Tall Tales

The world is a happier place, since Juliet of Eclogues is writing again.

Courtesy of Eclogues comes this fragment of Sumerian text. A portion reads:

"The people, in their fear, breathed only with difficulty.
The storm immobilized them,
the storm did not let them return.
There was no return for them,
The extensive countryside was destroyed,
no one moved about there.
The dark time was roasted by hailstones and flames.
The bright time was wiped out by a shadow."

This sounded eerily familiar to me, and eventually I remembered what it reminded me of: T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. Compare the above with this bit from one of Eliot's chorus speeches:

"Now I fear disturbance of the quiet seasons:
Winter shall come bringing death from the sea,
Ruinous spring shall beat at our doors,
Root and shoot shall eat our eyes and our ears,
Disastrous summer burn up the beds of our streams
And the poor shall wait for another decaying October."

Both texts have that rhythm, that oral-narrative structure, that I find incredibly powerful.

"When the Tsar had read the holy letter,
Ponder'd he, and ponder'd in this manner:
"Mighty God, what now shall this my choice be!
Shall I choose to have a heav'nly kingdom?
Shall I choose to have an earthly kingdom?
If I now should choose an earthly kingdom,
Lo, an earthly kingdom is but fleeting,
But God's kingdom shall endure for ever."

"But think, Thomas, think of glory after death.
When king is dead, there's another king,
And one more king is another reign.
King is forgotten, when another shall come:
Saint and Martyr rule from the tomb."

The first is from the Serbian Epic Poem "The Fall of the Serbian Empire", the second another verse from Eliot on the same theme.

In the rhythms of oral poetry is a sense of inevitability, of the workings of fate. The audience, after all, already knows what's coming. The stock phrases, the mnemonic repetition, the ritual introductions--all of these reinforce the feeling that the epic poem is at the same time a comment on a given society, and deeply embedded in it. It is pure anti-irony, a thumb up the ass of postmodernism, and I love it.

"The fortunes of war favoured Hrothgar.
Friends and kinsmen flocked to his ranks,
young followers, a force that grew
to be a mighty army. So his mind turned
to hall-building: he handed down orders
for men to work on a great mead-hall
meant to be a wonder of the world forever;
it would be his throne-room and there he would dispense
his God-given goods to young and old -
but not the common land or people's lives."

Seamus Heany's translation of Beowulf is brilliant. If you haven't read it, do so immediately. He's captured what all prose and most "modern verse" translations of Beowulf (or any other oral work, e.g. the Odyssey) so miserably lack: the rhythm, the spirit, the motion towards the proscribed end. It's beautiful. And its a facing-page translation with the original, which is nice even if you can't make any sense at all out of the left-hand side.

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And, oh yeah, I may start writing in this thing again. Blog on.