by Alice Oswald
Strengthless expressionless
Asking only to be washed and burned
And his bones wrapped in soft cloths
And returned to the ground
Like leaves who could write a history of leaves
The wind blows their ghosts to the ground
And the spring breathes new leaf into the woods
Thousands of names thousands of leaves
When you remember them remember this
Dead bodies are their lineage
Which matter no more than the leaves
Like chaff flying everywhere at threshing time
The winnowers waft their fans and the wind does its work
And a goddess is there picking the grain from its husk
While a fine white dust covers everything
Like thousands of water birds mill and mass in the air
Great gatherings of geese and cranes and long-necked swans
Flaring and settling in those fields where the rain runs down
to the Cayster
Continually shuffling and lifting and loving the sound of their wings
They shriek as they land like a huge birdfair a valleyful of voices
Like wandering tribes of flies that gather in sheds
In shadowy spring when the milk splashes in the buckets
Like crickets leaning on their elbows in the hedges
Tiny dried up men speaking pure light
Like strobe-lit wasps
That have built their nest on a footpath
Never give up their hollow house
But hang about the walls
Worrying for their children
Like tribes of summer bees
Coming up from the underworld out of a crack in a rock
A billion factory women flying to their flower work
Being born and reborn and shimmering over fields
Like locusts lifted rippling over fields on fire
Fleeing to the river
A hanging banner of insects trying to outfly flame
They hide by drowning
Like restless wolves never run out of hunger
Can eat a whole stag
Can drink the whole surface off a pool
Lapping away its blackness with thin tongues
And belching it back as blood
And still go on killing and killing
With their stomachs rubbing their sides
Haunted by hunger
Like when water hits a rocky dam
Its long strong arms can’t break those stones
And all its pouring rush curls back on itself
And bleeds sideways into marshes
Like when god throws a star
And everyone looks up
To see that whip of sparks
And then it’s gone
Like when god throws a star
And everyone looks up
To see that whip of sparks
And then it’s gone
Afterword
I
Alice Oswald begins her luminous poem Memorial with two hundred names. As the work unfolds, these names follow their owners into the hullabaloo and upset of war. Each one comes with a nanosecond’s visibility, a camera flash of passionate lyric. For a brief moment – too soon to know them, but long enough to mourn them – we see these young men leaping, screaming, running forward into dust and confusion.
And as fast as they go by, with just that speed Oswald cuts their moment into a keen, contemporary freshness of language. Here for instance is Diomedes, dealing with corpses on the battlefield ‘Red faced, quietly like a butcher keeping up with his order’. Or Pandarus, furious with himself for being in the war at all. If he ever gets home, he thinks, to his wife and his ‘high-roofed house’, he ‘will smash this bow / and throw it with my own hands into the fire’.
Now more men, more moments. All are lit by Oswald’s signature alloy of diction, both hip and oracular. Soldier after soldier goes by. And however dismayed by their fate, every reader can relish the sheer verve of language that conveys it. In a few searing lines each name joins a young man, until all of them stand in front of us. Here’s Pylaemenes, whose ‘heart was made of coarse cloth’ and whose ‘manners were loose like old sacking’. And Iphidamus, a ‘big, ambitious boy’, so determined to fight that even on his wedding night his new bride thought ‘he seemed to be wearing armour’. And Echepolus who died ‘letting the darkness leak down over his eyes’.
All of them are moving in one direction. All the names, neatly cataloged in the first pages of this poem, are following their owners into oblivion. They will all die in front of us before the poem is over. And we shouldn’t be surprised. There can be no other ending. In fact, they have already died long ago. They have already been named by Homer in the Iliad. Now Alice Oswald names them again.
Memorial is built on Homer’s Iliad. It stands squarely on an epic foundation. The names are the same. Some of the actions are the same. The locations are identical. The similes are comparable. But why, the reader might ask, do these young men need to die again? Didn’t Homer already lay them down in his great text?
These questions, far from being unsettling, are exciting. As are the clues Oswald offers in her preface. Despite her strong background as a classicist and her plain love for Homer’s epic, she is candid about taking liberties. ‘My approach to translation,’ she writes, ‘is fairly irreverent. I work closely with the Greek, but instead of carrying the words over into English, I use them as openings through which to see what Homer was looking at.’
Oswald acknowledges the Iliad as debt and detour. ‘This is a translation of the Iliad’s atmosphere, not its story.’ She speaks of stripping away narrative, and this purposeful reductiveness clarifies our view. Through it we can look freshly, to paraphrase her, at what Homer was looking at. And what we see there is remarkable.
