 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
 |
  |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS WITH THE PEOPLE OF THE PAST
Note: Thomas Cahill gave this address for the first time as the keynote speech to the Sun Valley Writers' Conference in August 2003, where he was introduced by Frank McCourt. I am always a little surprised when I am introduced as a historian, and tend to look around to see who is going to approach the microphone. I think of myself as a translator of ancient poetry--that is, someone who frames and re-presents language in its most concentrated form, language at its most potent, even language as revelation. To translate--for me--means that one must first find a way to live inside the ancient words. One must come to feel the meaning of the words, and then one must bring these words into the present, into our contemporary tongue, so that people of the present may say, "Now I understand these ancient people, who seemed so unlike myself. Now I can sympathize with their sorrows, laugh at their jokes, dance their dance." History must be learned in pieces. This is partly because we have only pieces of the past--shards, ostraca, palimpsests, crumbling codices with missing pages, newsreel clips, snatches of song, faces of idols whose bodies have long since turned to dust--which give us tantalizing glimpses of what has been but never the whole reality. How could they? We cannot encompass the whole reality even of the times in which we live. Human beings never know more than part, as "through a glass darkly"; and all knowledge comes to us in pieces. That said, it is often easier to encompass the past than the present, for it is past; and its pieces may be set beside one another, examined, contrasted and compared, till one attains an overview. Like fish who do not know they swim in water, we are seldom aware of the atmosphere of the times through which we move, how strange and singular they are. But when we approach another age, its alienness stands out for us, almost as if that were its most obvious quality; and the sense of being on alien ground grows with the antiquity of the age we are considering. I first came in contact with people of another time and place in the sayings, stories, and songs my mother taught me when I was little. These were pieces of an oral tradition, passed on to her by her mother, who died before I was born, a countrywoman from the Galway midlands. So many of the words were strange to someone growing up in twentieth-century New York City: "When you've harrowed as much as I've ploughed, then you'll know something"; "You never know who'll take the coal off your foot, when it's burning you"; "Every old shoe finds an old sock." I had been to a farm once but had never seen harrow or plough in use, I knew what coal was but had never been warmed at an open coal fire, I surely knew what shoes and socks were but nothing of the archaic courting practices in the Irish countryside. My mother explained patiently that this last was meant as a hilarious sendup of old maids and their prospects. The sexual aspect of the imagery she doubtlessly left me to work out for myself. But her waves of words had a sort of triple (and simultaneous) effect: first, the experience of coming into contact with alien lives through the medium of the words they had left behind; then, an acknowledgment of the humanity I shared with these strangers from another time and place; and, last, the satisfying thrill that concentrated, metaphorical language can give its listener--the electric sensation at the back of the neck announcing the arrival of the gods of poetry. It is through such wisps of words and such tantalizingly incomplete images that we touch the past and its peoples. When I attended a Jesuit high school in New York City and was taught to read Latin and ancient Greek, I had my first scholarly taste of the strangeness of other ages. Reading the stories left behind by Ovid, Virgil, Sappho, Homer, I felt I had been given the key to the souls of dead men and women--people who had lived more than 2000 years before me, in Homer's case nearly 3000 years before. The Jesuits were verbal but not visual. Though they pointed us in the direction of words, they failed to mention the sensual delights in which the city abounded--the things to be discovered, for instance, in the great museums and concert halls (to speak only of the most obvious). Just around the corner from my school was the Metropolitan Musem of Art. There, in the old gallery of classical art, I first saw the faint traces of paint on the classical marble statuary and learned that the eyeless bronzes had once been fitted with life-like irises. There I saw an accurate model of the Parthenon with its excited and boldly colored frieze of gods and heroes. I came to understand that ancient Greece had not been a collection of tasteful white marble statues but a place on fire with color. I made the connection between these astonishing figures that now lived along 5th Avenue and the brilliant colors of Homer's metaphors: the wine-dark sea, the rosy-fingered dawn. I had, without yet knowing it, put the literature in a context. The labor of learning the context of a work of ancient literature can be painfully slow, like that of an archeologist uncovering an ancient site and then with patience and care digging gingerly, dusting carefully, examining, identifying, and finally gaining an overview. It requires logic and intuition, book knowledge and life experience. You must bring to bear