Ciaran Carson's Dante

Ciaran Carson's translation of Dante's Inferno was such a rush to read that I was still buzzing from it a day after finishing it. It's chock full of quotable passages, but I was particularly pleased to find a fantastic bit of trash talking between two sinners in Canto XXX:

"Though I'm kept back,"
he quipped, from moving by my watery weight,
I have this arm that's well-prepared to smack."

The other said: "You weren't so free with it
the time they put you to the fire; the alloy
that you'd coined with it had sealed your fate."

The dropsied one: "You speak the truth, old boy;
but not so truthful were you, truth to tell,
when you were asked to tell the truth at Troy."

"If I spoke false, your coin spoke false as well,"
said Sinon. "I'm here for a single falsehood;
you, for more than any fiend in hell."

"Remember, perjurer, the horse of wood,"
replied the Paunch, "and may it torture you
to know the whole world knows that you're no good!"

"With thirsty tongue may you be tortured, too,"
the Greek shot back, "and with the dropsied piss
that swells your gut to keep the world from view!"

The forger then: "Your filthy orifice
spews out the usual ravings of your brain;
and if my thirst has bloated me, your sickness

makes you burn, and gives your head a pain;
and were Narcissus' mirror conjured here
for you to lick, I don't think you'd abstain."

Virgil threatens to chew Dante out for lingering too long—and as I noted when I read the Aeneid last year, Virgil was just as good at representing trash talking as Dante himself!

*

And this passage from Canto VII seems like a nice comment on our contemporary financial crisis (Virgil is commenting on the avaricious):

My son, see how the wheel of fortune whirls!
Observe them, as they dance to money's tune,
in money wars eternally ensnarled!

Not all the gold that lies beneath the mon,
or ever did, could buy a moment's rest
for even one of these misguided fools.

*

The other verse Inferno I have read is Robert Pinsky's, which I read with delight back in 1998. But while that delight was made possible by Pinsky's translation (I don't know Italian), its source was, I now realize, Dante's magnificent work itself. In contrast, Carson's translation crackles with a ferocious energy that had me gasping at times, I was so impressed, and often had me laughing out loud (as with the trash talking). For comparison, here's Pinsky's version of the same passage from Canto VII:

"Now you can see, my son, how ludicrous
And brief are all the goods in Fortune's ken,
Which humankind contend for: you see from this

How all the gold there is beneath the moon,
Or that there ever was, could not relieve
One of these weary souls."

Pinsky's Virgil: majestic, sonorous, oratorical. Carson's Virgil: temperamental, impatient, aggressive. At least in this reader's experience, that stands for the difference between the two, and it explains why Pinsky's book is a good read, while Carson's is a great one.

New versions of The Aeneid

The Feb. 2009 issue of Poetry begins with a selection from Book Two of the Aeneid, in David Ferry's translation. The passage (Aeneas's escape from Troy, as told to Dido) includes one of my favorite moments in the book, as Aeneas tries to embrace his wife Creüsa's ghost:

Three times I tried to embrace her and to hold her;
Three times the image, clasped in vain, escaped
As if it were a breeze or on the wings
Of a vanishing dream.

The selection implies that Ferry is translating the epic, which is something to look forward to. But there's also a new translation available now (even more recent than the Robert Fagles translation I read last summer): Sarah Ruden's new translation, published by Yale University Press. Garry Wills raves about it in the March 12, 2009, issue of the New York Review of Books (unfortunately, the article is not on-line):

The wonder of [Vergil's] poem is that it has a melancholy melodiousness while retaining a tight aphoristic ring. Fagles often achieved the former, but rarely the latter. Ruden gets both.

(By the way, why do Ferry and Fagles write "Virgil" while Wills and Ruden write "Vergil"?)

Virgil's Sixth Eclogue

One theme in Horace's poetry is that he does not want to write epics, but only his poems of everyday life. Since I read Virgil backwards (first the Aeneid, then the Eclogues and Georgics), I found it especially amusing to come across Virgil making the same claim in the Sixth Eclogue:

When I began to write, my Muse did not

Disdain to play Sicilian games nor did

She blush to live in the woods, and when I thought

Of singing of kings and battles, the god Apollo

Tweaked my ear and said to me, "A shepherd

Should feed fat sheep and sing a slender song."
So now—since there are plenty to sing your praise
And plenty to celebrate grim deeds of war—
I'll study how to play the pastoral reed
And win the favor of the country Muse.
I'll will not sing what I'm not supposed to sing.

But of course Virgil went on to write a great epic of praise of the Muses and the "grim deeds of war," so this is probably more a matter of "sing what you want to sing now and don't force yourself to sing things that aren't really what you want to sing now just because you think you ought to." :-)

David Ferry's translation again.

Virgil's Third Eclogue

One of my posts last summer about Virgil's Aeneid was about trash talking, and his Third Eclogue begins with a vigorous exchange of insults between Damoetas and Menalcas, before concluding with their singing competition, which their judge, Palaemon, ends up calling a draw. Here's a nice example of the trash, from Damoetas:

Maybe it was the day, right here, near these beeches,
When you broke Daphnis' bow and his arrows, too,
Because you couldn't stand the idea, you prick,
That that boy was given them as a song prize.
You were dying to get back at him.

