Saint Paul, Cleopatra, Shakespeare and Alliteration

As a little follow up to my previous post on Saint Paul. Saint Paul was born in Tarsus early in the first century. When he popped out into the world there would still have been people in the city who remembered the visit made by Cleopatra in 41 BC. Though, unlike Saint Paul, they would not realise that it was BC.

Cleopatra had been summoned there by Mark Antony who wanted her to support his war against the Parthians who kept winning wars by unsportingly shooting arrows in retreat. These were Parthian shots.

Anyway, the river Cydnus ran through Tarsus and Cleopatra insisted that she meet Antony by boat. Plutarch describes the meeting thus in Thomas North's translation of 1579:

...she disdained to set forward otherwise but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, howboys, cithernes, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge.

Sound familiar? It damned well should do, dear reader. Here's something from c. 1605.

The barge she sat in like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails and so perfumed, that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes.

It's always great to watch Shakespeare at work, and the thing to notice here is how he cuts and elaborates on the basis of alliteration. The word barge is in the original, and Shakespeare adds that it was burnished and that it burned and that its gold was beaten. The poop and purple are in the original, so Shakespeare invents the idea that the sails were perfumed. Shakespeare picks the flute from among all Plutarch's instruments and then makes the water follow faster.

You see the method?

As I keep saying, Shakespeare was all technique.

The Inky Fool realised he was on the wrong ferry

N.B. Readers of immemorial antiquity will remember that I have blogged about this passage before.

Homer Among the Postmoderns

Here is a postmodern metaphor. It's taken from Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America:

The sun was a like a huge 50 cent piece that someone had poured kerosene on and lit with a match and said 'Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper' and put the coin in my hand, but never came back.

It's postmodern, you see, because it's got lots of utterly unnecessary details like the match and the newspaper that don't help to describe the sun. It just keeps scuttling along for its own sake.

This is in sharp contradiction to how metaphors used to be used. Here is Homer describing a chap called Simoisius being stabbed:

...he was cut off untimely by the spear of mighty Ajax, who struck him in the breast by the right nipple as he was coming on among the foremost fighters; the spear went right through his shoulder, and he fell as a poplar that has grown straight and tall in a meadow by some mere, and its top is thick with branches. Then the wheelwright lays his axe to its roots that he may fashion a felloe for the wheel of some goodly chariot, and it lies seasoning by the waterside.

Which goes to show that time has no dominion and there is nothing new under the sun. The great thing about Homer is that there are so many translations that you can put poets into the ring and force them to fight for you amusement. Above was Samuel Butler's prose translation. Here is the same passage in Alexander Pope's version:

Short was his date! by dreadful Ajax slain,
He falls, and renders all their cares in vain!
So falls a poplar, that in watery ground
Raised high the head, with stately branches crown'd,
(Fell'd by some artist with his shining steel,
To shape the circle of the bending wheel,)
Cut down it lies, tall, smooth, and largely spread,
With all its beauteous honours on its head
There, left a subject to the wind and rain,
And scorch'd by suns, it withers on the plain

Thus pierced by Ajax, Simoisius lies

Stretch'd on the shore, and thus neglected dies.

And here it is in Chapman's Homer (which Keats first looked into):

Cut off with mighty Ajax' lance ; for, as his spirit put on,
He strook him at his breast's right pap, quite through his shoulder-bone,
And in the dust of earth he fell, that was the fruitful soil

Of his friends' hopes; but where he sow'd he buried all his toil.

And as a poplar shot aloft, set by a river side, 
In moist edge of a mighty fen, his head in curls implied,
But all his body plain and smooth, to which a wheelwright puts

The sharp edge of his shining axe, and his soft timber cuts

From his innative root, in hope to hew out of his bole
The fell'ffs, or out-parts of a wheel, that compass in the whole, 
To serve some goodly chariot; but, being big and sad,
And to be hal'd home through the bogs, the useful hope he had
Sticks there, and there the goodly plant lies with'ring out his grace:
So lay, by Jove-bred Ajax' hand, Anthemion's forward race...

Generally, I prefer Chapman's version; but I think in this passage the Twickenham dwarf wins by a nose.

The Inky Fool contemplating a hair cut

The Horse's Mouth

Though I know nothing about horses, I know that you can check their health by inspecting their teeth. This is why you should always look a gift horse in the mouth, a lesson the Trojans learnt to their cost. The horse's mouth, though, is merely a particularly good source for a racing tip. He heard it from the stable-boy, you heard it from the trainer, I heard it straight from the horse's mouth.

I know I am a lone voice crying aloud in the wilderness on this subject, but that paragraph was merely a lead-up to pointing out that you can only truly understand international affairs and the glories of English prose if you read the official news website of the North Korean government. The guy who writes it has clearly just learnt the word bedevilled and this account of the sinking of that South Korean ship is fantastic. Here is an unedited paragraph:

Branding the south Korean puppet conservative group as one of most wicked traitors who bedeviled the north-south relations to serve outsiders, a gang of vicious anti-reunification elements who dampened the nation's desire for reunification, a diehard traitorous clique who scuttled the inter-Korean cooperation and dangerous warmongers keen to bring nuclear war disasters to the Koreans, the indictment cites facts to prove its crimes.

Scuttled is a beautiful, beautiful word. Full article here.

Clearly the North has better curtains

Wales and Bad English

Two points about Wales. First: it doesn't have a name. Wales comes from wealh and means foreign, in the same way that a walnut is a foreign nut because walnut trees were not native to England. Wales simply means foreign country. It is an exonym.

The Welsh word for Wales is Cymru, which comes from the Brythonic word combrogi meaning land of our compatriots. So the English call it "Their Country" and the Welsh call it "Our Country", which means that the floor is wide open for somebody to think up an actual name for Permanentlyrainingland.