all the weapons in your arsenal, sometimes all your cleverness, at other times all your simplicity. But finally, having set the literature in its context, you must leap into the words and find the human being. Every culture, however strange, however alien, however distant from us, has something in common with us and our experiences. The people of the past saw the world in very different ways. Their religions, philosophies, and worldviews were often so different from ours that they might as well have been creatures from outer space. But the human body has not changed: we weep, laugh, sweat, bleed, just as they did--and because of this we can find communion with them. We must acknowledge the differences in philosophy; then we must find the similarities of feeling and make the human connection. When I was writing How the Irish Saved Civilization, the first volume in The Hinges of History® series, I almost despaired when I came to Saint Patrick. His first biographer had written of him two hundred years after his death and had few documents at his disposal. This biographer was a monk of the abbey of Armagh, which Saint Patrick had established, and his main point was to prove that Patrick was a greater saint than any other. He did this by making his subject a wonder worker and magician, who frightened all the snakes out of Ireland and went around saying "Zap, you're dead" to anyone who got in his way, after which the offending party would promptly keel over and die. I found myself unimpressed. I read the modern biographies of Saint Patrick, most of them written by pious souls who saw their subject through such a soft focus of unrelenting goodness that he no longer had any human reality. I decided to remove the "Saint" from Patrick's name. "Saint" was not his first name--and surely he hadn't grown up with his mother calling him that. He wasn't a saint to himself--no one is. So if I wanted to get close to Patrick, I would have to see him as he saw himself. His mother didn't even call him "Patrick" but "Patricius": he was a Roman citizen of the island of Britain, which was then--in the late fourth and early fifth centuries--a Roman province where everyone spoke Latin. Calling Saint Patrick Patricius seemed to give him an entirely new identity, something real to build on. Then I came to Patrick's own autobiography, a few pages written toward the end of his life, after he had spent some thirty years in Ireland, speaking Irish and nearly forgetting the Latin he had been born to. The Latin of Patrick the old man is execrable--the worst Latin ever to come down to us. (Undoubtedly, worse Latin than Patrick's was once written--scribbled notes and laundry lists, but none of these have survived.) The great difficulty in reading Patrick's Latin, if you know any Latin at all, is not that your Latin may not be good enough but that it may not be bad enough to understand him properly. I spent many weeks reading and re-reading Patrick's few pages of autobiography. He would have gotten an F for organization. At one moment he is telling us about something that happened to him as a young man; in the next moment he is recounting something that may have happened only yesterday--but he doesn't bother to alert us to the change in era. He has few connectives and no transitions. But, gradually (that's a transition), from these few ancient pages, written fifteen hundred years ago, a real human being began to emerge. He was no wonder worker, no magician; and he claimed no special powers. He shows us first his easy life as a boy in Roman Britain. His parents were loving, resourceful people, who owned estates; his father was a municipal official; his grandfather was a priest; they were members of the local gentry, not the most prominent, but comfortable, sheltered people. Patrick himself was a bit of a brat, a brash, entitled teenager, who felt fenced in by his parents' way of life and their aspirations for him. He thought their Christian religion more than a little silly--and the one thing he was certain about was that he was not going to follow in his father's footsteps. But one morning the unthinkable happened: he was kidnapped by Irish pirates who brought him to Ireland in chains and auctioned him off like a calf. For the next six years, from the age of sixteen to the age of twenty-two--the period that is the crucible of personality in each human being's life--Patrick was a slave to one of the mad warrior kings of Ireland. These were people who did not care about their own lives, let alone the lives of others. The Irish were then completely outside the Roman empire and the civilized world. They were not only the great slave traders of their day; they were practitioners of human sacrifice; and they warred with one another constantly. They did not fuss much about providing pleasant working conditions for those in their employ. Patrick tells us that he worked outdoors as a shepherd and that he often went hungry and naked--and this in a rainy country where the temperature seldom rises above fifty. He was completely alone; he could not even understand the language--and, needless to say, his employers, who did a lot of threatening and shouting, did not provide him with a course of language tapes. It was in these woeful circumstances, Patrick tells us, that he began to change. His abduction had, of course, already changed his life. But now the inner Patrick began to change. Completely cut off from everything familiar, he began to pray to the God of his parents, whom he had once made