The other day while marking some year 12 essays I had a revelation. It struck me that Catullus’ poetry is a lot like the TV show Seinfeld, while Horace’s is more like Sex and the City. Let me explain.
Seinfeld was a show which claimed to be about nothing, but in fact was about lots of stuff- based around the everyday lives and relationships of four friends. Sex and the City on the over hand claimed to be revolutionary television, but when you stripped away the rhetoric it too was about the everyday lives and relationships of four friends.
Catullus claims in his introductory poem that his poetry is also about nothing when he calls his poems mere trifles (‘nugas’). What I think he means is that his poetry doesn’t deal with any of the subjects which were considered in his time to be serious and important; subjects like mythology, gods, heroes, wars, history and even philosophy. Rather his poems are (generally) about his everyday life and relationships. Catullus was not the first to write this kind of poetry, he was heavily influenced by the Alexandrian poets of 200 or so years before (especially Callimachus)
On the other hand, Horace (in Ode III.30, a kind of epilogue, reflecting on his own poetic achievements) claims to have completed in his poetry a monument more lasting than bronze (‘aere perennius’) which will ensure his immortality as long as Rome exists. His boast rests on the assertion that he was the first (‘princeps’) to bring Greek poetry to Rome – though this is not strictly accurate. Catullus and the other poetae novi (whose work is for the most part sadly lost) also experimented with Greek themes, forms, meters and conventions in the same way that Horace did.
So, like Seinfeld, Catullus claims that his poems are nothing, when really they are something, and Horace, like Sex and the City, claims that his poems are revolutionary, when really they are heavily indebted to what has gone before.
[Disclaimer: I have never actually watched an episode of Sex and the City - this is just the impression I get of the show]
Showing posts with label Sappho. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sappho. Show all posts
Friday, June 20, 2008
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
another essay
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
An impossible task
'And what did you speak about?' I asked, as we stood by the roadside in the humming silence.
'Well, my paper was on just one of Sappho's poems, possibly her last, we can't be sure. It's one of the most beautiful poems ever written. Almost Chinese!' And she laughed.
'Would I know it?'
'Do you know Greek?'
'No.'
'Then you don't know it!' It wasn't said mockingly, but was deeply meant.
'Well, tell me about it.' I felt quite enlivened.
She glanced at the watch on her slim, brown arm. 'Tell you what: let's sit on the beach for half an hour and look at the sea. Does that sound good to you? I have to leave at four, and I can't think of a nicer way to end my stay. The sea and Sappho.'
So, while I stared at the red and blue caiques bobbing on the horizon - a scene Sappho herself would have found utterly familiar - my still nameless friend from Massachussetts, after collecting her thoughts, began to tell me about Sappho's perfect poem.
'Deduke men a seldna,' she began softly, sifting pebbles through her fingers,
'kedi Pleiiades mesaide
nuktes para derket ora
ego de mona katevdo.'
'It sounds beautiful,' I said.
'Do you think so? What do you hear?'
I was stumped. was this a test? 'Perhaps you should let me hear it again.' So again I listened to the trickle of simple syllables. Deduke men a seldna...
'Well,' I said, wishing I'd said nothing, 'it sounds liquid, like water trickling over stones. What does it mean?'
'That's the problem, isn't it. That's what I meant when I said that if you don't speak Greek, you don't know the poem. And that's what I was talking about at the conference. Oh, I can give you a version of it in English, if you'd like me to, but it partly means what you just said: it's partly about trickling away. All those vowels, so few consonants. Yet, as soon as I try to tell you what the poem says, you'll hear my mouth fill up with lumpy English consonants, you'll lose the sense of something flowing.'
'I wish you'd have a go.'
'Gone is the moon, gone
the Pleiades, it's past midnight,
and time's flashing by, yet
I lie alone here.'
Was that all? It sounded so ordinary. Moon, stars, midnight, time passing - hadn't I heard it all before?
'You're disappointed, aren't you?'
'A little.'
She laughed. 'I'm not surprised. You see what's miraculous about these lines in Greek is that they're at once so limpid - even you could hear it - yet so tightly, so seamlessly knit. Let me put it differently: they're like a drop of water on a leaf. Now, that's something you've seen many thousands of times, and, if you paid attention in your physics class, you know that a droplet on a leaf has the shape and colour it has for a myriad of complex reasons - all sorts of tensions are at play on the waxy surface, and there are angles to the sun to consider as well. Yet what could be simpler, more familiar than a drop of water on a leaf? Well, when you speak Greek, and read this poem of Sappho, it's like becoming instantly aware of all those angles and tensions, as well as the everyday beauty of the leaf - simultaneously. So it's a wonder - there's no other word.'
