essay
Performing the Classics: Oswald and The Vanishing
“Sense opens up in silence.”
—Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening
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“Sir, I cannot let you in. I have specific instructions to not let anyone in. We’re now past the time. If you go through those doors, you will be banned from ALL future readings at the Hammer.” I take a deep breath, straining to hear what will be said to this usher on the other side of the auditorium’s closed doors. Although I know what will happen. Someone like me has come to see the English poet Alice Oswald perform Memorial, her book-length poem on Homer’s Iliad. Oswald rarely travels to America to read. This was definitely a treat for Los Angeles. I remember finding out about the reading only a few hours beforehand, and quickly rearranging my day and nighttime plans so I could see her. Poetry readings are often boring, for reasons I’ve never entirely understood, but I knew in my bones this reading would change my life. This was a rare opportunity to see a poet perform the miraculous spectacle of language itself. “And so I am banned,” I heard my fellow audience member proudly announce to the usher. “Ban me for life but let me in!” The overhead lights go out. A dim blue light percolates up from the bottom of the walls all around me.
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Is translation really about loss?
Is translation really about impossibility?
Or have we just been fooling ourselves?
Isn’t translation really about abundance?
Isn’t translation really about the blue light coming up from the ocean floor?
“How does it start the sea has endless beginnings”[1]
And the joy flooding, speaking from all corners of our mouth?
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We are sitting in the dark. Not metaphorically, but literally. I cannot see my hands in my lap. The blue lights, dimly lit at the baseboard, barely give off any light. Oswald appears at the podium as shadow, as dark outline of poet perched before the night sky. Her voice speaks from somewhere, though I cannot see her mouth move. Her voice from the rafters begins telling a story. Although disoriented, I sense the cues that I’m being told a story and so I dutifully settle in. Her voice is clear and strong and quiet. She begins listing Greek names, a whole litany of warriors sail through the air on catapulted arrows. Gravestones start piling up in my mouth from her mouth. Although there has been no announcement made, no formal introduction by Stephen Yenser as I remember it, no catalog copy read aloud, I know Oswald is reciting sections from her book-length poem, Memorial, which she describes in her forward note as “a translation of the Iliad’s atmosphere, not its story.”[2] And this point is important—Oswald recites her book from memory. As my eyes adjust to the cool blue light, I confirm she’s not holding a book or papers at the podium. I see her foot tapping in time to the charge and gallop of her voice. A rush of names gathers in the corner of the room. I almost feel the presence of Patroclus and Achilles, goose bumps up and down my arm. A frieze appears before me: disputed armor, a bandaged arm, a ghostly blue-lit funeral pyre suffused in soul vapors, trees blowing in the wind, trees blowing in the wind, leaves rustling.
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You can sense repetition and rhyme even in a language you don’t know.
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Here is how Oswald describes her translation process for Memorial: “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. I write through the Greek, not from it—aiming for translucence rather than translation.”[3] Oswald trains her translator’s perceptions to discern beyond the shadowdark Greek letters. Perhaps this is why Oswald-the-performer uses the cover of night in her recitation. Shining through, her words illuminate a way out of the darkened corridor, connecting the past to the present.
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The poet and translator Anne Carson writes that the yet-to-be translated word reminds us of “the shadow of that text where it falls across another language. Shadows fall and move.”[4]
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Sometimes a translator can’t get between a body and a shadow no matter how hard she tries.
Sometimes poetry becomes the answer to the unsolvable equation.
Oswald’s poem, “Shadow” was first performed at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, as part of Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden on June 25, 2015.
Her hand—the shadow of her hand waves me over.
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If not equivalence, what then?
A version.
An imitation.
An aftering.
An appropriation.
A theft.
An expressive reformulation.
An interpretation.
A sampling.
A reimagining.
An excavation.
An adaptation.
A re-creation.
