Sun dogs? Adam's reticence in Paradiso 26

. . . out of Norse mythology and archaic names (Danish: solhunde (sun dog), Norwegian: solhund (sun dog), Swedish: solvarg (sun wolf)), . . . constellations of two wolves hunting the Sun and the Moon, one after and one before, may be a possible origin for the term. Sun Dog

As soon as Adam begins to speak in Paradiso 26, he wields a very fancy, learned Greek term, twice: parhelion -- image, copy, equal -- of the sun:

Indi spirò: Sanz' essermi proferta da te,
la voglia tua discerno meglio
che tu qualunque cosa t'è più certa; 

perch' io la veggio nel verace speglio
che fa di sé pareglio a l'altre cose,
e nulla face lui di sé pareglio."

Then breathed: "Without thy uttering it to me,
Thine inclination better I discern
Than thou whatever thing is surest to thee; 

For I behold it in the truthful mirror,
That of Himself all things parhelion makes,
And none makes Him parhelion of itself.  (Par. 26: 103-108)

His claim to knowledge is exactly like that of Cacciaguida, Beatrice and others in Paradise - "I know your thoughts better than you do," because the interlocutor is looking directly into the mind of God - the mirror that cannot be mirrored.

Photo of an actual parhelion - or "sundog"

The use of parhelion -- such a showy word -- is arresting. First, it's Greek, and might remind us that Adam's doppelganger, Ulysses, would not even respond to someone who spoke to him in a tongue other than his own. The question of language is already in play before Adam addresses it in his answers to Dante's four questions.

There is nothing hackneyed in Dante's presentation of the first Man. No one else would have approached Adam in this way. First, the insistent recurrence of "firstness" - primaia - marks this passage as concerned with the question of what it means to be "number one" - how to us humans, it is simply unacceptable to be number two. At the root of Adams trapassar, there is this moment of negation - YOU are not number one, I AM. Milton runs endless variants upon Satan's negation, and Adam's.

Dante quietly raises the issue within an allusive passage that begins with the sun and parahelions. Whatever else one might make of this word here, two things are true - this is a hapax legomenon, except it isn't, because the rare word is used twice in two lines. Its eye-catching uniqueness is immediately undercut by the duplicity of its doubling repetition.

Dante is mimicking the sad lack of language -- the power of ontological origination does not lie within it or us. In the text of medieval astrology, the parhelion was equated with mock suns, also known as sun dogs. These mirrors of the sun were bright, but nothing in comparison with the real deal. We and our words are paltry doppelgangers, mockeries of a Maker whose variety infinitely exceeds our imagination.

If one asks where this deflation of duality occurs in Paradiso 26, the best reply might be, "once Adam opens his mouth -- everywhere." He's a dud. Far from the rhetorical power of Ulysses of Inferno 26, who with a very brief speech ignited an exhausted team to the ends of the Earth (devil take the hindmost), Adam sorts out the difference between gustar del legno and trapassar del segno, echoing his Greek descendant's decision to go beyond the segno of Hercules.

To trapassar il segno is to enter a world of conventional, un-Adamic language:

ché l'uso d'i mortali è come fronda
 in ramo, che sen va e altra vene.

Echoing our ineluctable mortality from the greatest poets -- Homer, Virgil, Horace -- links language not to Prometheus's stolen fire, but to the negation of it. To be human is not to be like Adam's words -- but to be true children of an ephemerality indistinguishable from them.

The shortcoming of the father of our species is as clear, and as powerful, as the structural ironies visited upon Francesca, Ugolino and other denizens of hell. Adam's transgression brought him the gift of counting. The proportions of Edenic bliss to earthly existence to time in Limbo are not only curiously precise, but tacitly comical. Mosquitoes live longer than Adam in Paradise. "Congratulations on toting that up -- you traded immortality for that?" Something of this grimaces over the scene.

In view of this, the reader needs ask: where is the recuperation of Adam? Where is the theology of the fortunate fall?

Here's one suggestion. With the number play in this canto, Adam is always clear about his, and language's, non-primacy. He might be an animal coverto, but he's hiding nothing.

"Nel monte che si leva più da l'onda,
 fu'io, con vita pura e disonesta,
 da la prim' ora a quella che seconda,
come 'l sol muta quadra, l'ora sesta.”

