Issue 8 Michaelmas Term 2018

THE QUEEN’S COLLEGE LIBRARY

Inside this issue:

New Light on a Forgotten Astronomer—Will Poole

David Constantine on Modern Poetry in Translation

Archibald H. Sayce and his Papers at The Queen’s College, Oxford

elcome to Issue 8 of Insight. After the new building special of last year we W have reverted to our normal format of articles associated with the Library’s collections.

The first article is by Will Poole of New College who last wrote a piece for Insight five years ago. Will, a regular reader of our special collections, has recently been to Queen’s Library several times to consult a series of tiny seventeenth century mathematical L-R: Helen Constantine, David Constantine and Clare Pollard pictured notebooks by Richard Rawlinson, student and in discussion at our exhibition event. Fellow of Queen’s during the turbulent years of the Civil War and the Cromwellian Protectorate. Will’s Our final substantive article is by Silvia Alaura and article casts Marco Bonechi from the Consiglio Nazionale delle light on this Ricerche (CNR) in Rome. Marco and Silvia spent fascinating several weeks last December investigating the Sayce and little Papers kept in the College Library, and have written known a wide-ranging account of the life and career of one astronomer of the fascinating late nineteenth/early twentieth of the century personalities of Queen’s, for whom the seventeenth University created a Chair of Assyriology in 1891. century scientific The final pages of this issue highlight the current revolution. library exhibition curated by recent graduate Sarah One of Gouldesbrough, which is based on her DPhil Rawlinson’s subject and is entitled Images of Epic: Representations of Rawlinson Mathematical Notebook, circa 1646. exquisite Homer and his Works from the Archive to the Comic Book. (Queen’s MS346) manuscripts (pictured) has recently featured as our “book of the I am very grateful to all the contributors who wrote month” in the New Library. for this year’s issue and to my colleague, Sarah Arkle, who took many of the photographs and undertook Earlier this year, our thematic exhibition installed in the typesetting. I would also like to express my both the Upper Library and the New Library was gratitude to the college’s Director of entitled Opening the Frontiers: Modern Poetry in Communications, Emily Downing, for the new Translation in the Sixties and Since. It was co-curated by design. David Constantine, who has expanded on the associated talk he and co-curators gave at the launch of the exhibition to write about the lasting political If you have ideas for future articles or indeed and cultural importance of translating and would like to contribute, please contact me disseminating poetry around the globe. The article E-mail: [email protected] and the exhibition celebrate the fact that Queen’s Tel: 01865 279213 Library has recently received a substantial run of the journal Modern Poetry in Translation which David and Amanda Saville, Librarian, October 2018 Helen Constantine co-edited from 2003-12.

setting, three dons had gathered to observe the eclipse. They were the Savilian Professor of Geometry, John Wallis, and two younger dons ‘most expert in mathematical matters’, Christopher Wren of All Souls, and Richard Rawlinson of Queen’s. The three men set up a telescope to project the image of the sun onto a piece of paper, so that the progress of n 12 August 1654, in one of the the eclipse could be marked at regular intervals on opening conflicts of the Russo-Polish the paper. Rawlinson later engraved onto a brass OWar of 1654–1667, a Polish-Lithuanian army plate the observations they had made, and the image conquered a numerically superior Russian force in was published as part of Wallis’s later account of the the Battle of Skhlow. Just as the Russians began to eclipse. Wallis was not a natural acknowledger of cross the Dnieper river, the Polish surprised them, assistance, but Rawlinson memorialized his own role driving them back into the water. In seizing the by signing his engraving: ‘Ri: Rawlinson cælavit’, element of surprise, the combined Polish forces were ‘Richard Rawlinson engraved this’. assisted by an unlikely ally—a solar eclipse. The names of Christopher Wren and John Wallis remain well known, but who was this forgotten astronomer of Queen’s?

Richard Rawlinson was born, probably in 1618, in Milnthorpe, Westmorland, one of the college’s traditional recruiting territories, and entered Queen’s in 1636 as an eighteen year-old of plebeian rank. It is very likely he was the first member of his family to attend university. In 1640 he was elected a Taberdar, and the next year he took his BA. Life in Oxford was soon to be turned upside-down, however, with the outbreak of civil war, and in late 1642 the king and his troops were forced to retreat to Oxford, which became for the next three and a half years the headquarters of the royalist campaign. This is when we hear our first distinctive news about Rawlinson, who had evidently been reading books on fortification, which he then put to good use. As the Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood recalled,

The Works and Fortifications also did now go on apace, and those in St Clement’s Parish, on the East side of Oxford, were about this time begun. Which, Plate from Wallis’ Opera Mathematica in Queen’s College Upper Library, with other Fortifications about the City, were mostly depicting the solar eclipse observed by Rawlinson in 1654. (40b.B.3) contrived by one Richard Rallingson, Bach. of Arts of Queen’s College, who also had drawn a Mathematical The Poles reckoned by the Gregorian calendar, but Scheme or Plot of the Garrison. (History and in Oxford, still on the Julian calendar, that same day Antiquities, vol. 2, p. 462) was 2 August 1654. There, in a more peaceful

Rawlinson (he is frequently encountered as of getting a promising young man with undeniable ‘Rallingson’) successfully managed to attract royal royalist sympathies out of town at a difficult time. attention, and in recompense for his work Charles I ordered that he be created MA at once, a degree duly Rawlinson did not stay away for too long, however: conferred upon Rawlinson by Convocation. we find notices of him in the college records throughout the 1640s and 1650s, serving variously as Rawlinson was soon made a full fellow of the a tutor, as one of the two annual treasurers, and as college, and at about this time he ought to have ‘Magister puerorum’, or the choristers’ schoolmaster. taken holy orders too. He dragged his feet, however, The college accounts show that he drew his fellow’s seemingly out of nervousness about the future stipend of £4 per annum every year until 1665/6, direction of the Anglican Church, facing defeat, and without exception. Rawlinson, in other words, was by the time he was fully ordained, albeit in secret, one of those royalist dons who found a way of living Royalist Oxford was indeed on the brink of under an unpalatable Parliamentary regime by surrender to the Parliamentary forces. When the keeping out of the sight, and largely out of the mind, town fell, Rawlinson was prudently granted leave by of the new authorities. In this way, the man who was the governing body of Queen’s to absent himself for said to have designed the royalist defences of Oxford one year, or even longer ‘should it prove necessary’. (pictured below) was never formally ejected from his Indeed, when the Parliamentary Visitors came fellowship. soberly to the doors of the college, Rawlinson could not be found. The Provost of Queen’s, Gerard Langbaine, described him as ‘a very excellent yong man, extremely studious, a general Scholar; but a most eminent Mathematicien’—but in the same letter to the authorities Langbaine was making feeble excuses for Rawlinson’s nonappearance, blaming it on aristocratic intervention. What seems to have happened is that Rawlinson was whisked off as a private tutor to Henry Pierrepont, Marquess of Dorchester, a safe way Iconographia Oxoniae, showing Oxford’s defences, from Wood’s Historia et antiquitates Vniversitatis Oxoniensis (Queen’s Upper Library 52.f.13) 4

