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Eliot among the Metaphysicals · 111
chapter 9
Classics and Commercials
Christopher Logue
The past is always with us, but it is with us in translation. If each
generation must remake the past in its own image, our translators
are hardly at fault for whatever violence they visit on their texts.
We are increasingly bound by English; and as our horizons narrow
we are apt to treat translation as yet another “creative” act, rather
than an act of homage, fealty, or submission—and yet, as poets
know, at times the greatest homage is a form of betrayal.
For the past quarter-century, the British poet Christopher
Logue has been working fitfully on a translation of the Iliad. He
would be no one’s adequate idea of a translator of one of the two
great poems from the preclassical—the prehistoric—Western
world (his own poems are garden-variety avant-garde). He has no
Greek and is indebted to a shelf of Greek-reading scholars and poets, from George Chapman down. The results have often been
brilliant—and always cantankerous, a little dotty, full of heroic
grumbling and swearing. Passages are the best Homer we have had
since Pope—a music-hall Homer, violent and vicious. Logue has
regained in English some of the eerie world, so different from ours
in idea and so similar in emotion, that was Homer’s dream of his
distant Mycenean ancestors.
Logue has learned at the feet of Ezra Pound, our wayward master of translation, though Pound’s method has often been disastrous in other poets (consider the attempt by Louis and Celia
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Zukofsky to translate Catullus by sound alone). The method requires a deep (and incalculable, since it can’t be scheming) sympathy with the original—Pound tried to bring into English the mood
and the meaning at once, deceiving and even deranging the original where it would not suit the use in an English poem (“We must
try its effect as an English poem,” Samuel Johnson said of a new
translation of Aeschylus). It is a method that lives in error and inventive corruption. I am among those who feel that Cathay, and
Homage to Sextus Propertius, and Pound’s “Seafarer” are the height
of his achievement. Logue has at times equaled that achievement
in his Homer.
Think of those fields of light that sometimes sheet
Low tide sands, and of the panes of such a tide
When, carrying the sky, they start to flow
Everywhere, and then across themselves:
Likewise the Greek bronze streaming out at speed,
Glinting among the orchards and the groves,
And then across the plain—dust, grass, no grass,
Its long low swells and falls—all warwear pearl,
Blue Heaven above, Mt Ida’s snow behind, Troy inbetween. . . .
And what pleasure it was to be there! To be one of that host!
Greek, and as naked as God, naked as bride and groom,
Exulting for battle!
The echo of Henry V’s speech before Agincourt is exact to the intention, and Logue drags in the literature and even the technology
of all the centuries that lie between us and Homer—helicopters
and A-bombs and Tennyson clutter the imagery of the Trojan
plain. Logue has regained on the terms of English literature some
of the original’s moral and emotional force.
Some, but not all. The Husbands is an “account,” as he calls it, of
the third and fourth books of the Iliad, and in it the defects of his
method are as plain as the virtues. He has been too enticed by the
idea of a radical Homer in English to be faithful to the original,
and in the deviations some of his triumphs and many of his disasters occur. The faults of The Husbands are not fatal to its best pas-
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sages; but those faults, which severely damaged the movement and
passions of Kings (1991), his account of the Iliad’s first two books,
are almost always a failure to trust Homer.
The onslaught above is actually from the second book of the
Iliad and does not capture the seething of Homer’s images, images
surprisingly domestic—the soldiers swarming, for example, like
insects above a sheepfold. To suit his translation Logue has foreshortened and disordered his events (and, more culpably, invented
them), reduced the epic similes to asides (the Iliad is a narrative
that to a large extent proceeds through the body of its similes), and
corrupted details small and large, often to no advantage. He insists
on telling us exactly how gigantic the ancient warriors were: “He is
as tall as Hector (8'9").” He even imports weird and un-Homeric
names like Quibuph and T’lesspiax. To update Homer does not
require that Zeus and Athene be spoiled brats (“I definitely did
not.” / “Did-did-did-did—and no returns”) or Menelaos an embittered schoolboy (“I hate that man. I am going to kill that man”).
These are not just unfaithful to the original; they are contemptuous of the characters. Admittedly, Logue’s characterizations can
have humor—his young Paris (perhaps not so young after ten years
cooped up in Troy) is an affected decadent. Homer’s own scenes
among the gods may be the forerunners of soap opera; but when
Logue makes Athene say to Zeus, “Signor?” and Zeus answer,
“Choo-Choo . . . how nice,” we are lost in a trashy supermarket
paperback. We miss the Homer who shows the artful ways that
gods influence men (Athene doesn’t become Pandaros—she appears
in the guise of a friend and persuades him to try to murder Menelaos, breaking the truce between the Greeks and Trojans). We miss
the Homer who describes the silence of the advancing Greeks and
the cacophony of the Trojans speaking an incomprehensible welter
of languages.
