Yvor Winters has a very famous defense of the heroic couplet in his mammoth collection In Defense of Reason. I'm inclined to agree with nearly all of its conclusions, though not with the vengeful sort of impulse that leads Winters to them (and often takes him further into more absurd generalizations). This is understandable though, since even if wasn't a consequence of his particularly vengeful poetics, which tried to undo years of a particularly expressionist or expressivist (what he loves to call "Romantic") view of the role of poetry and literature by valorizing an austere hyper-rationalism, the heroic couplet had been so crapped upon over the years by so many insensitive people that some retribution was due. What's really great and still shocking, though, is that Winters focuses his argument by pitting the couplet aganst blank verse:
The heroic couplet must have certain qualities which enable the poet employing it to pass easily from description, to lyricism, to didacticism, to satire, and so on, or even at times to combine several of these qualities at a single stroke. It is doubtful whether so much freedom is possible in blank verse; the only satirical poet who has employed blank verse with major success is Ben Jonson, and much of his satire depends upon significance derived from the structure of the play--the details from line to line are usually variations upon an anterior theme rather than autonomous summaries.
-In Defense of Reason, 141
You have to appreciate that poet-critic sense of there being a stake in various verse forms, such that the fate of poetry itself seems to be in the triumph of one form over another. Though I've expressed annoyance with the sort of overzealousness of poet-critics when they get on such a track as this in the past, you can't at all blame them here, when the issue is form; and critics actually can only benefit from trying to feel things more intensely in this way (as long as they don't, like poet-critics, start turning the focus of criticism away from interpretation and towards manifesto-writing: that's how you get theory). But I say this as if critics weren't this impassioned already: most good ones are, because they have a deep, nuanced sense of form and know the significance of shifts in form throughout literary history.
Of course, everything about Winters' argument turns on his equivocating about "freedom" when he says: "It is doubtful whether so much freedom is possible in blank verse." Later, he will say that he means by freedom what we usually take to be its opposite. But if we agree that there is some sense in which freedom in general includes ease in passing between the functions Winters enumerates (description, lyricism, didacticism, satire, etc.), it's very true that the heroic couplet actually has more freedom here than blank verse.
This is because what matters in blank verse is argument. Now, argument means much more than we tend to think it does in all sorts of verse forms, or subordinates more elements to its elaboration than we--who have a very un- or anti-didactic sense of the role of literature--are usually willing to grant. But blank verse takes this to the max, because without the unity of the line, it needs higher semantic connection or a tighter syntactic arrangement. At the same time, this grammatical demand actually allows nearly any rhetorical possibility to be deployed: rather than fall back on just a few--heroic verse notably squeezes everything it can get out of parallelism, chiasmus, zeugma, and the simile, because it isn't quite capacious enough to admit any other figures--the whole canon of rhetoric is open to blank verse, and can vary them with ease. Also, because the line is stable, but not confining, new areas of interplay between meter and sense open up that are less concerned with reinforcement and more with pure rhythm. All of this explains why Milton is so much better at blank verse than Wordsworth, though the latter has more nuanced sense of the line itself and everything it can do: each speech, each narrative bit of Paradise Lost is masterfully put together as an argument and advances the argument of the whole, and this is what drives the verse along and wins you over to its movements. In Wordsworth, the more reflective and lyric turn of the verse does not lend itself to such clarity of argument, and the principled resistance of Wordsworth to the classical canon of rhetoric--his immense privileging of certain tropes over others, which reorients rhetoric immensely--does not allow such full-on deployment of all linguistic possibilities. Only in meter does Wordsworth perhaps excel Milton as far as blank verse goes: whenever he wants to, he can easily pull off the contrapuntal effects which are the most spectacular sign of Milton's utter mastery of prosody, and complete exploitation of all the freedom of the open line--but he has such a nuanced sense of the role of rhythm (despite his rather flat theoretical presentation of it) that he can subordinate it to a timing which works on scales Milton (if only because of the novelty of his work) could not go down.
