Part 20

So clear the flare That first lit me To seize Her whom my soul believes; If cad Sneaks, Blabs, slanders, my joy Counts little fee Baits And their hates. I scorn their perk And preen, at ease. Disburse Can she, and wake Such firm delights, that I Am hers, froth, lees Bigod! from toe to earring.

III

Amor, look yare! Know certainly The keys: How she thy suit receives; Nor add Piques, 'Twere folly to annoy. I'm true, so dree Fates; No debates Shake me, nor jerk. My verities Turn terse, And yet I ache; Her lips, not snows that fly Have potencies To slake, to cool my searing.

IV

Behold my prayer, (Or company Of these) Seeks whom such height achieves; Well clad Seeks Her, and would not cloy. Heart apertly States Thought. Hope waits 'Gainst death to irk: False brevities And worse! To her I raik.[5] Sole her; all others' dry Felicities I count not worth the leering.

V

Ah, visage, where Each quality But frees One pride-shaft more, that cleaves Me; mad frieks (O' thy beck) destroy, And mockery Baits Me, and rates. Yet I not shirk Thy velleities, Averse Me not, nor slake Desire. God draws not nigh To Dome,[6] with pleas Wherein's so little veering.

VI

Now chant prepare, And melody To please The king, who'll judge thy sheaves. Worth, sad, Sneaks Here; double employ Hath there. Get thee Plates Full, and cates, Gifts, go! Nor lurk Here till decrees Reverse, And ring thou take. Straight t' Arago I'd ply Cross the wide seas But "Rome" disturbs my hearing.

_Coda._

At midnight mirk, In secrecies I nurse My served make[7] In heart; nor try My melodies At other's door nor mearing.[8]

The eleventh canzo is mainly interesting for the opening bass onomatopœia of the wind rowting in the autumn branches. Arnaut may have caught his alliteration from the joglar engles, a possible hrimm-hramm-hruffer, though the device dates at least from Naevius.

En breu brisaral temps braus, Eill bisa busina els brancs Qui s'entreseignon trastuich De sobreclaus rams de fuoilla; Car noi chanta auzels ni piula M' enseign' Amors qu'ieu fassa adonc Chan que non er segons ni tertz Ans prims d'afrancar cor agre.

The rhythm is too tricky to be caught at the first reading, or even at the fifth reading; there is only part of it in my copy.

Briefly bursteth season brisk, Blasty north breeze racketh branch, Branches rasp each branch on each Tearing twig and tearing leafage, Chirms now no bird nor cries querulous; So Love demands I make outright A song that no song shall surpass For freeing the heart of sorrow.

Love is glory's garden close, And is a pool of prowess staunch Whence get ye many a goodly fruit If true man come but to gather. Dies none frost bit nor yet snowily, For true sap keepeth off the blight Unless knave or dolt there pass....

The second point of interest is the lengthening out of the rhyme in _piula, niula_, etc. In the fourth strophe we find:

The gracious thinking and the frank Clear and quick perceiving heart Have led me to the fort of love. Finer she is, and I more loyal Than were Atlanta and Meleager.

Then the quiet conclusion, after the noise of the opening, Pensar de lieis m'es repaus:

To think of her is my rest And both of my eyes are strained wry When she stands not in their sight, Believe not the heart turns from her, For nor prayers nor games nor violing Can move me from her a reed's-breadth.

The most beautiful passages of Arnaut are in the canzo beginning:

Doutz brais e critz, Lais e cantars e voutas Aug dels auzels qu'en lor latins fant precs Quecs ab sa par, atressi cum nos fam A las amigas en cui entendem; E doncas ieu qu'en la genssor entendi Dei far chansson sobre totz de bell' obra Que noi aia mot fais ni rima estrampa.

GLAMOUR AND INDIGO

Sweet cries and cracks and lays and chants inflected By auzels who, in their Latin belikes, Chirm each to each, even as you and I Pipe toward those girls on whom our thoughts attract; Are but more cause that I, whose overweening Search is toward the Noblest, set in cluster Lines where no word pulls wry, no rhyme breaks gauges.

No culs de sacs nor false ways me deflected When first I pierced her fort within its dykes, Hers, for whom my hungry insistency Passes the gnaw whereby was Vivien wracked;[9] Day-long I stretch, all times, like a bird preening, And yawn for her, who hath o'er others thrust her As high as true joy is o'er ire and rages.

