Euripides knows the track record of Neoptolemus but he deliberately gives us another version, which shows him moved for a moment, like Alexander. Pity wells up in him and has to be suppressed. The coalition’s messenger, Talthybius, who goes further and weeps for the daughter of Hecuba, in a great descriptive speech tells how Polyxena requests that no one should restrain her and that she will die ‘free’. He describes her being lifted onto the tomb like a stage from which she makes her speech and then, of her own will, rips open her robe, baring her breast and throat to the executioner’s sword-thrust. Even the compulsively vicious Neoptolemus is impressed by the bravery of the victim’s performance and for an instant holds back his sword. But only for an instant. There are empathetic tears in the Greek coalition ranks and they throw tokens of regard on the body of the girl, though they’d roared assent at the decision to sacrifice an innocent. Behind it also lies Euripides’ questioning of the use of tears, and by implication of tragic drama itself, at a time when Athens was in the process of a bloody and ultimately self-destructive war. Or at any time since for that matter.
In my notebooks, where I glue pictures among the drafts of translations from the Greek tragedies I’ve done, I have a recurring image of an old woman appealing to the camera that has captured her agony or the heavens that ignore it, in front of the utter devastation that had been her home, or before her murdered dead. They are all different women from many places on earth, with the same gesture of disbelief, despair and denunciation. They are in Sarajevo, Kosovo, Grozny, Gaza, Ramallah, Tblisi, Baghdad, Falluja: women in robes and men in hard metal helmets, as in the Trojan War. Under them all, over the years, I have scribbled Hecuba. My notebooks are bursting with Hecubas. Hecuba walks out of Euripides from 2,500 years ago straight onto our daily front pages and into our nightly newscasts. She is never out of the news. To our shame she is news that stays news.
When Granville Barker took Gilbert Murray’s version of The Trojan Women to New York in May 1915 and played in the Adolph Lewisohn Stadium, an effort was made to persuade President Woodrow Wilson to write a special preface to the published text, but he replied that he must ‘detach himself from everything which seems to bear the character of an attempt to make opinion even in the interest of peace’. I wonder what President Bush would reply if the RSC asked him to write a preface to my version of Hecuba to coincide with its visit to the Kennedy Center in Washington. And would he weep for Vanessa Redgrave’s Hecuba if he could be somehow tricked into attending a performance?
At the end of the First World War, in 1919, Sybil Thorndike played Hecuba at the Old Vic, in order to raise funds for the newly founded League of Nations (Gilbert Murray was the chairman of the League of Nations Union). She tells of a tough cockney barrow-woman saying to her, ‘Well, dearie, we saw your play … and we all ’ad a good cry – you see, them Trojans was just like us, we’ve lost our boys in this war, ’aven’t we, so no wonder we was all cryin’ – that was a real play, that was, dearie.’ Sybil Thorndike remembers a later performance at the Alhambra Theatre in Leicester Square as the most moving she could ever remember: ‘All the misery and awfulness of the 1914 war was symbolised in that play, and we all felt here was the beginning of a new era of peace and brotherhood.’
Many had a good cry, but the League that Hecuba’s tragic fate raised funds for didn’t prevent the Second World War, and the four Doric columns used in this setting for the sufferings of Sybil Thorndike’s Hecuba were destroyed in a German bombing raid on the RADA theatre in the London Blitz. Nor did the UN, the institution that succeeded the League, manage to prevent the ‘coalition’ invading Iraq. We may still be weeping for Hecuba, but we allow our politicians to flood the streets of Iraq with more and more Hecubas in the name of freedom and democracy. The audience might weep for Hecuba in Washington when the tragedy plays there, but will they squirm with regret for Iraq, or the re-election of George Bush, or pause a moment before going for the gullet of Iran?
[Newcastle-upon-Tyne]
Even Now
* * *
2004
It’s almost fifty years since I came across Black Marigolds. From a much-frequented stall in Leeds Market, I picked up, for a pound, the wonderful Anthology of World Poetry, edited by Mark Van Doren (1929). Even now I always buy copies if I see them to give to others. Its over 1,200 pages include translations of poems from Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Egyptian, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Scandinavian, Russian, as well as English, Irish, American poems.
