Bernart and the Music of Ideas

     Bernart de Ventadorn’s songs deploy most of the more widely used troubadour conventions in a way that is masterly, while not strikingly original. [1] Many of his cansos are elaborately organized structures of words which can be understood almost abstractly regardless of their explicit themes. The reader or listener can relish the repetitions, marvel at bipolar oppositions balancing like aerialists, and admire tightly wound contradictions, all couched in the most melodious and graceful language. Some critics, failing to appreciate this artful poetic technique and seeking for prose inside the exquisite poetry, have quarreled over the insoluble question of what Bernart himself thought. From the structuralist point of view, the dance of conventions (which prove far more alive than they were once thought to be) are the most significant element in a poem like “Lo tems vai e ven e vire” (“Time comes and turns and goes”).
     That very opening phrase presents a mystery. Does it mean that the flow of time (or “seasons”) simply approaches from the future, “turns” as it is experienced, and then goes or recedes into the past? But why use “turn” for the middle term? The apparent reversal between coming and going suggests a more subtle idea of the relativity of time, its subjective quality which might make it seem dynamic and mutable. Further, every line of verse, of which this clause is the first, “turns” at the end to become the next verse.
     But as soon as the initial proposition has been declared, a suggestive set of oppositions that generates speculation about time’s river and poetry’s flow, the already rich set of concepts is suddenly thrown into doubt: “no n sai que dire” (“I don’t know what to say”). Of course, this statement is itself paradoxical, since it appears in a poem, the most deliberate form of speech. [2]
     Having first suggested that time’s arrow may be ambiguous, though somehow analogous to the loom-like weaving of lines of verse, Bernart then opposes statement and silence. This may seem the ultimate term for a sung utterance, but the poet tops this tense and dizzying series of polarities with a monad of absolute love. Yet in this dialectical environment every term summons its contrary, so Bernart’s next move is to posit an absolutely unresponsive beloved. [3] While he represents himself as the extreme of devotion in love-service, she is the exact opposite, altogether aloof. This makes his love a sort of absurdity, for which the poet censures himself in the third stanza, calling himself a fool.
     These antinomies – the love which is not love and the speech which constantly threatens to descend into silence – continue in a symphonic play of concepts. In spite of the poem’s highly formal schematic matrix, the system is not in the end symmetrical. Though the poet threatens in the fourth stanza to cease his writing which, he says, cannot bring him joy, yet we see the text before us, decisive proof that he did indeed, after wavering, write. He presumably glimpses some possibility that the lady may ultimately be persuaded, or, by his own standards, he would have fallen silent.
     Indeed, though he protests that his beloved is impossibly obdurate, in stanza six he declares that his suffering is only a prelude to his joy. Slyly, he cites scriptural authority suggesting a happier denouement, “a single day” that is “worth more than a hundred.” [4] Just past the poem’s midpoint the possibility of sexual love displaces the idealized love service that never requires a reward. What had seemed an ethereal “courtly” relation analogous to feudal vassalage becomes suddenly an arduous and demanding seduction strategy.
     The seventh stanza reflects both sides of this new opposition. After saying that his devotion can never flag and comparing himself to a hollow straw in the wind, he grandly declares that he will not criticize her for her coldness, but the last line qualifies his submission: he expects that she will stop rejecting him in the future. This line leads to his first meditation on her body (“be faihz, delgatz e plas”) and the poem concludes with his prayer that God help him obtain the joy for which he has been waiting. The Biblical reference emphasizes the poet’s nearly blasphemous conflation of his sensual desire with the divine plan.
     The formal play is so central to the piece, as formal play would be in a Bach fugue or a Kandinsky composition, that the thematic focus is blurred. Is the writer a faithful Christian or a libertine? A courtly lover under amorous discipline or a self-seeking cynic? Is poetry worth the utterance? These and other issues hover unresolved, not because the poet cannot be decisive, but because human consciousness is suspended between the carnal and the spiritual, between the ego and the other, between dominance and submission. The text’s consumer can hearken to the dynamic dialectic of such oppositions in Bernart and feel a resonance of similar tensions in all human consciousness, including those in other written texts and in the reader’s own mind.




1. In this he resembles Sonny Boy Williamson’s use of the conventions of the blues.

2. Of course, among the most time-honored rhetorical figures are those in which the writer claims not to know what to say. This includes the claim that one is incompetent at expression (such as “unaccustomed as I am to public speaking . . .”) or the claim that the topic is beyond language (“her beauty cannot be expressed”). These are varieties of ignoratio. Another related figure is the interruption of the flow of speech through uncontrollable emotion (such as “let me pause a moment, I can’t go on.”) This is called aposiopesis.


3. Schematically the reasoning is rather like the Buddhist sages analyzing the reality of the phenomenal world which, to simplify considerably, many deemed to both exist and not exist.