"Upon the mount that highest o'er the wave
  Rises was I, in life or pure or sinful,
  From the first hour to that which is the second,
As the sun changes quadrant, to the sixth."

Adam's loss of immortal bliss occurred shortly after the sixth hour of his Day 1, at the moment the second quadrant of the sun's journey begins. His exile occurs at the first hour of the second quadrant -- the one that followed  -- "seconda" -- the prim'ora of his bright nativity.

That this echoes the hour of the sun's journey in which the crucial Good Friday act of his (and Dante's) redemption began remains unspoken. Adam omits the inexplicable act of caritas that took him and us beyond the segno of mortality. The father of language has no words for that. One can charitably ask whether any Ulyssean encomium could more adequately convey the primal power of the Word than Adam's reticence.

Noises off: Sound, sense and wildness in Philoctetes

The spare theatrical texture of Sophocles' Philoctetes is the sign of a playwright who has encountered complexity. It teases us into thinking we are "seeing" all there is to see. In contrast to earlier works -- such as Antigone and Women of Trachis -- this late work (produced in 409 BC, when Sophocles was nearing 90) has little of their dazzlingly dense poetry, laden with myth and mystery.

The lines seem more direct, less rifted with ore, yet immense dimensions of story trail behind them. Also, there's a crabbed, echoic, halting rhythm at times that strikes the ear -- places where it's as if the sentences themselves, like the pathetic figure at the center of the play, had a hard time making headway against some ill-defined but crushingly painful resistance. One reaches for analogies - one thinks (perhaps too easily) of Beethoven's last quartets, reaching for musical form beyond any music that had ever reached the human ear.

Some of this is apparent early on, at the first sign of Philoctetes. The Chorus says:

προυφάνη κτύπος, 
φωτὸς σύντροφος ὡς τειρομένου του, 
ἤ που τῇδ᾽ ἢ τῇδε τόπων. 
205βάλλει βάλλει μ᾽ ἐτύμα 
φθογγά του στίβον κατ᾽ ἀνάγκαν 
ἕρποντος, οὐδέ με λάθει 
βαρεῖα τηλόθεν αὐδὰ τρυσάνωρ: διάσημα γὰρ θρηνεῖ.

Chorus 

I heard a sudden thud, one that might naturally come from a man worn by pain. From there it came, I think—or there. [205] It strikes, strikes hard on my ear, the sure sound of someone creeping along his way as if tortured. I cannot miss that grievous cry of a man hard-pressed, even from afar—its tone is too clear.

The above translation is Jebb's. Here's Torrance:

A cry has arisen
as if from a man worn down by pain -
from there - or over there - it came.
Surely I hear the voice of someone
helplessly creeping along;
I cannot ignore
that grievously wearying voice from afar -
it comes too distinctly.

And here's Grene:

Hush! I hear a footfall
footfall of a man that walks painfully.
Is it here? Is it here?
I hear a voice, now I can hear it clearly,
voice of a man, crawling along the path,
hard put to it to move. It's far away,
but I can hear it; I can hear the sound well,
the voice of a man wounded; it is quite clear now.

The chorus speaks of what it hears, and what it hears is not at first clear. προυφάνη κτύπος is vague - κτύπος means a loud noise, a crash, as of thunder, or horses' hooves. προυφάνη also is decidedly open-ended, suggesting something manifesting towards one.

Each translator has dealt with this auditory fuzziness differently. One hears a human "cry," another, a "footfall." Jebb is closest to the sense of "noise" with "thud," but inserts the subjectivity of the choral speaker with "I heard," when it's more a sense of a loud noise manifesting itself.

This might seem trivial, but Sophocles was certainly capable of having his chorus say "I heard a voice!" if that's what he was after. The passage goes on to underscore the strange non-localized aspect of the noise - Grene gets it best by being entirely uncertain where it's coming from:

is it here? is it here?

The first sign of Philoctetes, then, is a loud, rude sound, indistinct in quality and location. As the chorus continues, we gather that in fact it is speaking about its own experience of sensing, then gathering more information, then translating that initially vague noise into the "heavy sound of a weary man" (βαρεῖα τηλόθεν αὐδὰ τρυσάνωρ), and then into, "a clear wail" (διάσημα γὰρ θρηνεῖ).

