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The Impossible Tradition of the Pindaric Ode in England

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The Impossible Tradition of the Pindaric Ode in England DOI: 10.2478/v 10319-012-0019-6 THE IMPOSSIBLE TRADITION OF THE PINDARIC ODE IN ENGLAND ZSÓFIA BARNA Eötvös Lóránd University, Budapest Email: [email protected] Abstract: The “burden of the past” (W. J. Bate) has persistently remained in the focus of poets’ attention across various periods of the history of Western poetry. Questions of tradition, historical belatedness, and “anxieti[es] of influence” (H. Bloom) have fueled both theorists and practitioners of poetry. The English Pindaric tradition confronts these questions uniquely. It has shown consciousness of its own historicity from the beginning. The vocation of the Pindaric poet and his relation to the inimitable master, Pindar, persist as central themes throughout the reception history. They contribute to the evolution of a tradition where poets increasingly question the possibility of autonomous poetic creation. Keywords: form, irregularity, Pindaric ode, poetic vocation, tradition 1. Introduction In the history of the English ode, the Pindaric has made a significant contribution both to the thematic and formal characteristics of that genre. Surprisingly, these contributions are largely based on a misunderstanding of the meter and line structure of Pindar’s odes. Two aspects, real or perceived, of the original Pindaric poetry, nevertheless, persisted in the nearly two hundred years of the English reception history. One of these is the authority of the divinely legitimized poetic voice, which is emulated in the early stages of the tradition and framed as a source of vocational anxiety later. In terms of form, Pindar’s legacy survived in a rapturous presentation of elevated subject matter usually in irregular stanzas, or alternatively, in regular stanzas strongly suggesting irregularity. In outlining the main stages of the English Pindaric tradition, I would like to draw attention to a unique paradox underlying this history; that insofar as works of art within a tradition may be said to emulate their predecessors, or to be in dialogue with them, the English Pindaric tradition problematizes why such an emulation or dialogue with Pindar had become increasingly impossible. 2. Pindar’s Epinician Odes Pindar’s epinikai, or victory songs, were written in celebration of athletic victories. Though the poems ostensibly immortalize individual athletic achievements, they do so by exposing “the special significance of the occasion … not only to the victor, but to the rest of the audience” (Nisetich 1990:42). The wider significance of the individual achievement derives from its relation to the mythical past in which the poet embeds the athletic victory. The task of the poem is to reveal those connections and parallels between victory and myth, victor and gods, the ephemeral event and immortality that make the event itself worth committing to its literary afterlife. The frequent transitions between the present and the past most probably did not present any difficulty for the original audience, for whom the various thematic elements of the epinician poem – the celebration of the victor, his family, and city; the mythological and religious reflections; and the gnomic statements – were well-known formulas (Nisetich 1990:40, 44). This is probably also the reason why the poet could afford to compress his thoughts instead of fully elaborating them, and in this way tailor the text to the requirements of the performance. A lengthy, detailed presentation of ideas would not have fitted well with a danced and sung choral performance (Nisetich 1990:47). Pindar scholars often point out that because contemporary readers are not familiar with the thematic and structural formulas and because we do not have any comparable experience of danced and sung poetry, Pindar’s odes have come to present the kind of difficulty that is only surmountable with specialist knowledge. The meter of Pindar’s odes has been a source of misconceptions throughout the reception history. The highly complex meter of the poems, sometimes Aiolic and sometimes Doric, was not fully understood when the first editions in the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C. were produced. The imperfect understanding of the meter and, as a result, the imperfect line-division of the 2nd century edition by Aristophanes of Byzantium remained authoritative down to the 19th century. Characteristic of Pindar’s style was the occasional long line, which in the 2nd century edition was broken into shorter sections that sometimes ended in mid-word. Because of the presence of these unexplained and seemingly arbitrary short lines, Pindar’s poems suggested for many early imitators, first, that the poet of the epinikai enjoyed a freedom of poetic expression that defied metrical constraints, and second, that the poems are expressive of the state of divine inspiration in which they were ostensibly composed (Nisetich 1990:13-21). Pindar’s victory odes were written in triads, i.e. in groups of three stanzas where the first stanza is called the strophe or turn, the second stanza the antistrophe or counterturn, and the third stanza the epode or stand. The lines of the strophe may be of varying lengths but the corresponding lines of each strophe and antistrophe are metrically identical. The lines of the epode show a metrical pattern altogether different from the rhythm of the corresponding lines of the strophe and antistrophe (Nisetich 1990:34). 