Bi-Polar World

George Orwell’s super-states came to mind as another paragraph on the Greek bailout was penned yesterday. Europe’s negotiators broke off talks with the Greeks. The story in the New York Times this morning reported this Greek reaction: “Greece, meanwhile, has suggested that it could turn to Russia or China for help if its talks on debt relief and a rollback of austerity measures break down.” The Russians and Chinese might review Virgil’s famous saying, but with a slight edit: Beware of Greeks even when they’re seeking gifts….

Dido and Aeneas

Of some thirteen eggs deposited on our dill plants early this butterfly season, six survived to form their pupae. Of these four had taken flight as of yesterday morning. Brigitte named the two still in chrysalis Dido and Aeneas. We took Aeneas across the Metro to Monique and John’s domain, thus paralleling Aeneas own travel from Troy to North Africa. Dido emerged yesterday morning—and luckily for us was indeed a female. I bring her image here. She was quite large and flew off in the already well-established and, one might say, blessed northerly direction.

Butterflies, fortunately, have not as yet reached the exalted stages of existence where the conquest of great cities, murder, suicide, tragedy, and high poetic drama play any role at all. Dido therefore is safe. Indeed she was a splendid specimen, quite large, and fluttered off with great energy. Brigitte’s naming strategy, by contrast—drawn from Greek and Roman culture—and their latterday operatic re-celebrations—caused me to have to look up who Dido actually was, and this despite having dipped a little into Virgil’s Aenead. A dip is all it has turned out to be and may remain so. I’m coming around to the view that butterflies may be on a culturally much more exalted level then the Greeks and Romans were. As for Aeneas, he is still in his chrysalis and will be the last to go.

Stumbling Over that E

Brigitte shared an article the other day indicating that failing gait in the aging is now thought by some to be an early omen of the approach of Alzheimer’s disease. We’re both stumblers. But I also stumble over letters. A very common case is the E in Vergil; there it was again on Laudator this morning (link), immediately followed by Virgil because Borges, quoted in that post, used Virgil in the title of one of his books. So which is it? I prefer Virgil myself. It has to do with the balanced look of that name, not with historical truth. The poet was called Vergilius in his own time. The rather lame-sounding explanation I find on the Internet (but no deep search here) is that Vergilius was so abstemious sexually (or perhaps only compared to his contemporaries) that an “I” got borrowed from virgin.

No deep search, as I say. But I do have an authority on my shelves here. Robert Graves knows his Latin and the ancient times better than I would have—even if I’d lived in Augustus’ own time. So I trust his usage. To be sure, Graves was no fan of the chaste Vergilius. In his monumental The White Goddess, there is a single reference to the poet in the index. Here is what Graves has to say. The context is Latin poets.

His contemporary, Virgil, is to be read for qualities that are not poetic in the sense that they invoke the presence of the Muse. The musical and rhetorical skill, the fine-sounding periphrases, and the rolling periods, are admired by classicists, but the Aeneid is designed to dazzle and overpower, and true poets do not find it consistent with their integrity to follow Virgil’s example. They honour Catullus more, because he never seems to be calling upon them, as posterity, to applaud a demonstration of immortal genius; rather, he appeals to them as a contemporary: ‘Is this not so?’

Now, mind you, Graves could not have consulted Google’s Ngram Viewer in his time. What Google shows is that Virgil was vastly more used in Graves’ times than in mine—but is still by far the more popular usage. In my 1956 Encyclopedia Britannica, the only E found in the name is in a parenthetical Vergilius; my 1989 World Book Encyclopedia echoes the rising usage of Vergil by hooking that name to Virgil in an “or Vergil” annotation to the title. Neither encyclopedia explains the differences in spelling. My own guess is that if Vergilius had celebrated the White Goddess in his poetry—rather than worshipped the collective power of Rome—Graves would have stoutly used Vergil. He knew what he admired; and I’m certain that he knew how Vergilius was spelled.