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Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad is comprised of equal parts biography (from the poetry of lament) and simile (from the pastoral lyric). Because Oswald removes the overarching narrative of the war story, we contend only with the remembered dead as litany and the natural world in extended simile. Similes singing like a Greek chorus. By juxtaposing these distinct poetic modes and recontextualizing them, we get a very different version of the Iliad, something Oswald claims as “an attempt to remember people’s names and lives without the use of writing.”[5] For her, the oral component of this translation project is paramount. Sound remains important to Oswald, as she prefers to call her poems “sound carvings,” suggesting that the song is already there to be chiseled from the air.[6]
Much of Oswald’s poetry sounds out sense in its melodies of meaning, in its operatic durations. In “Tithonus,” for example, the entire poem depends upon its very execution of “46 minutes in the life of the dawn.” The poem opens like this:
as soon as dawn appears
as soon as dawn appears
4:17 dressed only in her clouds
and murk hangs down over hills
as if guilty[7]
The poem does not exist on the page but in Time. In fact, there are no page numbers for the poem as it appears in the collection Falling Awake (2016). Running vertically along the left-hand side of the poem is a continuous dotted line interrupted after every fifth dot with an em-dash mark. The effect is like that of a ruler or a metronome marking time. In The Letter Press edition (2014) of the poem, no page numbers appear within the textual work either. Instead, multiple floating diagrams of an inset of a five-stringed instrument appear within the open field of the poem on the text’s left-hand side. This edition tells us that “Tithonus” was first performed with a nyckelharpa, a keyed fiddle or key harp, during the 2014 London Literature Festival. Various permutations of small circles, the morning sun as ascending note, travel across the strings of the illustrated harp as the poem endures until its terminus. It “stops 46 minutes later, at sunrise.” In the final diagram, the strings of the harp vanish and we are left with the yellow sun above the dotted horizon line. The poem depends upon this carving out of itself, where its rhythm is “nothing other than time of time, the vibration of time itself in the stroke of a present that presents it by separating it from itself, freeing it from its simple stanza to make it scansion (rise, raising of the foot that beats) and cadence (fall, passage into the pause.)”[8] What Jean-Luc Nancy further describes as “imposing form on the continuous.”[9]
The repetition of the poem’s opening registers the slowness of the scene, the time signature its presentness, and the heavy cloak of personification further weighs us down in primordial beginnings: we are at morning’s doorstep, suspended at the muddy hems of night’s initiation. Angela Leighton writes, “[l]iterary writing offers a threshold rather than a destination, and makes us pause there, to hear all the summoned sounds that words can make or bring to the ear. It stops us going straight over into sense and comprehension.”[10] Oswald, in essence, creates the circumstances in her poems for the perfect acoustical encounter. Think of her river in Dart (2002), which is a place of listening but also a landscape that is a generator of sound, of shared activities, or the Beckettian effect of “moonlight on our voices” in A Sleepwalk on the Severn (2009).[11] Her particular philosophy of listening reverberates in almost all her poems. We are asked to listen closely, to use our bodies (perhaps without organs) as portals, when occupying the listened-after landscapes of her natural world. In “The Art of Erosion,” Oswald’s first Oxford lecture, the poet discusses her interest “in the edge, where the mind gives up”; those vibrating thresholds where “poems are implicit in the air” and through listening we uncover them.[12] Indeed, Oswald prefaces her lecture with the distinction between the “livingness” and the “lastingness” of a poem. For Oswald, it is the living poem—the poem capable of dying, of vanishing into thin air—that holds the greater reward. Its gift is the “trace that the words leave inside you as it vanishes.”[13]
The first eight pages of Memorial include a running list of the names of the dead soldiers. It functions much like a war memorial built in stone. However, unlike a physical monument, these dead will appear again within the body of the poem as embodied entities made light, illuminated by language and imagination. Oswald’s mode of naming creates discrete sonic memorials. By invoking each dead solider individually, their living deeds and biographies attach themselves to the signifier of their name. In this way, the names stack up materially in the poem. When the dead are called out into imagined presence, we simultaneously escort them back into their graves. They are named and remembered. The extended, and often repeated, pastoral similes provide an atmosphere like that of a Greek chorus. They sing of a life all warriors shared on earth. They bear witness to the often exquisite and bittersweet details of life, the similes record life’s unstoppable rhythms. “And a stormwind rushes down / And roars into the sea’s ears / And the curves of the many white-patched waves / Run this way and that.”[14] Each warrior dies in a kinetic rush of energy, sometimes like a crash of waves as exemplified in this noisy quotation, or in a quieter collapse of arrested breath.
