment on what the ancient author might have produced if writing in the present context than a judgement on how the poetics and ideas of the ancient source activate the modern author and the literary figures in his or her work. 56 However, it seems to me that none of the existing theories of translation is sufficient as a model for the practices involved in the poetics and theatricality associated with ‘Living Classics’. It is perhaps better to look for a negotiated relationship between translation theory and the theories that have been developed to accommodate readers and spectators in the construction of meaning. Readers and spectators operate in (at least) two phases. The writers and dramatists who engage with the ancient material are the first phase. They are, in the first instance, readers and spectators as part of their practice as writers. The readers and spectators who engage with the new recombinations of material that ensue then constitute a second phase. Thus we are dealing with a map of the new material into which the ancient is interwoven, and to which the accretions of texts known either to the ancient author or to the modern (or both) can adhere. This map may include mediating texts and translations (both classical and non-classical) that have shaped the way in which new readers and spectators approach the modern work, and which influence how they regard the ancient original. Some links and connections may 56 See further Steiner (1975), Appiah (1993), and for a model based on rethinking the humanities in terms of text reading and the ‘erotics of the discipline’, Humphreys (2004) 25.

Translation Practice in Poetry and Drama

193

be direct and marked in the palimpsest that is the new text. Such is the case with the classical translations in the self-conscious writing of Longley and Friel. Others of course may prove to be discernable only with difficulty; some may have left no trace. The price that is paid for a concept of ‘Living Classics’ is that the comfort zones that might have been associated with notions of ‘accuracy’, ‘faithfulness’, and with the hierarchies associated with clear patterns of transmission through time and within genre have given way to a sometimes vulnerable ‘silken thread’, whose web may gleam only in certain lights and at the behest of the as yet ‘unknown lovers’ imagined by O’Loughlin. 57 57 I would like to thank the organizers and participants in the 2005 Living Classics conference for the opportunity to try out, debate, and subsequently develop the ideas that have led to this paper. Special thanks to Stephen Harrison for his guidance both of the conference and the subsequent publication.

12 Electra in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry: A Case of Identification Anastasia Bakogianni

In a volume entitled Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English, 1 the inclusion of a chapter on Sylvia Plath will appear at first glance anomalous, but Sylvia Plath, poet and twentieth-century icon, ‘haunts our culture’. 2 Her fame as a poet is mainly posthumous. 3 Since her death in 1963 she has become an idol. 4 From a classical perspective, what is particularly distinctive in her use of the figure of Electra in her poetry is that it seems intensely personal. Plath did not adopt any particular ancient tragic version of the story; instead, she responded to Electra as a mythic archetypal figure, and she used elements from the different earlier versions to construct a very personal response to the myth. 1 I am very grateful to Professor Stephen Harrison, editor of this volume, for all his help during the process of revision. I am also indebted to Professor Mike Edwards and Professor Lorna Hardwick for their help and constructive comments. 2 Rose (1991) 1. The very title of her book The Haunting of Sylvia Plath is indicative of the power of Plath’s reception. A recent example of her reception is the film Sylvia (2003) based on her life (directed by Christine Jeffs). The film covers the period from the time she was at Cambridge till her suicide. 3 Plath published her poetry in several magazines; though her first book of poetry The Colossus and Other Poems received favourable reviews, it did not gain her the status of icon which she now enjoys. As Kirk mentions in her bibliography of Plath, however, her position as a poet is jeopardized by ‘her status as a cult icon’ (Kirk (2004) 1). 4 Cf. Langholm (2003) 85. This trend became more pronounced in the 1980s when interest in dead artists became part of a movement in literary criticism (Langholm (2003) 77).

The Figure of Electra in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry

195

The figure of Electra makes several appearances in Plath’s poetry, most clearly in the poem Electra on Azalea Path, written on 20 March 1959. 5 This poem marked a significant ‘transition’ 6 for Plath, from borrowing ‘the stilts of an old tragedy’ 7 to fully integrating the myth into her poetry. Plath’s poetic ability to turn ‘the entire world into a myth’ made her imagine herself as an Electra figure. 8 In her later poem Daddy, written on 12 October 1962, 9 the persona speaks ‘as if she really was a character such as Electra’. 10 Plath’s vision of the Electra story was informed primarily by personal circumstances as well as social and cultural factors. Plath was an artist who to a great extent identified with Electra, but at the same time invoking Electra’s name also gave her the necessary emotional distance she needed to universalize her experiences. Plath herself said about her poems that they came ‘out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say that I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing’ and she went on to explain: ‘I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying.’ 11 In Plath’s work the personal elements are universalized by her creation of ‘a mythic system’: 12 using Electra is part of her poetic strategy. What seems to have most attracted Plath to the Electra myth is that she saw it as similar to her own relationship with her father. However, it must be noted that her view of Greek tragedy was greatly influenced by Freud’s theories about the development of relationships within families. Plath viewed Electra from a psychoanalytical perspective. She explored the Electra complex, 13 defined as the daughter’s desire for her father and her wish to supplant the mother in his affections. It was Freud who first came up with the idea of using ancient Greek tragedy to lend kudos to his theories about the early development of children. He formulated the Oedipus complex, the male version of the Electra complex, in The Interpretation of Dreams

5

6 7 Plath (1982) 300. Stevenson (1998) 153. Plath (1981) 117. 9 Kirsch (2005) 240 and 252. Plath (1981) 224. 10 11 12 Kroll (1976) 30. Sanazaro (1984) 90. Kroll (1976) 2. 13 Cf. Plath (2000) 512. The publication of Plath’s unabridged journals in 2000 edited by Karen Kukil provided Plath scholars with new material to work on. Even this edition, however, is not complete: Brain (2006) 144–6. 8

196

Anastasia Bakogianni

(1900). 14 Freud’s theories about the Electra complex were further explored and redefined by Jung. 15 It was he and not Freud who believed that: ‘women could be as violent as Oedipal men in their possessive love of the parent of the opposite sex and their jealous hatred for the parent of the same sex.’ 16 Jung also further refined the concept by seeing such complexes as ‘symbolical’. The parental figures in Freud’s formulation of the complexes represent ‘the inner parents from whose influence we must free ourselves in order to become independent’. 17 Plath’s fascination with these theories arose out of her own personal circumstances which caused her often to return to the ‘old father-worship subject’, as she herself called it, 18 particularly in her poetry. 19 A closer examination of Plath’s own family history helps to illuminate some of the more personal aspects of her poetry. Plath’s father Dr Otto Emil Plath died from diabetes mellitus on 5 November 1940, nine days after Sylvia’s eighth birthday. 20 His influence on his daughter, however, was enduring. In her autobiographical prose piece Ocean 1212-W 21 she writes about her childhood spent in Winthrop, Massachusetts, near the Atlantic Ocean and ends with these revealing lines: And this is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died, we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth. 22

Plath idealized her father and his ghost haunted her for the rest of her life, and it is precisely this aspect of Electra and her relationship with her dead father Agamemnon with which Plath most identified. 14

Freud (1938) 306–9. ‘a daughter develops a specific liking for the father, with a corresponding jealous attitude towards the mother. We could call this the Electra complex’, Jung (1961) 154. 16 17 18 Hayman (2003) 30. Freud (1938) 974. Plath (2000) 518. 19 Cf. Bassnett (1987) 82. 20 Lehrer (1985) 39. Schultz (2005) 172 calls Otto’s death ‘sub-intentional’ because he refused to see a doctor out of fear until it was too late. 21 The title of this prose piece is taken from Plath’s grandparent’s phone number Lehrer (1985) 39. Ocean 1212-W was broadcast on the BBC in 1962 and published in The Listener in 1963 Plath (1979) 9. 22 Plath (1979) 124. 15

The Figure of Electra in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry

197

In classical tragedy Electra’s relationship with her father defines her. In Aeschylus’ Choephori she is portrayed as a loving and dutiful daughter; after the anagnorisis (recognition scene) she joins her brother Orestes in prayer at the tomb of their father (Aeschylus, Choephori 332–5): 23

ÍÎFËfl ÌıÌ, t ‹ÙÂÒ, KÌ Ï›ÒÂÈ ÔÎı‰‹ÍÒıÙ· ›ÌËÁ. ‰fl·ÈÚ ÙÔfl Û’ ›ÈÙ˝Ï‚ÈÔÚ ËÒBÌÔÚ IÌ·ÛÙÂÌ‹ÊÂÈ. Hear then, O father, as in turn we mourn with Plenteous tears. Lo, ’tis thy children twain that Bewail thee in a dirge o’er thy tomb. 24

It is clear that she is her father’s daughter, siding with Orestes against her mother Clytemnestra, but despite the fervour of her prayers, she leaves the actual revenge to Orestes. It is Sophocles’ version that emphasizes the intensity of Electra’s emotions for her father, as revealed in the following lines from her first monologue upon entering the stage (Sophocles, Electra 92–6):

Ùa ‰b ·ÌÌı˜fl‰˘Ì Ífi‰Á ÛÙı„ÂÒ·d ÓıÌflÛ·Û’ ÂPÌ·d ÏÔ„ÂÒHÌ ÔY͢Ì, ¨Û· ÙeÌ ‰˝ÛÙÁÌÔÌ KÏeÌ ËÒÁÌH ·Ù›Ò’, And my hateful bed in the miserable house knows of the sorrows of my sleepless nights, how often I lament for my unhappy father 25

Sophocles’ Electra is willing to take action, but in the end she too leaves the matricide up to Orestes. It is only in Euripides that Electra’s relationship with the memory of her father is more ambiguous; she wants to avenge his death, but in both Electra and in Orestes she is 23

It is interesting to note that in Ted Hughes’s version of the Oresteia he has Agamemnon appear to his children as a ghost to emphasize, for a modern audience, the point of his influence upon them even from beyond the grave. 24 I have used the Loeb translations of the plays throughout this chapter (Smyth 1999 for Aeschylus) because although at times old-fashioned they do provide readers with no or very little knowledge of ancient with both the Greek text and the English translation in parallel. 25 Translations from Sophocles are taken from Lloyd-Jones (1994).

198

Anastasia Bakogianni

also equally concerned about the loss of her patrimony and her own honour. However Plath’s relationship with the ghost of her father, as it found expression within her poetry, differs crucially from that of the classical Electra in that it is as much about hate as it is about love. This crucial difference is illuminated by a comparison of Electra on Azalea Path and the later Daddy. Plath has chosen to create in both poems a female persona that has elements of Electra’s character but the voice in the first poem is ‘mourning his (the father’s) absence’ whereas the latter is ‘reviling what that absence and mourning have done to her’. 26 Plath redefined the Electra myth along these lines because of her own relationship with her father and the twentieth-century perspective from which she viewed the story. In order to illuminate this darker aspect of Plath’s creation of an Electra voice, the two poems mentioned above will now be examined more closely. Electra on Azalea Path was inspired by Plath’s visit to her father’s grave on 8 March 1959 on her temporary return to the United States. 27 This was actually her first visit because her mother Aurelia Plath had not let her or her brother Warren attend their father’s funeral, 28 so for Plath this visit was a momentous event. Her decision to visit the grave at the age of 26 may have been the result of her sessions with Dr Ruth Beuscher, her psychiatrist. Dr Beuscher had first treated her during her hospitalization at McLean psychiatric hospital after her first attempt at suicide in 1953, and on her return to Boston Plath decided to resume seeing her. These sessions gave her a feeling of catharsis: ‘As usual after an hour with RB, digging, felt I’d been watching or participating in a Greek play: a cleansing and an exhaustion’, she wrote in her journal on 3 January 1959. 29 Thus in Plath’s mind psychoanalysis was already associated with Greek tragedy and Aristotle’s view of tragedy as a cathartic event. As with Freud’s theories, this Aristotelian view of ancient Greek tragedy had entered twentieth-century popular consciousness. 30 Plath’s return to the United States in June 1957 marked the beginning of a personal and artistic growth that resulted in the particular way she presented the Electra story in Electra on Azalea Path. Ever 26 29

Kroll (1976) 86. Plath (2000) 455.

27 30

Stevenson (1998) 152. Bundtzen (2006) 37.

28

Schultz (2005) 163.

The Figure of Electra in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry

199

since her return to her native country, Plath had been ‘more and more drawn to psychology and to Freudian explanations for her behaviour’. 31 On 27 December 1958 she wrote in her journal that she read Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1915) 32 and saw in it an ‘almost exact description of my feelings and reasons for suicide: a transferred murderous impulse from my mother onto myself ’. 33 Freud explained melancholia as ‘a reaction to the real loss of a loved object’ that develops into ‘pathological mourning’. 34 Over those two crucial years (1958–9), during which Plath lived in the States with her husband Ted Hughes, she began the process of dealing with her father’s death and her negative feelings towards her mother that also had their source in the death of her father. Plath’s interest in psychotherapy seems to have been first rekindled by her work as a secretary in the record office of the Massachusetts General Hospital’s psychiatric clinic, where she had access to patients’ records. It was a temporary job Plath took in order to earn some money, but the fact that less than two months later, out of her own volition, she made the decision to start seeing Dr Beuscher again seems significant. All these influences crystallized in the formation of the Electra persona in Electra on Azalea Path. This persona undergoes a significant change of attitude towards her father, from denying the reality of his death to acknowledging it and then blaming herself for it. The creation of this persona provided Plath with the necessary distance for her to turn the experience of visiting her father’s grave, recorded in her journal, 35 into a poem. However, such was the personal significance of this event that Plath repeated the process in her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, written two years later in the spring 31

Stevenson (1998) 147. Freud (1984) 247–68. Schultz (2005) 161 raises the interesting idea that it might have been Dr Beuscher who recommended Freud’s essay to Plath. 33 Plath (2000) 447. 34 Freud (1984) 259–60. For a more modern discussion of Freud’s view on this see Bowlby’s views in Holmes (1993) 91. In particular his view that anger is an essential part of the process of mourning: ‘the seemingly endless examination of why and how the loss occurred, and anger at everyone who might be responsible, not even sparing the dead person’. Plath seems to have been unable to move beyond this phase in the process of mourning her father. 35 Entry for Monday, 9 March 1959: Plath (2000) 473. 32

200

Anastasia Bakogianni

of 1961. In this novel the heroine Esther Greenwood, ‘Sylvia’s alter ego’, 36 visits her father’s grave before she attempts suicide by taking an overdose of pills, as Plath herself had done in the summer of 1953. Two main themes run through both Plath’s journal and her two fictionalized versions of this visit to her father’s grave: the problematic nature of her love for her father’s memory and her guilt. Electra on Azalea Path 37 opens with the line ‘The day you died I went into the dirt’, referring to the trauma of losing her father. The imagery of hibernation suggests that the persona buried her feelings of loss because she could not deal with them: It was good for twenty years, that wintering— As if you had never existed, as if I came God-fathered into the world from my mother’s belly: Her wide bed wore the stain of divinity.

Instead of dealing with the trauma of losing her father, the persona constructed a mythical vision of her father as a god. The last line of the quotation used above alludes to the classical myths of how Zeus, and other male gods, metamorphosed themselves into inanimate objects or animals in order to pursue mortal women. For example Zeus turned himself into a shower of golden rain in order to impregnate Danae, the mother of Perseus (Apollodorus, Bibl. 4.1). The classical Electra, however, never forgot or tried to suppress the memory of her father. Just the opposite: she kept Agamemnon’s memory alive all the years she awaited Orestes’ return, despite the fact that it would have been more prudent if she had sided with her mother and her paramour, who were after all the rulers of Argos. Aeschylus and Sophocles, in particular, dwell upon her devotion to her father’s memory. The latter tragedian draws attention to Electra’s faithfulness to her father’s memory by introducing the character of her more timid sister Chrysothemis, 38 who counsels Electra to refrain from openly grieving for their father out of fear of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra’s displeasure (Sophocles, Electra 330–1 and 339–40): 36

37 Hayman (2003) 19. Plath (1981) 116. It must be noted that Sophocles did not invent the character of Chrysothemis (she was already part of the mythical story) but his decision to use her as a foil to her sister is a sign of Electra’s increased importance in comparison to Aeschylus’ version. 38

The Figure of Electra in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry

201

ÍÔP‰’ KÌ ˜Ò¸Ì©˘ Ï·ÍÒ©˘Ñ ‰È‰·˜ËBÌ·È Ë›ÎÂÈÚ ËıÏ©˘Ñ Ï·Ù·fl©˘ Ïc ˜·ÒflÊÂÛË·È ÍÂÌ‹; . . . ÂN ‰’ KÎÂıË›Ò·Ì Ï ‰ÂE ÊBÌ, ÙHÌ ÍÒ·ÙÔ˝ÌÙ˘Ì KÛÙd ‹ÌÙ’ IÍÔıÛÙ›·. And will you not learn, after so long, not to indulge in futile fashion your useless anger? . . . but if I am to live in freedom, I must obey those in power in everything.

Euripides on the other hand lays the emphasis not so much on Electra as a dutiful daughter but as the daughter of a king who is angry over the loss of her patrimony and blames her mother for that, as well as for the murder of her father (Euripides, Electra 1087–90):

K„g Ùfl Û’ M‰flÍÁÛ’ KÏ¸Ú ÙÂ Û˝„„ÔÌÔÚ; HÚ ÔP ¸ÛÈÌ ÍÙÂflÌ·Û· ·ÙÒ˛ÈÔıÚ ‰¸ÏÔıÚ ôÏEÌ ÒÔÛB¯·Ú, IÎÎ’ KÁÌ›„͢ Λ˜ÂÈ ÙIÎθÙÒÈ·, ÏÈÛËÔF ÙÔfÚ „‹ÏÔıÚ TÌÔıÏ›ÌÁ How did I wrong thee, and my brother how? Why, having slain thy lord, didst though on us Bestow not our sire’s halls, but buy therewith An alien couch, and pay a price for shame? 39

The speaker of Plath’s poem on the other hand stresses the bond with her mother after her father’s death: I had nothing to do with guilt or anything When I wormed back under my mother’s heart.

As Susan Bassnett put it: ‘the poem suggests, the speaker has existed without the need for a father in a relationship with the mother’. 40 The imagery of the sleeping bees reinforces this idea, since observing bees was one of Otto Plath’s scientific obsessions. 41 The classical Electra, on the other hand, never wavers in her complete rejection of her mother Clytemnestra. Such was her love for her father and her hatred of her mother that she condoned Orestes’ matricide. In Euripides she is the one who plans the matricide and convinces Orestes to carry it out when he hesitates. She tricks her mother into entering the hut, 39

40 Translation from Way (1988). Bassnett (1987) 85. Otto Plath published a book on the subject called Bumblebees and their Ways in 1934 (Kirk (2004) 11). 41

202

Anastasia Bakogianni

where Orestes waits to kill her, by pretending she had given birth to a son (Euripides, Electra 1123–40). In Electra on Azalea Path an important change takes place as the speaker comes to accept the reality of the father’s death and this also leads to a change of attitude towards the mother. The image of the speaker’s ‘epic’, godlike, unchanging father inspired by the figure of Agamemnon is shattered when she is faced with the reality of his gravestone: ‘The day I woke, I woke on Churchyard Hill’. The persona’s first reaction when faced with the reality of the father’s existence and subsequent death is disappointment: I found your bones and all Enlisted in a cramped necropolis, Your speckled stone askew by an iron fence.

In her journal Plath describes her feelings thus: ‘went to my father’s grave, a very depressing sight’, 42 and in The Bell Jar Esther describes her father’s grave as follows: ‘It was crowded right up by another gravestone, head to head, the way people are crowded in a charity ward when there isn’t enough space’ (Plath (1963) 177). This scene forms the book’s ‘centrepiece’. 43 Esther’s experience is very similar to that of the persona in Electra on Azalea Path. Plath has Esther pick some azalea flowers from the graveyard for her father’s grave, perhaps as an allusion to her earlier poem. It might, however, also be a sign of how her own experience of visiting her father’s grave was so traumatic that she needed to work through it a second time, this time in prose. In both the poem and the novel disappointment is mixed with feelings of anger that her father’s grave is so badly looked after: the poem’s speaker calls the section of graveyard where the father’s grave lies ‘this poorhouse’. There are no real flowers growing there, only cheap artificial flowers whose colours bleed in the rain. The daughter is thus ‘cheated of her heroic father’. 44 The classical Electra on the other hand experienced no such disappointment because she kept her father’s memory alive and was steadfast and unrelenting in her desire for vengeance, even when she believes Orestes to be dead. In Sophocles’ eponymous play she is even prepared to try to avenge her father herself. 42

Plath (2000) 473.

43

Schultz (2005) 166.

44

Bundtzen (1983) 135.

The Figure of Electra in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry

203

The use of the colour red in Electra on Azalea Path is significant— the colour of the dye of the artificial flowers is red: Although the rains dissolve a bloody dye: The ersatz petals drip, and they drip red.

This imagery is reminiscent of Aeschylus’ blood imagery in the Oresteia and the red/purple tapestries on which Agamemnon walks. Blood imagery is also found in Sophocles’ Electra. 45 The third stanza of the poem ends with this allusion to the classical plays, but it is in the fourth stanza that the speaker directly introduces the classical story of Electra: Another kind of redness bothers me: The day your slack sail drank my sister’s breath The flat sea purpled like that evil cloth My mother unrolled at your last homecoming. I borrow the stilts of an old tragedy.

These italicized lines seem to refer to the Aeschylean version of the story. The first line refers to the story of Iphigenia who was sacrificed by Agamemnon at Aulis so that Artemis would let the winds blow and the Greek fleet could reach Troy. In the extant plays this part of the story was dramatized by Euripides in Iphigenia at Aulis. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon Clytemnestra mentions this as one of the reasons she turned against her husband (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1417–18): 46

äËıÛÂÌ ·ïÙÔF ·E‰·, ˆÈÎÙ‹ÙÁÌ KÏÔd T‰EÌ’, K˘È‰eÌ »ÒÁÈÍfl˘Ì IÁÏ‹Ù˘Ì. he sacrificed his own child, even her I bore with dearest travail, to charm the blasts of Thrace.

The ‘evil cloth’ mentioned in Electra on Azalea Path refers to the purple tapestries that Clytemnestra persuaded Agamemnon to step onto in the Agamemnon (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 958–74). 47 Treading 45

Hayman (2003) 26. Clytemnestra makes this claim that she is avenging the death of her beloved daughter Iphigenia when she is defending herself before the chorus after Agamemnon’s murder. 47 For discussions of this crucial scene see Goldhill (1984) 75–9, Baldock (1993) 35, and Walton (2005) 199–205. 46

204

Anastasia Bakogianni

upon such purple tapestries was seen as a sign of hubris in Ancient Greece because it was thought that such cloth was sacred to the gods. Agamemnon is well aware of this prohibition (Agamemnon 922 ËÂÔ˝Ú ÙÔÈ ÙÔEۉ ÙÈϷΈÂEÌ ˜Ò²Ì,‘ ’Tis the gods we must honour thus’). However, Clytemnestra manages to persuade him to step upon these purple tapestries despite his own better judgement. His actions are a sign of his vaunting pride and Clytemnestra seems to be hoping that this would induce the gods to favour her cause. At first glance it appears that Plath chose the Aeschylean version of the myth over that of Sophocles and Euripides for her poem Electra on Azalea Path. However, her poetic strategy in borrowing ‘the stilts of ancient tragedy’ seem to have more to do with the persona’s wish to cling to the fantasy of her father’s heroic greatness. The use of italics for the three lines that directly refer to the classical story is significant; they confer the status of myth or perhaps a dream on the death of the father. 48 Plath’s direct allusion to Agamemnon’s story seems to be designed to negate the previous realization of the father’s status as an ordinary man, arrived at in stanza three of the poem. However, the persona soon comes to realize the falsity of trying to bestow upon her father the status of an Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks who besieged Troy in Homer’s Iliad and the unfortunate husband of a murderous wife in classical myth and tragedy. The speaker can no longer cling to such comforting lies, as she sees them, but is instead overwhelmed by feelings of guilt that have more to do with Freud’s theories of incestuous love than with the classical story of Electra: The truth is, one late October, at my birth-cry A scorpion stung its head, an ill-starred thing;

Plath’s zodiac sign was Scorpio and she seems to have believed that it was an unlucky sign linked to death and suicide. 49 In the fifth and last stanza of the poem it becomes clear that the speaker is blaming her mother for her father’s death but she is also blaming herself: ‘I brought my love to bear, and then you died’. Thus the second theme of the poem, guilt, is brought to the fore. This 48

Bundtzen (1983) 136. Plath was superstitious and thought her zodiac sign was significant (Kroll (1976) 219 n. 16). 49

The Figure of Electra in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry

205

transference of guilt is important for the dynamics of the poem, as is the use of classical allusion. One of the Aeschylean version’s most memorable characters is Clytemnestra, the murderess of her husband. In the Oresteia Electra’s character is overshadowed by that of her mother. Clytemnestra dominates the first tragedy in the trilogy, the Agamemnon, and she looms large in the Choephori as the object of Orestes’ revenge along with Aegisthus. Her ghost sets the Furies on Orestes in the last tragedy, the Eumenides, and thus forces him to seek the intercession of Athena. In comparison Electra only appears in the Choephori, and after her role as the dutiful daughter and sister is explored in the first part of the tragedy she disappears never to reappear again. In Electra on Azalea Path the three lines that directly refer to the classical story of Electra allude to Clytemnestra’s plan to murder her husband in order to avenge Iphigenia’s sacrifice. Thus the allusion can be seen to be working in two ways: first, as a vain attempt to maintain the fantasy of the father’s mythic status, and secondly, as an attempt to lay all the guilt the speaker feels over the death of her father at her mother’s door. A passage from the autobiographical The Bell Jar reveals that Plath took pleasure ‘in identifying with a girl whose father had been killed by her mother’: 50 ‘I had always been my father’s favourite, and it seemed fitting I should take on a mourning my mother had never bothered with.’ 51 Otto Plath, twenty-one years older than his second wife Aurelia, 52 was the acknowledged patriarch of the family, while he was alive. His daughter seems to have fallen into a pattern of trying to win his approval out of sibling rivalry, 53 a pattern reinforced by his deteriorating health which left him little time for his children. 54 Thus the idolization of her father seems to have been a process begun very early in Plath’s life which finds expression in ‘the life-long obsession with the father theme’. 55 In Electra on Azalea Path Plath created a persona 50

51 Hayman (2003) 27. Plath (1963) 175. Aurelia was Otto’s student. For more details about their relationship: Kirk (2004) 11–16. 53 Otto was disappointed by the birth of a girl, he had hoped for a boy: Gould (1984) 125. 54 For details of this theory see Lehrer in Lehrer (1985) 37–9. 55 Lehrer (1985) 42. 52

206

Anastasia Bakogianni

who shared this obsession with the father’s memory: the speaker of this poem sees herself as Electra and her father as Agamemnon. This leaves for the mother the role of Clytemnestra. Plath’s relationship with her own mother provides a clue as to why Plath created a speaker, in Electra on Azalea Path, who feels that her mother killed her father. It is interesting to note at this point that the name of the path, Azalea path, was ‘oddly close to her mother’s name, Aurelia Plath’. 56 Bowlby was opposed to ‘the stiff-upper-lip attitude’ of dealing with loss, because he saw it as harmful to the child’s ability to come to terms with the loss of a parent. 57 Aurelia Plath fell into that trap after Otto’s death, not realizing that her children ‘might later accuse her of not having felt the proper grief ’. 58 Plath made her feelings about her parents clear in her journal: ‘All my life I have been “stood up” emotionally by the people I loved most: daddy dying and leaving me, mother somehow not there.’ 59 Following Freud’s idea that high levels of anxiety are ‘based on object-loss’, Holmes theorizes that children who have an insecure attachment to their parents, for whatever reason, exhibit in later life ‘a simultaneous wish to be close and the angry determination to punish their attachment figure for the minutest sign of abandonment.’ 60 Plath seems to fit this pattern; having lost her father at the age of eight: she relied on her mother to provide her with a sense of secure attachment which from Sylvia’s perspective Aurelia seems to have been unable to do. 61 In the fifth stanza the speaker does not believe the mother’s description of how her father died: ‘It was the gangrene ate you to the bone.’ Otto Plath had a leg amputation as a last desperate measure to save his life, but his condition was too advanced and the operation was in vain. Plath, like the speaker of the poem, found it hard to accept this: My mother said; you died like any man. How shall I age into that state of mind? 56 Hayman (2003) 19. Stevenson (1998) 153 also notes the odd ‘echo’ of Aurelia’s name in the name of the pathway, as does Kirsch (2005) 253. 57 58 Holmes (1993) 95–6. Hayman (2003) 25. 59 60 Entry for 3 January 1959 (Plath (2000) 455). Holmes (1993) 67. 61 Plath’s attachment to her mother after the death of her father led her to try and replace him (Bundtzen (2006) 44).

The Figure of Electra in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry

207

The earlier acceptance of the father as a mortal man who died, achieved in the second stanza, is qualified at this point by attaching blame to the mother who becomes another Clytemnestra. The daughter also sees herself as blameworthy, 62 and this latter interpolation does not proceed from any of the classical versions of the myth but from Freud’s rewriting of it to fit his psychoanalytical theories. The persona of Electra on Azalea Path prefers instead to see her father’s death as a suicide: ‘I am the ghost of an infamous suicide.’ Otto Plath’s stubborn refusal to see a doctor until it was too late could indeed have been interpreted as ‘a kind of suicide’ and a ‘rejection’. 63 Having read the psychoanalytical ideas about the relationship of the daughter to the father, Plath seems to have felt guilty because she saw her father’s death as a deliberate attempt on his part to get away from her incestuous love. This sense of guilt is not a part of the classical Electra’s emotional makeup. Her strongest emotion is anger and a desire for vengeance (Sophocles, Electra, 110–16):

t ‰HÏ’ ö Afl‰Ôı Í·d –ÂÒÛˆ¸ÌÁÚ, t ˜Ë¸ÌÈ’ ú EÒÏB Í·d ¸ÙÌÈ’ ö AÒ‹, ÛÂÏÌ·fl Ù ËÂHÌ ·E‰ÂÚ ö EÒÈÌ˝ÂÚ, ·Q ÙÔfÚ I‰flÍ˘Ú ËÌ© fiÛÍÔÌÙ·Ú ≠ÒAË’, ·Q ÙÔfÚ ÂPÌaÚ PÔÍÎÂÙÔÏ›ÌÔıÚ, äÎËÂÙ’, IÒfiÓ·ÙÂ, ÙÂflÛ·ÛË ·ÙÒeÚ ˆ¸ÌÔÌ ôÏÂÙ›ÒÔı, O house of Hades and Persephone, O Hermes of the underworld and powerful Curse, and Erinyes, revered children of the gods who look upon those wrongfully done to death, who look upon those who dishonour the marriage bed in secret, come, bring help, avenge the murder of my father . . .

But then her father was murdered. Plath’s father on the other hand died because he neglected his health. Plath described her reaction to his death in these terms: ‘He was an autocrat. I adored and despised him, and I probably wished many times that he were dead. When he obliged me and died, I imagined that I had killed him.’ 64 The speaker of Electra on Azalea 62 Plath had nightmares about being responsible for her father’s death Schultz (2005) 165–6. 63 Bundtzen (1983) 136; see also Hayman (2003) 26. 64 Annas (1988) fn. 49, 165–6.

208

Anastasia Bakogianni

Path expresses similar feelings of guilt, particularly evident in the last lines of the poem: O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at Your gate, father—your hound-bitch, daughter, friend It was my love that did us both to death. 65

The speaker’s feelings of guilt are as strong as the classical Electra’s desire for revenge. However the speaker of Electra on Azalea Path also seems to see suicide as an answer to her guilt: ‘My own blue razor rusting in my throat.’ This is another point of difference with the classical Electra, who even in her most extreme portrayal, that of Sophocles, never contemplated committing suicide out of a sense of guilt. She is prepared to try and avenge her father herself when she hears of Orestes’ supposed death, even if it leads to her own death, but her motive is revenge not guilt. She tries to enlist her sister Chrysothemis’ help in an attempt to kill Aegisthus (Sophocles, Electra 954–7):

ÌFÌ ‰’ ôÌflÍ’ ÔPْ͛ äÛÙÈÌ, KÚ Ûb ‰c ‚Λ˘, ¨˘Ú ÙeÌ ·PÙ¸˜ÂÈÒ· ·ÙÒ©˘´ Ôı ˆ¸ÌÔı ÓfÌ Ù© Á‰ Ñ ’ I‰ÂΈ© ÁÑ Ïc Í·ÙÔÍÌfiÛÂÈÚ ÍÙ·ÌÂEÌ AY„ÈÛËÔÌ. But now that he is no more, I look to you not to be afraid to kill with me your sister the author of our father’s murder, Aegisthus.

When Chrysothemis rejects this plan, Electra is prepared to make the attempt herself despite the risky nature of any such enterprise. For the Sophoclean Electra it is a matter of family honour and rightful revenge. The speaker of Electra on Azalea Path, on the other hand, seems to see suicide as the solution to the loss of a parent. Pedder theorizes that the loss of a parent affected older children, who had some idea 65 The phrase ‘your hound-bitch’ is also reminiscent of Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’Agamemnon. Clytemnestra in her reply to the watchman refers to herself as a. ‰˘Ï‹Ù˘Ì Í˝Ì· (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 607), a female dog or a bitch, loyally guarding Agamemnon’s house. This is a false statement of loyalty to her absent husband. Cassandra also refers to her as ÏÈÛÁÙBÚ ÍıÌ¸Ú (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1227), a hateful bitch. This makes for an interesting contrast: Clytemnestra uses the metaphor to lie about her conduct while Agamemnon was away, but Cassandra knows the truth.

The Figure of Electra in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry

209

of the imminent loss, differently. He believes it was more likely that these children would react with anger and ‘suicidal gestures’. 66 Plath as a child of 8 fits this profile. She herself said that she felt: ‘her father was trying to drag her down into the grave’ 67 by his example when faced with ill health. Suicide would reunite her, as she saw it, with the longed-for father figure. This desire for union with the dead father refers the reader back to the speaker’s attempts in Electra on Azalea Path to turn her father into a mythic hero. His great value in his daughter’s eyes, expressed in the desire to turn him into an Agamemnon, makes suicide an attractive option. Thus the speaker of the poem does not seem to achieve a resolution by the end of the poem. She has not fully accepted that her father was just an ordinary mortal, as is indicated by her desire to join him in death. Her guilt and anger at his betrayal (his death) are not in the end enough to destroy her view of her father as a longed-for object of attachment that is irreplaceable. By comparison, the classical Electra’s wish for vengeance is gratified. In the extant plays Orestes kills both Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, and only in Euripides does Electra have to face any of the consequences. In Euripides’ Electra she is exiled and separated from her brother for the part she played in the matricide (Euripides, Electra 1321–4):

ÂÒfl ÏÔÈ ÛÙ›ÒÌÔÈÚ ÛÙ›ÒÌ· Ò¸Û·¯ÔÌ, Û˝„„ÔÌ ˆflÎÙ·ÙÂ. ‰Èa „aÒ ÊÂı„ÌFÛ’ ôÏAÚ ·ÙÒfl˘Ì ÏÂ΋ËÒ˘Ì ÏÁÙÒeÚ ˆ¸ÌÈÔÈ Í·Ù‹Ò·È. Fold me around, breast close to breast, O brother, O loved!—Of all loved best! For the curse of a mother’s blood must sever From our sire’s halls us, for ever—for ever!

The Dioscuri, however, mitigate this by giving her in marriage to Pylades so that she can have a safe home. In Orestes Euripides has Electra facing death alongside her brother but again she escapes by the divine intercession of Apollo. In Electra on Azalea Path, Plath altered the story of Electra to fit her Freudian version of a daughter’s relationship to her father, 66

Holmes (1993) 186.

67

Hayman (2003) 20.

