[Tim Murphy]

In his eighties Alec Derwent Hope wrote the Western Elegies, an immense valedictory on his life and an elegy for his wife Penelope. The form is very loose dactyllic hexameter, and it is the most muscular poetry I have ever read that pays obeisance to the meters of Homer and Virgil. I suspect that translations of Homer and Virgil in this meter would do a better job of recreating their thunder than anything yet attempted in English. But it would not be a line by line translation. Our language, lacking inflection, is much more economical of syllable than Greek or Latin, and I’m guessing a translation would run at 75 percent the line length of the original. Of course Alan and I found the same to be true of the Wulf, which in our version falls 400 lines short of the inflected Anglo Saxon. To employ Hope’s accentual hexameter, let me issue a challenge:

“Chris, are you called to attempt a fresh translation of Homer?”

Here is the fifth and last of the Western Elegies. I urge everyone to acquire Orpheus, the book published to commemorate Hope’s eighty-fifth birthday. All of it is marvelous, but this probably takes the cake.


V: The Tongues

Suppiluliumas! What a marvelous name for a monarch,
Ruler of royal Hattusas, whom the thousand gods of the Hatti
Granted an enclave of empire, when Troy was a petty city,
That stretched from the Western Sea to the Tigris and the Euphrates.
The ribs of that carcasse, dear heart, full of archaeological maggots,
Seethe in the Anatolian springtime today at Boghazkoy.

Suppiluliumas the King, may his bones evade their researches;
For his name is a beacon to me of the fabulous babble of Babel,
That fountain of human tongues which I bless and rejoice in forever.
And the one great family of speech I have loved and explored since my boyhood,
That ‘centum’ branch of the western Indo-European hegirah,
First of them all that survives is the Hittite of Suppiluliumas.

Whence did they come? Through the Balkans or south by Georgia or westward by Persia
To settle perversely in Asia, like the feckless Tocharian Buddhists,
While their brothers, the Celts and the Slavs, the Greeks and conquering Latins
And the vanished Illyrians forced ever west their migrations of language.
And even German, that lingo of slaves from their Aryan masters
Transmitted to us today, is the language of Goethe and Shakespeare.

Suppiluliumas, you spoke two tongues of the Hittite dominion
And wrote to the rulers of Egypt, Assyria and Mitanni,
To each in his own true speech as a prince in his dealings with princes;
You would not have thought it a curse as the book of the Hebrews reputes it,
That confounding of tongues in the unfinished ziggurat built in Shinar,
Whence the rivers of language first flowed to enrich the glory of nations.

For the man who knows only one speech is an ox in a paradise orchard,
Munching on grass and ignoring the fruits of delectable flavor
That ripen upon its boughs and depend from the vines that adorn it.
The man who has only one tongue lives forever alone on an island
Shut in on himself by conventions he is only dimly aware of,
Like a beast whose mind is fenced by the narrow extent of its instincts.

But the man who thinks in two tongues wins his mind free of a bondage
Which a sole speech imposes on all his thinking and feeling;
Translate as he will, what is said in the one never matches the other
Precisely in ambience and reach, so his soul grows still and attentive,
Aware, beyond any one speech, of a metaphysics of meaning
Which teaches that not mere words but the heart is what must be translated.

For those mighty rivers of language that fashion the landscapes of time
Like the Amazon and the Danube, the Mississippi and Ganges
Though they set frontiers to nations, act as makers and bearers of spirit;
Growing in volume and power, they build the rich soils of tradition.
How could such marvellous gifts be cursed as the folly of Babel?

I think now of those I have learned, adapting my soul to their music:
Latin, old father of tongues, whose discipline was the adventure,
First step into unknown space, that tempered and tempted my boyhood
To discover new countries of mind called Ovid, Virgil, Catullus,
And the dense and disciplined march of a prose that thinks in inflections.
Then the daughters of Latin, the tongues of Italy, France and Iberia,
So rich in their colour and chime and each so diverse from the others;
And the tongues of the Goths and the Germans, the Norse and the Anglo-Saxons
Which I chose for my province of study when I thought of myself as a scholar—
They were native and near as I listened and moved from one to another
Getting the feel of their strange, their guttural dissonant music;
Till further afield I found the earthy abundance of Russian,
Last of the tongues of men into which my soul found translation.

Suppiluliumas, you were born in bilingual Hattusas;
Which speech did you use for love and in which make war and take counsel?
Which of them would you choose from your heart to the heart of a woman,
Sundered by race and belief, with the width of the world between them,
Yet joined by pride of the mind and the ancient worship of fire?
Surely you would not have sent those words by the usual channels,
Printed on well-baked brick in diplomatic Akkadian.
Who shall I tell her, then, the instant thought of the moment,
Thought that can only be told, if at all, in the fire bird language?
How shall I tell her the world is simpler than men imagine,
For those set apart by God speak a tongue used only by angels;
That the distance from East to West is no more than its word for ‘I love you’?
And perpetual pentecost springs and renews itself in that message,
Which blesses the gift of tongues and crowns, the Venture of Babel,
Tongues that descend as flames and flicker about our temples
As we are caught up by the spirits to behold a new earth and new heaven,
We utter in unknown speech which we neither have learned nor remembered
An unforgettable song which begins: ‘O, Suppiluliumas!…’

Now this could all be scanned into our feet, but that's a mistake. He begins with a dactylic pattern, but swiftly switches to anapestic line beginnings. Iambs, trochees, bacchics and antibacchics, and amphibrachs abound. Better just to mark the six stresses in each line (except one! blue ribbon to the Spherean who hears the lone septameter.) It is a sinuous line, and one must read it aloud several times to nail the intended rhythms. By the way, I think to make rhythm, one must say SUpiluLIUmas.

