New translations of 16 Greek plays

Jutta points us to a WSJ piece about a new translation of 16 Greek plays by James Romm and Mary Lefkowitz. Here's a snippet from the interview:

What Greek play is most relevant to our times? 

JR: Any one of them can seem “most relevant” on any given day, depending on what’s going on in the world. But I’d say “Alcestis” pops up most often for me, in that it deals with very real (and flawed) characters and with psychological complexity. Its central figure, Admetus, is fated to die unless he can find a substitute; he chooses to let his wife die in his place, hardly the act of a larger-than-life hero! 

ML: I’d pick Euripides’s “Bacchae”—A new ecstatic religion has come to town, with weird transgender behavior, the liberation of women, and outlandish music; the old folks think it’s a good idea to go along with it, but the young king tries to stop it, and ends up torn to pieces by his mother and aunts. The story suggests that you can’t object to cultural change, even when it makes you uncomfortable or upsets the status quo. 

Do you have a favorite passage? 

JR: To continue with “Alcestis”—The play has a riveting central scene in which Admetus confronts his father, who had refused to give up his life for his son. Admetus excoriates his dad for selfishness, while the father asserts his right to live out his old age like anyone else. It’s an explosive scene with many great Euripidean themes: Self-interest vs. self-sacrifice, the obligations entailed by familial bonds, the war between the generations. I read the scene with my Greek students every chance I get. 

ML: I’d pick the third long choral song of Sophocles’s “Antigone,” which talks about the human propensity for getting things wrong! Plenty of examples of that every day.

Translating up to Cacciaguida

The figure and voice of Cacciaguida holds forth for three cantos at the center of the Paradiso. He is an ancestor/father who call himself the radice, i.e., root, of Dante's bloodline. He'll have a good deal to say about blood as he describes old Florence and its early families in cantos 15 through 17.

Before Cacciaguida speaks, the poet modulates from the sublime thunder of Paradiso 14 to a hushed arena where the pilgrim is given the attention of a vast audience of souls, who grow quiet to help him acquire that which he needs to learn from his forebear.

Dante manages this transition to a pregnant calm as only he can. There is the remarkable moment, in 14, as he's already moving from the Sun to Mars, when he speaks within himself in a kind of universal tongue:

Con tutto 'l core e con quella favella
ch'è una in tutti, a Dio feci olocausto,
qual conveniesi a la grazia novella.

With all my heart, and in that dialect
Which is the same in all, such holocaust
To God I made as the new grace beseemed; (14.88-90)

It's a passing moment, but it's also a kind of exquisite play on the act of translation. Dante says he used "that speech that is one in all" to make his holocaust, and as Hollander notes, this harks back to the old idea that humans share a kind of universal vernacular:

Dante is evidently referring to mental constructions, pre-verbal thoughts, which match one another perfectly until they are put into expression in various languages, when they may have small resemblance to one another. See John of Serravalle (comm. to vv. 88-90): “Conceptus mentis sunt idem in omnibus hominibus, loquela vero non sic” (Mental constructs are identical in all humans, but not the words [that are used to express them]). Dante is perhaps suggesting that there exists an ideal universal vernacular innate in all of us.

In another formulation, Noam Chomsky's theory of grammar rests on the notion that we share a "deep structure" that is generative of and common to all languages, however superficially different they may seem. Another way of putting this is, at this moment of transition, or translation,* as Dante chooses to put it, the distinction between lexis and logos comes to the fore:

Quindi ripreser li occhi miei virtute
a rilevarsi; e vidimi translato
sol con mia donna in più alta salute. (14.82-84)

Lexis of course concerns the specific linguistic vesture that clothes the idea or meaning (the logos). Lexis is the entire complex of linguistic features -- the particular language, the choice of words, their specific phonemes, rhythm, pitch, tone, aural and even visual articulation -- that carries the ideational content intended by the speaker.

That is to say, the very thing that gets in the way of perfect translation -- the lexical features of any specific utterance -- is here consumed, just as the lexical features of Dante's Italian verses are sacrificed in order to present their sense to speakers of Longfellow's tongue. The possibility of any translation whatsoever from one speaker to another in fact relies on our positing a third "tongue," a deep core of structure and meaning that is the shared basis and interface between any two sets of linguistic vestments. Any act of translation, after all is said and done, is an act of faith.