210

Anastasia Bakogianni

a version that was greatly influenced by her own experience of the loss of her father Otto Plath. Her poetic design in invoking the ghost of the classical Electra is equally about distancing herself from the speaker of the poem. In the end, however, she was not satisfied that she had achieved the necessary emotional distance and artistry. Plath soon grew dissatisfied with Electra on Azalea Path and she rejected it from her book of poems that would later become her first published collection The Colossus. She based this rejection on her feeling that the poem was: ‘Too forced and rhetorical’. 68 Plath had not yet achieved the seamless integration of the myth of Electra into her art that she desired. She wanted her poetry to have ‘a mythic drama’ that had ‘something of the eternal necessity of Greek tragedy’ about it. 69 Plath succeeded in doing this in Daddy, 70 where the persona of the poem speaks as Electra from the beginning. Another important change is that of the speaker’s attitude towards the father figure itself. 71 In her early poetry the myth she built around her father’s memory leads her to see him as a longed-for and irreplaceable object of love. 72 In her later poetry she ‘represents the persona’s attempts at psychic purgation of the image, “the model”, of a father she has constructed’. 73 She ends Daddy with the line: ‘Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.’ In Daddy Plath has managed to modify the story of Electra to such a degree that it fits seamlessly with her artistic vision. In the classical story there is no indication that Electra hated her father or that she sought to destroy the power his ghost had over her. On the contrary, Agamemnon’s memory is all that sustained her while she awaited Orestes’ return. In this respect the earlier Electra on Azalea Path is closer to at least some of the aspects of the classical story. 68

69 Entry for Thursday, 23 April 1959 (Plath (2000) 477). Kroll (1976) 6. Plath (1981) 224. 71 According to Jo Gill, Electra on Azalea Path prefigures the father theme explored further in Daddy (Gill (2006b) 93), but there are some important differences which will be discussed below. 72 See the more successful poem The Colossus from the eponymous first collection of Plath’s poetry. ‘A blue sky out of the Oresteia | Arches above us. O father, all by yourself | You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum’ (Plath (1981) 129). In this poem Plath successfully integrates the mythical dimension, with which she wishes to invest her poetry, with the image of the longed-for father she has lost. 73 Nance and Jones (1984) 125. 70

The Figure of Electra in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry

211

In Daddy the speaker reminds herself of an earlier time when ‘I used to pray to recover you’ which accords with the earlier idealized picture of the father, but the subsequent imagery of the father as a Nazi soon signals the speaker’s change of attitude. In fact, the speaker’s virulent hatred of the father figure is reminiscent of Clytemnestra’s hatred of Agamemnon. 74 In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon Clytemnestra gives a graphic description of how she murdered Agamemnon; she trapped him in a net and then struck him three times (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1389–92):

ÍI͈ıÛÈHÌ OÓÂE·Ì ·•Ï·ÙÔÚ Ûˆ·„cÌ ‚‹ÎÎÂÈ Ï’ KÒÂÏÌBÈ ¯·Í‹‰È ˆÔÈÌfl·Ú ‰Ò¸ÛÔı, ˜·flÒÔıÛ·Ì ÔP‰bÌ wÛÛÔÌ j ‰ÈÔÛ‰¸Ù˘È „‹ÌÂÈ ÛÔÒÁÙeÚ Í‹ÎıÍÔÚ KÌ ÎÔ˜Â˝Ï·ÛÈÌ. Fallen thus, he gasped away his life, and as he breathed forth quick spurts of blood, he smote me with dark drops of ensanguined dew; while I rejoiced no less than the sown earth is gladdened in heaven’s refreshing rain at the birth-time of the flower buds.

Her terrible rejoicing after she has murdered her husband is striking in its intensity. Clytemnestra hopes to justify herself in the eyes of the gods and the chorus by claiming that the murder of Agamemnon will put an end to the cycle of violence that started when Atreus killed his brother Thyestes’ children and fed them to him at a banquet. Atreus acted thus because he wanted revenge for his wife’s adultery with his brother. 75 In Daddy Plath’s speaker attempts a similar exorcism of the family curse, which in her case is the curse of guilt 76 and not the cycle of revenge in the House of Atreus as portrayed by Aeschylus. There are, however, in Daddy also some similarities with the classical Electra. In Sophocles’ version in particular, Electra displays a 74 Ibid. 126. Compare the later poem Purdah written on 29 October 1962 in which the female speaker turns against her bridegroom like a Clytemnestra. Purdah ends with an allusion to the plot of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon: ‘The lioness, | The shriek in the bath, | The cloak of holes’ (Plath (1981) 244). 75 In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon Clytemnestra tries to convince the chorus of the justice of her cause. She ends with the hope that Agamemnon’s death and her marriage to Thyestes’ son, Aegisthus, will put an end to the cycle of violence started by Atreus (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1573–6). 76 Stevenson (1998) 146.

212

Anastasia Bakogianni

similar intensity to that of her mother in desiring revenge against her father’s murderers. When Orestes strikes down Clytemnestra, Electra cries ·EÛÔÌ, ÂN ÛË›ÌÂÈÚ, ‰ÈÎBÌ (Sophocles, Electra 1416), ‘Strike twice as hard, if you have the strength!’ The crucial difference between the mother’s actions and those of her daughter is that it is Orestes and not Electra who is the primary agent of vengeance. The same is true of Euripides’ Electra, in which his heroine helps her brother by luring their mother to her death but again it is Orestes who is the rightful avenger. The use of nursery rhyme, baby words, and repetitions in Daddy give the poem ‘an impression of great speed and furious energy’ 77 as the speaker tries to break the hold of the father figure ‘So daddy, I’m finally through.’ From the beloved Agamemnon the father figure seems to have become an Aegisthus figure, the stepfather of Electra who is cruel to her. In Sophocles’ and Euripides’ versions of the story Aegisthus is portrayed as making Electra’s life a misery. In Sophocles’ Electra he prevented her from marrying out of fear that she will give birth to a male heir who will avenge his grandfather’s murder. 78 Chrysothemis also warns Electra later on in the play that Aegisthus and Clytemnestra plan to imprison her so that no one can hear her lamentation. 79 In Euripides’ Electra Aegisthus has forced Electra to marry a peasant so that any children she might have will not be noble-born. 80 Electra lives like a peasant woman because of Aegisthus as she complains in her opening speech (55–9):

KÌ wÈ Ù¸‰’ à„„ÔÚ ÙHȉ’ KˆÂ‰ÒFÔÌ Í‹Ò·È ˆ›ÒÔıÛ· Á„aÚ ÔÙ·Ïfl·Ú ÏÂÙ›Ò˜ÔÏ·È ...

ÔP ‰fi ÙÈ ÓÒÂfl·Ú KÚ ÙÔ۸̉’ IˆÈ„Ï›ÌÁ IÎÎ’ ΩÚ o‚ÒÈÌ ‰ÂflÓ˘ÏÂÌ AN„flÛËÔı ËÂÔEÚ. carrying this pitcher on my head, I travel to the river springs. . . not because I need to do it but to show the gods how cruelly Aegisthus treats me.

Electra’s virulent hatred of Aegisthus finds expression in Sophocles in the trick she uses to get him to enter the palace where Orestes waits 77

78 Bassnett (1987) 88. For Electra’s speech see Sophocles, Electra 164–7. For Chrysothemis’ warning see Sophocles, Electra 378–84. 80 In the prologue of the play spoken by the peasant himself he explains why Electra was given to him in marriage: Euripides, Electra 22–35. 79

The Figure of Electra in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry

213

to kill him. In Euripides her hatred finds expression in her terrible rejoicing over his corpse (907–56). The speaker of Daddy feels a similar hatred towards the ‘monstrous male figure’ 81 in the poem. This figure seems to be both the father and a second man: If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two— The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know.

This second figure has been identified by many critics 82 as the husband who also betrayed her, as the father figure had done. By the time Plath wrote Daddy her marriage to Ted Hughes had broken up over his affair with Asia Wevill, 83 which might explain why the speaker displays such ‘violence’ in ‘her determination to escape him’. 84 The ‘him’ refers to both the father and the husband figure. In Daddy the persona Plath creates is trying to destroy the male figures that have power over her: the father and husband. This is in direct opposition to the classical story of Electra who never wavers in her loyalty to her father and his cause in opposition to that of her mother. For the classical Electra her desire for vengeance makes her the child of her father and not of her mother. She sides with Orestes and supports his efforts to avenge their father even if it means matricide. As mentioned above, the narrator of Daddy begins to sound more like Clytemnestra. In Daddy Plath began the process of turning the Electra figure into the Clytemnestra figure of Purdah. In the latter poem the speaker takes revenge against the patriarchal order that limits her as Clytemnestra had done, by plotting and executing the murder of her husband. 85 81

Bassnett (1987) 89. See Nance and Jones (1984) 127, Wagner-Martin (1999) 130; also Bassnett (1987) 89 and Marsack (1992) 47. 83 An interesting biography of Ted Hughes written by Elaine Feinstein examines in depth Hughes’s relationships with the women in his life: Feinstein (2001). More recently Diane Wood Middlebrook has published a book entitled Her Husband Hughes and Plath—A Marriage exploring the relationship between Sylvia and Ted Hughes (Middlebrook 2003). 84 85 Kroll (1976) 86. Phillips (1991) 232. 82

214

Anastasia Bakogianni

Thus of the two poems, Electra on Azalea Path and Daddy, in which Plath created an Electra-like persona, it is the former that is closer to the story of the classical version despite its technical faults. Even Electra on Azalea Path, however, constitutes, from a classical perspective, a very personal approach to the story of Electra and, furthermore, one that is heavily influenced by psychoanalytical theory. Plath was also influenced by Virginia Woolf ’s admiration for ancient Greek literature expressed in her essay ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ written in 1925. In that essay Woolf stressed the importance of learning Greek because it gave one access to ‘the literature of masterpieces’, and extols the vigour and power of ancient Greek literature. She mentions Sophocles’ Electra as she was particularly impressed by his version of the character of Electra because of her heroism. 86 Woolf ’s admiration for Greek literature and for Electra in particular might have influenced Plath’s decision to use the figure of Electra in her poetry. Woolf herself, however, disapproved of any adaptations or translations of the classics. 87 Plath was also greatly influenced by the contemporary movement of ‘confessional poetry’. 88 While she was temporarily back in the United States, Plath decided to attend Robert Lowell’s writing seminar at Boston University, also attended by Anne Sexton. The label ‘confessional’ had not yet been applied when Plath attended the seminar, but both Lowell and Sexton were to become leaders of this movement. The term ‘confessional’ poetry was coined by the American critic M. L. Rosenthal and it refers to the ‘series of personal confidences’ 89 to be found in Lowell’s work and that of poets with a similar poetic strategy. The aim of confessional poetry was to appear very personal and intimate, almost like a diary. The autobiographical elements in Plath’s poetry reveal the influence of this movement, and yet the introduction of the story of Electra in Electra on Azalea Path and Daddy mitigates the personal elements. This shows that her poetic strategies were different from those of the confessional poets. Plath sought to universalize her experience by integrating such classical/mythical material into her work. Plath found that as Michel 86

87 Woolf (1994) 42, 48, and 50. Ibid. 42 and 49 respectively. Kirsch (2005) x, who also shows how Plath rejected the idea that her poetry was therapeutic. 89 Marsack (1992) 8. 88

The Figure of Electra in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry

215

Lioure put it, ‘the reworking of ancient myths illustrates forcefully the anxieties and hopes of twentieth-century man’. 90 The use of Electra as a mythic archetype in Plath’s poetry both lends it power and makes the poems less personal by universalizing her experience. As Kroll says: ‘In Plath the personal concerns and everyday role are transmuted into something impersonal, by being absorbed into a timeless mythic system.’ 91 In Electra on Azalea Path she was less successful, but in Daddy she was able to change even personal details so as to fit better into the myth she was constructing. For example, the chronology in the poem becomes more ritualistic in Daddy; the father died when the speaker was 10, the speaker tried to commit suicide at 20 and the exorcism that the speaker is attempting takes place when she is 30. Plath’s father died when she was 8, so the chronology is not that of her own life, but it is close. The Electra-like voice of Daddy is also different from that of Electra on Azalea Path; in the former the persona has evolved further away from that of the classical Electra. The voice in Daddy more closely resembles that of the classical Clytemnestra or Kriemhild from the Germanic folk epic Das Nibelungenlied in the intensity of the voice’s ‘need for independent identities’. 92 The speaker of Daddy hopes to exorcize ritualistically the ghost of the father/husband as Clytemnestra sought to exorcize the ghosts of the House of Atreus. Electra on Azalea Path and Daddy belong to the category of Plath’s poems that deal with the father theme, but her poetry was not exclusively focused upon this topic. In poems like Morning Song (19 February 1961) and Nick and the Candlestick (29 October 1962), for example, the speaker becomes the mother who loves and worries about her children, 93 but in these poems Electra has no role to play. 94 Plath’s interest in writing about women and her practice of creating female personae in her poems reveal another aspect of her art that is 90

91 Cited by Garnham (1996) 28. Kroll (1976) 2. Washington and Washington Tobol (1980) 20. It is interesting to note that Plath, whose father was of Polish-German extraction, was by the time she wrote Daddy opposed to anything German. 93 Broe (1980) 226–7. 94 For a discussion of Plath and the theme of motherhood in her poems see Christodoulides (2005). 92

216

Anastasia Bakogianni

relevant to Electra on Azalea Path and Daddy, that of her interest in the roles a woman could play. In many of Plath’s poems the female speakers are trapped by personal and social circumstances in a false life from which they wish to escape. American women in the 1950s and 1960s were trapped in what Betty Friedan described as a ‘comfortable concentration camp’. 95 In Daddy Plath used the imagery of concentration camps to describe the speaker’s personal relationship with her father. In order to emphasize the point she turned the father figure into a Nazi and the speaker into a half-Jewish daughter: 96 ‘I began to talk like a Jew | I think I may well be a Jew’, the female speaker says, and she refers to her father: ‘And your Aryan eye, bright blue. | Panzer-man, panzer man, O You—’ From her journals it becomes apparent that Plath struggled with her role as daughter/wife/mother on the one hand and artist on the other. 97 In Electra on Azalea Path the speaker, despite her anger, accepts her dependence upon the father figure, but in Daddy she tries to exorcize the father/husband and the patriarchal system he represents. As a woman poet Plath felt that she had ‘no champions’ 98 in the publishing world and her ambition to become a great poet caused her to greatly resent this. Plath, however, is above all a poet of ‘the self ’ 99 and it is only in her later poems in the Ariel collection that the personal and mythical aspects of her work are expanded to include more social commentary. 100 Plath committed suicide by gassing herself on 11 February 1963, and this has created a perception of her as a tragic heroine. It has also caused her work to be sensationalized and misread. Some modern critics like David Holbrook condemned her as a dangerous influence on her readers and sought to dismiss her as a ‘schizoid individual’, in other words a madwoman. He also rejected the personal elements in her poetry that led him to wonder why she wrote the poetry that 95

Cf. Annas (1984) 131. Plath was criticized by many scholars for incorporating references to the Holocaust in her poetry. She was accused of ‘trivializing history and aggrandizing herself ’, but as Jacqueline Rose writes in her book on Plath was drawing upon a ‘piece of collective memory’ to add a historical dimension to her poetry: Rose (1991) 7 and 8 respectively. Antony Rowland talks about Plath’s reception of the Holocaust and the ‘self-reflexive’ nature of the texts of Daddy and Lady Lazarus: Rowland (2005) 34. 97 98 See entry for 7 November 1959: Plath (2000) 524–5. Plath (2000) 492. 99 100 Annas (1984) 131. For more details on this subject see Annas (1984). 96

The Figure of Electra in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry

217

she did. 101 Poems like Electra on Azalea Path and Daddy, despite the distancing techniques Plath employs, are indeed difficult to understand without resorting to Plath’s personal circumstances that inform both poems. More recently Tracy Brain has also been critical of the autobiographical view of Plath’s poetry, and although she has a point when she warns against confusing the poems’ narrators with Plath herself, 102 one cannot dismiss the personal element in her poetry. In Electra on Azalea Path Plath used myth to disguise her narrator and distance herself from her, a process she repeated in Daddy with the added dimension of World War II events. From a classical standpoint, however, what is remarkable about these two poems is that Plath did not adapt one in particular of the versions of the story from the Greek tragedians. The narrator of Electra on Azalea Path and Daddy is a modern Electra. 101

Holbroon (1976) 2–10 (quotation from p. 2).

102

Brain (2001) 11.

13 The Autobiography of the Western Subject: Carson’s Geryon Edith Hall

WINGS AND SELVES To an essay about Echo in the Stanford Literary Review, the poet Anne Carson once appended the subtitle ‘A notional refraction through Sophokles, Plato and Defoe’. 1 My chapter here, an attempt to understand Carson’s project in Autobiography of Red (1997) as a poetic history of western ideas about human selfhood, offers instead a notional refraction of Geryon, a Greek mythical figure in whom Carson has demonstrated particular interest, through Stesichorus, Dante, and Heidegger. Besides the fragments of the archaic Greek poet Stesichorus’ lyrical narrative poem the Geryoneis (especially those contained in P.Oxy 2617), in my view the Christian picture of the objectified Geryon painted by Dante, and Heidegger’s identification of time as the chief locus by which human subjectivity orients itself, are two of the most important intellectual and aesthetic compass points that can help us reading the poetic map of Carson’s poem. Yet in Autobiography of Red (henceforward AoR) there are many other significant intertextual authors, including of course Englishlanguage poets. Herakles’ grandmother, pondering the paradox that photographs of disasters can be beautiful, quotes Yeats’s famous phrase, ‘Gaiety transfiguring all that dread’ (p. 66), from his Lapis Lazuli (1936). One function of this poem is usually understood as 1

Carson (1986a).

Carson’s Geryon

219

expressing Yeats’s desire to address the question of whether western literary art, from the ancient Greeks (personified by Callimachus) onwards, must fail in the face of the new historical tragedy that was then about to sweep Europe. Another function of the poem is certainly to assert the rich promise offered by investigating the other, eastern culture of China, carved in the titular lapis lazuli. The humanist hope of salvation through intercultural sensitivity to the achievements of all human civilizations is an important link between Yeats and Carson, two poets who share another, closely related passion— for the poetic achievements of ancient Greece. The poetic text that is quoted at greatest length in AoR (p. 107) is the four lines of Walt Whitman’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry (1856, revised 1881), in which the poet confesses that he has known what it is to be evil, like everyone else in Manhattan. This gloomy poem is one of the most famous and frequently anthologized in the North American canon; it is a sonorous and earnest attempt to describe the human condition and the serial generations that march successively through the same urban space. In Carson’s poem it is quoted at the point when Geryon’s search for understanding of his selfhood in Buenos Aires leads him to a bookshop, where under a pile of novels he finds the Whitman collection, translated into Spanish. The poem is quoted only to be humorously repudiated; Geryon reads the line ‘Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil . . . ’ in Spanish, before he ‘put evil Walt Whitman down’. This dismissal of the great North American poet, along with the substitution of the late twentieth-century Hispanic idiom for high nineteenth-century East coast American English, says something significant about Carson’s witty, playful, and multilingual take on the cultural tradition she has inherited. Geryon opens, instead, a ‘self-help’ book, whose title, Oblivion the Price of Sanity? is intended to bring a smile to the lips of Carson’s readers; it tells Geryon that depression is difficult to describe, because ‘there are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity’ (p. 107). There are no words for a world without a self. The world must have a person in it in order to be articulated. Selfhood, reality, and the way that the self must experience reality through language are indeed the overarching—and very epistemological—concerns of Red’s autobiography. Yet within this broad rubric it engages with a dazzling

220

Edith Hall

variety of issues and it is already proving to mean very different things to different readers. Its hero, Geryon, is a photographer, and it explores the relationship between cognition and language, between the visual and aural senses, between image and word, and also the way that metaphor can introduce what is visible into the enunciation of the unseen. 2 Even one of Carson’s harshest critics can be found admitting that her work ‘exerts a sort of fascination—if in nothing else than the relentlessness of its visual imagery.’ 3 For another, more enthusiastic reader, the poem is an epistemological testing of the degree to which we are imprisoned by perceptions, and in particular by perceptions of genderedness; 4 this view draws on the influential model developed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990), by which homosexuality in literature destabilizes categories of sex and gender, exploring the postmodern condition of ‘metaphysical homelessness’. 5 According to this line of analysis, Carson’s Geryon is a hybrid, who suggests that we ask whether his ‘physical and sexual impossibility is meant to rupture everything that seems safe and measurable’. 6 It is true that Geryon is post-gender (or transcends gender) in that he sometimes fails to remember whether people he has met are male or female (for example, his fellow librarians after he broken-heartedly takes a job in canto 24). One of his most endearing characteristics is a tendency to imagine himself sympathetically into the situation of females. But it is always quite clear that he is himself male, and that he is gay. Along with Carson’s intense exploration of Sappho in Eros the Bittersweet (1986) and If Not, Winter (2002), Red’s gayness has made this the text that has most contributed to the heterosexual Carson’s acquisition, at least in California, of the status of Lesbian Icon. 7 Yet it seems to me more accurate to suggest that it is primarily as a sign of ethnic alterity that Geryon, whose red skin and wings mark him out as different, can be read. Although no such connection is 2

See the excellent study of visuality and metaphor in the poem by Tschofen (2004). 4 5 Renner (2004). Battis (2003). Butler (1990) 97. 6 Battis (2003) 200. 7 Discussion of Carson’s works triggered a passionate encounter between Jenny and Marina in a notorious episode of The L Word, Showtime Network’s controversial TV drama serial about lesbians in Los Angeles. See the insightful analysis by O’Rourke (2004). 3

Carson’s Geryon

221

ever explicitly drawn, the implicit ethnic associations of ‘red’ skin in North American and Canadian culture lurk just beneath the poem’s surface, certainly after Geryon meets an indigenous Amerindian from Peru (see below). He may no longer suffer from the ‘fear of ridicule, | to which everyday life as a winged red person had accommodated Geryon early in life’ (AoR p. 83), but he still does not know where he belongs. He inhabits an in-between state, of the type that has been labelled ‘thirdspace’ by some postcolonial theorists—an ambiguous area lacking any clear coordinates. Homi Bhaba has called it a ‘disarticulated space’, a realm where hybridization can occur between bipolar areas of identity. 8

MENTAL FLIGHTS Although Geryon does indeed allow Carson to explore the subjectivity not only of a gay person, but of an ethnically and somatically different person, I do not think that the poem offers an exclusively negative account of the difficulties of living as such a subject. A more insightful reading stresses that the fundamental question Carson asks through Geryon is ‘how this monster can negotiate the conflicts entailed by loving and existing in a world more complex than its social, linguistic and literary conventions would suggest’. 9 Carson is frustrated by the restrictions of language generally, but it seems that her frustrations are mostly focused on the restrictions imposed by the patriarchal and racist traces lingering in her own English language in particular; this partly explains her attraction in Economy of the Unlost (1999) to the poetry of Paul Celan, a Jewish Romanian who struggled all his life with the paradox of writing in German, the ‘language of his mother but also the language of those who murdered his mother’ in the Holocaust, as Carson herself has put it. 10 Geryon’s wings—his affliction but also, ultimately, his means of discovering his true self—mean that flying is a crucial metaphor in the poem. A telling moment comes on the first of the several 8 10

Bhaba (1990) 221; see Battis (2003) 202. Carson (1999) 28; see Stanton (2003).

9

Rae (2000) 35.

222

Edith Hall

flights, in the plane taking Geryon from Miami to Puerto Rico, when he reads in his Fodor’s Guide to Argentina about the now extinct indigenous people, the Yamana. Although thought to be primitive, they had fifteen names for clouds and more than fifty for different kinds of kin. Among their variations of the verb ‘to bite’ was a word that meant ‘to come surprisingly on a hard substance when eating something soft e.g. a pearl in a mussel (AoR, p. 80)

Carson’s own sadness and envy at the lost potentialities of such a rich, precise language seem to glitter beneath Geryon’s own interest in it. Indeed, most of the few critics to write so far on AoR have emphasized its more melancholy undercurrent, in particular its commentary on the prison-house of language and the linguistic categories by which we must live. Yet from the moment I first read it I found that it simultaneously communicated a warmly humorous and joyous strain. This operates in counterpoint to the depression and isolation that does indeed dominate some extended passages of the poem, thus creating a remarkable psychological polytonality. Much of the feeling of joy stems from the exuberant delineation of the sheer vividness of Geryon’s Bildungsroman—his emotional experiences and adventurous spirit: as Carson has herself said in an interview, ‘you can do things when you’re young that you can’t do when you’re older. You can’t get simple again’. 11 Some of the most joyful cantos are about youthful experiences of love and Geryon’s memory of love—of being alone with his mother, of phone conversations with her (especially the hilarious canto 25), or of revelling in a café meal with Herakles after their first sexual encounter. The recurrent imagery of flying is intimately linked with Geryon’s delighted discovery of his autonomous selfhood. At the moment immediately after this, when the love between him and Herakles has been first physically consummated, Carson introduces the joyous canto (no. 16) with the sentence (p. 54), ‘As in childhood we live sweeping close to the sky, and now, what dawn is this.’ The very 11

D’Agata (1997) 10.

Carson’s Geryon

223

concept of flying in aeroplanes, which is to become so important to the winged little monster, indeed enters the poem on the crest of a laugh as Geryon apparently fends off his mother’s prejudices about Latin America. These are based on the movie Flying Down to Rio, made decades earlier in the 1930s. 12 The hero of that film was the (famously) joyous bandleader and aviator Roger Bond. But the joyousness in Carson’s poem amounts to something much more than this, and something inseparable from the intellectual tenor of the work as a whole. It takes on a complicated philosophical project as it revisits the steps that the human Subject—at least the western one—has taken on its journey from Stesichorus to Carson. Carson has herself said more than once that she believes her poetic voice is better suited to narrative than lyric, and that her lack of a sense of music affects the poetry she writes, making it ‘pretty clunky’. 13 There has been a debate about the extent to which her poetry even counts as poetry—the conservative and traditional elements of the literary press have tended to say that the sheer artificiality of her language and her enjoyment of self-conscious reflection on the uses to which she is putting words mean that they cease to be poetic at all. 14 While I do not agree with this reaction, it is true that Carson’s verse (perhaps above all in AoR) is flamboyantly intellectual. It appeals to the brain. It treats issues she has elsewhere teasingly, and fully aware of the double meaning of the word, described as ‘mental’: not for nothing had she summoned a gathering of Phenomenologists in her Plainwater (1995). 15 Poetry that refers to Virginia Woolf and Martin Heidegger is not exactly asking to be enjoyed at an exclusively emotional or sensual level. Nor is verse that paraphrases Einsteinian paradoxes, such as the question Geryon asks on one of his flights, ‘What is time made of?’, when he ‘could feel it massed around him’ (p. 80). The question ‘What is time made of?’ recurs insistently throughout cantos 29 to 30, during Geryon’s encounter with a professional philosopher.

12 According to the poem it was released in 1935 (p. 76), but the correct date is actually 1933, which raises the possibility that Carson wants to enshrine cognitive and temporal inaccuracy within her text. 13 14 See McNeilly (2003). e.g. Kirsch (1998) 37. 15 Carson (1995) 77.

224

Edith Hall

Running parallel with the topic of time throughout the entire poem is the topic of subjectivity. Nor is the interest just in the subjectivity derived from sense-perception (although that is indeed itself a prominent theme), but in the literary constitution of individual identity, the Subject in the philosophical sense, often called the Self by social psychologists. Since Heidegger’s Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927), it has been generally agreed that a key constitutive element of subjectivity is a sense of linear continuity through time— that is, of temporality. Two other philosophical concepts that can now stake nearly equivalent claims to importance in the make-up of the subject’s experience of himself or herself are spatiality and corporeality. In recent times, psychologists have also been stressing the importance of dialogue to the Self: this is the idea that no subject can define itself in isolation, but can only constitute itself in counterpoint with an interlocutor—an idea related to the Bakhtinian sense of the voice that only emerges dialogically. 16 The Subject or Self has also been the dominant interest of writers of prose fiction—of the European and subsequently the American novel—at least since the eighteenth century. 17 Carson subtitles Red’s autobiography A Novel in Verse, thus locating herself in an important hybrid genre going back via Vikram Seth’s sophisticated urban tragiccomic verse romance The Golden Gate (1986). A foundational text from this perspective was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse epicnovel of female self-discovery Aurora Leigh (1857), in which she fulfilled her childhood dream of becoming the ‘feminine of Homer’ by making a female the narrating subject. 18 Beyond even these lies Pushkin’s poem-novel Eugene Onegin (1825–30), which (like Autobiography of Red) has at its centre the youth and romantic escapades of a trio of appealing male heroes.

DANTE’S GERYON In Autobiography of Red Carson traces the way in which literary texts have treated certain kinds of Subject, through the example of 16 18

17 See Hall (2007). See in general Burke (1992). On Barrett’s phrase ‘feminine of Homer’ see Hurst (2006) 7–10.

Carson’s Geryon

225

Geryon, from archaic Greece to the late twentieth century. In delicate interaction with its pervasive melancholy, the story of the Subject here has an insistently upbeat drive, as Carson’s Geryon moves from the sidelines of ancient literature to the epicentre of his own text—gay, pigmented, other-bodied, confused, and philosophically reflective as he is. Indeed, AoR is also in a sense the Autobiography of the Subject of Art, who is now quite as likely to be gay, pigmented, other-bodied, or female as white, Anglo-Saxon, and male. In this process an important role is played by the Inferno of Dante Alighieri, the only other major author since the European Renaissance to focus at any length on Geryon. During their descent into the Inferno, the first part of the Divine Comedy, Virgil and Dante have already encountered two monstrous figures from classical mythology—the ferryman Charon, and the Cerberus, a three-headed dog who represents the sins of the gluttons that he is guarding. But Dante seems much more interested in Geryon, the winged monster. He appears, swimming through the murk, right at the very end of the 16th canto in order to transport Virgil and Dante across a great abyss to the Eighth Circle of Hell, where the crime that is punished is fraud. The 17th canto then opens with Virgil’s cry, ‘Look at the beast with the pointed tail!’ Virgil signals to the beast to land on the shore near the path that he and Dante are taking, and Dante describes Geryon in a detail that implies, as many critics have suggested, that he was wholly fascinated with his own poetic, Christian (re)creation of the ancient monster. Geryon has the face of a virtuous individual but a snake’s body, gaudily multicoloured. Dante’s account of his flight on Geryon later in the canto has entranced readers for centuries: 19 Just as a rowboat pulls out from its berth Backwards, backwards, so that beast pushed off, And when he felt himself all free in space, There where his chest had been he turned his tail, Stretching it out and waving it like an eel, While with his paws he gathered in the air.

19

Inferno Canto 17.100–36, trans. James Finn Cotter.

226

Edith Hall I do not think the fear was any sharper When Phaethon let the sun’s reins drop away (The reason why the sky is scorched with stars) Nor when unhappy Icarus felt his flanks Unfeathering as the wax started melting, His father shouting, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ Than mine was when I saw that on all sides I floated in the air and I saw all Sights lost to view except the beast himself. He flew on slowly, slowly swimming on, Spiraling and gliding: this I knew only By the winds in my face and underneath me. I heard already on my right the whirlpool Roaring with such horror there beneath us That I stretched out my neck and peered below. Then I grew more panicky of going down For I saw flames and I heard wailing cries; So, trembling, I pressed my legs in tighter. And then I saw, what I had not seen before: His descent was spiraled, since I saw torments On every side were drawing nearer to us. Just as a falcon, a long while on the wing, Who, without spotting lure or prey, Makes the falconer cry, ‘Ah, you’re coming down,’ Descends, tired, with a hundred turnings To where he set out so swiftly, and perches, Aloof and furious, far off from his master, So at the bottom Geryon set us down Right next to the base of a jagged rockface And, once rid of the burden of our bodies, He vanished like an arrow from a bowstring.

It is hardly surprising that this stunning episode has inspired many visual artists, including William Blake, whose watercolour of Geryon from his illustrations for Dante’s Inferno (1826–7) is reproduced here as Figure 13.1.

Carson’s Geryon

227

Figure 13.1. William Blake, 1757–1827, illustration to Dante’s Divine Comedy, 1824–7. Hell, Canto 17: Geryon conveying Dante and Virgil down towards Malebolge. Pen, ink and watercolour over pencil and chalk, 37.2 × 52.7 cm. (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. Felton bequest, 1920.)

It forms such a central image in the Western literary and pictorial imagination that it can not be excluded from our understanding of any poem about Geryon composed subsequently. I am, indeed, not the first person to suggest that Dante’s Geryon is also important to a full understanding of Carson’s, since Rae briefly proposes that Geryon is ‘for both authors, the personification of fraud and the pilgrims’ guide through the realm of dissemblers’. 20 But Rae seems reluctant to develop what he means by this intriguing parallel. It seems to me that Carson’s awareness of this outstanding passage has informed her own Geryon poem in profound and manifold ways, from her central motif of the significant flight to her use of myth, metaphor, and image: the feathers and the star-scorched sky are just two that will feature below. Carson has after all elsewhere blended Greek myth with a topic in medieval Christianity in a quest for understanding of the postmodern self. The narrator of her prose poem The Anthropology of Water, in 20

Rae (2000) 35.

228

Edith Hall

her collection Plainwater (1995), makes a pilgrimage to the shrine of St James in a quest to find possible ways of mourning her elderly father, but also retells the myth of the Danaids.

SUBJECTS AND OBJECTS In Dante’s account, the fascinating Geryon is not a Subject. He has no Subjectivity. He is an object to be described and ridden; he is paradoxical and ultimately—both as a voiceless creature and as a fraudster—unknowable. Yet in Carson’s novel in verse, a crucial element in Geryon’s maturation is the development of his own selfconsciousness that he is a separate and individual being—of his subjectivity. In Carson’s hands, Geryon’s sense of self is born, very explicitly, at the moment of his first sexual encounter, when he submits to sex with his older brother in return for an interesting marble. He then begins to think ‘about the difference | between outside and inside. | Inside is mine, he thought’ (p. 29). On the same day he begins to document his own subjectivity through time in the form of his autobiography, from which he ‘coolly omitted | all outside things’ (p. 29). Corporeality—one of the key loci of selfhood—as sensed through sexual contact is thus self-consciously described and distinguished from the cerebral, internal, consciousness—self. This autobiography is to be written entirely from the interior perspective, aided by the camera which he starts wielding in the eighth section, ‘Click’, when he takes a photograph of his mother at the kitchen sink (p.40). The components of selfhood are carefully introduced and negotiated. In section 9, ‘Space and time’, the necessity of social interaction with another to produce the sense of self constitutes the opening sentence, ‘Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition’ (p. 42). And through an increasing sense of alienation from his mother as his relationship with Herakles intensifies, the question of distance—physical and emotional—is raised in the question ‘How does distance look? ‘as he walks across the space physically separating him from his mother (p. 43). In canto 11, ‘Hades’, the connection of the visit to the fiery underworld with the notion of fraud, which Carson has drawn from her

Carson’s Geryon

229

engagement with Dante, vividly enters her poem. Here it transpires that Herakles’ hometown, on the other side of the Atlantic island on which Geryon lives, is called Hades, and is adjacent to a volcano. Yet it is before leaving home on this first outing with Herakles that Geryon learns to dissemble. His relationship with his mother changes gear forever as he ‘wrote a note full of lies’ for her and sticks it on the fridge (p. 46). Other aspects of the Self come into play in canto 13, ‘Somnambula’, which explores the subjectivity of the experience both of time and of visually perceived objects. Geryon overhears Herakles saying to his grandmother in the garden, ‘My world is very slow right now’, while she responds by ‘discussing death’ (p. 49). The young and the old have very different concerns when it comes to the experience of time. Then a big red butterfly goes past, riding on a little black one. ‘How nice, said Geryon, he’s helping him’. But Herakles retorts, ‘He’s fucking him’. This is a very succinct and pungent way of dramatizing the relativity of perception (pp. 49–50). The volcano at the heart of the poem had become important in ‘Hades’ where we learn that Herakles’ grandmother took a photograph of it (p. 46) and also that there was ‘a survivor’ called Lava Man (p. 47). Geryon is obsessed with the photograph of the volcano exploding in 1923, mainly because it was a fifteen-minute exposure on an old-fashioned camera, and that photograph had ‘compressed | on its motionless surface | fifteen different moments of time, nine hundred seconds of bombs moving up | and ash moving down’ (p. 51). Geryon asked Herakles’ grandmother ‘What if you took a fifteen-minute exposure of a man in jail, let’s say the | lava has just reached his window?’ And her response encapsulates the issue that Carson is wrestling with throughout the poem (p. 52). ‘I think you are confusing subject and object, she said’. Here Carson introduces an understanding of the psychological violence inherent in the artistic representation of subject–object relations, a topic that has been developed above all by feminists and by African American cultural theorists such as Henry Louis Gates and Robert B. Stepto. 21 Geryon, the object of literature from the Greeks to Dante, is in Carson’s verse novel becoming its subject. No wonder he is so interested in what it might feel like to be the man awaiting death inside a 21

See Hall (2007).

