laus in amore mori

Last Saturday the Guardian published in their review section an extract from On Love and Death by Patrick Süskind. Those of you hoping, like me, for a treatise on the brilliant Woody Allen movie of that name will be disappointed. Instead what we have is a rather lacunose and peremptory treatment of a theme or combination of themes which, after all, is written into all of literature, ever written, anywhere.

Here’s a particularly egregious specimen:

This unfortunate liaison - as we learn from Philippe Ariès's The Hour of Our Death - began as early as the beginning of the 16th century. At this date the visual arts first turn the medieval, dark but chaste danse macabre into a lascivious danse érotique. Later the phenomenon takes on necrophiliac features, followed by sadistic aspects even before de Sade, and makes its way into literature.

I’m becoming increasingly aware that just about any claim about beginnings in the history of literature can easily be countered with a ‘but what about…?’ My ‘but what about…?’ here will be Propertius. I would say the point when ‘Eros throws himself violently into the arms of Thanatos as if to merge with him, when love seeks to find its highest and purest form, indeed its fulfilment, in death’ has been reached in literature long before the period where Süskind locates it. It has been reached already in that most death-obsessed of the Roman elegists, Sextus Propertius.

The fantasy of the death that perfects and eternalizes the lovers’ union, or the moment of orgasm, is nothing unusual in poetry. So when Propertius concludes elegy 2.15, a poem suffused with post-coital languor, with the words: ‘perhaps tomorrow will bring death for us’ (‘forsitan includet crastina fata dies’), though it seems almost a wish, it is entirely conventional. Love and death converge on the ‘carpe diem’ topos. (One of the finest examples of which—‘soles occidere et redire possunt:/ nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,/ nox est perpetua una dormienda’—I quote here only so that I can reproduce Walter Ralegh’s beautiful version of it: ‘The Sunne may set and rise:/ But we contrariwise/ Sleepe after our short light/ One everlasting night’).

But the long habit of loving (to paraphrase Thomas Browne) indisposeth us for dying, and love poets generally tend to weight their emphasis more towards the vivamus atque amemus component than to dwell on the fact that death is coming, and soon.

Not so Propertius. He imagines the lover’s death far more thoroughly, and with a kind of sustained perversity that is far removed from either the ‘death comes to all, therefore: love’ conceit, or the languid death-in-life of the typical elegiac lover. It seems I’m not saying anything new here, since one Theodore D. Papanghelis has already written a book on this (Propertius: A Hellenistic Poet on Love and Death), in which comparisons are drawn between the elegist and the French symbolists, especially Baudelaire, and sundry nineteenth-century decadents. I can’t help wondering if the reason why it was the French that made the most of the love-death nexus is traceable to the phonetic similarity of the two words in that language. But that doesn’t explain it: la mort is blunter, less sensual than l’amour and (to my ear, at least) it doesn’t sound anywhere near as desirable. Incidentally, Papanghelis discusses at some length the line that provides the title for this post, ‘laus in amore mori’ (‘To die in love is glory’), arguing that in the wordplay there is a point being made about the common etymology of the two words, a counter to Lucretius’s explanation of ‘amor’ as ‘umor’.

Propertius fantasizes his own death in 2.13, complete with an intriguing necrophiliac element (‘tu vero nudum pectus lacerata sequeris […] osculaque in gelidis pones suprema labellis’ – ‘And you will follow and lash your naked breast, and press kisses on my frozen lips for the last time’). He also fantasizes the death of his beloved (2.26). Then Cynthia really does die (really?), and the poet dreams her as a revenant. Cynthia’s shade closes her speech to the poet with the words: ‘nunc te possideant aliae: mox sola tenebo: / mecum eris, et mixtis ossibus ossa teram.’ (‘Though other women possess you now, soon I alone will hold you: and you will be with me, and I will grind against your bones and unite them with mine.’) Sounds pretty unpleasant. Maybe we should see other people?

Propertius is perhaps more influential on Renaissance poetry than he is generally given credit for. Perhaps not so much on someone like Donne (who investigated the paradoxes of love and death in a different way), but certainly on neo-Latin poets. The Neo-Platonism of Ficino gave point to the by then conventional Petrarchan paradoxes: the lovers literally exchanged souls, dying as the soul left the body and being revived as a living corpse by the soul of the beloved. Johannes Secundus has a particularly bizarre exploration of this conceit (Basium 13): dying a death (that is to say, knackered after sex), the poet wishes for his beloved to act as a kind of erotic life-support machine for him, by sharing her soul in a perpetual kiss of life. Some of Secundus’s sex/death conceits certainly draw directly on Propertius (his and Neaera’s imagined death in Basium 2 certainly has a model in Propertius 2.28); and his death-tinged fantasies generally seem very Propertian in spirit.

[By the way, nothing to do with death, but this virtuoso translation of one of Secundus’s poems deserves to be read by all.]