such fun of. In order to understand how Patrick kept his sanity, we should probably compare his plight to the situation of a modern American or European hostage in a place like Iran. As so many of these men and women have told us after their release, the solitude, their inability to communicate with anyone (even their captors), the lack of any intellectual stimulus almost drove them insane--until they discovered prayer, which brought them peace and tranquility and a sense of hope even in the most desperate circumstances. Patrick did finally escape; but he could never settle down again to the pleasant, quiet life of the British countryside. He was no longer the person he had been when he left; his restlessness kept him traveling. At length, in middle age, he returned to Ireland as a bishop, bringing with him the Gospel and the Christianity he had once despised. He became the first person ever to bring this Gospel of peace and love to a barbarian nation; he became the first person ever to condemn slavery as immoral. He convinced the Irish to give up the slave trade and to cease their sacrifice of human beings. He even got them to limit the cattle rustling and the ensuing warfare that had been their bread and butter. His strange experiences had made him into a different man from the man he would otherwise have become; and he made something of his experiences--that is to say, with the help of the impossible Irish, he gave his strange life a meaning and a purpose. I must tell you about Frank McCourt and the nipples. Before Angela's Ashes was ever published, I met Frank at a party not long after the publication of How the Irish Saved Civilization and found that he was one of my readers. "Where did you get that stuff about the nipples? " said he. "I never heard that before." Patrick tells us that after he had escaped from his slavemaster, he was about to board a ship which he was sure was sitting there in the harbor just for him. But the captain refused to take him. Now Patrick was an escaped slave--and he looked like one. He could not have expected to remain free many hours, maybe even many minutes, more. He needed to get on the that ship. He walked away to a little hut to pray, and one of the sailors followed him there to say that the captain had changed his mind. When Patrick returned to the ship, the crew greeted him by inviting him to suck their nipples. Patrick declined politely, and then the sailors said, "Oh, well, come on board, anyway. You can make friends with us whatever way you like." Frank had never heard about the nipples because Patrick's alarmed biographers regularly leave them out. Patrick himself fails to explain the significance of the incident because its meaning must have been evident to the readers of his day. There must therefore have been a well-known custom among the Celts of nipple-sucking for the sake of friendship. By declining to participate, Patrick gives us an idea of how bizarre even he found the Irish and how rude and unrestrained their world must have been. Though I learned Hebrew before writing The Gifts of the Jews, the second volume in The Hinges of History® series, I was exceedingly happy to find that Everett Fox's translation of the Five Books of Moses answered most of my needs. One should probably not take on the task of translating biblical Hebrew without a direct call from above (which I had not received); and Fox's translation has all the earthy tension of the original. Biblical Hebrew developed as a desert language, and it exhibits the economy of desert people. The very opposite of Victorian English, which never uses fewer words if it can use more, Hebrew will not use three words if two will do. It will not use two words if one will do. If it can get away with silence instead of words, it will do so--and much of the meaning of the Hebrew Bible is to be found in its silences. This is because in the desert every movement is dehydrating; and desert people learn to think before they move and think before they speak. They are elegant conservors of energy. When Amos, the great prophet of the Northern Kingdom, tries to move the people to abandon their trivial pursuit of economic status and to take account of the poor, he says most beautifully: Ve-yigal ka-maim mishpat, ve-tsedaka k'nachal eytahn,which I would translate, "Let your justice flow like water, and your compassion like a never-failing stream." The English takes twenty syllables, the Hebrew only fifteen--and this is Hebrew at its most expansive! In The Gifts of the Jews, the figure I found myself most attracted to was not a saint but a king, David, the shepherd king who three thousand years ago united the tribes of Israel into one nation. Here again my search for the inner man centered on the writings that the man had left behind. We know King David's outer story from the Book of Samuel: how he began as a shepherd boy who killed the giant Goliath and was anointed king by the prophet Samuel; how his reign brought greater peace than Israel had ever known and how he could not keep his pants on (or his loin cloth up) whenever he encountered a beautiful woman (politics hasn't changed all that much); and how he arranged the slaughter of one man whose wife he wanted to have; and how in old age his favorite son rose against him. The Book of Samuel, in which all these stores are so well told, is a chronicle, an early Israelite history. But David's inner story, the story of his emotions, is told in another book, the Book of Psalms; and some of these psalms, which were