What we see above all is that the atmosphere of epic has no expiry date. The soldiers here are not ciphers any more than they are merely symbols in the Iliad. In fact, the opposite is true. They are the brothers, husbands, sons of every war. And as we put down Memorial we wonder whether we first met them in Homer’s epic or saw them on last night’s news bulletin.
II
Alice Oswald describes Memorial as an ‘excavation of the Iliad’. In her preface she places herself in the active role of oral inheritor, rather than the more passive one of translator. ‘I write through the Greek, not from it – aiming for translucence rather than translation,’ she states. ‘I think this method, as well as my reckless dismissal of seven-eighths of the poem, is compatible with the spirit of oral poetry, which was never stable but always adapting itself to a new audience, as if its language, unlike written language, was still alive and kicking.’
The spirit of oral poetry is everywhere in Memorial. In the catalogs, in the cadences, but especially in Oswald’s decision that her method should remove ‘narrative, as you might lift the roof off a church in order to remember what you’re worshipping’. After that, she writes, ‘What’s left is a bipolar poem made of similes and short biographies of soldiers’.
It is the similes juxtaposed to the biographies that make the reader part of the action. Oswald lays the lyric world beside violent death, like someone putting summer flowers in a coffin: a reminder of all that’s been lost. In one compelling passage, the death of a soldier, Scamandrius, is paired with a haunting simile of childhood. The graphic violence of his end – ‘One spear-thrust through the shoulders / And the point came out through the ribs’ – is framed by an animated sketch of a small, yearning child. The pairing is unforgettable.
Like when a mother is rushing
And a little girl clings to her clothes
Wants help wants arms
Won’t let her walk
Like staring up at that tower of adulthood
Wanting to be light again
Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted
And carried on a hip
&nb
sp; These similes also allow Oswald to use one of the most compelling strategies in this book. The biography of each dead and dying soldier is followed by a simile. The similes occur in short stanzas like the one above, mentioning woodlands, children, sunlight, locales. These in turn serve to widen the blunt record of death into the music of elegy. They help to get at that essence of epic on which Oswald is so obviously focused. But just as we take this in, just as we absorb the juxtaposition, the simile-stanza is repeated. In fact, every simile-stanza occurs twice, right through the poem. The effect is intense. The soldiers die in one paragraph, but the world they lose occurs in two. The repeated stanzas hold an acoustic mirror up to each other. The repetition builds throughout the poem into a sheer persuasion of sound. Look, it seems to say, the ruin and music of war are sensory, not logical. Here for instance is Phaestus from Tarne:
What happened to Phaestus
He came from Tarne where the soil is loose and crumbly
Like snow falling like snow
When the living winds shake the clouds into pieces
Like flutters of silence hurrying down
To put a stop to the earth at her leafwork
Like snow falling like snow
When the living winds shake the clouds into pieces
Like flutters of silence hurrying down
To put a stop to the earth at her leafwork.
This bold practice aligns Memorial even more with the old, sacred purpose of the oral tradition, which is nothing less than to be an understudy for human memory. It is this which makes Memorial – in Oswald’s eloquent phrase – ‘an oral cemetery’.
III
Of all the conversations that have sustained poetry in the last half century, few are as rich or exciting as the one about poetic translation. Memorial enters this conversation at a steep angle, sparking fresh insight and questions. We can see it evokes the Iliad. But what exactly does this evocation mean in our time and for it? How are we to read the relation between the two poems? Is Memorial a translation, an interpretation, or a restatement? A response? Certainly its originality suggests that it can’t be categorized.
The source is clear. The Iliad is the story of the Trojan War. Its composition has been located in the eighth century, although controversy about the date remains. In the narrative, the Greeks, or Achaeans, wage war against the city of Troy because one of its princes has stolen Helen, the wife of the Spartan king, Menelaus. The Iliad remains one of the most compelling works in the Western canon – a mysterious alchemy of a possibly historical war and fictional gods.
If the story of the Iliad is hard to extract from myth, its poet is even more shadowy. We have assumed him to be a single poet, but there is controversy about that, too. The few legends we have are unreliable. Some of them may have been smuggled out of folkloric texts that belong to Homer’s time but were probably the work of many poets. There is a reference to a blind Aeolian poet; there is a mention of Smyrna. But the connections are hard to prove. Across time, details have remained scarce and hard to come by. The truth is, Homer signals to us from a vast achievement, with no indulgence at all for our age of autobiography.
But one thing we do know; one thing we can hold on to. And it has everything to do with the relation between these two poems: the Iliad – at least in its original form –was recited or sung, not written. Scholars have long accepted that it is an oral composition, reaching down into the patterned words of a preliterate culture, dipping its similes and images into a deep well of musical and memorable speech.