In the interregnum Queen’s specialized in this kind Rawlinson as a potential successor, hoping that the of temporizing. While Rawlinson was discreetly universally respected Selden might amplify this praise clinging to his fellowship, the college became a home in the right ears. The great physician, inventor, and for many young men of royalist cloth, for instance statistician William Petty, whom Rawlinson must the well-to-do pair Robert Southwell and Joseph have got to know at Oxford, also wrote in support Williamson, both students in the 1650s, both future of Rawlinson’s candidacy, noting in Rawlinson’s knights, and both future Presidents of the Royal favour the ‘Bookes of his Owne compiling & Society of London. (Southwell’s student poetical Instruments of his owne hands making’. In the event notebook survives in the Bodleian, and offers a the far superior Lawrence Rooke of Wadham got the fascinating glimpse of Queen’s literary life in this job. decade.) Occasionally royalist sympathy lost its restraint: in 1657, for instance, one of Rawlinson’s own pupils, Lancelot Addison—we will encounter him again—delivered a supposedly comic oration in the university so inflammatory against the puritans that he was forced to recant in Convocation upon his knees. But in general Rawlinson’s milieu cultivated tact, and scholarly energies were directed to pursuits that were, or at least seemed, politically neutral.

And so in the 1640s and ’50s Rawlinson devoted himself to mathematics, principally to geometry. We know this because an extensive set of little manuscripts, all in his hand, survive in Queen’s College Library. These eight pocket volumes work systematically through Euclid’s Elements and Theodosius’s Spherics, and are so carefully compiled An example of one of Rawlinson’s little geometry notebooks in the Special Collections at Queen's College Library. (Queen’s MS427) and presented that they most probably functioned too as Rawlinson’s own textbooks for his pupils, or Petty referred to Rawlinson as a maker of scientific at least for his more mathematically inclined charges. instruments. None of these has been recovered, but He may have intended them for the press. Rawlinson we can be sure that Rawlinson knew how to handle also busied himself with the experimental philosophy brass and burin, because, as we saw, he engraved his clubs springing up in Oxford around this time, and own plates. His correspondence with Hartlib shows in the 1650s he became acquainted with the that he engraved not only eclipse plates but also a intelligencer Samuel Hartlib and the scholar John more extended work he called his ‘short Selden in London, as we learn from surviving letters Trigonometry’. This turns out to have survived, sent by Gerard Langbaine to Selden, and from letters albeit seemingly in a sole printed copy. It was addressed to Hartlib by Rawlinson himself. probably engraved by Rawlinson in or just before Langbaine enlisted Rawlinson to copy out ancient 1656, as he sent it to Hartlib in a letter of that year, Greek musical manuscripts in Oxford for Selden, along with the request to send further enclosed who was assisting a continental editor of the ancient copies to the Dutch mathematician Frans van musical theorists. When in 1652 London’s Gresham Schooten, and the French and Polish astronomers Professor of Astronomy, Samuel Foster, died, Ismaël Boulliau and Johannes Hevelius. We do not Langbaine put in a good word with Selden for know if Hartlib deigned to send Rawlinson’s tiny

work to these three grand men, but the sole surviving copy now in the British Library came from the books of the eighteenth-century collector Sir Hans Sloane, and Sloane plausibly acquired it from the library of the experimentalist Robert Hooke. Now Hooke was in Oxford in the 1650s too, and moved in the same circles as Rawlinson; Christopher Wren, for instance, was one precocious friend they shared. At this time Hooke also attended the lectures of the Savilian Professor of Astronomy, Seth Ward, After the 1650s, Rawlinson somewhat fades from who taught the young Oxonians the geometry view. In the Restoration he was proposed, but not necessary for the astronomer, especially the elected, to the Royal Society. He was however mathematics of ‘spherical triangles’. In 1652 Ward granted another honorary degree, that of Doctor of published for his students a short textbook in plane Divinity, in 1661, and he also found employment as and spherical trigonometry, the Idea Trigonometriæ private tutor to Josceline Percy, son and heir of Demonstratæ. It was popular both within and outside Algernon Percy, 10th Earl of Northumberland. In Oxford—Isaac Newton, for instance, studied it at late 1665 he became Rector of St Mary’s, Cambridge. Now Rawlinson’s surviving manuscript Pulborough, in West Sussex, a not particularly works, as I noted, consist chiefly of expositions of lucrative living. The next year Rawlinson married a Euclidean geometry, as well as the Spherics of much younger woman, Bridget Croke of the Crokes Theodosius, the pioneering work of spherical of Chequers, and reading between the lines of geometry. Likewise if we inspect the content of his Rawlinson’s will, which he made in 1668, his parents ‘short Trigonometry’, with Ward’s little textbook -in-law—who must have been about the same age as open beside us, it is immediately obvious that their new son by marriage—were not convinced that Rawlinson was in effect reducing Ward’s already their daughter had done as well as she might. (Their brief work into a series of handy tables for students. house, as the name suggests, is indeed now the The ‘short Trigonometry’ is Ward miniaturized and country retreat for the serving Prime Minister.) tabulated. It seems to me quite likely that Rawlinson and Hooke attended Ward’s lectures, and Rawlinson Rawlinson died in 1668. There was some talk among may well have given Hooke a copy of his little work. the mathematical community, notably John Collins, John Pell, and Francis Vernon, about the fate of his papers and books. But the general feeling was that no great original works were lurking among Rawlinson’s nachlass, and so no sustained effort was made to secure his papers for posterity. In 1671 the Oxford mathematician and orientalist Edward Bernard informed Collins that Rawlinson’s papers were now in the hands of Alan Carr, a fellow of All Souls. The next year Rawlinson’s executor, having evidently heard a rumour from Oxford, reopened the enquiry, asserting in vain his rights to the papers. We know Rawlinson’s papers ended up back in his college, but the final piece of the jigsaw—what ‘A maker of scientific instruments’. Above and on the right—examples of happened between Carr and Queen’s—has been Rawlinson’s mechanical illustrations from his mathematical notebooks. elusive until now. (Queen’s MS430)

It is provided by a series of letters now in the State Williamson evidently did not respond with the Papers between Rawlinson and Joseph Williamson, requisite enthusiasm or money, and Addison, I whom we encountered above as a student. At the propose, then decided to deposit the manuscripts start of their surviving correspondence, in early 1660, not only somewhere safe, but where they might also Rawlinson was still Williamson’s college senior, do some good: in the Taberdars’ Library of Queen’s. advising him on how to deal with tutorial students in Rawlinson’s absence. But Williamson was heading for great things, and within months was summoned to London by the Restoration government; in 1674 he became Secretary of State for the Northern Department. Rawlinson too soon left Oxford to take up his tutorship, splitting his time between his employer’s residences at Petworth and Northumberland House, and latterly his living at Pulborough. Rawlinson’s letters show that Williamson sent Rawlinson weekly ‘Letters of intelligence’ compiled by ‘Muddiman’; these are the manuscript newsletters of the political journalist Henry Muddiman (1629–92). Rawlinson, as Williamson evidently hoped, volunteered to send back any intelligence in return. Rawlinson also complained mightily of a being he sneeringly called the ‘Sultan of Queenes’, who was said to be wasting the college’s money. Presumably this was Thomas Barlow, the Provost, himself one of the great benefactors of the college’s library. Rawlinson’s last two letters ask for news about Lancelot Addison, his former pupil, now chaplain to the garrison in Tangier, and enclose a letter to be forwarded to him.