The point though, is that all of this can't happen in the heroic couplet--and that, really, this isn't a problem. For there are downsides to having the argument so much at the fore, and upsides to having a less strained relation between it and the verse form. Since in blank verse we are suddenly dealing with structures that extend over huge amounts of lines, and that suddenly become juxtaposed to the slightest variation in meter, the turns in the language, the points of pressure, become at once larger in scale and smaller than they were. This is wonderful if everything is connected via argument--we've seen what Wordsworth can do when these larger scales are exploited, and Milton most definitely plays with the smaller ones--but where argument now fills things in and connects, there was a very tight, well-fitting scale already established. And the heroic couplet takes advantage of nearly everything at this scale--which is, if not all of rhetoric, certainly most of rhetoric as well as all the tightest relations between rhyme, sense, and meter. So if we start to think of freedom in terms of a certain right-sizedness, being in the sweet spot which allows one to deftly switch between all these techniques of versification, we can see heroic couplet doesn't seem rigid or inflexible at all. Thus, Winters continues:
Ben Jonson himself employed the heroic couplet in some of his shorter poems, when he wished to indulge in a more direct and concentrated attack, and with remarkable vigor, in spite of the roughness of his versification. As a didactic instrument, blank verse is comparatively heavy and comparatively incapable of epigrammatic point; as a lyrical instrument, the range of blank verse, though wide, tends to be more closely limited to the grandiloquent and is less capable (in spite of charming passages in Fletcher and of Tears Idle Tears) of approaching the flexibility and variety of song. The heroic couplet, all things considered, appears to be the most flexible of forms: it can suggest by discreet imitation, the effects of nearly any other technique conceivable; it can contain all of these effects, if need be, in a single poem.
-In Defense of Reason, 141
You see, that's a bit strained, since whenever you read a heroic couplet you find it can very, very easily become monotonous (too regular) or, when it turns epigrammatic, too forced (too irregular). And then the comparison to blank verse becomes comical, since you'll find none of that there (the threat in blank verse, of course, is the prosaic, and even Milton falls into this sometimes). But Winters has certain very amazing possibilities of the couplet in mind, like the following, which he quotes:
No, no, poor suff’ring Heart, no Change endeavour,
Choose to sustain the smart, rather than leave her;
My ravish’d eyes behold such charms about her,
I can die with her, but not live without her:
One tender Sigh of hers to see me languish,
Will more than pay the price of my past anguish:
Beware, O cruel Fair, how you smile on me,
’Twas a kind look of yours that has undone me.
This is Dryden's very famous "One Happy Moment," and Winters is thinking about how, with the feminine ending here and the internal rhyme at the caesura, the thing turns into a song meter (see In Defense of Reason, 135-6).
But what's more telling to me is that he turns precisely to Dryden in making such a case for the heroic couplet against its strongest possible antagonist, blank verse, even though he thinks it just can't get any better than the more regular, consistent Pope:
Pope through the concentration of his entire forces upon a single method achieves a greater range in certain individual poems than Dryden ever achieves in a single poem. [...] Pope, in combining a comparable diversity into a single complexity, varies the couplet noticeably less than does Dryden; yet he is successful, and to the reader familiar with his sensibility he is one of the most exquisitely finished, as well as one of the most profoundly moving, poets in English.
-In Defense of Reason, 138
Given this, even though we might wonder why Pope couldn't be used to make the argument against blank verse, it's no surprise that after saying heroic couplets can contain"the effects of nearly any other technique conceivable [...] if need be, in a single poem," above, he gives up Dryden, and goes on to make the case for the intrinsic virtues of the couplet by hitting the point home with reference to "Popian balance":
What, then, makes the couplet so flexible? The answer can be given briefly: its seeming inflexibility. That is, the identity of the line is stronger in rhymed verse than in unrhymed, because a bell is rung at the end of every second line; the identity of the line will be stronger in the couplet than in any other stanza because the couplet is the simplest and most obvious form of stanza possible. [...] The poet may move in any direction whatever, and his movement will be almost automatically graduated by the metronomic undercurrent of regularity; and if he chooses at certain times to devote himself to prosaic explanation, the metronome and the Popian balance, emerging naked, are capable of giving his prose an incisiveness possible in no other form, and of maintaining the relationship of the didacticism to the rest of the poem--the relationship in regard to feeling, I mean, for a didactic passage would of necessity represent by explicit statement the rational relationships within the poem.
-In Defense of Reason, 142
This I think is a little too far, and is redolent of the minimalist excesses of Paul de Man, fascinated as both are with the automatic and mechanical. The bell is important, though, and even if things seem forced, Winters makes a lot of sense of it--if, that is, we read him a little against the grain and really understand that by the bell, he means not only rhyme but everything epigrammatic or everything involved in a concentrated turn in poetry, which rhyme so wonderfully helps out. This is what connects the bell to the argument about the identity of the line, more than the fact that this is the smallest stanza form.
Focusing on size and issues of regularity and automaticity instead leads him to say something which has to be one of the greatest little phrases I've read in criticism, but which seems a bit ridiculous:
A longer stanza is likely to be tyrannical.
-In Defense of Reason, 142
What follows is an interesting discussion of Spenser which justifies the statement more, so don't think it too ridiculous: my aim is only to show how committed Winters is to certain strands of his argument, rather than the one he should be following. He could have made a better case if he would have simply continued the argument against blank verse, for some people would say it is in blank verse that the identity of the line is strongest: shorn of all rhyme, it simply sits there, and rather than seeming like a part of the whole, it stands out all the more for remaining taut and internally unified. The argument here, if it would have admitted more of a role for the turn that rhyme itself gives verse, would have revealed this as a weak attempt to cover up the fact that the blank verse line is, essentially, not even a part, but a fragment, relying too much on meter. But that also would take Winters beyond the rigorous couplet of Pope back to the looser, more fanciful couplet of Dryden, who is willing often to extend a couplet into a triplet, or use amazing and absolutely unexpected rhymes and variations between rhymes. The form wouldn't be as pure.
