τὸ μὴ βεβαίως βλέφαρα συμβαλεῖν ὕπνῳ.
(Agamemnon, 15)
(Transliteration: to mē bebaiōs blephara sumbalein hupnōi.)
πῶς φής; πέφευγε τοὔπος ἐξ ἀπιστίας.
(Agamemnon, 268)
(Transliteration: pōs phēs? pepheuge toupos ex apistias.)
And Agamemnon’s contemptuous reference to the ashes of Troy, with his contempt for the effeminate sighing smoke carried by repeated ‘p’s:
σποδὸς προπέμπει πίονας πλούτου πνοάς.
(Agamemnon, 820)
(Transliteration: spodos propempei pionas ploutou pnoas.)
This appears in my version as:
the ashes of surfeited Asia still sighing
the sickly cachou breath of soft living and riches.
στείχει γυναικῶν φάρεσιν μελαγχίμοις
πρέπουσα; ποίᾳ ξυμφορᾷ προσεικάσω;
(Choephori, 11–12)
(Transliteration: steichei gunaikōn pharesin melagchimois prepousa? poai xumphorai proseikasō?)
πρὸς ἔρυμα τόδε κακῶν, κεδνῶν τ᾽
ἀπότροπον ἄγος ἀπεύχετον.
(Choephori, 154–5)
(Transliteration: pros eruma tode kakōn, kednōn t’ apotropon agos apeucheton.
Prose translation: ‘for this protection against evil, this talisman to repel loathsome pollution’.)
θεῶν τις οὐδ᾽ ἄνθρωπος οὐδὲ θήρ ποτε.
(Eumenides, 70)
(Transliteration: theōn tis oud’ anthrōpos oude thēr pote. Prose translation: ‘not one of the gods, nor a human nor an animal ever …’)
Or over several lines binding the grief of Electra in strangled knots:
δμωαὶ γυναῖκες, δωμάτων εὐθήμονες,
ἐπεὶ πάρεστε τῆσδε προστροπῆς ἐμοὶ
πομποί, γένεσθε τῶνδε σύμβουλοι πέρι:
τί φῶ χέουσα τάσδε κηδείους χοάς;
πῶς εὔφρον᾽ εἴπω, πῶς κατεύξομαι πατρί;
πότερα λέγουσα παρὰ φίλης φίλῳ φέρειν
(Choephori, 84–9)
(Transliteration: dmōai gunaikes, dōmatōn euthēmones,
epei pareste tēsde prostropēs emoi
pompoi, genesthe tōnde sumbouloi peri.
ti phō cheousa tasde kēdeious chaos?
pōs euphron’ eipō, pōs kateuxomai patri?
potera legousa para philēs philōi pherein?
Prose translation: ‘Slave women, you keep good order in our house, since you are present here as my escorts at my ritual of supplication, please advise me about this matter: what should I say as I pour these funeral offerings? How shall I speak graciously, how shall I entreat my father? Shall I say that I’m bringing these offerings to a beloved husband from his loving wife?’)
That ruggedness, that weight, that craggy mass of the verse which Dionysius of Halicarnassus likened to those vast piles of Cyclopean masonry we associate with the citadel of Mycenae, and which John Cowper Powys called ‘megalithic’, was certainly given, intermittently, an English counterpart in Browning, who, in a letter written in 1876, a year before his Agamemnon, proposes publishing it along with photographs of Schliemann’s recent excavations at Mycenae in 1874, where the notorious fantasist gazed on the face of a wizened anonymous mummy and called it Agamemnon.
His mistake, I always felt, even long before I undertook the Oresteia trilogy myself, was to dam the natural flow and current of English syntax and word order, which would have the necessary strength and clarity to move the boulders of massed meaning and craggy lexical invention, so that the dramatic momentum was remorselessly maintained, for in the unstoppable ongoing momentum, the forward drive, the inevitability of rhythmical progression lies as much in the meaning, especially of the Oresteia, as in any local crux deemed to deserve infinite glossing in any apparatus criticus. No one had programmes or copies of the libretto to consult at the performance of the Oresteia in 458 BC. There was no ‘rewind’ mode in the inexorable one-off of Athenian performance. Meaning was delivered moment by moment. ‘No Attic dramatist’, writes Bernard Knox in the New York Review of Books, ‘could afford to leave his audience puzzled.’
