Ezra Pound and Homer's Latin

This is the first of my summer reposts, here of a piece from last autumn about Ezra Pound’s encounter with Homer in Latin. I have edited it slightly to add a couple of useful links to more recent material, as there’s been a lot of online discussion about the translation of Homer in the last couple of months. For those of you who’ve just seen the Odyssey film, I’ve also added a few comments about that version.

I have always had a soft spot for Pound’s first Canto, which sounds like — and to a certain extent is — Homer rewritten by someone who has read a lot of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English alliterative verse (not to mention plenty of stilted nineteenth-century classical translations). It begins:

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.

You can read the whole poem here. This canto reworks the beginning of Odyssey 11 — if you want to look at the Greek you can see it (with parallel English and Greek glosses available) here, and here is rather a thorough discussion of several contemporary translations of the first 12 lines.

Odyssey 11 is the book in which Odysseus (recounts how he) descended to the Underworld, seeking to consult the prophet Tiresias. (He’s actually speaking to the Phaeacians, who aren’t in the film; Nolan has him telling his story to Calypso instead.) But before Tiresias appears, Elpenor, a comrade who died unheroically in a drunken accident on Circe’s island, comes bustling in, anxious to secure a proper burial. (Nolan skips Elpenor, both on Circe’s island and in the underworld, as he does all the less heroic bits.)

Pound spends 67 lines, some of them very short, recounting what Homer covers in 150 lines of hexameter. The truncation is sometimes quite funny. The next person to appear after Elpenor is Anticlea, Odysseus’s mother (not in Nolan either), understandably anxious to speak with him. In Homer, Odysseus is moved but knows he must not speak with her until he has fulfilled his tasks of speaking to Tiresias:

Next came up the soul of my mother, now dead,
the daughter of great-hearted Autolycus, Anticlea,
whom I had left alive when setting out for sacred Ilium.
I wept to see her and my heart was stirred.
But though it pained me deeply, I could not allow
her to approach the blood [of the rite] before hearing Tiresias.1

Pound reduces all this to simply: ‘And Anticlea came, whom I beat off’. Beat off! (Did Nolan read Pound?) Then when, after speaking with Tiresias, Odysseus turns back to have quite a long and tender conversation with his mother, Pound cuts off his fragment and ends the narrative before she can say anything: ‘And then Anticlea came. / Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is, Andreas Divus, / In Officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.’

Pound’s Odysseus is apparently very much not interested in chatting to his dead mother; so much so that, when the story reaches the point at which he should have a proper conversation with her, Pound interrupts to tell the speaker — the suggestively named Divus, ‘Divine’, whom we’ll come back to in a minute — to shut up. He sounds like a 14 year old who, while hanging out with his cool friends, is overcome with embarrassment to bump into his mother out shopping — perhaps she’s towing a particularly awful shopping trolley through the underworld.2

In Pound’s version, Tiresias, too, gets pretty short shrift. Sixty lines of Greek devoted to this encounter are condensed to nine-and-a-half. Speaking to Tiresias is supposed to be the objective of the exercise, but in Pound it feels like a bit of an afterthought. The dominant encounter of the first Canto is instead with Elpenor, and his description of his markedly unheroic accident on Circe’s island— the sort of bad luck that could happen to anyone after a drink. In Homer, Elpenor describes the undignified accident in just a couple of lines, and devotes the rest of his speech — another 12 lines — to his request for a burial mound and proper remembrance. Once again, Pound shifts the emphasis. Here is his version of Elpenor’s speech:

“Ill fate and abundant wine. I slept in Circe’s ingle.
”Going down the long ladder unguarded,
”I fell against the buttress,
”Shattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought Avernus.
”But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied,
”Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and inscribed:
”A man of no fortune, and with a name to come.
”And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows.”

Pound, in other words, ostentatiously begins his epic poem in a way that is both maximally epic — Homer, Anglo-Saxon, launching a ship, descending to the underworld — and fraught with a kind of anti-epic energy or resistance. The pacing is off, the register is strange and inconsistent, the characters don’t quite do what they ought, and at the centre of the passage is this most unheroic of characters who nevertheless hopes — quite justifiably as it turns out, and his name Elpenor means something like “hopeful” — that he, too, will be immortalised. You can recognise here a learned Poundian version of the sort of unheroic epic — the deflated, ironic and yet still romantic epic of the everyday — that you find also in Joyce and Eliot around the same time.