At the very moment of leaving the visual, circumscribed world of the Sun for something new and unknown, as a third circle begins to flicker and flash around Beatrice and Dante, the poet speaks of a third tongue that enables translation to occur. Without such a common "speech" -- invisible, inaudible, and unwriteable -- subtending all human languages, how else could translation occur? Remove the Logos and what's left is Babel.

The clothing metaphor I used a moment ago ("linguistic vesture") is traditional -- John of Serravalle resorts several times to it in his commentary on this tercet -- but here it also echoes another significant moment of this canto -- Solomon's remarkable account of the souls' condition -- first in the now, prior to the final resurrection, and then, when they will be reunited with their glorified bodies:

            “Quanto fia lunga la festa
di paradiso, tanto il nostro amore
si raggerà dintorno cotal vesta.

La sua chiarezza séguita l'ardore;
l'ardor la visïone, e quella è tanta,
quant' ha di grazia sovra suo valore.

Come la carne glorïosa e santa
fia rivestita, la nostra persona
più grata fia per esser tutta quanta;

                   "As long as the festivity
  Of Paradise shall be, so long our love
  Shall radiate round about us such a vesture. 

Its brightness is proportioned to the ardour,
  The ardour to the vision; and the vision
  Equals what grace it has above its worth. 

When, glorious and sanctified, our flesh
  Is reassumed, then shall our persons be
  More pleasing by their being all complete;  (14. 37-45)

The souls will radiate light as long as Paradise lasts; this light radiates from the love they have within -- it is the vesta, the garment that is the expression of each soul's love, which in turn is proportioned to its vision, itself an expression of grace. Grace is external, from above, and it sets in motion vision, love, and radiance in a generative chain. Put another way, each is a figure, a translation of each other -- in a sense, to be in Paradise is to be translated to a condition of always translating.

And this process -- the opposite of Babel -- doesn't end with the resurrection of the body, for the soul, which now wears light, will be covered -- rivestita -- with the body that is now covered by earth. But since the radiance will remain, we cannot see the glorified body as opaque, as another outside of mere flesh. It has at least to be translucent, a further fold in the series of vestments, or translations.

Obsessive types (guilty as charged) might ask at this point how the glorified persons (persona) will be "all complete." That is, the body that once held that soul is brought up and put on, like a new suit, and allows the light to come through, such that grace, vision, ardor and radiance are now complemented by glorified flesh. But since each is already a translation of the others, is there a sense in which we can find it meaningful to say the entities are now "all complete" (tutta quanta)?

The reunited body is yet another translation, no? It might be the perfect conclusion of the itinerary of the soul, from conception to resurrection, all rooted in the Annunciation and Resurrection of Christ, but it's still another outside, another covering, or expression. When something is a translation, what can it mean to say it's "all complete," given that the original of which it is the embodiment is precisely what is not present -- at least, not directly.

Somehow, Dante wants to have it both ways -- the souls reflect, emanate, translate grace which comes from God; yet once they have bodies, they will be "all complete." Translations as totalities, or as, in some sense, embodiments of what is not body, not soul, not measurable, not finite. There's a tension between the metaphor of dress, of translation, and the assertion of a total completeness in the phrase per esser tutta quanta.

Dante is treating of all this with concepts and images we can understand -- but the tools of his vocabulary might be approaching a critical moment, a breaking point. It's here that Cacciaguida -- the "guide of the chase" -- enters, and for three cantos inserts Dante, who still has his body, into the living context of history.

*Hollander notes that this is the sole instance of the word translato in the Commedia, and that it appears twice in the Pauline epistles, once in reference to Enoch (Hebrews 11.5), the other time in Colossians 1.13:

13 qui eripuit nos de potestate tenebrarum et transtulit in regnum Filii dilectionis suae

13 Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son:

The sin of synecdoche

A good deal of the story Beatrice tells in Paradiso 7 plays off of the question of direct versus indirect similarity, or proximity, or causality, of man to God. Before they sinned, Adam and Eve were good copies, or translations of God, she explains:

Goodness Divine, which from itself doth spurn
All envy, burning in itself so sparkles
That the eternal beauties it unfolds. 