[Golias]

Not too hard, Tim:

S3L1

WHENCE did they COME? Through the BALkans or SOUTH by GEORgia or WESTward by PERSia


GK

[This message has been edited by Golias (edited July 10, 2004).]

[Chris Childers]

Well, to me it sounds like the first line of S3, also quite clearly the longest line of the poem.

Tim asks me if it's my calling to be a translator of Homer; though I don't know, I've always thought the Georgics of Virgil should be my large undertaking. But now I've almost decided to give up my thesis on Virgil, in order to start learning Sanskrit, which, I believe, may offer much that's not been translated.

It's lately entered my head to do something with Parmenides, the philosopher; not a translation, since he's not much of a poet, but a condensed account of his vision & the words of the goddess.

Should more hexameters be posted in this thread? I recently ran into a translation by Lattimore from the Georgics, which caused me great pain to read, largely because it took one of my favorite passages of Latin--one which, incidentally, is extremely conversant with the Horace I've posted an attempt at on Translation--& made it dull & clunky in the extreme, even seemed to suck the passion out of it. Hopefully Janet Lembke will do better.

Chris

[Cross-posted with Golias.]

[This message has been edited by Chris Childers (edited July 10, 2004).]

[Janet Kenny]

This all makes fascinating reading. Thanks folks.

I can respect it profoundly as an attempt to keep an awareness of all of this world in the stream of our modern lives. The essential thread.

I only question the sense of writing new work in forms which grew from other ways of speaking.

But I have been reading up on a lot of this and feel greatly enriched.

Janet

[Joseph Bottum]

Originally posted by Chris Childers:
It's lately entered my head to do something with Parmenides, the philosopher; not a translation, since he's not much of a poet, but a condensed account of his vision & the words of the goddess.

Chris--

Parmenides is for young men’s dreams;
Heraclitus, old men read.
Boys believe, behind what seems,
a path to unity must lead.
Old men feel, as their years run,
the many behind the seeming one.

Jody



[This message has been edited by Joseph Bottum (edited July 10, 2004).]

[Henry Quince]

Tim, I suppose you’re right that Hope’s hexameter there was classically based, or inspired, but to me this is quite satisfactorily analysed as unrhymed English accentual hexameter, with one or two unstressed syllables before each stress in most instances.

You could call it mixed iambic-anapaestic, though some lines start on a beat and there are feminine endings. The accentual label fits here — speech stresses, with minimal need for promotion or demotion.

Though I can’t think offhand of another Hope hexameter, it’s clear that the meter of his earlier poem Observation Car belongs to the same family — but with five main speech stresses per line, and with rhyme. I’ll post it here and ask forgiveness in advance if it’s too much of a digression from the hexameter thread.


OBSERVATION CAR by A. D. Hope

To be put on the train and kissed and given my ticket, --^--^-^-^--^-
Then the station slid backward, the shops and the neon lighting, --^--^--^--^-^-
Reeling off in a drunken blur, with a whole pound note in my pocket --^--^-^--^-^--^-
And the holiday packed with Perhaps. It used to be very exciting. --^--^--^-^--^--^-

The present and past were enough. I did not mind having my back
To the engine. I sat like a spider and spun
Time backward out of my guts or rather my eyes and the track
Was a Now dwindling off to oblivion. I thought it was fun:

The telegraph poles slithered up in a sudden crescendo
As we sliced the hill and scattered its grazing sheep;
The days were a wheeling delirium that led without end to
Nights when we plunged into roaring tunnels of sleep.

But now I am tired of the train. I have learned that one tree
Is much like another, one hill the dead spit of the next
I have seen tailing off behind all the various types of country
Like a clock running down. I am bored and a little perplexed;

And weak with the effort of endless evacuation
Of the long monotonous Now, the repetitive, tidy
Officialdom of each siding, of each little station
Labelled Monday, Tuesday and goodness ! what happened to Friday ?

And the maddening way the other passengers alter:
The schoolgirl who goes to the Ladies' comes back to her seat
A lollipop blonde who leads you on to assault her,
And you've just got her skirts round her waist and her pants round her feet

When you find yourself fumbling about the nightmare knees
Of a pink hippopotamus with a permanent wave
Who sends you for sandwiches and a couple of teas,
But by then she has whiskers, no teeth and one foot in the grave.

