Instigations Part 46

"And then went down to the ship, set keel to breakers, Forth on the G.o.dly sea, We set up mast and sail on the swart ship, Sheep bore we aboard her, and our bodies also, Heavy with weeping; and winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas, Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed G.o.ddess.

Then sat we amidships--wind jamming the tiller-- Thus with stretched sail we went over sea till day's end.

Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean, Came we then to the bounds of deepest water, To the Kimmerian lands and peopled cities Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever With glitter of sun-rays, Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven, Swartest night stretched over wretched men there, The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place Aforesaid by Circe.

Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus, And drawing sword from my hip I dug the ell-square pitkin, Poured we libations unto each the dead, First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour, Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death's-heads, As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods.

Sheep, to Tiresias only; black and a bell sheep.

Dark blood flowed in the fosse, Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, Of brides, of youths, and of much-bearing old; Virgins tender, souls stained with recent tears, Many men mauled with bronze lance-heads, Battle spoil, bearing yet dreary arms, These many crowded about me, With shouting, pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts.

Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze, Poured ointment, cried to the G.o.ds, To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine, Unsheathed the narrow sword, I sat to keep off the impetuous, impotent dead Till I should hear Tiresias.

But first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor, Unburied, cast on the wide earth, Limbs that we left in the house of Circe, Unwept, unwrapped in sepulchre, since toils urged other.

Pitiful spirit, and I cried in hurried speech: 'Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast?

Cam'st thou a-foot, outstripping seamen?'

And he in heavy speech: 'Ill fate and abundant wine! I slept in Circe's ingle, Going down the long ladder unguarded, I fell against the b.u.t.tress, Shattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought Avernus.

But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied, Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-board, and inscribed: "_A man of no fortune and with a name to come._"

And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows.'

Came then another ghost, whom I beat off, Anticlea, And then Tiresias, Theban, Holding his golden wand, knew me and spoke first: 'Man of ill hour, why come a second time, Leaving the sunlight, facing the sunless dead, and this joyless region?

Stand from the fosse, move back, leave me my b.l.o.o.d.y bever, And I will speak you true speeches.'

And I stepped back, Sheathing the yellow sword. Dark blood he drank then, And spoke: 'l.u.s.trous Odysseus Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas, Lose all companions.' Foretold me the ways and the signs.

Came then Anticlea, to whom I answered: 'Fate drives me on through these deeps. I sought Tiresias,'

Told her the news of Troy. And thrice her shadow Faded in my embrace."

It takes no more Latin than I have to know that Divus' Latin is not the Latin of Catullus and Ovid; that it is _illepidus_ to chuck Latin nominative participles about in such profusion; that Romans did not use _habentes_ as the Greeks used _????te?_, etc. And _nos_ in line 53 is unnecessary. Divus' Latin has, despite these wems, its quality; it is even singable, there are constant suggestions of the poetic motion; it is very simple Latin, after all, and a crib of this sort may make just the difference of permitting a man to read fast enough to get the swing and mood of the subject, instead of losing both in a dictionary.

Even _habentes_ when one has made up one's mind to it, together with less obvious exoticisms, does not upset one as

"the steep of Delphos leaving."

One is, of necessity, more sensitive to botches in one's own tongue than to botches in another, however carefully learned.

For all the fuss about Divus' errors of elegance Samuelis Clarkius and Jo. Augustus Ernestus do not seem to have gone him much better---with two hundred years extra h.e.l.lenic scholarship at their disposal.

The first Aldine Greek Iliads appeared I think in 1504, Odyssey possibly later.[4] My edition of Divus is of 1538, and as it contains Aldus' own translation of the Frog-fight, it may indicate that Divus was in touch with Aldus in Italy, or quite possibly the French edition is pirated from an earlier Italian printing. A Latin Odyssey in some sort of verse was at that time infinitely worth doing.

Raphael of Volterra had done a prose Odyssey with the opening lines of several books and a few other brief pa.s.sages in verse. This was printed with Laurenzo Valla's prose Iliads as early as 1502. He begins:

"Dic mihi musa virum captae post tempora Troiae Qui mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes Multa quoque et ponto pa.s.sus dum naufragus errat Ut sibi tum sotiis (sociis) vitam servaret in alto Non tamen hos cupiens fato deprompsit acerbo."

Probably the source of "Master Watson's" English quant.i.tative couplet, but obviously not copied by Divus:

"Virum mihi dic musa multiscium qui valde multum Erravit ex quo Troiae sacram urbem depopulatus est: Multorum autem virorum vidit urbes et mentem cognovit: Multos autem hic in mare pa.s.sus est dolores, suo in animo, Liberans suamque animam et reditum sociorum."