Whate'er from this immediately (sanza mezzo) distils
Has afterwards no end, for ne'er removed
Is its impression when it sets its seal.

Whate'er from this immediately (sanza mezzo) rains down
Is wholly free, because it is not subject
Unto the influences of novel things.

The more conformed thereto, the more it pleases;
For the blest ardour that irradiates all things
In that most like itself is most vivacious. 

With all of these things has advantaged been
The human creature; and if one be wanting,
From his nobility he needs must fall.  

'Tis sin alone which doth disfranchise him,
And render him unlike the Good Supreme,
So that he little with its light is blanched,

And to his dignity no more returns,   (Par. 7.64-78)

Twice the passage uses the phrase sanza mezzo, i.e., without mediation, directly. It reappears a third time nearly at the end of Beatrice's speech:

But your own life immediately (sanza mezzo) inspires
Supreme Beneficence, and enamours it
So with herself, it evermore desires her.

The relation of immediacy made Adam and Eve similar to God in that they were free and immortal. But similarities can be deceiving.

God Envy

When the clever men of Greek mythology envied the Gods, they tried to steal their ambrosia, sleep with Hera, or defeat Death. They all ended up with signal eternal punishments in Hades.

With Adam, the fall is instantaneous: the moment the creature envied the Creator, he ceased to resemble that Being who, Beatrice says, doth spurn all envy. Enviously trying to assert his likeness, Adam proved his unlikeness; instead of a judicious translation of God, he produces a botched copy.

The similarity to God, it seems, veiled a vast difference -- a radical otherness. Instead of creating a perfect double of God, man discovers parody, and loses his standing, his dignified place in the universe. He goes into exile, a fallen creature in a fallen world. But unlike Tantalos or Sisyphus, he doesn't have to stay there.

Beatrice now tells of another translation, of divine Word into human flesh. It's not a simple story.

Ficca mo l'occhio, says Beatrice,

Ficca mo l'occhio per entro l'abisso
de l'etterno consiglio, quanto puoi
al mio parlar distrettamente fisso.

Fix now thine eye deep into the abyss
Of the eternal counsel, to my speech
As far as may be fastened steadfastly!

Man in his limitations had not power
To satisfy, not having power to sink
In his humility obeying then,

Far as he disobeying thought to rise;
And for this reason man has been from power
Of satisfying by himself excluded.

We need to be very attentive to Beatrice's words, her parlar, here.

Man's attempt to rise to the level of the Supreme made it quite clear that he had no concept of the Being whom he presumed to equal. The word "power," used three times, balefully intones the absence of any human power. Man doesn't even have the chops to lower himself to anything like the depth that would correspond to the absurd height to which he strove, in his follia, to rise. No amount of mere obedience will ever offset his egregious disobedience.

Yet the mistake the creature made is one we make all the time - the sin of synecdoche. Seeing that part of him was senza mezzo from God, he dreamt he had the power to become the whole - a total error of totalization. Man not only couldn't translate himself into the Divine; by presuming to try, he fell into an abyss deeper than any a human could create.

This abisso, Beatrice seems to say, is now to be found in her speaking. To listen to her is to see into that abyss, which in fact is where we always are.

Or where we would be, had God not found a way out. Man alone cannot excuse his transgression. God could forgive it - just cut him some slack - but that would not do justice to the dignity of the creature. And what Beatrice and Dante more than anything else are about in this canto is Justice, and God's other "way," mercy.

Therefore it God behoved in his own ways
Man to restore (riparar) unto his perfect (intera) life,
I say in one, or else in both of them. 

But since the action of the doer is
So much more grateful, as it more presents
The goodness of the heart from which it issues, 

Goodness Divine, that doth imprint the world,
Has been contented to proceed by each
And all its ways to lift you up again; 

Nor 'twixt the first day and the final night
Such high and such magnificent proceeding
By one or by the other was or shall be; 

For God more bounteous was himself to give
To make man able to uplift himself,
Than if he only of himself had pardoned;

And all the other modes were insufficient
For justice, were it not the Son of God
Himself had humbled to become incarnate. (Par. 7.103-120)

The doubleness of "such high and such magnificent proceeding" is truly a hall of reflecting mirrors (a mise en abyme, as the French say). 