A style that deliberately compels re-reading is not one that will communicate on one hearing. Weightiness in verse was a Victorian preoccupation, except, perhaps, in Swinburne, who recklessly jettisons poetic cargo to swing along with untrammelled momentum. But in Browning, though the vessel groans, it carries valuable cargo, not ballast.
On my way back from Prague in May 1976, after researching the geographical and economic background for Karel Sabina’s scenario for Smetana’s The Bartered Bride in Bohemia, I took the train to Vienna and saw the Ronconi production of the Oresteia at the Burgtheater, a building presided over by an Apollo with his lyre, and directly opposite the parliament building presided over by a giant statue of Athena. I would use a projected slide of the Burgtheater Apollo in a sequence of the dictator deity on almost all the opera houses and national theatres in Europe. I filed all this away for future use in Trackers, and though I took notes on my reactions to Ronconi’s production, I remember sitting after the show in the Café Landtmann looking at my Greek text covered with notes in different colours, but primarily I recall still hearing in my head what was a Germanic echo of my text in its stocky compounds like Blut-Klumpfen and Mutterblut. Hearing such as these, which are as natural to modern German as they were in the Old English of my models, I went back to Britain confirmed in my choices. And I delivered the first draft of Agamemnon on 27 July 1976, almost exactly a century after Robert Browning’s.
III
Some, including the Greek scholar W. B. Stanford, see in another Victorian poet Francis Thompson’s poem ‘The Hound of Heaven’ ‘one of the most Aeschylean in English’. Thompson’s favourite poets were Aeschylus and Blake, and he carried the Athenian tragedian in one pocket and the English visionary in the other when he left Preston, Lancs., for London and lived as a destitute match-seller round Charing Cross. Certainly some of his lines could be said to be inspired either by Aeschylus or, for hostile critics, by the addict poet’s ‘morphomania’, which finally helped to kill him. Professor Stanford’s citation is from ‘The Hound of Heaven’:
To all swift things for swiftness did I sue;
Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.
But whether they swept, smoothly fleet,
The long savannahs of the blue;
Or whether Thunder-driven,
They clanged his chariot ’thwart a heaven
Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o’ their feet …
And characteristic of Aeschylus is this synaesthetic image:
The long laburnum drips
Its honey of wild flame, its jocund spilth of fire.
‘Its jocund spilth of fire’ is on the way to being authentically ‘Aeschylean’, though I find his poem ‘A Corymbus for Autumn’ more like Aeschylus, even if it is only because its surface paganism throws off Thompson’s encrustations of Catholic guilt:
Hearken my chant, ’tis
As a Bacchante’s,
A grape-spurt, a vine-splash, a tossed tree, flown vaunt ’tis!
Suffer my singing
Gipsy of Seasons ere thou go winging;
Ere Winter throws
His slaking snows
In thy feasting-flagon’s impurpurate glows!
Tanned maiden! with cheeks like apples-russet,
And breast a brown agaric faint-flushing at tip,
And a mouth too red for the moon to buss it
But her cheek unvow its vestalship;
Thy mists enclip
Her steel-clear circuit illuminous,
Until it crus
t
Rubiginous
With the glorious gules of a glowing rust.
None of this is anything like as grounded as Aeschylus or even Browning, or, as in another style contemporary with Browning’s which achieved both the weight and the momentum I was searching for in my own Oresteia drafts, that of Gerard Manley Hopkins, also a Professor of Greek, who achieves both the sweep and grandeur I have always found in Aeschylus, and which Hopkins called his ‘swell and pomp’, as in these lines, for example:
Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind swivelled snow
Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deep.