Addison is the link. After Rawlinson’s death his old pupil, who had returned to England from Tangier in 1670, wrote to (now Sir) Joseph Williamson in 1672, A further example of Rawlinson’s notes on geometry. (Queen’s MS429) asking for his advice on what to do about Rawlinson’s papers, which he now held: This was a significant choice. College libraries in Oxford and Cambridge at the time were for graduate Dr Rawlinson dying made it his last desire, that all his fellows, not for students still studying for their Mathematique MSS. should be deliver’d into my degrees—in Oxford at the start of the seventeenth hands, which after some difficulty I haue got effected . . century there were in effect no undergraduate . they contain a whole Cursus Mathematicus in libraries at all. Queen’s was one of the first colleges English fairly writ with his own hand. I conceive he to find a solution to this problem. The Taberdars intended to have them made publiq, which is a thing I were students on scholarships, usually between the dare not attempt till I haue advised with you whom I degrees of BA and MA, and not yet full fellows. A know had a great respect for the Author. The work I library specifically to assist their study was set up conceive will be considerable, and the printing with perhaps as early as the 1620s, and by Rawlinson’s Symbols of no small charge . . . 7

time, it boasted a wide range of the kinds of texts concisely in symbols, from the editions of Isaac needed by those studying for their MAs, including Barrow [the Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, and several mathematical books. (Over two hundred editor of Euclid], and from the writings of masters books marked as from the Taberdars’ collection Oughtred [William Oughtred, the algebraist and survive in the library today.) When the great union reformer of notation], and Rawlinson’. But Bernard’s catalogue of English and Irish manuscript plans never got off the ground. The only subsequent collections, known as ‘Bernard’s Catalogue’, was mention of Rawlinson I have found among the finally published in 1697/8, it included a special mathematical community is that of the historian of category in Queen’s for the Taberdars’ manuscripts, mathematical notation Florian Cajori, who remarked containing the writings of two and only two in the early twentieth century that Rawlinson appears Queensmen: the Aristotelian treatises of the well- to have been the first to designate the sides of a known college scholar Richard Crakanthorpe (1568– triangle by the same letters as the angles opposite, 1624), and Rawlinson’s ‘Cursus Mathematicus’, as the former expressed by A, B, C, and the latter by a, Addison helpfully called it. That Rawlinson’s ‘Cursus b, c. This is still what is taught in schools today. Mathematicus’ was placed specifically in the Taberdars’ collection suggests that it was recognised We started with Rawlinson the astronomer, and we as suitable for these kinds of readers, and not just a should end on that angle too, as the majority of set of posthumous papers to be buried in the college Rawlinson’s mathematical work was concentrated in library’s manuscript series. the areas of geometry that in his day serviced technical astronomy. For there is one further piece of evidence that Rawlinson kept up actual observations of the skies into the Restoration, and in Queen’s College itself. In the college accounts for the year 1663/64, there is recorded the payment of the sum of £1 11s 6d ‘Ægidio Syvers pro opere circa domum a Doctore Rallinson astris obervandis designatam’—‘to Giles Syvers for work on the room appointed by Dr Rawlinson for stargazing’. William Poole, Fellow Librarian, New College Endnotes 1. Fuller information on Rawlinson, with references, may be found in ‘A Royalist Mathematical Practitioner in Interregnum Oxford: The Exploits of Richard Rawlinson (1616–1668)’, The Seventeenth Century 32 (2018). I have taken this opportunity to Close up of a sketch in one of Rawlinson’s notebooks on geometry. (Queen’s MS425) add some new information to this piece, however, especially my concluding remarks on the provenance Whether Rawlinson’s ‘Cursus’ was really studied by of Rawlinson’s papers. As ever, there is valuable any future Taberdar, we do not know. In the late material on Rawlinson in J. R. Magrath, The Queen’s 1660s and 1670s Edward Bernard was planning a College, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1921). huge series of mathematical editions, and tucked away in the corner of one of his prospectuses for 2. Rawlinson’s eight surviving letters to Williamson this venture we find a mention of Rawlinson’s name are: State Papers 18/221, fol. 2 (1 May 1660, on on account of his notational brevity: the volume on pupils); SP 29/134, fol. 21 (3 October 1665, from Euclid was to contain ‘Demonstrations set out Petworth); SP 29/134, fol. 164 (16 October 1665, 8

complaints about the ‘Sultan’); SP 29/148, fol. 128 (2 of the work of it to Weissbort, always however February 1665/6, from Petworth, requesting a keeping in touch and, by founding a world-wide certificate against the pressing of two of his ‘men’); annual festival, Poetry International, in 1967, greatly SP 29/164, fol. 118 (25 July 1666, from Petworth, extending its reach. Weissbort soldiered on; but for with the offer of venison); SP 29/188, fol. 133 (14 his hard work and faith there would have been no January 1667); SP 29/195, fol. 40 (27 March 1667, half-centenary celebrations. When Helen and I took now at Pulborough, asking after Addison’s letters); over in 2001 we shifted the home of the magazine SP 29/208, fol. 54 (3 July 1667, from Pulborough, from King’s, London, to Queen’s, Oxford; Sasha with a letter for Addison). Dugdale, who succeeded us, read German and Russian here and as Editor at once saw what new 3. SP 29/314, fol. 131 (28 August 1672). directions were needed; the present Editor, Clare Pollard, introduced herself in the Shulman 4. Thomas Smith, Vita . . . Edwardi Bernardi (London, Auditorium with a recitation from her version of 1704), sig. F2r: ‘Demonstrationes symbolis Ovid’s Heroines, so following Hughes and his Tales brevissimè expressæ ex editis D. Barovii, & scriptis from Ovid (after the Metamorphoses) but with a choice D.D. Oughtredi & Rawlinsoni’. – women’s voices – and a slant completely her own.