But can we really call Oswald’s Memorial a translation? Does Oswald transgress too far? In her translation of The Odyssey, Emily Wilson describes translation as inherently revisionary. “Maybe the logic of purity just doesn’t apply. Homeric poems are inherently works of revision. They didn’t even exist in an original form. They comprise many voices.”[15] Perhaps Oswald’s transgression is just what The Iliad needed: a new voice that’s not exactly a voice, but an open ear.
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And another, and another. The dead march on, long black pauses. The auditorium must have an occupant capacity listed somewhere on its walls. Who is recording this? We are getting closer and closer to the limit, I’m afraid. The energy in room—the hidden piano, the monsoon, the invisible xylophone—might blow the roof off.
The optimistic inscription of ruin.
The ruin of listening provides black holes of silence.
Performance as willed forgetting.
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Oswald’s own book-length poem inspired by The Odyssey is called Nobody. In an introductory note, she describes the voice of the poem as “wind-blown, water-damaged, as if someone set out to sing the Odyssey, but was rowed to a stony island and never discovered the poem’s ending.”[16] Preoccupied by ruin, wear-and-tear, silence, and no-naming, Nobody magnifies the holes of language.
In conversation with the purple-blue watercolor paintings of William Tillyer, the poem “is designed to be mobile” though I have only experienced it in its commercial book form and not as artist book nor as recitation. A pronounced choral voice turns and counterturns, enveloping us, in this instance, in a watery refrain: “So we floated out of sight into the unmarked air / and only our voices survived / like thistle-seed flying this way and that.”[17] The passenger list of this particular sea voyage can be found in the book’s final pages where a sunken tablet highlights a few notable names: Clytemnestra, Orestes, Odysseus, Aegisthus, Nobody. Of course, Nobody is one of Odysseus’ aliases, repeated twice as echoing query in the poem’s volcanic caves.
The continual trace, “all those longings of grass-flower smells / and the bird-flower sounds and the vaporous poems / that hang in the chills above rivers” registers as a co-mingling of senses when any one character resurfaces from the water.[18] Again and again, the poem submerges us into its watery depths: “it’s as if they didn’t know they were drowned / it’s as if I blinded by my own surface.”[19] Blinded, drowned, shaded, withered, bloomed, and failed.
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The translator, of course, is Nobody.
“But this is the sea
still with its back to me
in its flesh of a thousand faces all facing away
and who can decipher this
voice among voices
listen”[20]
What is the beauty of an awkward translation?
It reminds us how other languages think, how they move in time different from one another.
And the bad translation deserves an award for it introduces the errors we must take so much time to correct.
Josephine Balmer, a classicist whose “transgressions” include making Catullus’ poems her own, advances the idea that “by transforming the text, the translator, too, can be transformed as a writer, finding their own voice by revoicing those of the past.”[21] Hidden in her assertion lies the notion that because the art of translation requires invention or magical thinking, the translator can navigate a way back to the beginning of voice. “Beginnings are special / because most of them are fake” writes Carson in her translator’s note (as poem) for the Bakkhai.[22]
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Two days after the Hammer reading, I drive up the PCH, admiring the Pacific Ocean on my left. The traffic is not terrible. The car windows are down, and it’s still pretty warm, though the sun is about to go down any minute. Crazy chaotic pink, the sky bewilders me. I feel a buzzing in my ribs. My senses are already disorganized. The drive goes easy. The ocean smells salty and sweet at same time. I think of oysters and clams and grilled squid. I wonder if Oswald can eat anything before she performs. I know the setting tonight will be more austere than at the Hammer. Like usual, I am on time. More specifically, I always arrive fifteen minutes early, a trait I cultivated from my father. I slowly walk up the garden path from the parking garage, which is discreetly tucked into the side of mountain. The roses bloom immaculately, stooping and slouching just right over the stone walkway. The wildflowers not yet ready for bed, a galaxy of pixelated stars the jasmine bushes gently brush my arms in perfume. Not too intrusive, this faux Roman garden, this cultivated wildness reminds me I have now entered a sacred creative space. I hear fountains rushing. I wonder where my fellow Hammer audience member, the “Latecomer” as I now call him, might be. He’s still most likely on the PCH, trying to remember where exactly to turn into the Getty Villa. Of course, he hasn’t eaten dinner. The excitement and rush of today too great. Of course, he’s not even on the PCH yet, he’s still trapped in the rush hour traffic of downtown Santa Monica, not remembering one must zig and zag the city streets from memory.
