Horrible as harpies or beautiful as nymphs, all Sirens are distinguished by their song. In the last book of Plato’s Republic, eight Sirens sing each a different note that together constitute the Pythagorean harmony of the celestial spheres, dear to ancient astronomers until the time of Galileo. For Plato, the Sirens’ song is less a deadly temptation than a necessary device for the correct working of the heavens. On the Sirens’ song depends the balance of the universe itself.
But can we know the nature of such a song? According to Suetonius, the emperor Tiberius, whenever he met professors of Greek literature, enjoyed asking them three impossible questions of which the third was: “What song did the Sirens sing?” Fifteen centuries later, Sir Thomas Browne observed that, though puzzling, the question was “not beyond all conjecture.” Indeed.
Several characteristics of the song are known to us. The first is its danger, since in its very attraction it makes us forget the world and our responsibilities in it. The second is its revelatory nature, since it tells of what has taken place and of what will take place in the future, of what we already know and of what we cannot discern. Finally, it is a song that can be understood by all, whatever their tongue or birthplace, since almost all men travel the sea and anyone might encounter the fearful Sirens.
These features lead on to further questions. First: where exactly lies the danger of their song? In the melody or in the words? That is to say, in the sound or in the meaning? Second: if their song reveals all, do the Sirens know their own tragic destiny or, like self-reflecting Cassandras, are they alone insensible to their own prophesizing music? And third: what is this language deemed to be universal?
If we suppose with Plato that their song is composed not of words but of musical notes, something in those sounds suffices to lend them sense. Something that the Sirens’ voices transmit (and that cannot be reduced to pure rhythm or intelligence) calls on those who hear them like a rutting animal, emitting a sound untranslatable except as an echo of itself. The Church of the Middle Ages saw in the Sirens an allegory of the temptations that beset the soul in search of God, and in their voices the beastly noises that lure us away from the divine. But it is perhaps for that same reason that the sense of the Sirens’ song, unlike the sense of God’s will, is “not beyond all conjecture.” The problem, I believe, touches upon certain aspects of the essential conundrum of language.
The tongues developed in the Homeric and pre-Homeric world, under the influence of migrations and conquests, for the purpose of both commercial and artistic communication, were “translated” tongues. That is to say, tongues that for reasons of war or trade served to establish connections between Greeks and “barbarians,” between those who called themselves civilized and the others, the speakers of babble. The passage of one vocabulary to another, the translation (in physical terms) of one perception of meaning to another perception of that same meaning is one of the essential mysteries of the intellectual act. Because if a semantic communication, oral or written, colloquial or literary depends on the words that make it up and on the syntax that rules it, what is preserved when we exchange them for other words and another syntax? What remains when we replace the sound, structure, cultural bias, linguistic conventions? What do we translate when we speak to one another from tongue to tongue? Neither the endemic sense nor the sound but something else that survives the transformation of both, whatever remains when all is stripped away. I don’t know if this essence can be defined but perhaps, as an analogy, we might understand it as the Sirens’ song.
Of all its characteristics, the most powerful one is its divinatory nature. All great literature (all literature we call great) survives, more or less painfully, through its reincarnations, its translations, its readings and rereadings, transmitting a sort of knowledge or revelation that in turn expands and illuminates new intuitions and experiences in many of its readers. This creative quality, like the shamanic reading of tortoiseshells or tealeaves, allows us to understand, through the reading of fiction or poetry, something of our own mysterious selves. This procedure entails not just the comprehension of a shared vocabulary but the discernment, in a literary construction, of a newly created meaning. In such cases, it is the reader (not the author) who recomposes and deciphers the text, standing as it were on both sides of the page at once.
In the same section of the Republic in which the Sirens appear, Plato imagines that when the great dead heroes of antiquity were told to choose their future reincarnations, the soul of Odysseus, remembering how ambition had made him suffer in his previous life, chose the life of an ordinary citizen, a fate the other souls had disdainfully discarded. In that instant, Odysseus rejects the glory of Troy, the fame of inventor and strategist, the knowledge of the sea, the dialogue with his cherished dead, the love of princesses and witches, the crown of slayer of monsters, the role of honorable avenger, the reputation of faithful husband: all in exchange for a quiet, anonymous life. We may ask if such wisdom, surprising in a man who felt that the adventurous life was his destiny, was not given to him in the moment when, tied to the mast, he heard the Sirens’ song.
Tiresias had told him that after the last, mysterious voyage his death would be peaceful, “a gentle, painless death … borne down with the years in ripe old age / with all your people there in blessed peace around you.” Dante was unable to grant it to him, and neither did the generations of poets who each in his own way translated the Sirens’ song. Almost all, from Homer to Joyce and Derek Walcott, demanded that Odysseus/Ulysses be an adventurer. Only a few, Plato among them, intuited that Odysseus alone could change his given destiny after discovering his true self in the song he is made to hear. In the fourth century A.D., the rhetorician Libanius, friend of Julian the Apostate, argued in his Apology of Socrates that Homer had written the Odyssey in praise of the man who, like Socrates, wished to know himself.
Dante too recognized the necessary ambiguity of the Sirens’ song, which allows each listener to hear a different version. In the nineteenth canto of Purgatorio, Dante dreams a dream. He sees (in W. S. Merwin’s translation),
a stammering
woman, cross-eyed, and her feet were crooked, her hands mangled, and her color faded.
Dante looks at her, and his gaze renders her beautiful. The woman begins to sing, and her song dazzles the poet.
“I am,” she sang, “I am the sweet siren
who lures sailors astray out on the sea
so full of pleasure they are when they hear me.
I turned Ulysses from his wandering course
with my singing, and he leaves me seldom
who is at home with me, so wholly do I satisfy him.”
Suddenly, “a watchful and holy lady” appears beside them and calls upon Virgil to tell Dante who this apparition really is. Virgil grabs the Siren, tears open her dress, and reveals a pestilential belly whose stench wakes Dante from his dream.
The Siren (as conceived by the poet) is the creation of Dante’s erotic desire, a desire that transforms the image he looks on, exaggerating its features until it acquires a haunting but false beauty. The Siren, as Virgil attempts to show his charge, is not a true amorous vision but a reflection of his own perverted longing. The Siren and her song are projections of that which Dante hides from himself, a shadow of his own dark side, unspeakable and hallucinatory, the secret text that Dante’s dream conjures up and that his consciousness attempts to decipher. This is a possible interpretation of Dante’s Siren. But perhaps more can be read in her changing apparition.