But this, I think, should recommend Dryden all the more as the true hero of the heroic couplet, saving the form from the most vicious attacks: indeed, if we wanted to extend the argument more, we'd cite the fact that Dryden watched Milton very closely, and clearly thought his translations were a way of rivalling Milton, though they couldn't be original works of his own genius in the same sense. There's just nothing like the relaxed nimbleness of Dryden, the combination of a confident, strong line with the ability to make it fold and reform around the most playful thought. And if this isn't accomplished always by the most taut, tensed, controlled version of the form, the form in Dryden provokes it, which I think is more important than whether it is pure or not. The thing is just sheer fun, in a sense which the work and even play of Pope can't approach.
Especially when Pope is are understood as automatic, and this is the point at which we have to remember that, unlike Winters, the fact that Pope doesn't approach Dryden in this particular respect doesn't actually argue against him. For if I think that Dryden's example can defend the couplet better than Pope's, I mean only that: it does not imply that Dryden actually has a purer couplet, as Winters does with Pope. The idea that the purest form makes the best, least vulnerable model presupposes a lot about form itself that is pretty dubious, and shows us that questions about the vitality of a particular form in the end need to be posed differently and in a more historical manner: concerned with vitality, we can easily go beyond passionately delineating what a form can do when compared to another form, and, like Winters, start comparing versions of the same thing in some weird search to find the form itself. Such an effort ultimately to make us feel the weight of the form's accessibility--or, more likely, its inaccessibility--as if we ourselves could simply take it up again. Not that we can't: it's just that this will be more complex, more social and more historical venture than the effort (even given that Winters pursues it with more consciousness of the social and historical role of poetry than most) would make it seem.
In short, we shouldn't think of Pope as purer than Dryden, or Dryden as purer than Pope. Rather, we should say that Pope just has a certain inventiveness that works on a different level than Dryden, and accomplishes different things. Dryden seems to me to indeed remain more committed to the individual line, and experiments more than Pope with metrical possibilities--in the sense that Pope has too capatious an understanding of them all not to explore one without a point, just for sheer fun, and never with that happy sort of ignorance as to how it will come out. He thus actually works at the expense of the heroic couplet as a couplet sometimes. Pope, on the other hand works continually to display and reinforce masterfully chosen diction, to hit home something almost too clearly. And so when he uses the couplet, he is much more within it, exploring its ability to vary and indeed balance: one might say he thinks more in the couplet, distributing ideas and words with precision. It is from this that Pope's poise and balance comes, not from regularity.
Showing posts with label Pope. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pope. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Translations of Homer
Making my way through Pope’s Iliad again, I’m struck by its quickness, its poignancy--ultimately its poetry, after reading so much of Fagles. Take the following passage, from the first book, in which Achilles ends the quarrel with Agamemnon. I’ll use Richmond Lattimore’s translation first, which is wonderfully runs line-for-line, as a sort of neutral rendering of the scene:
“So must I be called of no account a coward
if I must carry out every order you may happen to give me.
Tell other men to do these things, but give me no more
commands, since I for my part have no intention to obey you.
And put away in your thoughts this other thing I tell you.
With my hands I will not fight for the girl’s sake, neither
with you nor any other man, since you take her away who gave her.
But of all the other things that are mine beside my fast black
ship, you shall take nothing away against my pleasure.
Come, then, only try it, that these others may see also;
instantly your own black blood will stain my spearpoint.”
So these two after battling in words of contention
stood up, and broke the assembly beside the ships of the Achaians.
Peleus’ son went back to his balanced ships and his shelter
with Patroklos, Menoitos’ son, and his own companions.
But the son of Atreus drew a fast ship down to the water
and allotted into it twenty rowers and put on board it
the hecatomb for the god and Chryseis of the fair cheeks
leading her by the hand. And in charge went crafty Odysseus.
These then putting out went over the ways of the water
while Atreus’ son told his people to wash off their defilement.
And they washed it away and threw the washings into the salt sea.
Then they accomplished perfect hecatombs to Apollo,
of bulls and goats along the beach of the barren salt sea.
The savour of the burning swept in circles up to the bright sky.
-Lattimore, 293-317.
Now for Fagles:
“What a worthless, burnt-out coward I’d be called
if I would submit to you and all your orders,
whatever you blurt out. Fling them at others,
don’t give me commands!
Never again, I trust, will Achilles yield to you.
