More Dalloway: Hermione Lee

The name was familiar, so I read around some of Lee's writing about Woolf:

I read some of the Vintage edition of 'Virginia Woolf' by Lee, and what stood out was the way that Woolf was represented not as a passive victim (as seems to be all too common) but someone who worked hard to accomplish what she did. It was very readable, actually, and Lee makes good use of Woolf's letters and other writing to construct a pretty solid picture of the person behind the writing.

I think what stood out most was the beginning of the book - not with "VW was born on this day," but "My God, how does one wirte a Biography?"

Week 16: Mrs Dalloway

So... first impressions:

Well, clearly it's the best example of the stream-of-conciousness narrative that I've seen, moving back and forth in time, and in and out of different characters' heads to construct a single (complete) image. Woolf seems to have a broader scope than Joyce did; not to say that one is better than the other, but I do appreciate Woolf's ducking and weaving around her characters.

The trouble I have is that picking up on one thing from the novel is like pulling threads - it's so well constructed, to put it clearly, that I feel uneasy picking on one thing and leaving the others. I mean - feminism, sexuality, madness, sexual/economic repression, colonialism, commercialism, medicine, politics - it's all there. Where to begin?

Well, to start with, as we did in class, I'll look at the video we saw. To be honest, I think too much of the class discussion we had was focussed on the treatments that the characters of the film/ video/ book received, and not enough on the book itself. Not that my comments were any different - I loved the book, with the fluid dipping in and out of different characters, and all I could think about was how jarring it felt to have the characters actually speaking out loud what I had always envisaged being purely in their heads - not even spoken sotte voce, but speaking clearly. But I digress, as I usually do.

Another digression: Vanessa Redgrave has become the quintessential Mrs Dalloway to me now. I think there was just something in her carriage that dovetailed perfectly with the character in the book, something wistful and forgetful and sad, but still endearing.

Case in point:

Update

Actually, it was in the same letter; I didn't recognise it because it wasn't in the Greek alphabet.

"Para thina poluphloisboio thalasses: the turn of the wave and the scutter of receding pebbles." It literally means "beside the loud-murmuring sea".

Here it is in Greek:

So Pound is quite right to say that his variation is totally different, and a different movement of the water. Don't know about the "inferior" bit, though.

Comparatively, what have others made of the same phrase?
Chapman's translation: "the sea-beat shore"
Dryden (in the unfinished Ilias): "along the hoarse-resounding shore"
Pope: "along the Shore"

Actually, Pope seems remarkably constrained, although he is big on capitalising Important Things.

NB - I didn't actually have to chase these translations down completely; they're from this review, from Signals, a (seemingly) short-lived poetry magazine.

On Andreas Divus and George Chapman.

Divus' Latin translations of Homer were also used by George Chapman in his English translations of the Iliad and Odyssey - so, did Chapman influence Pound? Or did he want to do a better job?

From Pound's letters, to W.H.D. Rouse, 30/12/9134:

Pound talks about people "whose interest I have aroused in the Odyssey and been unable to slake, as they are all too sensitive to read the tushery provided by "adorned" translations, though hey might stick a couple of pages of Pope and a dozen or so of Chapman."

So Pound thinks less of Pope's translations than he did of Chapman's, I gather.
In the same letter, he also discusses the difficulties of translation: "Can you augment it? Can you keep the drive of the narration and yet put back some of what you have skipped? What happens if you fgo through it again, making as straight a tale for adults?"
This is all pretty fascinating stuff. I love reading selected letters from writers, it gives such an insight. You also come across really well-known quotes from people, quotes you've read in lit crit, but never realised they could have been an off-the-cuff comment about a book from the same sentence as a joke, or something that was directed at a certain person. That's where wide reading on writers comes in so handy, you build up a picture of the writer's thought processes and general character (at least when writing to friends and acquaintances) - all this helps when you reread their works.

Update: I found another letter to W.H.D. Rouse from 1935 (6 June) that talks about Chapman: "the first essential is the narrative movement, forward, not blocking the road as Chapman does. Everything that stops the reader must go, be cut out. And then everything that holds the mind, long after the reading, i.e., as much as is humanly possible, must bee clamped back on the moving prose. It is enough to break six men's backs, and if you hadn't been there in a sailing boat, I shd. lie down and surrender..."

