Monday, June 04, 2018

Leedy and translation

Eastside Road, June 4, 2018—
ANOTHER IN WHAT I hope will be a series of occasional posts having to do with my late friend Douglas Leedy (Bhishma Xenotechnites), composer, musician, and scholar, whose frequent letters and telephone calls did much to extend my awareness of all sorts of subjects. First, a letter, sent soon after we had visited him at his home in Corvallis :
3 May 2009
Dear Charles and Lindsey,

It was lucky for me you were able to visit — not only was a very enjoyable, but it seems also to have been helpful : as you will recall, I was wondering how the grade and length of our Woodpecker walk would affect me. The next day I didn’t have any muscle pain (or the night before), but I didn’t walk much. On Sunday I found to my surprise that my walking was noticeably better than it has been recently. The next couple of days weren’t so good, but this suggests of course that I can be a bit more ambitious without undue risk. I’ll give it a try.

As I mentioned, the most memorable scene in the [Philip] Glass documentary (PBS) was his Qigong lesson, and I’ve incorporated some of what I can recall of the routine into my own daily (brief) workout. I’ve noticed some real (I think) benefit from this.

Let me have some feedback on the James Beard‘s Mother’s Raisin Bread. And I hope to hear about your Los Angeles theater etc. trip. You had, apparently, the better weather. I was hoping for a little more rain here, and it really arrived with a vengeance, up the coast from central California, with heavy winds. Portland had a big thunderstorm, power outages, at least one death (that by falling tree). Today, with sunshine and blossoms everywhere, only one disoriented bee.*

So, I’m hoping to be in touch with you by phone before you leave for the paese vecchio. When you get around to reading Emily Watson‘s excellent essay on Anne Carson’s An Oresteia (NATION 27 April) please note two errors : on page 30, left column, mnesimon should read mnesipemon ; but the one on page 32, left column, is serious — 14 lines from the bottom, instead of “— as was Aristophanes’ Frogs” read “as in A.’s Frogs.” !

Buon viaggio — or as the Germans say, Gute Fahrt!
Bhishma monogram

PS – Forgot quite a few things when you were here, including the epic “Bush Family Cookbook“ with its references to the “White House Mess“, and also the story about Aeschylus‘s death by dropping tortoise. In his 1937 critical edition (Oxford) of A., Gilbert Murray includes the old/ancient “Vita” and other bios from antiquity, which all have the story. No one today gives it much credence, and M. l. West’s new critical edition of A. omits all the old, traditional biographies — unwisely, to my mind.

——
*My therapist just got a number of beehives ( boxes) for his yard and vicinity.


Next, his enclosure, a fascinating study of a few lines from Aeschylus :

A LITTLE EXERCISE IN TRANSLATION FROM AESCHYLUS

Lines from the opening choral ode (or parhodos) of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, recalled by Robert Kennedy in the eulogy for Martin Luther King Jr. only hours after King’s murder — can these be what H. J. Rose, in his Commentary on the Surviving Plays of Aeschylus (a formal commentary takes up critical issues in the text and its interpretation), calls “a highly poetical but obscure passage, every word of which calls for examination”?

Here is the original Greek, transliterated from Gilbert Murray’s edition of 1937/55 (lines 179–83 ; I have marked a long alpha that affects the mostly trochaic scansion) :

stázei d’ ant’ húpnou prò kardías
   mnēsipémōn pónos : kaì par’ ā-
   kontas êlthe sōphroneîn.
daimónōn dé pou kháris bíaios
   sélma semnòn hēménōn.

The English version Kennedy (slightly incorrectly) recalled was identified as that of Edith Hamilton :

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despite,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.

It is quoted here from an excellent review-essay in the 27 April 2009 issue of THE NATION by classics scholar Emily Watson of An Oresteia, a trilogy composed of the Agamemnon, Sophocles’s Electra and Euripides’s Orestes, all translated by the classicist and poet Anne Carson (Faber and Faber), produced recently in New York City. Carson translates :

Yet there drips before my heart
   a griefremembering pain.
Good sense comes the hard way.
   And the grace of the gods
      (I’m pretty sure)
   is a grace that comes by violence.

Carson does justice to mnēsipémōn, an Aeschlyean coinage, meaning “remembering misery“ ; we recognize kardías and daimónōn ; sōphroneîn, a basic Greek principle, is indeed having “good sense“ or “prudence” (not really “wisdom“) ; kháris is familiar as “grace,“ “favor.“ Akontas is as Hamilton has it, “against the will.“ Selma is a ship’s upper decking, extended to a “rower’s bench“ as well as “seat“ or “throne,“ a location missing from the above English renditions.

Now we face some of Rose’s obscurities. Ant’ húpnouo means literally “instead of“ or “against sleep,“ but the text is a conjecture. Pro means “before, in front of,“ as Carson gives it. The verbs stázei (“drips“), êlthe (“comes“) are third-person, with subjects ponos (pain) and sōphroneîn : there is no first-person “my” or “our“ in Aeschylus's personal schema. A literal version might read :

And there drips, against sleep, at the heart,
remembered misery's pain ; even to the un-
willing comes moderation.
But of the gods, I suppose, the grace (that ?comes is) violent,
(they) upon their solemn throne seated.

M. L. West, in his new critical edition of Aeschylus (Teubner/de Gruyter) has instead of biaios (“violent“) the adverb biaiōs (“forcibly“), and inserts a comma after kharis ; the last four words now mean “occupying their solemn throne by force.“ Then for pou (“I suppose“) he reads (on authority yet unclear to me) poû (“where?“), making the sentence from daimónōn a question : “But where (is) the grace of the divinities, who forcibly occupy their solemn seat?“ As Gilda Radner‘s Emily Litella used to say, “Well — that’s different!“ (and perhaps more Aeschylean?).

There is another fine review of Carson's trilogy, by Gary Wills (NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, 14 May 2009), where in considering her Agamemnon he mentions Robert Browning‘s “oddly neglected translation,“ concluding that for a disputed passage from the Watchman’s opening soliloquy, not long before our lines, “Browning gets it right.“ In the course of investigations for this essay I was fortunate to have already been put on the trail of Browning’s Agamemnon, published in 1877. Here is his version of the above lines, to my mind the best of the eight or so I have compared :

In sleep, before the heart of each,
A woe-remembering travail sheds in dew
Discretion, — ay, and melts the unwilling too
By what, perchance, may be a graciousness
Of gods, enforced no less –
As they, commanders of the crew,
Assume the awful seat.
Unfortunately Browning himself needs some translation today ; and here, once again, is the perpetual dilemma of the translator : to decide, without resolving intentional ambiguity, what the author meant to say, and to convey that meaning, with the right tone (and for Aeschylus, do we try to imitate his often strange and by-then-old-fashioned language?), in words understandable to today’s ears and eyes — and in the case of dramatic works, to the theatai, spectators, but listeners, above all, for the meaning and music of the words.

bh.x.                                                                                          v.2009

APPENDIX : two further English translations

Still there drips in sleep against the heart
grief of memory ; against
our pleasure we are temperate.
From the gods who sit in grandeur
grace comes somehow violent.

      Richard Lattimore (Modern Library, 1942)
   We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart
      the pain of pain remembered comes again,
   and we resist, but ripeness comes as well.
From the gods enthroned on the awesome rowing-bench
          there comes a violent love.

                                          Robert Fagles (Viking, 1975)

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