And I tell you this--take it to heart--I warn you--
my hands will never do battle for that girl,
neither with you, King, nor any man Alive.
You Achaeans gave her, now you’ve snatched her back.
But all the rest I possess beside my fast black ship--
not one bit of it can you seize against my will, Atrides.
Come, try it! So the men can see, that instant,
your black blood gush and spurt around my spear!”
Once the two had fought it out with words,
battling face-to-face, both spring to their feet
and broke up the muster beside the Argive squadrons.
Achilles strode off to his trim ships and shelters,
back to his friend Patroclus and their comrades.
Agamemnon had a vessel hauled down to the sea,
he picked out twenty oarsmen to man her locks,
put aboard the cattle for sacrifice to the god
and led Chryseis in all her beauty amidships.
Versatile Odysseus took the helm as captain. All embarked,
the party launched out on the sea’s foaming lanes
while the sons of Atreus told his troops to wash,
to purify themselves from the filth of plague.
They scoured it off, threw scourings in the surf
and sacrificed to Apollo full-grown bulls and goats
along the beaten shore of the fallow barren sea
and savory smoke went swirling up the skies.
-Fagles, p. 87, lines 342-372
Now, for Pope:
Tyrant, I well deserv'd thy galling Chain,
To live thy Slave, and still to serve in vain,
Should I submit to each unjust Decree:
Command thy Vassals, but command not Me.
Seize on Briseïs, whom the Grecians doom'd
My Prize of War, yet tamely see resum'd;
And seize secure; No more Achilles draws
His conqu'ring Sword in any Woman's Cause.
The Gods command me to forgive the past;
But let this first Invasion be the last;
For know, thy Blood, when next thou dar'st invade,
Shall stream in Vengeance on my reeking Blade.
At this, they ceas'd; the stern Debate expir'd:
The Chiefs in sullen Majesty retir'd.
Achilles with Patroclus took his Way.
Where near his Tents his hollow Vessels lay.
Mean time Atrides launch'd with num'rous Oars
A well-rigg'd Ship for Chrysa's sacred Shores:
High on the Deck was fair Chruseïs plac'd,
And sage Ulysses with the Conduct grac'd:
Safe in her Sides the Hecatomb they stow'd,
Then swiftly sailing, cut the liquid Road.
The Host to expiate next the King prepares,
With pure Lustrations, and with solemn Pray'rs.
Wash'd by the briny Wave, the pious Train
Are cleans'd, and cast th'Ablutions in the Main.
Along the Shore whole Hecatombs were laid,
And Bulls and Goats to Phoebus' Altars paid.
The sable Fumes in curling Spires arise,
And waft their grateful Odours to the Skies.
-Pope, lines 388-417
Isn’t it amazing how quicker Pope seems! Of course, the thing to remember is just how few lines Lattimore takes to do everything: he uses twenty-four unrhymed six-beat lines. But it’s still sort of unbelievable how much Fagles just sloshes through the whole narrative here: even when he’s allowed the incredible looseness of Lattimore’s line, he needs thirty of them! Pope, of course, uses 30 lines as well, but these are heroic couplets, rhymed and (perhaps what is more remarkable, given how much both Lattimore and--again with less excuse--Fagles uses them) unenjambed. Indeed, if we consider that this means Pope used pairs of lines in iambic pentameter, we realize he almost uses less beats than Lattimore: Pope only has six more, or 150 to Lattimore’s 144. Fagles, however, takes 180 beats to say the same thing, without even having to use iambs or regular feet at all like Pope does.
Of course, poetry isn’t about trying to say things in the least amount of lines or beats or whatever. But Fagles in particular knows swiftness is still a major part of poetry (and especially translations that aim to be poetry) since the sense of rapidity we get when reading verse is often a trace of the economy of poetic language, of the fact that poetry does a lot with a little. So he tries continually to speed things up himself in the passage. Except all of his techniques--using dashes, exclamations, and plenty of deixis (all techniques taken from prose writing, by the way)--don’t seem to do anything at all except shift around register of the poem in a way that is as American as it is uncomfortable.
Pope on the other hand smoothly economizes, particularly embarrassing Fagles by never having to have recourse to something as textual or un-oral (except that this is how Fagles oddly thinks he can make a more performative, oral version of the Greek--seeming to solve things by confusing the issue) in the use of italics. Where Fagles says,
What a worthless, burnt-out coward I’d be called
if I would submit to you and all your orders,
whatever you blurt out. Fling them at others,
don’t give me commands!
Never again, I trust, will Achilles yield to you
Pope says,
Tyrant, I well deserv'd thy galling Chain,
To live thy Slave, and still to serve in vain,
Should I submit to each unjust Decree:
Command thy Vassals, but command not Me.