230

Edith Hall

picture being viewed. That is what has always been the situation for Geryon and his like in literature—they await death for the edification of the consumers of the poem. The boundaries of selfhood and the unknowability of other’s inner selves come out in the very next canto, no. 15, ‘pair’. Geryon’s wings are struggling. ‘They tore against each other on his shoulders | like the mindless red animals they were’ (p. 53). Geryon is having to objectify his own body parts in order to cope with the pain they are giving him, and moreover to hide the problem from Herakles, with whom he is as intimate as with anyone, by putting his jacket over his head. As the love affair intensifies, so does the examination of representations of consciousness and subjectivity. At the moment when Geryon’s mother is lambasting Herakles on the phone, it is no coincidence that it is one of the authors most associated with the development of ‘stream of consciousness’ techniques, Virginia Woolf, that Herakles’ grandmother is telling Geryon about; the old lady had once met her and ‘she was a highly original woman’ (p. 58). She had also met Sigmund Freud, who had cracked a joke when the dog he had given her (also called Freud) had died; the jokes concerned ‘incomplete transference’ (p. 58).

THE SELF AND ITS WORLDS Canto 19 is the turning-point of the poem, when Herakles tells Geryon to go home to his mother, and that they will always be good friends. Geryon is shattered. And this turning-point is paralleled by the title and intellectual interest of the section, ‘From the archaic to the fast self ’. On one level this issue is explored in terms of the global shift to chronometric time which philosophers and cultural historians associate with the invention of the railway train in the midnineteenth century, and which is regarded as effecting one of the most drastic epistemic shifts in the human subject seen transhistorically. This point is signalled by Carson with the discussion of the precise time of day at which Krakatoa erupted (which happened in the year 1883, a fact not recorded in the poem); Geryon has discovered the answer, 4.00 a.m., in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (p. 61). Geryon’s lapsarian moment when he falls from happiness

Carson’s Geryon

231

is equated with the drastic change that happened when humanity changed from the archaic to the fast self during the nineteenth century. The parallelism between photography and poetry in terms of recording and retrieving memories is underlined in canto 21, ‘Memory Burn’, where Herakles states that photography ‘is a way of playing with perceptual relationships’ (p. 65). This introduces a discussion of the extraordinary fact that the starlight you see is thousands of years old, and that some of the stars that you see are no longer there at all. Being and time indeed. And when Geryon gets to Buenos Aires he sits in a café writing postcards with bits of Heidegger on them, having been studying German philosophy at college for the past three years (p. 82). The snatches of German make little sense in their new context, but sound plausibly Heideggerian: sie sind das was betreiben, to his brother, a sports commentator, Zum verlorenen Hören to his philosophy professor, and die Angst offenbart das Nichts (‘Anxiety discloses Nothing(ness)’) to his mother, about whom he was usually anxious (pp. 82–4). Now naming Heidegger in a poem can signify several things, but in a poem quite so insistently about the parameters of the Self, it is above all Being and Time that resonates here. Geryon writes out his fragments in a café called the Café Mitwelt. ‘Mitwelt’ is a concept associated with Quantum Physics and Gestalt psychotherapy, but especially with German Existentialism. It means the world that is jointly perceptible to the humans in it—all that the consciousness of each of us shares with the consciousness of others. It is thus distinct from both of the two other worlds that preoccupy the Gestalt analysand, the Existentialist philosopher, and Carson’s Geryon: from the objective Umwelt which names the fundamental, invisible ground of existence (the physical conditions of the universe) and from the subjective Eigenwelt, which means each individual’s own personally and individually constructed reality. And it is in the Café Mitwelt in Buenos Aires that Geryon struggles to distinguish his views of his worlds, although when it comes to his Eigenwelt, the poem makes it clear that philosophy is not the answer: he will learn far more from less cerebral, more sensual engagement with experience—listening to emotional music in a tango bar, or gazing into a baker’s oven.

232

Edith Hall

The fragments of Heidegger prove to be a pre-echo of the central encounter between Geryon and an academic philosopher, Yellowbeard, who has arrived in Buenos Aires for a convention on Scepticism. Here, it seems to me, in the painfully comic account of the conference proceedings, lurks Carson’s central thesis about the difference between the philosopher and the poet. Yellowbeard quotes a translation of the famous passage on the limits of human reason to make sense of the human condition, from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, ‘I see the terrifying spaces of the universe hemming me in . . . ’ (p.91). The line trails powerfully into elipse, while the poem continues, the yellowbeard quoted Pascal and then began to pile word up all around the terror of Pascal until it could scarcely be seen— Geryon paused in his listening and saw the slopes of time spin backwards and stop.

Space and time merge as so often, while the spaces of the universe induce vertiginous experiences of psychic time travel and Geryon is once again, internally, back with his mother. But this passage is also taken from one of the most famous parts of Pascal’s defence of the rationality of belief in god, which frames the famous ‘wager’ resting on the premise that it is more rational to believe than not to believe. 22 Carson was herself raised in a Protestant-humanist tradition, and pours no cynical postmodern or post-Marxist scorn on religious devotion. 23 Although Red is not as theological in its focus as much of Carson’s work, especially some of the material in Glass, Irony, and God (1995), Carson’s tangos (her word, out of another context) with metaphysics do not leave Red untouched. 24 The second of the three important conversations which Geryon holds in Buenos Aires is with another philosopher at the conference, 22 The relevant sections are published in English translation in Pascal (1962) 200–16. 23 See especially the remarks on her attitude towards Celan’s ‘curiously devout lack of faith’ and the mysticism of Simone Weil, in Furlani (2003). 24 In an interview with Kevin McNeilly, Carson said that she thinks ‘there’s a theological aspect in being human. I think it’s one of the things you have to decide what you think about, at some point in your life . . . I just come back to it as one comes back to one’s shoes at a certain point in the day’ (McNeilly (2003)). On Carson’s interest in Christian mysticism, see Furlani (2003).

Carson’s Geryon

233

called Lazer, the son of atheist Jewish parents who had adapted the name Eleazar (p. 94). Lazer thinks that mortality is merely ‘divine doubt flashing over us’, and that children, like his 4-year-old daughter, make you aware of temporal distance. Humans are all walking over a hill towards death, at distances from each other marked by their respective ages (pp. 94–5). The role of the two philosophers has been to introduce strongly metaphysical interests to the poem, and especially the notion of godhead and its absolute power. In moments of death, ‘For an instant God | suspends assent and POOF! we disappear’, as Lazer says (p. 94). Geryon is intellectually disturbed, and sits up at night in his hotel room trying to reassert the idea of a Self in the teeth of the conference of Sceptics. And it is Heidegger to whom he turns for reassurance (p. 98), He hugged his overcoat closer and tried to assemble in his mind Heidegger’s argument about the use of moods. We would think ourselves continuous with the world if we did not have moods. It is state-of-mind that discloses to us (Heidegger claims) that we are beings who have been thrown into something else.

He leaves the hotel and stumbles around until he arrives at ‘the only authentic tango bar left in Buenos Aires’ (p. 99). Here he has a strange encounter with an androgynous woman tango singer who turns out to be just moonlighting—by day she is a psychoanalyst. But it is in the course of this conversation that Geryon has a profound reaffirmation of what makes a sense of Self—in a song, within a memory, within that bar in Buenos Aires. The singer performs her ‘typical tango song and she had the throat full of needles you need to sing it’ (p. 100); tangos are terrible because their message is always the same—Your heart or my death! (ibid.) Geryon is precipitated into a memory of standing at a high school dance, propping up the wall, no one to dance with, his body dripping sweat and desire (p. 101), while . . . music pounded across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being a self in a song.

234

Edith Hall

In this terrible image of adolescent sexual frustration and emotional yearning, all the philosophical doubts about selfhood and its definitions are swept away in the sensory overload of music, sweat, and the scent of the other boys’ colognes arising ‘in a light terror’ around them. In this powerful moment of recollection, Geryon’s self was not only palpable but desperate and dramatic. The power of art and sensory feeling to speak more truly than philosophical argumentation could scarcely be more emphatically asserted than in the three-part colloquy that constitutes Geryon’s Buenos Aires episode.

THE WESTERN SUBJECT SUBVERTED At the moment when Geryon put down Walt Whitman and selected instead a self-help manual, it looked as though he was about to go on a quest to discover his true self, by himself. But it is at this point that, after a gap of several years, who should crash back into his lonely life but the black-leather-jacketed Herakles? With Herakles immediately comes a third party, who is to provide a crucial point of reference through most of the rest of the poem. Herakles is accompanied by a Peruvian, ‘a man as beautiful as a live feather’ (p. 112). His name is Ancash, which is the ancient name of the region housing the oldest indigenous civilization in Northern Peru, the Chavin (pre-Inca). This people is traceable at least as far back as the seventh or sixth century bce—that is, as far as Stesichorus and the ‘western’ poetic tradition. Ancash becomes increasingly important both to Geryon and to the poem, and it is this relationship which seems to point to the possibility of the discovery of at least a kind of self-understanding. During the journeys of Geryon, Herakles, and Ancash, which refract the aerial ride of Dante and Virgil on Geryon’s back through the circles of Hell, the autobiography moves towards its mysterious conclusion. The poetic parallels introduced along with Ancash already seem to signal something more promising for Geryon’s quest for self-knowledge than Whitman’s injunction to accept that he, too, is evil. Herakles and Ancash are making a documentary film about Emily Dickinson, who wrote poems about volcanoes including On My Volcano grows the grass, a poem which Geryon likes very much

Carson’s Geryon

235

(p. 108). 25 The two young men are therefore travelling around South America recording the sounds made by volcanoes, presumably to provide an audio background to their documentary (ibid.). With the ‘feather man’ comes a new optimistic impetus, as well as a beautiful song sung in a language incomprehensible both to Geryon and the reader, and I am sure that beneath Ancash lies Dickinson’s wellknown poem that begins, Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all. 26

In the end Geryon and Ancash, after living through the tension caused by the fact that they are both sexually involved with Herakles, discover a much deeper bond based not on sex but on a shared spiritual understanding. They are much more fragile and much more sensitive Selves than Herakles. He is the consummate North American version of the appetitive ancient hero. Although he hangs around with Ancash, he is blind to issues of first-world imperialism; when he claims brightly to know some Quechua, the ancient indigenous language of the Andes, Ancash ‘gave him a raw look’ (p. 112). He enjoys risks and adventures, knows what he wants (sex, food, fun), and more importantly knows how to get it. He is insensitive, brash, anti-intellectual, intolerant of emotional claims being made upon him, but Carson is no naïve anti-American polemicist: he is also big, strong, warm, sexually desirable, full of the life force and exuberantly good company. The poetic episode that best captures his spirit is the escapade in the Buenos Aires branch of Harrods: Herakles cuts free a lifesize carved wooden tiger from a carousel in the children’s department, finds the department store’s central fusebox, plunges the entire shop into darkness, and carries off his trophy, yelling ‘Vamos hombres!’ to his friends (pp. 116–17). It is in the plane to Peru, sitting between the feathered, spiritual, ancient American Ancash and the brash, life-loving New World hero 25 26

This poem is no. 1677 in Dickinson (1970) 685. No. 254 in Dickinson (1970) 116.

236

Edith Hall

Herakles, that Geryon begins to soar away as an independent self, thus triumphing over his treatment in both Stesichorus and Dante. In the justly famous fragments of the archaic lyric describing the death of Geryon, it is entirely written from Herakles’ subjective viewpoint or that of an external witness-narrator. Herakles first strikes Geryon, whose helmet falls to the ground (fr. S 15 col. i.13–17); the killing of the monster is then described in gory detail, including the pain inflicted by the arrow poisoned with the blood and gall of the Hydra (fr. S 15 col. ii): . . . (bringing the end that is hateful (death), having (doom) on its head, befouled with blood and with . . . gall, the anguish of the dapple-necked Hydra, destroyer of men; and in silence he thrust it cunningly into his brow, and it cut through the flesh and the bones by divine dispensation; and the arrow held straight on the crown of his head, and it stained with gushing blood his breastplate and gory limbs; and Geryon drooped his head to one side, like a poppy which spoiling its tender beauty suddenly shed its petals and . . . 27

Geryon droops his neck in death at the hands of Heracles, and is likened to a poppy which spoils its beauty by suddenly shedding its petals. In Dante, Geryon had provided the mount for the poet Dante and his companion Virgil. But when transformed by Carson in her poetic novel, this poppy fragment and the flight with the two riders between them provide the material for the climax—an intense moment of orgasm in the mile-high club, as Heracles begins to masturbate the ecstatic red monster in a plane high over the Andes (pp. 118–19): He felt Herakles’ hand move on his thigh and Geryon’s head went back like a poppy in a breeze as Herakles’ mouth came down on his and blackness sank through him. Herakles’ hand was on his zipper. Geryon gave himself up to pleasure . . .

At this extraordinary moment of his ‘refraction’ by Carson through Existentialist models of the self and through earlier poetry, Geryon’s right to subjectivity triumphs over his millennia-long objectification 27

The translation and numeration here is that of Campbell (1991) 74–7.

Carson’s Geryon

237

as the creature who existed simply to be slain in Heracles’ tenth labour. Geryon displaces Heracles from the centre of his myth, and himself takes centre stage, substituting for his own death or his own treatment as a beast of burden an erotic triumph over the lover who had once (in Carson’s story) rejected him. Autobiography of Red charts the history of the western Subject through Geryon. He goes from his archaic self, existing in a poem as the object slain by the macho culture hero Heracles, to what the poem itself calls his ‘fast’ self, in which he emphatically becomes the subject of an intimate experience in an aeroplane. At this moment Carson not only introduces the poem’s most vivid and explicit of its numerous references to Stesichorus’ Geryoneis, but also refers to the representation of Geryon’s flight around the circles of Hell in Dante’s Inferno. The poem’s argument about the nature of the western Subject is therefore conducted through references to intermingled images and signs from the three cultural planes instantiated respectively by Geryon’s ancient pagan, Christian, and postmodern manifestations, with the addition of a dialogue with another—wholly un-Mediterranean—tradition altogether. Carson’s Geryon approaches full, autonomous selfhood through coming to terms with, and even at times enjoying, his physical and psychological strangeness. But the density of the underlying philosophical argument ensures that the melancholy yet witty autobiography of Geryon’s self is also the more profound autobiography of the western Subject in the form it has only recently begun to believe it can hope to inhabit—frank, diverse, post-feminist, postcolonial, intercultural and wryly defiant of normative heterosexist constraints.

14 ‘Purple Shining Lilies’: Imagining the Aeneid in Contemporary Poetry Rowena Fowler

Fleur Adcock’s ‘Purple Shining Lilies’ spring from her memory of reading the Aeneid, as she re-encounters both the Latin text itself and the earlier self who read it. Recalling her unappetizing school textbook the poet retraces the process through which her imagination once coloured in the pages: The events of the Aeneid were not enacted on a porridge-coloured plain; although my greyish pencilled-over Oxford text is monochrome, tends to deny the flaming pyre, that fearful tawny light, the daily colour-productions in the sky (dawn variously rosy); Charon’s boat mussel-shell blue on the reedy mud of Styx; the wolf-twins in a green cave; huge Triton rising from the flood to trumpet on his sky-coloured conch; and everywhere the gleam of gold and blood. 1

Adcock the schoolgirl, like Virgil’s Amazon Camilla, was fascinated by Chloreus in his Phrygian battle-dress (Phrygiis fulgebat in armis | . . . ipse peregrina ferrugine clarus et ostro: ‘he shone in his Phrygian arms . . . the man himself bright in foreign rust-red and purple’ 1

Cited from Adcock (2000).

Imagining the Aeneid in Contemporary Poetry

239

(Aeneid 11.769, 772); 2 the third stanza of her poem now attempts to capture in its English rhyme-scheme something of this outlandish allure: Cybele’s priest rode glittering into battle on a bronze-armoured horse: his great bow of gold, his cloak saffron, he himself splendid in ferrugine et ostro rust and shellfish.

A whole palette of Latin colour words which, as we know, do not correspond to our own distinctions of hue and luminance, is conjured up in the poem through sound, texture and association: ‘grim ater; or the two versions of white: | albus thick and eggy; candidus | clear . . . It dazzled me, that white, when I was young’. Through one of the displacements and superimpositions that are a hallmark of her work Adcock demonstrates how a slip of the eye across a line of Book 6 of the Aeneid created impossible, fantastic blooms out of lilia and purpureos flores: manibus date lilia plenis, ‘give lilies with generous hands’, says Anchises to Aeneas; while I, for my part purpureos spargam flores, ‘will scatter crimson flowers’ (6.883–4). Adcock read Latin at university and was ‘firmly taught’ at school, and although she knows that purpureos should mean red rather than purple and does not modify lilia, the misreading has taken on a life of its own, re-enacted in the poem: My eyes leaping across the juxtaposed adjectives, I saw them both as one, and brooded secretly upon the image: purple shining lilies, bright in the sun.

Adcock’s poem might provide a motto for a mode of classical reception in which the poet brings the past into some creative contiguity with the present while drawing attention to his or her own motives and processes: ‘inside my head | the word was both something more than visual | and also exactly what it said’. Such an approach is particularly well suited to the Aeneid, whose 2 Book 11 is the book over which Robert Lowell’s reader fell asleep; his dream vision is similarly full of colour (‘Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid’, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, 1951).

240

Rowena Fowler

reception is already complicated by its own sense of belatedness and its self-consciousness about origins and originality. Virgil enters English poetry in the company of Dante, Marlowe, Dryden, Purcell, Turner, Palmer, or Berlioz; the Aeneid suggests a model of reception which builds on the accretions of memory but carries its burdens lightly. With Virgil as their guide, contemporary writers encounter their own compound ghosts, including ghosts of their former selves, hoping to appease the dead and tap the sources of vision or prophecy. Looking and listening are important both in the text itself and in the modern poets’ memories and experiences of the text, including the visual appearance of the page and the retained sound of the Latin words. Deixis, invocation, and dialogue provide points of connection. Of the many ways in which one text may relate to another or a source may be understood to be at play within a text, I have worked here with the idea of various encounters between the Aeneid, the contemporary poet, and the reader, avoiding more explicitly ideological or agonistic models. The concept of ‘appropriation’ is too peremptory, of ‘assimilation’ too inert. Of the various metaphors—translation, migration, metamorphosis, necromancy—which have been applied to the reception of classical writers, the one most apt for Virgil is conversation. At the end of the last century Theodore Ziolkowski regretted that ‘We do not live in Virgilian times’ (Ziolkowski (1993) 285). We were conscious, rather, of living After Ovid, 3 in a literary climate conducive to shape-shifting, performance, and disguise. But where the late twentieth century was often prejudiced against the unitary, preferring hybridity and collage, poems ‘After Virgil’ tend in the opposite direction: towards a kind of alert integration. The tenor of the poems I discuss is attentive, reciprocal and, ultimately, conciliatory. For Eavan Boland, reading Virgil is at the heart of her poetic formation and vocation, marking the significant moments of self-discovery and of the discovery of language. In ‘A False Spring’, Boland’s undergraduate self is invoked as one of the voiceless warriors of Book 6 of the Aeneid, a disembodied ghost which the older poet must lay to rest. She remembers coming out of the university library after 3

See the influential anthology edited by Hofman and Lasdun (1994).

Imagining the Aeneid in Contemporary Poetry

241

studying the Aeneid but cannot find ‘the woman I once was’; like the vocem | exiguam, ‘tiny voice’ (Aeneid 6.492–3) of his former enemy, which Aeneas can hardly make out, Boland’s earlier, frailer self has disappeared into an echoing void which gives back neither reflection nor echo: 4 how they called and called and called only to have it be a yell of shadows, an O vanishing in the polished waters and the topsy-turvy seasons of hell—

Boland returns to an earlier reading of the Aeneid in ‘The Latin Lesson’; again, the poem takes its cue from a specific setting and moment: Easter light in the convent garden. The eucalyptus tree glitters in it. A bell rings for the first class. Today the Sixth Book of the Aeneid. An old nun calls down the corridor. Manners, girls. Where are your manners? Last night in his Lenten talk the local priest asked us to remember everything is put here for a purpose: even eucalyptus leaves are suitable for making oil from to steep wool in, to sweeten our blankets and gaberdines. My forefinger crawls on the lines. A storm light comes in from the bay. How beautiful the words look, how vagrant and strange on the page before we crush them for their fragrance 4

Boland’s poems are cited from Boland (1995a).

242

Rowena Fowler and crush them again to discover the pathway to hell and that these shadows in their shadow-bodies, chittering and mobbing on the far shore, signalling their hunger for the small usefulness of a life, are the dead. And how before the bell will I hail the black keel and flatter the dark boatman and cross the river and still keep a civil tongue in my head?

Within the double enclosure of garden and classroom the morning lesson is shadowed by Virgilian images and is marked off from ordinary time by the school bell; beyond the windows, however, are the waters of Dublin Bay and the intimation of future crossings. The eucalyptus tree, transplanted far from its own origins, provides a versatile parable. Catholic and classical modes of association meet and mingle. The extraordinary descent into the underworld, where the souls ‘chitter’ and ‘mob’ in a most un-Latinate way, must be accomplished within the framework of conventual decorum—the ‘civility’ of the final stanza with its wonderful blend of Latinate word and Irish idiom. In ‘The Bottle Garden’ Boland takes stock of half a lifetime, retracing the moment when she first became aware of the power of words. As she recalls in her essay ‘In Search of a Language’, she began when she was about sixteen to respect the Latin she had once found so burdensome, ‘the systems of a language that . . . stood against the disorders of love or history . . . I began to see how syntax can discover purpose’ (Boland (1995b) 75). The poem is both a transplanting and an underworld journey; in place of a Dantesque dark wood we find submerged greenery rendered unfamiliar by the convex glass of the bottle garden, encased in morning sunlight but offering a way through and back to a convent-school evening. Past and present are brought together deictically: ‘here they are | here I am’. For the

Imagining the Aeneid in Contemporary Poetry

243

schoolgirl the Latin text, as yet only partially understood, constitutes a rite of passage, releasing a whole future of departures and opportunities from ‘the open weave of harbour lights | and my school blouse riding up at the sleeves’: I decanted them—feather mosses, fan-shaped plants, asymmetric greys in the begonia— into this globe which shows up how the fern shares the invertebrate lace of the sea-horse. The sun is in the bottle garden, submarine, out of its element when I come down on a spring morning; my sweet, greenish, inland underwater. And in my late thirties, past the middle way, I can say how did I get here? I hardly know the way back, still less forward. Still, if you look for them, there are signs: Earth stars, rock spleenwort, creeping fig and English ivy all furled and herded into the green and cellar wet of the bottle; well, here they are here I am a gangling schoolgirl in the convent library, the April evening outside, reading the Aeneid as the room darkens to the underworld of the Sixth book— the Styx, the damned, the pity and the improvised poetic of imprisoned meanings; only half aware of the open weave of harbour lights and my school blouse riding up at the sleeves.

For the contemporary poet the Virgilian starting-point may be the site and experience of reading the text, or it may be a scene, a phrase or, as in Medbh McGuckian’s ‘Faith’, a single image: My grandmother led us to believe in snow as an old man in the sky shaking feathers down from his mattress over the world.

244

Rowena Fowler Her bed in the morning was covered with tiny scales, sloughed off in the night from peeling skin; they floated in a cloud of silver husks to the floor, or spun in the open window like starry litter, blowing along the road. I burned them in a heap, a dream of coins more than Thérèse’s promised shower of roses, or Virgil’s souls, many as autumn leaves. 5

The tercets, though unrhymed, gesture towards terza rima; as often happens in recent poetry, Virgil is partly mediated via Dante. The roses which St Thérèse of Lisieux promised to shower down from heaven mingle with Virgil’s metaleptic fallen leaves: quam multa in silvis autumni frigore primo | lapsa cadunt folia, ‘as many as the leaves that slip down and fall in the woods at the first chill of autumn’ (6.309–10). Both then claim comparison, as emblems and relics, with the flakes of the old woman’s skin. The images feel insubstantial, even whimsical, until grounded in the last tercet. The ‘Faith’ of the title traces a movement from belief as a mode of visualisation towards a specifically Catholic understanding of death and sanctity which can nevertheless coexist with the classical intertext. Starting from a phrase rather than an image, U. A. Fanthorpe’s ‘The Silence’, takes the first words of Book 2 of the Aeneid, after Dido has urged Aeneas to tell his story, to stand for the silence left behind after the departure of the Romans from Britain: Conticuere omnes, ‘all fell silent’. The phrase, scratched on a tile at Silchester, 6 constitutes a kind of found poem, through which Fanthorpe explores some of the ambiguity of transmission and reception; what is handed on cannot be completely erased, but what we can hear may only be silence. Fanthorpe’s particular contribution to the tradition of English poems with Romano-British personae is to construct a tentative but eloquent connection, built on silence, from text to graffito to voice to text: 5

Cited from McGuckian (1997). The tile, from the Roman town of Calleva, and now in the Silchester Collection at the Museum of Reading, reads: ‘Pertacus perfidus | Campester Lucilianus | Campanus conticuere omnes.’ 6

Imagining the Aeneid in Contemporary Poetry

245

They came too near the dark, for all their know-how. Those curses they scratched widdershins on lead— Asking for trouble. We withdrew into the old places, that are easier To believe in. Once we waited For someone to come back, But now it’s clear they won’t. Here we stand, Between Caes. Div. Aug. and the next lot, expert only At unspeakable things, Stranded between history and history, vague in-between people. What we know will not be handed on. Conticuere omnes. 7

In Fanthorpe’s ‘Rising Damp’ the lost rivers of London can still be imagined under the streets, running alongside, though never converging with, the rivers of the Greco-Roman underworld: Effra, Graveney, Falcon, Quaggy, Wandle, Walbrook, Tyburn, Fleet It is the rivers that lie Lower, that touch us only in dreams That never surface. We feel their tug As a dowser’s rod bends to the source below Phlegethon, Acheron, Lethe, Styx.

As the poem’s epigraph notes: ‘A river can sometimes be diverted, but it is a very hard thing to lose it altogether,’—an insight which could apply as aptly to the afterlife of classical texts as to the other submerged histories and memories which well up in this sequence of poems, Stations Underground. Fanthorpe explores wartime trenches, the London tube and, in ‘The Guide’, the underworlds of Homer, Dante, and Virgil. First, ‘The level-headed Greeks grasped | Their underworld, and charted it’ (1–2). Later, Dante’s ‘accurate taxonomy of sin’ pigeonholed the fluttering shades, providing ‘A new filing-system for | The irregular dead’ (11–12). However, it is Virgil, ‘The Guide’ himself, who, for Fanthorpe, has the profoundest understanding of suffering. 7

Fanthorpe’s poems are cited from Fanthorpe (2005).

246

Rowena Fowler

Her third stanza is a meditation on the sources of Virgil’s sense of the tragic in Book 4 of the Georgics: Dispossession, and the secrets Of his beemaster father, Taught Virgil more than men know.

Orpheus dies; Aeneas survives: in Fanthorpe’s reading of these ‘annals of the hive’ (Georgics 4.1–280) such outcomes are inevitable. In places the poem incorporates a sensitive and accurate translation of the Latin—of Virgil’s picture of the exhausted bees, for example, who ‘alas | attrivere’: How the workforce fly their wings To rags, to death; (30–1) saepe etiam duris errando in cotibus alas attrivere, ultroque animam sub fasce dedere (4.203–4) 8

The last stanza of ‘The Guide’ turns back from the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in the underworld in the Georgics to Dido’s refusal of Aeneas in Book 6 of the Aeneid. Here, rather than translating the Latin, Fanthorpe tries to find words and images to express our dulled and imperfect understanding of the classical text; reception is figured as echo, still occasionally audible in spite of the unremitting processes of attrition. The italicized lines work simultaneously as message and gloss, a compound utterance through which the contemporary poet hopes to interpret and hand on her reading of Virgil: About Hell too, he knew more Than the others. Through blunt-edged Latin, Its meanings scuffed by ages of misuse, He found ways of wording the unsayable, Fathomed echo-chambers behind the dulled And vague, and told us: Hell is a sort of underground bog. There are no landmarks. In it Those we have loved and failed Turn their backs for ever. 8 ‘Often they rub off their wings in their journeying on the tough rocks, and of their own accord give up their life under their burden.’

Imagining the Aeneid in Contemporary Poetry

247

Dido’s stony silence in the Mourning Fields in Book 6 of the Aeneid completes the pattern, begun in Book 1, of a relationship defined through listening and speaking, and through refusing to listen or speak. 9 Later writers have added their own voices, filling out the silences or placing themselves in the position of ideal listener. From the time of Ovid’s Heroides, and within the long-established (and not necessarily anachronistic) 10 tradition of sympathy for Dido, many poets have rewritten her experience, and in particular her impassioned speeches, in their own words. Aeneas, on the other hand, speaks only rarely in contemporary poetry; the ‘voids’, absences, and simulacra through which he is characteristically represented in Virgil’s text, 11 continue into his literary afterlife. Rachel Hadas’s poem ‘After the Cave’ is unusual in imagining the separate, unspoken, feelings of both lovers; Dido’s momentary foreboding is quickly shrugged off, but to Aeneas’ eyes their future seems already relegated to the remote past: he lingers and watches the dew and rain mixed in the mud and looks at scratched inscriptions on the rocky wall, old names with hearts and arrows, and comes out slowly: . . . And he feels the weariness of love . . . the emptiness where might have been the gods to guide him. 12

Virgil’s foreshadowing of that day’s consequences (Ille dies primus leti primusque malorem | causa fuit) is also the starting-point for Anne Ridler’s ‘Infelix Dido’. Where Hadas borrows the intimation of tragedy from the narrator of the Aeneid and refracts it through the individual lovers’ (imagined) viewpoints, Ridler alternates two contrasting modes of expression and interpretation. Obliquely rhymed lyric stanzas, spoken by Dido, alternate with more 9

See e.g. Braund (1998). For the argument that such readings are not necessarily anachronistic see Martindale (1984) 3. 11 12 See Porter (2004). Cited from Hadas (1975). 10

248

Rowena Fowler

discursive authorial paraphrase and commentary in unrhymed verseparagraphs metrically reminiscent of the classical hexameter. The choice of form may have been influenced by the alternation of aria and recitative in Italian opera 13 or of chorus and aria in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Infelix Dido Ille dies primus leti primusque malorem | causa fuit . . . (Aen.IV.169) (That day was the first of death and the first cause of woes . . . ) In a cave, safe from the storm, Dido coupled with her love. Nymphs shrieked on the mountain-top, Lightning flashed and earth sustained The piercing javelins of rain. ‘That was the day sorrow began.’ Virgil blamed her it seems, for love is the foe of decorum. All her generous hospitality counts for nothing: Welcome given to beggars, the shipwrecked penniless Trojans, Shelter provided, a share in the kingdom, while their leader Prays the gods to reward her, if justice rules in heaven; Prays that she may be blessed as she is prodigal in blessing. ...

...

That is all irrelevant, the poem seems to be saying: Things are as they are; the order of heavenly justice Takes no account of the debt he owed, of pity or anguish, Pays no heed to the irony when Aeneas asks a blessing. She was entrapped by a god? So much the worse for her. ‘For such a wound there’s no forgiveness. Though you declare your heart is wracked You yield too swiftly, follow your fate Too willingly. My only solace Since my desire is turned to hate Is that in dying I can curse.’ 14 13 14

Alongside her work as a poet Ridler also wrote and translated libretti. Cited from Ridler (1994).

Imagining the Aeneid in Contemporary Poetry

249

Dido’s farewell is most often reworked in modern poetry as soliloquy and lyric, with minimal authorial masking. The more the poet sympathises with and identifies with Dido, the more his or her personal voice may take over or even drown out that earlier voice. As examples of unashamedly personal responses to Virgil which still leave space for the original to breathe, I offer poems by Stevie Smith and Louise Glück. Smith’s version of Dido is close enough to the Aeneid to be approached as a translation, but the language and tone is transposed into a markedly different register ‘From Virgil’: 15 Dido’s Farewell to Aeneas From Virgil. I have lived and followed my fate without flinching, followed it gladly And now, not wholly unknown, I come to the end. I built this famous city, I saw the walls rise, As for my abominable brother, I don’t think I’ve been too lenient. Was I happy? Yes, at a price, I might have been happier If our Dardanian Sailor had condescended to put in elsewhere. Now she fell silent, turning her face to the pillow, Then getting up quickly, the dagger in her hand, I die unavenged, she cried, but I die as I choose, Come Death, you know you must come when you’re called Although you’re a god. And this way, and this way, I call you. . . . vixi et, quem dederat cursum Fortuna, peregi, et nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago, urbem praeclaram statui, mea moenia vidi, ulta virum poenas inimico a fratre recepi, felix, heu! nimium felix, si litora tantum numquam Dardaniae tetigissent nostra carinae!’ dixit et os impressa toro, ‘moriemur inultae, sed moriamur,’ ait. ‘sic, sic iuvat ire sub umbras. (Aeneid 4. 653–60)

Smith’s opening line works well as a twentieth-century English equivalent to the Latin hexameter. Dido’s passion then issues as English middle-class understatement (‘not wholly unknown’, ‘don’t think I’ve been too lenient’) and hyperbolic slang (‘abominable’). Her tragic realization felix, heu! nimium felix (‘happy, alas, too happy!) becomes ‘Yes, at a price, I might have been happier’ and the Dardaniae 15

Cited from Smith (1975).

250

Rowena Fowler

carinae (‘Dardanian keels’) suggest the cool periphrasis ‘our Dardanian sailor’. The tone of the poem is sardonic and bracing, the invocation to Death a recognizable signature in Smith’s writing and a bossily familiar, even cheerful, alternative to the Latin’s resolute tense and mood; ‘I die as I choose’ absorbs both future and subjunctive: moriemur . . . moriamur. Louise Glück’s more recent version of Dido, ‘The Queen of Carthage’, is further than Smith’s from Virgil’s text in its content but less distant in tone. It is passionate, poised, and dignified: classical epic rewritten as lyric. The first two stanzas are stark, seeming to present, in the American tradition, the ‘darkness’ of Virgil. 16 Yet the poem is also full of light. The language is spare and reflective, looking into the voids and distances of the ‘shimmering water’ but avoiding mistiness in favour of a dream-like clarity, which has been described as ‘at once strangely impersonal and weirdly authoritative’. 17 The experience of reading Virgil is here ‘shimmering’ for Glück, as for Adcock it was ‘dazzling’. The movement in Glück’s poem between first and third person encompasses a range of viewpoints, enabling an individual voice to be heard while muting any threat of autobiographical intrusion. The shift in the last six lines to the third person within reported speech (Dido referring to herself as ‘she’) expresses both resignation and self-fulfilment, the two yoked by the submerged Latin pun fames | Fama. ‘The Queen of Carthage’ Brutal to love, more brutal to die. And brutal beyond the reaches of justice to die of love. In the end, Dido summoned her ladies in waiting that they might see the harsh destiny inscribed for her by the Fates. She said, ‘Aeneas came to me over the shimmering water; I asked the Fates to permit him to return my passion, 16

See Harrison (1990a).

17

Clark (1999) 7.