4. Apparently the poet had Psalm 84:10 in mind.

Sontag's "Against Interpretation"

     When Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” was first printed, I was highly sympathetic. With an anti-academic literary heritage I regarded as descending from Pound to Rexroth to me, I used to ridicule the PMLA and declare that my only interest was poetry, not literary criticism. Yet a good share of my favorite books had been critical: Pound’s ABC of Reading, Zukofsky’s A Test of Poetry, Miller on Rimbaud, and Nabokov on Gogol. I loved the very different oeuvres of Edmund Wilson and Northrup Frye and learned from Blackmur and Brooks. In addition I particularly fancied essayists from the past including classic critical statements from the likes of Plato, Longinus, Sidney, and Shelley. I was not, I suppose, as much concerned with consistency as I was an admirer of Sontag’s originality, passionate engagement, and scintillating insights. And how could I resist a writer who calls for an “erotics of art”?
     Recently rereading the essay for the first time in a half century, I felt again admiration for her insightful comments and her bravura rhetoric, even as I demurred from what still seem to me her polemic overstatements. She makes no secret of her partisan attitude and feels little need to justify her use of words like “obtuse,” “onerous,” and “insensitive” to characterize her antagonists.
     Her basic point is a familiar one and one dear to Romantic suppositions: that criticism is a lesser parasite on the body of literature. Sontag points out quite correctly “to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world,” and then proceeds into metaphorical territory, adding that, apart from being “reactionary” and “stifling,” it “poisons the sensibility” rather like “the fumes of the automobile and heavy industry.” She evokes rape by calling interpretation an “assault” which “violates” art. Worst of all (in the eyes of the aesthete, at any rate), it is “philistine.” When I first read her argument, I greeted it with pleasure as a challenge to the academic mandarins and, at the least, as a passionate cri de coeur from the radical caucus.
     Yet the essay has the typical polemic’s flaw of rhetorical hyperbole. The fundamental logical problem is that Sontag fails to take into account that every written text, indeed, every perception, is similarly a reductive interpretation. If deconstruction has left no other useful lessons, it has revealed the inevitable inadequacy of language with high ambitions. Even Shakespeare must always settle for a part of the truth about love or government or death or god or the bird in the tree. Yet this does not mean that one should remain silent. The viewers of Macbeth appreciate not that its author has settled all questions but that he has enriched their partial vision with his own. Sontag indicates her awareness of this when she declares that Nietzsche was correct when he said “There are no facts, only interpretations,” and she promises to focus more clearly on a particularly pernicious form of interpretation, but after suggesting that she cares little for allegory (surely a rare bird these days), she tends to return repeatedly to the condemnation of any discussion of literary theme.
     Furthermore, she takes no account – though she herself is surely making aesthetic decisions while writing a theoretical essay – of the potential for beauty, for literary quality, in works that might be called interpretative. Who would deny the place in the canon of Johnson’s or Hazlitt’s essays on the English poets, or of Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, or Woolf’s The Common Reader. Interpretive and critical writing may rarely achieve Parnassos, but probably no more rarely than works of poetry, fiction, or drama. Undeniably, in the same way that a critic may be a poet as well, interpretation may be at the same time literature.
     That imperfect link between lived experience and the writer’s words never vanishes. Literature, while far from simple mimesis, always retains a relation, however tenuous, symbolic, transformed, and refracted, of what seems the experience of the external world. No single text, not even the accumulation of all texts, can be adequate to fully describe reality, yet each written record contains shards of truth. Criticism is simply literature primarily concerned with the author’s reading experience, no more different in theory from other forms of literature than stories about the sea or about love.
     However I may demur from some of her sweeping conclusions, it also seems to me that Sontag was prescient (she does call art “magical”) in even an error. She thought that cinema, along with Pop and abstract art, were more or less immune to criticism, an error arising from perspective, as recent trends would have inevitably been the focus of fewer commentators. Sontag was incorrect, of course. University students who enroll in film courses thinking they will be easy find themselves buried under post-structural rhetoric and blinded by obscurantist terminology. Sontag must have observed in her later years that the “cultural criticism” so widespread today, though eager to analyze the least of cultural phenomena, seeks to discount aesthetic and appreciative considerations, what Sontag called “really accurate, sharp, loving description” in favor of a hunt after themes, for meanings, for “allegory” in Sontag’s usage. Among the most reductive of readings, those that truly impoverish the text, are produced by gender critics, new historicists, and soi-disant Marxists who approach quite closely the sort of simple-minded “decoding” she was attacking. Her call for an “erotics of art” looks in a way more attractive and necessary today than it did a half century ago, if only as a corrective.
     If that judgement is also an interpretation, then the reader must take Sontag’s essay as an interpretation as well, and applaud not her quasi-scientific “research” but instead her creation of a memorable work of art strong enough to elicit a passionate response more than fifty years after its composition. Better evidence could not be adduced for the vigor of the characteristically human habit of interpretation.