What’s so unbelievable in Pope’s version is the comprehension of the argument of each speech, the willingness to let the wrath of Achilles come from the force of the point he his making, where Fagles is much more willing to think that the rage comes from the breaking up of the speech, its fragmentation, Achilles’ stuttering.
At the same time, of course, this intense and compressed interplay of meaning and emphasis makes Pope lose a lot of the actual Greek. It’s worth thinking about exactly what we mean by “actual,” though. If we were trained to have a wider sense of the registers and functions of language--particularly the ways grammar opens up into rhetoric and combines with form--we might be more willing to see Pope as just trying to translate the Greek using many of less literal functions, rather than as actually being unfaithful to the original. In other words, we might be willing to argue that what we see as Pope not giving us the actual Greek--not reproducing things like its particular syntactical structures, or changing and refocusing the vehicle of various metaphors rather than giving the nearest English equivalent of them--is really just the exploitation of different techniques which do actually attempt to indeed give us the actual Greek. The emphasis upon the argument of the speeches (something he defends in his Preface as Homer’s moral and didactic aim), for example, which requires the introduction of certain metaphors not present in the original and particularly the introduction of un-Homeric grammatical structures, we could see as just the working of various rhetorical and formal devices--of which we have such limited understanding now and over which we have such little control. What’s at work in Pope, in short, may likely be something other than an extremely literalist notion of translation, where there’s no sense that rhetoric or verse form can help to translate: both of these things seem like fancy grammar getting in the way of the sense, or some effort to “clean up” the Greek. So there’s something to be said for Pope letting “Command thy vessels, but command not me” do so much work (when combined with a similar parallel structure “To live thy Slave, and still to serve in vain” two lines earlier), when we see Fagles use two unrelated phrases “Fling them [orders] at others, / don’t give me commands!” and emphasis in another.
This registered, what is so unbelievably great about Fagles’ translation is the extent to which it takes this literalist sort of fidelity and tries to turn it into poetry, give it something more than the bland, cold, cynical impulse which (except in classicists, for whom it is a way of respecting the original) typically lies behind it: seizing upon the general aim of Lattimore’s work, which is straightforward translation of sense and grammar (and which is not empty of poetry--I prefer it to Fitzgerald explicit attempts to make each line poetic, actually), and he intensifies the accuracy by finding something like the exact equivalent of the expressive force of the Greek as well. And he finds the words to do this in a distinctly American vocabulary, which is why such a big deal is made about this translation: it really feels like the first really modern American version of Homer. Again, this is exciting and disturbing at once, because that vocabulary, we find, is the demanding, stressed, whiny voice of hyperindividuals:
What I really want
is to keep my people safe, not see them dying.
-Lines 136-7
Only when we move away from Agamemnon’s speeches to the world of the Odyssey--and even then to the more pastoral scenes with Eumaeus--does the voice captured in so many idiomatic uses (“want” above being a particularly American use of the word) seem a bit less stressed, more sane, playful:
“My friend,” the swineherd answered, foreman of men,
“you really want my story? So many questions—well,
listen in quiet, then, and take your ease, sit back
and drink your wine. The nights are endless now.
We’ve plenty of time to sleep or savor a long tale.
No need, you know, to turn in before the hour.
Even too much sleep can be a bore.
But anyone else who feels the urge
can go to bed and then, at the crack of dawn,
break bread, turn out and tend our master’s pigs.
We two will keep to the shelter here, eat and drink
and take some joy in each other’s heartbreaking sorrows,
sharing each other’s memories. Over the years, you know,
a man finds solace even in old sorrows, true, a man
who’s weathered many blows and wandered many miles.
-The Odyssey, Penguin, Book 15
And even though we do have a great complaint (“Even too much sleep can be a bore”) this is humorous: “be a bore” has a sort of eagerness and sense of fun about it that couldn’t be uttered in the UK without some sense that it can slip into a sort of sourness, playful whinging.
But my point in all this is that very seldom does rhetoric or versification have a role in helping along the poetic force of the language. Indeed I like “Even too much sleep can be a bore” so much because it actually seems to approach a more regular line. With five-beats, it starts with a trochee at the beginning which you want to sort of keep continuing, then aren’t sure whether it should have slipped into a dactyl; by this point though your indecision makes your resolve to turn things into something anapestic--you’re within some sort of rhythm and are feeling it out--and this turns the line around so that it can be finished off with iambs, which are definite and rewarding and regular. This is extremely odd in a poem where the line seems so loose, so shaggy (even for a line with mere beats), that it seems to have no real role as a line except to be broken up (this is only more apparent in Fagles’ Aeneid).