One thing to add: it’s worth remarking that in French poetry the unattractive sounding ‘mort’ can be avoided in favour of the more euphonious subjunctive mood of the verb. Samuel Beckett does it here, and succeeds in making death sound much preferable to love:

je voudrais que mon amour meure
qu’il pleuve sur le cimetière
et les ruelles où je vais
pleurant celle qui crut m’aimer

In the TLS a couple of weeks ago there was an excellent article on Beckett’s poetry, which includes his English version of this piece.

Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind

Idly browsing in the bookshop today I chanced upon a copy of the new Robert Fagles Aeneid translation (in truth it was pretty hard to miss: there was a great big stack of ‘em on the shelf; and it’s a pretty bulky hardback tome, printed as it is in the same format as his Homer translations, that is to say, making free and easy with the line breaks (what is with that? y’know, inserting a line-break every ten-or-so-words don’t make it poetry), with not much ink covering a lot of paper, and generally taking a devil-may-care rape-the-rainforests approach to paper conservation). Now, it just so happens that I really like the Homer translations he did: they’re robust, readable, they don’t sound too much like translations, and occasionally they even sound quite poetic – perhaps they don’t quite attain unto the sublime, but we can forgive them that.

This, coupled with the fact that the other day I read the generous write-up they gave him in the New York Times, made me want to check out this new translation (the product of ten years’ lucubrations, apparently). So, I pick up the book, flick through to the first line, and what do I read? ‘Wars and a man I sing’. ‘Wars and a man I sing’. ‘Wars and a man I sing.’ Nah, I don’t like that at all. It’s ‘Arms and the man I sing’, or it’s nothing. (At least Fagles didn’t feel the need to naturalize the word order too. I’ve seen translations that begin with ‘I sing of…’, which is surely nonsense. The first word must be ‘arms’, just as the first word of the Iliad must be ‘rage’.)

So anyway, I’m riffling through the pages, trying to get a general sense of what Fagles has done with (to?) Virgil, and it occurs to me to check out his rendering of that famously untranslatable line: line 462 of the first book. You know the one: sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

Here’s what Fagles makes of it:

Even here, the world is a world of tears, / and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.

Which, it seems to me, isn’t too bad, as vague approximations go. But wait, what’s this? A certain R. D. Williams, who wrote the commentary to the edition I have to hand, wishes to make the following point:

Line 462 is often detached from its context and quoted to summarise the note of pathos in the Aeneid; there is no harm in this provided that it is understood that the meaning is ‘people are sympathetic’, not ‘the world is full of sorrows, is a vale of tears’.

Thanks for that, R. D. Like all good classicists, you do a nice line in superciliousness.

Here is the crib suggested by Williams:

here, too, there are tears for human happenings and mortal sufferings touch the heart

happenings for ‘res’? Better than ‘things’ I suppose.

Speaking of which:

[we find] tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human transience
(C. Day Lewis)

[T]hey weep for things, their hearts are touched by the dying.
(Edward McCrorie)

Just what are these ‘things’ that keep cropping up? Who ever shed a tear for things? Things are not really for shedding tears over. But both of these versions are surpassed by Allen Mandelbaum, who sees fit to incorporate no less than two lots of ‘things’:

...and there are tears for passing things; here, too, / things mortal touch the mind.

May the the Lord God Lucretius preserve us from ‘things’.

There are tears for suffering, and men’s hearts are touched by what man has to bear.
(D. West)

Too wordy. As is this:

Here also there be tears for what men bear, and mortal creatures feel each other's sorrow.
(Theodore C. Williams)

Sidgwick has much the same thing, but simplified:

There are tears for trouble, and human sorrows touch the heart.

This version’s pretty economical too:

Here are the tears of the ages, and minds touched / By human suffering.
(Stanley Lombardo)

As for this:

…there is pity for a world’s distress, and a sympathy for short-lived humanity
(W. F. Jackson Knight)

A world’s distress? What world’s that then? And a ‘sympathy’ for humanity just sounds weak: Thinking of you, humanity. Get well soon. Kindest regards, Aeneas.

Speaking of dying relatives:

…here are tears over fortune and mortal estate touches the soul.
(J.W. Mackail)

Fortune? Estate? Sounds like the reading of a will. The will of a family member you never particularly liked, but there was a slight chance they might leave you some money, so you had to put on a show of grief when they kicked the bucket. That’s what it sounds like to me.

Earlier translators mostly read it along the lines of Williams’ ‘people are sympathetic’, and kept it specific to the context. So Annibal Caro: ‘ché ferità non regna / 
là 've umana miseria si compiagne.’ Dryden deflates it still more, and ends up with: ‘And Trojan griefs the Tyrians' pity claim.’

