What Archilochos Said

"Greet insolence with outrage."
----------Archilochos,
one of those--his--fragments in Guy Davenport's translation from the Classical Greek.

What Archilochos Said:
four words that have worked well in class, provoking good discussions of diction, denotation, connotation, and character study.

So much in four words.  Just think of what's said, what's signaled, with that choice of "greet" instead of "meet" or "match" or "return".

I must admit I have a qualm or two about the violence in the lines, but then we--our spirits, the collective consciousness--do need rousing in these times.

Three Coins from Guy Davenport

I love Guy Davenport's fine collection of critical essays: The Geography of the Imagination.  He had such a breadth and depth of knowledge, literary and humane, that he was able to bring to bear at a moment's notice, or so it feels, time and again.  Many of the essays began as lectures, composed while Davenport walked from his house to the university.  I wish I'd been in more than a few of those classes.

Here, I just want to share three quotations plucked almost at random from that fine book.

"Translation involves two languages; the translator is in constant danger of inventing a third that lies between, a treacherous nonexistent language suggested by the original and not recognized by the language into which the original is being transposed."

--from "Another Odyssey"


"Plutarch in the first structuralist study of myth, Isis and Osiris, demonstrates that there is no one way of telling the tales of the tribe. A myth is a pattern, not a script."

-- from "That Faire Field of Enna"



"Sir Walter Scott, out hunting and with some good lines suddenly in his head, brought down a crow, whittled a pen from a feather, and wrote the poem on his jacket in crow's blood."

--from "Finding"

"Kindness Flows": More From Archilochos

In time of shame,
Can you spare me the evil?
Kindness flows both ways.
Woman, woman,
Why do you keep me here,
Why this road, of all,
And why do you care at all?

----------

How many times,
How many times,
On the gray sea,
The sea combed
By the wind
Like a wilderness
Of woman's hair,
Have we longed,
Lost in nostalgia,
For the sweetness
Of homecoming.

----------

There's nothing now
We can't expect to happen!
Anything at all, you can bet,
Is ready to jump out at us.
No need to wonder over it.
Father Zeus has turned
Noon to night, blotting out
The sunshine utterly,
Putting cold terror
At the back of the throat.
Let's believe all we hear.
Even that dolphins and cows
Change place, porpoises and goats,
Rams booming along in the offing,
Mackerel nibbing in the hill pastures.
I wouldn't be surprised,
I wouldn't be surprised.

--Archilochos



from Guy Davenport's 7 Greeks: Translations,
A New Directions Book: New York, 1995.

Illustration: outtake from the previous blog entry: "Water Bowl".

"My Aim Is True": Novel Navigation?

Or, By Bluff and Blunder?
Or, Compassion As Compass?
Or, Pin The Tale On The Donkey?

I'll stop with the subtitles, the alternative guides, and move to my central concern.  Here are three quotations that I've probably offered before, but the last few days I've found them resonating alongside a certain ambition to craft a full-length narrative of mystery and adventure.

1.  "But I had learned long ago that resolution by itself is not enough; we are what we do, not what we think and feel."
--James Lee Burke, "Heaven's Prisoners"

Here I am quoting from memory, but this is a quotation that sticks with me, that offers a rather pitiless ideal, which draws me in even as I want to bring or find more compassion than those words offer. "Resolution" in the first part of the sentence definitely means "completion" or "finishing," not merely "deciding upon" or "resolving to do." I think this quotation will help me to set up the conflicts in the "novel" I'm attempting to outline/frame.

2.  Let's listen to my second-favorite ancient Greek poet:


I over-reached
And another
Bears the bother.

--Archilochos
trans. Davenport

I take that short poetic fragment with ruefulness, with regret in the tone, not triumph, though I can see the psychology that would exult in that way. I can see such, but save me and all of us from such, I say.


3.  And the last of the triad, for now:

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
--Maya Angelou

Fourth?  Frankly, on reflection, I can see how all three of the quotations above spiral around each other, twining thematically into one threefold strand, and so further sayings may be called for.  Somehow, the supposed opening line of my absolute favorite ancient Greek poet's lost comic-epic also horns in . . . .

"He knew many things, and all of them badly."
Homer, from his lost Margites . . . .


I'm quoting from memory again here, but I think you can see I don't plan to tell a tale overburdened by seriousness.  And a fallible, flawed, but well-meaning character?  Who wouldn't like a bit of that?  I mean, aren't we constructed in that way ourselves, however we may aspire and resolve to do better?

And, that fourth selection just may be another way to say "Pin the tale on the donkey."

Garage Art: Davenport's Paragraph, Ayrton's Golden Hive, and Hilary's Bees

Guy Davenport, in his literary scholarship, is the model I should should should have found when I was wrestling with the dissertation-daemon.

This was a mere aside in the essay, but what a rich paragraph, yes?

Please seek out Guy Davenport's scholarship and his translations (not his fiction, I say), and you will be rewarded by living, breathing, sharing erudition, especially regarding Modernism in Art and Literature, the Classical/Primitive, and archetypal aspects of how literature works as well, no matter the period.

Oh, and he's just a great practical and generous-minded reader of texts.

I have that quotation--and others worthy of attention, posted on a wall in my garage.  When I am working, or working out, out there, I often reread such words, such a paragraph, with renewed enjoyment and even wonder.

The Tide Is Low: Mask and Kelp

Triton Beached (detail).


Perhaps an ancient Greek poet can help us here:

Desire the limb-loosener,
O my companion,
Has beat me down.


--Archilochos

(Translated by Guy Davenport in 7 Greeks.)

Or, perhaps, we should recall a poem by W.B. Yeats I've posted once before here.
His poem begins . . .

I am worn out with dreams;
A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams . . . .

Archilochos: Grains of Salt

Three Pieces from Archilochos, the ancient Greek poet, translated by Guy Davenport:

With ships so trim and narrow,

Ropes fast and sails full,

I ask of the gods that

Our comrades have a wind too,

That they meet neither tall wave

Nor reef.

                 All fortune be with them.

Let us hide the sea-king's gifts,

The wrecked dead Poseidon brings.

Their lives

Held in the arms

Of the waves.

--Archilochos

from Guy Davenport's 7 Greeks,

A New Directions Book: New York, 1995.

(I've posted shots of this sculpture in the past here.)

"On Your Feet Now": Advice from Archilochos

Soul, soul,

Torn by perplexity,

On your feet now!

Throw forward your chest

To the enemy;

Keep close in the attack;

Move back not an inch.

But never crow in victory,

Nor mope hangdog in loss.

Overdo neither sorrow nor joy:

A measured motion governs man.

--Archilochos, ancient Greek mercenary and poet.

Guy Davenport's translation from his 7 Greeks.