Longer Views by Samuel R. Delany

Author:Samuel R. Delany [Delany, Samuel R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science
ISBN: 9780819552815
Google: rmoeZlJvzIsC
Goodreads: 552940
Publisher: Wesleyan
Published: 1996-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

—Ron Silliman, “Carbon,” from The Alphabet

After Odysseus recounts to Naussica’s father King Alcinous how the crow-queen Circe, “dread goddess of human speech,” exhorted him to leave her isle of Aeaea—palindromal in English and near so (Aiaien) in Greek—to visit Theben Tiresias in hell to receive wisdom, Odysseus goes on to explain at the opening of book “Lambda” (that is, Book XI):

Autar epei r’epi katelthomen ede thalassan

nea men ar tamproton erussamen eis ala dian,

en d’iston tithemestha kai histia nei melainie,

en de ta mela labontes ebesamen, an de kai autoi

bainomen achnumenoi thaleron kata dakru cheontes.

[“But when we had come down to the ship and to the sea, first of all we drew the ship down to the bright sea, and set the mast and the sail in the black ship, and took the sheep and put them aboard, and ourselves embarked, sorrowing, and shedding big tears,” in A. T. Murray’s translation.]

In 1900, Samuel Butler rendered this, “When we had got down to the seashore we drew our ship into the water and got her mast and sails into her; we also put the sheep on board and took our places, weeping and in great distress of mind . . .” three years after he published The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), a book that influenced Joyce, and that Pound was likely familiar with. The opening of “Lambda” (often called The Book of the Dead) gives rise to two modernist traditions. For at the beginning of “Lambda” ’s second verse paragraph, Odysseus tells how soon his ship

He d’es peirath’ hikane bathurroou Okeanoio.

entha de Kimmerion andron demos te

polis te, eeri kai nephele kekalummenoi. . .

[“. . . came to the deep-flowing Oceanus, that bounds the Earth, where is the land and city of the Cimmerians, wrapped in mist and cloud . . .”—Murray.]

The story is well known how in 1906 (or ’08, or ’10), Ezra Pound, browsing through the book stalls along the Seine’s quay, purchased in an octavo volume Andreas Divus Justinopolitano’s “ad verbum translata”—word for word translation—of The Odyssey, published in Paris in 1538, as part of the rebirth of interest in classical learning that gave the Renaissance its name.

Likely following notions that went back at least to those F. A. Woolf had put forward in 1795 (Prolegomena ad Homerum), Pound saw “Homer” as an amalgam of tales from different times, cobbled together more or less elegantly, more or less invisibly, somewhere before the classical age. Among that varied material, Pound was fairly sure that “Lambda,” with its account of the calling up the dead, who come to drink the blood of the sacrifice—Elpinor, Anticleia, Tiresias, and high born Tyro—before speaking, followed by the parade of ghostly queens—Antiope, Alcmene, Megare, Jocasta, Chloris, Lede, Iphimedeia, Phaedra, Procris, Ariadne, Maera, Clymene, and Eriphyle . . .—represented the oldest material in The Odyssey. Using a set of principles for translation that sound like nothing so much as those Nabokov formulated to bring off his Onegin, certainly Divus had translated the opening more literally than most:

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