he is seeing once more the sea (the same sea) that Stéphane Mallarmé longed for so lovingly, after telling us that “all flesh is sad” and that he has “read all the books.” It is the same terrifying sea that Paul Celan hears, “umbellet von der haiblauen See,” “barking in the shark-blue sea.” It is the wave that breaks three times for the tongue-tied Tennyson on “cold grey stones” — the same “tremulous cadence” that moves Matthew Arnold on Dover Beach and makes him think of Sophocles “who long ago / Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought / Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow, / Of human misery.” Mallarmé, Celan, Tennyson, Arnold, Sophocles are all present in Stevens when, far away on a distant shore, he sees the metallic water shine and grow still. And what does the reader find in that sight, in that sound? Arnold says it exactly: we find “in the sound a thought.” A thought, we can add, that translates itself through the power of metaphor into a question and into the vaporous ghost of an answer.
Every act of writing, every creation of a metaphor is a translation in at least two senses: in the sense that it recasts an outer experience or an imagining into something that elicits in the reader a further experience or imagining; and in the sense that it transports something from one place to a different one — the sense in which the word was employed in the Middle Ages to describe the moving of the pilfered remains of saints from one shrine to another, an activity generously known as furta sacra, “holy thefts.” Something in the act of writing, and then once more in the act of reading, pilfers, enshrines, and changes Arnold’s essential literary thought from writer to writer and reader to reader, building on the experience of creation, renewing and redefining our experience of the world.
A few years after Kafka’s death, Milena Jesenskà, the woman he had loved so dearly, was taken away by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. Suddenly life seemed to have become its reverse: not death, which is a conclusion, but a mad and meaningless state of brutal suffering, brought on through no visible fault and serving no visible end. To attempt to survive this nightmare, a friend of Milena’s devised a method: she would resort to the books she had read, stored in her memory. Among the texts she forced herself to remember was a short story by Maxim Gorky, “A Man Is Born.”
The story tells how the narrator, a young boy, strolling one day somewhere along the shores of the Black Sea, comes upon a peasant woman shrieking in pain. The woman is pregnant; she has fled the famine of her birthplace and now, terrified and alone, she is about to give birth. In spite of her protests, the boy assists her. He bathes the newborn child in the sea, makes a fire, and prepares tea. At the end of the story, the boy and the peasant woman follow a group of other peasants: with one arm, the boy supports the mother; in the other he carries the baby.
Gorky’s story became, for Milena’s friend, a paradise, a small safe place into which she could retreat from the daily horror. It did not lend meaning to her plight, it did not explain or justify it; it did not even offer her hope for the future. It simply existed as a point of balance, reminding her of the light at a time of dark catastrophe.
Catastrophe: a sudden and violent change, something terrible and incomprehensible. When the Roman hordes, following Cato’s dictum, razed the city of Carthage and plowed the land with salt; when the Vandals sacked Rome in 455, leaving the great metropolis in ruins; when the first Christian Crusaders entered the cities of North Africa and after slaughtering the men, women, and children set fire to the libraries; when the Catholic kings of Spain expelled from their territories the cultures of the Arabs and the Jews, and the Rabbi of Toledo threw up to Heaven the keys of the Ark for safekeeping until a happier time; when Pizarro executed the welcoming Atahualpa and effectively destroyed the Inca civilization; when the first slave was sold on the American continent; when large numbers of Native Americans were deliberately contaminated with smallpox-infected blankets by the European settlers (in what must count as the world’s first biological warfare); when the soldiers in the trenches of World War I drowned in mud and toxic gases in their attempt to obey impossible orders; when the inhabitants of Hiroshima saw their skin fly off their bodies under the great yellow cloud up in the sky; when the Kurdish population was attacked with toxic weapons; when thousands of men and women were hunted down with machetes in Rwanda; and when the suicide planes struck the twin towers of Manhattan, leaving New York to join the mourning cities of Madrid, Belfast, Jerusalem, Bogotá, and countless others, all victims of terrorist attacks — in all these catastrophes, the survivors may have sought in a book, as did Milena’s friend, some respite from grief and some reassurance of sanity.
For a reader, this may be the essential, perhaps the only justification for literature: that the madness of the world will not take us over completely though it invades our cellars (the metaphor belongs to Machado de Assis) and then softly takes over the dining room, the living room, the whole house. Joseph Brodsky, prisoner in Siberia, found it in the verse of W. H. Auden. For Reinaldo Arenas, locked away in Castro’s prisons, it was in the Aeneid; for Oscar Wilde, at Reading Gaol, in the words of Christ; for Haroldo Conti, tortured by the Argentinean military, in the novels of Dickens. When the world becomes incomprehensible, when acts of terror and terrifying responses to that terror fill our days and our nights, when we feel unguided and bewildered, we seek a place in which comprehension (or faith in comprehension) has been set down in words.
Every act of terror protests its own justification. It is said that before ordering each new atrocity, Robespierre would ask, “In the name of what?” But every human being knows, intimately, that no act of terror is possibly justified. The constant cruelty of the world and, in spite of everything, its daily miracles of beauty, kindness, and compassion bewilder us because they spring up with no justification, like the miracle of rain (as God explains to Job) falling “where no man is.” The primordial quality of the universe seems to be absolute gratuity.
Of all this we are aware, as we also aware the old trusims: that violence breeds violence, that all power is abusive, that fanaticism of any kind is the enemy of reason, that propaganda is propaganda even when it purports to rally us against iniquity, that war is never glorious except in the eyes of the victors, who believe that God is on the side of large armies. This is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words and metaphors for what we already know.
Metaphor builds on metaphor and quotation on quotation. For some, the words of others are a vocabulary of quotations in which they express their own thoughts. For others those foreign words are their own thoughts, and the very act of putting them on paper transforms those words imagined by others into something new, reimagined through a different intonation or context. Without this continuity, this purloining, this translation, there is no literature. And through these dealings, literature remains immutable, like the tired waves, while the world around it changes.
During a staging of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in Algiers, at the height of the War of Independence, after the hero, Béranger, had pronounced the play’s last brave words, “Je ne capitule pas!” the entire audience, Algerian indépendantistes and French colonials, burst out in cheers. For the Algerians, Béranger’s cry echoed their own, intent on not giving up their struggle for freedom; for the French, the cry was theirs, intent on not surrendering the land their fathers had conquered. Ionesco’s words are, of course, the same. The sense (the reading) is different.
It may be useful here to look at the practical side of this question of intellectual ownership, that is to say, at the notion of literary copyright. What it sets out to do is not protect the right of, say, Homer, to put himself forward as sole inventor of the expression “the wine-dark sea” but rather to regulate the exploitation of that expression by, say, Ezra Pound and the Greek Tourist Board. While Martial brags about his poems being read by even the centurions posted at the empire’s farthest borders, he also complains about publishers who sell those poems to those far-flung centurions without paying him, the author, for the privilege. It was in order to make sure that Martial got his sestertium that on 4 August 1789 the Revolutionary Assembly in Paris abolished all privileges of individuals, cities, provinces, and organizations and replaced them with the notion of rights. Authors as well as publishers, printers, and booksellers were granted particular rights regarding a text, and would from then on share in the profits of what the author had written, the publisher published, the printer printed, and the bookseller sold. Two essential points were made. The first, that “the work is deemed created, independently of its being rendered public, by the very fact of its having been conceived by the author, even if left unfinished.” The second, that “intellectual property is independent of the property of the material object itself.” That is to say, Rhinoceros belongs to Ionesco even before the first production, independent of the fact that Algerians and French may each have appropriated the play through their individual readings. The “value” of Rhinoceros belongs to Ionesco.