Words Are Mere Grains

I am at the entrance of an experience, the reading of Virgil’s Aeneid. Having read one introduction, to C.S. Lewis’ translation of part of that work (Lost Aeneid), I’ve read Book I to the point where the verse presented here appears. Aeneid, the man, heading from conquered Troy to the future site of Rome, is storm-wrecked and blown to Libya, making landfall at a point near Carthage. There he and his company encounter the Goddess Venus and have an exchange. That exchange ends in the verse as Venus says her last and turns away. I thought I’d comment because the introduction brings several translations, to which I’ve also added Fitzgerald’s. The “literal” translations are the result of my diligent turning of dictionary pages. So herewith the texts:

What Virgil (70-19 BC) wrote:

Dixit et avertens rosea cervice refulsit,

ambrosiaeque comae divinum vertice odorem

spiravere; pedes vestis defluxit ad imos,

et vera incessu patuit dea.

In literal translation:

Spoke and turning pink neck flashed,

ambrosial hair’s divine crown odor

wafted; feet robe’s flowed to deepest,

and true gait revealed goddess.

The literal translation cleaned up a touch:

Said she and, turning, her pink nape shone,

the crown of her ambrosial hair wafted divine odor;

the edges of her robe drooped low,

and her gait revealed the true goddess.

   

C.S. Lewis’ (1898-1963) translation:

She turned, and at her turning came a fragrant air

Of godhead, and her robe grew long; ambrosial hair

Flashed, and a rosy brightness on her neck, and all

The goddess in her going was revealed.

Robert Fitzgerald’s (1910-1985) translation:

On this she turned away. Rose-pink and fair

Her nape shone, her ambrosial hair exhaled

Divine perfume, her gown rippled full length,

And by her stride she showed herself a goddess.

    

Gavin Douglas’(1474-1522) translation into Scots:

Thus said sche and turnand incontinent,

Hir neck schane lyke onto the roys in May,

Hyr hevynly haris glitterand brycht and gay,

Kest from hir forhed a smell gloryus and sweit,

Hir habit fell down covering to hir feit,

And in hir passage a verray god dyd hir kyth.

John Dryden’s (1631-1700) translation:

Thus having said, she turn’d, and made appear

Her Neck refulgent, and dishevel’d Hair;

Which flowing from her Shoulders, reach’d the Ground,

And by her graceful Walk, the Queen of Love is known.

It struck me, having worked a little myself, that words are mere grains, mere seeds. They promise meaning but the meaning’s really supplied by the reader’s mind.  The reader links the words and produces the relationships between them—which is palpable when one is looking at a literal translation—because the linkages don’t happen quite so fast, quite so habitually, spontaneously.  Reading that literal rendition, I was reminded of Chinese characters that, even if their meaning is familiar to us, appear to stand alone, solidly rooted in the ground, like stone figures. The habit of rapidly, instantly relating them one to the other to get a meaning is not present until we’ve mastered the script, the sequences, the freedoms and restrictions of a particular semantics.

Here the issues of translations are to the fore. What is true translation? That subject exercised C.S. Lewis—and the reason why he did his own. He much disliked Dryden’s formalism, as he saw it. Indeed, comparing my hewn-rock literal to Dryden’s version, one has a sense of seeing on the one hand something chthonic and original, on the other something ex cathedra with the hint of a simper.

Lewis died before he managed to do the whole job, but then Virgil himself never finished the Aeneid.

Reading The Aeneid in the Florida Keys

Anyone inclined to follow G.K. Chesterton’s advice to read Virgil (ht), might consider the Robert Fitzgerald translation of The Aeneid for starters. Back a year or two ago now I was reading Dante’s Divine Comedy. In that work Dante, borrowing fame and name, makes Virgil his principal guide. Nearing the end, thus beginning Paradiso where Beatrix takes over, I resolved to read Virgil too. It took a while. Then I came across Fitzgerald’s translation which, wow!, offers the famous poet in a most accessible and vivid form. The book arrived from Amazon some weeks before our scheduled trip to the Florida Keys, and I had the notion of reading him there, in the sunshine, the Atlantic my foreground. And, indeed, I did, but just for part of one brilliant hot morning. The time and place claimed all the rest of our collective attention. Now I’m reading the Aeneid again in still wintery Michigan, although the first green shoots are up and, on a recent walk, I saw the first tiny lilies braving the challenges of Spring.