The letter also mentions Pound's reluctance to work with the Greek; as he says, he was "too god damn iggnurunt of Greek", and "when I do sink into the Greek, what I dig up is too concentrative; I don't see how to get the unity of the whole."

So Divus had the unity? Pound thought (in the same letter, again) that "neither Dante nor Homer had the kind of boring "unity" of surface that we take to be characteristic of Pope, Racine. Corneille.... A translation of the Odyssey seems to me so enormous an undertaking, and the requirements include all the possible masteries of English."

Great stuff. P. nevertheless did a pretty great job of translating part of the Odyssey for Canto 1... - He says "years' work to get that. Best I have been able to do is cross cut in "Mauberley", led up to:

"... imaginary
Audition of the phantasmal sea-urge..."

which is totally different. and a different movement of the water, and inferior."

Inferior? So which part of the Odyssey was he working with, there? And how the heck do I find it?

Notes on the Cantos, pt 4

Canto 2:

Equivalent poetic moment of metamorphosis [ cf Yeats at the top of the tower] - working up to an epiphany.

Start -> source (epic in modern-day).

Prophecy in the name of Helen/ Elenor - destroyer of ships/ cities.

Tyro - cd peacfeul sea/ Poseidon's rape of Tyro, after assuming the form of Enipeus.

Story behind the poem: The sailors abduct a young boy (actually Bacchus - Dionysus in godly disguise) to sell him as a slave. The ship is transformed to an extension of the god, the sailors to fish...
Going into reverie/ meditative mode...
Acoertes is released - warns Pentheus (who gets killed for interfering).

Notes on the Cantos, pt 3

Back to the Cantos:

1st Canto - written in Anglo-Saxon mode.

[Pound had a pagan, mystical sense in him... cf the spirit of the nymph in olives - wind and destruction. Evidence of the Gods moving through human existence.]

Pound's metaphor for the Gods = light. (replaces religion/ theology in much of his writing.)

2.) Burst through from the quotidian into the mystical (transcendence again) - metamorphosis. Luminosity - a testament to something else. [Daphne/ Laurel] -> cf Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Also, in Canto 2, the myth comes through again.

//Polyphony//

[1930s - his politics took a "right" turn, and made his way into his poems]
cf Yeats - the disconnect between politics/ morality// quality poetry? How do you reconcile this?

Canto 3 - pity/ usury (good and bad)

So, read the Cantos as Pound suggested you read Homer - Periplus/Periplum - the Odyssey was written as it would be revealed to a passing sailor.

Canto 1: First 8/9 lines: hints at the alliterative tradition of poems like Gawain & the Green Knight, Seafarer etc...
This, though, has a slight artificiality - must have 3 alliteratives in each line.

Read this with the Odyssey, Book 11 - the descent.

Analogy to chase down - looking through soapy water using a glass - to see to the bottom, see more. Barry talked about this, but I'm sure I've read it before as well, just not in connection to Pound, unless it was last year in English 319.

1535 - Andreas Divus - Pound's Latin translation of the Odyssey, the one he worked from. Interesting that he would have worked from this, rather than from the Greek... I want to find an English translation of Divus' Latin, to compare to Pound's Canto 1.

[digonos] - key in the Cantos = rebirth/ reincarnation/ retelling.
Mistranslating n error [digenes] = exalted/ worthy
Pound takes advantage of a mistranslation, a linguistic error.

End the first Canto with and evocation of the muses - willful obscurity -> make the reader chase it down. (Generated from the sources he was using.)

cf The Waste Land (TWL) - rubble with an intimation of a tradition in ruins/ setting of tone.
- a provocative ending, a difficult one. Invoking the tradition of a poem without closure.

Notes on the Cantos, pt 2

From a 1927 letter from Pound to his father about "the whole thing":

1.) Point/ Counterpoint of th subject in fugue (cf Bach - the "divine sewing machine")
- themes/motifs in variation - a complete set (in every possible key)
- the Cantos do echo from one to the other

Themes:
- a living man goes down into the world of the dead (Odysseus as prototype, but Homer was responding to an even older mythos - more ancient than poetry itself)
- the repeat in history - Pound as an ideas man: Rhyme is not just metrical, but echoes exist across the ages - repeats on themes/images - a rhyme. Therefore Pound jumps a lot in his Cantos. I can't help but feel that he jumps a little too much, though... Maybe I don't like reading poetry with a dictionary and an encyclopedia next to me all the time, but that's what I have to do with the Cantos.
After I've read a couple of Cantos like that, though, they are enjoyable to read "normally".
[Pound is jumping A -> B -> C -> F]

Rhyme has closure (harmony) - but the disharmony in 1/2 rhyme (cacophony) is a kind of closure, in a way. It makes a point, anyway...
Rhyme in history -> P moves from society to society, handles allusion between cultures - Chinese, classical myths, the whole lot. There are so many allusions to chase down, almost too many (where do you begin - or end?). So again, it seems like he is so much more well-read than other people. Apparently, though, he had a limited range of available texts.. I'd love to have lists of the libraries of some of the writers I study, partly out of interest, and partly as a starting-point for new research.