Welcome not lax, and my words were protected Not blabbed to other, when I set my likes On her. Not brass but gold was 'neath the die. That day we kissed, and after it she flacked O'er me her cloak of indigo, for screening Me from all culvertz' eyes, whose blathered bluster Can set such spites abroad; win jibes for wages.

God who did tax not Longus' sin,[10] respected That blind centurion beneath the spikes And him forgave, grant that we two shall lie Within one room, and seal therein our pact, Yes, that she kiss me in the half-light, leaning To me, and laugh and strip and stand forth in the lustre Where lamp-light with light limb but half engages.

The flowers wax with buds but half perfected; Tremble on twig that shakes when the bird strikes-- But not more fresh than she! No empery, Though Rome and Palestine were one compact, Would lure me from her; and with hands convening I give me to her. But if kings could muster In homage similar, you'd count them sages.

Mouth, now what knacks! What folly hath infected Thee? Gifts, that th' Emperor of the Salonikes Or Lord of Rome were greatly honored by, Or Syria's lord, thou dost from me distract; O fool I am! to hope for intervening? From Love that shields not love! Yea, it were juster To call him mad, who 'gainst his joy engages.

POLITICAL POSTSCRIPT

The slimy jacks with adders' tongues bisected, I fear no whit, nor have; and if these tykes Have led Galicia's king to villeiny----[11] His cousin in pilgrimage hath he attacked-- We know--Raimon the Count's son--my meaning Stands without screen. The royal filibuster Redeems not honor till he unbar the cages.

CODA

I should have seen it, but I was on such affair, Seeing the true king crown'd here in Estampa.[12]

Arnaut's tendency to lengthen the latter lines of the strophe after the diesis shows in: Er vei vermeils, vertz, blaus, blancs, gruocs, the strophe form being:

Vermeil, green, blue, peirs, white, cobalt, Close orchards, hewis, holts, hows, vales, And the bird-song that whirls and turns Morning and late with sweet accord, Bestir my heart to put my song in sheen T'equal that flower which hath such properties, It seeds in joy, bears love, and pain ameises.

The last cryptic allusion is to the quasi-allegorical descriptions of the tree of love in some long poem like the Romaunt of the Rose.

Dante takes the next poem as a model of canzo construction; and he learned much from its melody:

Sols sui qui sai lo sobrefan quern sortz Al cor d'amor sofren per sobramar, Car mos volers es tant ferms et entiers Cane no s'esduis de celliei ni s'estors Cui encubric al prim vezer e puois: Qu'ades ses lieis die a lieis cochos motz, Pois quan la vei non sai, tant l'ai, que dire.

We note the soft suave sound as against the staccato of "L'aura amara."

_Canzon._

I only, and who elrische pain support Know out love's heart o'er borne by overlove, For my desire that is so firm and straight And unchanged since I found her in my sight And unturned since she came within my glance, That far from her my speech springs up aflame; Near her comes not. So press the words to arrest it.

I am blind to others, and their retort I hear not. In her alone, I see, move, Wonder.... And jest not. And the words dilate Not truth; but mouth speaks not the heart outright: I could not walk roads, flats, dales, hills, by chance, To find charm's sum within one single frame As God hath set in her t'assay and test it.

And I have passed in many a goodly court To find in hers more charm than rumor thereof.... In solely hers. Measure and sense to mate, Youth and beauty learnèd in all delight, Gentrice did nurse her up, and so adyance Her fair beyond all reach of evil name, To clear her worth, no shadow hath oppresst it.

Her contact flats not out, falls not off short.... Let her, I pray, guess out the sense hereof For never will it stand in open prate Until my inner heart stand in daylight, So that heart pools him when her eyes entrance, As never doth the Rhone, fulled and untame, Pool, where the freshets tumult hurl to crest it.

Flimsy another's joy, false and distort, No paregale that she springs not above.... Her love-touch by none other mensurate. To have it not? Alas! Though the pains bite Deep, torture is but galzeardy and dance, For in my thought my lust hath touched his aim. God! Shall I get no more! No fact to best it!

No delight I, from now, in dance or sport, Nor will these toys a tinkle of pleasure prove, Compared to her, whom no loud profligate Shall leak abroad how much she makes my right. Is this too much? If she count not mischance What I have said, then no. But if she blame, Then tear ye out the tongue that hath expresst it.