Among all these mostly unknown foreign treasures one discovery began to haunt me from the moment I first read it in the 1950s: Black Marigolds, a version of the Sanskrit Chaura-panchasika by Edward Powys Mathers. It seemed somewhere to chime with remembered complex childhood feelings of the pleasure of, say, biting into a beautiful apple in our bomb-shelter cellar as German bombers droned above; and then in the ’50s with the teenage apprehension of individual death at the same time as the unfathomable well of sensuality. The epigraph attributed to Azeddin El Mocadecci, which I am now inclined to believe is a brilliant invention of Mathers, stayed so vividly in my mind for forty years that when I was making a film about three women with Alzheimer’s and noticed that the floor of the psychiatric hospital was decorated with mosaics of black daisies and that all the women had photography of their by now forgotten weddings beside their hospital beds, remembering Mathers’s epigraph to Black Marigolds I called the film Black Daisies for the Bride. I was looking for a way to dramatise a mode of affirmation in women whose capacity for recall was gone, and who were prisoners of oblivion. The Even now of Black Marigolds became my talisman, for the dark affirmation in that film, and in my life.
Whenever I came across any book with the name of Edward Powys Mathers on the spine I bought it, and now have a good many, including a first edition of Black Marigolds (1919), though as they were mostly the sort of mildly erotic Eastern literature published ‘for subscribers’ or from publishers of fine books like the Golden Cockerel Press, they have never been easy to come by, and too expensive when they could be found. I wanted to know more about the poet/translator, but there were only the most tantalising clues, which seems appropriate enough for Edward Powys Mathers, who, as well as being a translator of Eastern poetry, had more fame and repute as Torquemada, the setter of crossword puzzles for the Observer. Torquemada is even now setting us puzzles. Some of his crosswords have clues which make up a poem that rhymes from clue to clue, and many of his ‘original’ poems are hidden behind cyphers. The autobiographical clues are as hard to solve as Torquemada’s. But his wife Rosamond, in a memoir prefaced to a collection of his best crossword puzzles, gives us a few facts.
Edward Powys Mathers was born in Forest Hill on 26 August 1892 and died on 3 February 1939. He was at Trinity College, Oxford, from 1910 to the outbreak of the First World War. Although everyone remembers him as suffering from an unspecified ‘illness’, he had himself finally accepted as a private in the 24th Middlesex Regiment, though he was after some months given his discharge. He seems, characteristically, to have been extremely quick and efficient at decoding cyphers, which earned the budding Torquemada, generally known to close friends as ‘Bill’, the nickname of ‘Willy the Cypher King’. At one of the camps where he was billeted as assistant to the medical officer (either Woldingham, Halton or Northampton), Cecil French, a fellow private with literary tastes, remembers that ‘Black Marigolds his first translation was in progress’. And Mathers himself tells us that ‘my rendering was finished in 1915, in two or three sessions on a box by the stove in hutments’. Since Mathers admits to having only ‘a very small smattering of Sanskrit’ and, indeed, that all his Eastern poetry was ‘translated at second-hand’, he probably had to make use of a previous translation of the Chaura-panchasika by Sir Edwin Arnold, who did know Sanskrit and published in 1896 the Sanskrit text and his verse rendition in his own handwriting with his watercolours of tropical flowers and Indian scenes. Mathers points out a
lmost in the same words as Arnold that each stanza in the original starts with adyapi, ‘a word of reminiscence’. Arnold writes that this repeated Sanskrit word gives to the stanzas ‘a melodious and ingenious monotony of fanciful passion’, and Mathers that it gives to the poem ‘a recurring monotone of retrospection, which I hope my unchanging Even now also suggests’. Arnold varies his response to the recurrent word, as in ‘I die, but I remember!’; ‘Dying I recall’; ‘I die, yet well I mind …’; ‘Ah, dying – dying – I remember’; ‘Yet I will die remembering’; and then finally in stanza 27 comes up with the phrase that Mathers lifted to make the heart of the captive condemned lover affirm his celebration in the shadow of death:
And, even now, when any dawn may bring
Such as shall slay me to the prison-gate …
It is also possible that he lifted the phrase ‘Even now’ from Arthur A. Macdonell’s A History of Sanskrit Literature (1900), which speaks of the fifty stanzas of the Chaurapanchasika ‘each beginning with the phrase “Even now I remember”’.