This Too Shall Pass

I happened across an evidently well-known Virgil quote yesterday on Laudator. It must be well known because I found it easy to get a translation of the phrase into English, not present where I saw it. On Laudator I always feel decidedly like a fellahin, and justly so. Here is the quote:

Dabit Deus his quoque finem.

God will also bring this to an end—which just happens to match one of our most basic sayings within Ghulfdom, and we are not alone.

The more we know the more humble we ought to be—because as knowledge expands so does awareness of the vast universes we’ve not even approached. Having read Dante a while back I couldn’t help but become very aware of Virgil, Dante’s guide right to the gates of heaven. In that connection I looked up the poet, read bits. Of course I’d also read or used other snippets from him (see this, for instance). With the Roman culture I am exactly in the same position as those who used bricks and stones from once splendid Roman architectural works to build their hovels. I meant to read the Aeneid, one of these days, the celebration of Rome’s foundation, but to speak of an urge here is incorrect. Whether in writing that work Virgil was celebrating the Augustan age or poetically critiquing it, that scholars are still debating. In any case his focus was the founding of what I view as a secular domain, which interests me not at all. And I don’t even have a child’s Latin any more, hence I can’t appreciate Virgil’s works in the original.

Nevertheless, like a child, having found that quote, I ran upstairs to read it to Brigitte with a manner, although camouflaged in a 75-year-old body, of a little boy: “Look, Ma! Look what I found!”

Attitudes to Iron

One of our most persistent tendencies as humans is to produce the mirage of the Golden Age. We project this age both backward and forward in time. It is a poetic creation (of course). In the Greek-Roman the poet Hesiod (didn’t those fellows have a first name?) produced the metallic classification—Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron. In all of the variants of it, surprise!, we always live the Iron Age, whenever we happen to live. Paradise is the golden age of the Hebraic tradition, but because it appears in the Bible, the Garden does not usually appear in a recital of ages.

A comment here about the Heroic age—clearly not a metal. It was Hesiod’s way to refer to a period like our Second World War, thus when great heroes fill the earth—the Greatest Generation, etc. In Hesiod’s case, the reference is to the twelfth century BC, the time of the Trojan War. There are wars, you see, dime a dozen, and then there are Wars!

Golden ages that we find looking back we also discern ahead in time. But those who see the gleam of gold ahead are still writing in the Age of Iron. That age we know only too well. Virgil, positioned at the transit between the Roman Republic and Roman Empire—well, actually, in the early Empire, foresaw a future golden age in these lines (Eclogue IV, 5-8):

The age Cumaean Sybil sang has passed.
New centuries begin to roll at last.
Virgo now reigns, Saturn resumes the throne,
The Iron Age is past and gone,
A golden race arises from the rust.
Heaven has sent a new breed down to us.

Yes, I’ve tackled Virgil too, but not the Latin—just “fixing” translations into English.

Indeed one’s tempted to judge a culture by the poetic images by means of which it captures the looking back and looking forward. The glory of the Second Coming contrasts sharply with the Marxist future in which a Classless Society dawns as the State Withers Away.

The certainty that all ages are made of iron recurs to me every time I look closely into a period as yet unfamiliar to me—particularly when that time is described by a contemporary. In the high Middle Age Dante looked back to Virgil’s time in awe—and ahead to the effective restoration of the Holy Roman Empire. His own time was corruption squared, of course. He transcended this feeling by writing poetry about an idealized Beatrice in the heights of Heaven.

A transcendental attitude toward the grind of the Age of Iron is relatively rare—and a transcendental but practical approach does not attract the masses either. That attitude is encased in the saying: “Be in the world but not of it.” The maxim is very well known and has an unambiguously religious flavor. For this reason lots of people think that it is somewhere in the Bible. Google shows many people trying to find it there.