Imagining the Aeneid in Contemporary Poetry

251

even for a short time. What difference between that and a lifetime: in truth, in such moments, they are the same, they are both eternity. I was given a great gift which I attempted to increase, to prolong. Aeneas came to me over the water: the beginning blinded me. Now the Queen of Carthage will accept suffering as she accepted favor: to be noticed by the Fates is some distinction after all. Or should one say, to have honored hunger, since the Fates go by that name also.’ 18

The tragedy of Dido continues to exert such a powerful fascination for readers and writers that Aeneas’ past experiences and future mission (the larger part of the Aeneid) may be overlooked. Northern Irish poets, however, have found a special resonance in Aeneas’ abandonment of Creusa at the sack of Troy, and the rescue of his father and son from the burning city. In Paul Muldoon’s Hay (1998) 19 Virgil accompanies the poet’s transplantation from one continent to another, acting the roles of both victim and beneficiary of typographical mishap: ‘For “vigil” read “Virgil”’ (‘Errata’). Through the extended ring-composition of the sonnet-sequence ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’ Muldoon revisits and revises the flight from Troy, cooking up a migration to Australia for his own Irish father and a rendezvous for himself with a Parisian Creusa: As for my Creusa, as for my little coquette, though I knew in my heart of hearts that one night’s ice is not a Neapolitan, hey, knew that I might only aspire to taking a turn with her through the Latin Quarter, (xviii. 7–13) 18

Cited from Glück (1999)

19

Cited from Muldoon (2001).

252

Rowena Fowler

The figure of Virgil oversees Hay from the outset, pointing to his own inventiveness in the Aeneid as his qualification for correcting and re-writing Muldoon: ‘The beauty of it,’ ventured Publius Vergilius Maro, ‘is that your father and the other skinnymalinks may yet end up a pair of jackaroos in the canefields north of Brisbane.’ We heard the tink of blade on bone, the Greeks’ alalaes as they slashed and burned, saw Aeneas daddle-dade his father Anchises and his son, Iulus, to a hidey-hole on the slopes of Mount Ida. ‘The beauty of it is that I delivered them from harm; it was I who had Aeneas steal back to look for Creusa, I who had her spirit rub like a flame through his flame-burnished arms, I who might have let him find his own way through the streel of smoke, among the cheerless dead, the dying’s chirrups.’ (i. 1–14)

Even as he revels in a new marriage and a new life in America, Muldoon must ‘steal back’ to the shades he has left behind. As the American poet Mark Strand notes, in his essay on embracing the dead in the Aeneid, ‘She [Creusa] did her job, allowing Aeneas to pursue his destiny without having to look back, which, as it happens, he is in the midst of doing.’ 20 Some memories, though, are harder to throw off, as Muldoon’s imagination continues to ‘reel-to-reel | through the blazing town as Aeneas stumbled under the weight of Anchises on his back’ (xxi.3–4). A rather different Virgil presides over Seamus Heaney’s Seeing Things (1991). 21 The volume is framed by Stygian journeys, opening with ‘The Golden Bough’, a translation of Aeneid 6.98–148, and closing with a translation from Inferno 3, ‘The Crossing’. Among 20

Strand (2001) 68; see also Homans (1987). The presence of the Aeneid in Seeing Things may be compared with that of the Eclogues in Electric Light (2001) and of the Georgics in Heaney’s earlier volumes: see e.g. Twiddy (2006) and Thomas (2001a). On the importance of Latin poetry and the Latin language in Heaney’s poetic formation see Kubiak (2001). 21

Imagining the Aeneid in Contemporary Poetry

253

the poet’s encounters with the shades of people he has known the most important is that with his recently dead father. The fusion and reversal of the father–son relationship in Heaney’s work goes back at least as far as Death of a Naturalist (1966) where each may be the ‘Follower’ in the other’s shadow. In Seeing Things Aeneas tells the Sybil: I carried him on these shoulders through flames And thousands of enemy spears. In the thick of battle I saved him And he was at my side then through all my sea-journeys, A man in old age, worn out yet holding out always. (‘The Golden Bough’, 15–18; cf. Aeneid 6. 110–14)

The Virgil translation prepares the ground for the second poem in Seeing Things, ‘Man and Boy’, in which Heaney mingles his father’s memories with his own. The poem ends with a striking reverse simile as the poet sees again from the vantage point of childhood: when he will piggy-back me At a great height, light-headed and thin-boned, Like a witless elder rescued from the fire.

Escaping from one country to found a new life elsewhere, the Irish Aeneas finds himself exposed to criticism and self-doubt. Heaney’s ‘Exposure’ in North (1975) has often been read as an expression of Ovidian exilic tristia, but it has at least equal recourse to the Aeneid. Indeed, it may be read as a modern version of the sortes Virgilianae, with the poet testing himself against the classical text. He wonders if he was right to have fled the war-torn city, and looks for signs of a promised comet: ‘If I could come on meteorite!’ Anchises refused to leave Troy until he saw the shooting star (Aeneid 2.680–705); Heaney fears he may have missed the ‘once-in-a lifetime portent’. It has been suggested (Williams 1999) that all the essence of the Aeneid is here ‘extracted from Virgil’s epic and then reworked in [Heaney’s] poem’. The wood, for example, in which the poet wanders and reflects, recalls the forest of Book 6 and Aeneas’ quest for the Golden Bough, haec ipse suo tristi cum corde volutat, | aspectans silvam immensam, ‘he turned this over with his own sad heart, gazing at the limitless wood’ (Aeneid 6.185–6):

254

Rowena Fowler It is December in Wicklow: Alders dripping, birches Inheriting the last light, The ash tree cold to look at.

Aeneas and his companions cut down trees—pine, ash, oak, and rowan—for a pyre, in accordance with the Sybil’s instructions; Heaney, the solitary ‘inner émigré’, has no such guide to piety. Caught between warring certitudes and pondering his own ‘responsible tristia’, he is left belatedly ‘Imagining a hero’. It remains for a novel, Margaret Drabble’s The Seven Sisters (2002), to attempt a contemporary reading of Virgil in which the situation of a middle-aged woman explicitly parallels the events of the Aeneid. When the adult education institute where she is studying Virgil is demolished (to be rebuilt as a health club) the heroine assembles six new friends and sets off on a journey from Carthage to Rome, consulting the Cumaean Sybil en route. The present-day narrative is interspersed with passages from Dryden’s magnificent translation of the Aeneid and punctuated with mock-heroic marginal glosses: ‘They arrive in Africa, and meet their stately guide’. The novel incorporates readings and discussions that the group have with their oracular Latin tutor, where they attempt to construe the text and to test it on its own ground. Arriving at a sunlit Avernus that turns out to be ‘by no means birdless’, they remember Virgil’s black lake and Hecate’s warning to keep away: but ‘The message does not make sense to them at all, on this late spring day at the beginning of the third millennium. . . . They do not feel the need to stand aside. They feel at liberty to go in and order some lunch. Their floral paper tablecloth wishes them a Good Appetite in many living languages, though not in Latin.’ The Latin tutor in the Seven Sisters takes Broch’s The Death of Virgil to read on the journey but soon puts it aside to embark on her own adventures in the footsteps of Aeneas. Imagining the Aeneid, contemporary writers explore the power of speech and silence, attachment and loss, in the search for our personal and historical pasts. The cave, the pyre, and the underground river, the city founded and destroyed, still provide loci and points of departure for new encounters between texts.

15 Shades of Rome in the Poetry of Derek Walcott Emily Greenwood

GHOSTS/SHADES Walcott’s poetry is populated with shades and shadows. The prevalence of shadows can be partly explained by Walcott’s dual identity as poet and painter, and the influence of watercolour on his poetic craft. 1 But these shadows also have a figurative, metapoetic dimension, signalling the poet’s dialogue with a long tradition of pastoral poetry, as well as the intertextual intervention of the shades/ghosts of specific poets in his poetry. 2 The shades and shadows of the past are most pronounced in Walcott’s last collection of poetry, The Prodigal (2004). The atmosphere of this poem teems with the vocabulary of shade(s) (both shadows and ghosts): shade5 , shadow9 , ghost2 , ghostly1 , phantom5 , echo5 , spectral1 , spectre2 , apparition, presence, umber, and umbrageous. 3 1 On the coherence of poetry and painting in Walcott see Baugh (1997) on Another Life, Bensen (1997) on Midsummer, and latterly, Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), a poem about the painter Camille Pissarro, which juxtaposes Walcott’s painting and poetry. On the latter see Fulford (2004) and Erickson (2005). 2 For an excellent discussion of pastoral and its definition in relation to Walcott’s poetry, see Davis (1999) passim. 3 The subscript numerals indicate the frequency of each word. I include ‘echo’ amongst the vocabulary of shade, because Walcott often associates shadows and echoes; see, e.g. Walcott (2004a) 61: ‘every noun has its echo . . . as every stone . . . finds an exact translation in its shadow’.

256

Emily Greenwood

As with the ambiguities of the Latin noun umbra in Virgil’s poetry, shades and shadows in Walcott have many resonances. 4 In postcolonial terms, the noun ‘shadow’ evokes the memory of colonial subjecthood, where the colonial subject was the dark shadow of a white form. 5 Lance Callahan has described this phenomenon in relation to Caribbean identity: ‘In the centuries leading up to emancipation, and for the most part in the century that followed, the black citizen was considered to be the white citizen’s “shadow”.’ 6 In terms of Caribbean, New World aesthetics, ‘shadows’ hint at the prejudice that every act of artistic creation is a copy of an Old World form. Hence the memorable lines in Omeros in which the narrator asks ‘Why not see Helen | as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow,’? 7 This impulse persists in Walcott’s last poem, The Prodigal, where the narrator as painter proclaims the joy of ‘the village houses, the streets untainted | by any history, by any thought or shadow | on the blank canvas except from the sky’. 8 Shades are also ghosts and presences, particularly in Walcott’s later poetry, which keeps returning to the topography of the Underworld—both the underworlds of classical epic and the underworld of Dante’s Divine Comedy. 9 In The Bounty, Joseph Brodsky’s shade awaits the poet ‘off the ferry’; 10 while in The Prodigal, towards the end of what is apparently his ‘last’ poem, the poet pictures himself ‘waiting on the landing stage | fingering the obols in your pocket’, before envisaging the ghost of Brodsky ‘crossing with me, so calmly, to the other shore’. 11 The shadow of mortality looms over this collection;

4 On umbra and its range of signification in Virgil, see Theodorakopoulos (1997) 162–4; on umbra and shades in Omeros, see Davis (1999) 46. 5 A dehumanizing condition famously decried and analyzed in Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs (1952). 6 Callahan (2003) 50. 7 Walcott (1990) 271 (6.liv.iii). All references to Walcott’s Omeros and Tiepolo’s Hound are cited by page number, followed by a reference in brackets consisting of the book, chapter, and section numbers. 8 Walcott (2004a) 99. 9 For the theme of the classical katabasis in Walcott’s poetry, see Davis (2007), Callahan (2003) 85–6, Hardwick (2002). 10 Walcott (1997) 65. 11 ‘Last’ poem (Walcott (2004a) 99, ‘In what will be your last book . . . ’); ‘obols’ (ibid. 97); ‘ghost of Brodsky’: (ibid. 98).

Shades of Rome in the Poetry of Derek Walcott

257

as the poet reasons, in dialogue with himself, ‘Look at it in any way you like, it’s an old man’s book.’ 12 This idea of the poetic tradition personified as the shades of poets past is one that Walcott shares with the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky (1940–96), Walcott’s friend and fellow Noble Laureate. In Brodsky’s Nobel lecture (1987), he named the five poets whose work had the greatest influence on his own, envisaging them as ghostly presences: ‘These shades disturb me constantly, they are disturbing me today as well.’ 13 Similarly, in interviews Walcott has often spoken of being conscious of writing for an audience of dead poets, as much as for the living. 14 His poems are peopled with the ghosts of poets, ranging from the ghost of Ovid’s in Hotel Normandie Pool (1981: 63–70), to Homer’s ghost in Omeros (1990), to the ghostly presence of Joseph Brodsky in The Bounty (1997) and The Prodigal (2004). But the frequency of shade(s) in Walcott’s poetry, and his simultaneous interest in Roman poets, is not merely coincidental; Walcott invites readers to make deeper connections between the language of shades, shadows, and ghosts in his poetry, and the Latin noun umbra, which has become synonymous with bucolic poetry after Virgil. 15 In poem 52 of Midsummer (1984), the poet contemplates the history of colonial warfare on St Lucia and the island’s divided affiliations, pondering whether service to English is comparable to serving in the Queen’sranks: 16 Have we changed sides to the mustached sergeants and the horsy gentry because we serve English, like a two-headed sentry 12

Walcott (2004a) 8. Brodsky (1987). Brodsky subsequently brightens his imagery: ‘these, shades, better still, sources of light–lamps? stars?’ (ibid.). 14 See e.g. Walcott’s comment in an interview with Leif Sjöberg (Baer (1996) 83): ‘What keeps me awake is tribute to the dead, who to me are not dead, but are at my elbow’ (orig. 1983). See also the interview with Valentina Polukhina: ‘All the literati keep an imaginary friend. But all the literati also keep an imaginary guide, whoever the master is. Therefore it’s like the preceding shadow of Ovid, or whoever’ (Polukhina (1992) 314; orig. 1989). 15 See Martindale (1997) 109, 113 on umbra as one of the markers of bucolic poetry. 16 Walcott (1984) 72. 13

258

Emily Greenwood guarding its borders? No language is neutral; the green oak of English is a murmurous cathedral where some took umbrage, some peace, but every shade, all, helped widen its shadow.

The pun on ‘shade’ hints at the variegated texture of English: a language that is widened by the accretion of different nuances or ‘shades’, which are here associated with the shades of all its speakers, giving a less sinister hue to the shadow it casts. Walcott’s poem illustrates the capaciousness of English as an imperial language—one that has both suffered and imposed empire. His use of the English noun umbrage (derived from Latin umbra) preserves a use now obsolete in English– umbrage as ‘shade’, 17 and simultaneously uses one of the current senses of umbrage in the phrase ‘to take umbrage’. 18 This wordplay is revived in The Prodigal, where the poet explores the ‘envy of statues’, triggered by a military statue in Milan. 19 The ‘envy’ in question turns out to be ambiguous or, better still, reciprocal. There are echoes here of Joseph Brodsky’s extensive reflections of the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome. 20 The statue is enviable for its access to a vanished age (it is both ‘present’ and ‘absent’), and it is also enviable from Walcott’s perspective as Caribbean poet for its Old World historical cachet (‘We had no such memorials on the island’). But envy is also imputed to the statue as well: ‘Poor hero on his island in the swirl of traffic, | denied the solace of an umbrageous linden | or chestnut’. Here the adjective umbrageous contains both the sense of ‘shady’, but also ‘jealous/envious’, as the tree’s shade is imbued with the emotions of the poem. I will argue that this play of shade and shadows is typical of Walcott’s engagement with Roman literature as a perpetual if ambiguous presence in his poetry. Like shade, this engagement can assume many different accents, which shift across Walcott’s poetic corpus. In order to illustrate Walcott’s shifting relationship with Roman poetry, I propose to work backwards from his ‘last’ poem—The Prodigal, examining how the shades and shadows in this poem symbolize a deeper reflection on poetic and cultural traditions. 17 19 20

18 OED s.v., senses 1 and 2. Ibid., sense 8b. Walcott (2004a) 25. Brodsky ‘Homage to Marcus Aurelius’ (1995) 267 ff.

Shades of Rome in the Poetry of Derek Walcott

259

The Prodigal broadcasts its engagement with several different poetic genres. In the first poem of the collection, the reader is confronted with elegiac banjos (1), elegiac earth (2), pastoral willows (5), and a toilet gurgling its eclogues (8)—the latter a masterly onomatopoeic, bathetic recusatio. The idea of fallen genres is also hinted at in the opening line where the pastoral trope of the silva is reinvented in the city of Pennsylvania: ‘In autumn, on the train to Pennsylvania’. 21 In other ways, too, The Prodigal is a profoundly allusive poem, opening with a train ride that glides through literary topography. 22 In addition to the copious literary allusions, the first poem also contains a catch-all clause for all the unread books (‘unread famous novels’ . . . ‘in lament for all the leaves of the unread books’). 23 Furthermore, this is a poem in which the landscapes of Europe are created out of literature: on seeing Abruzzi, the poet comments ‘I remembered Abruzzi | from A Farewell to Arms’. 24 In the third poem of the collection the small farms of the Tuscan countryside, again ‘seen’ from the vista of a train, are ‘conjugating Horace’, the olive trees are ‘as twisted as Ovid’s syntax’, and the light is ‘Virgilian twilight’ (17). But the force of these Roman poets is soon qualified by the reminder of Greek lurking behind Latin literature: To live in another language with the swallow’s wings: chelidon beating over the rye, shadows on the barley, between the peeling farms and the rusted poplars, the bright air full of drunken insects, the Pervigilium Veneris, Latin words leaping to life as the train glides into dividing Florence.

To illustrate ‘Latin words leaping to life’, Walcott chooses chelidon (swallow)—a noun loaned to Latin from Greek, which occurs in the last few lines of the Pervigilium Veneris. Although not related, etymologically, the noun Pervigilium ‘all-night vigil’ echoes the adjective ‘Virgilian’ in the third line, hinting at sameness and 21

Walcott (2004a) 3. On silva and pastoral in Omeros, see Davis (1999: 44–5). See e.g. p. 5 ‘In the middle of the nineteenth century, | somewhere between Balzac and Lautréamont, | a little farther on than Baudelaire Station | . . . my train broke down, [. . .] When I got off | I found that I had missed the Twentieth Century.’ 23 Ibid. 24 Walcott (2004a) 18. See Hinds (1998) 4 on the trope of allusion figured as memory. 22

260

Emily Greenwood

difference. 25 It is striking that Walcott singles out this relatively late Latin work, itself overshadowed by the classical Latin of Horace, Ovid, and Virgil, and a Greek word within this work, signalling an ironic approach to classical influences. Lurking behind this equivocal homage to Latin literature is the ghost of Joseph Brodsky. The reader has seen this Italian landscape before in the earlier collection The Bounty (1997). In the poem ‘Italian Eclogues’, dedicated to Joseph Brodsky, Brodsky is the voice of Latin poetry. Travelling in Italy—in a car this time—the poet hears: On the bright road to Rome, beyond Mantua, there were reeds of rice, and I heard, in the wind’s elation, the brown dogs of Latin panting alongside the car, their shadows gliding on the verge in smooth translation, past fields fenced by poplars, stone farms in character, nouns from a schoolboy’s text, Virgilian, Horatian, phrases from Ovid passing in a green blur, 26

before revealing, eleven lines in, that the voice in the reeds is Joseph’s voice, whom Walcott accredits with refreshing the ‘forms and stanzas’ of Roman poetry. 27 The title ‘Italian Eclogues’ alludes to Virgil’s pastoral landscape, but it does so via Brodsky, who had dedicated one of his own Eclogues (‘Eclogue IV: Winter’) 28 to Walcott and prefaced it with an epigraph from Virgil’s fourth Eclogue. Although Walcott came to Latin independently, 29 long before his acquaintance with Brodsky, the Roman poetry of the collections Midsummer, The Bounty, and The Prodigal, is frequently read through Brodsky. 30 As Walcott 25

26 This line is quoted on p. 260 below. Walcott (1997) 64. For discussions of Brodsky’s engagement with Roman poetry, see Walcott (1998) 134–52, Kennedy (2002) 332–5, and Hofmeister (2005). 28 Brodsky (2001) 289–94. This poem was first published, in Russian, in 1977; Brodsky’s own translation of this poem into English was first published in The New Yorker, 29 March 1982. 29 In addition to taking a BA in Liberal Arts (English Literature, French, and Latin) from the University College of the West Indies (1950–3), Walcott also taught Latin for several years, as a junior master at St Mary’s College, Castries (1948–9), as an Assistant Master at Grenada Boy’s Secondary School in St George (1954), and as a Master at Jamaica College in Kingston (1955–7). Details of Walcott’s teaching career can be found in chapters 4–7 of Bruce King’s biography (King (2000)). Walcott’s career as teacher is reflected in the poem ‘A Latin Primer’ (Walcott (1987) 21–4). 30 On the dialogue with Brodsky in Midsummer, see Baugh (2006: 172–3). 27

Shades of Rome in the Poetry of Derek Walcott

261

explained in an interview with Valentina Polukhina (29 September 1990): 31 [T]here is a time in poetry, a time historically in poetry when poets wrote letters to each other in the same diction, the epistolary diction or the reflexive diction. It was a common thing. It was a thing to exchange letters of reflection. And in many cases, when I have written or referred to Joseph, like the book Midsummer, it was really an attempt to do that. Joseph was writing elegies on Rome and I thought, ‘Well, there’s no difference between Rome and Port-of-Spain really’; I don’t mean historically or culturally.

In Walcott’s later poetry it becomes increasingly impossible to separate the Roman poets from Brodsky’s poetry. Elsewhere in the interview with Polukhina he comments that Brodsky ‘sets up models for himself; not even models, sort of peers, contemporaries, people he thinks of as great poets. People like Ovid, Virgil . . . ’ (1992: 312). It is possible to see the correspondence with Brodsky as responsible for a thorough reorientation of Walcott’s position on Rome—encouraging and affirming relationships with Roman literature that Walcott had experimented with in earlier poems. His comment to Valentina Polukhina that Brodsky’s self-identification with Ovid in exile (‘as if Ovid is alive’) helped him to see the historical parallels between the Roman empire, the British empire, and the Russian empire is striking, 32 particularly when the reader thinks back to the poem ‘Hotel Normandie Pool’, in which the ghost of Ovid advises Walcott on the predicament of the poet between two cultures. 33 Walcott’s attitude to Rome is not static. It is characteristic of his poetry that he revisits the same Roman landscape from different perspectives. In part this is due to Brodsky’s influence and his sustained dialogue with Brodsky in art and life, but even more influential is Walcott’s own dialogue with himself across successive poems. We have seen how the poet of The Prodigal returns to the Roman countryside traversed in The Bounty; but the return to ‘Rome’ in The Prodigal also revisits and revises a scene from Walcott’s second collection of Poetry, Epitaph for the Young (1949). 31

32 Polukhina (1992) 314. Walcott (1992) 313. Walcott (1981) 63–70. For a masterful discussion of this poem, see Terada (1992) 135–42. 33

262

Emily Greenwood

Epitaph is a learned, allusive, and complicated poem. 34 Studies of this poem have tended to concentrate on the poem’s engagement with the modernist poetics of Joyce, Eliot, Pound, as well as the sustained formal and thematic engagement with Dante. 35 However, Walcott is also preoccupied with the influence of classical literature in its own right, and not simply as a reflex of European modernism; although I concede that it is not easy, and sometimes not possible, to separate classical literature from its reception. The classics are embedded in local complexes and traditions. Canto IV of this collection is prefaced by the epigraph (‘There is not a West Indian Literature’) and, by way of explaining this lack, satirizes the tradition of producing poetry in the Caribbean modelled, incongruously, on classical themes. We string the gold hair of an idle lute, Singing to virgins on the virginal; denied satisfaction Of Union, we force A perjured memory on our sons. Eheu (meaning alas) we think of turreted castles Where barons were factitious, while our fathers Hunted the crocodile by feverish brown rivers; Of fountains in the courtyard and stockinged pages, Orchard and Tiber, and the slender branches. Deciduous in the immodesty of an autumn That leaves them naked. 36

Paul Breslin has described the poet’s preoccupation in this Canto as ‘the lack of ready access to any sustaining tradition’. 37 This particular Canto envisages Caribbean poets labouring to produce ‘civilization’ under the mantle of colonialism. 38 These poets, with whom the poet numbers himself in the first-person plural, are depicted in an 34 Epitaph For the Young: XII Cantos was written between December 1946 and June 1949, and was originally published in Barbados, by Advocate Press, in 1949. I have used the reprint of the poem in volume 39.1–3 of the journal Agenda, ed. Maria Christina Fumagalli (2003) 15–50. 35 Breslin (2001) 63–6, and Fumagalli (2003). For the problematic implication of Caribbean writers in Modernism, see Gikandi (1992), passim, Fumagalli (2003) 52–3, and Pollard (2004) passim. 36 37 Walcott (2003) 23. Breslin (2001) 64. 38 Ibid. 22: ‘Who talks of culture without civilization? | Where is your civilization?’

Shades of Rome in the Poetry of Derek Walcott

263

absurd rite of Apolline worship, composing poems on alien subject matter (turreted castles . . . fountains . . . stockinged pages . . . Orchard and Tiber . . . autumn). What is more, these foreign themes are glaringly archaic: not only out of place, but out of time as well. The pompous Latin interjection (Eheu), which is translated, implying that it will be foreign to Walcott’s audience, underscores the absurdity of this misplaced cultural enterprise. The tension between Europe and Africa is encapsulated in the contrast between their fathers in Africa and the sons who think of themes from medieval court poetry, thereby forcing a ‘perjured memory’ on future generations. But this affiliation is too simple: elsewhere Walcott has written memorably about the divisions of his blood and the inevitability of cultural syncretism in Caribbean cultures. 39 In focusing on the fathers in Africa this stanza occludes the fathers in Europe, and the strain shows in the elusive following stanza. A classical alas For naked pickanninies, pygmies, pigs and poverty, Veiling your inheritance you kneel before The sessile invocation of the thrush, the sibilant yew trees, By broken and flaked languages, near a drying river, You practise the pieties of your conquerors, Bowing before a bitter god. Marassacarrefour, AdorénanpiéDamballa.

The incongruity between Latin conversational tags (‘A classical alas’) and the pressing needs of the poet’s environment exposes the cultural posturing of the previous stanza. But the poet’s cultural allegiance is difficult to pinpoint: the genuflection towards European civilization involves ‘veiling your inheritance’, and the ‘broken and flaked languages’ are normally understood as the vernacular dialects of the Caribbean. I understand the phrase ‘the pieties of your conquerors’ as referring back to the metaphor of art as worship in the preceding lines—merging the trope of poetry as the worship of Apollo 39

See, e.g. line 3470 of the autobiographical poem Another Life (1973): ‘our father’s bones. Which father?’ [line number from the 2004 edition = Walcott (2004b) 146].

264

Emily Greenwood

with the debased position of the colonial poet harping on European themes. But this phrase has also been interpreted as a reference to the Ancestor worship of Vodoun, symbolized by the invocation in Haitian Creole to the Loa—the Gods of Vodoun (Marassa, Carrefour, Damballa). 40 The way in which we construe the referents of ‘conquerors’ and ‘bitter god’ is important, since it determines the coherence of Walcott’s imagery. The reference to ‘a bitter god’ arguably echoes Swinburne’s ‘Hymn to Proserpine’, which contains the couplet, ‘Yea, is not even Apollo, with hair and harpstring of gold, | A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold?’ 41 Construing ‘a bitter God’ as a reference to Apollo is easy to reconcile with the classical references in this Canto to ‘broken temples . . . Ajax . . . Diana . . . the Mantuan marshes’. The line ‘we string the gold hair of an idle lute’ may also be a play on Swinburne’s couplet. In view of the Canto’s theme of colonial prejudice towards the culture of the colonized and the latter’s complicity in this prejudice, it makes more sense to understand ‘pieties of our conquerors’ and ‘bitter god’ as references to the inheritance of European culture, an inheritance which is undermined by the sudden rupture into Haitian Creole and the worship of Vodoun, as a reminder of another part of the poet’s inheritance. Ultimately both cultures prove an inalienable part of the poet’s birthright and both prove inalienable. In this Canto Latin functions as a token of borrowed civilization; but it is interesting to see how this stance is revised in a passage in The Prodigal, published over half-a-century later. One of the landmarks of European culture satirized in Canto IV of Epitaph is ‘turreted castles’

40

See Breslin (2001) 64–5 with n. 37 (306): ‘Walcott apparently regards Vodoun as submission to the “Pieties” of the “conquerors”; only later would he come to see it as a “cunning submission,” so that in the end, “what was captured from the captor was his god.” [‘The Muse of History’ (1998), 43, 47].’ Breslin’s use of ‘The Muse of History’, an essay first published in 1974 (repr. 1998), to cast light on these lines is problematic. It is not clear that the passages that he cites from this essay do in fact support his reading. 41 Swinburne’s poem was first published in 1866 in his Poems and Ballads. The ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ is written in the persona of a devotee of Rome’s pagan gods in the context of the Emperor Constantine’s proclamation of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman empire in ad 313.

Shades of Rome in the Poetry of Derek Walcott

265

(2002/3: 23). This detail gets repeated in the third poem of Prodigal, where the poet intones: Blessed are the small farms conjugating Horace, and the olive trees as twisted as Ovid’s syntax, Virgilian twilight on the hides of cattle and the small turreted castles on the Tuscan slopes. 42

The poet’s tone has mellowed from biting social satire and literary parody to an expression of benign equanimity towards the classically inflected European landscapes, which were a source of irritation in Epitaph to the Young. The perspective has also changed: the landscape is small (‘small farms . . . small turreted castles’). The shadows that impinge on the countryside of the Eclogues are picked up in the ‘Virgilian twilight’, suggesting both a painting and the twilight of the poet’s own life. The recension of earlier poetry is a familiar feature of Walcott’s poetry. Charles Pollard has discussed this summative ‘process of revising and perfecting’ in the context of Walcott’s self-representation as public poet. 43 He argues that, in common with T. S. Eliot and Walcott’s fellow Caribbean poet, E. K. Brathwaite, ‘they sum up their careers to secure their reputations. . . . [T]hey culminate their careers by revising their relationship, not only to traditions of other writers, but also the tradition of their own writing. Eliot and Walcott recast earlier opinions to broaden the scope of their traditions’ (ibid.). It is precisely this process of ‘broadening the scope of tradition’ that I detect in Walcott’s reworking of classical motifs throughout his poetic output. Bruce King’s biography of Walcott lists Virgil’s Georgics as one of the texts on which Walcott was examined in his finals at the University College of the West Indies, Jamaica, in 1953. 44 In Midsummer, Walcott vacillates between openness to Rome, and distance from Rome. In poem 38, Virgil’s Georgics are used to symbolize cultural alienation, ‘Now the islands feel farther than something out of the Georgics.’ 45 By contrast, in The Bounty and The Prodigal, the Eclogues and Georgics have been assimilated more comfortably into Walcott’s poetry, read in 42 43

Walcott (2004a) 17; these four lines precede the lines quoted on p. 259 above. 44 45 Pollard (2004) 142. King (2000) 98. Walcott (1984) 51.

266

Emily Greenwood

such a way that they compliment his own preoccupations with nature and landscape in his poetic corpus. In the next section I will examine the role that trees play in Walcott’s landscape of literature, paying particular attention to the way in which Latin intervenes in the lexical play of power between Walcott’s ‘two languages’—English and St Lucian Creole. Following my discussion of Walcott’s use of umbra in Virgil as a figure for bucolic poetry and a figure for anxieties both literary and political, I will suggest that Walcott also seizes on the Latin of botanical taxonomy to create an etymological bridge between English and St. Lucian, in what we might call Walcott’s New World pastoral, where Latin lingers on as an ambiguous shade from the old world. 46

OLD WORLD, NEW WORD ‘Compare a word to a battle and the battle is forgotten and the word is there.’ (Derek Walcott, interviewed by David Dabydeen in 1999) 47

Walcott’s poetry is fully implicated in the politics of translation. At the level of cultural imperialism, Walcott’s poetry has always dealt with the metaphor of ‘the colony as a translation, a copy of an original located elsewhere on the map’. 48 Walcott has tackled this challenge aesthetically, embracing and acknowledging the role of imitation in his apprenticeship as an artist, but also stressing the newness of his poetry in relation to these same works of literature. Many of Walcott’s poems translate other poems in the sense of transposing them into the Caribbean—examples include Dante’s Divine Comedy, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Homer’s Odyssey. At the linguistic level Walcott’s poetry frequently contains standard lexical translation between his ‘two languages’: English and St Lucian Creole, leaving aside other languages which feature in Walcott’s poetry (such as French, Latin, and Spanish). Walcott has written about the Adamic thrill of naming 46 For a slightly different version of what Walcott’s pastoral might look like, see Terada (1992) 180–2. 47 48 Dabydeen (2003) 157. Bassnett and Trivedi (1999) 5.

Shades of Rome in the Poetry of Derek Walcott

267

in poetry in English what had never before been named: elements of St Lucian landscape and culture, flora, fauna, and topography. 49 These new words from the new world pose an implicit challenge to the dominant English language in which Walcott writes. Nouns such as pomme-arac, bois-canot, lauriercanelles, and bois-flot require translation and remind us that St Lucia is not wholly within the language of empire. Maria Tymoczko has written perceptively about the analogies between translation from minor culture into dominant culture, and the cultural inequalities exposed in the circulation of postcolonial literature. With reference to translations, Tymoczko writes of unparalleled, untranslatable words from the source culture that persist into translations, causing ‘perturbations in the lexis’ of the translation. 50 Similarly, Lawrence Venuti has written of ‘language use as a site of power relationships’, and the ability of literary texts in socalled ‘minority’ languages to ‘submit the major language to constant variation, forcing it to become minor, delegitimizing, deterritorializing, alienating it’. 51 Walcott invites this power play, commenting on words as the inalienable resource of the Caribbean writer (‘But that’s all those bastards have left us: words’). 52 I think that the writer writing in English or in Spanish is lucky in the sense that he can master the original language, or the language of the master himself, and yet have it fertilized by the language of dialect. Someone who knows what he is doing, a good poet, recognizes the language’s essential duality. The excitement is in joining the two parts. 53

Walcott’s comments describe at the level of language, what he has described elsewhere at the level of culture, condoning the idea that, in art, ‘maturity is the assimilation of the features of every ancestor’. 54 Lorna Hardwick has explored this position in the work of Walcott and Seamus Heaney, explaining that ‘here we are dealing 49

50 See, e.g., Walcott (1998) 79–80. Tymoczko (1999) 24. Venuti (1998) 9–10; here Venuti draws on Lecercle (1990), and Deleuze and Guattari (1987). 52 From the poem ‘The Schooner Flight’, Walcott (1980) 3–20, at p. 9 (alternatively Walcott (1992) 345–61, at 350. 53 Walcott in Ciccarelli (1996) 45 (the interview was conducted in 1977). 54 In the essay ‘The Muse of History’, Walcott (1998) 36; originally published in 1974. 51

268

Emily Greenwood

with consciousness which recognizes both the assimilationist impact of classical texts on colonised peoples and the capacity of writers to use the texts to build new works’. 55 In the first section of this chapter I suggested that the figure of the shade/shadow enables Walcott to express the duality of literary traditions, while at the same time hinting at the dark, colonial side of these literary relationships. In linguistic terms, Walcott is alert to the penumbrae that surround words, giving every word at least one shadow. Walcott’s last three collections of poetry (The Bounty (1997), Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), and The Prodigal (2004)) have all explored the effects of translation in Caribbean literature on the Caribbean landscape. More specifically, all three poems articulate the threat of translation through trees, their ‘natural’ leaves serving as running commentary on the poet’s written leaves. 56 In the eighth poem of The Bounty, entitled ‘Homecoming’, Walcott is accosted by the trees and shrubbery of St Lucia—specifically the oleander, the breadfruit, the casuarinas, and the bougainvillea—who accuse him of betraying St Lucian Patois, his native tongue. But in accusing Walcott of betrayal, 57 for serving both English and Patois, they expound an artificial monolingualism (‘We offered you language early, an absolute choice;’—32), which is belied by Walcott’s own practice as poet. The trees’ response is deftly metapoetical: “I have tried to serve both,” I said, provoking a roar from the leaves, shaking their heads, defying translation.

At one level it is the trees’ anthropomorphic gestures that defy translation, opening up the gap between fiction and reality: Walcott’s reader can only imagine this dialogue with the trees imperfectly. At another level their gesture is explained as a rejection of translation between the St Lucian Creole and standard English, yet in this they are thwarted, in that they speak in formal standard English. In the very act of defying translation they are translated. In defence, Walcott 55

Hardwick (2002) 241. See Prince (2007) 173–5 for an analysis of the poetic symbolism of trees and their leaves in the poem ‘Cul de Sac Valley’ (Walcott (1987) 9–15). 57 On translation as betrayal elsewhere in Walcott’s oeuvre, see Terada (1992) 93–4. 56

Shades of Rome in the Poetry of Derek Walcott

269

protests ‘that all the trees of the world shared a common elation | of tongues, gommier with linden, bois-campêche with the elm’. The poem concludes with a contrast between Walcott’s love of his ‘two languages’: standard English (‘so rich | in its imperial intimacies’) and Creole (‘the other like the orange words of a hillside in drought’). Walcott’s problem is that in advocating an empire of art in place of the erstwhile British empire, or any other empire for that matter, he signs up to an empire of verbal art whose language is English. Creole culture is the antidote to this English language ‘so rich | in its imperial intimacies’, and Walcott represents the landscape as a natural repository of this culture, but like the colony that it once was, this landscape is not self-sufficient, but is repeatedly translated back into English. In Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), the narrator remarks that ‘The empire of naming colonised even the trees, referred our leaves to the originals’, only to proceed to renounce this referential dependence: 58 The gommier in flower did not mimic the dogwood or snow at the roots of white cedar, or Queen Anne’s lace, an apple orchard, or April’s autumnal firewood; they were, like the breadfruit, true to their sense of place.