False Translations

     There are endless challenges for the literary translator as well as the certainty that the product will never be flawless. [1] Some versions strive for literal precision while others seek more freely to capture an effect analogous to that of the original. The extreme of the first sort is the old Loeb Library’s facing translations which, for all their Victorian fustian, serve best as a crib of the original. The second sort might be represented by Pound’s versions of Li Po or Robert Lowell’s “imitations.” Most literary translators situate themselves somewhere between.
     Some works presented as translations, however, present an entirely different set of questions. For instance, poems in which the sounds of a foreign language are rendered in something close to the same sounds in the target language with no regard for the original meaning, sometimes called homophonic translations, have appeared for the last sixty years. The tradition is generally dated from the versions of Catullus rendered by Louis and Celia Zukofsky between 1958 and 1966 and published by Cape Goliard in 1969, though these in fact represent a compromise between a reliance on sound alone and a conventional translation.
     A few examples will suffice to illustrate the Zukofskys’ method. Here is the Latin followed by Celia Zukofsky’s literal translation and then the semi-homophonic version in their collection.


Catullus 112

Multus home es, Naso, neque tecum multus homost qui
descendit: Naso, multus es et pathicus.


Much a man you are, Naso, and that you much a man it is who
comes down: Naso, much you are and pathetic/lascivious.

Mool ’tis homos,’ Naso, ’n’ queer take ’im mool ’tis ho most he
descended: Naso, mool ’tis – is it pathic, cuss.


     A Latin-derived word like “descend” passes between the languages with at least some semantic relevance (including hints of obscenity), but most words are not similarly accommodating . Even were it lacking the enigmatic “mool,” this translation clearly veers in the direction of gibberish. For instance, the concluding “cuss” seems wholly reliant on sound. Yet, for the reader familiar with the original and perhaps for others as well, the Zukofsky rendering can seem oddly effective. The slangy tone of the Zukofsky certainly mirrors the colloquialism of the original, and even its sniggering indecency seems to have a place.
      A slightly longer piece may provide a better measure. Here the Latin is followed first by a plain prose translation by Leonard C. Smithers (1894) and then the joint Zukofsky rendering.


Catullus 70

Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle
quam mihi, non si se Iuppiter ipse petat.
dicit: sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti,
in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua.

No one, says my lady, would she rather wed than myself, not even if Jupiter himself sought her. Thus she says! but what a woman says to a desirous lover ought fitly to be written on the breezes and in running waters.

Newly say dickered my love air my own would marry me all
whom but me, none see say Jupiter if she petted.
Dickered: said my love air could be o could dickered a man too
in wind o wet rapid a scribble reported in water.


     Here again the anchorage in meaning the Zukofskys retained affords their verse a weird aptness, with new elements added through the “mistranslation.” For instance the repeated use of “dickered” in the place of forms of dicere suggests the repeated if minor squabbles of a couple and the transformation of a form of petere (to ask, seek, pursue) as petted suggests intimacy. The garbled syntax could be thought to represent the addled lover’s mind.
     Yet the choices seem sometimes almost arbitrary. In accordance with their mixed mode of work the Zukofskys were satisfied to begin with “newly” solely because it sounds like “nulli” and to end by simply translating Catullus’ final acqua as water, there neglecting the sound altogether.
     Since the Zukofskys’ Catullus was published, it has received negative reviews from Classicists and markedly mixed reviews from poetry journals. Paul Mann undertakes to speak for the majority when he says, “For most translators, the name Zukofsky represents a scandal. It is a name better left unspoken, and when it is spoken, it signifies grotesque infidelity, gratuitous distortion, the deliberate abuse of a poem for the translator’s own aesthetic satisfaction.” According to his account the “only” readers who “respond sympathetically” to Zukofsky’s book are those “devoted” to his “overwhelmingly difficult” poetry in general. [2]
     On the other hand, to Curtis Faville “Louis Zukofsky's Catullus stands as one of the major works of literature of the 20th Century, right alongside Ulysses, “The Waste Land,” Mrs. Dalloway, Spring & All, Harmonium, The Naked Lunch, Light in August; in other words, in the company of those works which propose revolutionary, new paradigmatic conceptions of form and method.” [3] With only a bit more modesty on behalf of his poet, Peter Quartermain calls the book “one of the most imaginative and resourceful texts produced in English in the last half of the twentieth century.” [4]
     To my knowledge no one has followed the Zukofskys’ method since. Yet a more extreme if less demanding procedure of homophonic translation which wholly ignores the signification of the original text, following only its sound, has become nearly commonplace. In Charles Bernstein’s widely used The Practice of Poetry, he recommends so “translating” a work from a language of which one is ignorant. Bernstein has himself essayed homophonic translation in his “From the Basque” and “me Transform – O!” [5]
     Not surprisingly, others among the so-called Language poets, whose goal seems at times to make poetry as boring as possible, have taken a fancy to this procedure. Among the more widely known examples of homophonic translation is David Melnick's treatment of the opening of the Iliad in which Homer’s menin aeide becomes “Men in Aida” (1983). [6] Ron Silliman produced a new Duino Elegy under the title “Do we know Ella Cheese?” that opens


Where
when itch scree
hurt as much

Then how's their angle
or known gun?