We sat there in silence for a moment or two. I felt touched by an unexpected melancholy.
'There's more to it than that, of course. Somehow, in just sixteen words and thirty-two syllables (eight a line), Sappho has been able to make a distillation of sadness sound almost like the jaunty plucking of a lyre. It's about stillness - lying alone in contemplation - as well as about movement - towards old age and death, presumably, but also, from the wider world's perspective, a new day. It's about desire, clearly, and waiting - it's drenched with the anguish of hopeless waiting - yet only one tiny, insignificant word, mona, 'alone', hints at this. Sappho has taken plain, worn-out old mona and somehow, by uttering it at just the right instant, perfectly angled to the poem, she's turned it into a knife in the heart.
'It's pitiless and tender at the same time, this poem... So when I recited those lines to you in English... Gone is the moon, gone the Pleiades, it's past midnight... and so on, I knew I wasn't reciting Sappho's poem for you.'
'Still it was worth doing.'
'Oh, yes. Absolutely. An impossible task, but none the less worth doing.'
'Well, my paper was on just one of Sappho's poems, possibly her last, we can't be sure. It's one of the most beautiful poems ever written. Almost Chinese!' And she laughed.
'Would I know it?'
'Do you know Greek?'
'No.'
'Then you don't know it!' It wasn't said mockingly, but was deeply meant.
'Well, tell me about it.' I felt quite enlivened.
She glanced at the watch on her slim, brown arm. 'Tell you what: let's sit on the beach for half an hour and look at the sea. Does that sound good to you? I have to leave at four, and I can't think of a nicer way to end my stay. The sea and Sappho.'
So, while I stared at the red and blue caiques bobbing on the horizon - a scene Sappho herself would have found utterly familiar - my still nameless friend from Massachussetts, after collecting her thoughts, began to tell me about Sappho's perfect poem.
'Deduke men a seldna,' she began softly, sifting pebbles through her fingers,
'kedi Pleiiades mesaide
nuktes para derket ora
ego de mona katevdo.'
'It sounds beautiful,' I said.
'Do you think so? What do you hear?'
I was stumped. was this a test? 'Perhaps you should let me hear it again.' So again I listened to the trickle of simple syllables. Deduke men a seldna...
'Well,' I said, wishing I'd said nothing, 'it sounds liquid, like water trickling over stones. What does it mean?'
'That's the problem, isn't it. That's what I meant when I said that if you don't speak Greek, you don't know the poem. And that's what I was talking about at the conference. Oh, I can give you a version of it in English, if you'd like me to, but it partly means what you just said: it's partly about trickling away. All those vowels, so few consonants. Yet, as soon as I try to tell you what the poem says, you'll hear my mouth fill up with lumpy English consonants, you'll lose the sense of something flowing.'
'I wish you'd have a go.'
'Gone is the moon, gone
the Pleiades, it's past midnight,
and time's flashing by, yet
I lie alone here.'
Was that all? It sounded so ordinary. Moon, stars, midnight, time passing - hadn't I heard it all before?
'You're disappointed, aren't you?'
'A little.'
She laughed. 'I'm not surprised. You see what's miraculous about these lines in Greek is that they're at once so limpid - even you could hear it - yet so tightly, so seamlessly knit. Let me put it differently: they're like a drop of water on a leaf. Now, that's something you've seen many thousands of times, and, if you paid attention in your physics class, you know that a droplet on a leaf has the shape and colour it has for a myriad of complex reasons - all sorts of tensions are at play on the waxy surface, and there are angles to the sun to consider as well. Yet what could be simpler, more familiar than a drop of water on a leaf? Well, when you speak Greek, and read this poem of Sappho, it's like becoming instantly aware of all those angles and tensions, as well as the everyday beauty of the leaf - simultaneously. So it's a wonder - there's no other word.'
We sat there in silence for a moment or two. I felt touched by an unexpected melancholy.
'There's more to it than that, of course. Somehow, in just sixteen words and thirty-two syllables (eight a line), Sappho has been able to make a distillation of sadness sound almost like the jaunty plucking of a lyre. It's about stillness - lying alone in contemplation - as well as about movement - towards old age and death, presumably, but also, from the wider world's perspective, a new day. It's about desire, clearly, and waiting - it's drenched with the anguish of hopeless waiting - yet only one tiny, insignificant word, mona, 'alone', hints at this. Sappho has taken plain, worn-out old mona and somehow, by uttering it at just the right instant, perfectly angled to the poem, she's turned it into a knife in the heart.
'It's pitiless and tender at the same time, this poem... So when I recited those lines to you in English... Gone is the moon, gone the Pleiades, it's past midnight... and so on, I knew I wasn't reciting Sappho's poem for you.'