The curious fact is that this saying comes from the Sufis—and isn’t in the Qur’an either. Its original is Persian: Dar Dunya Básh: Az Dunya Mabásh. Be in the world but not of the world. It’s a rhyming maxim, thus mnemonic. Not that it takes a rhyme to remember it.

The more ordinary attitudes to life in this valley are resentment, aggression, combat—or withdrawal, indifference, resignation. Being in the world, to the contrary, strongly suggests sincere, energetic, and active participation—including service and effort—but with the heart detached. By “world,” of course, neither the Sufis nor the public nor I really mean the wonders of nature or the starry skies.

Empire Now and Then

In Canto XVIII of Dante’s Paradiso, we enter a high heaven, that of Jupiter, where warrior saints have their space of manifestation. And up there, in a sphere already bright and silvery (the sixth of seven heavens) bright lights—but these lights are alive, they are the warrior saints—conjoin to print out a command in Latin, in the sky as it were, which means “Love justice, ye that judge the earth.” The final word of this command ends in the word TERRAM, and that word of course ends in M. Now as the canto develops, the lights begin to transform the final M of the command into the image of the Roman Eagle—a symbol that somewhat resembles the letter if the bird’s wings are lowered; you need but add a neck and head and elaborate the descending lines into wings and tail.

In Dante’s day the Roman Empire was dead, dead, dead—and I mean like the dodo. And its nostalgic revival, in the form of the Holy Roman Empire, just would not, would not hold together. But we are at a point (early fourteenth century) when the Renaissance is dawning. The world was turning its face toward the sensory; a great nostalgia for the glory that was Rome possessed our poet. He elaborates this feeling throughout the Divine Comedy, and he also elaborated it in less poetic form in his book on monarchy. Therefore this symbol of military power, might, and conquest is made to appear in a very high heaven. And nothing happens in those heavens without the absolute sanction of God. Therefore this eagle, and emphatically the Roman eagle, is a symbol of God.

The passionate and thick entwinement between this and a projected transcendental world is a characteristic aspect of Dante’s work—and greatly amusing to discover how very thickly populated with Italians are hell, purgatory, and paradise. Amusing to discover how keenly the noble, high, and long-since departed concern themselves with what we would now call the sordid, grimy politics of a corrupt era—or perhaps Dante’s visit gave them a welcome respite from the tedium of perpetual divine contemplation?

In any case, that damned Eagle startled me—not that I hadn’t gotten a bit uneasy in the pursuit of Paradise already. My view of Empire is much darker than Dante’s. I’m not taking my cue about Rome from Virgil, who wrote as Empire was just beginning and had barely any track record as yet. I see the whole bloodstained brutal history of Empire and live in a time that trends in the same direction once again. And of course, quite like Dante, I make the foolish mistake of looking backward with nostalgia to medieval and earlier times, entirely overlooking fact, seeing only those things that appeal. Recognizing this sort of habitual perception as a mere climate of emotions, waking up in the morning as I did, sobered and irritated, makes me sympathetic to a gnostic view served straight in a shot-glass.
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Image from the the Chauvin family linage site.

An Addendum: Mantua

Virgil was born in Mantua, in Northern Italy. And Dante was born in—and exiled from—Florence, located just to the south and east of Mantua, hence, no doubt, he felt more than merely a poetic kinship to the figure he appointed to be his guide in Hell and Purgatory. The map shows these two locations: these days, obeying a new interest in geography, I just go and look.

As I was writing the last post, a German phrase kept playing in my head, over and over again: Zu Mantua in Banden… I turned to Brigitte to enlighten me, and she produced more of the verse. The line comes from a poem celebrating a Tyrolean rebellion against Napoleon led by Andreas Hofer. His rebellion failed; he was executed in Mantua. And years later Julius Mosen wrote a poem titled Andreas Hofer, but better known in Germany, where we used to sing it as well, by the phrase that I remembered. I managed to find an English translation of the poem here—thus saving me a couple of hours of difficult translation. I could not pin down the translator’s name beyond the fact that it is W. The first verse in German, then in Latin, follows.

At Mantua, in fetters,
The Faithful Hofer lay;
To death, to death in Mantua,
Bears him the foe away;—
His brothers’ hearts they beat and bleed;
All Deutschland lies in shame and need;
And with it—land Tyrol.