Honky sets selves,
his name a eye nor much.

Plows lick answers . . . [7]


     In these examples sound is not only foregrounded; it is given unlimited license. Thus the author may arrive at a text through a process little different from free association. The words of an original in a different language serve as a basis for generating random meaning amid a constantly changing vortex of half-meaning, mistaken meaning, and willful defiance of meaning.
     Another sort of false translation is the poem presented as a translation for which no original exists. In the trans-European trading about of narratives during the Middle Ages, a text not infrequently claims to be a translation of an earlier poem. If that source is unknown, it can be impossible to determine what, if anything, the present work owes to prior models. At times the assertion that the poet is merely transmitting an older story rather than composing altogether afresh is designed to enhance the received value of the work (though for moderns a claim to originality is privileged).
     In order to attach bardic significance to his work in the proto-Romantic moment James Macpherson published what purported to be the works of the legendary Ossian yet which was largely original. Since exoticism served the emerging Romantic sensibility as well as antiquity, William Thomas Beckford’s claimed his Vathek to be translated from an unpublished Arabic manuscript. Whether readers did or did not believe the source was other than English scarcely matters: the same semantic spin exists in either case.
     Ezra Pound’s “Papyrus,” while shaped by scholarly publication of finds such as the Oxyrhynchus papyri, also valorizes the Modernist qualities of fragmentation.


Spring…
Too long…
Gongula…


     Though evoking antiquity and Sappho in particular (who mentions a Gongula), Pound’s one syllable first line implies the entire reverdie tradition of the Middle Ages. The two-syllables that follow echo the complaint continuous in poetry from the Bible [8] to the “Hesitation Blues,” and the three-syllable final line (drawn out in languid longing) is a name liquid on the tongue. The pretense of translation justifies the elliptical syntax and places the object of desire impossibly distant in time and place.
     Doubtless the grandest monument on the shelf of translations without originals is Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets which purports to be a translation with commentary by a “Scholar-Translator” from ancient Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform. Rather like Carlyle had done in Sartor Resartus or Nabokov in Pale Fire this strategy purchases ironic distance and indicts the authority of the single authorial subject, refracting a multiplicity of possible attitudes and interpretations of experience. This is hardly the place for an exposition of this ambitious poem which, according to those who saw him, remains far less marvelous on the page than when performed by the author.
     The difference in literary value between Zukofsky’s Catullus or Pound’s “Papyrus” and the mass of utterly forgettable compositions by so-called experimental writers who keep pursuing the same, now traditional, avant-garde techniques is unmistakable. In spite of the mysteriously compelling appeal of dreams to the dreamer, they seem to be, alas, composed for an audience of one, for very little is as boring as another person’s dream. Elementary school students now compose exquisite corpses (after their unit on haiku, perhaps) which have precisely the appeal of those by celebrated poets who write in French. Tzara’s “Dada Manifesto on Feeble & Bitter Love," which prescribes the cut-up method for generating text, is itself a satisfactory poem. What results from following its instructions will, unfortunately, not be. Does anyone feel pleasure at the prospect of a half hour of Jackson MacLow? Does even Gary Sullivan read flarf?
     The fundamental problem of all aleatory methods is that they remove intention from composition. Intention may be mistaken or twisted or self-deceiving or vicious, but it must be present to generate meaning. A sunset may be beautiful, but it is not a work of art because it lacks intention. Significance arises only in the interpretations of nature, not in its creation. I am not thinking here of authorial intention as the “correct” reading of a poem or story. [9] As Blake knew, the author may not know a new work’s potential. In fact the writer makes many revelations to readers without knowing what is going on. Yet there is some impulse of desire, some feeling of a moment, some shade of affect preserved in every work of art. The arts’ unique role arises from their ability, unshared with other artifacts, to render the evanescent gossamer of human consciousness in permanent form. The random generation of words can produce only an arid sham, what a cheeky child might call “the Avant-garde Emperor’s New Clothes.”





1. This is only a more pointed version of the imperfection of all texts. See my “Sweet Treason” in Dada Poetry: An Introduction or on this website for a fuller treatment of conventional translation.

2. Translation Review, Volume 21-22, Issue 1, 1986, “Translating Zukofsky's Catullus” pp. 3-9.

3. http://compassrosebooks.blogspot.com/2009/02/louis-zukofskys-catullus-new-york.html

4. Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde, University of Alabama,p. 60.

