On Serial Narration and on the Julian Star
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Proceedings of the Virgil Society 21 (1993) 1-16 ©1993 On Serial Narration and on the Julian Star The Presidential Address 1992 ON SERIAL NARRATION It is a great honour for me to have been elected President of the Virgil Society. My first task will be to thank those who, by their faith and their devotion, have revitalised the Society in recent years, and to congratu late them on the obvious success of their efforts. When I began to plan this Presidential Address I happened to be distressed by the prettifications of Homer in the verse translations of Lattimore, Fitzgerald and Fagles, and by the complaisance of Greek scholars in praising these versions and using them to teach Greek literature in translation. It seemed to me in these dark hours that the time had come to raise a voice to survey the range of translations of poetry from the crib to creative composition, each of which has its place, and to try to separate wheat from chaff. But when I came to write I soon discovered that anger is not a good basis for a fifty minute talk. Besides, those of us who translate are wiser not to theorise. We live in an age obsessed with the biography and the interview—even Radio Three is now full of fatuous chat when what we need is great music. The interest ing thing about artisans and artists is their artefacts and their art. Translators, like plumbers, should not talk about their work, but do it. Having abandoned the idea of offering the Virgil Society a survey of the translation continuum, I then decided to take some points from reviews of my own version of the Aeneid, published in March 1991, and see what could be learned from them. Many useful corrections have been offered, but few of them provide suitable material for a lecture. Virgin' for Virgil' is an error I do not wish to discuss in public. But some points of interest have been raised. In one of his brilliant short reviews in Greece and Rome (38 [1991] DAVID WEST 224-6), Don Fowler discusses 1.469-73, where Aeneas is inspecting the frieze of the temple of Juno in Carthage: nee procul hinc Rhesi niveis tentoria veils agnoscit lacrimans, primo quae prodita somno Tydides multa vastabat caede cruentus, ardentisque avertit equos in castra prius quam pabula gustassent Troiae Xanthumque bibissent... He wept too when he recognised the white canvas of the tents of Rhesus nearby. It was the first sleep of the night. The tents had been betrayed, and were being torn down by Diomede, red with all the blood of the men he had slaughtered. He it was who stole the fiery horses and took them back to the Greek camp before they could crop the grass of Troy or drink the water of the Xanthus. West (1991) Still in tears he recognised in another scene the snow-white tents of Rhesus' encampment, betrayed to Diomede during the early hours of sleep and wrecked by him; and Diomede himself, bloody from the great massacre, was shown driving the fiery horses away to the Greek camp before they could taste the grass of Troyland and drink the water of Xanthus. W.F. Jackson Knight (1956) Fowler adduces two objections to West's version of this passage. The second is on line 471 'red with all the blood of the men he had slaugh tered'. Fowler finds this "infuriating: surely we could have been allowed to work out the colour contrast for ourselves." This is wholesome criti cism. Why did West not produce a literal translation like Jackson Knight's "and Diomede himself, bloody from the great massacre"? The answer, as far as I can remember, takes us into ground where discussion is not useful. There is an area of irreducible subjectivity in the assessment of translations. Each of us has our own sense of language, formed in the forests of our experience, and my sense of English is formed in Scottish forests. I could not write 'bloody from the great massacre' any more than I could write 'the soldier of hard Ulixes' which is what Fowler would PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS accept for duri miles Ulixi (2.7). The soldier of hard Ulixes' and 'bloody from the great massacre' in our passage sound to my ear like translatese. But even if I were right to avoid 'bloody' and 'bloodstained' at 1.471 I could still be attacked for importing the word 'red'. My defence would be that this is an ekphrasis, a description of an imaginary work of art, and it is full of visual details, the Greeks pursued by the Trojans in 467, in 468 the Trojans pursued by Achilles high in his chariot with his crested helmet, Troilus in 474-8 dragged along on his back behind his chariot, his neck and hair trailing on the ground, the point of his spear inscribing the dust. So when at 471 Diomede is cruentus we see his blood-soaked body against the white canvas of the tents of Rhesus and remember that the white-red colour contrast is very common in Virgil. Fowler sees this naturally, but in my dullness I had not noticed it till I was at work on this passage. I was so thrilled with this that, in order to help others to see it, for cruentus I wrote 'red with blood'. As a result of the criticism I now see that this is wrong. I should have written something like 'soaked in blood' but at least I was not prettifying the original, rather striving officiously to bring out its character. The worst crime is yet to come. At 472 Fowler objects to 'He it was who'. In this he is entirely justified and West is guilty of a lie. He lied because he saw a problem and settled for a wrong solution. What was Diomede doing on this frieze? Was he wrecking the tents of Rhesus or was he driving off the horses? Fowler puts it sharply, "We have vastabat and avertit and no way of reconciling the two moments in a single picture." West's false solution is to take vastabat as the depiction and avertit as a pendant explanation. 'He was tearing down the tents... This was the Diomede who went on to drive off the horses.' This is a spurious rationalisation. The effect, as Fowler says, is bathetic. And it is not in the Latin. There is no justification for emphasis upon Diomede in 472. He is not even named—ardentisque avertit equos. Jackson Knight clearly toiled over the same problem. He takes the depiction to be the driving off of the horses, happening after the tents have been wrecked. This is totally false to vastabat. The imperfect tense indicates what was going on, not what had already happened. Fowler's solution is equally unsatisfactory. He explains the difficulty of reconciling the two moments in a single picture as the mingling of interpretation and description. What this means is not clear from the notice in Greece and Rome but in the Journal of Roman Studies 81(1981) DAVID WEST he explains it by quoting from Eleanor Leach on 'The Rhetoric of Space' (1981), "the order of presentation creates confusion between the visual image and Aeneas' thoughts... This is clearest in the Troilus panel." So one of the two actions is description and the other is Aeneas' thoughts. Which, then, I ask, is which? Is Diomede tent-wrecking or horse-stealing? Fowler gives no answer but presumably he means that the imperfect vastabat indicates what is depicted and auertit hints that Aeneas is going on to think of what happened next. But there is no hint of any such focalisation in the text. The solution is simple. In these lines we have what art historians call a technique of serial narration, whereby different moments in a narra tive are depicted within the same frame, a strip cartoon without dividing lines. We know it from the narrative embroidered on the coverlet in Catullus 64, from the shield of Aeneas, on which at 8.696 Cleopatra is summoning her forces at Actium and a dozen lines later is seeing to the sails for her retreat. So here at 467 the Greeks are in flight and at 468 the Trojans. We see two stages in Diomede's raid on the camp of Rhesus and two stages in the duel between Achilles and Troilus. My favourite example is the assumption of Ganymede on the cloak presented to Cloanthus as winner of the boat race. On it, at 5.253, Ganymede is pursuing the deer— you can see his chest heaving and at 255 he is carried up to Olympus by the eagle of Jupiter—you can see and hear his dogs barking in auras: intextusque puer frondosa regius Ida velocis iaculo cervos cursuque fatigat acer, anhelanti similis, quern praepes ab Ida sublimem pedibus rapuit lovis armiger uncis; longaevi palmas nequiquam ad sidera tendunt custodes, saevitque canum latratus in auras. ...and woven into it was the royal prince running with his javelin, and wearying the swift stags on the leafy slopes of Mount Ida. There he was, eager and breathless, so it seemed, and down from Ida plunged the bird that carries the thunder bolt of Jupiter and carried him off in its hooked talons high into the heavens while the old men who were there as his guards stretched their hands in vain towards the stars and the dogs barked furiously up into the air. PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS I wrote in the introduction to my translation that it admits defeat in every line and today's discussion has demonstrated that.