The Continued Life:
A Conversation with Sherod Santos
conducted by Bryan Narendorf
Meridian
Fall/Winter 2005
This conversation is occasioned by the publication of Santos's Greek Lyric Poetry (W.W. Norton, 2005), a selection of poems translated from the Greek Anthology. Organized chronologically, the book focuses on a slice of the Greek literary corpus, the lyric, ranging from some of the earliest Greek lyrics to those written in late antiquity. While philologically informed, Santos's primary aim is to provide readable, English renderings of these poems.
Sherod Santos is a Curator's Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He has published five books of poems, including, most recently, The Perishing (W.W. Norton, 2003), which won the Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Bryan Narendorf: Gary Wills's review of your Greek Lyric Poetry argues, "The classics are no longer crucial because we do not experience a continuity with their world.... We are islanded off from antiquity by accelerating forces – by secularism, by science, by democracy, by technology."
Sherod Santos: That's a very grand, very sweeping statement indeed, and in a certain sense it must be true. That is, it must be true for a particular sort of reader, the sort of reader who regards classical literature as a historical record, a cultural artifact, and nothing more. Mr. Wills is, after all, a historian with a PhD from Yale, so he's no doubt being true to his calling, and perhaps to his class as well. As you know, the term "classical" derives from the Latin classicus and originally signified "of the highest class of Roman citizen." I suppose it goes without saying that I'm not that sort of reader, nor is that the sort of reader I had in mind when I started writing this book.
BN: What sort of reader did you have in mind?
SS: The sort who reads poetry on a bus, or under a shade tree, or in the light of a candle in a bombed-out apartment in Sarajevo. The very same sort, or so I like to imagine, that Homer had in mind. At the very least, I write for those readers whose experience belies the claim that literature is the property of academics and that its proper place is the library and philological realm. William Tyndale, the great sixteenth century translator of the New Testament, once remarked that he worked to make the Bible intelligible to the plowman, that is, to working class people, and that still seems to me a very worthy ambition.
BN: Wills cites Chapman and Pope's translations from Homer as examples of translations made in a time when people lived in societies that would recognize the Homeric world in their own. In fact, Chapman's Iliad figures the relationship between Agamemnon and the Achaean chieftains as a relationship between a monarch and his nobles.
SS: I haven't read his piece all that closely – I shy away from anyone who speaks in the royal "we" – but I find it surprising that someone so fond of writing about the Bush administration can find no "continuity" between the rampant uses of nationalism, militarism and fear that one sees in The Iliad, for example, and American foreign policy of the last five years. I suspect the citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq will find that continuity all too familiar. I mean, is it really so different, the Macedonian army of Alexander the Great advancing on Kirkuk in the third century B.C.E., and the U.S. brigades of George W. Bush doing the same in 2003? Probably not to the people of Kirkuk. I also think it's naive to pretend, just because the terms "monarch" and "nobles" are no longer in use, that the concentrations of power and the disproportionate influence of a privileged class aren't as prevalent today as they were in the past.
BN: So I take it you believe The Iliad still has something to say to the modern reader?
SS: I do, yes. One of its many great and enduring truths, just to take one example, concerns the sinister psychological effects that violence inflicts on both the victim and the aggressor. Our nation would be wise to heed Homer's insight: those who possess power do so only illusorily and fleetingly, and the consequences of our actions will afflict us in turn. This is a fundamental issue in Greek thought – it's contained in the term "Nemesis" – and it lies at the heart of the epic. To my mind, we are "islanded off" from its truth only by a kind of willful ignorance or indifference.
BN: I can think of a number of poets motivated by a similar impulse – Christopher Logue's ongoing work with The Iliad, Michael Longley's "Cease-Fire," a poem that re-imagines the scene of Achilles and Priam's meeting in a sonnet originally published the weekend the Irish peace accords were signed, Seamus Heaney's Irish nationalism in his Beowulf even the Beowulf poet's "translation" of Christianity into the pagan world of the poem. There's the commonplace that each generation needs its own translations, which I understand to mean that we graft our selves — our concerns and fears, even our blindnesses – onto the work of translation, that translation, the works we choose and how we approach them, says as much about us as it does about the work itself.
BN: To go back to the Wills review, you did choose to translate lyric rather than epic. Does lyric provide a space where we also experience continuity with the antique world?
SS: My book begins at the very beginnings of lyric poetry, so it traces the emergence of that form through which Western poets first began to speak in human guise – that is, out from the shadow of heroes and gods – about the concerns of their everyday lives. In Archilochus, for example, we have the first poet to compose whole poems around the day to day of his own world. And in so doing, he also became the first poet to use the lyric as a vehicle for criticizing the social, political, and military structures which governed that world. If anything the early Greek lyrics are even more continuous, even more reflective of those boredoms, joys, protests, and dreams that form, and are formed by, human experience regardless of time and culture.
BN: I'd like you to talk about your practice of translation. How did you get started on this book?