Zu Mantua in Banden
Der treue Hofer war,
In Mantua zum Tode
Führt ihn der Feinde Schar.
Es blutete der Brüder Herz,
Ganz Deutschland, ach in Schmach und Schmerz.
: Mit ihm das Land Tirol,
Mit ihm das Land Tirol. :

En Mantuae e vinclis
Fidelem Hoferum
Ad mortem, vae, ducebat
Caterva hostium;
Divulsa est Germania
Dolore, ignominia
Et una Tyrolis.
Et una Tyrolis.

Oh. I should have humbly noted somewhere above, near the names of Virgil and Dante, that I too once lived in Mantua. It was, to be sure, just a development in Fairfax Virginia, but that name does sort of cling even to casual minstrels wandering the wilderness.

Reading Dante in Detroit

A few years ago Monique gave me Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran—and just tracing that experience would suffice for a post. For one thing members of my extended family (Ghulf Genes, you might say) include children born of an Iranian woman, hence blood lines connect us back to Persia too. Indeed, whenever a country comes into focus in one or another context, I can trace tendrils of relationship—and strong ones, too, either of blood or spirit. But here my only purpose is to justify the title of this posting, to indicate the same kind of tension between cultures that Nafisi had in mind when she sat down to trace her own experiences as a woman and a teacher.

Yes. I’m reading the Divine Comedy, all of it this time, and slowly, with real attention. This too runs in the family’s spiritual genes. My mother would have done that sort of thing in her advanced years and Monique’s mate, John, is prone to feats like that as well—a kind of heroic determination to achieve the impossible, which is to grasp the entire culture, ancient and near, even if only by a few grand gestures. When I began reading Purgatory, I smiled as I read Dorothy Sayers’ introduction, in the first paragraph of which she says: “Persons who pontificate about Dante without making mention of his Purgatory may reasonably be suspected of knowing him only at second hand, or of having at most skimmed through the circles of his Hell in the hope of finding something to be shocked at.” Or, Sayers may have added, “something to quote.” She should have put that into her general introduction to nudge people on, beyond the Inferno, which is, as its name implies, a very dismal place. And arriving at the base of Mount Purgatory, one is astonished (I was) at the sudden change.

Culture is, ultimately, a system of shared values. Great literature holds these values. Its neglect is therefore either part of cultural change or cultural decay. If the value system continues to be renewed by great new works of art and philosophy, the sliding of the awkwardly dated back into the past is no matter of regret. But if the new has lost its nicotine, as it were, like fake cigarettes intended to wean us of smoking, the loss is genuine.

The cultural process is sharply discernible in the Comedy. In the first two books Dante’s guide is Virgil, the Latin poet famed for his Georgics and Aeneid, the last an epic account of Rome’s founding. The stories and myths in which Dante himself anchors his values are drawn from Graeco-Roman sources and the Bible, his philosophy is based on “moderns,” like Thomas Aquinas, and ancients, like Aristotle. The time distance between Virgil’s death and Dante’s birth is 1284 years. In 2009, we are 688 years from Dante’s death in 1321. Hence, for us, Dante stands closer in time than the towering figure of Virgil stood to him. The speed of change, however, has been so great in modern times that Dante appears to us at least 1300 years back, subjectively, rather than a mere 700.

It’s much more difficult today to get even a feel for the vast extent of human culture. Dante published his Comedy, if you can call it publishing, by having parts of it copied by hand as they were written, entirely in response to the demands of his friends. Printing still lay in the future. Today we can get dozens of translations of the Tao Te Ching, for example, and the best literature of any country we desire to read. And we have languages to master if we really wish to be serious students. I could here write a post titled Reading Goethe in German, for example, or Reading Madács in Hungarian. I’ve done both. Goethe’s name everyone knows, but Madács is known only to Hungarians. He wrote the all-time classic play called The Tragedy of Man. When you expend your energy in projects like that, you haven’t got time left to make money, do you? Anyway, that’s my excuse for failing in the American Way.