In short, the language is left to fend for itself, as it were, as Fagles is concerned only with creating poetry by expressiveness and narration. These aren’t bad things in themselves--the last especially--but we can’t help but feel they are symptoms of a sort of despairing view of the role of poetry (one I think we might be on the verge of surmounting) where aim of poetry in the face of so many postmodern weirdnesses and media revolutions is to try and simply tell a story, any story, and give some sense that language is doing something, anything. The telling of stories doesn’t need to involve a position that is this desperate, one whose other reactionary side (which Fagles thankfully couldn’t care less about) involves reducing everything of this world to narrative and linguistic weirdness, so as to show there are more stories than we think. Storytelling and poetry happen in between somewhere, and conceding so much, and seeing such a huge role for the expressivity of various idioms, sets you against versification and rhetoric just like the forces you oppose--and many people do read Fagles and sometimes think they are just reading prose.
Nevertheless, if the role for such an American English isn’t wholly defined, Fagles’ collection and presentation so much vocabulary is something on the way towards renewing or making fresh a certain very old poetic task, involving both establishing the language of the people and finding fitting dialects for particular linguistic tasks. Indeed, Fagles and Pope actually aren’t too far apart in appreciating this in the author they translate (though Fagles accomplishes it as well and with creativity), since this task involves making language work with the poem. I’ll close with Pope in his Preface, who sees this helping with the meter of the work--in Fagles we might only need to substitute something more general and fundamental that is facilitated by such an immense and worthwhile task, like storytelling itself:
He was not satisfied with his language as he found it settled in any one part of Greece, but searched through its different dialects with this particular view, to beautify and perfect his numbers he considered these as they had a greater mixture of vowels or consonants, and accordingly employed them as the verse required either a greater smoothness or strength. Thus his measures,
instead of being fetters to his sense, were always in readiness to run along with the warmth of his rapture, and even to give a further representation of his notions, in the correspondence of their sounds to what they signified.
“So must I be called of no account a coward
if I must carry out every order you may happen to give me.
Tell other men to do these things, but give me no more
commands, since I for my part have no intention to obey you.
And put away in your thoughts this other thing I tell you.
With my hands I will not fight for the girl’s sake, neither
with you nor any other man, since you take her away who gave her.
But of all the other things that are mine beside my fast black
ship, you shall take nothing away against my pleasure.
Come, then, only try it, that these others may see also;
instantly your own black blood will stain my spearpoint.”
So these two after battling in words of contention
stood up, and broke the assembly beside the ships of the Achaians.
Peleus’ son went back to his balanced ships and his shelter
with Patroklos, Menoitos’ son, and his own companions.
But the son of Atreus drew a fast ship down to the water
and allotted into it twenty rowers and put on board it
the hecatomb for the god and Chryseis of the fair cheeks
leading her by the hand. And in charge went crafty Odysseus.
These then putting out went over the ways of the water
while Atreus’ son told his people to wash off their defilement.
And they washed it away and threw the washings into the salt sea.
Then they accomplished perfect hecatombs to Apollo,
of bulls and goats along the beach of the barren salt sea.
The savour of the burning swept in circles up to the bright sky.
-Lattimore, 293-317.
Now for Fagles:
“What a worthless, burnt-out coward I’d be called
if I would submit to you and all your orders,
whatever you blurt out. Fling them at others,
don’t give me commands!
Never again, I trust, will Achilles yield to you.
And I tell you this--take it to heart--I warn you--
my hands will never do battle for that girl,
neither with you, King, nor any man Alive.
You Achaeans gave her, now you’ve snatched her back.
But all the rest I possess beside my fast black ship--
not one bit of it can you seize against my will, Atrides.
Come, try it! So the men can see, that instant,
your black blood gush and spurt around my spear!”
Once the two had fought it out with words,
battling face-to-face, both spring to their feet
and broke up the muster beside the Argive squadrons.
Achilles strode off to his trim ships and shelters,
back to his friend Patroclus and their comrades.
Agamemnon had a vessel hauled down to the sea,
he picked out twenty oarsmen to man her locks,
put aboard the cattle for sacrifice to the god
and led Chryseis in all her beauty amidships.
Versatile Odysseus took the helm as captain. All embarked,
the party launched out on the sea’s foaming lanes
while the sons of Atreus told his troops to wash,
to purify themselves from the filth of plague.
They scoured it off, threw scourings in the surf
and sacrificed to Apollo full-grown bulls and goats
along the beaten shore of the fallow barren sea
and savory smoke went swirling up the skies.
-Fagles, p. 87, lines 342-372
Now, for Pope:
Tyrant, I well deserv'd thy galling Chain,
To live thy Slave, and still to serve in vain,
Should I submit to each unjust Decree:
Command thy Vassals, but command not Me.
Seize on Briseïs, whom the Grecians doom'd
My Prize of War, yet tamely see resum'd;
And seize secure; No more Achilles draws
His conqu'ring Sword in any Woman's Cause.
The Gods command me to forgive the past;
But let this first Invasion be the last;
For know, thy Blood, when next thou dar'st invade,
Shall stream in Vengeance on my reeking Blade.