As for me, I vote for Damoetas as the winner (which will of course lead Menalcas to shower me with insults), for this couplet:

Pollio loves my songs, however clumsy;
Muses, offer a calf to placate readers.

All this in David Ferry's translation, by the way.

Aeneid: A Black Swift

I guess I am as fascinated by the things that appear in Virgil in passing as I am by the overall story, for the things I want to comment on are all basically asides, such as this one:

Quick as a black swift darts along through the great halls
of a wealthy lord, and scavenging morsels, banquet scraps
for her chirping nestlings, all her twitterings echo now
in the empty colonnades, now in the brimming ponds.

(Book XII)

I have been watching swifts for years now, ever since I moved to Basel and was turned on to bird watching by my friend Dave, but I have never seen swifts flying inside any "great halls" here. That would be quite a sight!

Poetry-wise, I love the way Robert Fagles enjambs the first "now" here, allowing its meaning to open up in various directions, and allowing the second "now" to focus the meaning of the first "now."

Aeneid: Trash Talking

Trash talking, it turns out, is at least as old as the Aeneid (next time I read the Iliad, I'll have to keep an eye out for it). Here's one Numanus, "flaunting his own power to high heaven":

"But you, with your saffron braided dress, your flashy purple,
you live for lazing, lost in your dancing, your delight,
blowzy sleeves on your war-shirts, ribbons on bonnets.
Phrygian women—that's what you are—not Phrygian men!
Go traipsing over the ridge of Dindyma, catch the songs
on the double pipe you dote on so! The tambourines
they're calling for you now, and the boxwood flutes
of your Berencynthian mother perched on Ida!
Leave the fighting to men! Lay down your swords!"

(Book IX)

As Fagles's note says: "In Latin poetry, Phrygian often stands derogatorily for oriental, and thus for effeminate."

It's worth noting that Numanus is promptly shot down by Ascanius with an arrow through his head!

Aeneid: To strike a spark from flint

Achates is first to strike a spark from flint,
then works to keep it alive in dry leaves,
cups it around with kindling, feeds it chips
and briskly fans the tinder into flame.

(Aeneid, Book I, trans. Robert Fagles)

I like reading poetry or other literature from long ago and coming across passages like this, in which everyday activities from the time of writing are described, things that we might know something about (like the lighting of a fire without matches) and sometimes things we know
almost nothing about, like the life of a housewife at the time, as revealed through a description of an early hour of the morning (or late late hour of the night) as the "hour a housewife rises":

that hour a housewife rises, faced with scratching out
a living with loom and Minerva's homespun crafts,
and takes the ashes first to awake the sleeping fires,
adding night to her working hours, and sets her women
toiling on at the long day's chores by torchlight—
and all to keep the bed of her husband chaste
and rear her little boys ...

(Book VIII)

Book V is about the funeral games for Anchises, Aeneas's father, and though I read the book in July, I did think of the Olympics as a descendant of such a description. And then there's this description of Orpheus playing music:

And Orpheus himself, the Thracian priest with his long robes,
keeps their rhythm strong with his lyre's seven ringing strings,
plucking now with his fingers, now with his ivory plectrum.

(Book V)

A better musician than I am, I guess, since I only play with a pick and hardly ever with
my fingers ... :-)

Virgil and Horace

Before and after reading the Aeneid at the beach, I read David Ferry's translations of the Odes of Horace. Just as the Aeneid made me notice differences between Virgil and Homer, I noticed one significant difference between Virgil and Horace: while the Aeneid is splendid, I am more a Horatian than a Virgilian. The Odes are closer to me than Horace's friend's epic. Perhaps it's just that the Odes are closer to the dominant mode of contemporary poetry (lyricism) than the Aeneid is (even if I love verse novels).

(And isn't it fascinating how great poets so often come in pairs who knew each other well? Virgil and Horace, Goethe and Schiller, Eliot and Pound, etc.)

Aeneid

One general response I had to the Aeneid while reading it at the beach (in the Robert Fagles translation) was this: I was repeatedly struck by the image of Virgil actually sitting or standing somewhere and writing the poem. In contrast, when reading Homer (whether Iliad or Odyssey), I never had a sense of a person (be it Homer himself or anyone) actually writing the poem.

Of course, this could be just a side-effect of the fact that I know that a historically identifiable person named Virgil actually wrote the Aeneid, while that is not the case for Homer's epics. But I also had the feeling that this had something to do with how the Latin epic reads.

Perhaps this is something classicists have studied: Virgil as a written text vs. Homer as a text composed orally. What struck me most about it, finally, was that Fagles apparently succeeded in translating Homer and Virgil differently enough to create this sensation.

Quietude

I have not been blogging much lately, as I have been too busy with my things to do this summer. And now I'll be off-line with Virgil at the shore for two weeks.