Logue has removed some of the worst excesses of the version
published in Britain last year. The Husbands is still a messy work,
given to a comic-book Alice-in-Wonderland tone we do not expect
in Homer (“Off with his cock! Off with his cock!” shout the
troops). But how many splendid lines and phrases there are! A poet
who can write, “Your altars smoke on every empty coast, / To catch
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your voice grave saints in oilskins lean across the waves” or “Now
see the beauty to be fought for with long spears” could give us—
has already given us in fragments—an incomparable English version of this distant, uncomfortable, alien poem.
Alice Fulton
Alice Fulton is a nervy, skittish, bandbox of a poet, thrilled by
image and image and image—the reader’s afraid to dart out into
the traffic of all those images whizzing by. Sometimes everything is
thrown into her poems except the kitchen sink; then that gets
thrown in, too. You long for one still, quiet moment. She’s so eager
to get on with things, she’ll run the title into the first line. “The
Priming Is a Negligee” begins:
between the oils and canvas. Stroke the white
sheath well into the weave. The canvas
needs more veil. The painting
should float on skins of lead
white coating—or its oils will wither
the linen they touch, its colors gnaw
at cloth until the image hangs on air.
The canvas needs more veil.
This is language charged with idea, even if the logic goes awry
(gnawing is not at all the same as withering, and a negligee isn’t
much protection against either). Fulton’s poems have linguistic facility and appetite, but she can’t write even of small matters except
in this fanciful, Edith Sitwell way: of a man sanding, “I guess he
meant to open the finish, / strip the paint stalled on some grain /
and groom the primal gold.”
Simulation, fraud, imitation, protective coloration: Sensual
Math, her fourth book, is a book of otherness, to use the term fashionable in academia. The high spirits of her earlier poems have
found subjects increasingly ambitious, though often ill-suited to
the calculated cuteness of her style. In “My Last TV Campaign,”
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an ad man is lured from retirement by a mysterious organization
that wants advocacy ads for—if I can make it out—embracing the
enemy, the other (“An ad that pushed viewers to incorporate-embrace / rather than debase-slash-erase the other / gal-slash-guy”).
Fulton has a feeling for the American huckster—in her relentless
amphetamine style she’s sometimes a huckster herself (though the
ad slogans she dreams up are worse than the names Marianne
Moore suggested for the Edsel). The point of this campaign is
never clear (except that it’s clearly preposterous), and after two
dozen pages Fulton has ventured little about advertising beyond a
few dressy clichés. She quotes from real campaigns; and the slogans have more bite, more splendid vulgarity and wit, than anything in her verse. It’s hard to put your phrases up against Madison
Avenue’s.
Fulton’s poetry ought to have the tragedy of myth, but the fussiness keeps tragedy out. The associative logic, giddy images, and
idiosyncratic indentations and punctuation are highly reminiscent
of Jorie Graham’s poetry. (To disrupt the plain gestures of a poem,
Fulton sometimes uses a kind of spastic colon, a double equals sign
[==], just as Jorie Graham uses her notorious lacunae or single-line
stanzas.) Not surprisingly, Fulton is drawn to Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and the showpiece of her book is a “re-imagining” of the myth
of Daphne and Apollo. The forty pages of forced-march invention
(Ovid needed only a hundred lines or so) show her at her most
appallingly frivolous and wearyingly meaningful—Apollo is a Vegas lounge lizard with a taste for camouflage outfits and Daphne a
compound of Emily Dickinson and Amelia Earhart and Marianne
Moore and Annie Oakley. Her Apollo threatens,
“You can lose a bay leaf
from a laurel tree—lose-a lose-a your lunch, dear—
but you’ll never lose me, uh-uh-uh—
no siree,” defends
“Doggone it, Bachelor-Girl, I’m Phoebus not a fibber,
so be a Natural-Girl,
not a hairy Ladies-Libber,” sweet-talks
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“Inky-Dink Nymphie, don’t say toodle-loo—
I’m Apollo, not some moron out to oooo-oogle you,” wheedles
“Yo! Miss Daphne, doncha say amscray—
How ’bout it baby,
wanna hear ‘My Way?’”
The facetiousness never quite rises to humor or descends to poetry—you don’t get closer to the idea of gods and men, or men and
rapists, with such mincing campiness, all dimples and self-congratulation. We’re a long way from Ovid’s apologetic lovelorn sap.
The bad parts of this improvisation are as awful as anything I’ve
read by a young poet of substance. But though too often a poet of
trifles, Fulton is not always to be trifled with. When she describes
“the spine’s / expansive gossip and / the prophet in the cell,” all
that self-conscious daring, all that frenzy of image, has become a
little poetry. Her showy performances destroy whatever animal
sentiment the poems mean to establish—there’s an odd heartlessness at the center of her fancy. It’s dangerous for this poet to say of
Daphne and Apollo, “deep down they were profoundly / superficial.”