poems sung to musical accompaniment, were actually written and performed by David himself. David was an intense man, perhaps one of the most intense men who have ever lived, a great sinner and a great poet--which is a terrific literary combination. Unlike Patrick's stumbling Latin, David's Hebrew is a model for all lyric poetry from his own day to ours. David is the first person to use the word "I" as we use it--to mean one's interior self. This is an astonishing accomplishment for the tenth century BC, because a sense of the inner self is notably absent from all other ancient literatures. Prior to the humanist autobiographies of the Renaissance, we can count only a few isolated instances of this use of "I" to mean the interior self. But David's psalms are full of I's: the I of repentance, the I of anger and vengeance, the I of self-pity and self-doubt, the I of despair, the I of delight, and the I of ecstasy. The Psalms are a treasure trove of personal emotions and a unique early roadmap to the inner spirit--previously mute--of ancient humanity. Whereas the historian must normally guess at the emotions of his subjects from incomplete or indirect evidence, David's Psalms reassure us that three thousand years ago people laughed and cried just as we do, bled and cursed, danced and lept--that our whole repertoire of emotions was theirs. But the historian is seldom lucky enough to find a subject like David, who has already let it all hang out in black and white. Sometimes the historian's subject may even be someone he comes to loathe, whose emotions he isn't especially interested in sharing. I found this to be the case with Desire of the Everlasting Hills, the third volume in The Hinges of History® series, which begins with the story of Alexander the Great. Like Patrick, Alexander first comes to our attention as a spoiled teenager, who is bummed out by news of his father's military victories. "There will be nothing left for me to conquer," pouts Alexander not-yet-the-Great. Whether or not the rumor was true that he murdered his father in order to get his throne, he was acclaimed king of the Greek state of Macedon at the age of twenty (in the year 336 BC) and immediately embarked on a campaign of conquest such as the world had never seen. Though he intended to conquer the whole world, his loyal soldiers, whom he had inherited from his father, finally forced him to stop midway through India, after they had already conquered most of eastern Europe, part of Africa, and half of Asia. They said they just couldn't go any further. O.K., said Alexander, but we're going back by way of the Gedrosian Desert, because no army has ever been able to do that and I mean to prove that if I can't own the whole world, I am at least invincible. About three-quarters of his army perished in the desert, but Alexander the Invincible made it home. He died a year later in 323 just weeks short of his 33rd birthday. What was the purpose of his conquests? Power, honor, and fame. How did the conquered feel? Nobody asked, but we can imagine. Wherever he went he established military garrisons, supposedly for the purpose of disseminating the glories of Greek culture. Their real purpose was economic exploitation of the conquered territories. From a moral perspective, I do not see how this is any different from a holdup. But mine was hardly the attitude of ancient historians like Plutarch who believed that Alexander aptly came by his title "the Great": he was, they believed, the greatest man who had ever lived. In their eyes, public action--that is, by war and conquest--was the most dangerous and, in consequence, the most noble of all human endeavors. If Plato was the measure of all subsequent philosophy and Phidias of all attempts to carve a man in marble, Alexander was the measure of man himself, a man who put whole cities and races of people to the sword and who did not hesitate to crucify anyone who displeased him. We may think such a value-system outmoded or remote, but it was not so long ago that Napolean enchanted Europe in his quest to be the modern Alexander, nor were such values unknown to the generals and kommandants of the twentieth century, and God knows they continue to infect the brains of all those who take up weapons of destruction in what they believe to be a noble cause. Indeed, down the whole course of history, the invincible warrior with raised sword has been the archetypal hero of the human race. It is not hard to understand what made Alexander tick, for there is a bit of Alexander in most of us. But still, I found unsettling this discovery of a supposedly great man--the greatest--whose values I could not share and whose very emotions I needed to push away from me. Has human nature changed so radically, I wondered, that there was no one in the whole of the ancient world who shared my loathing for this man and his antihuman violence, the disruption and misery and heartache that his actions caused to millions of people? It seemed to me a test of my method of writing history. If I could not find a point of view like mine in all of ancient history and commentary, then how can I be sure that I am interpreting correctly the emotions of people who may have been as unlike me as interstellar aliens? But then, most unexpectedly, I found the very thing I had all but given up hope of finding: an ancient chronicle of Alexander and his successors that saw their depredations exactly as I did: Alexander of Macedon son of Philip . . . defeated Darius king of the Persians and