‘Does this not read like an inspired translation of some unknown fragment of Aeschylus?’ asks D. S. Carne-Ross. Indeed it does, an inspired Victorian translation, and I had always felt that Hopkins, with his clotted but never clogged or cumbersome line, and his thorough knowledge of Greek, had everything necessary to render a great translation of Aeschylus, except, perhaps, like most of his contemporaries, a feeling for theatre; and if a translation is not an acting translation, and cannot be played, it seems to me to fall far short of being a translation of Aeschylus at all. If one turns, however, to an actual, though admittedly extremely youthful, piece of Aeschylean translation from Hopkins (in this case Prometheus Bound), the cumulative vehemence of Hopkins’s own alliteratively forged verse, with its anglicised versions of Welsh metrical effects from cynghanedd, becomes indistinguishable from the lines any Victorian gentleman might have turned out in response to the Greek:
Sith I loved and lov’d too well
The race of man; and hence I fell.
Woe is me, what do I hear?
Fledgèd things do rustle near.
Very disappointing stuff from the poet who could come up with English lines like:
The sour scythe cringe and the blear share come,
or as Aeschylean a sequence of lines as the following:
O then weary then why should we tread? O why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered?
or the packed line from ‘Spelt from the Sibyl’s Leaves’:
Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe-and-shelterless, thoughts against thoughts in groans grind.
or could himself write a Greek verse with qualities quite recognisably Aeschylean:
στροφή
λόγος Ὀρφέως λύραν καὶ δένδρεσιν
καὶ νεφοκτύπων ὄρεων κορυφαῖσιν θαμὰ, δαμείσας πόθῷ,
κελαδοῦντι δ’ εὐθύς ἀνθῆσαι ῥοδοισίν θ’ ἁλίου τε γᾶν καὶ
ψακάδος οὐρανιοῦ βλαστήμσιν καλλικάρποις
ἀντιστροφή
χιόνος κρύος μεσούσας. πόντιον δὲ κῦμα
τῶν τ’ ἐριβρόμιον ἀίοντ’ ἀνέμων πνεύματα γαλάνᾳ πέσεν.
κιθάρᾳ δὲ ταῖς τε Μούσαις ὡς ἔνεστ’ εἰπεῖν τὸ παυσίλυπον
ἀδύνατον: κατεκοίμασ’ αὐτίκα πάντα λάθα.
which is a version in Greek of the song from Act III, scene i of King Henry VIII:
Orpheus with his lute made trees
And the mountain tops that freeze,
Bow themselves when he did sing:
To his music plants and flowers
Ever sprung; as sun and showers
There had made a lasting spring.
Everything that heard him play
Even the billows of the sea,
Hung their heads and then lay by.
In sweet music is such art.
Killing care and grief of heart
Fall asleep, or hearing, die.
Hopkins also manages to make another light Shakespearean air gravid with compounds we might also find in Aeschylus, ‘Tell me where is Fancy bred’ (Merchant of Venice, III, ii). What Hopkins is doing in these Greek versions of Shakespearean songs is making them weightier, making them dance, but dance in Greek clogs rather than ballet slippers. It is somehow the opposite of what Gilbert Murray does to Aeschylus. He relieves him of the heavyish clogs in which he is brilliantly agile and gives him the comfort of slippers in which, paradoxically, he feels awkward and gauche. It’s not the light fantastic the translation needs to trip but the gravidly grounded. Browning and Hopkins give a modern poet some feeling for what Aeschylus might sound like in English, and certainly give more clues than the melodiously Swinburnian versions of a scholar like Gilbert Murray. Louis MacNeice, while translating the Agamemnon, wrote in The Spectator (1935) that ‘a touch of Gerard Manley Hopkins might have helped Professor Murray’. He gives an example:
Thus if for
‘Hark! in the gates the bronzen targes groan’
we substitute
‘Hark! in the gates the bronze shields groan’
we improve both rhythm and diction and so make the whole more real.