The song begs you: Count not this speech ill chance, But if you count the song worth your acclaim, Arnaut cares lyt who praise or who contest it.

The XVIth canto goes on with the much discussed and much too emphasized cryptogram of the ox and the hare. I am content with the reading which gives us a classic allusion in the palux Laerna. The lengthening of the verse in the last three lines of the strophe is, I think, typically Arnaut's. I leave the translation solely for the sake of one strophe.

Ere the winter recommences And the leaf from bough is wrested, On Love's mandate will I render A brief end to long prolusion: So well have I been taught his steps and paces That I can stop the tidal-sea's inflowing. My stot outruns the hare; his speed amazes.

Me he bade without pretences That I go not, though requested; That I make no whit surrender Nor abandon our seclusion: "Differ from violets, whose fear effaces Their hue ere winter; behold the glowing Laurel stays, stay thou. Year long the genet blazes."

"You who commit no offences 'Gainst constancy; have not quested; Assent not! Though a maid send her Suit to thee. Think you confusion Will come to her who shall track out your traces? And give your enemies a chance for boasts and crowing? No! After God, see that she have your praises."

Coward, shall I trust not defences! Faint ere the suit be tested? Follow! till she extend her Favour. Keep on, try conclusion For if I get in this naught but disgraces, Then must I pilgrimage past Ebro's flowing And seek for luck amid the Lernian mazes.

If I've passed bridge-rails and fences, Think you then that I am bested? No, for with no food or slender Ration, I'd have joy's profusion To hold her kissed, and there are never spaces Wide to keep me from her, but she'd be showing In my heart, and stand forth before his gazes.

Lovelier maid from Nile to Sences Is not vested nor divested, So great is her bodily splendor That you would think it illusion. Amor, if she but hold me in her embraces, I shall not feel cold hail nor winter's blowing Nor break for all the pain in fever's dazes.

Arnaut hers from foot to face is, He would not have Lucerne, without her, owing Him, nor lord the land whereon the Ebro grazes.

The feminine rhyming throughout and the shorter opening lines keep the strophe much lighter and more melodic than that of the canzo which Canello prints last of all.

SIM FOS AMORS DE JOI DONAR TANT LARGA

"_Ingenium nobis ipsa puella facit." Propertius II, I._

Sim fos Amors de joi donar tant larga Cum ieu vas lieis d'aver fin cor e franc, Ja per gran ben nom calgra far embarc Qu'er am tant aut quel pes mi poia em tomba; Mas quand m' albir cum es de pretz al som Mout m'en am mais car anc l'ausiei voler, C'aras sai ieu que mos cors e mos sens Mi farant far lor grat rica conquesta.

Had Love as little need to be exhorted To give me joy, as I to keep a frank And ready heart toward her, never he'd blast My hope, whose very height hath high exalted, And cast me down ... to think on my default, And her great worth; yet thinking what I dare, More love myself, and know my heart and sense Shall lead me to high conquest, unmolested.

I am, spite long delay, pooled and contorted And whirled with all my streams 'neath such a bank Of promise, that her fair words hold me fast In joy, and will, until in tomb I am halted. As I'm not one to change hard gold for spalt, And no alloy's in her, that debonaire Shall hold my faith and mine obedience Till, by her accolade, I am invested.

Long waiting hath brought in and hath extorted The fragrance of desire; throat and flank The longing takes me ... and with pain surpassed By her great beauty. Seemeth it hath vaulted O'er all the rest ... them doth it set in fault So that whoever sees her anywhere Must see how charm and every excellence Hold sway in her, untaint, and uncontested.

Since she is such; longing no wise detorted Is in me ... and plays not the mountebank, For all my sense is her, and is compassed Solely in her; and no man is assaulted (By God his dove!) by such desires as vault In me, to have great excellence. My care On her so stark, I can show tolerance To jacks whose joy's to see fine loves uncrested.

Miels-de-Ben, have not your heart distorted Against me now; your love has left me blank, Void, empty of power or will to turn or cast Desire from me ... not brittle,[13] nor defaulted. Asleep, awake, to thee do I exalt And offer me. No less, when I lie bare Or wake, my will to thee, think not turns thence, For breast and throat and head hath it attested.