5. The influential journal of translation Circumference features such homophonic translations regularly. See Horáček, J. "Pedantry and Play: The Zukofsky Catullus." Comparative Literature Studies 51.1 (2014): 106-131. Bernstein also composes in semi-gibberish, notably in “Johnny Cake Hollow.”

6. The opening scene is in a gay bathhouse. Melnick’s version of the first three books of the epic were published under the title of Men in Aida by Uitgeverij (The Hague and Tirana 2015).

7. First published in Roof V in 1978. The German is “Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel/ Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme/ einer mich plötzlich ans Herz.”

8. See Habakkuk 1:2, Psalms 13 and 35, Revelations 6:10, etc.

9. With the publication of their influential essay “The Intentional Fallacy” in The Sewanee Review in 1946, authors W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley questioned further the value of searching for authorial intention, while such a search is essential for others, such as Yvor Winters, E.D. Hirsch and M. A. Abrams.

Black Lives Matter

     It is disgraceful that in the twenty-first century, a hundred and fifty years after emancipation and fifty years after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights laws, a movement asserting that “Black Lives Matter” should have to arise. Yet opposition to racism remains a controversial position. The bigots, ashamed of their own attitudes, use more subterfuge now. Instead of speaking of “nigras” as the Southern politicians used to do, they claim to live in a post-racial world; they condemn “political correctness” and quotas and complain about of crime and welfare recipients, while saying “all lives matter.” But every American knows that unalloyed racism lies just beneath this rhetoric.
     Though de jure segregation and explicitly white supremacist language are obsolete, the United States remains a country bound by structural and institutional racism. I have encountered college freshmen who honestly feel that discrimination is a thing of the past. Often, accompanying this conviction lurks the notion that in fact minorities now enjoy an advantage. Such resentment flies in the face of all available evidence, including studies that consistently show that a white person who reports having just been released from prison will receive a job in preference to a black with equivalent education and experience who reports no criminal history. Inner city neighborhoods are worse off by many measures than they were before the civil rights era due to the exit of members of the black middle class who departed as soon as they were able to purchase homes in the suburbs. In terms of drug addiction, incarceration, single parent households, and welfare dependence these areas are significantly more depressed than they once were. [1] As a teacher in a New York State prison my entire class was often made up of men of color. In average social conditions, health care, education, employment, the criminal justice system, indeed, in every significant way, blacks are in a position statistically inferior to whites. Anyone with open eyes and an objective mind can see these things.
     This in no way denies the opportunities available to middle class and academically well-qualified blacks which are indeed far greater than in the segregationist past. But for the majority of blacks conditions have not improved in the least. Contact with the (largely) white working class in police departments across the country is only a flashpoint for this far more general and significant rule. Though the real enemy sits in the corporate board room and the police are merely the minions of the powers that be, it is on the level of the street that society’s contradictions become manifest. Of course security is the first requirement for civil life and black grandmothers need to be able to go to the market without worrying about thugs. This hardly alters the fact that police in general, including black police, do not do their job in a color-blind way and that needless harassment, arrests, and the use of excessive force are all too common. White progressives are well acquainted with behavior from law enforcement ranging from crude to sadistic and illegal. And yet the malefactors are protected not only by their more well-behaved colleagues, but also by politicians and juries because of their uniforms.
     The fact is that, however well-meaning an individual may be, a white person in America inevitably benefits from white skin privilege. This unfair edge has nothing to do with individual integrity and everything to do with social norms. One can shed money but not this socially institutionalized advantage. Further, contrary to sentimentalist rhetoric about racism arising from ignorance and being a matter for the individual conscience, personal feelings about race are almost irrelevant to the social problem. Overt racism flourishes in fact in those poor white neighborhoods that find themselves physically adjacent to black areas where workers feel they compete for jobs with blacks. Suburbanites in economically segregated districts can afford to be unprejudiced (except when it comes to workplace decisions). In my view Lester Maddox was entitled to shun black dinner guests in his home and to attempt to dissuade his son from marrying an African-American but he could not refuse to serve any individual in his public restaurant. It is social guarantees like the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the middle sixties that transform society, not spiritual awakenings.
     As a lifelong white anti-racist I think the crisis at this moment is sufficiently heightened that all people of good will must stand in public together. If only the many groups that fail to get a fair shake under American capitalism today, the workers, women, national minorities, gay, immigrant, the poor, the sick, the young and the old, if all these were to stand together, what might not be won? It is time to join hands in a real rainbow coalition. [2]



1. In the same way, sub-Saharan Africa (with the exception of South Africa, always a special case) has regressed in terms of education and health standards from late colonial days.