3. Restoration and Neoclassical Reception The condensed, para-tactical style of Pindar’s poetry and the incorrect colometry of its early editions lie at the heart of the subsequent Pindaric fashion in England. Already at the earliest stages of the reception history, these aspects had falsely been interpreted as stylistic and formal manifestations of divinely inspired poetry. In reality, however, what appeared as irregular had in fact been composed in accordance with rules that had, soon after Pindar’s death, become 209 obsolete (Fränkel 1975:425-426). The para-tactical style is at war with logic only if the reader is not able to anticipate the elided steps of the argumentation, and the line-division suggested formal irregularity only because the correct meter escaped the editors. Neither of these ‘mistakes’ is derivative from an intrinsic quality in the poetry itself but much rather from the extrinsic condition of its anteriority. In the English reception, the Pindaric influence is usually correlated either with formal irregularity or a regular form which, nevertheless, imitates an irregular, capricious line structure. Although Pindaric influences can be found already in the Renaissance ode, most notably in Ben Jonson’s “To the Immortall Memorie, and Friendship of that Noble Paire, Sir Lucius Cary, and Sir H. Morrison” (1640), the Pindaric did not make a lasting effect until Abraham Cowley published his collection of “Pindarique Odes Written in Imitation of the Stile and Manner of the Odes of Pindar” in 1656. Cowley’s publication consisted both of a theoretical treatise on the question of translation as well as poetic illustrations of it, and may, therefore, be seen as the first systematic attempt to domesticate the genre in England. The preface on translation immediately draws attention to the difficulties arising from the historicity of the enterprise: If a man should undertake to translate Pindar word for word, it would be thought that one Mad man had translated another … We must consider in Pindar the great difference of time betwixt his age and ours, which changes, as in Pictures, at least the Colours of Poetry, the no less difference betwixt the Religions and Customs of our Countrys, and a thousand particularities of places, persons, and manners, which do but confusedly appear to our Eyes at so great a distance. And lastly, ... we must consider that our Ears are strangers to the Musick of his Numbers. (Cowley 1905:155) Without considering the historical, religious, cultural, and poetic differences between present and past, the translation would implicate both the original poet and his translator as mad men. Neither a literal translation, nor a poetic paraphrase is a viable option for Cowley because the literal meaning of Pindar’s poems is not immediately accessible for the modern reader. Cowley’s solution for this impasse is to adapt the style of the epinician odes to the modern context: preserve everything from the past that is still meaningful, abandon all that have lost meaning, and supply the losses with comparable parallels from the present: [A]fter all these losses sustained by Pindar, all we can adde to him by our wit or invention (not deserting his subject) is not like to make him a Richer man than he was in his own Country ... Upon this ground, I have in these two Odes of Pindar taken, left out, and added what I please; nor make it so much my aim to let the Reader know precisely what he spoke, as what was his way and manner of speaking ... This Essay is but to try how it will look in an English habit … (Cowley 1905:155-156) As Carol Maddison suggested, Cowley’s Pindar turns out as a 17th century English voice adjusted to the aesthetic norms of the Restoration period. Pindar’s para-tactical style, perceived as a mark of immediate divine vision, is replaced in the translation with “carefully concatenated pieces of 210 arguments”, and the apparent formal irregularity of the original poems is suggested in metrically irregular, but nevertheless, rhyming lines (Maddison 1960:372). In other words, Cowley substituted the logical and formal freedom that was associated with Pindar’s poems for logical rigor and a controlled formal irregularity. Cowley’s adaptations of Pindar’s Olympian 2 and Nemean 1, his own poems written in Pindar’s style, and most importantly the new irregular form made an extraordinary impact in the second half of the 17th century. The Pindaric became a widely popular genre. Contemporary criticism, as expressed in the words of John Norris of Bemerton, considered it “the highest and most magnificent kind of writing in verse; and consequently fit only for great and noble subjects” (qtd.
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