Pouch-mouthed blubberers, culrouns and aborted, May flame bite in your gullets, sore eyes and rank T' the lot of you, you've got my horse, my last Shilling, too; and you'd see love dried and salted. God blast you all that you can't call a halt! God's itch to you, chit-cracks that overbear And spoil good men, ill luck your impotence!! More told, the more you've wits smeared and congested.

CODA

Arnaut has borne delay and long defence And will wait long to see his hopes well nested.

[In De Vulgari Eloquio II, 13, Dante calls for freedom in the rhyme order within the strophe, and cites this canzo of Arnaut's as an example of poem where there is no rhyme within the single strophe. Dante's "Rithimorum quoque relationi vacemus" implies no carelessness concerning the blending of rhyme sounds, for we find him at the end of the chapter "et tertio rithimorum asperitas, nisi forte sit lenitati permista: nam lenium asperorumque rithimorum mixtura ipsa tragoedia nitescit," as he had before demanded a mixture of shaggy and harsh words with the softer words of a poem. "Nimo scilicet eiusdem rithimi repercussio, nisi forte novum aliquid atque intentatum artis hoc sibi praeroget." The De Eloquio is ever excellent testimony of the way in which, a great artist approaches the detail of métier.]

[1] Preëminence.

[2] Presumably De Born.

[3] Wriblis = warblings.

[4] This is nearly as bad in the original.

[5] Raik = haste precipitate.

[6] Our Lady of Poi de Dome? No definite solution of this reference yet found.

[7] Make = mate, fere, companion.

[8] Dante cites this poem in the second book of De Vulgari Eloquio with poems of his own, De Born's, and Cino Pistoija's.

[9] Vivien, strophe 2, nebotz Sain Guillem, an allusion to the romance "Enfances Vivien."

[10] Longus, centurion in the crucifixion legend.

[11] King of the Galicians, Ferdinand II, King of Galicia, 1157-88, son of Berangere, sister of Raimon Berenger IV ("quattro figlie ebbe," etc.) of Aragon, Count of Barcelona. His second son, Lieutenant of Provence, 1168.

[12] King crowned at Etampe, Phillipe August, crowned May 29, 1180, at age of 16. This poem might date Arnaut's birth as early as 1150.

[13] "Brighter than glass, and yet as glass is, brittle." The comparisons to glass went out of poetry when glass ceased to be a rare, precious substance. (_Cf_. Passionate Pilgrim, III.)

VIII

TRANSLATORS OF GREEK

EARLY TRANSLATORS OF HOMER

I. HUGHES SALEL

The dilection of Greek poets has waned during the last pestilent century, and this decline has, I think, kept pace with a decline in the use of Latin cribs to Greek authors. The classics have more and more become a baton exclusively for the cudgelling of schoolboys, and less and less a diversion for the mature.

I do not imagine I am the sole creature who has been well taught his Latin and very ill-taught his Greek (beginning at the age, say, of twelve, when one is unready to discriminate matters of style, and when the economy of the adjective cannot be wholly absorbing). A child may be bulldozed into learning almost anything, but man accustomed to some degree of freedom is loath to approach a masterpiece through five hundred pages of grammar. Even a scholar like Porson may confer with former translators.

We have drifted out of touch with the Latin authors as well, and we have mislaid the fine English versions: Golding's _Metamorphoses_; Gavin Douglas' _Æneids;_ Marlowe's _Eclogues_ from Ovid, in each of which books a great poet has compensated, by his own skill, any loss in transition; a new beauty has in each case been created. Greek in English remains almost wholly unsuccessful, or rather, there are glorious passages but no long or whole satisfaction. Chapman remains the best English "Homer," marred though he may be by excess of added ornament, and rather more marred by parentheses and inversions, to the point of being hard to read in many places.

And if one turn to Chapman for almost any favorite passage one is almost sure to be disappointed; on the other hand I think no one will excel him in the plainer passages of narrative, as of Priam's going to Achilles in the XXIVth Iliad. Yet he breaks down in Priam's prayer at just the point where the language should be the simplest and austerest.