Whatever the source, EPM had the dramatic instinct to use the repeated ‘Even now’ with the effect of both passing bell and the beat of the condemned but affirmative and death-defying heart. In the pause before each second line comes in we hear the bell toll, which opens the condemned captive’s mind and heart to his sensual memories. They remain in the celebratory kaleidoscope in his soul until the last brilliant line, which is pure Mathers:
The heavy knife. As to a gala day.
The darkness and the colours make each other more profound. All the ‘Even now’s tolling with certain mortality nonetheless fill the heart so full of sensual recall that it goes out to execution with the gaiety of a gala.
The phrase ‘Even now’ reverberates beyond the poem to the time and place of its translation, affirming the sensual at the time of the 1914–18 war in the hutments of an army camp where we know Mathers composed it. ‘Even now’ asserts the sensual fullness of all the translations in this book which were done in the same period. Even now in times of darkness and extinction the passions of the heart and the pleasures of the sensual body have to be remembered. Even now the child slowly relishes his apple, with unfriendly Fokkers growling overhead. In a time of war the idea of death tomorrow for a young man of twenty-three, as Mathers was, would have been extremely common, though not for the offence of loving a Kashmiri princess. Bearing in mind that they were written in the First World War, they have something of the sensual tonic of the silk-clad odalisques of Matisse in the Second World War, and of my childhood apple!
Charles Tomlinson, in his Oxford Book of Verse in Translation, which surprisingly does not include Mathers, claims that Ezra Pound’s Cathay, with its Chinese poems of parting or frontier service, had an implicit link to the campaigns in France of the First World War and quotes Hugh Kenner as saying, ‘Cathay is largely a war-book.’ One can say something similar about Black Marigolds, in which Mathers’s ‘Even now’ allows us to hear the passing bells of the First World War tolling behind a passionate sensual recall. But to achieve that celebratory note it has to have an exotic location. It couldn’t come from the front, even though men under the shadow of death dreamed of their women at home. The darkness of the same shadow enhances the delicate sensualities of Coloured Stars, published in the same year as Black Marigolds, 1919, the title taken from a line in ‘Song’ (p. 29):
If our clear blue night full of white stars
Turned to a night of coloured stars
This poem, along with ‘English Girl’ (p. 40), the one poem by which Mathers is represented in W. B. Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), and ‘Being Together at Night’ (p. 34), is attributed by Mathers in his note to an American-born Chinese, a valet by profession. He names him as J. Wing (1870–1923) – ‘or Julius Wing as he hated to be called!’ E. Allen Ashwin, in a memoir prefixed to a collection of Torquemada’s puzzles, says that J. Wing and John Duncan, the ‘lowland Scot’ responsible for the Arabic poem ‘Climbing Up to You’ (p. 47), ‘represent one of their author’s most successful flights in imaginative fiction’. They are both without a doubt among EPM’s Pessoan personae.
He gives much longer sequences to both in later books, and much more elaborate and suspicious biography. J. Wing’s ‘The Green Paper Lanterns’ appears in Volume XI of The Eastern Anthology, and Mathers elaborates on his life: ‘He might have inherited a great charcuterie business’ but he became ‘a sort of chasseur at hotels in San Francisco and Saint Louis, and a gentleman’s gentleman in New York and Boston. Later he shook cocktails, and contributed verse in English to three or four American journals. As a valet he visited England, France, Spain and Italy. He perished of consumption in lodgings by the harbour at Vigo in 1925, just as the boat on which I had come to visit him was mooring under a green dawn cloudy with gulls.’ He claims to have spent six months in the island of Teneriffe with Wing in 1921. It is interesting to note that they were, supposedly, in Oratava, the place where Sir Edwin Arnold wrote his version of the Chaura-panchasika. Torquemada clues?
He tells us that in the poems of J. Wing, ‘opium and wine speak for themselves’. It seems that Mathers used both the translations of genuine poems from Eastern poets and those from the invented personae as a safer context for what are hinted at in the meagre reminiscences as ‘alcoholism’ and drug addiction and bisexuality, which Mathers needed to place in an exotic Eastern location to address. He certainly found the sexual reticence of the English poetic tradition frustrating, and he praises the Islamic poet who ‘takes his veneration and description from the navel to the knee without altering his key of worship. Few English poets have been able to do this.’ He complains in an essay on Arabic prose and verse that from Chaucer to the great Victorians, poets could not mention the female pudenda without waiting, as it were, for the laugh to follow. ‘Breasts they could manage and remain the devout lover; but the rest was a matter for mirth.’