We don't find the word for "voice" until φθογγά (206) - and even then, it's voice as something that strikes, repetitively (βάλλει βάλλει ), more like the traces of a hobbled gait (στίβος). What is emphasized is the process of moving from a purely sensory experience (from a random direction) to a more vivid awareness of a sound now apparently "far off" to an even more specific sense of a wail coming through clearly. διάσημα carries the word for "mark" or "sign" (σῆμα + διά (through)). A mere noise turns into a sign which then gets read, translated, and grasped as meaningful.

In a much shorter passage than I've managed in this comment, Sophocles dramatizes the act of translation. The chorus quite carefully moves through the stages of an interpretive act from initial sound to apparent signification to a sign it feels it can read, translate, understand. The translator who jumps in too soon with the presumption that one here is hearing a human voice betrays the way in which the speech makes the act of translation itself both its subject and the very thing it performs. Traduttore, tradittore indeed!

Why does this matter? Perhaps because this is but one of several moments in the Philoctetes when something manifests, but leaves substantial doubt about what it is, how it is to be understood and assimilated to consciousness. A few lines further on, Philoctetes will be overjoyed to hear the sound of Greek:

234: ὦ φίλτατον φώνημα: he'll say, upon hearing Neoptolemus's voice.

O cherished sound! 

Less than the meaning of Neoptolemus's words, Philoctetes delights in their sound. Their cadence stands out against the background noise of barbarous, non-Greek, utterance, whether of man, beast, or pounding surf. It manifests by its phonetic texture alone something that is not uncivilized, or barbarous, or monstrous. And this matters. Marooned on Lemnos for nine years, Philoctetes has been surrounded by wildness. It is by no means clear how far from savagery - from a purely wild being - he now is.

Yet it's this figure, human or no, that Odysseus must "persuade" to return to service in the Greek army, to Troy, to a mission that means nothing to the order of wild things -- signals lost in the crash of the pounding surf.

Where words work: Anne Carson on Greek

A friend in California shared this observation of Anne Carson's (author of Eros the Bittersweet and translator of Sappho):

"I don’t know every language in the world—maybe if I knew Sanskrit and Chinese I would think differently—but there’s something about Greek that seems to go deeper into words than any modern language. So that when you’re reading it, you’re down in the roots of where words work, whereas in English we’re at the top of the tree, in the branches, bouncing around. It was stunning to me, a revelation. And it continues to be stunning, continues to be like a harbor always welcoming. Strange, but welcoming."

It's an excerpt from an interview published in full here.

Some words in Euripides' Hippolytus

As we begin Euripides' Hippolytus, I'll be putting occasional notes here, some strictly philological in nature, others as seems fit.

Three words that come back again and again, with almost hypnotic regularity, are:

sōphrōsunē

From Ancient Greek σωφροσύνη (sōphrōsunē, “soundness of mind, prudence, self control, temperance”) from σώφρων (sōphrōn, “sane, moderate, prudent”) (from σῶς (sōs, “safe, sound, whole”) + φρήν (phrēn, “mind”)) +‎ -σύνη.

Sophrosyne is the subject of Plato's Charmides, and is treated in Book 2 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

semnos  σεμνός  revered, august, holy: 

I. [select] prop. of gods, e.g. Demeter, h.Cer.1,486; Hecate, Pi.P.3.79; Thetis,Id.N.5.25; etc. 

2. of things divine, ὄργια ς. h.Cer.478, S.Tr.765; “θέμεθλαδίκης” Sol.4.14; “ὑγίεια” Simon.70;  devoted to the gods,  holiness,D.21.126. 

