Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought by Paul Magee

Author:Paul Magee [Magee, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781538153536
Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
Published: 2022-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

(7a)

Atreidēs te anax andrōn

Atreus’s son, lord of men,

(7b)

kai dios Achilleus

and godlike Achilleus

But Homer also has at his disposal the above-noted de (it elides to d’ before a vowel, and always comes as second item in the phrase). de does service in Homeric (but not later) Greek for this other and meaning that we have started to unpack, the colloquial one that indicates the start of another step in the speaker’s discourse, as they move through a succession of ideas. English speakers, in contrast, use one and the same word for both functions.58

The words are differently calibrated across the two languages, but it is important to realise that the English and in the second of these meanings actually presents a very accurate, that is functionally equivalent, translation of Homer’s de. The reason a functional equivalent for that Homeric usage of de can be found in a language as far removed in time and space as modern English is highly revealing, and has to do with the cognitive constraints touched upon above. There are limits on how much we can process in any given moment of real-time speech production, and this is an issue with which all spoken languages have to contend. Hence the relative translatability that pertains to the Homeric de, our colloquial and, and their equivalents in other tongues. We find ourselves constantly in a position, whatever the language, where the most convenient way to connect the next chunk of thought is with a conjunction equivalent to ‘and the next thing I have to say is’. In Bakker’s words, such an and ‘serves the purpose of continuation: it signals that “more is to come,” that the unit in question is part of a chain of ideas verbalized. In short, the passage is a process rather than a product, a written text’.59

The speaker’s description of this motorcycle incident comprises, in sum, ‘a series of short speech units that are more or less loosely connected syntactically’. It is, in this regard, strikingly similar to lines 1–7 of Book 1, Homer’s famous ‘first sentence’. The transcript, just like Homer’s text, evidences a speaking in the moment. Both composers – the one a Greek poet from something like the Archaic period, the other a twentieth-century North American conversationalist – are finding their words in the very act of saying them. For the Iliad and The Odyssey are like linguistic transcripts of conversational speech. Or at least, they are much closer to that, than to ‘to a written text as we conceive of it’.60 So Bakker demonstrates his contention that the Homeric poet was composing his far from ‘naïve’ work in real-time, just as it came to his lips.

Actually, Bakker has a further point to make about this so revealing little word and, a point with significant bearing on the question of whether a real-time poetic thinking is at all possible. It emerges from his discussion of one of the androktasía, or ‘man-to-man slaying’, scenes that bestrew The Iliad, which is of course a poem about rage, violence and pity, as much as a document of how speech emerges in the living moment.

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