Medes, whom he succeeded as ruler. . . . He undertook many campaigns, gained possession of many fortresses, and put the local kings to death. So he advanced to the ends of the earth, plundering nation after nation; the earth grew silent before him and his ambitious heart swelled with pride. He assembled very powerful forces and subdued provinces, nations, and princes, and they became his tributaries. . . . Alexander had reigned twelve years when he died. Each of his officers established himself in his own region. All assumed crowns after his death, they and their heirs after them for many years, bringing increasing evils on the world.What is especially impressive about this terse, dry-eyed epitome is its sympathy for the world of fellow sufferers, people the writer had never met. The author, though we do not know his name, was a Jew who lived in Palestine toward the end of the Greek occupation but before the Romans had arrived--that is, about 100 BC. His limpidly written chronicle is called the First Book of Maccabees, and you may find it in the deuterocanonical (or apocryphal) section of your Bible. The growing silence of the earth as nation after nation is plundered and laid low by Alexander, the increasing evils brought on the world by generation after generation of such predatory activity: these are extraordinary images to come upon in ancient records, which seldom waste space on the sufferings of losers. But, then, it is seldom people at the invigorating center of events--the ones who (like Plutarch) normally write the first drafts of history--who see clearly what has happened, especially the "increasing evils" wrought by those who blindly pursue their own wealth and power. Rather, it is the dispossessed, the ones who have been relegated to the margins, whose eyes are open and who know what wounds they bear. We may find history in official biographies and state papers, but we are far more likely to find the real story--and the deepest emotion--in poems like David's, in half-literate remembrances like Patrick's, and out-of-the-way chronicles like First Maccabees, left behind by those whom the world did not consider important. But even in reading a translation of the Bible, the historian must exercise great care. If Patrick's pious biographers thought it prudent to omit certain scenes, the misplaced reverence of translators can make the people of the Bible sound as they never did in life. There is one passage in the Hebrew Bible that I found I had to translate myself--because all translators have found it too shocking to translate accurately. This is the story of the response of Rehoboam, David's knuckleheaded grandson, to the northern nobles. It may be found in Second Chronicles 10:10 and in The Gifts of the Jews on page 208. As with Patrick and the sailors' nipples, many worthy people have felt it would be better if you didn't know about it. The scene is the accession of Rehoboam, son of Solomon and grandson of David, to the throne of the United Kingdom of Israel and Juda. Rehoboam's family were southerners from Juda; and his father, Solomon, had treated the northerners, the Israelites, badly, so a deputation of northern nobles approached the new king and said: "Your father laid a cruel yoke on us; if you will lighten your father's cruel slavery, that heavy yoke which he imposed on us, we are willing to serve you." Of course, their courtly language concealed the threat that, if Rehoboam did not treat them well, they would withdraw from the union. The court elders counseled Rehoboam to "be kind to these people . . . and give them a fair reply" and "they will remain your servants forever." But Rehoboam was was young and decided to go with the advice of his buddies, who warned him not to commence his reign with a show of weakness. They even wrote a reply for him--they were the Karl Roves of their day--which Rehoboam delivered. It began thus: "My dick is fatter than my father's thigh! So--my father laid a heavy yoke on you? Mine will be even heavier! My father kept you in line with the lash? I'll whip you with scorpions." These, the actual words of the Holy Bible, are always fudged by translators, who cannot bear to have such words spoken aloud in synagogue or church--even though, I rush to assure you, my translation was made under rabbinical supervision. Needless to say, the political union of Israel and Juda did not survive Rehoboam's studly display, which I must say reminds me of any number of strutting verbal aggressions committed by our current commander-in-chief--from his empty threat to Osama bin Ladin ("Wanted: Dead or Alive") to his embarrassing "Top Gun" imitation as he performed in full costume on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier to celebrate the supposed end of the Second Gulf War. Historical parallels are never exact, but they should always give us pause for reflection. It is known, for instance, that when Donald Rumsfeld took over the Pentagon one of his first acts was to order a study of how ancient empires maintained their hegemony. Why, I wonder, didn't it occur to him to study how each empire sooner or later lost everything it had gained? In such a study he might have found profound occasion for reflection. For further reflection on this subject, I commend to your attention Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter, the latest volume in The Hinges of History® series, in which troubling parallels are noted between America's current posture in the world and the tragic mistakes made by substandard