2. This term, later coopted by Jesse Jackson, was first used in the late sixties to describe the program of the Illinois Black Panther Party which sought solidarity in Chicago with the Puerto Rican Young Lords and with such white activists as the Young Patriots, Rising Up Angry, and SDS.

Sherman Paul

     Riding my bicycle as I do for twenty-five miles every possible day, I have little doubt that one motive which has brought me to this discipline, so unlikely for one like myself who has little regard for athleticism, is my memory of Prof. Sherman Paul. During the sixties many intellectuals were in sympathy with my distaste for sports and exercise of all sorts, but Paul, whom I knew at the University of Illinois when I was an undergraduate and at Iowa during graduate school, used to swim laps every morning at a community pool before donning a suit over the whitest of white shirts and lecturing on campus, always looking healthy and well-turned out. He made no point of this activity; it was simply part of a sensible life to him, and ultimately even I was impressed.
     Thinking I needed no guide to my own culture, I never studied much American literature, so I took no classes with Paul except for the two semester survey of the subject required of English majors in which I enrolled during my sophomore year (1964-5). I remember his literary approach, but, even more vividly, the day he halted class to denounce me and my friend Ray Miller for coming to class wearing jeans. “You disrespect me, the institution, and the field of study,” he claimed. “At Harvard,” he recounted, “on an exceedingly hot summer day, I once took off my suit coat in the library and hung it on the back of my chair. Within minutes I was knocked on the head by the cane of Samuel Eliot Morison who let me know I was flouting decorum in a way that would simply not do in Cambridge.” With his deep belief in the potential of Whitmanic radical democracy, Paul doubtless felt that the land grant University of Illinois was failing to strive after the highest standards if it did not insist on similar practices. “Professors had style in those days,” he continued, “as did students.” A few years later, he commented ruefully that the entire class faced him in denim. “I used to be able to read people’s socio-economic class at a glance,” he said, “now I have to wait until they talk.”
     The year I studied with Sherman Paul was the year of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and its briefer epigone the Filthy Speech Movement, both of which the genteel Prof. Paul admired. With the same competitive impulse with which he had invoked Harvard’s dress code, he asked us, “Why doesn’t something like that get organized here? If this can happen in California, it can in Illinois.” Those who find some discontinuity between these suggestions should have a look at photographs of the free speech demonstrators over fifty years ago. Virtually all the men among the student body including the demonstrators wear sport coats and most of them narrow ties as well, odd-looking now. To Paul the dignity of intellectual work was wholly consistent with the thinker’s obligation to stir things up and challenge the powers that be. Identified throughout his career with what Paul Rosenfeld long before Earth Day or Green parties called the “green tradition” in American literature, he was a learned radical.
     I recall the day he asked each student to bring to the next meeting a definition of literature, a task that seemed simple until I began writing. What does, in fact, distinguish the aesthetic text from all others? I now have an answer, but it took some years of study to develop. I might trace my investigations of what now strikes me as a very significant and controversial issue to the stimulation of that classroom exercise.
     I have always thought that every teacher, from preschool through dissertation committees, teaches not only subject matter but also how to engage with the work of the mind in an energetic, effective, elegant, and meaningful manner. Though I doubtless could have gone much further into Hawthorne and Emerson under his tutelage, I learned a great deal from Sherman Paul on that larger humane topic of how to live, so significant for anyone who pursues the humanities, yet so rarely acknowledged.