William Poole is Galsworthy Fellow and Tutor in English, In the beginning MPT was notably male and white and Fellow Librarian, at New College, Oxford. His interests and Eurocentric. Over the last twenty years, as a lie mainly in seventeenth century literary and intellectual history, and his two most recent books are Milton and the matter of editorial policy, it has become steadily Making of 'Paradise Lost’ (2017) and John Fell’s New more various, closer to the way the world is. Now it Year Books, 1666–1686 (2018). girdles the earth and sends out feelers to all points of the compass. More than a hundred languages have been ‘englished’ in its pages. Work comes in more abundantly from Africa, the Indian sub-continent, the Far East; women and men (poets and translators) his essay is my word of thanks, on behalf are far more equally represented; and a far wider of Modern Poetry in Translation, to Queen’s range of humanity’s and the long-suffering earth’s Library, the people who work there and social, political, ecological (= existential, life-or- the building itself, for the recent death) problems and crises are addressed. The joys Texhibition celebrating the first half century of the are abundantly and variously celebrated too. Poetry magazine’s life and times. Ideal venue! The sum total is in the midst of it, saying what it is like, and where of all the issues of MPT since the first in 1966 is in poetry is there is also its good companion, spirit certainly, and perhaps also in practice, a translation. The chief – perhaps even the only – miniature of this great library with its holdings from tense of poetry is present. Reading it, hearing it, we many lands and eras, its many languages, creeds and are affected now. But its makers, its material, its voices and its countless points of view. The shapes and tones and voices go back, even in this endeavour is kindred: to collect, safeguard, make one magazine’s pages, deeper than Homer. The available. Translation is reading upon reading. The principle – ‘I am human, I count nothing that is translator reads, translates, and the work continues human foreign to me’ – applies not just across the its life, its ability to be further read, across frontiers world now, but down through the strata of the of space and time. centuries also. Perhaps ways of being human, of ever The first editors of MPT were Ted Hughes and having been human, never quite become extinct. Daniel Weissbort. Hughes was the prime mover, it Once tried, they will continue, for good or ill, as was his idea; but after only a few years he left most possibilities, for ever. The Four Horsemen of the

Apocalypse gallop tirelessly to and fro. And people fall in love. People look around them like John Clare in the days of Enclosure and still may wholeheartedly say: ‘I love to see’ – the birds, beasts and flowers, the cosmos, the dance of life. MPT taps into the dizzying mix of past and present days and gives glimpses of what it is like being human.

Queen’s and our sister college, Pembroke, Cambridge (Ted Hughes’s old college) both contributed generously to our celebratory year– to the publication of our anthology Centres of Cataclysm and to the upgrading of our website, for example. And so doing, they helped us ensure that the commemoration of past achievement also aided the magazine’s future. Queen’s now has an almost complete run of the magazine from 1966 to the present day, and also a small archive (being added to) of MPT material, which, we hope, may encourage translation studies in the College. MPT launches, readings, and discussion of work translated from many languages, have become a regular item in the “[The sixties were] ‘a spring-time feeling,’ he said, ‘and the Beatles were like the song-bird sexual overspill of it’…” Shulman’s annual programme. All this – and more! – amounts to a presence of MPT in the College, it the genocides and the division of Europe by the Iron consolidates the existence of the magazine, which is Curtain.) Hughes spoke of ‘the tidal wave of poetry to say enables it into further life. It’s a good motto translation in the early Sixties’ on which, he says, the generally, and an essential one for a magazine of magazine came into being. There was no need to poetry in translation, that if you are not busy living, search out contributors; they came flooding in of you are busy dying. So: loyalty to the tradition, to the their own accord. In Hughes’s words ‘it seemed spirit of the origins, in the freedom to change, to easier to let the Magazine take off than to keep it move with, and answer the demands of the times, a grounded. The sheer pressure of material forced the continual self-translation to engage with the here and issue.’ now. It is good to be doing that with the generous encouragement of a college nearly seven hundred Translation is a good deed. That was the Editors’ years old. stated belief, intention and practice from the start. So, in the first issue, important poets such as Miłosz, Ted Hughes, in 1982 looking back on the Lalić, Voznesensky and Holub were lifted from beginnings, located the enthusiasm for translation, behind the Iron Curtain into a wider circulation in out of which MPT was born, fully in the midst of the English in the West. In 1968, after the Prague Spring sex, drugs and rock n’ roll of the Sixties. ‘It was a and its crushing in August by Soviet tanks, poetry spring-time feeling,’ he said, ‘and the Beatles were was got out across the Czech frontier like vital like the song-bird sexual overspill of it, an contraband. The dissident writer George Theiner, accompaniment that kept the party atmosphere going into exile, became a translator of his going for years.’ (And that upsurge of revolutionary compatriots into English, so preserving and energy should itself be understood as a Blakeian extending his homeland’s living word. But this ‘contrary’ to the deathly legacy of two world wars, 10

export was not a one-sided act of charity. Hughes arise out of ignorance or misunderstanding. We and Weissbort were clear from the outset, in the very operate amidst imprecision, evasiveness, half-truths, conception of the magazine, that the good deed downright and deliberate lies, fake news and would be one of mutual aid. British and American alternative facts. We don’t see one another properly. poetry needed the shock of the poetry of Eastern Often we aren’t allowed to: the managers, elected or Europe and beyond (Amichai in Israel, for example). not, make sure we don’t. In the view of the Hughes noted, ‘Their poetry is more universal than philosopher Emmanuel Levinas our primary ours.’ It had been up against harder facts of life, existential state as human beings is responsibility. taken on a more public responsibility. Western poets ‘Being with others’ – that is, being in the world with could learn from it. any other human being – is a state of unconditional responsibility. Responsibility itself comes from proximity, from the fact of being near, from the first sight of the face of a fellow human being. Levinas says, ‘The face orders and ordains me.’ Translation brings us face to face.

Hughes and Weissbort began their endeavour in times of ‘cataclysm’, as the old order broke up under the irresistible demands for change. The times were no less uneasy when Helen and I took over, but they had a new hallmark, a new mark of Cain: the biggest