Notes on the Cantos, pt 1

The Cantos: Pound attempting to update Dantes (100 Cantos) - to stand as the major figure of his age. He wanted to write the "epic of his age". He's possibly the only one to be able to conceive of such a thing (and one of the few to be able to do it).

Pisan Cantos: "scents and images come to him on the air" - like Italian sausages, apparently. Little touches that can haunt the imagination.

All this despite the fact that he seems to think it was a "botched" job.

Arrogance/ contrition//over-reached -> he wanted to do more than was possible...

Basil Bunting: "On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos":

There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?
There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble! (130)

[Hugh Kenner: The Pound Era] - read for later

Pound started the project in 1904, but he wasn't "serious" about it until post WW1 - in the 1920s, he actually withdrew from his other projects (of which there were many). So he was rude about people who weren't sufficiently Modernist (of course), but he actually helped other.

See the Cantos as the logical outcome of Imagism - esp. the effect of juxtapositional montage: cf Whitman - it's a catalogue, a slideshow, not a movie. Pound generates an effect of movement - dynamic quality of cinema. (think: lights through a set of static images.)

So, the ideas of Vorticism are to be kept in mind when reading the Cantos, an "elephantine" poem that occupied the rest of Pound's life.

A note on translations, and an idea...

After the previous post:

That's not to say that I don't think it would be great fun to compare, say, three or four verse (and prose, assuming it was sparing) translations of the Descent segment, to see where different authors diverged.

And speaking of which, 'divergence' & 'descent' can mean different things, depending on what you're studying:

What might be an interesting thought (only because I studied too much comparative phylogeny in Genetics): to compare actual texts in a kind of evolutionary tree, with the "is descended from" lines instead mean "was influenced by"...
- For the first implmentation, you'd have to rely on actual evidence - to know that author X owned and had read book Y, etc...
[Admittedly, it doesn't require close reading, just knowledge about author's resources and source texts. I could be quite useful as a visual tool, a kind of "six degrees of separation" for authors.

I suppose you could do this with word choice in translations as well, but that would require a lot more assumptions about what individuals (long dead) were thinking, or what the words meant to them... Too many assumptions should be avoided.

I think that if I did this, I'd use the "Descent" segment of the Odyssey, just so I could use a snappy title using both the words 'divergence' and 'descent'. I'm sure there must be a culture somewhere in the world that thinks puns are the highest form of wit. Perhaps I've just written for too many Capping Shows, though.

Week 15: Pound's Cantos

Pound's most ambititious and ambiguous achievement; a close reading of Canots I & II as an introduction to the architechtonics of the greater whole. Necessary awareness: the descent into the underworld from Homer's Odyssey and the story of Daphne and Apollo from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

After reading the first two cantos without knowing much about the descent / Daphne & Apollo, I was pretty much lost and, to be honest, a little worried about understanding enough about what Pound was trying to get across to be able to comment on them at all. However, after some background reading, more things became clear, particularly the way Pound worked very closely with his translated text, and, I suppose, was working towards another verse translation of the descent.

Notes on the Descent (Book 11):

I was reading the Alexander Pope translation, which is very versified, almost to the point of losing the power of the text; I think it needs something more than a Victorian scrub-up to appeal to me. This is perhaps why I turned to Modernism, why William Carlos William's plans to strip the "dull patina" of language holds so much appeal: it's when writers "show", and don't "tell" that their writing becomes more real and insistent, rather than jarring on the nerves.

"Who is this Pope that I hear so much about?" said George II; "I cannot discover what is his merit. Why will not my subjects write in prose? I hear a great deal, too, of Shakespeare, but I cannot read him, he is such a bombast fellow."