Second: when I was young and easy and doing my GCSEs, I used have to write preposterous translations. No awkwardness of the other language (French, German or Latin) could be omitted. Frenchmen were forever "at the house of" other Frenchmen, Romans were always doing things "in order that they might" do something else in the subjunctive (which seemed unfair). I would carefully write out crimes against English prose like "The about to be killed legionaries saw the having been crossed river".

I can still (for some reason) recite some of my Latin set texts, which I, like everybody else, memorised in English:

At that time appeared in the palace a sign miraculous in both appearance and outcome. They say that while a boy slept, whose name was Servius Tullius, his head burnt with a divine fire; and they say that, a great shout having arisen, the king...

In today's Independent there is the story of an unfortunate potholer whose troglodyte corpse has finally been dragged to the light after thirty years in the underworld.

A spokeswoman for Dyfed Powys Police said: "Although he was located at that time in the caves, his body was never able to be recovered despite several attempts over the following weeks and as a result he has remained in the location he died."

There's something fantastic about "his body was never able to be recovered". It ascribes will and inability to a cadaver, but a will to be the subject of a passive verb. Located is fantastically ambiguous because you don't know whether it means "was there" or that his whereabouts were known. I stubbornly refuse to believe that anybody, even a policeman, could invent such a byzantine and grotesque sentence. The spokesman must have been speaking Welsh, or Latin.

All signs in Wales are bilingual, so English speakers who erect them have to e-mail a translator for a Welsh rendering. But translators go on holiday. The lower half of this sign reads “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated”.

Hello, Sadness!

In the bookshops is a new edition of Françoise Sagan, containing in a single volume her two novels Bonjour Tristesse and A Certain Smile. It said so on the cover. Both books were of course written in French and A Certain Smile was originally called Un Certain Sourire. Yet that title has been translated while Bonjour Tristesse has not. The reason for this inconsistency is, I'm sure, that Hello, Sadness sounds so irredeemably stupid in English (so does the utterly literal Good-day, Sadness, which if anything adds a feeling of lunatic politeness).

Some titles, like A Rebours, are untranslatable. Others like L'Etranger dwindle a little in translation (étranger can mean either outsider, foreigner or stranger, but the English translator can only choose one). But these cases are quite different from those foreign words and phrases that, when translated, lose their exoticism. The ancient authority of Latin, the cerebral chic of French, the compounded intellectualism of German and the romantic intensity of Italian all vanish with translation. It's like Helen of Troy visiting her gynaecologist. There is a terrible sense of: "Is that all it means?"

This is particularly true of Italian names. Would you go to an opera by Joe Green? Or be seduced by Jacob Newhouse? Or watch a film starring Lenny Goat? Of course not.

But Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Casanova and Leonardo Di Caprio are another matter.

I can also assure you that the body of the novel Bonjour Tristesse is quite as disappointing, French and pretentious as the title.

The usual girls-staring-out-of-windows-vaguely-implying-profundity crap

P.S. I know that goat in Italian is technicaly capro, but it still amuses me.

And the Iron Entered into Coverdale's Soul

Myles Coverdale is my hero. He is the patron saint of inadequate optimists.

Coverdale was an early protestant and like all protestants he believed that the Bible should be translated into the vernacular. Thus the ownership of the Bible would be taken from the priests and prelates of the Roman Church. To do this, you of course needed to go back to the original Hebrew and Greek. So Coverdale set out to make his translation bravely ignoring the fact that he didn't know any Hebrew and was utterly innocent of Greek.

Coverdale did know a bit of German and the Germans had already started translating the Bible from its original languages. So armed with a dash of Deutsche and the belief that he was doing God's Work he settled down to translate.

The result was a carnival of inaccuracy. The most fabulous of his mistakes is in Psalm 105 and it goes like this:

But he had sent a man before them: even Joseph, who was sold to be a bond-servant
Whose feet they hurt in the stocks : the iron entered into his soul

The iron entered into his soul and the phrase entered into the language. It is beautiful, and like most beauty it is utterly wrong. It should be his neck was put in irons.

How this came about is reasonably explicable. The Hebrew word nefesh means breath. Metonymically it can mean neck, because that's where you do most of your breathing. Metaphorically it can mean soul because your breath is your soul (the same as spirit, which comes from the latin to breathe).

Once you've got his soul was put in irons, all you need to do is mistake the subject for the object, which Coverdale could do with ease, and you have The iron entered into his soul.

There are too many Coverdale mistakes to list them all. My second favourite, which I came across in church one Sunday, is in Psalm 18:

As soon as they hear of me, they shall obey me : but the strange children shall dissemble with me.

The strange children shall fail : and be afraid out of their prisons.

Who are the strange children, and why were they in prison in the first place? To what abominable crimes has infantile strangeness led them? Why will fear release them? What the hell is going on, God?
 
Coverdale's strange children are the ben necker or foreign-born. Coverdale's prison should be a stronghold or fortress. The literal translation is:
 
As soon as they hear me, they obey me;
foreigners cringe before me.
They all lose heart;
they come trembling from their strongholds.

Which isn't nearly as good. It's just another of those dull, dull, dull gentiles-shall-be-driven-before-me bits of the Old Testament. That is the paradox of the Coverdale psalter. It may be inaccurate, it may not be what God or David or a series of writers over several centuries meant, but it is one of the finest works in the English language.
 
The Book of Common Prayer, which is used on Sunday evenings in my parish church, still contains the Coverdale Psalter. Shakespeare, I once read*, alludes to the psalms more than any other book. Coverdale, though no linguist, was a poetic genius. Had he let his utter inadequacy deter him from his task, posterity would have been impoverished. Keats was wrong: error is beauty, beauty error.
 
 

Well done, my son.

 
*I can't remember the reference.