514
PARTISAN REVIEW
Here, then, are some casualties of "the tradition," some heroes who
never made it, who fell outside the canon and who, preserved in
their native splendor, are now objects of aesthetic delight without
possible use or application, kept in training eternally for a task they
are too late to perform . Best of Moritz's alternative mythologies is
"Petra," of which I reproduce here the first and last sections:
The city, recently abandoned when we arrived,
was as disappointing as usual with legendary sites.
Nothing of labyrinth in the grid of the few streets .
Nothing of garden in the dusty acacias along gravel paths.
True, it was a city of rose-colored stone.
But only as others are cities of tarpaper or corrugated tin.
True, th e city was half as old as time : much had gone o n.
Experts might keep themselves busy there for years.
But we already knew all about the ones who lived there.
How their pleasures ceased to move them,
yet they found themselves unable to change at all,
afraid to give up or alter a single gesture.
Then one day they set out, taking eve rything with them ,
to see if there were other people with a nother love ;
or at least a new color of skin, a strange caress .
Moritz does not evenly sustain this tone of melancholy historicism ,
deceptively bland and slyly subversive, but when he does succeed in
evoking the invisible cities of the past, he persuades us that , despite
Whitman, there may still be something owing to those immensely
overpaid accounts held in perpetuity by the dead.
DAVID M. HALPERIN
POEMS OF LOVE AND WAR. FROM THE EIGHT ANTHOLOGIES
AND THE TEN LONG POEMS OF CLASSICAL TAMIL. Selected
and Translated by A. K. Ramanujan. Columbia University Press. $34.00.
In recent months the Tamils, or at least a projection of
them , have infiltrated the news in the self-styled "developed" coun–
tries . So that , from the parochial vantage common to those coun–
tries, the Tamils have suddenly begun to ex ist. One might gather