From Alexander Pope's translation (summary): "Ulysses continues his narration. How he arrived at the land of the Cimmerians, and what ceremonies he performed to invoke the dead. The manner of his descent, and the apparition of the shades: his conversation with Elpenor, and with Tiresias, who informs him in a prophetic manner of his fortunes to come. He meets his mother Anticles, from whom he learns the state of his family. He sees the shades of the ancient heroines, afterwards of the heroes, and converses in particular with Agamemnon and Achilles. Ajax keeps at a sullen distance, and disdains to answer him. He then beholds Tityus, Tantalus, Sisyphus, Hercules; till he is deterred from further curiosity by the apparition of horrid spectres, and the cries of the wicked in torments."

The summary is probably about as much of Pope's translation as I can stand. Comparing the two verse translations in a small segment:

Pope:
“There in a lonely land, and gloomy cells,
The dusky nation of Cimmeria dwells;
The sun ne’er views the uncomfortable seats,
When radiant he advances, or retreats:
Unhappy race! whom endless night invades,
Clouds the dull air, and wraps them round in shades."

Pound:
"Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean,
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever with glitters of sun-rays
Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven
Swartest night stretched over wretched men there."

I don't have much to say about this, other than the fact that in getting away from the verse form to which Pope so rigidly adheres, Pound has freed the intent of the text itself. I also dislike exclamation points in poetry, for a reason that I haven't quite worked out yet... I think that maybe it comes across too much as an insistent syllable or word, something that's fine in a text like a hymn, a text in reverence of something Absolute, but otherwise? It's enough to make me look for a different translation.

Primium Mobile

The idea of the primium Mobile caught my mind in class, so I thought I'd chase it up...

From Sourcery Forge, a wiki-based and community-maintained encyclopedia of esoteric knowledge, and something of a play on Source Forge:
"Philosphic term. Latin for "First Mover".
Everything the happens appears to be caused by something, which was caused by something, which was caused by something.
But, unless the universe has existed forever, there must have been something which acted without first being acted. Possibly god. This is refered to in some discussions on philosophy as the Primium Mobile."

Apparently it's also represented by the Aces in a Tarot deck, meaning 'white', 'soul' and 'good', presumably among other things.

So, it's the act of creation, I suppose, but there's something mystical in there as well - cf Yeats' mystical leanings in his earlier days?

Manuscript info, links

A microfilm of the manuscript for the poem, along with others, is here. Unfortunately, there's no electronic version of it available yet, but maybe in a couple of years, depending on whether Google Print carries on with its efforts after the NYPL project. You'd think it would be easy enough to enable web access to these things, after it was scanned in...

Also, a pretty good review of 'W. B. YEATS: A Life: Volume II: The Arch-Poet, 1915–1939', by R. F. Foster is here. Entertaining, at the least. Published in the Hudson Review, which thoughtfully provides full-text versions of most of its contents. The review is nice, but the better parts are at the start, when the author, Brian Phillips, talks about the death and subsequent burials of Yeats.

The epitaph on his headstone? Just as in his death-anticipating poem “Under Ben Bulben”:

Under bare Ben Bulben’s head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid,
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago; a church stands near,
By the road an ancient Cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase,
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

Gustave Moreau's unicorns:




From a French site. Showing, I assume, a subtle kind of sexuality associated with the virgins who could tame unicorns. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure that it is all that subtle, but it's certainly romanticised.

More on "Meditations"

Written in the summer/autumn of 1922 while Yeats was staying at his Tower in Co. Galway during the Irish Civil War. The Anglo-Irish Treaty had recently been signed... cue bloody civil war... The outcome of the negotiations for the Anglo-Irish Treaty split the Irish into Free State and Republican parties.

Yeats was a private supporter of the Free State party, which saw the outcome of the Treaty as a means for establishing the Ireland that the revolutionaries dreamed of... The Republicans saw the Treaty as a betrayal of the fundamental basis for the revolution. While neither party was unjustified, the bloodshed that resulted was seen by Yeats as senseless violence, as he outlines in "Meditations".

But, it wasn't published until 1928.

C&P'd: "Meditations" is a series of poems dedicated to the consideration of the violence Yeats observed in Ireland as a whole. In the first poem "Ancestral Houses", Yeats describes the difference between the Ireland of the past and his contemporary Ireland. While the past had greatness that stemmed from the violence of rebellion, that greatness had a purpose. Later Irish violence, the violence of the Civil War, had no greatness; rather, it was full of "slippered Contemplation" which no longer had a cause to motivate its violence, but simply a "servile shape, at others' beck and call."