God's problem is that his creature has to raise himself, even though man is clearly unable to do that without divine help. To merely act as God and grant a pardon would give the creature no part in his own rehabilitation. It would not accord any being worthy of recovery with the dignity of playing some role in that process.

God's solution: humble himself "to become incarnate." Translated into a man, the Verbo di Dio is humbled beyond measure -- even without the power to measure, one can see that this descent of God is at least equal to, and therefore a successful mirroring translation of, Adam's fatuous self-elevation of yore. 

At this point in Beatrice's story, we understand why Justinians's conversion from Monophysitism is deeply relevant, and we are now able to discern the subtle adequation of the balance of Justice. When the Word became flesh, it made Adam's abortive parody into something no longer absurd. Since God here is now double -- both God and a real man who teaches, is punished and killed -- He has, through sacrifice of Self, given the creature both the ownership of undergoing punishment and the dignity of playing a role in his own reparation. God doubles as man in order that man might accede to a dignity he lost when he tried to double as God. 

Are we satified?

Listening to Beatrice's parlar, we hear about the satisfaction of a debt, one that comes by surprise. A debtor satisfies his indebtedness thanks to his creditor's both assuming his debt and undergoing harsh pains to pay it off.  The question is, does this tale of satisfaction satisfy? If yes, then we're no longer in the abisso. 

If no, then why not? Is it that Adam's follia is here matched by the madness of God? The Greeks, who thought they knew gods, would probably think so. What god -- even the unknown one that Paul, on the Areopagus, said they acknowledged at Athens -- would contemplate such a thing? 

Paradiso 6 and 7 present a double account of history and of justice. From the Roman perspective of Justinian we gain insight into the workings of empire and its justification in the divinely orchestrated punishment and redemption of man. Beatrice's beatific vision takes us into the depths of that transaction. Either she persuades us to be satisfied with a surprising accounting -- an intricate juridical, ontological, and literally linguistic exchange that translates humanity into something more than a banished bad joke -- or, if we're not satisfied, leaves us at the brink of an abyss that could be nothing, or the lair of a mad god. We might not want to stare too long.

Doing Justice to the word: Paradiso 6-7

Paradiso 7 might present some interpretive difficulties, but there can be no argument that its opening tercet offers a song, sung by Justinian, that speaks in two tongues:

“Osanna, sanctus Deus sabaòth,
superillustrans claritate tua
felices ignes horum malacòth!”

Interestingly, it's common among translations of this canto to keep these lines as they appear in the original, rather than translate them. Translations are offered in footnotes - here's Grandgent's version:

"Hail, holy God of hosts, doubly illuminating with thy brightness the happy fires of these kingdoms."

As with many other poetic effects throughout the Commedia, a reader here has to work to bring out the sense, translating from two languages. We will want to ask why, at this point in the poem, Dante chooses to force us to become translators. What is it about translation that makes it relevant here?

Before getting to that, we might note that the first words of Justinian in Paradiso 6 speak of Constantine's transfer of the capital of the Roman empire to Constantinople -- a move that in Justinian's view went contro' al corso del ciel -- "against the course of the heavens."

The words speak of two different things: moving backwards, from West to East, reversing a course that tracks the actual sun in the sky as well as going against the the will of Heaven, which was interpreted to endorse a westward path of the Roman people from Troy to Italy.

Benvenuto da Imola, writing around 1380, offered this:

Justinianus narrat tempus sui imperii, conversionem et opera: et primo vult dicere quod romanum imperium jam steterat in Graecia ducentis annis et plus post translationem factam per Constantinum quando pervenit ad manus suas.

Justinian tells the story of his reign, conversion and deeds: and he first wishes to say that the Roman empire had already been located in Greece for more than 200 years after the transfer (translationem) made by Constantine when the empire came into his hands.