The Guru of Guinness

     Having poked around the fine old cathedral in Kilkenny, Patricia and I decided to sit a spell before strolling the rest of the town. In the Abbey pub on the High (the name of which had changed to Parliament in the charming if confusing way of old cities), I asked for something I had never tasted: a Franciscan Well IPA.
     “Ah, no, you don’t want that,” the barman said with a grimace. “That’s no good.”
     “Well, I like an IPA,” I responded. “I think I’ll try it anyway.”
     “Ah, but it’s so rough. You’ll be sorry.” By this time he had assumed a pained and concerned look. Patricia ordered a Guinness, and his expression instantly brightened.
     “Now, there you are. Guinness is good for you. We’re very proud of it. You know, it’s the very thing for pregnant ladies. What other drink can say that? Shall I make it two?”
     My resistance came alive, “No, no, it’s Franciscan Well for me. But did you mean by ‘rough’ that it has higher alcohol? We’re going out on a long walk. I expect I can handle one.”
     “No, it’s not at all the alcohol. It’s the same there, but it’s just so hard on the stomach. You’re sure to regret it.” He pulled two-thirds of the Guinness, then drew mine, placed it before me on the bar and recoiled as though from a venomous thing. He turned with a smile to Patricia, his favored one, as he topped off her pint. “M’dear, y’know we have the finest quality control of any business anywhere, but it’s got to be served right as well. I was all m’life with Guinness, retired now, I’m only helpin’ out an old friend here f’r a while. Why, I’ve taught servers how to handle Guinness all over the world: Germany, Singapore, California, Texas, New York. I’d be sent to give the course to the locals before they could sell our stuff, had to make sure it’s done half-right.”
     “What a great career,” Patricia was encouraging him, “to be able to travel like that.”
     He needed little encouragement. “It’s a rotten shame, but today even in Dublin, they have only a three-month course for certification. In my day the apprenticeship was seven years. There are only forty-three of us properly trained master servers left alive. Soon the skill will be lost. These young ones are doin’ the job any which way. They’ve lost the respect for craft and the ability to know the difference. That’s the modern world for ya.”
     We took our drinks to a table in the front. The only other customer was nursing a drink at the bar, and, before we knew it, our Guinness master had slid into the bench next to Patricia. “Now, it’s not only just the servin’. You’ve got to drink it properly as well. If, as they should, they’re usin’ a Guinness glass, they’ll place the name toward the customer. Don’t turn it, but keep the same side facin’ yourself all along. Hold it gently, don’t jostle and rudely shake, drink in the right way, and ev’ry sip you take will leave a line of foam on the opposite side of the glass. We call these ‘lines of goodness.’ It’s like rings in a tree trunk, a beautiful thing, really.” He managed to elaborate his theme for very nearly our entire visit.
     “Darlin’,” he said to Patricia confidentially as she took her leave while I was in the men’s room, “I’ll look forward to seein’ you again, but leave him at home next time, will ya?”
     I survived my Franciscan Well. A few days later we described the guru of Guinness to another publican who said, “Maybe he was pulling your leg . . . just a little.”

Poetry's Long Memory

     The lesser poems of a master can sometimes bear more information about a culture’s deepest assumptions than more original and idiosyncratic works. Such an expectation is all the more likely in the case of a piece like Horace’s ode beginning “Dianam tenerae” (I.21) which is apparently, like the grand “Carmen Saeculare,” composed to order for a public occasion. To me this poem, for all its sophistication and polish, suggests far more archaic liturgies, reaching back to the Palaeolithic.
     The persona addresses a troupe of adolescent boys and girls, dancing and singing praises to the gods and to a range of wilderness locations, with the express hope that their performance will ward off the chief sources of collective suffering: war, want, and sickness. As maidens the girls are asked to address Diana, and the boys the youthful Apollo (with long hair), and these deities also provide a transition to the wild and holy places catalogued through the poem.
     The dancers are asked also to celebrate Latona, mother of Diana and Apollo by Jupiter. She (known in Greek as Leto) was born of Titans [1] and is in a sense backward-looking, as she plays little role in mythology other than as parent to this important pair. She, like earlier archaic Near Eastern fertility goddesses is a mistress of animal figures, associated with wild beasts. [2] Her ancient generative power is split in two in her children. [3]
     Each child is then associated with specific localities. As the primary projection of the mother goddess, Diana is treated first. She is identified with three mountains: Algidus, Erymanthus, and Cragus. Each is chosen in part for reasons of cult. Algidus in Latium was known as a center of worship of Diana and of Fortuna; Erymanthus in Arcadia is considered a site for Artemis’ hunts [5] as is Cragus in Lycia. Next Tempe and Delos are mentioned as haunts of Apollo. The mention of these wild places, important for hunting and for signifying earth’s generative powers altogether independent of human agency, reinforces the élan vital as the generalized object of the poet’s (and the young performers’) praise.
     Yet the specific place names, while serving this exceedingly ancient purpose, are also chosen as sophisticated literary ornament, to produce the maximum intertextual effect. The Vale of Tempe, for instance, in Thessaly, anciently associated with Apollo and the Muses as a cult center, is mentioned as well by Catullus, Vergil, and Ovid. [5]
     The address to Diana and Apollo to constitute a fertility charm through the powers of art in both poetry and dance is not peculiar to this ode alone. Indeed the magic in the service of fecundity is more explicit in other of Horace’s works. In the last four stanzas of his ode beginning “Dive, quem proles Niobae” (IV.6) after paying homage to Apollo for his literary gift, Horace asks the young people to dance, keeping strict time to his Sapphic meters, in order that the moon might bless the harvest. [5] He then foresees the dancers later in life, in marriage, presumably with children. Then, he says, they may boast of having pleased the gods with Horace’s meters. Again, his petition to Latona and her children Diana and Apollo employs the power of words, of poetry, to obtain life through food-crops and children.
     Horace’s “Carmen Saeculare” is a sort of restarting of time at the conclusion of an era of the sort most familiar from Central American ceremonies. Written for the national games, which included dance and song, this text includes again in the reader finds the same elements as in “Dianam tenerae”: Apollo the sun and Diana the moon, a troupe of young virgins, both male and female. Diana is here identified with Ilithyia, goddess of childbirth, and the poet explicitly asks for the birth of many children as well as for rich harvests and prospering herds. Here, however, the concern is national, as befits the ritual occasion and the poet’s commission from the emperor. The poet recalls Aeneas and asks for Rome’s protection and for military victories as well as plenty.
     Such passages as these bring the reader back to the dawn of art and religion alike. Such rituals, at once hopeful for the favor of a gracious deity and fearful of the many calamities that bring suffering to mortals, surely resemble in essence the rituals enacted in Palaeolithic caves and yet today in scattered regions all about the earth. The basic human prayer is simply for life, both increase of the human community and of those plants and animals, both wild and domestic, on which people rely for their sustenance. World-wide, the technology for obtaining such blessings has regularly involved prayerful petition and sacrifice. Often, people reassured themselves with the principle of “do ut des,” assuming that their rewards should be assured if the verbal formulae and sacrificial offerings conform to prescribed requirements.
     But what is being offered in Horace’s poems? It is the dancing and melodious poetry the gods are understood to relish. The formal beauty of art which mimics the order of the phenomenal world thereby guarantees to the community that all is well and even, almost, under control. Though the Romans were not at this point practicing human sacrifice [6], the beauty of the young dancers is clearly part of the excellence of the offering. Perhaps we retain remote echoes of such practices not only in Broadway choruses, but also in our culture’s exaltation of young actors and athletes. Furthermore, many people today who have little faith in either institutional religion or modern philosophy receive an extraordinary comfort from the beauty of works of art. The chorus in Oedipus the King knows that the very existence of their dance is a sign that the world is well, that all is functioning as it should. [7]
     These poems represent an attempt at magic, the familiar ambition to influence through symbols the decisions of fate. The question of whether Horace in fact believed in the literal efficacy of such a verbal formula need not arise. Though even from early times, the modern reader often wonders in what way, if at all, the intelligent and spiritually cultivated thinkers of the ancient world accepted the pantheon of gods and the marvelous interlocking tales of their doings. One need not expect the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to come galloping across the sky to recognize the poignant power of the identification of humankind’s most dread enemies: war, pestilence, famine, and death, all very real threats. [8]
     In Horace’s poem the yea-saying implied by the delight in young bodies, in nature, and in art is primarily affective. Supportable by a number of ideologies or by none, it is in itself a sufficient strategy for dealing with existence. Horace’s assumption of an entire community feeling the same emotions in the context of a public performance adds a love of community to that of form itself, of individuals, of new life manifested in both people and wilderness. Even a wholly inefficacious petition to the gods is an eloquent outcry of human desire. If the horrors of life are not eliminated by the poet’s song, they are held at bay as the singer and the dancers and the audience join in a melodious and rhythmic statement of desire, the elaboration of which will, if nothing else, beguile a festive afternoon. Informative as a digital photograph, it is a snapshot of consciousness that perfectly and precisely preserves emotions and ritual responses from the very earliest human era. How much of modern art is likewise a worried attempt to impose order on the unpredictable chaos of reality? How many modern poems seek, like Horace, to overcome the anxiety of existence with beauty?