Murray’s verse always comes too trippingly off the tongue and the need to keep metrically light-footed makes him opt for what is, even for his own time, a dated poetic diction. Murray nevertheless, in his use of pronounced rhythms, rhymes and energetic, if balletic, metric, at least gives us an inkling of the momentum I find essential to deliver the dramatic meaning, though much valuable consonantal cargo is thrown overboard to lighten and streamline the skiff. His versions have more feeling for the pace of the drama, even when wallowing in ‘melody’ and religiose musicality, than Browning.
When I began work on my version for the National Theatre in 1973, I had in mind two basic things: weight and mass on the one hand, and rhythmical energy on the other; the weight never quite so ponderous that the rhythm became clogged or ground to a halt, nor the rhythm so jaunty that the words escaped on the wing. In addition to this, when we take into account at an early stage the masked nature of these plays, which so many scholars, it seems to me, treat only as a by-the-way, a masked nature which makes speeches one block of solid colour rather than the lurches and subtextual twists we associate with Stanislavskian readings of more modern texts, or intimate screen acting, the sense of necessary weight and momentum is linked to a world of primary emotional colours which complicate their palate by accretion and cumulative effects rather than by a prismatic surface.
The early emphasis I’d placed on consonants rather than vowels made me keen to use the kind of actors I’d been working with in The Passion – the first part of The Mysteries, an adaptation of the northern, heavily alliterative mystery play cycles which came to complete epic fruition at the National in 1985. The work on this northern classic often betrayed by churchified gentility was also a deliberate reclamation for northern voices, part of my long, slow-burning revenge on the teacher who taught me English at Leeds Grammar School and wouldn’t let me read poetry aloud because of my ‘common’ south Leeds accent. It was an accent that honours consonants and shortens vowels, ideal for the poetry of The Mysteries, written for earlier versions of that accent and, tentatively at this stage, right for the style I was looking for in the Oresteia. So the actors I eventually kept trying to insist on were those with accents somewhat like my own, with short vowels and a sensuous consonantal quality in their speech. Something also of the style of the medieval plays, written like Greek drama for the open air, influenced my early use of alliteration, which sends dramatic speech like a speeding arrow across large stage spaces, or across the Corpus Christi Day hubbub of crowded medieval streets. Very early in our workshop experiments the instinct for the northern alliterative style seemed to be right in one important and extremely practical respect: the clarity of language in masks depended more on the consonants than on the vowels, and when vowels were lengthened it caused a vibration in the masks that fogged the language and seriously disturbed the actors’ concentration.
The concern for consonantal mass led me to alliteration with its repeated consonants
, and its aid to al fresco clarity. This concern led me to invent a ghostly alliterative metre that owed something to the earliest metrics of northern poetry, and something to the earliest and most democratic drama in English. The echo of Beowulf seemed appropriate enough when we think of the plays of Aeschylus being described as ‘slices from the banquet of Homer’ and of the parallels often drawn between the heroic world of the Iliad and Odyssey and Beowulf, as in, for example, J. Wight Duff, Homer and Beowulf: A Literary Parallel (London: Viking Club, 1906). W. P. Ker, in his Epic and Romance, says of the epic clan life of early Britain: ‘there is no question that the life depicted has many things in common with Homeric life’; and ‘how much the matter of the Northern heroic literature resembles the Homeric, may be felt and recognised at every turn …’ Everywhere Ker finds ‘the affinities and correspondences between the Homeric and the Northern heroic world’, and describes Beowulf as a ‘Northern Odyssey’. You can see the translator C. D. Locock in the 1920s making similar connections when he not only offers thirty-two passages from both the Iliad and the Odyssey, but also Fritiof’s Saga, a nineteenth-century romantic recasting of the Norse saga Fritiof the Bold, by the Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér (1782–1846), who was also a Professor of Greek at Lund University.
What I felt emerging as we experimented was a language that suited the full classical mask, that had an echo of our own ‘heroic’ clan world and the northern energy of our earliest drama, but that would give me the resources I also needed as a modern poet.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 28