The Greek poet Pindar, who lived a few hundred years after Homer’s time, referred to such a composition as a ‘rhapsode’ and its creator as ‘a rhapsodist’, although that term was not used in Homer’s time. There is even a hint that the rhapsodist held a wand in his hand as he began his recitation, just as the Anglo-Saxon scop recited Beowulf accompanied by a harp. In the same way, not so long ago, a traditional singer in the West of Ireland would have a man stand behind him as he sang unaccompanied, moving the singer’s arm to the beat of the song. Ancient methods of keeping time. Ancient ways of measuring the world.
The most important fact in all this, the one essential to understanding the relation between Memorial and the Iliad is in the nature of both poems: A written text is fixed. An oral composition is not. There is a splendid air of unfinished business about an oral poem. And until it was written down and standardized, it’s not unreasonable to imagine that the reciter of the Iliad might well have intervened in the poem, adding and embellishing. For the reader of a later age, living in an era of fixed text, there is something bright and moving in this image of the Iliad as a river, not an inland sea, flowing in and out of song, performance, memory, elegy and human interaction.
The best way of seeing Memorial, and its relationship to the Iliad, may be right here. As an evocation of a living, fluid tradition, an ardent remaking of a poem that was almost certainly hospitable to new makers in its origin. Seen this way, as an extension of rich and ancient improvisations, Memorial has a subtle and respectful relation to the Iliad, but by no means a submissive one.
Within that relation, the poem enacts the quality Oswald points to her in her preface. ‘Matthew Arnold (and almost everyone ever since),’ she says there, ‘has praised the Iliad for its “nobility”. But ancient critics praised its “enargeia”, which means something like “bright unbearable reality”. ’ It is this reality we track as readers of Memorial, as we note the names, unite them to their owners and join both to their similes. And as we follow them to the end, we can watch this reworking of an ancient epic unfold in front of us into one of the most tender-hearted and ambitious of contemporary poems.
Eavan Boland
Additional Praise for
MEMORIAL
“Graceful and elegiac.”
—New York Daily News
“Alice Oswald’s reckless new adaptation of The Iliad is a lyrical masterpiece of lamentation, a concentrated war poem of startling beauty and terrifying clarity. It leaves me shaken and speechless.”
—Edward Hirsch
“The most profound reimagining of Homer since Derek Walcott’s Omeros.”
—Peter Thonemann, Times Literary Supplement
“Beautiful, bleak. . . . Oswald has achieved a miraculous feat. She’s exposed a skeleton, but found something magnificently eerie and rich. She has truly made, to borrow a phrase from Stephen Spender, a ‘miniature Iliad,’ taut, fluid and graceful, its tones knelling like bells into the clear air, ringing out in remembrance of all the untimely dead.”
—Telegraph
“Precise and scalpel-sharp. . . . The words are Homer’s, but refracted through her own lucent poetic imagination. . . . But it is also an exquisite and brutal thing taken entirely on its own terms. It’s a major achievement.”
—Guardian
“The measure of Oswald’s poetry is that, in the dignity it affords the war dead, and in the shimmering potency of its imagery and its similes, her verse does approximate to the Homeric. And it is still hard, almost 3,000 years after Homer wrote his Iliad, to think of a higher term of praise.”
—New Statesman
“Alice Oswald doesn’t so much revise as explode the tradition of translation. Her sawn-off, scrambled take on Homer’s epic of the Trojan War smashes it into poetic fragments that resonate with the clash of arms and the crackle of funeral pyres. Hypnotic imagery and eerie repetitions set the pity and terror of bloody battle against the power of language to commemorate the fallen. Oswald’s radiant poetry of remembrance will not be readily forgotten.”
—Independent
“Takes off from The Iliad to find a brilliance and resonance all its own.”
—Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year
“An uncompromising rewriting of The Iliad, stripping away its epic narrative to foreground its fallen foot-soldiers.”
—Times Book of the Year
Copyright © 2011 Alice Oswald
Afterword copyright © 2012 by Eavan
Boland
First American Edition 2012
First published in 2011 in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Limited
under the title Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad
All rights reserved
First published as a Norton paperback 2013
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Oswald, Alice, 1966–
Memorial : a version of Homer’s Iliad / Alice Oswald ; with an afterword by Eavan Boland. — 1st American ed.
p. cm.
“First published in 2011 in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Limited
under the title MEMORIAL: An Excavation of the Iliad”—T.p. verso.
ISBN 978-0-393-08867-0 (hardcover)
1. Homer. Iliad—Poetry. 2. Achilles (Greek mythology)—Poetry.
3. Trojan War—Poetry. I. Title.
PR6065.S98M46 2012
821’.914—dc23
2012022791
ISBN 978-0-393-34727-2 pbk.
eISBN: 978-0-393-08981-3
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