Pope is easier reading, and, out of fashion though he is, he has at least the merit of translating Homer into _something_. The nadir of Homeric translation is reached by the Leaf-Lang prose; Victorian faddism having persuaded these gentlemen to a belief in King James fustian; their alleged prose has neither the concision of verse nor the virtues of direct motion. In their preface they grumble about Chapman's "mannerisms," yet their version is full of "Now behold I" and "yea even as" and "even as when," tushery possible only to an affected age bent on propaganda. For, having, despite the exclusion of the _Dictionnaire Philosophique_ from the island, finally found that the Bible couldn't be retained either as history or as private Reuter from J'hvh's Hebrew Press bureau, the Victorians tried to boom it, and even its wilfully bowdlerized translations, as literature.

"So spake he, and roused Athene that already was set thereon.... Even as the son of ... even in such guise...."

perhaps no worse than

"With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving"[1]

but bad enough anyway.

Of Homer two qualities remain untranslated: the magnificent onomatopœia, as of the rush of the waves on the sea-beach and their recession in:

_παρὰ θῖνα πολυΦλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης_

untranslated and untranslatable; and, secondly, the authentic cadence of speech; the absolute conviction that the words used, let us say by Achilles to the "dog-faced" chicken-hearted Agamemnon, are in the actual swing of words spoken. This quality of actual speaking is _not_ untranslatable. Note how Pope fails to translate it:

There sat the seniors of the Trojan race (Old Priam's chiefs, and most in Priam's grace): The king, the first; Thymœtes at his side; Lampus and Clytius, long in counsel try'd; Panthus and Hicetaon, once the strong; And next, the wisest of the reverend throng, Antenor grave, and sage Ucalegon, Lean'd on the walls, and bask'd before the sun. Chiefs, who no more in bloody fights engage, But wise through time, and narrative with age, In summer days like grasshoppers rejoice, A bloodless race, that send a feeble voice. These, when the Spartan queen approach'd the tower, In secret own'd resistless beauty's power: They cried, No wonder, such celestial charms For nine long years have set the world in arms! What winning graces! What majestic mien! She moves a goddess, and she looks a queen! Yet hence, oh Heaven, convey that fatal face, And from destruction save the Trojan race.

This is anything but the "surge and thunder," but it is, on the other hand, a definite idiom, within the limits of the rhymed pentameter couplet it is even musical in parts; there is imbecility in the antithesis, and bathos in "she looks a queen," but there is fine accomplishment in:

"Wise through time, and narrative with age,"

Mr. Pope's own invention, and excellent. What we definitely can _not_ hear is the voice of the old men speaking. The simile of the grasshoppers is well rendered, but the old voices do not ring in the ear.

Homer (iii. 156-160) reports their conversation:

_Οὐ νέμεσις, Τρὧας καὶ ἐϋκνήμιδας Αχαιοὺς_ _Τοιῇδ ἀμΦὶ γυναικὶ πολὺν χρόνον ἄλγεα πἀσχειν·_ _Αἰῶς ἀθανάτῃσι θεῇς εἰς ὦπα ἔοικεν._ _Ἀλλὰ καὶ ὣς, τοὶη περ εοῦς', ἐν νηυσὶ νεέσθω·_ _Μηδ' ἡμἰν τεκέεσσι τ' 'οπίσσω πῆμα λιποιτο._

Which is given in Sam. Clark's _ad verbum_ translation:

"Non _est_ indigne ferendum, Trojanos et bene-ocreatos Archivos Tali de muliere longum tempus dolores pati: Omnino immortalibus deabus ad vultum similis est. Sed et sic, talis quamvis sit, in navibus redeat, Neque nobis liberisque in posterum detrimentum relinquatur."

Mr. Pope has given six short lines for five long ones, but he has added "fatal" to face (or perhaps only lifted it from _νέμεσις_), he has added "winning graces," "majestic," "looks a queen." As for owning beauty's resistless power secretly or in the open, the Greek is:

_Τοῖοι ἄρα Τρώων ἡγήτορες ἧντ' ἐπὶ πύργῳ._ _Οἵ δ' ὡς οὦν εἶδον Ἑλένην ἐπὶ πύργον ἰοῦσαν,_ _Ἠκα πρὸς ἀλλήλους ἔηεα πτερόεντ' ἀγόρευον·_

and Sam. Clark as follows:

"Tales utique Trojanorum proceres sedebant in turri. Hi autem ut videruut Helenam ad turrim venientem, Submisse inter se verbis alatis dixerunt;"