Poetry became ‘like contraband’ in sites of conflict and revolution. displacement of people since the end of the Second World War. And those are the times, ever worsening, Translating teaches not just the translators but also we are in still. Wars, refugees, colossal and increasing their readers what the foreign language can do, what inequalities in wealth, people on the move to its peculiar resources are. And learning that, you improve or save their lives. And, part of that, part of begin to see what you might do to and with your the cause of that: the unleashing and running out of own. The native tongue is wonderfully resourceful, control of ‘market forces’. in this sense: it has in it resources unknown until a writer discovers and deploys them. And very often it Translators are – unashamedly, indeed polemically – is the act of translating, or the arrival of a translation, citizens of the world. Pace our Prime Minister, that that makes that discovery. As Hölderlin wrote, ‘What does not mean they are citizens of nowhere. You is our own has to be learned as much as that which is translate well only if you are steeped in your mother foreign to us’; and he learned his own (quite tongue, dyed in the love of it. And best if you have a unmistakeably his own) poetic language by homeland, a beloved native habitation. Rooted like translating from Ancient Greek. that, gladly you welcome in the foreign. It won’t harm you, it will strengthen and enrich you. Rightly, Hughes and Weissbort felt in the 1960s and Encountering the foreign, you will learn and develop 70s an urgent need for translation. MPT rode the your own identity, fashion it better in a continual flood tide of it. But really, recognized or not, acted dialect with the native speech, customs, beliefs of upon or not, there always has been and always will ‘abroad’. Hölderlin thought of the translator as a be such a need. It helps us to know one another, the journeyman, travelling for years abroad, to learn the living and the dead. Most often it is a pleasure, craft. Then coming home, to serve. Perhaps the always it is a necessity. Bigotry, hatred, war, citizens of nowhere that the PM really had in mind expulsions, genocide and the thousand-and-one were the non-doms, the tax-exiles, the off-loaders other milder ways of living badly together, very often off shore, the shunters of capital from one hidey- 11

hole to the next. They really do belong nowhere. So therefore is the spirit of poetry. Poetry in translation is a furthering, extending, ramifying of A month after the Referendum, we presented Centres that instinctual bid to assert the fact and virtue of the of Cataclysm in Paris at Shakespeare & Co. Since 1919, living world’s plurality. Father Jacques Hamel was a with a gap between 1941 and 1951, at two locations victim of the untrue evil opposite. before the present one, that bookshop has been a house and home of world literature, an Fundamentalists, believing their creed to be the only internationalist centre, generous, lively, youthful, true one, become iconoclasts, image-breakers, in the enterprising and courageous. Founded by Sylvia simple logic that everything made before their own Beach, it closed under the city’s occupation by the one true faith arrived is by that arrival rendered armies of an ideology set on extirpating the very idea redundant and offensive. In that spirit, our own of cosmopolitan humanism. Many of the works that British Reformation destroyed at least 90% of our bookshop championed and disseminated were fed by Medieval art and the Taliban blew the Buddhas of storm-troopers, students and professors to the Nazi Bamiyan to smithereens. There has never been any fires. George Whitman who opened his shop first in shortage of wreckers and murderers with God on the spirit of Sylvia Beach’s then (as a gift from her) their side. Daesh/Islamic State, having begun the with its very name, once described Shakespeare & destruction of the temples and friezes at Palmyra, on Co. as ‘a socialist utopia, masquerading as a 18 August 2015 they publicly beheaded Professor bookshop’. But what a bookshop! Run by his Khaled Mohamad al-Asaad, Curator of Antiquities at daughter now, another Sylvia, named after the first, Palmyra Museum, because he refused to disclose to run in the same brave and generous way, young them the whereabouts of some particular treasures in people of the world lodging there among the books, his care which they intended either to destroy, or to free board in exchange for their help. sell on the black market to fund their crusade against civilization or, indeed, against human life altogether. We presented Centres of Khaled Asaad was eighty-one. He had looked after Cataclysm in the early the collection for more than forty years. evening of 26 July 2016, introduced by Fergal The Romans sacked Palmyra in 273 AD, not to Keane, then with readings assert the one true faith but just as part of the usual of poems from half a conduct of a war. The city ‘vanished’; that is, the dozen languages, to an ruins of it stood in the desert unvisited by Western audience of at least three travellers, until Robert Wood and James Dawkins score and ten outside the ‘discovered’ them in 1751. They measured, drew and shop with the Seine and published them, engraved and with copious notes, in Notre Dame behind a handsome folio, The Ruins of Palmyra, in 1753 them. We read, they (Queen’s has a copy). Doing so, they fed them back attended, in the into the understanding of classical architecture and The centres of cataclysm cover knowledge that near its revival in the 18th century. Robert Wood, by 1756 Rouen, in the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, Undersecretary of State to William Pitt, was not only at early mass that morning, the priest, Father Jacques a traveller and discoverer but also the author of An Hamel, a man of eighty-five, had been murdered, Essay on the Original Genius of Homer, a book which, had had his throat cut, in front of the altar before his appearing in abbreviated form (Wood, a busy man, small congregation, by two local young men in the was still working on it) in only half a dozen copies in service of Islamic State. 1769, was translated, amplified from Wood’s own notes, into German in 1773 (two years before any ‘World,’ said Louis Macneice, ‘is incorrigibly plural.’ completed English edition) and powerfully affected 12

Herder and Goethe in their enthusiasm for ‘primitive plant or animal, the loss of any language, has the song’. same unhappy effect, even if we had not known of their existence till we heard the news of their extinction. A part of the whole ecology, of Gaia’s web, of the whole interconnected, interdependent, variously beneficent living system, has gone, and we are the poorer even though the particular material loss might be minute, unappreciable. T. S. Eliot felt that all works of literature, whatever their language and age, coexist in an accessible present, they have ‘a simultaneous existence’ and compose ‘a The Ruins of Palmyra. simultaneous order’. By the arrival of a new work Poetry – native or translated – won’t save the world; ‘the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, a humane and intelligent politics will be necessary. altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of Poetry lives and works now in a context – of lies, each work of art towards the whole are readjusted.’ commodification, widespread war, the trashing of A bit far-fetched perhaps, and I shouldn’t like Eliot the lovely earth – which is hostile to its very survival. himself to be in charge of these adjustments; but the But it answers back, it is one very important part of idea of not only continuity in literature but also of a the whole ecology of human and humane life. MPT, simultaneity of works alive in present time is deeply the magazine itself, is one bearer of poetry, an agent congenial. Such co-operating life is manifest in the by which poetry, the good of it, is furthered. And a workings of a single poem. Studying Hölderlin’s library is an ark, still afloat, freighted with colossal manuscripts I have seen close up and in the act his and vital treasures among which are not just such faith that every line-break and stanza-break, every precious books as a Shakespeare First Folio or sentence, word and punctuation mark contributes Wood’s Ruins of Palmyra, but also runs of periodicals livingly to the whole. All choices, all changes matter. and magazines. Václev Havel, dissident playwright More or less palpably, the replacement anywhere in before he became Czechoslovakia’s President, wrote the poem of one word by another causes a shift. an open letter to Gustáv Husák, General Secretary of Hence his habit of piling up possible epithets, the Czechoslovak Communist Party, objecting to the holding them potentially in play, until, for the whole, closure or driving into extinction of literary he must choose. magazines. They made a web, the loss of any one of them is ‘an interference … in the complex system of Earth is a living system, not a machine. We and every circulation, exchange and conversion of nutrients living thing on and in and above the earth (even that maintains life in the many-layered organism those living not in the least the way we do) are which is society today.’ His image is that of an interdependent, co-operating parts of the web. That ecology. We are lessened by the loss of every species is why every extinction hurts. So thanks be to (c.27, 000 a year) and every language (one a Queen’s Library, whose holdings (I love that word!), fortnight). In the case of magazines, he said, the loss among them MPT, keep countless possibilities alive. is real even if few people ever read them – strictly, even if they had till their loss been read by nobody but their writers and editors. Why? Because a David Constantine read French and German at Wadham possible resource, an agent of society’s self- College and taught German Language and Literature at the knowledge, has been extinguished. We can’t even University of Durham and at Queen’s. Since 2000 he has know, once it has gone, how it might have served us worked as a freelance writer and translator. With his wife in our worsening plight. The loss of any species of Helen he edited Modern Poetry in Translation 2003-12.

inextricably linked to the Queen’s College, and his portrait, painted by George Fiddes Watt in 1919, still stands out on the wall above the fireplace in what is now the College Office, which was for many decades the ‘Sayce Room’.