Athenian politicians after the death of Athens' great democrats, men such as Solon and Pericles--who cannot but put us in mind of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. But for the moment I think we must leave the subject of historical parallels and return to the subject of translation . . . If the misplaced reverence of translators can make the people of the Bible sound as they never did in life, no one brings on attacks of reverence more often than Jesus, who was actually humorous, affectionate, and down-to-earth, who spoke to his friends and followers in a clear and bracing manner, was often blunt, sometimes vulgar, and always arresting. Never did he employ the dreary, self-righteous, even priggish sound that some of his admirers would wish for him. Despite the popularity of the King James Version, Jesus was not a 17th-century Englishman. How weird it is that if we wish to understand the Iliad, the Odyssey, or the Aeneid, we would never think of going to a translation that is four (in actuality, nearly five) centuries old. We would be more likely to want the latest translation, the one that speaks to us in our language. In Mark's Gospel, the most primitive of the four gospels, the first words that Jesus speaks are: "The Time has come. The Kingdom of God draws near . . ." The next word is almost always translated as "repent" or "convert"--which makes Jesus sound like a sidewalk freak with a placard in his hands. But the word Mark uses is metanoiete, which means literally in Greek "change your minds." For the Greeks, the mind was considerably more than it is for us. It was the core of the person, the center of his being. The word we would use is "heart." So in Desire of the Everlasting Hills, I have translated the Greek as "Open your hearts"--a far cry from "repent!" As I insist in Desire of the Everlasting Hills, before all else that may be said of him, Jesus was a prophet, speaking like Amos in the Jewish prophetic tradition, urging his people to tsedaka, to justice like God's justice, to the idea that compassion for those in need is not just a passing feeling or a convenient political slogan but an abiding obligation. My object in writing The Hinges of History® is not to discover new facts or even to offer new interpretations. I always attempt to base myself on the broad middle consensus of contemporary scholarship, avoiding the sensational and fashionable extremes that pass so quickly into oblivion. I'd like each reader to close these books and be able to say: Now I know what it would have been like to have been a slave in pagan Ireland, to have felt the passion, exaltation, and remorse of David when he played his lyre and wept hot tears, to have been in the crowd that first heard Jesus, to have been his friend, to have been touched by him. And if you can say such things, if I have helped you to see these people--not just to see them but, as Shakespeare said, to "see [them] feelingly"--I will be well satisfied. (And I hope you will be, too.) The Greek of the New Testament, which is called koine (or common) Greek, is much easier to tackle than the complex Greek of earlier periods. Though ancient languages are notable for their modest vocabularies (the world still being young and the phenomena to be named far fewer than what we face today), Greek is an exception: the abundance of words in a dictionary of ancient Greek is staggering not only to the student but to the expert. The Spartans, the Achaeans, the Athenians, the Boeotians, the Aetolians, the Euboeans, the Thessalonians, the Macedonians, the Lydians, the Ionians, the speakers who hailed from the various Adriatic and Aegean islands, the colonists of Sicily, southern Italy, and the Black Sea--these and many more contributed their finely shaded regional vocabularies to the whole language, which became like a vast orchestra of diverse instruments, able to produce modulations of extraordinary refinement. Unlike the Jews, the Greeks could never stop talking, and as is always the case with such people, their favorite subject was themselves. The entire library of ancient Hebrew runs to a compact cabinet of twenty-four scrolls; the books of the Greek library are close to countless. Not only this, but Greek proceeds in a naturally discursive style, constantly turning this way and that in elegant riffs and delicate variations, like a spring river running to tributaries, curling into rivulets, bubbling into pools. Even when you are thinking or speaking another language altogether, Greek can scratch away impishly at the back of your brain. Neither as compressed as Hebrew, coiled and ready to spring, nor as mellifluous and tidy as Latin, it is, by contrast, a spiky language as full of sharp ups and downs as an economist's graph. No wonder that when Virginia Woolf went mad, she heard the birds singing in ancient Greek, the language her father had taught her; and when she heard them, many years later, singing again in that same tongue, she knew it was time to depart and, filling her pockets with stones, walked into the Ouse. The latest volume in The Hinges of History® series, as I already mentioned, is entitled Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter. Given what I have told you about the Greek language, you will understand that I was exceedingly happy to come upon excellent translations especially of Homer and Plato. Only when I reached the Greek lyric poets did I find myself stuck, unable to find translations that deliver the thrill of the originals. So once again I was