Benvenuto uses the term that was both proper and customary to describe what Constantine did. The noun form, translatio, derives from the verb transfero: "to carry over, carry across." However, it took on a broader meaning, as both the online etymological dictionary and Wiktionary note:

trānslātiō f ‎(genitive trānslātiōnis); third declension Translation, in the broadest sense: the process of transferring or carrying something over from one thing to another; in particular:

1. Translation of text from one language to another

1. A transfer from a literal to a figurative meaning; a metaphor (compare the Ancient Greek μεταφορά with the same senses)

The use of "translation" for the relocation of Constantine was common enough that Gibbon and other English writers spoke of "the translation" of Rome. And Justinian is clear from the outset that Constantine's act was a mistranslation -- "Rome" did not easily, or successfully, translate into Constantinople.

We have remarked before upon how the Commedia often does, through its poetics, something analogous to what it is saying, or an acting out of its thematic statement. Here the poem seems to be reinforcing through these cues the suggestion that, at this moment of the Paradiso's development, translation is deeply relevant. What Justinian does in canto 6 is to find the workings of Justice in history. But also in his own life, the decision to give coherence to Roman Law came after he abandoned Monophysitism, the belief that Jesus had a single nature that was either purely divine, or a synthesis of human and divine:

And ere unto the work I was attent,
One nature to exist in Christ, [una natura in Cristo esser] not more,
Believed, and with such faith was I contented.

This thread -- of duality, of two, not one -- marks the figure of Justinian, seen for the last time after his dual-lingual song:

Così, volgendosi a la nota sua,
fu viso a me cantare essa sustanza,
sopra la qual doppio lume s'addua;

In this wise, to his melody returning,
This substance, upon which a double light
Doubles itself, was seen by me to sing. . .   (Par. 7. 4-6)

Justinians's song is double, and sings of double illumination. At the same time, the two languages are musically harmonious, and fit the rhythmic and rhyming scheme of Dante's terza rima. As he said towards the end of his speech in Canto 6:

Diverse voci fanno dolci note;
così diversi scanni in nostra vita
rendon dolce armonia tra queste rote.

Voices diverse make up sweet melodies;
So in this life of ours the seats diverse
Render sweet harmony among these spheres  (Par. 6. 124-26)

Justinian says here that diverse voci (voices, but can also mean words, vows) and scanni (seats, positions, hierarchic statuses in the Empyrean) produce harmony in, of, and by the heavenly spheres (music as formal proportion is a subset of Justice). But to say as much is merely to allege. To clarify that just translation can in fact take place, is another thing. This performance occurs in canto 7 when Justinian incorporates two languages into the structure of a third, Dante's Italian terza rima:

“Osanna, sanctus Deus sabaòth,  

superillustrans claritate tua  

felices ignes horum malacòth!”

Note that in accomplishing this harmony, Justinians's song preserves the differences between Latin and Hebrew. The poem acts out, formally on the plane of language, what is at stake, theologically and politically, in the speech of Justinian in canto 6:

Theologically: Each tongue retains its integrity, like the two natures of Christ, yet they harmonize into a single intelligible poetic structure. 

Politically: The Hebrew words have to do with order, an order more militant than natural: sabaòth signifies "armies," and malacòth, "kingdoms" -- a vision of different and distinct kingdoms and powers, but under one God. 

Formally: The poetic accomplishment occurs in bringing Latin and Hebrew under the control of Dante's form -- his Italian syntax and the rhythm and rhyming structure of his terza rima. 

==

We might even suggest a historical analogue, as the Old Testament and Roman tongues are carried over into Italian as the inheritor of the two peoples chosen by God to bring about the central act of redemption.

And it is here that the entire burden of translation is brought to bear. When Justinian and his cohort vanish like velocissime faville, it is left to Beatrice to describe the descent of the Verbo di Dio:

fin ch'al Verbo di Dio discender piacque 

u' la natura, che dal suo fattore
s'era allungata, unì a sé in persona
con l'atto sol del suo etterno amore. 

Till to descend it pleased the Word of God

To where the nature, which from its own Maker
Estranged itself, he joined to him in person
By the sole act of his eternal love.   (Par. 7. 30-33)

The salvific act of history is a translation performed by the Word of God. The Trinity - Verbo/Fattore/Amore - is at work here in this atto, culminating not so accidentally with line 33. The duality of the man-God both is a carrying over of God into man and an opening of a way for man to cross back over to God. But as both Justinian and Beatrice strive to make clear, this elaborate transference not only must be just; it must do justice to be a true translation.