On the other hand, it is nearly impossible to believe that Clark and Ernestus were unfamiliar with Divus. Clark calls his Latin crib a composite "non elegantem utique et venustam, sed ita Romanam, ut verbis verba." A good deal of Divus' _venustas_ has departed. Clark's hyphenated compounds are, I think, no more Roman than are some of Divus'

coinage; they may be a trifle more explanatory, but if we read a shade more of color into _a??sfat?? ?????_ than we can into _multum vinum,_ it is not restored to us in Clark's _copiosum vinum_, nor does _terra spatiosa_ improve upon _terra lata, e???de???_ being (if anything more than _lata_): "with wide ways or streets," the wide ways of the world, traversable, open to wanderers. The participles remain in Clark-Ernestus, many of the coined words remain unchanged. Georgius Dartona gives, in the opening of the second hymn to Aphrodite:

"Venerandam auream coronam habentem pulchram Venerem Canam, quae totius Cypri munimenta sort.i.ta est Maritimae ubi illam zephyri vis molliter spirantis Suscitavit per undam multisoni maris, Spuma in molli: hanc autem auricurae Horae Susceperunt hilariter, immortales autem vestes induere: Capite vero super immortali coronam bene constructam posuere Pulchram, auream: tribus autem ansis Donum orichalchi aurique honorabilis: Collum autem molle, ac pectora argentea Monilibus aureis ornabant...." etc.

Ernestus, adding by himself the appendices to the Epics, gives us:

"Venerandam auream coronam habentem pulchram Venerem Canam, quae totius Cypri munimenta sort.i.ta est Maritimae, ubi illam zephyri vis molliter spirantis Tulit per undam multisoni maris Spuma in molli: hanc autem auro comam religatae Horae Susceperunt hilariter, immortales autem vestes induere: Caput autem super immortale coronam bene constructam posuere Pulchram, auream, perforatis autem auriculis Donum orichalci preciosi: Collum autem molle ac pectora Candida[5]

Monilibus aureis ornabant...." etc.

"Which things since they are so" lead us to feel that we would have had no less respect for Messrs. Clarkius and Ernestus if they had deigned to mention the names of their predecessors. They have not done this in their prefaces, and if any mention is made of the sixteenth-century scholars, it is very effectually buried somewhere in the voluminous Latin notes, which I have not gone through _in toto_. Their edition (Glasgow, 1814) is, however, most serviceable.

TRANSLATION OF AESCHYLUS

A search for Aeschylus in English is deadly, accursed, mind-rending.

Browning has "done" the Agamemnon, or "done the Agamemnon in the eye" as the critic may choose to consider. He has written a modest and an apparently intelligent preface:

"I should hardly look for an impossible transmission of the reputed magniloquence and sonority of the Greek; and this with the less regret, inasmuch as there is abundant musicality elsewhere, but nowhere else than in his poem the ideas of the poet."

He quotes Matthew Arnold on the Greeks: "their expression is so excellent, because it is so simple and so well subordinated, because it draws its force directly from the pregnancy of the matter which it conveys ... not a word wasted, not a sentiment capriciously thrown in, stroke on stroke."

He is reasonable about the Greek spelling. He points out that _?????

?d?? ?????st?? ??d???_ sounds very poorly as "Seeing her son the fairest of men" but is outshouted in "Remirando il figliuolo bellissimo degli uomini," and protests his fidelity to the meaning of Aeschylus.

His weakness in this work is where it essentially lay in all of his expression, it rests in the term "ideas"--"Thought" as Browning understood it--"ideas" as the term is current, are poor two dimensional stuff, a scant, scratch covering. "d.a.m.n ideas, anyhow." An idea is only an imperfect induction from fact.

The solid, the "last atom of force verging off into the first atom of matter" is the force, the emotion, the objective sight of the poet. In the Agamemnon it is the whole rush of the action, the whole wildness of Ka.s.sandra's continual shrieking, the flash of the beacon fires burning unstinted wood, the outburst of

_?????? ??a??? ??sa?_,

or the later

_????a? ??a??? t?d' ????s' ?? ?p??a._

"Troy is the greeks'." Even Rossetti has it better than Browning: "Troy's down, tall Troy's on fire," anything, literally anything that can be shouted, that can be shouted uncontrolledly and hysterically.

"Troy is the Greeks'" is an ambiguity for the ear. "Know that our men are in Ilion."

Anything but a stilted unsayable jargon. Yet with Browning we have

"Troia the Achaioi hold," and later,

"Troia do the Achaioi hold," followed by:

"this same day I think a noise--no mixture--reigns i' the city Sour wine and unguent pour thou in one vessel--"

And it does not end here. In fact it reaches the nadir of its bathos in a later speech of Klutaimnestra in the line

"The perfect man his home perambulating!"

We may add several exclamation points to the one which Mr. Browning has provided. But then all translation is a thankless, or is at least most apt to be a thankless and desolate undertaking.

What Browning had not got into his sometimes excellent top-knot was the patent, or what should be the patent fact that inversions of sentence order in an uninflected language like English are not, simply and utterly _are not_ any sort of equivalent for inversions and perturbations of order in a language inflected as Greek and Latin are inflected. That is the chief source of his error. In these inflected languages order has other currents than simple sequence of subject, predicate, object; and all sorts of departures from this Franco-English natural position are in Greek and Latin neither confusing nor delaying; they may be both simple and emphatic, they do not obstruct one's apperception of the verbal relations.

Obscurities _not inherent in_ the matter, obscurities due not to the thing but to the wording, are a botch, and are _not_ worth preserving in a translation. The work lives not by them but despite them.

Rossetti is in this matter sounder than Browning, when he says that the only thing worth bringing over is the beauty of the original; and despite Rossetti's purple plush and mola.s.ses tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs he meant by "beauty" something fairly near what we mean by the "emotional intensity"

of his original.