At 19 Sayce came to Oxford from Bath and was elected to a Classical Scholarship at Queen’s. His arrival is vividly depicted in his 1923 wide-ranging autobiography:

“My name had long been entered for matriculation on the books of Brasenose College, and in the early spring of 1865, accordingly, I went to Oxford, and after swearing belief in the Thirty-nine Articles which I had never read, I duly became a member of the University. It so happened, however, that I had noticed an announcement of an examination for scholarships at Queen’s which was to commence the day after my matriculation, and accordingly, instead of returning to Batheaston I tried my luck at it, and was elected Scholar of the College along with Charles Tait. When I reached home, instead of being congratulated on my success, I was received with frowns; my father’s recollections of Oxford belonged to a time when Queen’s was the abode of rough North-countrymen who had an Archibald Henry Sayce, painted in 1919 by George Fiddes Watt unsavoury reputation among their fellow-collegians. It was the period when, according to current report, there mong the outstanding figures in the was a special suffrage in the Litany in use in history of the University of Oxford is University College on the opposite side of the High to be counted the Anglican clergyman Street: ‘From the gentlemen in the back-quad at Archibald Henry Sayce (Shirehampton, Queen’s, Good Lord, deliver us!’ When I first joined BristolA 1845 ‒ Bath 1933), comparative philologist, the College there were still some untutored specimens of religious scholar, Assyriologist, Hittitologist, and humanity in it, and there were still traditions extant of Egyptologist. Many of his books were pioneering a recent member of the community who had been milestones in Near Eastern studies, such as An detected, after a riotous evening, dancing in a state of Assyrian Grammar for Comparative Purposes (1872), Fresh nudity at midnight on the altar of the College Light from the Ancient Monuments (1884), The Hittites. Chapel.” (A.H. Sayce, Reminiscences, London, The Story of a Forgotten Empire (1888), and The “Higher 1923, p. 29). Criticism” and the Verdict of the Monuments (1893). Sayce’s prominence as a public intellectual, and his At Queen’s Sayce attended the lectures of Friedrich very many contacts with leading contemporary Max Müller (the Oxford-based German Professor of scholars, politicians, and artists for most of his long Comparative Philology) and became his disciple and life, placed him in the thick of that intense network friend. In 1868 Sayce obtained a First Class in that formed the backbone of the Victorian and Greats, and the following year was elected to a Edwardian establishment. Sayce’s life and career is Fellowship at Queen’s and was at the same time

appointed Classical Lecturer. In 1870 this became a College was regular and significant, as recalled in this Tutorial Fellowship, and in 1876, when Max Müller appreciation after his death, written by his own partially retired, Sayce was appointed Deputy College and published in The Oxford Magazine of Professor of Comparative Philology, a University February 16th, 1933: post which he retained until 1889. His delicate health forced him, from 1879, to spend long periods in “To us he was a wandering star, rising and setting with warm countries of the Near East, so that he resigned absolute regularity. [...] He appeared at the beginning his College Tutorship (though retaining the of May, went away on the morrow of the Summer Fellowship). From 1881 onwards he went regularly Meeting (in old days Ascension Day,) reappeared for a to Egypt. First he settled at Abydos, then in 1884- summer season of one month in August, and vanished 1885 he hired a dahabeeyah on the Nile and at the once more, to rise above the horizon for All Saints’ same time took a house in London to share with his Day, and then migrate to the South. The rest of the brother and sister. Sayce very much liked the year he spent in visits; at one time he had a flat in sparkling, cooperative and cosmopolitan atmosphere London, but for some years past he owned a house in of the London milieu. Here he was used to spend his Edinburgh.” time between the British Museum and the Savile and In 1889, when Sayce’s father died and he became Athenaeum Clubs, where politics and science found financially independent, Sayce resigned the Deputy their meeting point. Although Sayce was seldom to Professorship of Comparative Philology and bought be seen in Oxford, his presence at the Queen’s his own dahabeeyah, (pictured below) named after the

F.B. Attwood-Matthews, A.H. Sayce’s Dahabeevah, Istar, Assouan, Egypt. Image reproduced with permission from Newport Museum and Art Gallery, Newport (Wales). 15

Babylonian goddess Ishtar, fitted out with a library reproduced by Ridler Vivian in The Oxford Almanack and with a crew of 19, where he lived for long of 1972. periods studying and writing, and also entertaining friends and other orientalists, among them the The Sayce Papers kept in six boxes at The Queen’s renowed Egyptologist Flinders Petrie. In May 1891 College, ordered and catalogued in July 2005 by the Sayce received in Egypt the news that the University Librarian Amanda Saville, are almost all unpublished. of Oxford had created for him, then 45 years old, a They throw light on aspects not previously known of Chair of Assyriology, to which no duties either of Sayce life and of his religious and professional residence or of teaching were attached: activities. They are also relevant for a better understanding of the worldwide intellectual milieus “The following form of Decree was proposed: That the and networks he frequented. We began the study of Rev. Archibald Henry Sayce, M.A., Fellow of these important archival materials, together with Queen’s College, be appointed Professor of Assyriology those kept at the Griffith Institute and the Bodleian under the provisions of Statt. Tit. XIX §6 cl. 6 for a Library during a stay at Oxford in late autumn 2017, period of five years, his duties being to lecture or give granted by the CNR Short Term Mobility Program, instruction during some part of each year and his in the framework of the research “Aspects of Near stipend to be £100 a year.” (Oxford University Eastern Studies in Victorian Age” of the initiative Gazette, 5th May 1891) ‘Gruppo di Ricerca Interdisciplinare di Storia degli Studi Orientali’ (GRISSO) of the ISMA, Roma. Our Sayce was in the habit of delivering two public first recognition allows us to offer some highlights of lectures, one in the spring and one in the autumn, the Sayce Papers at Queen’s. before leaving for Egypt. The professorship was renewed every five years until his retirement in 1915. Therefore, the establishment of Assyriology as an academic discipline in England is due to a Fellow of The Queen’s College, since Sayce before 1891 lectured on Assyrian and Egyptian philology in the London rooms of the Society for Biblical Archaeology, and then from 1891 onwards he held the Oxford chair.