At this, they ceas'd; the stern Debate expir'd:
The Chiefs in sullen Majesty retir'd.
Achilles with Patroclus took his Way.
Where near his Tents his hollow Vessels lay.
Mean time Atrides launch'd with num'rous Oars
A well-rigg'd Ship for Chrysa's sacred Shores:
High on the Deck was fair Chruseïs plac'd,
And sage Ulysses with the Conduct grac'd:
Safe in her Sides the Hecatomb they stow'd,
Then swiftly sailing, cut the liquid Road.
The Host to expiate next the King prepares,
With pure Lustrations, and with solemn Pray'rs.
Wash'd by the briny Wave, the pious Train
Are cleans'd, and cast th'Ablutions in the Main.
Along the Shore whole Hecatombs were laid,
And Bulls and Goats to Phoebus' Altars paid.
The sable Fumes in curling Spires arise,
And waft their grateful Odours to the Skies.
-Pope, lines 388-417
Isn’t it amazing how quicker Pope seems! Of course, the thing to remember is just how few lines Lattimore takes to do everything: he uses twenty-four unrhymed six-beat lines. But it’s still sort of unbelievable how much Fagles just sloshes through the whole narrative here: even when he’s allowed the incredible looseness of Lattimore’s line, he needs thirty of them! Pope, of course, uses 30 lines as well, but these are heroic couplets, rhymed and (perhaps what is more remarkable, given how much both Lattimore and--again with less excuse--Fagles uses them) unenjambed. Indeed, if we consider that this means Pope used pairs of lines in iambic pentameter, we realize he almost uses less beats than Lattimore: Pope only has six more, or 150 to Lattimore’s 144. Fagles, however, takes 180 beats to say the same thing, without even having to use iambs or regular feet at all like Pope does.
Of course, poetry isn’t about trying to say things in the least amount of lines or beats or whatever. But Fagles in particular knows swiftness is still a major part of poetry (and especially translations that aim to be poetry) since the sense of rapidity we get when reading verse is often a trace of the economy of poetic language, of the fact that poetry does a lot with a little. So he tries continually to speed things up himself in the passage. Except all of his techniques--using dashes, exclamations, and plenty of deixis (all techniques taken from prose writing, by the way)--don’t seem to do anything at all except shift around register of the poem in a way that is as American as it is uncomfortable.
Pope on the other hand smoothly economizes, particularly embarrassing Fagles by never having to have recourse to something as textual or un-oral (except that this is how Fagles oddly thinks he can make a more performative, oral version of the Greek--seeming to solve things by confusing the issue) in the use of italics. Where Fagles says,
What a worthless, burnt-out coward I’d be called
if I would submit to you and all your orders,
whatever you blurt out. Fling them at others,
don’t give me commands!
Never again, I trust, will Achilles yield to you
Pope says,
Tyrant, I well deserv'd thy galling Chain,
To live thy Slave, and still to serve in vain,
Should I submit to each unjust Decree:
Command thy Vassals, but command not Me.
What’s so unbelievable in Pope’s version is the comprehension of the argument of each speech, the willingness to let the wrath of Achilles come from the force of the point he his making, where Fagles is much more willing to think that the rage comes from the breaking up of the speech, its fragmentation, Achilles’ stuttering.
At the same time, of course, this intense and compressed interplay of meaning and emphasis makes Pope lose a lot of the actual Greek. It’s worth thinking about exactly what we mean by “actual,” though. If we were trained to have a wider sense of the registers and functions of language--particularly the ways grammar opens up into rhetoric and combines with form--we might be more willing to see Pope as just trying to translate the Greek using many of less literal functions, rather than as actually being unfaithful to the original. In other words, we might be willing to argue that what we see as Pope not giving us the actual Greek--not reproducing things like its particular syntactical structures, or changing and refocusing the vehicle of various metaphors rather than giving the nearest English equivalent of them--is really just the exploitation of different techniques which do actually attempt to indeed give us the actual Greek. The emphasis upon the argument of the speeches (something he defends in his Preface as Homer’s moral and didactic aim), for example, which requires the introduction of certain metaphors not present in the original and particularly the introduction of un-Homeric grammatical structures, we could see as just the working of various rhetorical and formal devices--of which we have such limited understanding now and over which we have such little control. What’s at work in Pope, in short, may likely be something other than an extremely literalist notion of translation, where there’s no sense that rhetoric or verse form can help to translate: both of these things seem like fancy grammar getting in the way of the sense, or some effort to “clean up” the Greek. So there’s something to be said for Pope letting “Command thy vessels, but command not me” do so much work (when combined with a similar parallel structure “To live thy Slave, and still to serve in vain” two lines earlier), when we see Fagles use two unrelated phrases “Fling them [orders] at others, / don’t give me commands!” and emphasis in another.