1. Today most accept the derivation of Leto from the Lycian word for wife, emphasizing her essential generative character. Some regard Latona as representative of the human mind as her parents were Phoebe, associated with prophetic wisdom and Coeus, governing rational inquiry.

2. See Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses and Aelian, On the Nature of Animals.

3. Indeed, according to Callimachus’ “Hymn to Artemis,” Leto’s daughter was born without labor, as a natural doubling of the mother, while Apollo’s birth according to the “Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo,” took nine days. The displacement of the prehistoric goddess resulting in the mastery of the sky-god Zeus/Jupiter took, apparently, considerable time and effort.

4. Odyssey 6.103 ff. Leto is observing her daughter with pride. In a striking example of the complexly interwoven mythological system, Erymanthus is also a son of Apollo, who watched Aphrodite making love to Adonis (or bathing)and was inconsequence blinded. Apollo took revenge on Aphrodite by changing himself into a boar and killing Adonis. (The Erymanthian boar is, of course, also the one killed by Heracles.)

5. Diana as the moon complements Apollo as the sun, which one might think has the greater influence on crops. The stress here on the beneficent effect of Diana’s lunar nature is a reminder of the primary mother goddess historically underlying the earliest cults of farmers and pastoralists.

6. Livy and Plutarch record instances of human sacrifice in archaic Rome. Prohibited only in 97 BCE, human sacrifice thereafter persisted only in such vestiges as the Vestal Virgins tossing of puppets from the Pons Suplicius and the suspension of dolls in trees as part of the Feriae Latinatae.

7. Oedipus the King, ll. 895-6.

8. In a suggestive variation of the motif, the Buddha set out upon his quest for enlightenment after encountering an old man, a diseased one, a corpse, and an ascetic, thus enclosing one solution (though not the one the Buddha ultimately adopted) with the problem.