To see that this is the case, it execution must in turn be translated, i.e., read. Dante's doubt has to be dispelled through a clarity that sees how the sacrifice of Jesus was both just and unjust. Those executing him justly in his dual nature in turn had to be punished with the destruction of Jerusalem and the diaspora of the Jews. The Good News of the crucifixion, harrowing of Hell, and resurrection has a residue, an after-echo, that is bad news for the formerly Chosen People.

==

To translate is a sacrificial act of liberation. To break old bounds while yet preserving them; a disruption that frees so that something impossible, just now, can be, and can be spoken. The new, as in the New Adam, is the Old Adam carried over. A new tongue.

The sparks and fires of this scene should recall the tongues of flame of Pentecost. Fire descends, contrary to its nature, bringing with it a power of translation in which the Word becomes intelligible to all tongues.

The Commedia approaches this central redemptive act of human and divine history through the double lenses of Justice and Translation, at work in the dual kingdoms of Jerusalem and Rome. It is in the act of interpreting how Justice is rendered that the singular complexity claimed for the Redemption becomes intelligible. But how intelligible is it, as of yet?

Dante, Justinian, and Beatrice might feel that the destruction of Jerusalem, like the fall of Troy, was the necessary co-efficient of just human salvation. If some readers are left with an unsettling sense of something not quite square about this judgement, some frayed or still trembling loose end that occasions reiterated harrowing acts of injustice throughout human history, this would not come as a surprise. Doubt asserts itself. Further work is needed if one is to possibly get it right. To translate well, in the end, is to find le mot juste. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not there yet.

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.

Jonas' Reading Dante

Even as we are engaged in a slow reading* of parts of the Purgatorio in preparation for tackling the Paradiso, we can rest assured that what it means to read will forever be an open question.

For several years, the American artist Joan Jonas, whose work is part of the U.S. exhibit at this year's Biennale in Venice, has been working on a series of performative pieces entitled Reading Dante.

In an interview with Art Forum, she drew a parallel between Dante and Aby Warburg:

In my mind, Dante connects to Aby Warburg, who was central to my last large-scale work of this kind, The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things. Both had an overarching worldview. Dante thought epically during a moment—the medieval era—when people were very isolated, and Warburg attempted to synthesize widely disparate cultures through the lens of art history. For me, they both represent characters that are on a journey through life that involves thinking about the world as a whole, not just what’s immediately around them.

Jonas, Reading Dante

According to a gallery where the work was performed, Jonas is continually revising:

Reading Dante IV draws inspiration from Dante's fourteenth-century Divine Comedy, a reoccurring topos of Jonas's work since 2007. Each performance and installation becomes increasingly layered as the work transforms and develops.

Reading Dante becomes an act of translation:

Jonas translates the medieval allegory, borrowing small fragments of the text and greatly reinterpreting the story through performance, sound, drawings, video and installation. The artist dynamically visualizes the journey of the characters, merging their experience with her own through footage of travels and performance. Galleria Raffaella Cortese.

In another interview (in frieze), Jonas says:

Dante separated heaven, purgatory and hell but I don’t believe in such a separation. One aspect, though, that interested me is the fact that Dante was the first writer to write using vernacular Italian so I want to record lots of different people reading Dante.

With a work so rich as Dante's, the acts of translation are unending, as are the many varieties and forms its reading can assume.

Jonas, Reading Dante

video clip

Diverse images, Jonas Galleria Raffaella Cortese

*slow reading

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.

Shelter from the storm: Antigone 117-125

Beauty walks a razor’s edge

στὰς δ᾽ ὑπὲρ μελάθρων φονώσαισιν ἀμφιχανὼν κύκλῳ 
λόγχαις ἑπτάπυλον στόμα 
ἔβα, πρίν ποθ᾽ ἁμετέρων 
120αἱμάτων γένυσιν πλησθῆναί τε καὶ στεφάνωμα πύργων 
πευκάενθ᾽ Ἥφαιστον ἑλεῖν. τοῖος ἀμφὶ νῶτ᾽ ἐτάθη 
125πάταγος Ἄρεος, ἀντιπάλῳ δυσχείρωμα δράκοντος.