Mirroring the cultural poetics of Walcott’s poetry, the trees eschew mimicry, rooted in a sense of place. As we have seen, the crisis of translation, grafted onto the landscape, is never resolved for long. The problems of translation that are laid to rest in The Bounty resurface in Tiepolo’s Hound, where they are temporarily resolved, only to emerge again in The Prodigal. In The Prodigal the crisis of translation is explored through the frangipani plant. In this poem the apparition of the frangipani plant (p. 61, ‘the wireless harp of the frangipani’) is followed by a long meditation on translation (pp. 61–2), in which Walcott muses: Is every noun: breakwater, headland, haze, seen through a gauze of English, a bright scrim, a mesh in which light now defines the wires and not its natural language? Were your life and work simply a good translation? Would headland, 58

Tiepolo’s Hound (2000) 92 (iii.xv.1).

270

Emily Greenwood haze and the spray-wracked breakwater pronounce their own names differently?

On p. 63 Walcott breaks down the noun frangipani into its Latin etymology ‘frangerepanem | to break bread’, returning to the theme of Easter and communion. 59 On the following page the Latin etymology is repeated, only to yield to a dual word play in English and Creole. Through a rearrangement of vowels, the Latin noun panis becomes ‘pain’, symbolizing both pain (Fr. ‘bread’) and pain. for the communion of breakfast, the leafless, flower-less but crusted bark of the frangipani, frangerepanem, the pain that I break and eat flower and flour, pain and pain, bright Easter coming, like the sea’s white communion. 60

There are affinities with Walcott’s representation of the breadfruit tree. In the first poem of The Bounty, the breadfruit tree ‘opens its palms in praise of the bounty, | bois-pain, tree of bread, slave food, the bliss of John Clare’. 61 Bois-pain, or bwapen, the breadfruit’s Creole name, which stands here as both the tree of bread (Fr. pain) and the tree of pain, prefigures the etymological play of the frangipani in The Prodigal, while the play on pain and pain in the later poem enriches the word play in the earlier poem. In the case of frangipani, Walcott invents a trilingual etymology, with the Latin etymology opening up additional meanings in English and Creole. 59 A circuitous etymology: the plant is named after Muzio Frangipani, an Italian Marquess of the 16th cent. who allegedly created a fragrance infused with the scent of this plant. 60 Walcott (2004b) 64. Gemma Robinson, editor of Martin Carter’s Collected Poems & Selected Prose, has pointed out to me that the play on ‘frangipani’ and ‘pain’ occurs in the last line of Carter’s poem ‘On the Death by Drowning of the Poet, Eric Roach’ (1974): ‘And the window in the front of my house | by the gate my children enter by, that window | lets in the perfume of the white waxen glory | of the frangipani, and pain’ (Carter (2006) 140). The Trinidadian poet Eric Roach drowned himself in April 1974. Walcott was a Trinidadian resident at the time and was an admirer of Roach’s work—the two men had collaborated in the past. It is interesting to speculate that Walcott’s etymological play on the frangipani plant echoes Carter’s word play, as well as the pain of the earlier poem. Arguably there is also a nod here to Auden’s poem ‘The Garrison’ with its image of the living breaking bread with the dead (Auden (1994) 845). 61 Walcott (1997) 1.

Shades of Rome in the Poetry of Derek Walcott

271

This wordplay comes close to the process of code-switching that Rei Terada has identified in section IV of Walcott’s long autobiographical poem Another Life (1973). Writing about the shifts between Latin, French, French-lexicon Creole, and English-lexicon Creole, as the characters translate themselves, Terada demonstrates the interdependency of these languages. Standard English is inflected with Creole grammar, and standard French is blurred with Frenchlexicon Creole: ‘The concept of creolization encompasses what codeswitching cannot: a creole is a language in which not the alternation but the interpenetration of languages is recognized as normative, constitutive of the language itself.’ 62 Latin, rather than trumping English or Creole, moves in between them, revealing reciprocal resemblances and counter-cultural roots. In the case of the bilingual etymologies in Walcott’s Omeros, Carol Dougherty has demonstrated the role that these etymologies can play in redressing cultural inequalities: ‘Walcott’s bilingual etymologies in Omeros reverse this direction to discover contemporary colonial meanings in an elite and often imperial literary tradition.’ 63 Similarly, in a recent article Cashman Kerr Prince has suggested the term ‘post-colonial philology’ to describe Walcott’s linguistic creativity, ‘creating new language and new connections between language’. 64 In Walcott’s poetry Latin has the capacity to level out the inequities in cultural translation by pointing up an imperial debt at the heart of English. The process is analogous to that which Maria Cristina Fumagalli has identified in the poetry of Seamus Heaney: with Heaney activating Latin etymologies at the heart of ‘English’ words in the midst of dialect, leading to a middle form, which she likens to Dante’s use of the vernacular. 65 If we read the line ‘civilization is impatience’, 66 in the tenth poem of The Bounty with this mechanism in mind, then the characteristic of civilization is not just restlessness, but also impassivity—drawing on the Latin etymology—impatiens. These classical etymologies are more frequent in Walcott than criticism of his poetry acknowledges. 67 Sometimes they are pseudo-etymologies 62

63 Terada (1992) 96. Dougherty (1997) 336. 65 Prince (2007) 184. Fumagalli (2001) xxv. 66 Walcott (1997) 35. 67 See the very last section of Omeros p. 324 (7.lxiv.iii), where the character Achille is identified with Achilles in a phrase (‘aching Achiles’) that activates the Greek 64

272

Emily Greenwood

that exploit sound rather than sense, shrugging off pedantic familiarity. Hence on page 60 of The Bounty there is an invented Greek etymology, where the rain is described as ‘the muse of Amnesia which is another island’, deriving Amnesia from ÌBÛÔÚ (island) rather than the standard etymology from ÏÈÏÌfiÛ͢: I remind). The complaint of the trees in The Bounty, echoed by the narrator’s concerns in The Prodigal (‘Is every noun: breakwater, headland, haze, | seen through a gauze of English,’), suggests that the unvoiced, unwritten Creole names are the original, ‘natural’ names that underlie the English names that have been transposed onto them. But the conceit that the landscape speaks Creole is precisely that, a conceit. The flora, fauna, and landscape of the Caribbean resist colonization because they persist through and beyond civilizations, becoming assimilated to successive cultures and thereby exposing the provisionality of naming. Guy Rotella has analysed Walcott’s use of the trope of the ‘natural sublime’—an antimonumentalist aesthetic that asserts the natural world over historical civilizations and which enables Walcott to undercut the pull of older civilizations. 68 However, this trope presupposes that the natural landscape is unvoiced, and uncultivated by any historical epoch; as such, it evades all languages, whether Latin, standard English, or St Lucian Creole.

CONCLUSION To Walcott citizens of the modern Caribbean are natural heirs to Virgil because of—not in spite of—the experience of empire and its paradoxes. By paradoxes, I mean the fact that dwelling on empire in a historical context leads to the realization of the mutability of empire—a familiar warning in Greek and Roman literature and a consolation

etymology of Achilles’ name derived from à˜ÔÚ (pain, sorrow, trouble, distress): ‘In the standpipe’s sandy trough aching Achilles | washed sand from his heels’. On the merging of the St Lucian fisherman Achille with the Homeric Achilles in this passage, see Callahan (2003) 46. 68 Rotella (2004) ch. 4.

Shades of Rome in the Poetry of Derek Walcott

273

in Caribbean literature in the decades before Independence. 69 Britain too had been colonized—by Rome, and in the context of the Caribbean accessing Latin was a way of pulling rank on English literature. The second paradox is that the colonial system of education made the classical languages—particularly Latin—one of the cornerstones of secondary education in the Caribbean, so that students grew up with Latin as part of their cultural inheritance. As the Trinidadian Eric Williams, recipient of an ‘Island Scholarship’ to Oxford University in 1931, which he took up in 1932, joked ‘We speak Latin in Trinidad’. 70 This line of thinking seems to lie behind Walcott’s comments in an interview with the poet David Dabydeen, broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1999: 71 What we are talking about is an epic width that would be the Empire or the Raj. The width of the Empire is an epic width. You were growing up in that, so your sense of history was not narrowed down purely to your immediate environment. Besides it would be embarrassing for an English student—here is a nice little irony—to take pride in the conquests of the Empire at a certain point because then she’d be beating her chest saying ‘Romanus Civis sum’ whatever. You wouldn’t be saying ‘Britannicus Civis sum’ because it would have been bad form and besides, the Empire wasn’t going to last. But it was OK for a colonial to say it strangely enough because it was like delayed pride. We came to the language and brakes were put on expression. The expression was virtually prevented by whoever said they were protecting the property that belonged to the Empire. But in a sense our joy in certain things was stronger than the joy of the origin of the thing. In other words the colonial child reading Tacitus brings more to reading Tacitus than a young Italian having to do Latin and that is the strength and ambiguity of Caribbean thinking.

The English student seems to retreat into the idea of empire as a Roman invention, while the colonial schoolchild, although part of one of Britain’s imperial possessions, possessed English. In this context it is interesting to recall Heaney’s description of Walcott: 69 See Habinek (2002) 54 on the theme of the transfer of empire (translatio imperii) in Roman literature. For the same trope in Caribbean literature see George Lamming’s In The Castle of My Skin, (1991) 103 (orig. 1953; Lamming took the title for this novel from Walcott’s Epitaph For the Young (1949)). See also Rotella (2004) 141–2: ‘the sun sets ironically on empires often in his [Walcott’s] poems’. 70 Williams (1969) 35. See Greenwood (2005) 65–7 for discussion. 71 Dabydeen (2003) 157. The interview was broadcast on 29/2/99.

274

Emily Greenwood

‘Walcott possesses English more deeply and sonorously than most of the English themselves. Except for Ted Hughes, I can think of nobody now writing with such imperious linguistic gifts’ (my emphasis). 72 The shift to Tacitus shows how instinctively Walcott’s meditations about empire, and the literature of empire, turn to Rome. For Walcott Roman literature is also the property of the New World, but it is the literature of Ovid’s exile and the shades and shadows of Virgil’s poetry. 72 Heaney (1997) 306. Compare Prince (2007) 190: ‘A prince himself of the empire of language, which he traces in the poetry of others, Walcott rules over his English with a benevolent, a generous hand.’

16 ‘We’ll all be Penelopes then’: Art and Domesticity in American Women’s Poetry, 1958–1996 Isobel Hurst

Mythical characters or plots offer writers a distinctive perspective on the language and ideas of their own day, enabling them to explore contemporary life with some critical distance. Poets may produce a literal translation of an ancient text, create a poem which refers to a classical text but is also a new and influential work, rework familiar stories (often in a different genre), or challenge the interpretation and value attached to a particular classical text, suggesting questions which have not previously been asked or have been forgotten. These strategies have proved particularly useful to women poets who sought to challenge narrow stereotypes of womanhood by using literary models of strong, active, creative women to prove that women’s inferiority is determined by society, not nature. Sandra M. Gilbert argues that ‘a mythological way of structuring female experience . . . has been useful to many women writers since the nineteenth century’ (Gilbert (1979) 248). Victorian women writers explored controversial issues through the women of Greek tragedy, particularly Medea and Antigone; suffering, outspoken, violent, and troubling female characters such as Clytemnestra, Medea, and Electra make Greek tragedy a perennially rich resource for those who undertake ‘the aggressive act of truth-telling from a woman’s experiences’ (Blau DuPlessis (1979) 284). Explorations of the mother—daughter relationship often draw on Demeter and Persephone, as in Rita Dove’s Mother Love (1995);

276

Isobel Hurst

the tales of Orpheus and Eurydice, and Apollo and Daphne, offer a variety of themes, including the connection between poet and muse or singer and song, love, death, metamorphosis. 1 In the reception of ancient texts in twentieth-century poetry Homer is perhaps the prominent author (followed by Ovid): the variety of poems inspired by the Iliad and the Odyssey is evident in anthologies such as Nina Kossman’s Gods and Mortals (2001) and Deborah de Nicola’s Orpheus & Company (1999). Much changed for women between the 1850s and the 1950s, not least access to higher education. The women poets discussed here were all educated at least to degree level; some hold postgraduate degrees; several have taught literature or creative writing at universities. Some attended classes in which poetry was represented as a career choice—learning to be a poet was ‘a form of professional training linked with the institutional and curricular study of literature’ (Britzolakis (1999) 73). Nevertheless, they were expected either to give up poetry for domestic life or to model themselves on eccentric spinster poets like Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop. In the postwar period prevalent (American) notions of femininity, reinforced by popular Freudian theories, were not that far from the Victorian Angel in the House: ‘every woman’s magazine in the country preached the joy of wifehood and the creativity of domesticity for women’ (Ostriker (1986) 58). Despite the popularization of personal themes in the ‘confessional’ poetry of Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, and Anne Sexton, the American women poets who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s experienced difficulties in getting serious consideration for a poetry based on the personal and the domestic. Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, women writers found that classical models enabled them to give their poems a culturally sanctioned authority and to articulate ideas about gender which clashed with current proprieties. Women who attended university and began to write poetry in the 1950s and 1960s found that dominant New Critical principles favoured the work of male modernists like Eliot whose poems were regarded as impersonal, not autobiographical; the kind of condensed complexity which rewards close reading was essential; intellectual 1

For women poets’ responses to the Apollo and Daphne myth, see Fowler (2005).

Art and Domesticity in US Women’s Poetry

277

content was more highly valued than emotional affect. Looking back on this period, Rich comments ‘I had been taught that poetry should be “universal,” which meant, of course, nonfemale. Until [the late fifties] I had tried very much not to identify myself as a female poet’ (Rich (1979) 44). In the 1960s, ‘confessional’ poets like Robert Lowell, whose poetry seminars were attended by Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, chose to write in the first person about their lives and emotions, often drawing on their experiences of mental breakdown and psychoanalysis, and claiming a different kind of universality based on analogies between the speaker’s psychic history and a collective history (Britzolakis (1999) 3). Elizabeth Dodd argues that women poets such as H.D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Glück have created a kind of ‘personal classicism’, a compromise between these two schools: they ‘combine personal impulses (those that appear in confessional poetry) with careful elements of control that allow them to shape and frame—and mute—what are at their core romantic, personal poems. Those elements chosen to mitigate the personal centre tend specifically to mute or conceal the autobiographical details in the poetry and to imply a more “universal” approach’ (Dodd (1992) 1–2). Attempts to define the female self in poetry by American women of the 1960s and 1970s often subvert traditional mythological portrayals of women. Alicia Ostriker argues that such revisions, challenging both the gender stereotypes enshrined in myths and the accusation that women poets can only write on a small scale about their own lives, enable cultural change: ‘These poems generically assume the high literary status that myth confers and that women writers have been denied because they write “personally” or “confessionally.” But in them the old stories are changed, changed utterly, by female knowledge of female experience’ (Ostriker (1982) 73). The myths are changed, that is, not only from their ancient versions but also from their modernist incarnations in the works of Yeats, Joyce, and Eliot, who ‘use myth as a framework by which a total culture can be organized’, whereas ‘postmodern use of myth is distinguished by attention to inwardness, . . . to learning to inhabit a world, not creating one’ (Blau DuPlessis (1979) 299). The women poets discussed here use Penelope as a model for their explorations of women’s changing attitudes towards marriage and of the difficulty of reconciling the

278

Isobel Hurst

demands of art and domestic life. They do not seek to match the scale of Homeric epic—whether the form in which they explore the ‘inwardness’ of Penelope is a dramatic monologue or a postmodern lyric, their poems usually comprise approximately thirty to forty lines and frequently point to a connection between the ancient Greek heroine and the modern woman. Reworkings of the androcentric mythology of the ancient world proved indispensable for the feminists who fought against restrictions on women’s identity in the second half of the twentieth century. In her essay ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ (1971), Adrienne Rich argues that ‘Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction— is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival’ (Rich (1979) 35). Before looking at the women poets who attempt such re-visions, exploring art and domesticity through the figure of Penelope, it is worth considering Sylvia Plath, a woman poet whose struggle to combine the identities of perfect wife and mother and serious poet has frequently been read as a tragedy; this interpretation derives from Plath’s biography and also from poems in which she identifies with tragic figures such as Clytemnestra, Medea, Electra, and Orestes: 2 Torn between her acquiescence in the decorum of the fifties and her ambition to become a great artist, between modest pride in her poet-husband’s power and immodest competitiveness toward him, between scholarly admiration of an often misogynist male modernist tradition and secret anxiety about that tradition, Plath seems always to have been doomed to suffer in her own person the sexual battle that marked the century in which she was born. (Gilbert and Gubar (1994) 270)

Taking Plath as an example indicates that, whereas the power of tragic heroines to shock, and to challenge notions that women are naturally weak and non-violent, worked well for writers who needed to kill the Angel in the House (as Woolf expressed it), for a writer in the age of psychoanalysis identifying with tragic figures can lead to a reductive emphasis on the poet’s life, and the overall impression is one of pathos rather than strength. If a woman poet wants to write about 2

See Bakogianni, Chapter 12 (above) on Plath and Electra.

Art and Domesticity in US Women’s Poetry

279

artistic and domestic success, a different model is needed: ‘to be a female human being trying to fulfill traditional female functions in a traditional way is in direct conflict with the subversive function of the imagination. . . . There must be ways, and we will be finding out more and more about them, in which the energy of creation and the energy of relation can be united’ (Rich (1979) 43). The Odyssey’s comic vision can be empowering, as Alicia Ostriker notes in ‘Homecoming’, from A Woman Under the Surface (1982): My husband . . . happens to be The man who wrote the brutal but idealistic Iliad, while I am the woman who wrote The romantic, domestic Odyssey, filled With goddesses, mortal women, pigs, and homecoming. (31–5)

WHY PENELOPE? Giving a voice to a mythical character who is silent or who says little in the original text is a strategy frequently used by women poets who are attempting to deconstruct the old myths which exclude them and construct new ones. For example, Linda Pastan’s series of poems based on the Odyssey includes a dramatic monologue by Odysseus’s dog as well as poems written from Telemachus’ point of view or Circe’s. As a poet rather than a critic, Pastan does not have to ‘stick to the text as we have it, but invents new episodes to support her reading . . . [and] retells the episodes that are in the poem, but adds a new perspective, evoking a subjectivity that is absent from the original’ (Murnaghan (2002) 138). Penelope, whose thoughts and feelings remain largely hidden, is a major female character in a canonical poem who is open to reinterpretation. Recent scholarship on Penelope emphasizes her similarity to Odysseus, and the complexity and indeterminacy of her character and motivations. 3 ‘She too is a trickster, fabric/ator, spinner of artifice. She 3 Heitman (2005) 2. See also Felson (1997). One of the most debated problems is how long it takes her to recognize that the beggar who has arrived at the palace is Odysseus himself. ‘The sheer amount and variety of critical commentary generated by

280

Isobel Hurst

too has a story to tell, woven into a weave of wiles. For her, home is not unnarratable, but the time and space of the coming and going of men—the absent husband, the growing son, the pressing suitors, the dying father-in-law’ (Friedman (1990) 1). Her domestic stability is threatened, but her weaving, unweaving and reweaving prevents the break-up of her family. Penelope’s web is ‘not only a symbol of the female sphere of influence and the traditional idea of familial order that Penelope seems to accept and represent in the poem, but also the very weapon which she uses in order to protect and maintain this kind of order by deceiving those who threaten it’ (Pantelia (1993) 496–7). However, her life offers possibilities for exploring unhappiness as well: she is isolated and persecuted by the suitors, and the weaving she spends so much time on is associated with the anticipation of Laertes’ death. Women poets’ identification with Penelope can be uneasy as well as celebratory: the Penelopes in poems by Linda Pastan, Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, Angela Jackson, Cynthia Macdonald, and Eve Merriam range from a resourceful, creative figure, worthy of emulation, to a poor substitute for the more fantastic characters in the Odyssey. As readers, women often ‘experience the pull of the narrative to identify with Odysseus’ (Doherty (1995) 29). An active, adventurous hero seems a more attractive model than the deserted heroine: ‘Within the quest plot, men might do anything: literature tells us all they have done. Within the marriage plot women might only wait to be desired, to be wed, to be forgotten’ (Heilbrun (1990) 108). The woman poet wants to be the lover, the singer, but tradition places her as the beloved, the song. In ‘The Eyes of Laura Mars: An Orchid Myth’ (a poem dedicated to Adrienne Rich), Diane Wakoski writes: . . . there is no myth which allows women to be the charmed singer, none which allows her to go after love. She can be the sorceress who beguiles loves, or Penelope who waits, but she can never be the poet, singer, questing lover. (17–22) 4 this opening is evidence of its importance to the interpretation of the poem’ (Doherty (1995) 33), yet it is not a question which appears in the poems discussed here. 4 Cited from Wakowski (1991).

Art and Domesticity in US Women’s Poetry

281

In Eve Merriam’s ‘Speaking of Marriage’ (1958), the speaker rejects identification with both the patient, suffering Penelope and the fakely glamorous Circe. She mocks Ulysses’ dream of returning home to a clean, scented castle: real life, she argues, involves squabbling children, frying smells and messy drawers. She wants to be a traveller like Ulysses, to exchange places with him: ‘wanderer I would also be | with you to return to as my key’ (26–7). The problem is how to seek adventure in the prosaic modern world: but how to tread the dusty city blocks and greenplunge out to sea? Beloved bedeviled Ulysses, we share a perplexity. (30–3)

In identifying with Penelope, the poet may have to abandon her dream of becoming Odysseus, as Linda Pastan explains. Even though the first time she heard the story of the Odyssey, she was ‘half in love with Penelope’, she also wanted to be the hero, ‘the one to have adventures out in the world, not the one who remained at home, watching at a window or pacing a widow’s walk. But coming of age as I did in the ’50s, it seemed to me that as a woman of my times I was destined to be Penelope’ (Pastan 1996). In her poem ‘You Are Odysseus’, Pastan expands on this perception that the rigid gender roles of 1950s America do not allow for epic adventures. She refigures Odysseus’ journey home as his daily return from work, ‘tentative, a little angry’ (3), followed by his departure each morning. The poem suggests that these absences involve both geographical and emotional distance, creating a gendered split between the masculine world of work and the feminine world of home (perhaps also a contrast between city and suburb). This divide is emphasized by the speaker’s prediction that their son will soon join his father in the daily journeys, leaving her alone at home. However, Penelope does not regret that she is a woman who has to remain at home rather than a man going to the office every day. Her ambitions have been thwarted, but they were distinctly female: she had hoped to be a temptingly sexual Siren ‘on strewn sheets’ (6). She reluctantly sees that she has no power to allure through song, but has become silent and repressed:

282

Isobel Hurst I . . . hide my song under my tongue— merely Penelope after all. (8–10). 5

The unhappily silent Penelope, hiding her song under her tongue, seems to have an autobiographical resonance for the poet. Pastan gave up writing for nearly a decade to concentrate on her marriage and family, and published her first volume of poetry when she was 39: I was a product of the ’50s—what I called the perfectly polished floor syndrome. . . . And I felt that I couldn’t be the perfect wife and mother that I was expected to be, and commit myself to something as serious as my poetry, and I wasn’t going to do that half-heartedly. It was all or nothing. And I stopped writing for almost ten years, and I was very unhappy about it during those years. And my husband finally said he was tired of hearing what a good poet I would have been if I hadn’t gotten married. Let’s do something about it. (Brown 2003)

MARRIAGE The relationship between Odysseus and Penelope can convey a wide range of attitudes to marriage, depending on what point in the story the poet chooses to enter at. It can be seen as ‘an idealized marriage between two people of comparable intelligence and tenacity’ (Doherty (1995) 40), or Odysseus’ long absence can make Penelope seem like ‘a single parent’ (Heilbrun (1985) 105). Negative versions may be articulated by other characters; for example, when seen from the point of view of the other woman, usually Circe, Penelope is belittled as a tedious housewife. The speaker of Linda Pastan’s ‘Circe’ identifies herself at once in opposition to Penelope and imagines Odysseus’ wife as a dull, practical housekeeper, to whom sheets merely signify household tasks. And though he may leave, memory will perfect me. One day the light 5

Cited from Pastan (1998)

Art and Domesticity in US Women’s Poetry may fall in a certain way on Penelope’s hair, and he will pause wildly . . . but when she turns, it will only be his wife, to whom white sheets simply mean laundry—

283

(10–18) 6

In ‘The Suitor’, Pastan challenges Homer’s version of the myth from a different point of view, explicitly filling a gap in the original narrative: the poem begins ‘There is always a story | that no one bothers to tell’ (1–2). This character is described as ‘the younger son of a younger son, | hardly a suitor at all’ (3–4). In contrast to the other suitors, he is not greedy, or even hungry ‘except for a glimpse of Penelope’ (7). He voices explicit criticism of Odysseus, asking how he could have left Penelope. Through his eyes, she is seen as a beautiful woman whose predicament inspires pathos: a woman wasted, he thinks— those pale arms, that hair a web she might have woven around her own head. (8–11) 7

Nevertheless, Penelope’s solitude is not always seen as a waste of her life. In Cynthia Macdonald’s ‘Why Penelope was Happy’, she is able to see Ulysses in a vision when she is at her loom. Knowing he is safe and far away, she takes pleasure in being by herself, moving from loom to loom as she progresses through the day (she goes from her morning’s work on Daphne to the ‘noon room’ where she will work on Apollo): To be alone in your domain— A queen within, a king without and distant— Such stately pleasure, such companied solitude. (23–5) 8

In Meadowlands (1996), Louise Glück interweaves poems about Penelope and Odysseus with a series of poems about a modern couple’s marital breakdown. Glück draws on her own experience of divorce as well as on the Odyssey, creating ‘a kind of postconfessional personal classicism—one in which the voice of the self is muted by 6

Ibid.

7

Ibid.

8

Cited from Macdonald (1985).

284

Isobel Hurst

an amplified sense of the mythic’ (Dodd (1992) 149). Glück has described Meadowlands as a book that was written at a time: when a very long marriage was beginning to seem not likely to continue, and one of the problems of the book was that my life was giving me materials that were desolating, and what I felt as an artist was an imperative to do comedy. . . . [I]t was very clear to me that I had no wish to write a lacerating book about divorce. I had no wish to embody it in verse. I wanted to write my genial, forgiving, tolerant book of adult love. . . . What the book ended up by being was a double narrative, in which the dissolution of a contemporary marriage, which is elaborated in a series of petulant, comic conversations and private bickerings, alternates with, is threaded through, with the story of Odysseus and Penelope. (Cavalieri 2000)

The modern couple argue and criticize each other in poems like ‘Ceremony’, in which both voices are heard within the same poem: One thing I’ve always hated about you: I hate that you refuse to have people at the house. Flaubert had more friends and Flaubert was a recluse. Flaubert was crazy: he lived with his mother. (4–10)

Significantly, it is one of their happiest and most harmonious moments that provokes a comparison with the Odyssey, in ‘Quiet Evening’: More than anything in the world I love these evenings when we’re together, the quiet evenings in summer, the sky still light at this hour. So Penelope took the hand of Odysseus, not to hold him back but to impress this peace on his memory. (6–11)

More frequently, the querulousness of the modern couple fosters a sense of marital discontent which colours the poems about Odysseus and Penelope; that their marriage is not particularly happy is also indicated by several poems in which Telemachus trenchantly comments on his parents’ relationship. ‘Glück succeeds in making

Art and Domesticity in US Women’s Poetry

285

myth and quotidian experience illuminate each other. She shows us how much stifled rage there must have been in the familial relations among Penelope, Odysseus and Telemachus’ (Breslin (2005) 109). In ‘Telemachus’ Guilt’, Penelope emerges as full of anger, repressing Odysseus’ ‘native abandon’ (9) and provoking her son to bad behaviour by her distant coldness. Looking back on his childhood, he recalls that he felt proud of Odysseus for staying away from home although it was for ‘the wrong reasons’ (26). As an adult he recognizes that his childish cruelty in enjoying his mother’s suffering was, like her coldness, ‘a means of remaining | separate from what | One loves deeply’ (33–5). In ‘Telemachus’ Burden’ he implies that there can be no happy reunion between his parents, because Penelope’s solitariness is too deeply engrained: good luck to my father, in my opinion a stupid man if he expects his return to diminish her isolation; perhaps he came back for that. (20–4)

Glück’s Telemachus repeatedly insinuates that he understands his parents and the problems within their relationship, to which they are blind—or at least Odysseus is. In ‘Telemachus’ Kindness’, he hints that their personalities are incompatible, Odysseus being ‘prone to dramatizing, | to acting out’ (20–1) and unable to appreciate ‘her courage subtly | expressed as inaction’ (18–19). Disputing the uniqueness of Odysseus and Penelope, the poems written from Telemachus’ point of view reinforce the point made by the interpolated voices of the modern couple, that the emotional isolation of husband and wife when under the same roof may be as great as that of the withdrawn Penelope, whose husband has been absent for years. Telemachus learns that a family composed of an absent or distant father and a mother who spends her time ‘hypothesizing | her husband’s erotic life’ (5–6) is not uncommon: ‘my trials | were the general rule’ (8–9). Despite his apparent perceptiveness, Telemachus cannot provide a definitive account of Penelope’s life. In her son’s version, she appears cold and distant but is angry and passionate, she lacks Odysseus’ dramatic nature but is equally courageous within the constraints of

286

Isobel Hurst

her own life. There is no hint from Telemachus that this is not the long-suffering and faithful Penelope of legend, but his mother turns out to be more complex than he appreciates or is willing to admit. In ‘Penelope’s Song’, she exhorts herself to be ‘generous’ to her errant husband when he returns, because she too has found it impossible to repress her desires: . . . You have not been completely perfect either; with your troublesome body you have done things you shouldn’t discuss in poems. (7–10)

As well as the poems from Penelope’s and Telemachus’ viewpoints, there are two narrative poems in the sequence, ‘Ithaca’ and ‘Reunion’. Although the speaker of ‘Ithaca’ is not Penelope, she seems to have access to Penelope’s consciousness, stressing that Odysseus’ physical existence is less important than his life within Penelope’s head, as her creation: ‘the unfolding dream or image | shaped by the woman working the loom’ (9–10). The less insightful suitors, ‘literal-minded men’ (12), fail to see that it is the imagined Odysseus rather than the man himself who keeps them from Penelope. The sea, too, has tried and failed to take Odysseus away, but since it took only ‘the first, | the actual husband’, not the image (16–17); the ‘deceived’ sea is an object of pity (14), as are the deluded suitors: they don’t know that when one loves this way the shroud becomes a wedding dress. (20–1)

‘Reunion’, which appears to be from the point of view of an impartial third-person narrator, offers a more positive image of the marriage of Odysseus and Penelope than any of the other poems. After the killing of the suitors, Odysseus sends his son away and speaks not of his experiences at Troy or on his long journey, but exclusively of small things, as would be the habit of a man and woman long together: once she sees who he is, she will know what he’s done. And as he speaks, ah, tenderly he touches her forearm. (10–14)

Art and Domesticity in US Women’s Poetry

287

WEAVING Poets and critics have agreed that weaving is a useful symbol for women’s creative endeavours: ‘weaving was women’s speech, women’s language, women’s story’ (Heilbrun (1985) 103). Metaphors of spinning and weaving are used for storytelling, and Penelope is by no means the only female character in ancient literature whose weaving has been invoked by women poets. At least equally familiar is the story of Arachne (found in Book 6 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses), who claimed that her skill in weaving owed nothing to Athena, the patron of the craft, and rashly entered upon a weaving contest with the goddess. Her audacity and flawless skill in depicting the multiple infidelities of the gods in various disguises increased Athena’s anger: she punished Arachne by destroying her work and striking her repeatedly with the shuttle with which she had woven her own tale of the terrible fates of mortals who defied the gods. After Arachne was driven to hang herself, the goddess transformed her into a spider, reducing her life to a constant cycle of spinning and weaving. In Angela Jackson’s 1993 volume, Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners, there is one poem which touches on Penelope, but the volume’s title suggests that it is Arachne’s spidery form which dominates these poems of spinning and weaving. For this African-American poet, the gods’ exploitation of mortal women carries undertones of slavery: in ‘Arachnia: Her Side of the Story’ Arachne, ‘the dusky girl from | Memphis’ (17–18) accuses Zeus of ransacking and plundering ‘the dark continent’ (10). Jackson’s Arachne condemns Athena for covering up the sins of her father with woven lies—her ‘seamy press releases’ (30) are political spin: What Athena weaves best is lies. Propaganda issued from Olympus. A thread of deception. Her stuff sticks to the history books. You believe that one? (19–24)

Arachne denies that her death was suicide, claiming ‘It was a lynch-| rope, my Grecian girl wove | for me’ (41–3). The history of racial persecution in the American South is added to what Nancy K. Miller has

288

Isobel Hurst

described as Athena’s ‘phallic identification with Olympian authority’ and her destruction of ‘the woman’s countercultural account’ (Miller (1986) 273). A more grotesque version of Arachne’s punishment for using her skill at weaving to expose sexual exploitation is another tale from Metamorphoses 6, that of Philomela. In this story, Philomela herself is repeatedly raped by Tereus, the husband of her sister Procne, and can communicate the story of her violation to Procne in no other way, the brutal Tereus having silenced his victim by cutting out her tongue. When Philomela and Procne take revenge by killing Tereus’ son and feeding him to his father, the story takes on unmistakably tragic qualities. Like Arachne, however, the doomed family is reprieved, and Philomela, Procne, and Tereus all metamorphose into birds. Philomela (the nightingale) becomes a figure for the poet. Whereas feminist critics have reread the stories of Arachne and Philomela as part of ‘the recuperation of subjectivity in the form of female identity as the best defense against androcentrism’ (Homans (1988) 398), 9 women poets have preferred the less subversive but also less tragic figure of Penelope as the weaver of a woman’s story. As Carolyn Heilbrun suggests: ‘Helen and Penelope represent what might be called the legitimate weavers, those who weave while men make war . . . Arachne and Philomela represent the defiant woman weaver, the one who will not be silenced in her only art though it costs her her life.’ Although the web woven by Helen (the other prominent weaver in the Homeric epics—Iliad 3.121–45) represents the Trojan war from her perspective, it focuses on men as heroes and may be seen as both self-justifying and escapist. ‘In the context of the Iliad, where her marital status and social identity are ambivalent, Helen finds relief and escape from her sad reality by depicting on her loom images which actually record history as she herself sees it . . . producing an artifact which will survive and “tell her story”’ (Pantelia (1993) 495). 10 In a 9

Homans comments that Patricia Joplin, in ‘The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours’ (on Philomela), and Nancy K. Miller, in ‘Arachnologies’, both transform ‘a grand, ancient, and violated female figure into the type of a new project against violation’: see Joplin (1984) and Miller (1986). 10 Pantelia (1993) argues that the Helen of the Odyssey, who has re-established her identity as Menelaus’ queen, no longer needs to weave her own story. Instead she ‘spins the thread which will empower other women . . . to weave their stories’ (496). Similarly, Penelope turns from weaving to spinning following Odysseus’ return (497).

