Poetics Before Plato: Interpretation and Authority in Early Greek Theories of Poetry by Grace M. Ledbetter

Author:Grace M. Ledbetter [Ledbetter, Grace M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History & Surveys, Philosophy, Ancient & Classical
ISBN: 9781400825288
Google: 6as2NXsnQTwC
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2003-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three

Pindar: The Poet as Interpreter

LIKE HOMER and Hesiod, Pindar1 petitions the Muse for a divine message:

Muse, be my oracle, and I shall be your interpreter. (fr. 150)

Pindar, however, departs from both Homer’s and Hesiod’s poetics by casting the poet as an interpreter (profhvth~). Much of Pindar’s poetic theory flows from this innovative model, including his radical conception of a poem as a decryption of a divine message from the Muse. Pindar’s revisionary conception of the Muse as oracle also lends sense to his poetry’s claim of authority: poetry interprets for its human audience a divine message that the poet receives as inspiration from the Muse.2 Dodds took the narrator of this fragment to disavow all but an interpretive role: “observe that it is the Muse, and not the poet, who plays the part of the Pythia; the poet does not ask to be himself ‘possessed, ’ but only to act as interpreter for the entranced Muse.”3 According to Dodds, the poet asks the Muse only for the “supernormal knowledge” required to grasp her message or act as her interpreter. But in fact the poet asks for more; he also asks that the Muse be his oracle. That must include a request, if not for ecstatic possession, then at least for inspiration that supplies him a divine message on which to exercise his interpretive skill.4 Dodds’s reading, then, misses the innovative division within Pindar’s poetics that this fragment introduces: the distinction between the poet’s reception of divine inspiration and his active production of poetry by transforming, through an exercise of interpretation, the divinely coded message into a poem. The poet is both inspired by the Muse’s oracle and the interpreter of its divine message. Dodds correctly emphasizes that Pindar’s invocation to the Muse requests no ecstatic state of divine possession. But unlike the publicly accessible messages of the Delphic oracle, the Muse communicates with Pindar’s poet privately, by inspiration. Dodds is also correct in viewing Pindar’s poet as gifted in “supernormal knowledge,” for the poet’s receptivity to divinely coded messages appears less like an ecstatic state than a cognitive one. Pindar’s poet may be compared to a one-way bilingual translator who understands the language of the Muses and translates what he understands into the language of his human audience.

In portraying himself as an interpreter of the Muse’s oracle, Pindar draws attention to himself as master of an ambiguous code that transmits some divinely certified truth.5 But he does not mean to suggest, even in the most oblique way, that his interpretations constitute or “construct” a realm of truth.6 That would imply an interpreter who does not discover truth, but fashions it himself through the persuasive power of poetic language. His use of oracle imagery to set forth his poetics goes out of its way to discourage any view that credits the poet with constructing the truths he communicates. It promotes instead the suggestion that he discovers them. Oracles utter coded messages of which interpretations are either cor- rect or incorrect; oracular utterances have a determinate meaning, a right interpretation.

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