Elpenor and his humiliating accident have a parallel in the Aeneid in Palinurus, who in Aen. 5 falls from the ship while steering at night and, like Elpenor, later encounters Aeneas in the underworld to ask for burial. But the pathos of Palinurus’s death — one of the most dazzlingly beautiful bits of the Aeneid — has none of the mild comedy of Elpenor. On the contrary, Palinurus’s noble death secures the safety of his comrades: unum pro multis dabitur caput (‘one life shall be given for many’). This line had obvious resonances for Christian readers, and Palinurus, unlike Elpenor, has a long and varied afterlife in both elegy and panegyric.3 (Though funnily enough, there is a distant echo of Elpenor in the New Testament, in the strange story in Acts 20 of Eutychus (‘Fortunate’) who fell asleep while listening to Paul, fell out of a third storey window and died, only to be revived by Paul and brought back upstairs.)

The contrast between Palinurus’ moving (albeit unwitting) self-sacrifice and Elpenor’s hint of slapstick and dose of reality — ladders are indeed dangerous if you are drunk — is quite typical of a pattern of differences between the Odyssey and the Aeneid. Pound’s first Canto invites comparison, of course, with Aeneas’s descent into the underworld, as it does with Dante’s Inferno, in which Palinurus also appears. But these associations are quite distant compared to the use of Homer.

So Pound is doing something idiosyncratic (and in some ways, quite funny) with the opening of Odyssey 11. But as we’ve seen, the great majority of the canto is, we discover, being spoken by Divus, that is, Andreas Divus, because Pound’s translation is not a translation directly of the Greek but rather of Andreas Divus’s sixteenth-century Latin translation of Homer. Pound points us to Divus at the end of the canto, when he interrupts him before he can relate Odysseus’s conversation with his mother (‘Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus, / In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.’) In his essay, ‘Translators of Greek: Early Translators of Homer’, Pound recounts how he picked up a 1538 edition of Divus’s Odyssey cheaply from a riverside stall in Paris before the First World War, though couldn’t afford to buy his Latin Iliad that was also available. (Early modern Latin editions of Greek and Latin classics were then, as they are now, surprisingly cheap because there were just so many of them in circulation.)

Indeed, many of the curious features of the first canto come directly from Divus. Pound’s version is not an exact translation — he often follows the association of a Latin word rather than its precise function in the Latin sentence — but nevertheless it tracks the Latin very closely, and it is attentive to Divus’s distinctive and markedly unclassical style. A lot of the alliteration in Pound’s version which makes it sound, to us, like an echo or pastiche of early English alliterative verse, is in fact borrowed from Divus’s Latin. In that first passage, for example, the swart ship translates Divus’s in navi nigra (‘in a black ship’). Pound’s ‘trim-coifed’ for Circe, is closer to Divus’s striking coinage benecomata than it is the Homeric εὐπλόκαμος (‘lovely-haired’). The strange jingle of ‘I slept in Circe’s ingle’ catches something of the Latin in domo dormiens, and Elpenor’s oddly specific detail that he ‘shattered the nape-nerve’ similarly comes direct from Divus: ast autem mihi cervix / nervorum fracta est. (Divus’s nervorum here is rendering the Greek ἀστραγάλων, which means ‘vertebrae’.)

At the end of the first canto, Pound sets Divus aside and turns to another of the Latin texts that was printed in the same single volume — Giorgius Dartona’s Latin translation of the Homeric hymns. Here are the final lines of the canto:

Venerandam,
In the Cretan’s phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite,
Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichalchi, with golden
Girdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids
Bearing the golden bough of Argicida. So that:

‘The Cretan’ is Dartona himself, and these lines are a compressed version picking out elements from Dartona’s translation of the second, shorter hymn to Aphrodite (no. 6 in modern editions of the Homeric Hymns). In this case, Pound leaves some key phrases untranslated: Venerandam means ‘to be revered’; Cypri munimenta sortita est, ‘having been allotted the citadels of Cyprus’; orichalchi is a rare Latin word lifted directly from the also rare Greek term ὀρείχαλκος, meaning copper-ore. In Dartona’s text below I have put in the bold the elements Pound has picked out and added in square brackets the translations for the elements he put into English. (For a modern translation of this hymn, see here.)