Art and Domesticity in US Women’s Poetry

289

feminist reading, her weaving appears ‘a liberating act by which she refuses to accept as adequate the external definitions of herself either as a helpless possession without any power to make or act on her own decisions or as a woman without scruples and morality’ (Roisman (2006) 10). If the stories of Arachne, Philomela, and Helen associate weaving not just with remarkable creativity or with an alternative voice for the silent or silenced woman, but more ominously with punishment by the gods, male brutality, and war, Penelope’s example is also both encouraging and problematic. Unlike Arachne, Penelope is not a rival to Athena—rather, she, like Odysseus, is under the goddess’s protection. Penelope’s suitors do not rape or mutilate her as Tereus does to Philomela: instead, she uses her weaving skills to keep them at a distance. There is another reason for Penelope’s prominence as a weaving woman, the idea of repeatedly undoing and redoing her work: And now it is the third year, and will be the fourth year presently, since she has been denying the desires of the Achaians. For she holds out hope to all, and makes promises to each man, sending us messages, but her mind has other intentions. And here is another stratagem of her heart’s devising. She set up a great loom in her palace, and set to weaving a web of threads long and fine. Then she said to us: ‘Young men, my suitors now that the great Odysseus has perished, wait, though you are eager to marry me, until I finish this web, so that my weaving will not be useless and wasted. This is a shroud for the hero Laertes, for when the destructive doom of death which lays men low shall take him, lest any Achaian woman in this neighborhood hold it against me that a man of many conquests lies with no sheet to wind him.’ So she spoke, and the proud heart in us was persuaded. Thereafter in the daytime she would weave at her great loom, but in the night she would have torches set by, and undo it. So for three years she was secret in her design, convincing the Achaians, but when the fourth year came with the seasons returning, one of her women, who knew the whole of the story, told us, and we found her in the act of undoing her glorious weaving. So, against her will and by force, she had to finish it. (The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Lattimore; 2.89–110)

290

Isobel Hurst

The repeated weaving and unweaving of the web is usually read in a positive way by women poets: ‘for the most part, Penelope’s poetic tradition does not interpret the web’s permanent state of incompletion as trapping Penelope in an endless cycle of creating nothing’ (Clayton (2004) 94). One exception is Eve Merriam’s ‘Speaking of Marriage’, which begins by rejecting Penelope as a model and classes the weaving as useless and dehumanizing domestic labour: that weaving weaving endlessly do and undo and at day’s end all to begin again like dustmop: classic frustrate employ (3–6) 11

Angela Jackson’s ‘Spinster Song: African-American Woman Guild’ begins ‘We’ll all be Penelopes then. | Weaving by day, untying by night’ (1–2). The first two stanzas suggest that this identification with Penelope is a positive one, enabling women to reject the lovers who are ‘not | quite right’ (3–4). It is the male heroes who are vulnerable once their ‘cool shining shields’ are thrown aside, uncovering their ‘breakable hearts’ (7–8). As the second half of the poem begins, there is an abrupt change in tone in relation to Penelope’s weaving: It’s wasteful to be Penelope. Spending days doing nothing to undo nights. (9–11) 12

Nevertheless, the endless possibilities for reinvention offered by weaving and unweaving, especially as Homer offers no description of what her woven fabric looks like, are often interpreted as Penelope trying out different stories or identities on her loom. ‘She unravels each night what she has woven that day, not only for delay, but also, metaphorically, because unlike the other weavers, she is not writing a story of male violence, but the story of woman’s free choice, and there is no narrative to guide her’ (Heilbrun (1990) 107). If, as Barbara Clayton argues, in the Odyssey ‘the weaving, unweaving, and reweaving of the shroud parallel the poetic process of oral composition itself ’ (Clayton (2004) 35), they also parallel the painstaking drafting and redrafting of poets like Jorie Graham and Linda 11

Cited from Merriam (1958).

12

Cited from Jackson (1993).

Art and Domesticity in US Women’s Poetry

291

Pastan. Graham is ‘famous for her repeated drafts’ (Casper 2001– 2) and Pastan states that ‘each poem of mine goes through something like 100 revisions . . . I want every word to have to be there’ (Brown 2003). In ‘Ravel and Unravel’ (from The End of Beauty), Jorie Graham represents the unweaving of the web and the pause before her weaving begins again as a space Penelope comes to enjoy more than the creation. The poem is ‘a meditation on the moment just before an idea or shape crystallizes’ (Gardner (2003) 338): So it’s right, isn’t it, that she should come to love it best, the unraveling, every night, the hills and cypresses turning back into thread, then patience again, then . . . is it emptiness? (1–5) 13

‘Self-Portrait as Hurry and Delay [Penelope at her Loom]’ is one of a series of self-portraits in The End of Beauty (the others include ‘Self-Portrait as the Gesture Between Them [Adam and Eve]’, ‘Self-Portrait as Apollo and Daphne’ and ‘Self-Portrait as Demeter and Persephone’). As these titles demonstrate, the self-portraits focus on opposing characteristics within a pair of characters, and although Odysseus is not named in the Penelope poem’s subtitle he is identified with hurry, and Penelope with ‘shapely and mournful delay’ (53). The poem’s title and form (it is divided into numbered stanzas of varying lengths) suggest forward movement interrupted by periods of stasis or reversal—‘the threads running forwards yet backwards over her stilled fingers’ (24). Helen Vendler compares this technique to the cinematic freeze-frame and notes its aptness for the process of creating a self-portrait, alternately looking at oneself and painting or writing: ‘The alternations of consciousness as the pen succeeds the gaze are not concealed; rather, they are inscribed on the page, number succeeding number’ (Vendler (1995) 81): 1 So that every night above them in her chambers she unweaves it. Every night by torchlight under the flitting shadows the postponement, 13

Cited from Graham (1987)

292

Isobel Hurst

working her fingers into the secret place, the place of what is coming undone, 2 to make them want her more richly, there, where the pattern softens now, loosening, 3 to see what was healed under there by the story when it lifts, by color and progress and motive when they lift, 4 the bandage the history gone into thin air, 5 to have them for an instant in her hands both at once, the story and its undoing (1–11)

The meaning of what Penelope weaves is as much in ‘the secret place, the place of what is coming | undone,’ as it is in the temporarily existing ‘story’. Graham’s poem unravels the story of Penelope from the Odyssey in order to create such places ‘where the pattern softens’. Nevertheless, the story, with its concrete, graspable qualities of ‘color and progress and motive’ is not devalued; it is able to heal, to act as a ‘bandage’. Penelope’s resistance to closure, it turns out, is also a resistance to Odysseus, who constantly drives on towards the end of the story. She realizes that their lives after his return to Ithaca would take their story into a static mode, an ending which would be no longer narratable. The only solution is to keep unweaving the web, to keep desire alive: 15 approaching ever approaching the unmade beneath him, knotting and clasping it within his motions, wrapping himself plot plot and denouement over the roiling openness. . . . 16 Yet what would she have if he were to arrive? Sitting enthroned what would either have? It is his wanting in the threads she has to keep alive for him, scissoring and spinning and pulling the long minutes free. (46–52)

Art and Domesticity in US Women’s Poetry

293

REREADING THE ODYSSEY Seventeen years after the publication of ‘You Are Odysseus’, Pastan returned to Penelope in ‘Rereading The Odyssey in Middle Age’ (and several other poems: ‘At the Loom’, ‘The Sirens’, ‘Circe’, ‘The Son’, ‘The Suitor’, and ‘Argos’). 14 The title places the speaker as a middleaged (woman) reader returning to a familiar text and re-evaluating it as a reader who has been changed by her life experience: she is self-consciously explaining her new reception of the text. The poem begins not with Odysseus but with the unnamed Penelope, as if the reader immediately focuses on her equivalent in the text. Penelope is no longer seen as deserted wife and dutiful daughter-in-law, but as an attractive woman who might well be flirting with a younger suitor on warm summer evenings. Penelope is central to Pastan’s rereadings: for example, she is an object of desire in ‘The Suitor’, and a rival for Odysseus’ affections in ‘Argos’ and ‘Circe’. In the first stanza of the poem, the speaker corrects her own previous misconception: what she had construed as Penelope creating a shawl for herself was actually a shroud for Laertes. This leads to the question of Penelope’s intentions: . . . Did she mean to finish it after all, unweaving less and less each night, and could that mean she wished Laertes dead? (8–12)

As readers have frequently observed, Penelope’s motives remain opaque. Pastan extends this observation by drawing the reader’s attention to the difficulties of unravelling concealed emotions or interpreting a piece of art: How can we hope to find the darker threads of her impatience or lust in the design of that nubby material? (14–16)

Language is also being unravelled: the speaker opens up the theme of complex meanings by considering different uses of ‘shroud’. This uncertainty about definitions leads into a larger and more challenging 14

Cited from Pastan (1998).

294

Isobel Hurst

question asked by Penelope, one which interrogates Penelope’s most famous quality: ‘What is faithfulness anyway?’ (30). The poem ends on a distinctly unhopeful note for Odysseus: She wonders if Telemachus will find a wife to weave a shroud for her lost father-in-law, or would the water be winding sheet enough for him? (35–8)

Pastan’s rereadings, including the poems spoken by or representing other characters who comment on her, weave together several of the preoccupations of women poets in their ‘re-visions’ of the Odyssey. Her Penelope is intelligent, contemplative, sometimes frustrated by domesticity, able to escape into another world as a weaver and creator of beautiful things (although it is unclear why she has chosen to weave what she does), a woman who is still relatively young and attractive. Although apparently happy in her marriage, she is desired and has at least considered infidelity—she cannot match Argos’ unquestioning devotion; she is despised as a dull housewife by women with more adventurous histories but those who live with her find her complex and impossible to define. Despite the poet’s earlier reluctance to choose between the fixed gender roles of husband and wife, Penelope’s story has evolved through retellings until she is as central to the poem as she is to her household. The long absent Odysseus is thoroughly displaced: Telemachus is more important to Penelope. By unweaving and reweaving the character of Penelope, American women poets have created a heroine who represents their struggles with the competing claims of art and home, one whose story suggests, as Adrienne Rich hoped, that it is possible to combine the ‘energy of creation and the energy of relation’.

17 Catullus in New Zealand: Baxter and Stead Stephen Harrison

INTRODUCTION The translation and imitation of Latin poets has been a consistent feature of modern New Zealand poetry in English. Fleur Adcock (1934–) has produced some fine translations of two of the greatest twelfth-century Latin poets, Hugh Primas and the Archpoet (1994), and Ian Wedde (1946–) has presented us with a modern Kiwi Horace in The Commonplace Odes (2001). Likewise, Anna Jackson’s poetic interest in Catullus, which she discusses in her chapter in this volume, follows that of other figures in New Zealand poetry, as she herself acknowledges. 2 In this chapter I want to look at two major predecessors of Jackson in making versions of Catullus in New Zealand— James K. Baxter and C. K. (Karl) Stead.

1 I am much obliged to John Barsby, John Davidson, Anna Jackson, and Simon Perris for various kinds of help and advice, and to Karl Stead for his kindness in promptly and fully answering my queries about his work. This chapter at least partly owes its origins to the splendid opportunity of a William Evans Fellowship at the University of Otago, Dunedin in March/April 2006 and to lectures delivered there and at Victoria University of Wellington. My thanks to all my generous New Zealand hosts, colleagues, and audiences. 2 R. A. K. Mason (1905–71), sometimes referred to as New Zealand’s first substantial home-grown poet, wrote several poems with strong Catullan references, e.g. ‘Lugete o Veneres’ and ‘Nox perpetua dormienda’ in No New Thing (1934).

296

Stephen Harrison JAMES K. BAXTER (1926–72)

Baxter, one of the most colourful and controversial figures in New Zealand literary culture, 3 began his engagement with Catullus early on. In ‘Catullus at the Grave of his Brother’, dated 12 June 1946, he provided a version of Catullus 101, the famous epitaph for his brother: After all journey over sea and land At last to this one final shore I come And you, my brother, wedded to the sand— Untimely grave O mouth forever dumb. Take then the gifts I offer, though they make No change in mind or memory. O weep For my lids tearless, flowers that cannot wake Thee from all-dark and everlasting sleep. Earth, that restores to the sad year her spring, Him shalt thou now restore—to me more dear Than parent, or such loves as dreams may bring At the first breathing of the nascent year. So, my own blood, whose death no womb can fill Again—for all eternity farewell. Multas per gentes et multa per aequora uectus aduenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias, ut te postremo donarem munere mortis et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem. quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum. heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi, nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias, accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu, atque in perpetuum, frater, aue atque uale. Travelling through many peoples and many oceans, I come, brother, to these sad funeral rites, to present you with the last gift due to death and address your dumb dust to no avail. Since fortune has taken you yourself from me, alas, poor brother, undeservedly snatched from me, now at least for the 3

For a full account of his complex career see McKay (1990).

Catullus in New Zealand: Baxter and Stead

297

moment take these things, which in the ancient custom of our fathers have been handed down for funerals, drenched through with a brother’s tears, and hail and farewell for ever, brother.

Baxter chooses a traditional form (the Shakespearean sonnet) and a formal and sometimes archaic diction (‘Him shalt thou now restore’), but makes modifications of the original which already mark him out as an able and enterprising poet. In the first quatrain of lines ‘many peoples’ (multas gentes) is replaced by the similarly intensive ‘all journey’, the epithet ‘final’ is moved from the gift to the shore, and ‘dumb’ is transferred from ashes to mouth, while the idea of death instead of marriage is added in ‘wedded to the sand’, tragically suggesting the young man’s incapacity to fulfil his potential in good classical manner. In the second quatrain, the original is treated with greater freedom: the apostrophe to the brother to ‘weep | for my lids tearless’ is an effective addition, embellishing the Catullan address in line 6, while ‘flowers that cannot wake | Thee from alldark and everlasting sleep’ specifies the grave-gifts of Catullus in twentieth-century terms as floral tributes (libations or cakes would be the Roman norm): the reference to eternal sleep seems to import the famous nox est perpetua una dormienda, ‘we must sleep one single everlasting night’ from another famous Catullan poem (5.6). The third quatrain moves away from the original considerably: the address to earth, the reference to spring and ‘the first breathing of the nascent year’ (the last a line with a fine Tennysonian colour) are all additions; ‘such love as dreams may bring’ has a Shakespearean ring (‘such stuff as dreams are made on’, Tempest Act 4 Scene 1). In the final couplet we return to the original for the last words ‘for all eternity farewell’, but ‘my own blood, whose death no womb can fill’ reminds us not of Catullus but of Sophocles’ Antigone, who famously argued that a brother was irreplaceable compared to a son since he ‘could not be born again’ (912). Thus Baxter’s early Catullan version, which has something of the air of a student exercise, shows signs of his reading in both classics and English. In his brief year at the University of Otago in Dunedin (1944–5) he attended at least one Latin class in which Livy and Virgil were read, and perhaps an encounter with Catullus here may have led ultimately to this poem. In the next twenty years of poetry, Baxter

298

Stephen Harrison

turned occasionally to classical material, usually Greek (e.g. ‘Perseus’, ‘The Sirens’, both of 1952, ‘Sisyphus’ of 1959), but it was again contact with a university environment which directed his attention to Catullus. In 1966 Baxter was appointed to the Burns Fellowship in Creative Writing at his old university, a position he held for two years. There he attended the classes of Kenneth Quinn, just arrived as Professor of Classics, who was then working on the second edition of his influential The Catullan Revolution (1968) and his commentary on Catullus (1970) and seems to have encouraged Baxter in what Quinn regarded as ‘creative translations’. 4 The result was a forceful sequence of fourteen poems which were written in and around 1966 but published posthumously in Runes (1973). These were collectively headed ‘Words to Lay a Strong Ghost (after Catullus)’, and the suggestion of appeasing a powerful dead presence (though referring to a former girlfriend whose memory Baxter was trying to exorcise) 5 is appropriate to the loose but vigorous treatment of Catullus here, which suggests Freudian competition with a literary father figure. 6 The sequence opens with a poem entitled ‘The Party’: A kind of cave—still on the brandy, And coming in from outside, I didn’t like it—the room like a tunnel And everybody gassing in chairs— Or count on finding you there, smiling Like a stone Diana at Egnatius’ horse-laugh—not my business exactly That he cleans his teeth with AJAX, But he’s the ugliest South Island con man Who ever beat up a cripple . . . Maleesh—the booze rolls back, madam; I’m stuck here in the void 4

MacKay (1990) 222–3. Baxter himself wrote ‘I wrestled with the ghost of an ancient mistress who came back to haunt me’—see McKay (1990) 223. 6 There are interesting anticipations here of Bloom (1973), being written at the same time. 5

Catullus in New Zealand: Baxter and Stead

299

Looking at my journey’s end— Two breasts like towers—the same face That brought Troy crashing Down like a chicken coop—black wood and flames!

In the first three stanzas of this poem Baxter takes on Catullus’ attack on the salax taberna, the ‘filthy bar’ and its disreputable denizens in Catullus 37, especially the Spaniard Egnatius who cleans his teeth with urine. Baxter compresses and modifies the original: the bar becomes a party in a cave-like room, as in Catullus the hostile location of the apparently estranged girlfriend, its detested habitués become talkative guests from whom the speaker feels similarly excluded, Egnatius’ urine dentifrice becomes a patent household cleaner (presented in its label’s capital letters) used for the same purpose, and his Spanish origins are transposed into coming from the South Island (as Baxter himself did), with some extra abuse as a con-man and cripplebeater. The mood and direction of the poem then suddenly changes with the Arabic Anzac slang term maleesh (‘no matter’, ‘never mind’), and the speaker seems to be addressing a barmaid in maudlin manner while staring at the object of his thwarted passion. The last stanza recalls Marlowe’s Helen (‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships | And burned the topless towers of Ilium ?’, Doctor Faustus Act 5 Scene 1), but also seems to echo the last stanza of Catullus 51 (13–16): otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est: otio exultas nimiumque gestis: otium et reges prius et beatas perdidit urbes. Leisure, Catullus, is troublesome to you; you exult in leisure and desire too much: leisure has destroyed both kings and rich cities before now.

These lines can be taken to refer to the disastrous impact of the adulterous love of Paris and Helen on Troy, 7 and Baxter’s Marlowe reference may also be picking up Catullus’ poem; that Catullus 51 is in play is perhaps confirmed by Baxter’s speaker’s visual concentration on the object of passion, a strong theme of the Catullan poem (qui sedens adversus identidem te | spectat et audit, 3–4). Marlowe’s elevated 7

See further Harrison (2001b).

300

Stephen Harrison

tragic moment and Catullus’ passionate glance are both characteristically deflated by the context in Baxter’s poem of banausic breastgazing. In this poem we see two strategies repeated by Baxter elsewhere in these versions—the appropriation of the ending of a Catullan poem for the end of one of his, and the suturing together of two Catullan poems in a new unit. The appropriation of an ending is matched in the last two stanzas of the thirteenth poem, ‘The Flower’, where the poet, having renounced his love, pictures himself as having given up his early ideals: The principle That should have made me tick went early Half underground, as at the paddock’s edge You’ll see in autumn some flower (Let’s say a dandelion) Go under the farmer’s boots Like a faded sun Cut with a spade.

Here Baxter recalls perhaps the most famous Catullan simile from the end of Catullus 11: nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem, qui illius culpa cecidit uelut prati ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam tactus aratro est. And let her not look back as before for my love, which through her fault has fallen away like a flower on the edge of a field, after it has been touched by the passing plough.

The image is plainly made less elevated: the agricultural ‘paddock’ is less poetic than the original meadow (prati), the wildflower usually thought to be a poppy becomes a weed, and the blade of the plough becomes both the sturdy boots of the farmer and the more ordinary spade, though the comparison of the dandelion to ‘a faded sun’ adds an imaginative poetic element not present in the original. A third example of an appropriated ending occurs in the eleventh poem, ‘The Streetlight’. This poem (set in Dunedin) is a nightmarish

Catullus in New Zealand: Baxter and Stead

301

attack on Pyrrha which has little Catullan connection until its ending: I hate And love: I love and hate . . . Under the streetlight it’s your mouth that’s wet with blood: I’m your refrigerated meat!

The idea of the former beloved as a streetwalker may possibly draw on Catullus 58, where Lesbia is seen as a common street prostitute, but the vampiric aspect is Baxter’s own imaginative addition. And of course this ending looks to the shortest and pithiest of Catullus’ poems of disappointed love, 85: Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. I love and I hate. Perhaps you ask why I do this. I don’t know, but I feel it happening and am in torment.

The horrific ‘I’m your refrigerated meat’ perhaps looks to the idea of torture in excrucior. The suturing together of more than one Catullan poem occurs again in the second poem of the sequence, ‘The Peach Tree’, where a very loose and abbreviated version of Catullus 68a (the thanks to Allius for the loan of his house) in the first five stanzas is concluded by lines which draw on Catullus 5: It would be good to die Now—the peach tree will drop its flowers Today or tomorrow—after the light Goes out, lady, we’re going to have A long, long sleep.

This quite clearly recalls Catullus 5.4–6: soles occidere et redire possunt: nobis cum semel occidit breuis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda. Suns can set and return again: for us, when our brief light is set, there’s one perpetual night to sleep.

302

Stephen Harrison

The warm-climate peach-tree and other details earlier in the poem (its location near Oban, the principal town of Stewart Island off the south coast of the South Island, and a reference to South Pacific tapa mats made of mulberry bark cloth) have already firmly located the poem in New Zealand, but the ending generalizes and recalls the Catullan poem relatively closely in its address to the lover, with ‘light’ in particular echoing lux. Likewise, the fourth poem, ‘The Hymen’, another loose version, seems to combine elements from Catullus’ two lengthy weddingpoems (61 and 62) in another brief unit of only twenty lines: apart from the title which recalls the refrain of 61 Io Hymen hymenaee io, io hymen hymenaee but with a bawdy anatomical pun, the initial address ‘virgins’ looks to the repeated address virgines in that same poem (61.37, 224), but the splendid comparison of cabbages and virgins looks to 62: Cabbages no doubt are virgins Growing plump behind the wire netting In each suburban garden, waiting for The slug to climb and rape them . . .

The words ‘suburban garden’ perhaps look to the hyacinthus in the hortulus to which the bride is compared at Catullus 61.87–9, but the idea of the enclosed plant ripening for violation plainly picks up the simile for the bride at Catullus 62.39–44: Ut flos in saeptis secretus nascitur hortis, ignotus pecori, nullo conuolsus aratro, quem mulcent aurae, firmat sol, educat imber; multi illum pueri, multae optauere puellae: idem cum tenui carptus defloruit ungui, nulli illum pueri, nullae optauere puellae. Just as a flower grows secluded in fenced gardens, unknown to the flock, ripped up by no plough, soothed by the breezes, strengthened by the sun, brought up by the rain: many a boy, many a girl have longed for it. But when the same flower droops when plucked by a thin finger-nail, no boy, no girl has longed for it.

The Catullan flower is replaced by the unromantic cabbage, the deflowering gardener (clearly parallel to the bridegroom) by a

Catullus in New Zealand: Baxter and Stead

303

gastropod violator, and the whole poem is again set in a rural New Zealand near the Deep Stream of Otago. A final example of suturing occurs in the seventh poem, ‘The Counter Lunch’, Baxter attacks an enemy named as Caelius, ridiculed for eating everything in sight, who turns out to be an erotic rival: Nobody gets a look in When Caelius cleans up the counter-lunch (They call him Garbage Guts)— Cheese, chicken, saveloys, black pudding, It all goes down the hatch—old men get knocked In the ribs with an elbow-jolt, And he blows whisky through his red moustache And tells that boring story About the moll with rice grains in her fanny— I’m sorry; I forgot You love him, Pyrrha— Well, that’s only natural!

The use of ‘Caelius’ for the poet’s rival must recall Catullus 58, where the poet laments that Lesbia, whom he and Caelius have both loved, is reduced to the status of a common prostitute; this is confirmed by ‘The Rival’, the ninth poem in Baxter’s sequence, where the rival is again named as ‘Caelius’ (though little else in the poem is Catullan). The attack on Caelius’ greed, on the other hand, is more like the criticism of Egnatius’ anti-social behaviour in Catullus 39; this link of personal abuse and sexual jealousy is perhaps Catullan, since Catullus 37 might suggest that Egnatius too is an erotic rival of the poet. But the last two stanzas of this poem plainly turn to Catullus 97, the famous indictment of Aemilius’ halitosis, whose mouth is said to smell worse and be dirtier than his rear end. Baxter makes this fragrance-challenged character into an erotic rival, and with Chaucerian colour exploits the Catullan oral-anal analogy in an erotic context in the manner of the Miller’s Tale: Remember it’s much the same whether You kiss his mouth or his arse—the same Dull buttock-face, the same shitty breath, The same red tuft of hair.

304

Stephen Harrison

The ultimate difference between arse and mouth in Catullus (the former is cleaner and without ugly teeth) is here ignored in favour of their disgusting close identity. In these versions, Baxter consistently relocates Catullus in a contemporary time and place, and provides interesting and creative twists on the originals. The third poem in the sequence, ‘The Budgie’, provides a neat version of Catullus 3, the epitaph for the sparrow: Pyrrha’s bright budgie who would say, ‘Pretty fellow! Pretty fellow!’ For bits of cake from her hand is now Silent in the underworld. We buried him beside the rhubarb Ceremoniously in a box That once held winklepickers—Death, You’ve got a hard gullet! Pyrrha’s eyes are red—partly on account of The bird, and partly for herself, Because nothing desired can last for long— That’s why she’s crying. Lugete, o Veneres Cupidinesque, et quantum est hominum uenustiorum: passer mortuus est meae puellae, passer, deliciae meae puellae, quem plus illa oculis suis amabat. nam mellitus erat suamque norat ipsam tam bene quam puella matrem, nec sese a gremio illius mouebat, sed circumsiliens modo huc modo illuc ad solam dominam usque pipiabat. qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum illuc, unde negant redire quemquam. at uobis male sit, malae tenebrae Orci, quae omnia bella deuoratis: tam bellum mihi passerem abstulistis o factum male! o miselle passer! tua nunc opera meae puellae flendo turgiduli rubent ocelli.

Catullus in New Zealand: Baxter and Stead

305

Weep, you Venuses and Cupids, and all men of greater charm: my girl’s sparrow is dead, her sparrow, my girl’s darling, which she loved more than her own eyes. For he was honey-sweet and knew his mistress as well as a girl knows her mother, nor did he stir himself from her lap, but hopping around this way and that he was forever cheeping to his owner alone. He now is on that shadowy journey to that place from which they say no-one returns. Shame on you, evil shades of Hell, who devour everything fine: such a fine sparrow have you taken away from me. O evil deed! Poor little sparrow! For your sake my girl’s sweet eyes are red and swollen with weeping.

Here the more European sparrow (though found in New Zealand) is changed for the typically Antipodean budgerigar, and other telling transformations of detail cleverly relocate the poem in Baxter’s own time and space: the bird’s mimetic speech and cake diet are touchingly detailed to match the affective cheeping (pipiabat) of the original, while the garden burial in a shoe-box previously dedicated to contemporary footwear neatly domesticates the event ironically built up into a disaster by Catullus. The Catullan address accusing death is retained, though in a terser and more colloquial form (‘Death, you’ve got a hard gullet’). The first two stanzas compress the original, but the third and last expands it: like many translators, Baxter adds an element of commentary, taking it upon himself to add a double explanation for the girl’s red eyes which is wholly missing from the original. The result is a more serious ending than that of Catullus: the original seems to lament with comic irony and exaggeration that the girl is losing her looks through grief, while Baxter replaces this with a pessimistic general outlook (‘nothing desired can last for long’). In several of the poems discussed so far, Baxter uses the name ‘Pyrrha’ for the beloved, not Catullus’ ‘Lesbia’. The origin is clearly in Horace Odes 1.5, where the same name occurs for an ex-lover, and the surprise of Baxter’s sequence is its sixth poem, ‘The Change-Over’, where that famous ode of Horace is clearly appropriated in the middle of a group otherwise dedicated to Catullus: Four times tonight I’ve heard the bed creaking— The wall is thinner than cardboard Or else you don’t care! Tears like booze Are running into my mouth—

306

Stephen Harrison He’ll find out what it’s like! That mug! It doesn’t help me, Pyrrha; I’m hooked for life—mad enough to think The sun rose up the sky out of your cunt— I’m freezing! All the trees have died. Your mini-skirt sticks to his bed rail, And he’s the noonday sun. He looks down on A rough sea of storm-black curls; One day he’ll drown. He’ll hang, like me, An old coat on your clothesline Pegged up to dry! Better not ever to be Born than be your man.

Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa perfusus liquidis urget odoribus grato, Pyrrha, sub antro? cui flauam religas comam, simplex munditiis? Heu quotiens fidem mutatosque deos flebit et aspera nigris aequora uentis emirabitur insolens, qui nunc te fruitur credulus aurea, qui semper uacuam, semper amabilem sperat, nescius aurae fallacis. Miseri, quibus

5

10

intemptata nites. Me tabula sacer uotiua paries indicat uuida suspendisse potenti uestimenta maris deo. What slender boy soaked with liquid perfumes is pressing you, Pyrrha, surrounded by roses in a pleasant grotto? For whom do you bind your blonde hair, plain in your smartness? Alas, how often will he lament your disloyalty and his changed gods, and admire all unused the sea made rough by dark winds—he the gullible one who now enjoys your golden charms, who hopes that you will be always available, always lovable, with no inkling of the deceptive breeze. Wretched are those for whom you shimmer untried. As for

Catullus in New Zealand: Baxter and Stead

307

me, a holy wall claims in a votive tablet that I have hung up my wet clothes to the deity who controls the sea.

Concerned as ever to deflate any elevation in the original, Baxter amplifies the hints of sexual encounter in Horace’s opening stanza into audible congress elsewhere in the same house. As in the first poem, ‘The Party’, ‘booze’ is prominent, recalling Baxter’s life-long battle against alcoholism, and the simile ‘tears like booze | Are running into my mouth’ transforms the Horatian speaker’s relatively detached attitude into a more Catullan angst about the ex-lover— hence perhaps the inclusion of this Horatian version in a Catullan cycle. ‘He’ll find out what it’s like! That mug!’ and renders Horace’s second stanza in a typically pithy way; the middle of Baxter’s poem, crude and forceful, perhaps picks up the image of the sun in connection with love (used twice) from Catullus 8.3–4 fulsere quondam candidi tibi soles | cum ventitabas quo puella ducebat, ‘once the suns shone bright for you when you used to go where your girl led you’, but returns subtly to the sea-imagery of the Pyrrha ode in ‘He looks down on| A rough sea of storm-black curls’, where the Horatian image of the dark storm of erotic disaster to come is redirected to Pyrrha’s dishevelled hair, a neat transformation in both colour and discipline of Pyrrha’s carefully controlled red coiffure in the original. ‘One day he’ll drown’ again picks up the storm-image, but takes it a little further: in Horace the danger of drowning is only explicit as the young man faces a storm at sea. Baxter’s ending again combines an Horatian element with an original twist: ‘He’ll hang, like me, | An old coat on your clothesline | Pegged up to dry!’ provides a nicely domesticated and bathetic version of Horace’s temple-dedication, but the sententious close ‘Better not ever to be | Born than your man’ draws a moral more bitter than that of Horace: Horace’s ending expresses the speaker’s relief at having escaped Pyrrha’s wiles, but Baxter’s points again to a more obsessive, bitter and Catullan erotic colour. The remaining poems of the sequence comprise two which allude further to Catullus (8, ‘The Wound’, which compresses Catullus 63 on the self-castrating Attis, 10, ‘The Friend’, which like 2, ‘The Peach Tree’ uses Catullus 68a on the help of Allius), two which have no real Catullan connection apart from an obsessive erotic focus on Pyrrha

308

Stephen Harrison

(5, ‘The Earth’ and 12, ‘The Rock’), and the final poem, 14, ‘At the Grave of a War Hero’: One fat nut from the macrocarpa tree That grows above the garage Where you kept your bike and rabbit traps— I plant it at the edge of your military Slab—not as a bribe to Deathwish Drang, The zombie in charge of this cemetery— But in hopes it might reach down to Hell And split the rock and let some light in, Or that your blind deaf soul may touch it And smile to remember home— That endless hangover you tried to wash away By swimming the Taieri in winter! You’re out of touch, mate—no gear to fiddle— Nobody to fuck, punch, kick a ball at— All that self-loving vigour Swallowed up in Caesar’s black mad eye That imitates Zeus! Yet from here Death looks to me like the only love affair Worth having—you rot In khaki; I in civvies— Let’s say they cut off the toes, Then the fingers, then the legs at the knees, Then the hands, then the legs at the thighs, Then the arms at the shoulders— Wisdom is this armless legless stump Howling for its mother! Well, brother, The War Graves Commission Has put you in your place Right where you started from, Perfectly adjusted, normalized, In your concrete cabin—till the last flag drops, Good luck, mate; goodbye!

Here Baxter returns to Catullus 101, the epitaph for the poet’s brother, which he had imitated rather more conventionally twenty years

Catullus in New Zealand: Baxter and Stead

309

previously (as discussed above). This time Catullus’ poem is treated much more loosely in a considerably expanded version, though the situation is still the same, with the speaker imagined as travelling to his brother’s grave, this time updated to one controlled by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission; the brother seems to be a casualty of the Second World War returned to New Zealand. 8 Again, domestication is important: the gift brought by the grave-visitor this time is not flowers, as in the first version, but the nut of a macrocarpa, the Monterey cypress so successfully exported to New Zealand, which in time will produce a long-lasting tree from a genus long associated with death and cemeteries. The notion that the tree will reach down to Hell may be another idea picked up by Baxter from his reading of Latin poetry (cf. Virgil Georgics 2.291–2, Aeneid 4.445–6). But most of the poem has only a tangential connection with Catullus: the reference to ‘Caesar’s mad black eye | that imitates Zeus’ is mysterious but seems to suggest the war-madness of the great leader which leads to the slaughter of soldiers such as the brother, and has no Catullan original. But its commonplace details and evocation of the brother’s youthful vigour so cruelly cut off (‘bike and rabbit traps’, ‘endless hangover’, ‘swimming the Taieri’, ‘Nobody to fuck, punch, kick a ball at’) fully evoke the Catullan sense of sharp and premature loss, and the poem’s ending returns in detail to the original: ‘Good luck, mate: goodbye’ familiarizes into colloquial Kiwi terms Catullus’ famous last line atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale, ‘and forever, brother, hail and farewell’. Baxter’s versions of Catullus revivify a long-dead poet for a distant age and place. His relocation of these poems into bohemian 1960s New Zealand provides telling and effective personal detail with autobiographical colour, in an idiom which is distinctly contemporary and which makes no concessions to the supposed decorousness or tight form of classical verse. Baxter’s characteristic direct expression, intensity, and firm engagement with the physical all pick up features of Catullus, a poet who is often seen as a rebellious purveyor of youth 8 Suggested by the line ‘Right where you started from’, unless this alludes symbolically to the enclosing ‘womb’ of the concrete tomb. The ironic sobriquet given to the cemetery’s custodian, ‘Deathwish Drang’, is no help in identifying the setting, as it is the name of a tough training NCO from the science fiction novel Bill, The Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison (1965) and drawn from Baxter’s own recent reading.