This registered, what is so unbelievably great about Fagles’ translation is the extent to which it takes this literalist sort of fidelity and tries to turn it into poetry, give it something more than the bland, cold, cynical impulse which (except in classicists, for whom it is a way of respecting the original) typically lies behind it: seizing upon the general aim of Lattimore’s work, which is straightforward translation of sense and grammar (and which is not empty of poetry--I prefer it to Fitzgerald explicit attempts to make each line poetic, actually), and he intensifies the accuracy by finding something like the exact equivalent of the expressive force of the Greek as well. And he finds the words to do this in a distinctly American vocabulary, which is why such a big deal is made about this translation: it really feels like the first really modern American version of Homer. Again, this is exciting and disturbing at once, because that vocabulary, we find, is the demanding, stressed, whiny voice of hyperindividuals:
What I really want
is to keep my people safe, not see them dying.
-Lines 136-7
Only when we move away from Agamemnon’s speeches to the world of the Odyssey--and even then to the more pastoral scenes with Eumaeus--does the voice captured in so many idiomatic uses (“want” above being a particularly American use of the word) seem a bit less stressed, more sane, playful:
“My friend,” the swineherd answered, foreman of men,
“you really want my story? So many questions—well,
listen in quiet, then, and take your ease, sit back
and drink your wine. The nights are endless now.
We’ve plenty of time to sleep or savor a long tale.
No need, you know, to turn in before the hour.
Even too much sleep can be a bore.
But anyone else who feels the urge
can go to bed and then, at the crack of dawn,
break bread, turn out and tend our master’s pigs.
We two will keep to the shelter here, eat and drink
and take some joy in each other’s heartbreaking sorrows,
sharing each other’s memories. Over the years, you know,
a man finds solace even in old sorrows, true, a man
who’s weathered many blows and wandered many miles.
-The Odyssey, Penguin, Book 15
And even though we do have a great complaint (“Even too much sleep can be a bore”) this is humorous: “be a bore” has a sort of eagerness and sense of fun about it that couldn’t be uttered in the UK without some sense that it can slip into a sort of sourness, playful whinging.
But my point in all this is that very seldom does rhetoric or versification have a role in helping along the poetic force of the language. Indeed I like “Even too much sleep can be a bore” so much because it actually seems to approach a more regular line. With five-beats, it starts with a trochee at the beginning which you want to sort of keep continuing, then aren’t sure whether it should have slipped into a dactyl; by this point though your indecision makes your resolve to turn things into something anapestic--you’re within some sort of rhythm and are feeling it out--and this turns the line around so that it can be finished off with iambs, which are definite and rewarding and regular. This is extremely odd in a poem where the line seems so loose, so shaggy (even for a line with mere beats), that it seems to have no real role as a line except to be broken up (this is only more apparent in Fagles’ Aeneid).
In short, the language is left to fend for itself, as it were, as Fagles is concerned only with creating poetry by expressiveness and narration. These aren’t bad things in themselves--the last especially--but we can’t help but feel they are symptoms of a sort of despairing view of the role of poetry (one I think we might be on the verge of surmounting) where aim of poetry in the face of so many postmodern weirdnesses and media revolutions is to try and simply tell a story, any story, and give some sense that language is doing something, anything. The telling of stories doesn’t need to involve a position that is this desperate, one whose other reactionary side (which Fagles thankfully couldn’t care less about) involves reducing everything of this world to narrative and linguistic weirdness, so as to show there are more stories than we think. Storytelling and poetry happen in between somewhere, and conceding so much, and seeing such a huge role for the expressivity of various idioms, sets you against versification and rhetoric just like the forces you oppose--and many people do read Fagles and sometimes think they are just reading prose.
Nevertheless, if the role for such an American English isn’t wholly defined, Fagles’ collection and presentation so much vocabulary is something on the way towards renewing or making fresh a certain very old poetic task, involving both establishing the language of the people and finding fitting dialects for particular linguistic tasks. Indeed, Fagles and Pope actually aren’t too far apart in appreciating this in the author they translate (though Fagles accomplishes it as well and with creativity), since this task involves making language work with the poem. I’ll close with Pope in his Preface, who sees this helping with the meter of the work--in Fagles we might only need to substitute something more general and fundamental that is facilitated by such an immense and worthwhile task, like storytelling itself:
He was not satisfied with his language as he found it settled in any one part of Greece, but searched through its different dialects with this particular view, to beautify and perfect his numbers he considered these as they had a greater mixture of vowels or consonants, and accordingly employed them as the verse required either a greater smoothness or strength. Thus his measures,
instead of being fetters to his sense, were always in readiness to run along with the warmth of his rapture, and even to give a further representation of his notions, in the correspondence of their sounds to what they signified.
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