'Still it was worth doing.'
'Oh, yes. Absolutely. An impossible task, but none the less worth doing.'
[Corfu, Robert Dessaix, 2001. pp203-7]
Monday, October 22, 2007
Lyric Poetry
The prescribed genre for Latin extension next year is Lyric Poetry. I was a bit unsure what qualified as Lyric poetry, so I checked the article in my trusty Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, and this is what it said:
Lyric Poetry
1. Greek Lyric Poetry
Lyric poetry, meaning 'poetry sung to the lyre', is a term applied originally to songs accompanied by music; at first to Scolia or drinking songs, and to light songs of love; but always to to songs as expressing the untrammelled and personal sentiments of the poets, as distinguished from epic and dramatic poetry. Lyric poetry had its origin in the Aeolian island of Lesbos, with Terpander, Sappho, and Alcaeus, and in Ionia with Anacreon. It was accompanied at first on some kind of lyre. It employed a great variety of meters, of which the most characteristic were combinations of dactyls and trochees. It was chiefly developed among the Dorians, where Terpander, who migrated to Sparta, is said to have established it. It there took the more solemn and elaborate form of the Choral Lyric, accompanied by the flute as well as the lyre. This reached its greatest perfection with Pindar. The age of the great lyric poets ended about 452 B.C. when Pindar and Bacchylides wrote their last known odes. But by this time lyric poetry had found a new field in the choruses of the Greek drama. Greek tragedy was at first essentially lyric in character. The early tragedian Phrynicus was famous for the sweetness of his lyrics; and although as tragedy developed the chorus was more and more relegated to a subordinate position, the lyrical element continued a source of delight to the end of the period of the great tragedians. Lyrics are an important feature likewise in the comedy of Aristophanes, and there is often in his choruses 'a rush of real feeling and beauty, quickly apologised for and turned off with a laugh' (Murray).
2. Roman Lyric Poetry
The adoption in Latin of the Greek Lyric meters presented great difficulty, especially with the restrictions that the Romans introduced, and the number of great Roman lyric poets is small. Livius Andronicus composed a national hymn to be sung by a choir of maidens; and Laevius was another early writer of lyrics, but only fragments of his work have survived. The two chief Roman lyric poets were Catullus and Horace, and they had no important successors (except perhaps Statius). Seneca uses a variety of lyric meters in the choruses of his tragedies, Sapphics, Glyconics, Asclepiads; but without the metrical skill of the great Greek tragedians and without the variety of the strophic arrangement.
Lyric Poetry
1. Greek Lyric Poetry
Lyric poetry, meaning 'poetry sung to the lyre', is a term applied originally to songs accompanied by music; at first to Scolia or drinking songs, and to light songs of love; but always to to songs as expressing the untrammelled and personal sentiments of the poets, as distinguished from epic and dramatic poetry. Lyric poetry had its origin in the Aeolian island of Lesbos, with Terpander, Sappho, and Alcaeus, and in Ionia with Anacreon. It was accompanied at first on some kind of lyre. It employed a great variety of meters, of which the most characteristic were combinations of dactyls and trochees. It was chiefly developed among the Dorians, where Terpander, who migrated to Sparta, is said to have established it. It there took the more solemn and elaborate form of the Choral Lyric, accompanied by the flute as well as the lyre. This reached its greatest perfection with Pindar. The age of the great lyric poets ended about 452 B.C. when Pindar and Bacchylides wrote their last known odes. But by this time lyric poetry had found a new field in the choruses of the Greek drama. Greek tragedy was at first essentially lyric in character. The early tragedian Phrynicus was famous for the sweetness of his lyrics; and although as tragedy developed the chorus was more and more relegated to a subordinate position, the lyrical element continued a source of delight to the end of the period of the great tragedians. Lyrics are an important feature likewise in the comedy of Aristophanes, and there is often in his choruses 'a rush of real feeling and beauty, quickly apologised for and turned off with a laugh' (Murray).
2. Roman Lyric Poetry
The adoption in Latin of the Greek Lyric meters presented great difficulty, especially with the restrictions that the Romans introduced, and the number of great Roman lyric poets is small. Livius Andronicus composed a national hymn to be sung by a choir of maidens; and Laevius was another early writer of lyrics, but only fragments of his work have survived. The two chief Roman lyric poets were Catullus and Horace, and they had no important successors (except perhaps Statius). Seneca uses a variety of lyric meters in the choruses of his tragedies, Sapphics, Glyconics, Asclepiads; but without the metrical skill of the great Greek tragedians and without the variety of the strophic arrangement.
(Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, ed. Sir Paul Harvey, 1962)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