Notwithstanding his many stays in Egypt and travels all around the world, the emotional bond that joined Sayce to Queen’s was deep and life-long, as indicated for instance by his generous donations of precious incunables to the College Library. Sayce loved so Example of Sayce’s juvenile insect sketches much the spectacular view of the chief buildings of The oldest manuscript is a notebook of Sayce’s Oxford from the windows of the Upper Common juvenile verses of the late 1850s; other, and even Room at Queen’s that he begged, unsuccessfully, mature, poems are in loose folios, also including Holman Hunt, the co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite juvenile pencil and watercolour sketches of insects, Brotherhood, to paint it. As we know from Sayce’s mainly butterflies autobiography, he was convinced that no one except Hunt “could have done it with the spiritual vision Furthermore, there are two youth diaries, dating and carefulness of detail that it demands” (A.H. back to the age of 19 and 20, when Sayce entered Sayce, Reminiscences, p. 303). Years later, this view was Queen’s, and six notebooks of undergraduate lecture painted by the hand of John Piper, and it has been notes and writings, including his first drawings of

other sources, traces the history of the founders of cuneiform studies, including Henry Creswick Rawlinson (1801-1895), Austen Henry Layard (1817- 1894), who also was British ambassador at Constantinople from April 1877 to May 1880, and George Smith (1840-1876), as well as their prominent German and French colleagues Jules Oppert (1825-1905), Eberhard Schrader (1836- 1908), François Lenormant (1837-1883) Friedrich Delitzsch (1850-1922), and Paul Haupt (1858-1926).

Sayce’s unpublished sermons, which cast new light on his involvment in the debate between religion and Pages from Sayce’s 1864 diary. science deserve a special mention. First insights on cuneiform signs with their meanings. these matters are given by Roshunda Lashae Belton in her 2007 Louisiana dissertation “A Non- The Sayce Papers also include many manuscripts of Traditional Traditionalist: Rev. A. H. Sayce and His lectures and articles on a broad gamut of topics Intellectual Approach to Biblical Authenticity and (philology, archaeology, history, and theology), with Biblical History in Late-Victorian Britain.” Sayce’s own straight titles. Among the unpublished texts dealing with the ancient Near Eastern studies stands out in importance the lengthy undated manuscript entitled The Heroic Age of Assyriology. Here Sayce, mentioning episodes that do not feature in

Box with Sayce’s letters and his portrait by Hetty J. Dallin.

Of particular interest is a small box containing the correspondence between Sayce and Isaac Taylor (1829-1901), the anglican clergyman author of a famous book on the ancient alphabets (The Alphabet, 1883) who, during the 1870s, was rector of Settrington, North Yorkshire. The box also contains a medallion with the portrait of Sayce dated 1902, (above) painted by Hetty J. Dallin, daughter of Thomas Francis Dallin, Fellow of The Queen’s Sayce’s The Heroic Age of Assyriology. College (1864-1871), then Professor of Rhetoric at

London and Public Orator at Oxford (1877-1880). Other important Sayce papers to come to Queen’s Approximately 100 letters were exchanged by Sayce are those presented as a legacy by the Anatolian and Taylor between 1874 and 1893. Among their scholar Richard David Barnett (1909-1986). The topics worthy to be mentioned are discussions of the papers were presented on June 26, 1979 at the Etruscan inscriptions and of the written sources and suggestion of John Oswald Prestwich (1914-2003), monuments from Anatolia and Northern Syria to be Fellow and Librarian at Queen’s. It contains Sayce attributed to the Hittites. Friendship and general materials, ranging from 1880s to 1910s and later, freedom of expression characterize the once in possession of the archaeologist John correspondence between the two scholars. The box Garstang (1876-1956), who was a faithful was donated to The Queen’s College on June 29, collaborator of Sayce. Among them there are many 1954 by the brothers Oliver (1905-1986) and Martin drawings and photographs mainly of Anatolian Davies (1908-1975), at that time respectively hieroglyphic inscriptions, and a little correspondence. Professor of the University College, Achimota (Accra, Ghana), and Deputy Keeper (he will become Interesting is a letter to Sayce from Arthur Nicolson Director) of the National Gallery, London. Sayce’s (1849-1928) ‒ the well-known British diplomat and intimacy with the Davies family is shown by a letter politician ‒ who at the beginning of September 1879, he wrote from Egypt in 1904 to “Ms. Davies”, also when he was second secretary at the embassy at kept in this box. Constantinople, confirmed to Sayce that Layard would be available to meet him at the summer residence of the British embassy at Therapia, a decisive event that enabled Sayce to travel for the first time to the Near East. Sayce used the back of this letter to make travel notes including his first impressions of the monumental Karabel Relief, Western Anatolia, written in pencil, but still legible. In the Sayce Papers this is not the only example of his reusing of letters, hotel receipts, and tickets to make painstaking drawings and notes during his travels, including those he made during the winter 1911-1912 in Japan and one year later in India, Burma, and China.

The Sayce Papers of The Queen’s College also include the copious correspondence he exchanged with Lady Mary Lilian Boyd Dawkins (nee Poole), the second wife of Sir William, Professor of Geology at Manchester. Among the sixty letters there is what it likely to be Sayce’s final script. In a pencil missive sent from Bath a few days before dying, on a Sunday afternoon he wrote:

“I have been very ill. It would have been better to have passed to a world where there is no need of breathing”.

Some of the correspondence between Sayce and Taylor. This image shows a Sayce’s legacy is not only kept at The Queen’s letter from Sayce to Taylor, September 27, 1882. College, but also at the Bodleian Library (his passive

The letter from Nicolson to Sayce confirming his meeting with Layard in Therapia (left) and the back of the letter, where Sayce made his travel notes (right). correspondence), Griffith Institute (mainly his wind was blowing, when between eleven and twelve, papers on Egyptological topics), and The Sackler while I was busy with the manuscript of my lectures, Library (his books and off-prints, deposited by the one of my brother-Fellows came to my rooms with a Queen’s College on loan at the Ashmolean Museum pale face and told me that the porter had just discovered in 1933). It is to be mentioned that Sayce’s books a fire in the Bursar’s rooms. We found subsequently and papers suffered great losses and damages on that the fire had been due to an exposed beam of wood December 11, 1886, during the fire that burnt down in the chimney which had, no doubt, been smouldering the western front Quadrangle of Queen’s. As we for some time; the gale which was blowing fanned it into learn from his autobiography, Sayce had unusually a flame, and owing to the deserted state of the College decided to spend in England the winter of 1886, and the fire was not discovered until too late. By the time he remained at Oxford also in order to attend the the fire-engines had arrived the whole staircase was in a Boar’s Head Procession on Christmas Day: blaze, and the fire was running along the roof, over the Provost’s lodge and my own rooms, and threatening our “the great fire took place which destroyed the staircase Common-rooms and Library. Meanwhile such next to mine and threatened at one time to consume the undergraduates as were left in Oxford had congregated whole of that side of the ‘Front Quad’ of the College in at the burning College and were busily engaged in which my rooms were situated. It was the evening after removing the silver from the Buttery, and books and the the undergraduates had gone to their homes; a violent like from the Provost’s house and the adjoining rooms.