310

Stephen Harrison

culture with all its angst and passion, who is unafraid to engage in crude and vigorous language and abuse, and who when Baxter was writing was being promoted by Kenneth Quinn as a revolutionary who introduced the short personal lyric into world literature and had not long before been translated by Frank Copley into the radical modernist idiom of e.e.cummings. 9

C. K. (KARL) STEAD (1932–) Stead, one of New Zealand’s most distinguished living poets, novelists, and critics, has published many poetic versions of Catullus over the last quarter-century. In his 1982 collection Geographies there is a sequence of fifteen Catullan versions entitled ‘The Clodian Songbook. 15 Adaptations’, followed by another sequence of twenty poems ‘From the Clodian Songbook’ in Between (1988), plus further imitations of individual poems in Dog (2002) and The Red Train (2004) and two poems related to Catullus in The Right Thing (2000), 10 more than forty versions in total. I will here consider a selection of his versions and his approach in general. Stead knew and admired Baxter (as we shall see) and was impressed by the Catullan versions discussed above; for his own Catullan versions ‘Baxter’s there somewhere in the background, I suppose, but quite well back’. 11 The first sequence of fifteen poems in Geographies covers many of the opening poems of Catullus’ collection (of Catullus 1–17 all except 3, 6, 9, 10, and 14 are turned). Unlike Baxter, the more scholarly Stead notes which Catullan poem is under contribution in each version, and uses the name ‘Clodia’ for Catullus’ girlfriend, following the usual historical identification of his ‘Lesbia’ as one of the Clodia sisters. 12 Like Baxter’s versions, Stead’s are lively updatings which 9

Copley (1957). ‘Suffenia the Poet’ (clearly related to the version of Catullus 49 in Stead 1988) and ‘Absence’. Stead (2000a) and Stead (2004) also contain several versions of Horatian odes and some poems stimulated by Ovid’s Metamorphoses (following Hofmann and Lasdun 1994). 11 C. K. Stead, e-mail to author, 18.9.2007. For Stead’s high view of Baxter see Stead (2000b) 98 and the version of Catullus 12 discussed below. 12 For the evidence see Wiseman (1974) 104–14. 10

Catullus in New Zealand: Baxter and Stead

311

generally abbreviate their originals: just as Baxter had turned Lesbia’s sparrow of poem 3 into a budgie, Stead uses a pair of pigeons in a version of poem 2, the other sparrow poem (‘The Clodian Songbook’ [CS], 2): Clodia’s pigeon pair one on egg-guard the other at large or roosting above tomatoes heavy with their siftings— she likes the hard peck they give her fingers she likes their talk of rolled oats under the awning. Ignoring my parallel season she ripens in her deck chair eating the stained fruit. I too like that tang on the tongue softness of feather pain of the sharp peck. Passer, deliciae meae puellae, quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere, cui primum digitum dare appetenti et acris solet incitare morsus, cum desiderio meo nitenti carum nescio quid lubet iocari et solaciolum sui doloris, credo ut tum grauis acquiescat ardor: tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem et tristis animi leuare curas! Sparrow, my girl’s darling, with which she is used to play and to hold in her lap, to which she is used to give her finger-tip as he pecks and stir to sharp biting, when, shining with love for me she is pleased to have some sweet little game as a comfort for her pain, I believe, so that her deep passion may then rest still: would that I could play with you as your mistress does and relieve the sad cares of my heart!

312

Stephen Harrison

The telling modern details (tomatoes, awning, deck-chairs) wittily update the poem, and there are interesting modifications of direction: where the original speaks of Lesbia’s pains of passion assuaged by playing with her pet, the version presents her as ignoring the speaker in a different way (by eating), and the neat innovation of a cooperating conjugal pair of birds seem to present a contrast with the human erotic pairing where some distance is evident. But key points remain from Catullus: Clodia/Lesbia’s pleasure in the pet’s pecking, and the speaker’s desire to play with the bird too. Likewise, the version of Catullus 4 (=CS 3), the address to the poet’s yacht, relocates the yacht’s Mediterranean movements to the South Seas: That prow drawn up on shingle under willows where the early lake fishermen cast into stream-flow— put your ear to its heartwood you’ll hear slap of salt snap of sail rush of long nights straining under bellying moons northward to Suva. On her side like the star Cross she lies under given over to calm and reflection. Catullus’ yacht hot youth of Catullus.

Catullus’ twenty-seven line travelogue is radically shortened, but the boat is still one retired from open ocean sailing to lake work (cf. Catullus 4.24); and though Stead drops the element of religious dedication at the original’s end, where the boat is presented as an thankoffering to the Dioscuri for a safe return from the sea, he adds an interesting allegorical comment: the yacht is seen as representing the poet’s ‘hot youth’, now given over to the age of ‘calm and reflection’. Likewise, the two kiss poems (Catullus 5 and 7) are relocated in New Zealand in Stead’s versions (CS 4 and 5): in the former the sun sets.

Catullus in New Zealand: Baxter and Stead

313

. . . over the lake beyond the etceteras bush-spike burned black on it

and in the latter the Catullan figure of sand-grains for numberlessness is relocated to the North Island: for example beginning at Ahipara and counting north along Ninety Mile Beach grain by grain . . .

CS 4 also contains a witty close echo of the Latin: Catullus’ nox est perpetua una dormienda (5.6) becomes ‘perpetual dormitory’. A similar play on linguistic elements in the original is found in CS 11 (a version of Catullus 16): Furius and Aurelion back from the Gay Rights Convention Catullus ‘born on the sabbath day’ salutes you— enjoy whatever your own tastes in transport pedicabs irrumbuses riding nose-to tail in tandem or just holding hands at the movies and may the law stay out of your trousers! But as a poet I protest bugger you why GAY you dizzy pricks? That’s one indispensable irreplaceable word you’ve rendered unuseable. That was vandalism, brothers. That was misappropriation.

Here Stead turns Catullus’ reply to accusations of effeminacy (cut out of the poem) into a critique of the politically correct use of the traditional word ‘gay’, looking forward to his attack on positive

314

Stephen Harrison

discrimination in Catullan form (see p. 319 below). Stead picks up the forcefully crude language of the original, once again with a clever play on the original Latin words: pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo (16.1), ‘I’ll give it to you up the arse and in the mouth’ is echoed in the witty nonce-words ‘pedicabs’ and ‘irrumbuses’. Similarly effective is the version of Catullus 11 in CS 7: Air New Zealand old friend of Catullus you offer a quick hike to Disneyland the South Pole Hong Kong’s hotspots to ease a jealous ache. Thanks brother but I’d rather you flew downcountry a message to Clodia. Tell her she’s known to her 300 loveless lovers as the scrum machine. Tell her Catullus loves her as the lone lawn daisy loves the Masport mower.

Catullus’ opening allusion to potential world travel in the military expeditions of Crassus and Caesar becomes airborne journeying to similarly hot and cold places, while details again wittily provide updating and domestication—the reference in ‘scrum machine’ to New Zealand’s national game of rugby, the smaller and everyday garden daisy replacing the more romantic corn-field poppy of the original, the local brand-name mower for Catullus’ plough. 13 The pathos of the original ending is reduced (as in Baxter’s version, ‘The Flower’—see above), and the poet’s voice is made tougher and more ironic than the somewhat masochistic original. 13 Masport, founded in Auckland in 1910, still advertises itself as ‘the Australasian leader in lawn and garden care products’—see http://www.masport.co.nz/n (accessed 17.9.2007).

Catullus in New Zealand: Baxter and Stead

315

One poem of particular interest in this sequence is CS 8. This appropriates Catullus 12, the well-known poem about Asinius’ faux pas of stealing napkins, and very loosely adapts it to remember a dead poetic colleague. The poem opens with Stead in bed, moving on to his thoughts: thinking as I lay there of the True Confessions of George Barker in pink paper covers I borrowed from the pocket of that 1950s raincoat of Asinius prince of poets who died the month I returned it after twenty years—lying there wishing I’d kept it Asinius, as a memento of you.

Catullus’ scenario is neatly varied: instead of stealing a napkin of sentimental value (Catullus claims that his Spanish napkins were a present from close friends, 12.4–5), we find regret at returning a loaned copy of a 1950 poetic autobiography. The subject of the book is relevant as Asinius here represents James K. Baxter, fellow poet (and fellow adaptor of Catullus, whose Catullan versions are discussed above). 14 Catullus’ semi-ironic attachment to his napkins in the original (he claims he should love them as much as he loves the friends who gave them) is here given more emotional depth: though the book is small and relatively insignificant, the prematurely dead poet friend is clearly remembered with warmth and sorrow. 15 The sequence closes with a version of a poem already turned twice by Baxter, Catullus 101 (the epitaph for his brother), CS 15: Ianus I’m camped a hundred yards from your bones. The moths attack the lantern and die as surely As you did on that asphalt strip near home We used to burn up with our eager wheels. Defeated in love and in my dearest ambitions I’ve come to visit one who took the last blow first. The world’s sweetest when it offers us nothing. Remember our eel-trap that summer polio closed 14 15

Confirmed by C. K. Stead, e-mail to author, 18.9.2007. Cf. ‘Dunedin’, another poem in memory of Baxter, in Stead (2002).

316

Stephen Harrison The schools and drove us north? These tears are happy. I wish you manuka on the eternal winds. ‘So long’ we used to say, not knowing what it meant.

The New Zealand location and the touchingly trivial memories of boyhood recall Baxter’s version in his ‘At the Grave of a War Hero’, similarly placed at the end of its similarly-sized cycle. Death on the roads (like World War II) is a plausibly modern and local cause of death 16 and more local colour is given in ‘manuka on the eternal winds’, the Maori word evoking the delicate scent of the New Zealand tea-tree. Stead’s second Catullan sequence in Between (1988), ‘From the Clodian Songbook’ (FCS), includes twenty versions. Here there are poems which recall the previous cycle (e.g. the sparrow of Catullus 3 becomes a pigeon again in FCS 1, as in CS 2), but there is also a tendency to appropriate Catullan poems to provide an ironic and critical sidelight on the New Zealand cultural and literary world. For example, FCS 3 satirizes a young woman who epitomizes the youthful Kiwi obsession with foreign travel: Verania, mother-met, brother-hugged handing out duty-free packets still jet-lagged and already talking of your return to Spanish lovers the London theatre hitching down the Rhine— oh my dear scatter-brained clatter-tongued Kiwi kin Catullus groans to see what a cliché the world has made of you. 16 Road fatalities are relatively high in New Zealand, especially for the period before 1990: see the statistics at http://www.monash.edu.au/muarc/reports/papers/ fatals.html (accessed 17.9.2007).

Catullus in New Zealand: Baxter and Stead

317

This poem uses Catullus 9, the address to his friend Veranius, similarly returned from Spain. But the sentiment is wholly inverted: Catullus provides a warm welcome, not criticism, for the returnee (1–5), and looks forward to his friend’s travel stories (6–9) rather than being bored by trite ‘OE’ 17 talk of Spain, London, and the Rhine. The Catullan poem finishes with reflections on his own happiness, Stead’s with Catullus’ disgust. The feminization of Catullus’ addressee gives the appearance of realism, suggesting adaptation to fit a particular individual: we will see this technique again in Stead’s versions. The targeting of the literary world in Stead’s versions picks up a key feature of Catullus’ poetry, which operates in a particular cultural milieu where particular styles of poetry are approved or disapproved (cf. Catullus 14, 22, 35, 36, 95), but the material is naturally modernized. In FCS 5 Stead attacks the problem of the self-published mediocre writer: Calvus sends me his book printed at his own expense. He hopes for a plug from Catullus for the jacket of his next. I ought to fire it straight back or write ‘Calvus please don’t send me your arsepaper —I’ve plenty of my own’ —but I don’t. I write ‘Calvus, how kind— I’m looking forward to getting into your book as soon as my desk is clear.’

The Catullan original (14) roundly abuses Calvus for sending his friend a collection of work by bad poets; Stead’s version instead presents Calvus as sending his own bad work to Catullus, to be met by the hypocritical temporizing of those who receive unsolicited publications of poor quality, a dreadfully familiar feature of the modern literary/scholarly world. The anal language cleverly evokes another 17 ‘OE’ = ‘Overseas Experience’, a common abbreviation and term for a young New Zealander’s ritual extended travels abroad.

318

Stephen Harrison

Catullan poem on bad poetry, Catullus 36, where the poet famously abuses the dreadful Annals of Volusius (Anals?) as cacata charta, ‘shaton paper’ (36.1 and 20). Thus Stead, like Baxter, engages in suturing effects from two Catullan poems in one version. FCS 7 evokes the New Zealand literary world in a different way. The Catullan original (24) is addressed by Catullus to the young boy Juventius, regretting that the boy has chosen the cashless Furius for his new lover. Stead’s version substitutes the voice of a censorious older female for the poet’s, and replaces poverty with non-observance of bourgeois conventions as the grounds for discouraging a relationship: ‘Young man’, she used to say ‘you stay away from old Furius. His hedge is a disgrace to the suburb.’

The boy replies that Furius grows excellent vegetables, is a great cook and lends him books. But this is not enough for the neighbour: She wanted to know why he didn’t cut his hedge. ‘He’s a writer’ I told her. ‘He’s very busy and famous. His books are published in England.’ ‘What’s the good of that’ she asked ‘if he doesn’t have a washing machine and his hedge is falling over the pavement?’

The small-mindedness here about tidiness perhaps conceals further prejudice. The writer represented by Furius was Frank Sargeson (real name Norris Frank Davey, 1903–82), the openly gay leading New Zealand short story writer and encourager of younger writers such as Stead himself and Baxter. 18 Thus the gay context of the Catullan original has clear resonance in Stead’s version, though as an unmentioned 18

King (1995).

Catullus in New Zealand: Baxter and Stead

319

subtext for those that know, just as the identity of Furius with Frank Sargeson is not especially obvious. 19 Further connections with the modern literary world are seen in FCS 16: Suffenia, feminist in fiction and Tullius Tuhoe walk off with the Book Awards and Catullus chalks up another defeat. Gender and race combine like an All Black front row— unstoppable! Yes yes they are deserving. Certainly they are the best— as much and as truly the best among our writers as it is true to say Catullus is the worst.

Here Stead adapts Catullus’ famously ambiguous poem on Cicero (49), in which Catullus concludes by saying that he is the worst of all poets as much as Cicero is the best advocate for everyone, 20 into an attack on political correctness which caused some controversy at the time. 21 (Marcus Tullius) Cicero morphs into the Maori Tullius Tahoe, while Suffenia feminizes Suffenus, the bad poet of Catullus 14 and 22. 22 This, and the allusion to rugby, fully locate the poem in contemporary New Zealand cultural life. A third poem in FCS satirizing the literary scene is 14, picking up Catullus 44. In that poem Catullus ironically claims to have literally caught a cold after reading a metaphorically frigid speech by Sestius in order to get an invitation to dinner at Sestius’ house. Stead’s version (like FCS 5 on Calvus, see above) neatly transfers this to a plausible modern context, where Sestius, having entertained the speaker to an 19

The identity was confirmed by C. K. Stead, e-mail to the author, 18.9.2007. Stead clearly interprets the Catullan poem as ironic, and this seems likely: ‘advocate for everyone’ might be a jibe at Cicero’s defence of Vatinius in 54 under political pressure having famously delivered an invective against him in 56. 21 Cf. Stead (2000b) 253–4. 22 Suffenia appears again in a later ironic Stead poem about a female poet—see n. 10 above. 20

320

Stephen Harrison

excellent dinner, forces him to listen to ‘a chapter of his book | on critical theory’: It must have lasted an hour— post-colonial, post-structuralist, postmodernist— did his pole house have something to do with its drift? ‘What do you think, Catullus?’ (his eyes bulging and glazed). ‘Solid,’ I acknowledged. I suggested he call it The Deconstructing Kiwi. Driving home I had to stop the car and spill my guts in the gutter. Such good cooking wrecked by bad writing– it’s a metaphysical puzzle. It took me two days to recover. Clearly the literary life is more dangerous than we care to admit.

The fun poked here at high theory is consistent with Stead’s own published views on modern developments in criticism, 23 but the poem carefully reworks the original: Sestius’ oration becomes another prose work, a critical volume, and the poet is once again made ill by the dreadful work, this time after the meal instead of as a result of preparing for it. I conclude with mention of Stead’s use of Catullus in his 2002 volume Dog. This contains two Catullan laments, nicely reworked for their new contexts. The first is an elegy for a cat (‘Cat/ullus’): Zac’s dead buried with his brother Wallace beside the carport under the pongas. 23

See Stead (2000b).

Catullus in New Zealand: Baxter and Stead

321

Zac of the goldfish eyes and nice-smelling fur who when I had a problem with a poem slept on it, who lived to put his paw-print on a valued citation, who in his dying days jumped to swipe at a passing moth and missed. Zac the radical, Zac the bed-crowder the window leaper the lateral-thinker, Zac the head-first rat-eater is dead, is ‘laid to rest’, has met his match. Frater ave (etc) Black Zac Zac the Knife.

The quotation of Catullus 101 in the last stanza touchingly suggests the brotherhood of owner and cat, and is consistent with other literary allusions packed into those closing lines. 24 Though the poem is an elegy for an animal, it seems to have been written without conscious reference to Catullus 3 and the dead sparrow, 25 though Stead had imitated that poem some years earlier in FCS 1. The second lament is for Allen Curnow (1911–2001), one of New Zealand’s greatest poets and an early mentor for Stead, in ‘Catullus 65’: Grief—or if what’s expected and accepted Cannot be grief, then call it incomprehension— Has kept me from the company of the Muse And the sweet children she bears me, Rodicus, Because my brother poet has taken his swim 24 ‘Laid to rest’ cites Auden’s elegy on his brother-poet Yeats, ‘Earth receive an honoured guest | William Yeats is laid to rest’, while ‘Zac the Knife’ plays on ‘Mack the Knife’, the 1954 English translation by Marc Blitzstein of Brecht’s song ‘Mackie Messer’ from the 1928 Brecht/Weill Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera). 25 As stated by C. K. Stead, e-mail to the author, 18.9.2007.

322

Stephen Harrison This time in Lethe’s waters, and already I feel His forgetfulness leaving me, leaving us all behind. Never again will I see him dragged by his dog As if he wore the leash, nor wait for the end Of a witty sentence broken by the lighting of his pipe. But something of his voice will sound in my lines As the morepork, heard in a dream, tells us we’re home. And though I cannot send you poems of my own I offer this by my older friend Catullus So you’ll know my boast of verses wasn’t idle. Let it come to you, as it does in the Roman’s trope, Like an apple given to a girl, hidden in her clothes And forgotten until it rolls to her mother’s floor And has to be explained, and cannot be.

Here once again a lament for Catullus’ brother is pressed into service, for a brother poet rather than a fraternal feline. Here Stead engages in fairly close translation at times, but the key feature is his mapping of Catullus’ relationships: Curnow is the lost brother in the fraternal link of poetry, while the addressee Rodicus is Alan Roddick, ‘South Island friend, poet and dentist’, 26 matching Catullus’ addressee, sometimes seen as the orator Q. Hortensius Hortalus. The poem is neatly tailored to the canine theme of Stead’s collection and touchingly personalized with the references to Curnow’s dogwalking and pipe, and located in New Zealand by the reference to the morepork, a local owl species (Ninox novaeseelandiae). A neat touch is the appearance of Catullus as a character other than the speaker in a Stead Catullan version: here the poetry of Catullus picks up the mention of that of Callimachus in the original, and Catullus’ next poem (66) is a famous version of Callimachus. This allusion to ‘my older friend Catullus’ perhaps reminds the reader that versions of Catullus have been a stock-in-trade of Stead’s later poetry. Stead’s versions of Catullus use the Latin poet in a number of ways. In a 2004 note, he says ‘I have allowed myself complete freedom. Some are close to the original; some rework similar elements into a different statement; some take off in a completely different direction. . . . I am certainly no Latinist. I use these precedent texts to make 26

The identity was confirmed by C. K. Stead, e-mail to the author, 18.9.2007.

Catullus in New Zealand: Baxter and Stead

323

what I hope I can claim as my own poem, creating my own fictional persona.’ 27 This is clearly true, but equally clearly there are features of the Catullan poetic persona which Stead finds particularly attractive: his capacity for invective (especially in a literary or cultural context) and his warm feeling in personal poems of love and lament. Like Baxter, Stead fully updates his precedent texts through contemporary cultural references, but the common interests of poets persist across the centuries.

CONCLUSION This analysis shows that Catullus was an important poetic precedent for two significant New Zealand poets in the period since the Second World War, and that both Baxter and Stead exercise a careful and detailed intertextuality in manipulating and modifying classical originals for modern contexts. Baxter’s versions served as some stimulus for Stead, less than a decade younger but writing his versions in the next poetic generation after Baxter’s early death, just as Stead’s own versions gave some impetus to those of Anna Jackson (see Chapter 4 above). It is worth speculating as to why Catullus has been especially taken up in this way: perhaps the new, youthful, revolutionary 1960s Catullus promoted by the literary criticism of Kenneth Quinn, working in New Zealand and clearly influential on Baxter (see above), seemed for some Kiwi poets a suitable poetic ancestor for Antipodean straight talking about life, love, and literature, and one more approachable, flexible and adaptable than the more hallowed figures of Horace and Virgil. Here at least the classical heritage of colonialism could be reflected back from a looser and less stuffy New Zealand perspective. Whatever its origin, however, this is a remarkable cluster of receptions of a Latin poet in the modern world. 27

Stead (2004) 82.

This page intentionally left blank

Bibliography Abbreviations for journals and serials follow the style of L’Année Philologique. Adams, D. (1987) Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. London. Adcock, F. (1971) High Tide in the Garden. London. (1994) Hugh Primas and The Archpoet. Cambridge. (2000) Poems 1960–2000. Newcastle. Allen, M. L. (2000) ‘Longley’s Long Line: Looking Back from the Ghost Orchid’, in Peacock and Devine (2000) 121–41. Almond, M. (2002) Oyster Baby. Washington. (2004) The Works. Washington. Annas, P. J. (1984) ‘The Self in the World: The Social Context of Sylvia Plath’s Late Poems’, in Wagner (1984) 130–9. (1988) A Disturbance in Mirrors. The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York. Appiah, K. A. (1993) ‘Thick Translation’, Callaloo 16.4: 808–19. Arkins, B. (1988) ‘Pound’s Propertius: What Kind of Homage?’ Paideuma 17: 29–44. (1991) ‘The Role of Greek and Latin in Friel’s Translations’, Colby Quarterly 27: 202–9. (1992) Desmond Egan—A Critical Study. Little Rock. (2005) Hellenising Ireland: Greek and Roman Themes in Modern Irish Literature. Newbridge. Arthur, M. (1980) ‘The Tortoise and the Mirror: Erinna PSI 1090’, Classical World 74: 53–65. Auden, W. H. (1994) Collected Poems. London. Baer, W. (ed.) (1996) Conversations with Derek Walcott. Jackson. Baldock, M. (1993) Greek Tragedy. An Introduction. London. Balmer, J. (1992) Sappho: Poems and Fragments. Newcastle upon Tyne. (1996a) Classical Women Poets. Newcastle upon Tyne. (1996b) ‘The Romans Had a Word for it—but Do We?’ The Observer, 8 September. (2004a) Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate. Newcastle upon Tyne. (2004b) Chasing Catullus: Poems, Translations and Transgressions. Newcastle upon Tyne. (2005) ‘The Word for Sorrow: A Work Begins its Progress’, Modern Poetry in Translation 3.3: 61–8. Bassnett, S. (1987) Women Writers: Sylvia Plath. Basingstoke.

326

Bibliography

Bassnett, S. and Bush, P. (eds.) (2006) The Translator as Writer. London. and Trivedi, H. (eds.) (1999) Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. Abingdon. Battis, Jes (2003) ‘ “Dangling inside the word she”: Confusion and Gender Vertigo in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red’, Canadian Literature 176: 198–203. Baugh, E. (1997) ‘Painters and Painting in Another Life’, in Hamner (1997) 239–50. (2006) Derek Walcott. Cambridge. Bensen, R. (1997) ‘The Painter as Poet: Derek Walcott’s “Midsummer” ’, in Hamner (1997) 336–47. Berger, J. (1984) And our faces, my heart, brief as photos. London. Bhaba, H. K. (1990) ‘The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhaba’, in Rutherford (1990) 201–21. Blau DuPlessis, R. (1979) ‘The Critique of Consciousness and Myth in Levertov, Rich and Rukeyser’, in Gilbert and Gubar (1979) 280–300. Bloom, H. (1973) The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York. Boland, E. (1995a) Collected Poems. Manchester. (1995b) Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. New York. Bolton, J. D. P. (1962) Aristeas of Proconnesus. Oxford [reprinted 1999]. Bowra, C. M. (1936) ‘Erinna’s Lament for Baucis’, in Greek Poetry and Life: Essays Presented to Gilbert Murray Oxford, 151–68. Brain, T. (2001) The Other Sylvia Plath. Harlow. (2006) ‘Plath’s Letters and Journals’, in Gill, 139–55. Braund, S. M. (1998) ‘Speech, Silence and Personality: The Case of Aeneas and Dido’, Proceedings of the Virgil Society 23:129–47. Brearton, F. (2006) Reading Michael Longley. Tarset, Northumberland. Brennan, Claire, (1999) The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York. Breslin, P. (2001) Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott. Chicago and London. (2005) ‘Thanatos Turannos: The Poetry of Louise Glück’, in Diehl, 90–130. Britzolakis, C. (1999) Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning. Oxford. Brize, P. (1980) Die Geryoneis des Steischoros und die frühe griechische Kunst. Würzburg. (1988) ‘Geryoneus’, LIMC 4.1: 186–191. Brodsky, J. (1987) ‘Nobel Lecture, 1987’, trans. Barry Rubin, in Loseff and Polukhina (1987) 1–11. Also online: http://nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/ literature/laureates/1987/brodsky-lecture-e.html (2001) Collected Poems in English, Manchester.

Bibliography

327

(1995) On Grief And Reason. New York. (2001) Collected Poems In English. Manchester. Broe, Mary Lynn (1980) ‘A Subtle Psychic Bond: The Mother Figure in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry’, in Davidson and Broner (1980) 217–30. Brown, J. (2003) ‘Conversation: Pastan’, Transcript from NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec03/ pastan_07-07.html# [accessed 11/8/2008]. Brown, R. (1985) James Joyce and Sexuality. Cambridge. Browning, E. B. (1857) Aurora Leigh. London. Budelmann, F. (2005) ‘Greek Tragedies in West African Adaptations’, in Goff (2005) 118–46. Bundtzen, L. K. (1983) Plath’s Incarnations. Woman and the Creative Process. Ann Arbor. (2006) ‘Plath and Psychoanalysis: Uncertain Truths’, in Gill (2006) 36–51. Burke, S. (1992) The Death & Return of the Author. Edinburgh. Burnett, P. (2003) ‘Derek Walcott on Poetry, Pity and Power: Interview with Derek Walcott’, in Fumagalli (2003) 139–53. Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble. New York. Byatt, A. S. (2000) ‘Arachne’, in Terry (2000) 131–57. Cachey, T. J. (2001) ‘Dante’s Journey between Fiction and Truth: Geryon Revisited’, in Picone (2001) 75–92. Callahan, L. (2003) In the Shadows of Divine Perfection: Derek Walcott’s Omeros. New York and London. Calvino, I. (1989) The Literature Machine. London. Cameron, A., and Cameron, A. (1969) ‘Erinna’s Distaff ’, CQ 19: 285–8. and Kuhrt, A. (eds.) (1983) Images of Women in Antiquity. London. Campbell, D. A. (1991) Greek Lyric III. London and Cambridge, Mass. (1992) Greek Lyric IV. London and Cambridge, Mass. Carson, A. (1986a) ‘ “Echo with no door on her mouth”: A Notional Refraction through Sophokles, Plato, and Defoe’, Stanford Literary Review 3.2: 247–61. (1986b) Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. Princeton. (1995) Plainwater: Essays and Poetry. New York. (1997), Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse. London. (1999), Economy of the Unlost. Princeton and Oxford. (2000) Men in the Off Hours. New York. (2001) The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos. New York. (2002) If not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. London: Virago.

328

Bibliography

Carter, M. (2006) University of Hunger: Collected Poems & Selected Prose, ed. Gemma Robinson. Tarset. Casper, R. N. (2001–2) ‘About Jorie Graham: A Profile’, Ploughshares 27 [http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmarticleID=7400, accessed 11/8/2008]. Cavalieri, G. (2000) Interview with Louise Glück. Beltway Poetry Quarterly. 2007. [http://washingtonart.com/beltway/gluckinterview.html, accessed 11/8/2008]. Cavarzere, A., Aloni, A., and Barchiesi, A. (eds.) (2001) Iambic Ideas. Lanham, Md. Chlenova, N. L. (1983) ‘Predystorija “torgovogo puti Gerodota” ’ (Prehistory of ‘Herodotus’ Trade Route’), Sovetskaya arkheologiya 47–65. Christodoulides, N. (2005) Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking. Motherhood in Sylvia Plath’s Work. Amsterdam and New York. Ciccarelli, S. (1996) ‘Reflections Before and After Carnival: An Interview with Derek Walcott’, in Baer (1996) 34–49. Clark, H. (2006) The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962–1972. Oxford. Clark, T. (1999) ‘Subversive Histories’, American Poetry Review 28.5: 7–10. Clayton, B. (2004) A Penelopean Poetics: Reweaving the Feminine in Homer’s ‘Odyssey’. Lanham, Md., and Oxford. Cohen, B. (ed.) (1995) The Distaff Side: Representing the Female in Homer’s ‘Odyssey’. New York and Oxford. Connor, S. (1988), Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Oxford. Copley, F. O. (1957) Catullus: The Complete Poetry. Ann Arbor. Constantine, D. (2004) A Living Language. Newcastle. Coogan, T. P. (1995) The Troubles. London. Corcella, A., and Medaglia, S. M. (1993) La Scizia e la Libia: libro IV delle Storie Erodoto. Rome. Cornish, F. W., Postgate, J. P., and Mackail, J. W. (1913) Catullus, Tibullus, Pervigilium Veneris. London. Cotter, J. F. (1987, trans.), The Divine Comedy: Dante Alighieri. New York. Crawford, R. (1990) A Scottish Assembly. London. (1992) Talkies. London. (2001) The Modern Poet: Poetry, Academia and Knowledge Since the 1750s. Oxford. (2003) The Tip of My Tongue. London. (2006) Apollos of the North: Selected Poems of George Buchanan and Arthur Johnston. Edinburgh. (2007) Scotland’s Books: The Penguin History of Scottish Literature. London. (2008) Full Volume. London.

Bibliography

329

and Imlah, M. (2000) The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse. London. Cullingford, E. B. (1996) ‘British Romans and Irish Carthaginians: Anticolonial Metaphor in Heaney, Friel and McGuinness’, PMLA 111: 222–39. Cyrino, M. S. (2005) Big Screen Rome. Oxford. (2008) Rome Season One: History Makes Television. Oxford. D’Agata, J. (1997) ‘A — with Anne Carson’, Iowa Review 27.2: 1–22. Dabydeen, D. (2003) ‘ “A continual Sense of Isness”: An Interview with Derek Walcott’, in Fumagalli (2003) 154–163. [Originally broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 29/2/99.] Davidson, C. N., and Broner, E. M. (eds.) (1980) The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature. New York. Davies, M. (1988), ‘Stesichoros’ Geryoneis and its Folk-Tale Origins’, CQ 38: 277–90. Davis, G. (1997) ‘ “With no Homeric Shadow”: The Disavowal of Epic in Derek Walcott’s Omeros’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 96.2: 321–33. (1999) ‘ “Pastoral Sites”: Aspects of Bucolic Transformation in Derek Walcott’s Omeros’, CW 93: 43–49. (2007) ‘ “Homecomings without Home”: Representations of (Post)colonial nostos (Homecoming) in the Lyric of Aimé Césaire and Derek Walcott’, in Graziosi and Greenwood (2007) 191–209. Deane, S. (1984) Introduction to Friel (1984) 11–22. (2002) ‘Field Day’s Greeks (and Russians)’, in McDonald and Walton (2002) 148–64. Deguy, M. (1984) Given Giving: Selected Poems of Michel Deguy, trans. Clayton Eshleman. Berkeley, Calif., and London. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis. DeNicola, D. (ed.) (1999) Orpheus & Company: Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology. Hanover, NH, and London. Devlin, B. P. (1986) ‘In Spite of Sea and Centuries: An Irish Gael Looks at the Poetry of Sorley MacLean’, in Ross and Henry (1986) 81–9. Diaz-Diocaretz, Myriam (1985) Translating Poetic Discourse: Questions of Feminist Strategy in Adrienne Rich. Amsterdam. Dickinson, Emily (1970) The Complete Poems. London. Diehl, J. F. (ed.) (2005) On Louise Glück: Change What You See. Ann Arbor. Dillon, M. (1990) The Shankill Butchers. London. Dodd, E. C. (1992) The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H.D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Glück. Columbia and London. Doherty, L. E. (1995) Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey. Ann Arbor. Doolittle, Hilda [H.D.] (1925) Collected Poems. New York.

330

Bibliography

Dougherty, C. (1997) ‘Homer after Omeros: Reading a H/Omeric Text’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 96/2: 335–57. Dovatur, A. I., Kallistov, D. P., and Shisova, I. A. (1982) Narody našej strany v ‘Istorii’ Gerodota (The Peoples of our Country in Herodotus’ ‘History’). Moscow. Dover, K. J. (1978) Greek Homosexuality. London. Drabble, M. (2002) The Seven Sisters. London. duBois, Page (1995) Sappho is Burning. Chicago. Duffy, N., and Dorgan T. (1999) Watching the River Flow. Dublin. Dunlop, P. (1972) The Poems of Tibullus. Harmondsworth. Eco, Umberto, (2004) Mouse or Rat? London. Eliot, T. S. (1919) ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry (lV)’, The Egoist 6.3: 39. (1944) Four Quartets. London. (1966) Selected Essays. New York. Erickson, P. (2005) ‘Artists’ Self-Portraiture and Self-Exploration in Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound’, Callaloo 28.1: 224–35. Fairclough, H. R. (2005) ‘The Art of Poetry’, in Horace: Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica. Cambridge, Mass. Fanon, F. (1967) Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York (first published in French in 1952). Fanthorpe, U. A. (2005) Collected Poems 1978–2003. Calstock. Feeney, D. (2004) Introduction to Raeburn (2004) xiii–xxxiv. Feinstein, Elaine, (2001) Ted Hughes. The Life of a Poet. London. Feldherr, A. (2002) ‘Metamorphosis in the Metamorphoses’, in Hardie (2002) 163–79. Felson, N. (1997) Regarding Penelope: From Character to Poetics. Norman, Okla., and London. Ferry, D. (1997) The Odes of Horace. New York. (2001) The Epistles of Horace. New York. Flaschenriem, B. L. (1999) ‘Sulpicia and the Rhetoric of Disclosure’, CPh 94: 36–54. Foley, H. P. (ed.) (1981) Reflections of Women in Antiquity. New York. Ford, P. J. (1982) George Buchanan, Prince of Poets. Aberdeen. and Green, R. (forthcoming) George Buchanan, Poet and Dramatist. Swansea. Foster, R. F. (1989) ‘Varieties of Irishness’, 5–24 in Cultural Traditions in Northern Ireland, ed. M. Crozier, Institute of Irish Studies, The Queen’s University of Belfast. Fowler, R. (2005) ‘ “This tart fable”: Daphne and Apollo in Modern Women’s Poetry’, in Zajko and Leonard (2005) 381–98.

Bibliography

331

Freud, S. (1938) The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. New York. (1984) ‘On Mourning and Melancholia’, in On Metapsychology [The Penguin Freud Library Vol. II]. Harmondsworth, 247–68. Friedman, S. S. (1990) Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction. Cambridge. Friel, B. (1984) Selected Plays. London. Fugard, A. (2002) ‘Antigone in Africa’, in McDonald and Walton (2002) 128–47. Fulford, S. (2004) ‘Painting the Sublime in Visible Syntax: Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound’, Cambridge Quarterly 33/1: 11–27. Fumagalli, M. C. (2001) The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante. Amsterdam and New York. Fumagalli, M. C. (ed.) (2003) Agenda: Special Issue on Derek Walcott. Agenda 39.1–3 (Winter 2002–3). Furlani, A. (2003) ‘Reading Paul Celan with Anne Carson: “what kind of witness would that be?” ’, Canadian Literature 176: 84–107. Gaertner, J. F. (ed.) (2007) Writing Exile: The Discourse of Displacement in Greco-Roman Antiquity and Beyond. Leiden. Gardner, T. (2003) ‘Jorie Graham’s The End of Beauty and a Fresh Look at Modernism’, Southwest Review 88: 335–49. Garnham, B. (1996) ‘Real in the Unreal—Jean Giraudoux and Greek Myth’, in Thomas and Le Saux (1996) 27–35. Geddes, W. D. (ed.) (1895) Musa Latina Aberdonensis II. Aberdeen. Gikandi, S. (1992) Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Ithaca and London. Gilbert, R. (2002) ‘Post-love poetry’, Michigan Quarterly Review 41: 309–28. Gilbert, S. M. (1979) ‘A Fine, White Flying Myth: The Life/Work of Sylvia Plath’, in Gilbert and Gubar (1979) 245–60. and Gubar. S. (1994) Letters From the Front. New Haven and London. (eds.) (1979) Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets. Bloomington, Ind. Gill, Jo, (2006a) ‘The Colossus and Crossing the Water’, in Gill (2006b) 90–106. (ed.) (2006b) The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath. Cambridge. Glück, L. (1996) Meadowlands. Hopewell, NJ. (1999) Vita Nova. Manchester. Godwin, J. (ed.) (1999) Catullus: The Shorter Poems. Warminster. Goff, B. (ed.) (2005) Classics and Colonialism. London. and Simpson, M. (2007) Crossroads in the Black Aegean. Oxford. Goldhill, Simon, (1984) Language, Sexuality, Narrative: The Oresteia, Cambridge.