The idea of violence for the sake of violence - vilified by Yeats in "I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness." Templar knight Jacques Molay used as a metaphor for the situation in Ireland - the vengeance sought by those who saw Molay as a martyr was more devastating than simple revenge. Martyrdom created a compulsion for revenge that would be taken out on anyone seen as an "other" figure. Such was the case, as Yeats saw it, in Ireland. The martyrs of 1916 created something that even they would not have been able to control. Fundamentalism of this nature is so volatile that Irishmen were fighting Irishmen, and civil war would only devastate the original cause.

Week 14: Yeats' "Meditations in Time of Civil War"

A profound contemplation of his place in time and history.

Responses:
Reading through it and "The Tower" - I'm not sure what to think. I was just reading comments by Joyce about meeting Yeats, and deciding that Y was too old for Joyce to have a positive effect on him (and this is when Joyce was 19 and Yeats in his 30s, I think). So "Meditations", written when Yeats was in his 60s, came as a huge surprise to me. Very powerful, and somewhat shocking. But again with the ambiguity of ideas, the tension between action and thought...
Ideas about enduring (similarities with the idea of Y's tower as both a symbol of Irish imagination and a monument [perhaps to the same]).

I. Ancestral Houses:
- aristocratic, images of gracefullness (but a symbol of British presence, an earlier age).
- fountain imagery.
- fulfilment/ fullness of being.
- Homer, the father of poets.
- Pope Julius II and Michaelangelo, the urge to commemorate own life, own ego.
- degeneration of power, influence, fortune, impulse.

II. My House:
- Platonic creation = world of forms
- the Platonic hero at the top of a tower, rooted in the earth, but toiling towards the transcendent. (Tower as hero).
- Rhyme scheme - very tightly formed, finely crafted. ABCABCDEED. Intricate.

III. My Table:
- sword - beauty/deadly. Tradition...
- mutability of the moon, Platonic realm of enduring form. cf "Easter 1916"'s "stone" - enduring, not transitory.
- tradition of ancestral houses, sword as an emblem of that tradition.
- tension between mutability and permanence.
- "business" = 'busyness'. Quotidian. Everyday life.
- a celebration of the best that imagination can do.

IV. My Descendants:
- imagination as flower
- arrogance and humility - Y. knew his children didn't have his gift of the imagination.
- degeneration again - "natural declension of the soul"
- Tower images again = resonant. Y. as architect of the poetic paragraph.
- Ptolemaic emblem of the owl circling.
- "a girl's love" - Georgie Yeats
[The real tower is the poem, fashioned by the imagination.]

V. The Road at My Door:
- Republicans/ Free State
- light of the sun, not the moon. This is reality?
- moor-hen as a natural part of life, as Yeats is caught up in the vocation of being a poet.

VI. The Stare's Nest by my Window:
- "the empty house of the stare"

VII. I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness
- Y. at his best (or worst...).
- trying to get himself into a mood of reverie, to get an overwhelming epiphany. Of course, it fails. This is the key thing - the bathos.
- Gustave Moreau's unicorns
- "brazen hawks" - the mind seizes on the emblem.
- violence, but emblems out of his own mind, emblems with a permanence.
- Y must withdraw, leave the top of the tower, and pine, unable to transcend.
- partial revelation - frustration - he cannot achieve what he wants. brought back down to earth. He tries for the emotional, rhetorical epiphany, but it just doesn't work.



After the class (with class notes):
- The dilemma between contemplative and active lives [Scholar/Soldier]
- The image of old age as oppressive and scary as a tin can tied to a dog's tail, that the dog running away from the noise will run until it dies...
- Vocab = Wordsworth-esque (a conscious evocation of W e.g. the "humbler worm" - W in a bad moment)
- Likens himself to W, the gift of imagination decaying into senility, the years that bring the philosophical mind. A dread of ending up like W, but his imagination seemed to blossom when he was in his 60s: "Easter 1916" and the transition
- [Out of the quarrel with ourselves ... poetry"]
- "bit the muse go pack" - consolation of philosophy, "deal in abstract things" in his 60s, feeling his age.
- battlements - looking over his life and works

"The making of the soul" - preparation of life for death...

Ireland falling apart re: the union. Find out more about this.

Reconciling the gap between the mundane and the transcendental world.