I have lost my faith that the ticket tells where we are going.
There are rumours the driver is mad we are all being trucked
To the abattoirs somewhere the signals are jammed and unknowing
We aim through the night full speed at a wrecked viaduct.

But I do not believe them. The future is rumour and drivel;
Only the past is assured. From the observation car
I stand looking back and watching the landscape shrivel,
Wondering where we are going and just where the hell we are,

Remembering how I planned to break the journey, to drive
My own car one day, to have choice in my hands and my foot upon power,
To see through the trumpet throat of vertiginous perspective
My urgent Now explode continually into flower,

To be the Eater of Time, a poet and not that sly
Anus of mind the historian. It was so simple and plain
To live by the sole, insatiable influx of the eye.
But something went wrong with the plan: I am still on the train.
....

Well, there are more of the masculine line endings here, but still, recognizably the same type of rhythm. A couple of lines of the hexameter for comparison:

And even German, that lingo of slaves from their Aryan masters -^-^--^--^--^--^-
Transmitted to us today, is the language of Goethe and Shakespeare. -^-^--^--^--^--^-

Without consciously imitating Hope, I’ve found myself using a pentameter similar to his on occasion, for example in Ern Malley’s Account of the Affair.

As my sister they sent in samples, her covering letter --^--^-^--^--^-
artfully artless. Harris, who printed and praised them, ^--^-^--^--^-

Henry

[Tim Murphy]

Henry, I quite agree with you that it should just be read as accentual hexameter, which is why I said that scansion into feet was unproductive. And thanks for posting the train poem, a fine example of loose iambics. By all means, post more hexameters. Yes, l1, s3 is the septameter. I wonder if he just lost count, or given the subject of the line, lengthened it for expressive purposes. I'm a little disappointed at the tepid reaction. Taken all together, I think the Western Elegies are the most remarkable poems of the last twenty years. I should write and think so well at eighty-five!

[Chris Childers]

Henry,

The major thing to do, I think, when imitating classical hexameter in English is to end the line with a dactyl followed by a spondee or a trochee. The classical hexameter does occasionally allow fifth foot spondees; or rather, poets make use of them occasionally--Virgil much more sparingly than Catullus, for example--but that line-ending -~~-x is the most constant sound in the meter, since in each of the first four feet spondees are used probably as often as dactyls. In other words, the greater preponderance of feminine endings in the Suppiluliumas poem does make it sound more classical than the street car poem.

Tim,

I don't mean to be tepid; I like the Hope very much. It seems to me the use of the hexameter is an implicit acting-out of Eliot's dictum: "And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time." This is borne out in the ring composition on "Suppiluliumas." In any event, I think the meter works very well here, (though it might grow tiresome extended to 24 books, in a translation of Homer, say); & the last stanza is thrilling, especially the "perpetual Pentecost."

Jody,

No, no, I like Heraclitus too, though it's always been my feeling that they're both saying largely the same thing, though from different perspectives; Parmenides from the divine, Heraclitus from the human. But I'm largely interested in Parmenides now because he wrote in verse & has that cool proem with its blazing Chariot of Being & all. It may be true that kids like him better than old men; but Nietzsche was rather young when he wrote about the PreSocratics, & he greatly preferred Heraclitus. This is what he said about Parmenides:

One's sympathy toward phenomena atrophies; one even develops a hatred for being unable to get rid of the everlasting deceitfulness of sensation. Henceforward truth shall lie only in the palest, most abstracted husks of the most indefinite terms, as though in a house of cobwebs. And beside such truth now sits our philosopher, likewise as bloodless as his abstractions, in the spun out fabric of his formulas. A spider at least wants blood from its victims. The Parmenidean philosopher hates most of all the blood of his victims, the blood of the empirical reality which was sacrificed and shed by him.

I quote that because I rather like it; it's very dramatic.

Chris

[Janet Kenny]

Chris

The major thing to do, I think, when imitating classical hexameter in English is to end the line with a dactyl followed by a spondee or a trochee.

I would like you to read this sentence again when you are fifty years old

I edited back in to say I don't mean to sound as though I'm patronising
your age. Mozart was a comparitive boy when he died. I am interested in how our priorities and perceptions change as we age. I suspect we move closer to a Japanese ideal of truth to materials.
best
Janet

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited July 11, 2004).]

[Chris Childers]

Well, Janet, it may be my 'callow youth,' to quote Mr. Cantor, (doubtless soon to be very much occupied with the British Open,) but I'm not sure I catch the point of your post. Perhaps my phrasing was inelegant? All I meant was that, in my opinion, for a satisfactory English accentual hexameter with a classical flavor, for the first four beats you can mix up iambs, anapests, trochees, spondees & dactyls in any old way you choose, as long as you end the line with that -~~-x rhythm. This could very well be wrong, & perhaps I'll understand why when I'm 50, but for now I'm afraid I must endorse my own idea.

By the way, I am very fond of Mozart, though little familiar with the Japanese; but as regards both I fail, once again, to see what point is being made. Best,

Chris