Christopher Sandford, who took over the Golden Cockerel Press from Robert Gibbings in 1933, described EPM in a 1980 letter to Michael Dawson, another would-be solver of the puzzle of Mathers, as an ‘alcoholic’, ‘bearded, wide and squat’, but adds that he was the most benevolent man he’d ever met, though he implies that the beaming benevolence owed much to the amount he’d imbibed and the level of his inebriation. He also said that EPM was ‘very loving – maybe too loving – with women and men’, and describes how Mathers made a dead set at seducing him.
Just as in the invented poems of the Chinese American Julius Wing ‘opium and wine speak for themselves’, so in EPM’s short scenarios, what he calls ‘the squibs’ of Red Wise, on the life of the real Abu Nowas, with invented incidents and poems, there is much wine drinking and a chapter on experiments with chewing bhang that only a genuine devotee could imagine. There is one poem attributed to Abu Nowas in which the beauty of the whole world turns into wine and becomes quaffable:
If He made all beauty out of wine
He’d get no worship to compare with mine:
For, when my purse were flat and credit far,
I’d suck the golden nipple of a star
Or that blue grape He dangles up on high,
The infinite first vintage of the sky …
He further elaborates on John Duncan (1877–1919), the supposed author of ‘Climbing Up to You’ (p. 47), in the next book he published, The Garden of Bright Waters: One Hundred and Twenty Asiatic Love Poems (Oxford: Blackwell, 1920). He makes him a lowland Scot who lived in Edinburgh until he was between twenty and twenty-five and, after a disastrous love affair, left Scotland, and in two years was an established member of a small tribe of nomadic Arabs, travelling up and down the whole line of the south-west coast of the Persian Gulf with them. He married an Arab, and all his forty-odd poems are addressed to her. Like this one, ‘Sand’, with another metamorphosis of the world into first milk, then the always welcome wine!
The sand is like acres of wet milk
Poured o
ut under the moonlight;
It crawls up about your brown feet
Like wine trodden from white stars.
Once alerted to the pseudonymous personae, you begin to suspect them everywhere. In the twelve volumes of The Eastern Anthology, EPM claims as one of the real ‘discoveries’ of the whole series – which covers Cambodian, Japanese, Arabic, Bengali, Sanskrit, Chinese, Turkish poetry and stories, all translated from the French – a poem called ‘A Love Song’, where ‘there is a reaction under wine and a letting go … [where] the poet swings back to the old severe intricacies of versification and, with them, to the homosexual ideal’:
Surely the faces of women are pleasant, but the taste of cheeks that have been newly shaved is better.
This ‘discovery’ is attributed to a Turkish poet Jenab Shehabuddin. In his note EPM writes: ‘I have been able to find out no more about this very real poet than that he was born in 1870 and studied medicine and wrote much of his verse in Paris.’
‘He [EPM] had a scholar’s knowledge of French … but he was not a good linguist,’ wrote E. Allen Ashwin. Mathers’s sources for all the Eastern poems were collections in French translation. As, I think, a smokescreen for his own pseudonymous activities, he explains how he abandoned one already advertised part of The Eastern Anthology when he discovered that it was ‘a clever and entertaining French forgery’. I think if assiduous search were made in those French collections he cites, many other poems would be found to be by an EPM alias. Especially those for which he provides notes.
His wife Rosamond observes sadly that his health prevented his fulfilment as an author. ‘A melancholy and self-distrustful temperament undermined his faith in his conceptions before they had attained full maturity’, and ‘the pile of work brilliantly begun and laid aside mounted out of all proportion to that brought to completion’. But many, especially the translations represented here, were also brilliantly completed. It seems that translation and pseudonyms were safer for his depressed and diffident talent, though he qualifies his invented Abu Nowas poems in Red Wise by saying, ‘I have not forgotten that my hero was a lyric poet of the first excellence. We must suppose that the examples ascribed to him were each written on an “off day”.’
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 33