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There poured through all my veins, in icy chords,
The chill of an inaudible chorale,
G. S. FRASER
all conscious dignity and skill; to Dickey, all cunning blunt informality,
Poetry gives off smoke
but it doesn't die out.
It acts kind of crazy, flutteringly,
when it chooses us.
A very good buy even for a reader who believed that Yevtushenko was
not a real person at all but a kind of "blue guitar" on which very
different, but very skilled, American poets were strumming their varia–
tions on a basic theme.
And
Beowulf?
Michael Alexander learned from Pound what Anglo–
Saxon should sound like in modern English but, unlike Pound, went on
to learn Anglo-Saxon in a scholarly way. For generations, in English
universities at least,
Beowulf
has been a kind of
pons asinorum
which
young students had to cross before they could get on to literature that
interested them. The translations, in prose or verse (though I would
make an honorable half-exception for Charles Scott-Moncrieff, the trans–
lator also, of course, of Proust and Stendhal) have been more depressing
than the original. Michael Alexander has made it come alive and contem–
porary. I quote one very short passage of a moralizing, not dramatic or
narrative, kind:
But to elude death
is not easy: attempt it who will,
he shall go to the place prepared for each
of the sons of men, the soul-bearers
dwelling on earth, ordained them by fate:
laid fast in that bed, the body shall sleep
when the feast is done.
It
is a reflection, is it not, that our aging leaders, at great international
conferences, at the banquet table and the council table, might bear prof–
itably in mind? But the language is alive all through and even more alive
than this when it embraces desperate action.
The Aeneid
is a universal classic in a way that
Beowulf
is not: any
modern translator has, looking over his shoulder, Gawain Douglas, the
Earl of Surrey, Marlowe's play, Purcell's opera, Dryden's version, and,
capturing Virgil's syntax in prose, Jackson Knight's piously laborious
prose version and, imitating the syntax, Hermann Broch's very great
novel,
The Death of Virgil.
Allen Mandelbaum took six years over this
