After Odysseus recounts to Naussica’s father King Alcinous how the crow-queen Circe, “dread goddess of human speech,” exhorted him to leave her isle of Aeaea — palindromal in English and near so (Aiaien) in Greek — to visit Theben Tiresias in hell to receive wisdom, Odysseus goes on to explain at the opening of book “Lambda” (that is, Book XI):
[“But when we had come down to the ship and to the sea, first of all we drew the ship down to the bright sea, and set the mast and the sail in the black ship, and took the sheep and put them aboard, and ourselves embarked, sorrowing, and shedding big tears,” in A. T. Murray’s translation.]
In 1900, Samuel Butler rendered this, “When we had got down to the seashore we drew our ship into the water and got her mast and sails into her; we also put the sheep on board and took our places, weeping and in great distress of mind…” three years after he published The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), a book that influenced Joyce, and that Pound was likely familiar with. The opening of “Lambda” (often called The Book of the Dead) gives rise to two modernist traditions. For at the beginning of “Lambda” ’s second verse paragraph, Odysseus tells how soon his ship
[“… came to the deep-flowing Oceanus, that bounds the Earth, where is the land and city of the Cimmerians, wrapped in mist and cloud…”—Murray.]
The story is well known how in 1906 (or ’08, or ’10), Ezra Pound, browsing through the book stalls along the Seine’s quay, purchased in an octavo volume Andreas Divus Justinopolitano’s “ad verbum translata”—word for word translation — of The Odyssey, published in Paris in 1538, as part of the rebirth of interest in classical learning that gave the Renaissance its name.
Likely following notions that went back at least to those F. A. Woolf had put forward in 1795 (Prolegomena ad Homerum), Pound saw “Homer” as an amalgam of tales from different times, cobbled together more or less elegantly, more or less invisibly, somewhere before the classical age. Among that varied material, Pound was fairly sure that “Lambda,” with its account of the calling up the dead, who come to drink the blood of the sacrifice — Elpinor, Anticleia, Tiresias, and high born Tyro — before speaking, followed by the parade of ghostly queens — Antiope, Alcmene, Megare, Jocasta, Chloris, Lede, Iphimedeia, Phaedra, Procris, Ariadne, Maera, Clymene, and Eriphyle… — represented the oldest material in The Odyssey. Using a set of principles for translation that sound like nothing so much as those Nabokov formulated to bring off his Onegin, certainly Divus had translated the opening more literally than most:
Where the Greek begins “Autar epei…” (literally “But then,” instead of the “But when…” that A. T. Murray settled on for the 1919 standard Loeb translation [quoted below the Greek], or the “At length we were at the shore…” that T. E. Lawrence gives us in his 1935 translation), Divus wrote “Ad postquam…”—literally “But after-that…” The problem with the English is that “Autar” is not just any old “But.” For that, the Greeks used “alla.” Rather it is an emphatic “but”—a bit more like “but also.” Also, it has a bit of the thrust of the Italian “pertanto” (literally “but-so-much,” which usually comes out in English as “But of course”). This accounts for the “But’s,” the “At long last’s,” and the “Finally’s” various translators have used to commence this passage.
Nevertheless, Pound was intrigued by the notion that what he took to be the most ancient poetic material in the poem (and thus some of the most ancient literary material in the West) began with a connective — and an emphatic connective at that — which might well be taken as joining it to prior material even older still, though now lost.
This, at any rate, was the spirit in which Pound began his own great serial composition poem, The Cantos, with his own translation of Divus’s translation of Homer’s account of Odysseus’s trip to northern Cimmeria, where gaped the gate of helclass="underline"
But T. E. Lawrence had a different and deprecating view of “Lambda”: “Book XI, the Underworld, verges toward ‘terribilitá’—yet runs instead to the seed of pathos, that feeblest mode of writing. The author misses his every chance of greatness, as must all his faithful translators.” Yet Lawrence’s Homer is one that most of us, scholar or general reader, probably have a bit of trouble recognizing, at least in some of its aspects: “a bookworm, no longer young, living far from home, a mainlander, city-bred and domestic. Married but not exclusively, a dog-lover, often hungry and thirsty, dark-haired. Fond of poetry, a great if uncritical reader of The Iliad, with limited sensuous range but an exact eyesight which gave him all his pictures. A lover of old bric-a-brac, though as muddled an antiquary as Walter Scott… He is all adrift when it comes to fighting and had not seen deaths in battle.” El ’Awrence had, of course, both seen and dealt out many.
But it’s probable that a young rural Texan, reading in The Odyssey as a teenager, sometime during the mid-twenties, had very much the same feelings about “Lambda” that Pound had picked up; for it was frozen, ice-and fog-bound Cimmeria that young Robert E. Howard, in the tiny town of Cross Plains, Texas, chose to make the home of his barbarian hero, Conan — who through his adventures is tormented by various and sundry supernatural escapees from just those gaping gates near Conan’s place of birth.
And the same emphatic copula which, for Pound, connected The Cantos to something even more primal and proto- than the oldest poetic stuff of the Greeks, still, today, provides the various practitioners of the genre Howard initiated, “sword and sorcery” (Fritz Leiber’s term for it), with a connection between the prehistoric and history itself.
43. The discursive model through which we perceive the characteristic works of High Modernism — from The Waste Land and Ulysses to The Cantos and Zukofsky’s “A” and H. D.’s Helen in Egypt, from David Jones’s In Parentheses and The Anathēmata to Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems and Robert Duncan’s The Structure of Rime and Passages — is that of a foreground work of more or less surface incoherence — narrative, rhetorical, and thematic — behind which stands a huge, and hugely unified, background armamentarium of esoteric historical and esthetic knowledge, which the text connects with through a series of allusions and relations that organize that armamentarium as well as give it its unity.