thrown back on my own resources. The mechanisms that drive Greek lyric poetry--highly specified varieties of set rhythms appropriate to different moods and occasions, tonal values (now lost to us) associated with long and short syllables, musical modes--are so different from most of the mechanisms available in modern English that every translator must despair of recreating a semblance of the original textures of Greek poetry in English. What is necessary is to live inside the Greek long enough so that one has a chance of making a new English poem that can convey similar sense and feeling by the instruments available to us: the ways in which words may be chosen and combined through stress and rhythm, alliteration and assonance, and rhyme. Though rhyme is never employed in Greek lyric poetry, it is a useful English tool for binding elements together that in Greek are bound together by other means. Most important to bear in mind is that all Greek poetry was sung in performance. Greece has been, in fact, through all of its history a land of song and dance. The fishmonger sang of his fish, the militia marched to martial rhythms, the laundress sang the blues, while others sang songs of different colors. It was said that after the disastrous Sicilian Expedition in 413 B.C. Athenian soldiers, held captive in the horrible quarries outside Syracuse, won their freedom by singing and dancing choruses from the plays of Euripides, whose songs the Sicilians were crazy about. Daily life could sometimes seem a sort of amateur contest, an eternal audition with a host of hopeful voices--primeval Paul Simons and Judy Collinses, Tom Waitses and Ani diFrancos--competing for attention. Ancient Greece was a culture of song. The moon has set, and so have the Seven Sisters.That's Sappho, in one of her most quoted fragments. Though I want to give you more of her poems, that's the only one I've been able to provide music for. So as I give you the others, you must imagine not me but a small, elegant cabaret singer, dressed in what would look to us to be a graceful sari. She sings with precise enunciation and with sad realism--or with comic sprightliness, depending on her subject. To be unmusical, as sly Sappho informs us in a short poem to a deceased woman who had shown talent neither for performance nor appreciation, was a fate worse than death. You might as well never have lived: When you were living, never did you smellThis poem, constructed like a well-aimed body blow, is the work of a woman the Greeks called "the tenth Muse," the greatest poet after Homer, born in the late seventh century on the large Greek island of Lesbos, celebrated for the sweetness of its wine and the tartness of its verse. Unfortunately, much of post-Homeric poetry--called lyric poetry because it was usually sung to a lyre--was lost in the upheavals of subsequent centuries, especially in the depredations and decay that would follow the barbarian incursions into the Greco-Roman world in the fifth century A.D. In Sappho we have been particularly unlucky, for her work survives mostly in small clusters of words, though sometimes in longer fragments, like exotic petals and branches, cut from a mysterious tree whose fullness we can never know. In translating Sappho, my favorite among the lyric poets, I found that the piquancy of the original fragments often cried out for rhyme, when translated into English: I love what is delicate,In longer, less pithy poems, I could dispense with rhyme: Some say cavalry, others infantry,hoplites being Greek infantrymen. The poem once had twelve more lines but we can no longer read them in the manuscript fragments that are left to us. All we know is that the poem ended with a word that probably means "surprise." But even this fragment, wonderful and unsatisfying as it is, leads me to the lesson that writing these books has taught me over and over: though official history is the record of the deeds of politicians and generals, the actions that actually sustain civilization are the actions of lovers, people who like Patrick come to us without swords and with open hands: "Love in the open hand," as Edna St Vincent Millay, put it: Love in the open hand, no thing but that,The donors of true civilization are those like the Hebrew prophets who shout at us and refuse to let us forget our obligations to the poor and marginalized. The patrons of our cultural patrimony are people like David, who repented his violence, people like Jesus, who asks us to open our hearts, people like Sappho, who insists that, despite all evidence to the contrary, "black earth's most beautiful thing" cannot be cavalry, infantry, or navy. It cannot even be love. It is the person loved. Another way of stating this is to read you a poem I wrote recently for my daughter, Kristin, and her husband, Dan. (Omygod, now he's going to start reading us his poems. Only one, and then I'm done.) Two years ago Kristin gave birth to a baby boy, Devlin Francisco Cahill Garcia. Devlin came into this world with difficulties, a still-mysterious pulmonary affliction that has seen him hospitalized in the infant intensive care unit three times since his birth. Devlin is--and I say this, of course, with complete objectivity--a remarkable child, full of spirit, questing, and inquiry. But his breathing is often audible. The poem is called "Tradition," and it speaks, to my mind, of the only human tradition that finally matters: The stories of love are the ones that are lost,
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |