A translator's thoughts on making a new Iliad

Arline shared this interview with Caroline Alexander, whose new translation of the Iliad recently was released to high expectations, including her own:

“I know this sounds arrogant,” Ms. Alexander said, but she couldn’t imagine taking on the project “unless you believed you could do a better job.” She spent five years on her translation. Her goal is for her version to become the “translation of record.”

Alexander's discussion of her decisions in this translation are worth reading. Some have to do with diction (lexis):

I worked hard for restraint, and my mantra was “trust Homer, trust Homer.” I knew that if I could find the simple English word for his simple Greek, work for cadence—spoken cadence, not the cadence of “high” poetry—it would work.

Asked about a recent Hollywood treatment featuring Brad Pitt, she moves to another level of the work of the translator -- this not so much on the lexical level as on the level of thought (logos):

I didn’t watch the whole film. But I did see his first big kill in the opening 10 minutes. A stunning bit of stunt-work, very athletic and adroit, and totally un-Achillean. It implied that Achilles’ greatness as a warrior lay in his skill. Having just finished working on a documentary about tigers, I would venture that confronting Achilles would be more like coming face-to-face with a tiger than with a tricky swordsman.

This too is reading -- translating lived experience and that of the poem into a new vernacular of living images.

A few notes . . . part 2

This is the second in a series of posts about the opening of the Paradiso. 

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3     Part 4     Part 5

The somewhat detailed look into Paradiso 2 in the most recent post served to interrupt the effort to trace a pattern begun a few days earlier, but it was quite helpful. How so should become clear if we go slightly ahead.

Let's look again that scene in Paradiso 3 where Dante says he made an error opposite to that of Narcissus, thinking the faces appearing to him in the moon were specchiati sembianti - mirrored semblances. Turning around to see the source of the images, he says, e nulla vidi - and I saw nothing.

The error here is not simply the opposite of that of the boy who fell in love with his own image; it is also the exact reversal of what happens in at sunrise in Purgatorio 2: Dante, expecting to see Virgil's shadow next to his own, and seeing nothing, turns to where Virgil should be, and in fact still is. Virgil reproves him for mistrusting -- he doesn't cast a shadow because he is one. 

Io mi volsi dallato con paura
d'essere abbandonato, quand' io vidi
solo dinanzi a me la terra oscura; 

e 'l mio conforto: “Perché pur diffidi?”
a dir mi cominciò tutto rivolto;
“non credi tu me teco e ch'io ti guidi?

Unto one side I turned me, with the fear
Of being left alone, when I beheld
Only in front of me the ground obscured. 

"Why dost thou still mistrust?" my Comforter
Began to say to me turned wholly round;
"Dost thou not think me with thee, and that I guide thee?

These scenes in the third canto of each canticle set up mini-paradigms that resonate with the nature of each world the pilgrim is experiencing. For Dante in Purgatorio, it is a matter of trust -- submitting to an authority that is not immediately visible but which, from past experience, one knows to be reliable. (This is also why the Muses in Purgatorio are led by Calliope -- they are on a mission to rhetorically demolish false guides.)

Here in Paradiso 3, the mode is no longer the shadowy realm of expectation, belief, or trust, but of increasingly brilliant surprise. The seemingly mirrored semblances are not images or shadows, but in fact the very beings they appear to be.* The substance of things hoped for is given before it can be hoped for, and this is "revealed" as becomes clear in the nothingness (nulla) the poet turns to see.

This surprise reversal has the structure of hysteron proteron, as used by the poet in the image of the arrow that strikes the target in canto 2:

e forse in tanto in quanto un quadrel posa
e vola e da la noce si dischiava,

And in such space perchance as strikes a bolt
And flies, and from the notch unlocks itself

This figure that reverses cause and effect, completion and beginning, is the challenging narrative trope of Paradiso -- "challenging" because it violates the sequential order of ordinary quest narrative. It also reverses the prefigurative mode in which the Christian Middle Ages read the Bible. The Old Testament was read, as in the superb title of a book on Milton, as "shadowy types" that prefigured the truth (logos) of the New Testament. Once revealed, the Word obviated quest.

If one looks at the three cantos 3 from the perspective of poetics, we can add to the order of the three canticles we began once before:

Inf: hope forever lost                                    -- the letter: "abandon all hope"
Purg: hope actively propelling one ahead       -- shadowy types: guide to truth
Par.: hope substantiated                                -- truth

One could go on ticking off attributes of each canticle that fall into something of this order, but the last thing I want is to overschematize the Commedia. The poem complicates itself as it goes along, and that's more interesting.

How does canto 2 help with the effort to discern a pattern? Consider what we found: When Dante the pilgrim enters the moon, he bogs down his journey by asking Beatrice about the man in the moon, a fabled figure dreamed of by men who can't see him face to face.

But even as Dante is asking Beatrice about this shadowy type, he is himself a man in the moon incarnate. In Par. 3.43-45, the poet explicitly relates the co-joined human and moon to the Incarnation, which will be self evident when we finally get to see it.

Lì si vedrà ciò che tenem per fede,
non dimostrato, ma fia per sé noto
a guisa del ver primo che l'uom crede.

There will be seen what we receive by faith,
Not demonstrated, but self-evident
In guise of the first truth that man believes.

The "spirit" of this scene, its wit, playfully gives us a lunatical misdirection of a quester who asks about distant spots and signs when he in fact is the very thing (a sort of loony λόγος) about which he is asking. This bewilderment tickles, and Beatrice's smile conveys full awareness of what fools these mortals be. Within this frame, laughter can be relaxed and even medicinal -- to see one's own error, even among the wise, will now and again occasion a cathartic spasm of self-debunking laughter.

While the poem is registering esprit on several comedic levels, it never loses sight of the reader, whom it warned about venturing too far out to sea. Dante's bark (legno) is heading for the deepest waters, and those who fail to see their own folly are most at risk of becoming the drowned man the poet of Inferno 1 nearly was.

*This point will be looked at in more detail when we discuss canto 4 in the continuation.

This is the sec in a series of posts about the opening movement of Dante's Paradiso. Here are the other parts: 

Part 1     Part 3     Part 4   

to be continued . . .

Living end: Heracles' Fate in Women of Trachis

λείπου μηδὲ σύ, παρθέν᾽, ἀπ᾽ οἴκων, 

μεγάλους μὲν ἰδοῦσα νέους θανάτους, 

πολλὰ δὲ πήματα καὶ καινοπαθῆ,

κοὐδὲν τούτων ὅ τι μὴ Ζεύς.

And you, maiden, do not be left at the house. 

You have seen immense, shocking death, 

with sorrows great in number and strange. 

And in all of them there is nothing that is not Zeus.

The entrance of Heracles in Women of Trachis is an image of the supine hero at his most  weak, vulnerable moment. We never see him in his prime. Imagine an American superhero in a film that presents only the moment of his impotent, agonizing death. The sole reason we remember our heroes (or go to the box office) - their immortal deeds and abilities - is absent. Imagine Superman reduced to an unrecognizable hulk, crying out in frustrated, mystified anger. Helpless, then dead.

As his flesh is being eaten away, Heracles evokes his former role, struck by the seemingly intimate absurdity of how he was brought down:

Not spearmen on the battlefield, nor the Giants' earth-born army, nor the might of savage beasts, [1060] not Hellas, nor the land of the barbarian, nor any land which I came to purify has ever done this to me. No, a woman, a weak woman, born not to the strength of man, all alone has brought me down without a stroke of the sword!

His helplessness tempts us to write Heracles off as a has-been, no longer capable of acting, of doing anything worthwhile for or in the world to which he had so long labored to bring vital order.

The word he chooses has more than order in it. He says καθαίρων ἱκόμην - "I came to purify." καθαίρων carries the root sense of "cleanse," but connotes a purging act that carries an ethical, and thus sacred, mode of action. He had a job to do, as the son of Zeus. His career, all of it, was Zeus, and now this unintelligible turn defies understanding -- why does his Father allow this?

It would be very 20th Century of us to adopt the approved smartass attitude. Hyllus speaks with seeming anger of the lack of compassion of the gods. But the story of Heracles deliberately addresses that apparent inference, that glib assumption that the existence of incomprehensible suffering is a sure sign that we humans are essentially alone. (One might ask a confirmed atheist if that conviction requires god to not exist, or simply to not care about us.)

Heracles would of course be a great hero if we only remembered him for his accomplishments of strength and cunning, but he would not be a tragic hero. Sophocles is adding another dimension - one which he clearly feels is necessary for his Athenian audience to understand, ponder, and remember.

Why does he want us to ponder this dimension of the strongest human being's career? Throughout the play we have been hearing (from Deianira, mostly) that one bears an innocence, and ignorance, of the suffering of others until one experiences it for oneself. That would suggest that the gods might not have much understanding of mortal slings and arrows.

Labors of Heracles, 3rd c. CE

But Heracles is that nearly immortal being who, at the last, is consumed by an extraordinary experience of mortality. But why, if the gods do not understand or care about what we suffer, would Zeus have prophesied in advance all that's happening to his beloved son?

Perhaps we need to look past the spectacle of violent pain to examine how Heracles handles it. At first he is loudly complaining and vengeful, seeking to kill Deianira. But he moves on to other tasks, which he makes Hyllus swear to perform before telling him what they are. They are not trivial: Enabling the death of his father, and marrying his father's new chosen queen. It is the allegedly Oedipal desire of all sons that the father here is imposing upon his beloved son.

It would be consistent with the thinking of the hero to make this demand upon Hyllus only if he saw in it a reflection of his own response to his father's imposed word. For he now understands that his fate was foretold by his father; his fate "is" Zeus - and this, as unintelligible as it is, he now sees summoning him to duty.

He has broken the world he was supposed to cleanse:

• broken his first family with Megara and her children; 
• broken his marriage to Deianira, and 
• broken the world of Eurytus, killing his son and raping his daughter. 

The temptation to curse Zeus and die might be quite powerful. Or to order Hyllus to kill Iole and all her people. Or, to seize the throne of Trachis. But this is not what Heracles does. Instead, he makes a last stab at mending things. Hyllus must marry Iole - an unthinkable thing for all - the request causes Hyllus to doubt his father's sanity (which in turn awakens Heracles' torment). Yet in one stroke, it gives both children status as heirs of Heracles, gives legal protected status to those children of the next generation he cares most about, and creates a protective dynastic order. It is an act that might seem baffling or strange to all, but in its effects, it authors a remnant saved from a broken world.

Asking his own son to prepare his pyre and to set it ablaze - this too suggests a duty that is unthinkable. Hyllus agrees to prepare the pyre, but not to light it, and Heracles agrees. That task will fall to Philoctetes. The entire series of commands up to the blaze is like the charm of Nessus, only here, perhaps, a countercharm.

The question of whether Heracles "knows" that his fate is to undergo apotheosis is undecidable - the play offers no indication (other than the negative -- Heracles promises to come back from "below" to curse Hyllus of that possibility, which is no assurance of anything).

Heracles steels his "tough soul" to undergo death. Only the actual experience of death will decide whether Hyllus is a polluting murderer (as the boy himself believes (1028-29)), or a healing physician, as Heracles claims. Death swallows infinite pain, but is this all the healing one can hope for? It is our fate to not know our fate until it has happened to us - as Deianira says at the very beginning of the play:

λόγος μέν ἐστ᾽ ἀρχαῖος ἀνθρώπων φανείς, 

ὡς οὐκ ἂν αἰῶν᾽ ἐκμάθοις βροτῶν, πρὶν ἂν 

θάνῃ τις, οὔτ᾽ εἰ χρηστὸς οὔτ᾽ εἴ τῳ κακός: 

There is an ancient word people tell

that none can judge the life of any man

for good or bad until that man is dead;

The fate of Heracles demonstrates that ancient word (λόγος) with the deadbolt force of a syllogism. No one knew better than Deianira how powerless we are to know, before our end, our end. Heracles orders his own death believing he is fulfilling a foretold fate, as the son of the highest god, but not knowing what that fate might be. It is left to Hyllus to offer, as the only true thing that can be said, the hypothesis that all these ancient words did not lack sense.

The first word of the play is "λόγος"; the last is "Ζεύς." If the alpha and omega of the Women of Trachis are one, if the play trues its circle, then Heracles and Hyllus are dutiful in believing they are on sacred ground. Are they obeying the cathartic will of Zeus, or collaborating in a primal act of patricide? If the former, the career of Heracles ends with a final heroic purgation. If not, it's the most polluting act of murderous nihilism. Heracles is borne off alive. Until his end, can one say?

There is nothing here that is not Zeus.

Curious felicity in Heroides 16: Paris to Helen (I)

I, the son of Priam, send Ledaea that pure felicity

which only if imparted by your giving may be mine.

Hanc tibi Priamides mitto, Ledaea, salutem,

     Quae tribui sola te mihi dante potest.

The lovely opening of Heroides 16 sets a kind of conundrum centered on the act of giving and sending. We are as yet unawares of Paris's exact location -- and this is by design. Only gradually will it dawn on the reader that Paris is not writing from far off Troy, or some other distant land. Although he says "send," mitto, his epistle is in fact being conveyed from one room in Menelaos' palace to another. Paris is already "in the building," as we say, and the echo of Elvis might not be altogether misplaced.

Let's explore the oddity here a bit more. Paris says "I send felicity," (salutem: health, well being, welfare, prosperity...) but the very thing he sends to Helen can only come to him if she gives it to him. Mitto suggests distance, but dante ("giving") seems an act much closer to hand.  Yet the salutem in question -- which Paris does not have but can send -- only exists if both parties give and receive it to and from one another. This violates distance and time, as might be clearer in a paraphrase: I am sending you something I do not have, but I will have it for you if you give it to me.

In effect this is a condition of pure mutuality -- not as in sharing an ice cream cone, but more like a glance, or a kiss - neither can occur unless both parties simultaneously participate in it. This participation seems impossible if one is sending and therefore at a distance from the receiver. Only if both distance and time vanish in the act of giving can felicity occur. This is known as a specular, or mirror, relation, in which one can only see oneself seeing oneself in a mirror (speculum) if one's eyes reflect their mirror image, like Narcissus staring at his visage in the fateful pool.

That is to say, at the very beginning of his letter, Paris suspends polarities such as giving and receiving, distance and closeness, self and other, past and future. It might be worth noting, in this letter filled with allusions to prophecies, that prophetic speech suspends, and at times harshly dissolves, all that separates our usual compartmentalization of time. Seers see a future event in all its particular and imponderable uniqueness as if it were occurring now. We might return to this conjunction of beautiful people and hoary prophecy.

The entire letter elides temporal distinctions. First it seems Paris has not yet left Troy; then he's describing how his ships were built, and decorated; next thing he's getting a tour from Menelaos (even as he only has eyes for Helen), and a moment later he's winking at her at dinner and, from his lonely bed in the palace, writing to invite her company.

Another aspect of Paris's passion elides time just as his narration elides space:

My flames I brought with me; for I did not first find them here. They were the cause of my undertaking so long a voyage; They were the cause of my undertaking so long a voyage: for no threatening storm or wandering (error) drove us hither;

Attulimus flammas, non hic invenimus, illas.

     Hae mihi tam longae causa fuere viae,

Nam neque tristis hiemps neque nos huc appulit error; (27-29)

Paris's tale is the exact opposite of the sequence experienced by Aeneas (Heroides 7), who first wandered into Carthage (with divine nudging), then saw Dido, then felt passion for her.