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Oswald reads her entire poem, “Tithonus” in 46 minutes exactly. She calls upon Dawn, and as she comes, gradually, slowly, the audience listens with a solemnity I have never experienced before except in Catholic funeral Masses. The story goes like this: Dawn falls in love with Tithonus, but when she asks Zeus to make her lover immortal she forgets to ask for his eternal youth as well. As a result, Tithonus shrivels up like an old bug. Like a cicada, some versions tell us. Heartbroken, Dawn puts him in a little room “where he still sits babbling to himself and waiting night after night for her appearance.”[23] Sappho writes a Tithonus poem, which comes to us almost a complete work, as does Alfred Lloyd Tennyson’s dramatic monologue version. Affectionately, or not so affectionately, it is often known as the old age poem. Oswald’s poem enacts the encounter between Dawn and Tithonus. She writes in a performance note preceding the printed poem:
What you are about to hear is the sound of Tithonus meeting the dawn at midsummer. His voice starts at 4.17, when the sun is six degrees below
the horizon, and stops 46 minutes later, at sunrise. The performance will begin in darkness.[24]
Oswald holds a long wooden rattle in one hand and its complementary stick in the other. She will mark off certain time signatures with the rattle. Five minutes have passed here, seven and half minutes later. We begin in darkness, in prehistory. No blue light, the underground cave light of the Trojan War representing classical history. No, we begin in total darkness. But “as soon as dawn appears / as soon as dawn appears / 4:17 dressed only in her clouds” the light leaks in from above shining on my leaves my leaves my face my legs and a rustling of thought breathes in—
Works Cited
[1] Alice Oswald, Nobody (London: Jonathan Cape, 2019), 13.
[2] Alice Oswald, Memorial (London, Faber & Faber, 2011), 1.
[3] Ibid., 2.
[4] Anne Carson, “On the Translation,” The Complete Sophocles, Volume II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 221.
[5] Oswald, Memorial, 2.
[6] Claire Armistead and Emily Wilson, “Interview, Alice Oswald: ‘I like the way that the death of one thing is the beginning of something else,” The Guardian, July 22, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/22/alice-oswald-interview-falling-awake
[7] Alice Oswald, “Tithonus,” Falling Awake (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016), lines 1-4.
[8] Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 17.
[9] Ibid., 39.
[10] Angela Leighton, Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2018), 38.
[11] For further context regarding Samuel Beckett’s dictate to his performers of “having moonlight on their voices, listen to Oswald’s first lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry titled, “The Art of Erosion,” http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/art-erosion.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Oswald, Memorial, 20.
[15] Ben Purkert and Emily Wilson, “Back Draft: Emily Wilson,” Guernica, February 24, 2020, https://www.guernicamag.com/back-draft-emily-wilson/
[16] Oswald, Nobody, Author’s note.
[17] Ibid., 16.
[18] Ibid., 14.
[19] Ibid., 17.
[20] Ibid., 22.
[21] Josephine Balmer, “Translating, Transgressing, and Creating,” Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 63.
[22] Anne Carson, “i wish i were two dogs then i could play with me,” The Bakkhai (New York: New Directions, 2017), 9.
[23] Oswald, Falling Awake, 46.
[24] Ibid.
Catherine Theis is a poet and scholar. Recent poems can be found in Firmament. Meanwhile, the critical essay, “Braving the elements: H.D.’s and Jeffers’ ‘transduction’ of Euripides,” explores the similarities between poets H.D. and Robinson Jeffers and their interest in the choral odes of Euripides’ The Bacchae, can be found in The Classics in Modernist Translation (Bloomsbury, 2019).