The flames shot up above the spire of St. Mary’s, and Müller and the Sinologist James Legge. the white stone statues which stand on the College wall facing the High Street looked like martyrs at the stake. Fortunately the wind, which had been blowing furiously from south to north, suddenly shifted to the opposite quarter and so enabled the firemen on the roof to drive the flames back towards the staircase in which the fire had broken out, and eventually to confine it there. But the night was very cold, with occasional showers of sleety rain, and the result of exposure to it in my case was a chill and an attack on the lungs. My books and papers also had suffered grievously, partly from the water with which my staircase and rooms had been deluged, partly from their hurried conveyance in the dark to a place of The three ‘Eastern Sages’ of Oxford Scholarship, with Sayce on the left, safety, and contact also with the fire. Most of my and Müller and Legge at the centre and to the right respectively. Image reproduced with permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. correspondence from the scholars and other ‘celebrities’ I had known was destroyed; a considerable part of my books was injured by water, and for many years It has been a great pleasure for us to be able to work afterwards I was constantly finding that individual on the Sayce Papers at Queen’s. We wish to express parts of a series in the case of learned periodicals, or of all our gratitude to Amanda Saville, without whose volumes in the case of a literary work, were missing. A extraordinary help and kind availability our work collection of Oriental gems, moreover, which I had would have been impossible; we are also deeply placed on a table in one of my rooms ready to take to indebted to the members of the College Library London, where they were to be photographed and staff, and particularly to Sarah Arkle, for the time published in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical they have dedicated to us. Archaeology, was entirely lost, doubtless trampled We warmly thank Christopher Metcalf, Associate underfoot in the sodden grass of the ‘quad.’ Some day Professor and Tutorial Fellow in Classical Languages they will probably be recovered, and the archaeologists of and Literature at The Queen’s College, for the future will be tempted to weave theories about the stimulating conversations about our research. Last Oriental connections of Queen’s College.” (A.H. but not least, we are very grateful to Jacob Dahl, Sayce, Reminiscences, pp. 245f.). Professor of Assyriology at the Oriental Institute, This detailed account by Sayce as an eyewitness University of Oxford, and Fellow of the Wolfson complements the page written just after the events College, for his warm hospitality during our stay in by the Queen’s Provost John Richard Magrath in Oxford. “Letters of Richard Radcliffe and John James of Queen’s College, Oxford. 1755-83,” Margaret Evans ed., Oxford, 1888, pp. 276f., where Sayce is not Silvia Alaura and Marco Bonechi are both Researchers at the mentioned. Istituto di Studi sul Mediterraneo Antico (ISMA) ‒ Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Roma. Silvia is In conclusion, the study and publication of the Sayce an Hittitologist and she has extensively published on the Papers at The Queen’s College will substantially history of Near Eastern studies. Marco is an Assyriologist and contribute to highlight the life and career of a scholar his interest lies also in the nineteenth-century intellectual who was dubbed by his contemporaries as one of the history. Silvia and Marco are shortly to publish an edition of three “Eastern Sages” of Oxford scholarship, the correspondence and papers of Archibald H. Sayce. together with his teacher and lifelong friend Max 20

The following images and captions are a selection from our Summer 2018 exhibition, curated by former DPhil student Sarah Gouldesbrough. The exhibition explores the various ways that illustrators, printers and artists have represented the Greek poet Homer and his famous poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey; the texts on show stretch from the 1500s to the present day. The Iliad deals with the story of the Trojan War, the war fought by the Greek and Trojan heroes over Helen, the most Left: the title page of Tickell’s translation of Homer, and beautiful woman in the world; and the Odyssey tells above, a closer look at the engraving of Homer from the title the story of one of those war heroes, Odysseus, as he page. From: Queen’s College, P.i.764(2). tries to get home and encounters monsters and mayhem along the way. Thomas Tickell (1685—1740) The First Book of Homer’s Iliad, Translated by Mr Tickell (1715)

Recent scholarship has rejected the idea of one fantastically talented ‘Homer’ as the author of the poems, instead outlining a model of multiple poets working in an oral culture who created these poems over many years, but historically ‘Homer’ was a revered and respected literary figure. He is usually represented as a blind old man, as in the image to the left, printed on the front cover of Thomas Tickell’s translation of the first book of the Iliad. Tickell was a fellow of Queen’s, and his portrait still hangs in the Hall. Linked event The exhibition was launched with a talk by Sarah about her DPhil thesis into representations of Homer both classical and contemporary. This talk was held in the Shulman Auditorium, and was the second in our series of events linked to our exhibition (the first being the Modern Poetry in Translation event which David Constantine discussed in his article). The poster advertising the exhibition and the linked talk forms the back cover of this issue of Insight.

The opening lines of the Iliad, ftom Queen’s College Library, Sel.e.86

Homer’s Iliad (1524) The Iliad focuses on a few weeks towards the end of This beautifully printed edition of Homer’s Iliad is the Trojan War when Achilles, the aristos Achaion, the open to the first lines of the poem, which famously ‘best of the Achaeans’ (Greeks), argues with the commander of the Greek armies, Agamemnon. The begins: beauty and richness of this edition of the poem, seen in the careful printing of the text and the gilded μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω edges of the pages, reflects the esteem that the poem Ἀχιλῆος… has traditionally been held in: the Iliad and the Odyssey have often been considered to be foundational in the Western canon, and cornerstones of European literature Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Achilles,

the son of Peleus…

Odysseus and The Cyclops One of the most memorable passages of Homer’s Odyssey is Odysseus’ encounter with the Cyclops, Polyphemus, an enormous one-eyed monster. The Cyclops traps Odysseus and his men in his cave and eats Odysseus’ men in a graphic, grotesque description:

He snatched up two of my men and dashed them against the earth ike puppies. Their brains ran out onto the ground and wetted the earth. He sliced them up, limb from limb, and made his meal. He ate them like a mountain-raised lion, and he left nothing behind, A contemporary depiction of the Cyclops, from ODY-C by eating the entrails and the flesh and the marrow-filled Matt Fraction and Christian Ward (private collection), which bones. shows the enduring legacy of Odysseus’ encounter with the cyclops.

A depiction of Odysseus giving wine to the cyclops, who becomes drunk enough to allow Odysseus and his remaining men to escape from certain death. From Queen’s College Sel.g.110 23