Dido confesses in the Aeneid that the embers of her former love (for Sychaeus) are reignited as she gazed on and listened to Aeneas

adnosco veteris vestigia flammae

I recognize the vestiges of the ancient flame 

The reverse is true for Paris:

It is you that I seek, whom golden Venus pledged (pepigit) to my embraces; I desired you before you were known to me. I beheld your face with my soul before I saw you with my eyes, for fame was the first messenger of your beauty to wound me.

Te peto, quam pepigit lecto Venus aurea nostro;

     Te prius optavi, quam mihi nota fores. 

Ante tuos animo vidi quam lumine vultus;

     Prima tulit vulnus nuntia fama tui. (35-39)

It's one thing to see a beautiful face and fall in love; another to love someone first, and then to see what they look like. Paris is saying his experience of falling in love with Helen is a reversal of the usual order of cause and effect - which is precisely what's described by the rhetorical figure of prolepsis.

PROLEPSIS: the representation or assumption of a future act or development as if presently existing or accomplished. The representation of a thing as existing before it actually does or did so, as in he was a dead man when he entered.

First he loved her, then he saw her. Paris's love is proleptic, which, according to the above definitions, is not far from prophetic. No love was more steeped in prophecy that that of these two. To represent the future as present is to have a vision of that which is not yet. Unlike Dido, who re-cognizes love, Paris's love is fore-told, and in the telling, becomes real.

Which has everything to do with the question Paris poses right after his opening couplet:

Eloquar?

Shall I then speak? 

Paris first seemed to write from afar, but he's right next to us (and to Helen). He speaks of a passion that preceded empirical knowledge, reversing the Dido-Aeneas paradigm. But the question he asks -- that he must ask before he can say anything -- is whether to speak out -- e-loquar -- at all. In Ovid, speaking and loving, logos and eros, are so deeply intertwined as to be close to indistinguishable. Like Narcissus's eye in the speculum, fixed upon his returning gaze. We'll look at this more in another post.

A review of Mary Beard's new book

Jutta sends along this review of Mary Beard's new book, Confronting the Classics. It sounds like a fun read - the sort of thing that would provoke undead minds to find out more about those whose cultural value has, for the past 70 years or so been marked more in the breach than the observance.

A Minoan fresco from Knossos, Greece, known as the 'Ladies in Blue,' which dates from 1500 B.C. but was extensively restored in the early 1900s. The Bridgeman Art Gallery

If her intent - and Beard is a highly regarded classicist at Cambridge -  is to stimulate interest, hoping that a virus of curiosity might prod schools and media mavens to give the Classics a tad more centrality, or at least visibility, then of course more power to her. She does seem to be aiming beyond the heads of those already enchanted by, or receiving a salary for expertise related to, the "ancient" Greeks and Romans -- no mean feat, and a generous thing for a scholar to do.

What might not be quite so strongly emphasized in Beard's book -- I can't tell from the review, but will be curious to discover -- is an argument we don't hear so much any more: That the Classics are always current, always central to our languages, our words, syntax, rhetorical susceptibilities, logical powers, scientific interests. The classics are the wellspring of our underlying vernacular: we can not say "logic" without invoking, as from Olympus, the richly shared semantic burden of the λόγος of Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle. The fact that some folks might have neither read nor even heard of these Greek authors carries no weight -- when one says "logic," one summons a symposium living on in the λόγος -- a lively 2500-year conversation going on within the philology of that word to this day.

The classics won't be irrelevant or otherwise superfluous so long as we insist on attempting to apply reason to our world. It would be like trying to walk without feet - or better, without the gravity that keeps us grounded as well as able to stand, move, and look around us. As much as we might consider Socrates rather out of date, at some moment, in the αγορά of daily interaction, the smile of his awe at our all-knowing modernity could cease to flatter. In that moment, we might learn to see ourselves with a bit more classical candor, and share a bit of his good humor.