II. of human or half-human beings, reverend, august, “ἐν θρόνῳσεμνῷ σεμνὸν θωκέοντα” Hdt.2.173,  E.Fr.688; αἱφαυλότεραι . . παρὰ τὰς σεμνὰς καθεδοῦνται beside the great ladies,Ar.Ec.617, cf. Isoc.3.42; “οἱ σεμνότατοι ἐν ταῖς πόλεσιν” Pl.Phdr.257d;ἄνθρωπος οὐ ς., i.e. a nobody, Ar.Fr.52D.; opp. χαῦνος, Pl.Sph.227b(Comp.); opp. κομψός, X.Oec.8.19; “σεμνὸς οὐ προσώπου συναγωγαῖς ἀλλὰβίου κατασκευαῖς” Isoc.9.44: c. dat., revered by . . , “ς. πόλει” Riv.Fil.57.379(Crete); also, worthy of respect, honourable, 1 Ep.Ti.3.8, 11, Ep.Phil. 4.8.
2.of human things, august, stately, majestic,  

III. in bad sense, proud, haughty, “τὰ σέμν᾽ ἔπη” S.Aj.1107; “σεμνότερος καὶ φοβερώτερος” And.4.18; τὸ ς. haughty reserve, E.Hipp.93, cf. Med.216.
2. [select] in contempt or irony, solemn, pompous.

aidos αἰδώς  reverence, awe, respect

A. reverence, awe, respect for the feeling or opinion of others or for one's own conscience, and so shame, self-respect (in full “ἑαυτοῦ αἰδώς” Hierocl.in CA9p.433M.), sense of honour, “αἰδῶ θέσθ᾽ ἐνὶ θυμῷ” Il.15.561; ἴσχε γὰρ αἰ.καὶ δέος ib.657, cf. Sapph.28, Democr. 179, etc.; “αἰ. σωφροσύνης πλεῖστον μετέχει, αἰσχύνης δὲ εὐψυχία” Th. 1.84, cf.E.Supp.911, Arist.EN1108a32, etc.; “αἰδοῖ μειλιχίῃ” Od.8.172; so “ἀλλά με κωλύει αἴδως” Alc.55 (Sapphus est versus); “ἅμα κιθῶνι ἐκδυομένῳ συνεκδύεται καὶ τὴν αἰδῶ γυνή” Hdt.1.8; δακρύων πένθιμον αἰδῶ tears of grief and shame,A.Supp.579; “αἰ. τίς μ᾽ ἔχει” Pl. Sph.217d; “αἰ. καὶ δίκη” Id.Prt.322c; “αἰδοῦς ἐμπίπλασθαι” X.Cyr.1.4.4; sobriety, moderation, Pi.O.13.115; “αἰδῶ λαβεῖν” S.Aj.345. 

2. regard for others, respect, reverence, “αἰδοῦς οὐδεμιῆς ἔτυχον” Thgn.1266, cf. E.Heracl.460; αἰ.τοκέων respect for them, Pi.P.4.218; τὴν ἐμὴν αἰδῶ respect for me, A.Pers.699; regard for friends, “αἰδοῦςἀχαλκεύτοισιν ἔζευκται πέδαις” E.Fr.595; esp. regard for the helpless, compassion, “αἰδοῦς κῦρσαι”S.OC247; forgiveness. 

II. that which causes shame or respect, and so,
1. [select] shame, scandal, “αἰδώς, Ἀργεῖοι, κάκ᾽ ἐλέγχεα” Il.5.787, etc.; αἰδώς, ὦ Λύκιοι: πόσε φεύγετε;16.422; “αἰδὼς μὲν νῦν ἥδε . . ” 17.336. 

2. τὰ αἰδοῖα, dignity, majesty “αἰ. καὶ χάρις” h.Cer.214.
III. [select] Αἰδώς personified, Reverence, Pi.O.7.44; Mercy, Ζηνὶ σύνθακος θρόνων Αἰ. S.OC1268, cf. Paus. 1.17.1; “παρθένος Αἰδοῦς Δίκη λέγεται” Pl.Lg.943e.

Phaedra:

εἰσὶ δ᾽ ἡδοναὶ πολλαὶ βίου,

μακραί τε λέσχαι καὶ σχολή, τερπνὸν κακόν, 385

αἰδώς τε. δισσαὶ δ᾽ εἰσίν, ἡ μὲν οὐ κακή,

ἡ δ᾽ ἄχθος οἴκων. εἰ δ᾽ ὁ καιρὸς ἦν σαφής,

οὐκ ἂν δύ᾽ ἤστην ταὔτ᾽ ἔχοντε γράμματα.

Life's pleasures are many, long leisurely talks—a pleasant evil— [385] and the sense of awe. Yet they are of two sorts,1 one pleasure being no bad thing, another a burden upon houses. If propriety were always clear, there would not be two things designated by the same letters.