332

Bibliography

Gould, J. (1984) Modern American Women Poets. New York. Graham, J. (1987) The End of Beauty. New York. Graziosi, B., and Greenwood, E. (eds.) (2007) Homer in the Twentieth Century, Oxford. Green, P. (1994) Ovid: The Poems of Exile. London [2nd edn. 2005]. (2005) The Poems of Catullus. Berkeley, Calif. Greene, E. (ed.) (1996) Re-Reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission. Berkeley Calif. Greenwood, E. (2005) ‘ “We Speak Latin in Trinidad”: Uses of Classics in Caribbean Literature’, in Goff (2005) 65–91. (2007) ‘Logue’s Television: Reading Homer from a distance’, in Graziosi and Greenwood (2007) 145–76. Griffin, J. (1986) The Mirror of Myth: Classical Themes and Variations. London. Gunn, T. (1994) ‘Arachne’, in Hofmann and Lasdun (1994) 145. Habinek, T. (2002) ‘Ovid and Empire’, in Hardie (2002) 46–61. Hadas, M. (1935) ‘Utopian Sources in Herodotus’, CPh 30: 113–21. Hadas, R. (1975) Starting from Troy. Boston. Hall, E. (2007), ‘Subjects, selves and survivors’, Helios 34: 125–59. Macintosh, F., and Wrigley. A. (eds.) (2004) Dionysus since 69. Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium. Oxford. Hallett, J. P., and Van Nortwick, T. (eds.) (1997) Compromising Traditions: The Personal Voice in Classical Scholarship. London. Halperin, D. (1990) One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love. London. Hamilton, I. (1964), ‘Four Conversations’, London Magazine 4.6: 72–7. Hamner, R. D. (ed.) (1997) Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Boulder, Colo., and London. Handley, George (2005) ‘Derek Walcott’s Poetics of the Environment in The Bounty’, Callaloo 28.1: 201–15. Hardie, P. (ed.) (2002) The Cambridge Companion to Ovid. Cambridge. Barchiesi, A., and Hinds, S. (eds.) (1999) Ovidian Transformations: Essays on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its Reception. Cambridge. Hardwick, L. (2000) Translating Words, Translating Cultures. London. (2002) ‘Classical Texts in Post-Colonial Literatures: Consolation, Redress and New Beginnings in the Work of Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 9/2 (Fall 2002): 236–56. (2006) ‘ “Murmurs in the Cathedral”: The Impact of Translations from Greek Poetry and Drama on Modern Work in English by Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney’, Yearbook of English Studies 36: 204–15.

Bibliography

333

(2007a) ‘Postcolonial Studies’, in Kallendorf, 312–27. (2007b) ‘Singing Across the Faultlines: Cultural Shifts in TwentiethCentury Receptions of Homer’, in Graziosi and Greenwood (2007) 47–71. (2008) ‘Translated Classics Around the Millenium: Vibrant Hybrids or Shattered Icons?’ in Lianeri and Zajko, 341–66. (forthcoming), ‘Classical Texts and Modern Poetry in English’, in J. Parker and T. Mathews (eds.), Translation, Trauma and Tradition. Oxford, forthcoming. and Gillespie, C. (eds.) (2007) Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds. Oxford. and Stray, C. A. (eds.) (2007) A Companion to Classical Receptions. Oxford. Harrison, S. J. (1990a) ‘Some Views of the Aeneid in the Twentieth Century’, in Harrison (1990b) 1–20. (ed.) (1990b) Oxford Readings in Vergil’s Aeneid. Oxford. (ed.) (1995) Homage to Horace: A Bimillenary Celebration. Oxford. (2001a) ‘Some Generic Problems in Horace’s Epodes: or, On (Not) Being Archilochus’, in Cavarzere et al. (2001) 165–86. (2001b) ‘Fatal Attraction: Paris, Helen and the Unity of Catullus 51’, Classical Bulletin 77: 161–7. (2002) ‘A. E. Housman’s Latin Elegy to Moses Jackson’, TAPA 132: 209–13. (2004) ‘Bimillenary Ovid: some recent versions of the Metamorphoses’, Translation and Literature 13: 251–67. (2007a) ‘Virgilian Contexts’, in Hardwick and Stray, 113–26. (2007b) review of Merten, JHS 127: 261–2. (2007c ) ‘Horace and the Construction of the English Victorian Gentleman’, Helios 34: 207–22. (ed.) (2007d) The Cambridge Companion to Horace. Cambridge. Harrison, T. (1992) The Gaze of the Gorgon. Newcastle. Hartnett, M. (2003) Translations. Oldcastle, Co. Meath. Haussig, H. W. (1980) ‘Die Ältesten Nachrichten der Griechischen und Lateinischen Quellen über die Routen der Seidenstrasse nach Zentralund Ostasien’, Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientarum Hungaricae 28: 9–24. Hayman, R. (2003) The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath [2nd edn.]. London. Heaney, S. (1968) ‘Old Derry’s Walls’, The Listener, 24 October 1968, 522. Heaney, S. (1987) The Haw Lantern. London. (1991) Seeing Things. London. Heaney, S. (1995) Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture. New York. (1996) The Spirit Level. London.

334

Bibliography

Heaney, S. (1997) ‘The language of Exile’, in Hamner (1997) 239–50. [First published in Parnassus vol. 8 (1980) and also published as ‘The Murmur of Malvern’, in id., The Government of the Tongue (1988)]. (1998) Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996. London. (2001) Electric Light. London. (2004a) The Burial at Thebes. London. (2004b) Anything Can Happen. Dublin. (2006) District and Circle. London. Heilbrun, C. G. (1990) ‘What Was Penelope Unweaving?’ in Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women. New York, 103–11. Heitman, R. (2005) Taking Her Seriously: Penelope and the Plot of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’. Ann Arbor. Henderson, J. (1999) ‘Ch-ch-ch changes’, in Hardie et al. (1999) 301–23. Hennig, R. (1935) ‘Herodots Handelsweg zu den siberischen Issedonen’, Klio 28: 242–54. Hermann, A. (1916) ‘Issedoi’, RE 9.1. 2235–46. Herzfeld, E. (1947) Zoroaster and His World. Princeton. Hills, P. (2005) Horace. London. Hinds, S. (1998) Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry. Cambridge. Hofmann, M., and Lasdun, J. (1994) After Ovid. London. Hofmeister, T. P. (2005) ‘Joseph Brodsky’s Roman Body’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 12.2: 81–93. Holbrook, David, (1976) Sylvia Plath. Poetry and Existence. London. Hollis, A. S. (2007) Fragments of Roman Poetry c.60 bc–ad 20. Oxford. Holmes, J. (1993) John Bowlby and Attachment Theory. London. Homans, M. (1987) ‘Feminist Criticism and Theory: The Ghost of Creusa’, Yale Journal of Criticism 1:53–82. (1988) ‘The Woman in the Cave: Recent Feminist Fictions and the Classical Underworld’, Contemporary Literature 29: 369–402. Honig, Edwin (ed.) (1985) The Poet’s Other Voice: Conversations on Literary Translation. Amherst. Humphreys, S. C. (2004) ‘Classics and Colonialism: towards an erotics of the discipline’, in The Strangeness of Gods, Oxford, 8–50. Hurst, I. (2006) Victorian Women and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer. Oxford. Jackson, A. (1993) Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners. Evanston, Ill. Jackson, A. (2003) Catullus for Children. Auckland. Jennings, C. (2001) ‘The erotic poetics of Anne Carson’, University of Toronto Quarterly 70.4: 924–36.

Bibliography

335

Jebb, R. C. (1967) The Complete Plays of Sophocles. New York. [Johnston, A., ed.] (1637) Delitiae poetarum Scotorum huius aevi illustrium. Amsterdam. Johnston, D. (1986), ‘Q and A: Michael Longley’, Irish Literary Supplement, 5.2: 20–2. Johnstone, R. (1985) ‘The Longley Tapes’, Honest Ulsterman 78: 13–31. Jones, F. M. A. (1994) Review of Hofmann and Lasdun, Liverpool Classical Monthly 19: 60–3. Joplin, P. K. (1984) ‘The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours’, Stanford Literature Review 1: 25–53. Joshel, S. R., Malamud, M., and McGuire, D. (eds.) (2001) Imperial Projections. Baltimore. Joyce, J. (1969) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Harmondsworth. Jung, C. G. (1961) The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: Vol. 4. London. Kallendorf, C. W. (ed.) A Companion to the Classical Tradition. Oxford. Kavanagh, P. (2005), Collected Poems (ed. A Quinn). London. Kearney, R. (1983) ‘Language Play: Brian Friel and Ireland’s verbal theatre’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 72: 20–56. Kelly, A. (2007) A Referential Commentary and Lexicon to Iliad VIII. Oxford. Kennedy, D. (2002) ‘Recent Receptions of Ovid’, in Hardie (2002) 320–35. Kennedy-Andrews, E. (2000) ‘Conflict, Violence and “The fundamental interrelatedness of all things” ’, in Peacock and Devine, 73–99. (2008) Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland 1968–2008. Cambridge. Kenner, H. (ed.) (1953) The Collected Translations of Ezra Pound. London. Kermode, F. (ed.) (1975) Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. New York. King, B. (2000) Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life. Oxford. King, M. (1995) Frank Sargeson—A Life. London. Kinsella, T. (1986) (ed.) The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse. Oxford. Kirk, C. A. (2004) Sylvia Plath. A Biography. Westport, Conn. Kirsch, A. (1998), ‘All mere complexities’, New Republic 218: 37–42. (2005) The Wounded Surgeon. Confessions and Transformation in Six American Poets. New York. Klein, B. (2007) On the uses of history in recent Irish writing. Manchester and New York. Kossman, N. (ed.) (2001) Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths. Oxford. Krisak, L. (2006) The Odes of Horace. Manchester. Kroll, J. (1976) Chapter in a Mythology. The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York. Kubiak, D. P. (2001) ‘Digging for the Classics in Seamus Heaney’s Opened Ground’, Classical and Modern Literature 21: 71–86.

336

Bibliography

Lamming, G. (1991) In the Castle of my Skin. With a foreword by Sandra Pouchet Paquet. Ann Arbor [first published in 1953]. Langholm, S. (2003) The Sweeter Tide of Pain. Oslo. Lane Fox, R. (2004) The Making of Alexander. Oxford and London. Lawrence, D. H. (1932) Apocalypse. London. Lecercle, J.-J. (1990) The Violence of Language. London and New York. Lee, G. (1996) Propertius: The Poems. Oxford. (1998) Horace: Odes and Carmen Saeculare. Leeds. Lee, H. D. P. (trans.) (1955) Plato: The Republic. London. Lehrer, S. (1985) The Dialectics of Art and Life. A Portrait of Sylvia Plath as Woman and Poet. Salzburg. Levine, S. J. (1991) The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. Saint Paul. Lianeri, A., and Zajko, W. (eds.) (2008) Translation and the Classic. Oxford. Licht, H. (1932) Sexual Life in Ancient Greece. London. Lindegger, P. (1979) Griechische und Römische Quellen zum Peripheren Tibet. Teil I. Rikon. Lloyd-Jones, H. (1994) Sophocles I. Cambridge, Mass. (1998) Sophocles II. Cambridge, Mass. and Parsons, P. (1983) Supplementum Hellenisticum. Berlin. Logue, C. (1981) War Music. London. (1999) Prince Charming. London. Longley, M. (1969) No Continuing City. London. (1979) The Echo Gate. London. (1986a) Interview with Dillon Johnston [‘Q&A: Michael Longley’], Irish Literary Supplement 22: 21. (1986b) Poems 1963–1983. Harmondsworth. (1991) Gorse Fires. London. (1993) Baucis and Philemon—After Ovid. Hatch End, Middlesex. (1994) Tuppenny Stung: Autobiographical Chapters, Belfast. (1995) The Ghost Orchid. London. (2000) The Weather in Japan. London. (ed.) (2002) 20th Century Irish Poems selected by Michael Longley. London. (2004a) Snow Water. London. (2004b) interview in Poetry Book Society Bulletin, No. 200, Spring 2004. (2005) The Rope Makers. London. (2006) Collected Poems, London and Winston-Salem. (2007) interview in Poetry Review, Volume 96.4, Winter 2006/7, 61–4. (2008) Wavelengths: Various Translations. London.

Bibliography

337

Loseff, L., and Polukhina, V. (eds.) (1987) Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics. Basingstoke. Lyne, R. (2002) ‘Ovid in English Translation’, in Hardie, 249–63. Lyne, R. O. A. M. (2007) Collected Papers on Latin Poetry. Oxford. Lyons, S. (2007) Horace’s Odes and the Mystery of Do-Re-Mi. Oxford. Macafee, C. I. (1996) A Concise Ulster Dictionary, Oxford and New York. MacDiarmid, H. (1978) Complete Poems 1920–1976 [2 vols]. London. Macdonald, C. (1985) Alternate Means of Transport: Poems. New York. McDonald, M., and Walton, J. M. (eds.) (2002) Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy. London. McDonald, P. (2000) ‘Lapsed Classics: Homer, Ovid and Michael Longley’s Poetry’, in Peacock and Devine (2000) 35–50. MacDonald, T. (2003) ‘The pilgrim and the riddle: father-daughter kinship in Anne Carson’s The Anthropology of Water’, Canadian Literature 176: 67–83. Macfarlane, R. (2007) Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Oxford. McGuckian, M. (1997) Selected Poems 1978–1994. Oldcastle, Co. Meath. McGuinness, F. (1996) Carthaginians in Plays 1. London, 291–379. Macintosh, F., Michelakis, P., Hall, E., and Taplin, O. (eds.) (2005) Agamemnon in Performance. Oxford. McKay, F. M. (1990) The Life of James K. Baxter. Auckland. McNeilly, Kevin (2003) ‘Gifts and questions: an interview with Anne Carson’, Canadian Literature 176: 12–25. McSweeney, S. (1983) ‘The Poets’ Picture of Education’, Crane Bag 7.2: 134–142. Maguire, S. (2004) ‘Translation’, Poetry Review 94.4: 52–61. Maier, C. (1980) ‘Some Thoughts on Translations, Imagination and (Un)academic Activity’, Translation Review 6: 25–9. Marsack, Robyn, (1992) Open Guides to Literature: Sylvia Plath. Buckingham, Pa. Martindale, C. (ed.) (1984) Virgil and his Influence: Bimillennial Studies. Bristol. (1997a) ‘Green Politics: the Eclogues’, in id. (1997b) 107–24. (ed.) (1997b) The Cambridge Companion to Virgil. Cambridge. (2007) ‘Reception’, in Kallendorf, 297–311. and Thomas, R. (eds.) (2006) Classics and The Uses of Reception. Oxford. Mason, R. A. K. (1962) Collected Poems. Wellington. Mercuri, R. (1984) Semantica di Gerione: Il motivo del viaggio nella “Commedia” die Dante. Rome: Bulzoni.

338

Bibliography

Merriam, E. (1958) The Double Bed: From the Feminine Side. New York. Merten, Kai (2004) Antike Mythen—Mythos Antike: Posthumanistische Antikerezeption in der englischsprachigen Lyrik der Gegenwart. Tübingen. Middlebrook, Diane Wood, (2003) Her Husband: Hughes and Plath—A Marriage. London. Miller, F. J. (trans.), (1916; 3rd edn. 1977, rev. G. P. Goold), Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Cambridge, Mass. Miller, N. K. (1986) ‘Arachnologies: The Woman, The Text, and the Critic’, in The Poetics of Gender. New York, 270–95. Morash, C. (2002) ‘A Night at the Theatre 7, Translations’, in A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000, Cambridge, 233–41. Morrison, B. (1980) The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s. London. Moyer, Patricia (1997) ‘Getting Personal About Euripides’, in Hallett and Van Nortwick (1997) 102–19. Mühlestein, H. (1986) ‘Kirschmus und Kahlköpfe’, 561–4 in O-o-pe-rosi: Festschrift für Ernst Risch zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. A. Etter. Berlin, 561–4. Muldoon, P. (2001) Poems 1968–1998. London. Murnaghan, S. (2002) ‘The Trials of Telemachus: Who was the Odyssey Meant For?’ Arethusa 35: 133–53. Murray, A. T., and Dimock, G. (1995) The Odyssey. London and Cambridge, Mass. Nance, G. A., and Jones J. P. (1984) ‘Doing Away with Daddy: Exorcism and Sympathetic Magic’, in Wagner (1984) 124–30. Nietzsche, F. (1882) ‘On the Problem of Translation’, trans. P. Mollenhauer, in Schulte and Biguenet (1992) 68–70. Nisbet, G. (2006) Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture. Bristol. O’Brien, C. C. (1974) States of Ireland. London. O’Brien, M. C. (2003) The Same Age as the State. Dublin. O’Connor, F. (1962) Kings, Lords and Commons. London. O’Hara, F. (1995) The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen. Berkeley, Calif. O’Loughlin, M. (2002) ‘Latin as a Foreign Language’, in Longley (2002) 126–7. O’Rourke, M. (2004) ‘What is Anne Carson doing on The L Word?’ Slate, 11 Feb. 2004 [http://slate.msn.com/id/2095317/, accessed 11/8/2008]. Ostriker, A. (1982) ‘The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking’, Signs 8: 68–90. (1986) Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America. Boston.

Bibliography

339

O’Tuama, S., and Kinsella, T. (eds.) (1981) An Duanaire/Poems of the Dispossessed. Dublin. Pack, R., and Parini, J. (eds.) (1996) Touchstones: American Poets on Favourite Poems. Hanover, NH, and London. Pantelia, M. C. (1993) ‘Spinning and Weaving: Ideas of Domestic Order in Homer’, AJP 114: 493–501. Parker, H. N. (1993) ‘Sappho Schoolmistress’, TAPA 123: 309–51. Pascal, B. (1962) Pascal’s Pensées [trans. M. Turnell]. London. Pastan, L. (1996) ‘On “The World as Meditation” by Wallace Stevens’, in Pack and Parini (1996) 184–5. (1998) Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems, 1968–1998. New York and London. Paterson, D. (1999) The Eyes. London. (2006) Orpheus. London. Peacock, A. J., and Devine, K. (eds.) (2000) The Poetry of Michael Longley. Gerrards Cross. Peek, W. (1955) Griechische Versinschriften 1. Grabepigramme. Berlin. Phillips, E. E. (1955) ‘The Legend of Aristeas: Fact and Fancy in Early Greek Notions of East Russia, Siberia, and Inner Asia’, Artibus Asiae 18: 161–77. (1960) ‘The Argippaei of Herodotus’, Artibus Asiae 23: 124–6. Phillips, S. (1991) Beyond the Myths. Mother-Daughter Relationships in Psychology, History, Literature and Everyday Life. Harmondsworth. Picone, M. (ed.) (2001) Dante, da Firenze all’ aldilà. Florence. Plath, S. (1963) The Bell-Jar. London. (1979) Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Prose Writings. London. (1981) Collected Poems. London. (1982) The Journals of Sylvia Plath. New York. (2000) The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950–1962, ed. Karen V. Kukil. London. Pollak, A. (1993) (ed.) A Citizens’, inquiry: The Opsahl Report on Northern Ireland. Dublin. Pollard, C. (2004) New World Modernisms: T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite. Charlottesville and London. Polukhina, V. (ed.) (1992) Brodsky Through the Eyes of his Contemporaries. Basingstoke. Porter, J. I. (2004) ‘Vergil’s Voids’, Helios 31: 127–56. Pound, E. (1913) ‘How I began’, T’s Weekly (June) 707. (1970) ‘Horace’, Arion 9: 187. Prince, C. Kerr (2007) ‘A Divided Child, or Derek Walcott’s Post-Colonial Philology’, in Hardwick and Gillespie (2007) 170–91.

340

Bibliography

Pushkin, A. S. (1995) Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, trans. James A. Falen. Oxford. Rabinowitz, N. S. (1993) ‘Introduction’, in Rabinowitz and Richlin (1993) 1–20. and Richlin, A. (eds.) (1993) Feminist Theory and the Classics. London. Radice, W., and Reynolds, B. (1987) The Translator’s Art: Essays in Honour of Betty Radice. Harmondsworth. Rae, Ian (2000) ‘Dazzling Hybrids: The Poetry of Anne Carson’, Canadian Literature 166: 17–39. (2003) ‘Anne Carson and the Solway hoaxes’, Canadian Literature 176: 45–66. Raeburn, D. (trans.) (2004) Ovid: Metamorphoses. London. Randolph, J. A. (2003) ‘Interview: Jody Allen Randolph and Michael Longley’, Colby Quarterly 39: 294–9. Rees, R. (ed.) (2009) Ted Hughes and The Classics. Oxford. Reid, J. D. (1993) The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts: 1300– 1990s (2 vols.). Oxford. Renner, B (2004) ‘A Review of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red and Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings’ [http://www.elimae.com/reviews/ carson/paintings.html, accessed 11/8/08]. Reynolds, M. (2001) The Sappho Companion. Basingstoke. (2003) The Sappho History. Basingstoke. Rich, A. (1979) On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978. New York. Ridler, A. (1994) Collected Poems. Manchester. Rieu, E. V. (1946; rev. 1991) The Odyssey. Harmondsworth. Riley, K. (2008) The Reception and Performance of Euripides’ Herakles: Reasoning Madness. Oxford. Robinson, D. (2001) Who Translates: Translator Subjectivities Beyond Reason. Albany, NY. Roisman, H. M. (2006) ‘Helen in the Iliad; causa belli and Victim of War: From Silent Weaver to Public Speaker’, AJP 127: 1–36. Rolle, R. (1980) Die Welt der Skythen: Stutenmelker und Pferdebogner: Ein Antikes Reitervolk in neuer Sicht. Lucerne and Frankfurt. Rose, J. (1991) The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. London. Ross, R. J., and Hendry, J. (eds.) (1986) Sorley MacLean: Critical Essays. Edinburgh. Rotella, G. (2004) Castings: Monuments and Monumentality in Poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney. Nashville. Rowland, A. (2005) Holocaust Poetry. Edinburgh.

Bibliography

341

Rutherford, J. (ed.) (1990) Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London. Said, E. (1983) The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge, Mass. (2001) Reflections On Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass. Sanazaro, L. (1984) ‘The Transfiguring Self: Sylvia Plath, a Reconsideration’, in Wagner (1984) 87–97. Schein, S. (1995) ‘Female Representations and Interpreting the Odyssey’, in Cohen (1995) 17–28. Schulte, R., and Biguenet, J. (eds.) (1992) Theories of Translation. Chicago. Schultz, W. T. (2005) ‘Mourning, Melancholia, and Sylvia Plath’, in the Handbook of Psychobiography. Oxford, 158–74. Scott, J. (2005) ‘A Poetics of Survival: Sylvia Plath’s Electra Enactment’, in ead., Electra after Freud: Myth and Culture. London, 141–64. Seth, V. (1986) The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse. London. Skinner, M. B. (2005) Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture. Oxford. (2007a) ‘Authorial Arrangement of the Collection: Debate Past and Present’, in Skinner (2007b) 35–54. (ed.) (2007b) A Companion to Catullus. Oxford. Skoie, M. (2002) Reading Sulpicia: Commentaries 1475–1990. Oxford. Smith, S. (1975) The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith. London. Snyder, J. M. (1997) Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho. New York. Solomon, J. (2001) The Ancient World in the Cinema. New Haven. Spence, S. (ed.) (2001) Poets and Critics Read Vergil. New Haven. Stanford W. B. (1954) The Ulysses Theme. Oxford. (1976) Ireland and the Classical Tradition. Totowa, NJ, and Dublin. Stanton, Robert (2003) ‘ “I am writing this to be as wrong as possible to you”: Anne Carson’s Errancy’, Canadian Literature 176: 28–43. Stead, C. K. (1988) Between. Auckland. (2000a) The Right Thing. Auckland. (2000b) The Writer at Work. Dunedin. (2002) Dog. Auckland. (2004) The Red Tram. Auckland. Steiner, G. (1975) After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford. (1999) ‘Greek is the Word’, The Observer, 24 October 1999. (2000) Grammars of Creation. London. Stevenson, J. (2006) Latin Women Poets. Oxford. Stevenson, Anne (1998) Bitter Fame. A Life of Sylvia Plath. Boston. Strand, M. (2001) ‘Some Observations on Aeneid Book VI’, in Spence (2001) 64–72.

342

Bibliography

Stray, C. (1997) Classics Transformed: Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960. Oxford. (ed.) (2003) The Classical Association: The First Century 1903–2003. Oxford. Symonds, J. A. (1901) A Problem in Greek Ethics. London. Talbot, J. (2003) ‘Twenty-first century Horace and the end of a Shared Culture’, Arion 11: 149–92. Taplin, O. (2002) ‘Contemporary Poetry and Classics’, in Wiseman (2002) 1–20. (2004) ‘Sophocles, Philoctetes, Seamus Heaney’s, and Some Other Recent Half-Rhymes’, in Hall et al. (2004) 145–67. (2005) ‘The Harrison Version: “So long ago it’s become a song?” in Macintosh et al. (2005) 235–54. (2007) ‘Some Assimilations of the Homeric Simile in Later TwentiethCentury Poetry’, in Graziosi and Greenwood (2007) 177–90. Tartt, D. (1992) The Secret History. London. Terada, R. (1992) Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry. Boston. Terry, P. (ed.) (2000) Ovid Metamorphosed. London. Theodorakopoulos, E. (1997) ‘Closure: the Book of Virgil’, in Martindale (1997b) 155–65. Thomas, N., and Le Saux, F. (eds.) (1996) Myth and its Legacy in European Literature. Durham. Thomas, R. F. (2001a) ‘The Georgics of Resistance: From Virgil to Heaney’, Vergilius 47: 117–47. (2001b) Virgil and the Augustan Reception. Cambridge. (2007), ‘The Streets of Rome: The Classical Dylan’, Oral Tradition 22: 30–56. Tomaschek, W. (1895) ‘Argippaei’, RE 2.1: 719–21. Trypanis, C. A. (1971) The Penguin Book of Greek Verse. London. Tschofen, M. (2004) ‘ “First I must tell about seeing”: (de)monstrations of visuality and the dynamics of metaphor in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red’, Canadian Literature 180: 31–50. Twiddy, I. (2006) ‘Seamus Heaney’s Versions of Pastoral’, Essays in Criticism 56: 50–71. Tymoczko, M. (1999) ‘Post-Colonial Writing and Literary Translation’, in Bassnett and Trivedi (1999) 19–40. Vandiver, E. (2007) ‘Translating Catullus’, in Skinner (2007) 523–41. Vendler, H. (1995) The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham. Cambridge, Mass., and London. Venuti, L. (1998) The Scandals of Translation: Towards an ethics of difference. London.

Bibliography

343

Wagner, L. W. (ed.) (1984) Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath. Boston. Wagner-Martin, L. (1999) Sylvia Plath. A Literary Life. Basingstoke. Wahl, S. (1999) ‘Autobiography of Red and Other Anthropologies’, Iowa Review 29: 80–8. Wakoski, D. (1991) Medea the Sorceress. Santa Rosa, Calif. Walcott, D. (1980) The Star-Apple Kingdom. London. (1981) The Fortunate Traveller. New York. (1984) Midsummer. London. (1987) The Arkansas Testament. London. (1990) Omeros. London. (1992) Collected Poems: 1948–1984. London. (1997) The Bounty. London. (1998) ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’, in What the Twilight Says. London, 65–84. (2000) Tiepolo’s Hound. London. (2003) Epitaph for the Young: A Poem in Twelve Cantos. Agenda: Special Issue on Derek Walcott. Agenda 39/1–3 (Winter 2002–3): 15–50 [first published in 1949]. (2004a) The Prodigal. London. (2004b) Another Life: Fully Annotated. With a critical essay and comprehensive notes by Edward Baugh and Colbert Nepaulsingh. Boulder and London. Walker, S. (1983) ‘Women and Housing in Classical Greece: The Archaeological Evidence’, in Cameron and Kuhrt (1983) 81–91. Walton, J. M. (2005) ‘Translation or Transubstantiation’, in Macintosh et al., 189–206. Washington, I. H., and Tobol, C. E. (1980) ‘Kriemhild and ClytemnestraSisters in Crime or Independent Women?’ in Davidson and Broner (1980) 15–21. Watson, L. C. (1995) ‘Horace’s Epodes The Impotence of Iambos?’, in Harrison, 188–202. (2007) ‘The Epodes: Horace’s Archilochus?’ in Harrison (2007) 93–104. Way, A. S. (1988) Euripides: III. Cambridge, Mass. Wedde, I. (2001) The Commonplace Odes. Auckland. West, D. (1997) Horace: The Complete Odes and Epodes. Oxford. West, M. L. (1977) ‘Erinna’, ZPE 25: 95–119. Wheeler, A. L. (1924; rev. G. P. Goold, 1996) Ovid: Tristia, Ex Ponto. London and Cambridge, Mass. Williams, E. (1969) Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister, London. Williams, M. F. (1999) ‘Seamus Heaney’s Exposure and Vergil’s Aeneid’, Classical and Modern Literature 19: 243–56.

344

Bibliography

Winkler, J. J. (1981) ‘Gardens of Nymphs: Public and Private in Sappho’s Lyrics’, in Foley (1981) 63–89. Winkler, M. M. (2001) Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema. Oxford. (2004) Gladiator: Film and History. Oxford. (2006) Troy: From Homer’s Iliad to Hollywood Epic. Oxford. (2007) Spartacus: Film and History. Oxford. Wiseman, T. P. (1974) Cinna The Poet and Other Roman Essays. Leicester. (1985) Catullus & His World: A Reappraisal. Cambridge. (ed.) (2002) Classics in Progress: Essays On Ancient Greece and Rome. Oxford. Woolf, V. (1928) Orlando: A Biography. London. (1994) ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf IV: 1925–1928, London, 38–53. Wright, G. T. (1975) ‘On translating Catullus’, Centennial Review 19: 172–4. Wyke, M. (1997) Projecting The Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema and History. London. Yeats, W. B. (1962) A Vision. London. Zajko, V., and Leonard M. (eds.) (2005) Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought. Oxford. Ziolkowski, T. (1993) Virgil and the Moderns. Princeton. (2005a) Ovid and the Moderns. Ithaca, NY. (2005b) ‘Uses and Abuses of Horace: His Reception since 1935 in Germany and Anglo-America’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 12: 183–215. (2007) ‘Anglo-American Catullus since the Mid-Twentieth Century’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 13: 409–30.

Index Adcock, Fleur 238, 295 Aeschylus, versions of 194–217 Almond, Maureen 12, 19–42 Antigone, versions of 122–42 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 192 Armitage, Simon 7, 52 Atwood, Margaret 3, 7 Balmer, Josephine 10, 13–14, 43–63 Baxter, James K. 296–310, 315 ‘Belfast Group’, the 112, 164 Blake, William 226–7 Boland, Eavan 240–3 Brodsky, Joseph 9–10, 256–7, 260–1 Buchanan, George 72–3, 77–8 Bush, George W. 120, 133 Calvino, Italo 126, 130–1 Carson, Anne 13, 14, 69–70, 81, 218–37 Catullus, versions of 13–14, 50–2, 82–96, 156–7, 295–323 Celan, Paul 221 Crichton, James (‘the Admirable’) 78–9 Claudian, versions of 53 Code-switching 271 ‘Confessional’ poetry 214, 276–7 Constantine, David 52 Copley, Frank 13 Corinna, versions of 47–50 Crawford, Robert 65–81 Crimp, Martin 6 Curnow, Allen 321–2 Dante 225–8 Dido, Virgilian 246–51 Dionysus in 69 4 Drabble, Margaret 254 Duffy, Carol Ann 9 Dylan, Bob 10 Egan, Desmond 5 Electra, versions of 194–217 Erinna, versions of 48–50

Euripides, versions of 4–5, 117–21, 194–217 Fagles, Robert 6 Fanthorpe, U. A. 244–6 Film, classics and 3 Freud, Sigmund 195–6, 199, 206–7, 230 Friel, Brian 182–91 Fugard, Athol 127 Gallipoli 59–63 Geryon 218–37 Glück, Louise 7, 250–1, 283–6 Graham, Jorie 291–2 Green, Peter 10 Hadas, Rachel 247 Harrison, Tony 3, 5, 6, 117–21 Hartnett, Michael 11 Heaney, Seamus 5, 11, 12–13, 122–42, 163–71, 252–4 Heidegger, Martin 231–2 Heath-Stubbs, John 14 Hedge-schools 184–5 Herodotus, on Argippaei 143–51 Homer, versions of 6–8, 57–9, 97–105, 163–71, 186–8 Horace, versions of 11–12, 19–42, 111, 305–7 Hughes, Ted 4, 5, 9 Iraq, invasion of 121, 133–4 Irish, poetry in 135–7 Jackson, Angela 287 Jackson, Anna 82–96 Johnston, Arthur 72, 76–7 Juvenal, versions of 56 Larkin, Philip 2 Latin and Greek, teaching of, at school 1 Lattimore, Richmond 6 Lochhead, Liz 4

346

Index

Logue, Christopher 6 Lombardo, Stanley 6 Longley, Edna 148–51, 164 Longley, Michael 8–9, 69, 81, 97–113, 143–51, 159–62, 163–71, 175–82 Lowell, Robert 214 Macdonald, Cynthia 283 Maguire, Sarah 83 Mahon, Derek 5 Mandelbaum, Allen 9 McGuckian, Medbh 243–4 Meleager, versions of 73–4 Merriam, Eve 281 Mitchell, Katie 6 Movement, the 2 Muldoon, Paul 251–2 Murray, Gilbert 119 New Zealand, classics in 295–323 Nietzsche, Friedrich 84 novel, in verse 224 O’Brien, Conor Cruise 128–32 O’Hara, Frank 82 O’Loughlin, Michael 172 Orkney 65–6 Ovid, versions of 8–10, 59–63, 107–10, 112–13, 158–62, 175–82, 287–8 Pastan, Linda 281–3, 291, 293–4 Paulin, Tom 5 Penelope 277–94 Penguin Classics 2, 71 Plath, Sylvia 194–217, 278 Plato 57 Propertius, versions of 105–6, 153–5 Quinn, Kenneth 13, 298 Reception theory 15–16 Ridler, Anne 247–8

Sappho, versions of 14, 46–7, 67–70, 110–11, 220 Sargeson, Frank 318–9 Scots, versions in 80–1 Simonides, versions of 80–1 Slavitt, David 9 Smith, Stevie 249–50 Sophocles, versions of 5, 53, 120–42, 194–217 Soyinka, Wole 4 Stanford, W. B. 97–8, 164 Stead, C. K. 85–6, 310–23 Steiner, George 83, 192 Stesichorus, versions of 218–37 Sulpicia, versions of 14, 111, 156 Tartt, Donna 2 Teesside 19–42 Television, classics and 3 Tibullus, versions of 106–7, 155–6 Tragedy, Greek, versions of 4–6 Translation, discussion of 43–63, 122–42, 163–71, 172–93, 266–74 Translation, ‘thick’ 192 ‘Troubles’, Northern Irish 5, 101–7, 122–42, 152 Virgil, versions of 12–14, 111, 188–91, 238–54, 255–66 Wakoski, Diane 280 Walcott, Derek 3, 7–8, 10, 255–74 Wedde, Ian 12, 295 Whitman, Walt 219 Wilson, Florentius 80 Wilson, Woodrow 120 Women, and classics 7, 14, 275–94 Woolf, Virginia 214 World’s Classics (OUP) 2–3, 71 Wright, G. T. 82 Zukofsky, Louis 13