Anyway, if I’m reading my notes correctly, it seems Fagles (and a fair few of these others) have got the sense pretty much wrong. However. The problem with the Williams view, and what it misses, is that the meaning of the line is bound up with what it has come to mean. It’s all very well to insist that the context demands that Aeneas respond to a specific thing (being touched that the Carthaginians should be sympathetic to the plight of a people they had never met); but another context has its own demands, and that is the context formed by the accretion of readings and uses of the line over the centuries. Perhaps to some of Virgil’s first readers the line meant ‘[Carthaginian] people can be sympathetic too’, but does it mean the same thing to a Christian-era reader, one who has read Ecclesiastes, and fine-tuned his Romantic sensibilities, and who has heard and read that very line quoted again and again in certain contexts and with certain associations?

Well, perhaps it’s a bit much to expect a translator to cram all that into his version of one line of poetry. The awareness of this same problem of the specific versus the commonplace, the immediate context versus the literary-historical context, is what motivated my protest against Fagles’ version of the first line. It may well be the case that Virgil is not making a claim to be singing of the human condition, and so to speak of ‘a man’ is perfectly correct: he sings the story of one man. But Aeneas is not just ‘a man’; he is ‘the man’, he is ‘man’. Maybe Fagles thinks of Aeneas as merely ‘a man’ because he’d already called Odysseus ‘the man’ in the first line of his translation of that work…?

Anyway, here’s my favourite version of the line. Perhaps it’s not as economical as some of the others, but it combines the two contexts very well: it sticks to the specific (the sympathy of the Carthaginians), but also sounds that note of pathos, the lament for transience and the vanity of human concerns.

                                                          They weep here
For how the world goes, and our life that passes
Touches their hearts.
(R. Fitzgerald)

Blinded by the Light

In an idle hour one afternoon last week I bethought myself to wander over to the National Gallery and take a look at the Velásquez exhibition they’re putting on at the moment. I turned up an hour or so before the doors closed and, predictably enough, they sent me away with a flea in my ear, being all sold out for the day. So I thought I might as well kill a couple of hours in the main gallery.

Whenever I go to the National Gallery I always end up looking at the same things; so this time I thought I’d take a different route through, bypassing the Cinquecento Italians and avoiding the magnetic pull of that damn Holbein, and heading straight into the seventeenth century instead.

In the Rembrandt room there are two paintings hanging side by side, one by the man himself and another not (or rather no longer) considered worthy of his brush. These are: 'Anna and the Blind Tobit'; and the snappily-titled 'A Man Seated Reading at a Table in a Lofty Room'. It’s easy to see why the curators set them next to one another like this: they are pretty similar in composition and tone. But what interested me were less the visual and more the thematic similarities and contrasts between the two pieces.




Considered as two texts to be read in parallel (though they were almost certainly never intended to be), the paintings say something about reading and writing. Blindness adopts the same pose as reading. The light streams from behind and above; the seated figure is engulfed by solitude.

Solitude is the unifying theme of these two paintings. Tobit's blindness isolates him from his wife Anna, and he prays for death ("for it is profitable for me to die rather than to live […] turn not thy face away from me." Tobit 3:6). The reader (or is he a writer? Is that a pen in his left hand?) hunched over his desk, withdrawn fully within the ‘little world’ oblivious to those symbols of the ‘big world’ on the right: what looks like two globes, barely visible in the gloom. The function of the light here, it seems to me, is paradoxically not to draw the eye ‘outside’, but to involve it more deeply in the darkness.

Where there is but the merest suggestion of a ‘seeing hand’ in the Reader painting, the Tobit scene features hands prominently. Hands are the focal point of the composition. The hand of the blind man, unfailingly, suggests the hand of the artist, the hand of the writer. Tobit gazes unseeingly at his hands while Anna busies hers with work. Derrida, in his Mémoires d’aveugle – though he does not discuss this painting – writes at length on the significance of hands and eyes in the Tobit story, and in its representation in visual art. Tobias will cure his father’s blindness by laying hands on his eyes, his hands guided in turn by the hand of the angel Raphael.

And Tobit will become a writer. Once his sight is restored Tobit will write the first-person account of his blindness and solitude. As Derrida emphasizes, this act of writing is an act of acknowledgement, the repaying of a debt that is unpayable; Tobit’s story is of the ‘seeing of sight itself’. Derrida goes on to write of the impossibility of the self-portrait (the draftsman draws without seeing – he cannot see himself as he draws – just as our Reader writes without seeing, in the dark); here Rembrandt, the self-portraitist par excellence, makes Tobit into a writer who is not yet a writer, and portrays the impossibility of writing.

Maybe next week I’ll get to the Velásquez…

Contra illos qui bonas litteras colunt

People of this sort think that philosophy is a kind of book like the Aeneid or the Odyssey, and that the truth is to be sought, not in the universe, not in nature, but (I use their own words) by comparing texts!

--Galileo, Letter to Kepler, 1610


Well, that us told...