Venerandam auream coronam habentem [with the golden crown] pulchram Venerem
Canam, quae totius Cypri munimenta sortita est
[. . .] skips three lines
Susceperunt hilariter [Pound’s mirthful], immortales autem vestes induere:
[. . .] skips two lines
Donum orichalchi aurique; honorabilis:
Collum autem molle, ac pectora argentea
Monilibus aureis [‘with golden necklaces’, Pound’s girdles and breastbands] ornabant,
[. . .] skips seven lines
Salve, nigras habes palpebras [‘thou with dark eyelids’, a mistranslation of the Greek]
[. . .] skips final two lines, a prayer for victory in the singing-contest

Pound’s final line ‘Bearing the golden bough of Argicida’ also refers to Aphrodite’s story, though the phrase comes not from this second hymn to Venus but from Dartona’s translation of the first, longer hymn (Hymn no. 5). Aphrodite (Venus) recalls repeatedly how ‘the gold-wand Argus-slayer’ [i.e. Hermes] snatched her away to be the wife of Anchises. Argicida is Dartona’s Latin version of the Greek epithet of Hermes, Ἀργειφόντης (‘slayer of Argus’). Here is an image of Dartona’s Latin, reading inde me rapuit auream virgam habens Argicida (‘Then he snatched me away, the slayer of Argus who bears the golden staff’).4

Pound’s version makes it sound as if it is Aphrodite herself who is ‘bearing the golden bough’ but it is Hermes of course who holds a golden wand and who snatched her away — Pound perhaps took Argicida in the phrase auream virgam habens Argicida to be a Greek accusative form, agreeing with auream virgam, rather than an epithet in the nominative. In any case, Hermes (‘Argicida’) is the final word in the last complete sentence of the canto, and perhaps brings with him the idea of being snatched away, as the text breaks off.

I think it is revealing, too, that Aphrodite effectively replaces Anticlea, Odysseus’s mother, in canto 1. (Pound also removes from Elpenor’s speech his references to Odysseus’s parents, wife and child.) Aphrodite is the mother of Aeneas rather than Odysseus, though the relationship between Aeneas and Venus in the Aeneid has little of the tenderness characteristic of mother-son relationships in Homer. But Pound’s Aphrodite is not at all maternal: she is the lovely Venus of the hymns, the stately goddess or the beautiful girl at her marriage to Anchises, and I think, since this is Pound, we are probably also meant to remember how the sixth hymn ends, and the purpose of its invocation:

δὸς δ᾽ ἐν ἀγῶνι
νίκην τῷδε φέρεσθαι, ἐμὴν δ᾽ ἔντυνον ἀοιδήν.
αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ καὶ σεῖο καὶ ἄλλης μνήσομ᾽ ἀοιδῆς.5

Or as Dartona has it:

da vero in certamine
Hoc victoriam ferre. meam autem praepara cantionem.
At ego & tui, & alterius memor ero cantionis.

That is:

Grant me in this contest
The victory, make ready my hymn,
And I will remember you also in another song.

The hymns quite often end in this self-conscious way, with a reference to the singer and another song. This is well-suited to the structure of the cantos. But I think the ambition of the singer is appropriate here too: Pound is embarking upon a great project, and he wants to win.

Modern scholars would blench at the composite ‘Homer’ created by running together the Odyssey and the Homeric Hymns (which emerge from the same tradition as the Iliad and the Odyssey, but are no longer considered to be by the same author), but in this too Pound is faithful to a Renaissance perspective. Renaissance readers and scholars generally took the Homeric authorship of the hymns at face value and they were regularly included in editions of Homer as they no longer are. As a result, the hymns had a much greater prominence in the early modern canon than they do today: they are quite often mentioned in advanced school curricula, for instance.

Pound liked to posture in Greek, but — like the great majority of Western authors over the last two thousand years — he was much more comfortable in Latin. Divus’s Latin versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey were probably based on existing medieval versions, and went on to be edited and republished hundreds of times. George Chapman, for instance, certainly consulted a Latin edition of Homer that was essentially Divus’s text. Just as most readers of Latin or Greek now, even relatively skilled ones, do most of their longer reading in translation or in parallel text, referring to an English version to find their place or check the meaning, so for most of Western history Greek texts were read in or alongside Latin versions.

Almost no-one now works on the Latin translations of Greek — not even when it comes to Shakespeare, for whom almost every possible research seam has been mined hundreds of times, and who surely read plenty of Greek literature in Latin translation.6 But it is hard to think off-hand of a single category of literary translation that has been more influential. Pound’s scholarship, such as it was, has often been mildly sneered at by scholars. But he knew, and here acknowledges, what so many literary historians have forgotten: that the great Western love-affair with Greek was conducted largely in Latin.