[117] He paused above our dwellings; he gaped around our sevenfold portals with spears thirsting for blood; but he left [120] before his jaws were ever glutted with our gore, or before the Fire-god's pine-fed flame had seized our crown of towers. [125] So fierce was the crash of battle swelling about his back, a match too hard to win for the rival of the dragon.

Seven-gated Thebes

Jebb notes the oddness here, as has been noted here for the second strophe, of a "blurred" transition from figure to proper sense, and calls it "thoroughly Sophoclean":

The words φονώσαισιν ἀμφιχανὼν... λόγχαις once more merge the image of the eagle,—as at v. 115,—in literal description of a besieging army, save in so far as the figurative “ἀμφιχανών” suggests a monster opening its jaws. The word was perh. suggested by Il. 23.79 “ἐμὲ μὲνκὴρ ι ἀμφέχανε στυγερή” (hath gaped for me—i.e. ‘devoured me’). These transitions from clear imagery to language in which the figure is blurred by the thought of the object for which it stands, are thoroughly Sophoclean: cp. n. on O. T. 866.

Further along in the strophe, many translators choose to not include the names of gods that are in the Greek. Jebb has "Fire-god" -- literally it's "piney Hephaestos." He and others also literalize Ares. Jebb has "clash of battle" where "clash of Ares" (πάταγος Ἄρεος) would seem closer to the text.

Grene drops the divine names for literal reference.

But before his jaws would be sated
with our blood, before the fire,
pine fed, should capture our crown of towers,
he went hence—
such clamor of war stretched behind his back,
from his dragon foe, a thing he could not overcome.

Fitts-Fitzgerald:

But before his jaws were sated with our blood,
Or pine fire took the garland of our towers,
He was thrown back; and as he turned, great Thebes––
No tender victim for his noisy power––
Rose like a dragon behind him, shouting war. 

Curiously, all three keep the figure of the dragon for Thebes, but the effect is different. Fitts-Fitzgerald's dragon is an animated simile and vocal where Jebb's is more like a metonymic mascot name.

We can't ignore the issue of the war "at the back of" the attacking army (or eagle). If the Theban defenders were in the city, how did they (the dragon) rise behind the enemy? Perhaps something (the beam of Helios?) caused the Argives to turn and run, so that the defenders opened the gates and pursued them.* 

So, with help from Nicholas P. Gross's commentary and begging the indulgence of the gods and skilled craftsmen of translation:

He stood having gaped around the roofs of the seven-gated mouth [stoma or στόμα is singular - the multiple as one] with bloodthirsting spearheads. Before the jaws could glut our blood or
piney Hephaestos seize our crown of towers, they left [no agency is identified], and the clashing Ares of the dragon stretched round the back of the Eagle, a near-equal hard conquest.

Sophocles uses ἀντιπάλῳ in the final line. Literally the word means "wrestle against," but in use it came to mean a situation in which two are "nearly matched or balanced." It's odd to use it with δυσ-χείρωμα, "hard conquest." In a few lines we have an impending attack, which suddenly ceases, and a counterattack, ending with a conquest in which the two clashing forces were nearly as one. The Argives get rendered visually, the Thebans more aurally.

In this ode rich in language in which, as Jebb notes, "the figure is blurred by the thought of the object for which it stands" so that gaping eagles and clashing Ares are jarred by actual spearheads, it would be interesting to ask our modern translators why they suppress metonymies like Hephaestos and Ares. As we've seen, the language of the ode is destabilizing -- one can't know from moment to moment whether to expect prosaic literal language, strong metaphor, weak metonymy, or a combination of these (as in φονώσαισιν...λόγχαις - "blood-thirsting spearheads").

Given this unstable poetic environment, changing Hephaestos to "fire" and Ares to "war" seems odd. Perhaps where anything goes, one seeks literal language to cling to, shelter from the storm.

*Euripides' Phoenissae offers very much this sort of scenario, except the stampede occurs after the single-handed combat of Eteocles and Polyneices. These two fight and die by each other's hand. The Argives have laid down their arms during the contest, the Thebans have not. Perceiving their advantage, the Thebans pursue and slaughter the Argive army.