SS: I speak about this in the introduction, and as I say there, the whole project began by happenstance. I started out doing some research on 5appho for a seminar I was planning to teach. That research brought me into contact with other poets of the period, Stesichorus, Xenophanes, Alcman, Alcaeus, poets I'd previously known only in bits and pieces. As I began reading those poets more closely, I grew increasingly curious about the period itself, about the literary and cultural conditions out of which those poets arose. Anyway, one thing led to another, and along the way my curiosity became an interest, and my interest, in turn, became something of an obsession. At that point there was no turning back, despite the enormous commitment in time and energy I realized I would have to make.
BN: What was your relationship with the originals in Greek and the critical apparatus that surrounds those poems? As I understand it, you worked from the Greek originals with en face prose trots toward free verse sketches that were then worked into the poems that appear in the book.
SS: Actually, it was a bit more complicated than that. I'm not a Hellenist and my knowledge of ancient Greek is, at best, rudimentary, so I was wholly dependent on my sources. More often than not I began with the standard texts, the Loeb editions of Paton's Greek Anthology, J. M. Edmonds' Lyra Graeca and Elegy and Iambus, David Campbell's Greek Lyric, Douglas Gerber's Greek Elegiac Poetry, and so on. There were any number of scholarly sources and commentaries I would turn to after that – C. M. Bowra, S. F. Gow, D. L. Page, among others – depending on the poet and the poem. So before I began to do anything, I'd have in front of me a substantial amount of material to work from. That material helped me sort out things like scholarly interpolations and interpretive renderings, and it gave me a fair sense of how the poems moved, at the literal level, from word to word. At that point I'd generally begun sketching out something in my head, but before I wrote anything down, I searched out all the literary translations into English that I could find of that particular poem. Sometimes there weren't any to be found, sometimes, as with Sappho, there was a long and distinguished history to draw on. Those too I would copy and keep in front of me as I wrestled with my own version. As for the formal structures of the poems, I worked in a variety of meters and stanzaic shapes, some with Greek origins, some from altogether different traditions – decasyllabic couplets, elegiac stanzas, sapphics, accentuals, even, on one or two occasions, forms as remote as renga and haiku. So free verse was less an intermediate form than it was the unformed substance I would work up into verse, sometimes in fact into free verse itself.
BN: What guided your choices in this matter? Some choices, the elegiac stanza, sapphics, even blank verse, seem warranted by the source material, while others, such as accentuals or haiku, seem wildly and wonderfully assertive.
SS: Several things come to mind here. The first is that ancient Greek and modern English possess such different phonic qualities, that English versions of Greek meters can hardly reproduce the sound or sense of the originals. That said, I can certainly understand how some of those choices might still seem a bit assertive. But if we think of poetic forms as shapes for particular kinds of thoughts – if we agree, for example, that there's a particular kind of thought that might be contained in a sonnet but not in an ode or a villanelle or a haiku – then perhaps those choices will seem less imposed than discovered. For what I was trying to do, albeit more at an intuitive than a conscious level, was find a form that fit the "thought" of whatever text I was working with. And since many of those texts exist only in fragments, I was searching for poetic structures that might've been different if I'd had the poem as a whole. That Western texts might find poetic forms derived from non-Western traditions – if that's part of what appears assertive about them – doesn't really feel so unnatural to me, for it reflects my belief in the interconnectedness of all literatures at all times, a belief, by the way, I hold very dear.
BN: One of the decisions you made was to translate Sapphic fragments and bring them together so the reader might have the sense that you've "made" a poem from those fragments. Yet you claim that those fragments may not be a poem as much as they are poetry. That's a compelling but elusive distinction. Would you comment a bit more on this idea?
SS: I'm afraid the distinction is a good deal plainer than it seems. If you were to encounter a fragment from Hopkins, say, "It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; it gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil," you would immediately recognize it as poetry. But you might not recognize it as a poem – for one thing, you wouldn't have any idea what the "it" is that possesses these remarkable attributes. And yet, if the rest of the poem, God forbid, had somehow been lost or destroyed, that passage, in my opinion, would still be worth retaining. And perhaps some translator in Krakow or Buenos Aires or Hyderabad would find it sufficiently worthy to render it another tongue. What he or she would be translating, then, would be poetry, but not a poem. As for the first part of your question, by juxtaposing certain fragments of Sappho, I certainly didn't mean to suggest that I was making them into a poem – they don't have that coherence, in any case – simply that I was inviting connections between them that made the cluster somehow emotionally richer than its parts. You might say I think of them as a small handful of beach glass.
BN: What principles of selection guided your choices? How did you come to decide what you would exclude from your anthology?
SS: [Laughing] I suppose I was guided by what Freud called the pleasure principle. I chose those poems I found pleasurable and left out those I didn't. I wanted to put together a collection of poems and poetic fragments, first and foremost, and I had no interest in making a book that was comprehensive in any broad literary-historical sense.
BN: Would you care to discuss something in detail that you translated but decided not to include? I don't think I've ever seen someone discuss a "failed" or discarded choice.
BN: Your working title was Lyre, Lyre, Lyre. It's been my experience that a working title, even if ultimately discarded, acts as focus while the work is in progress. What was it that was so attractive to you about this Sapphic fragment?
SS: I still love the suggestive possibilities of that title. Not only does it name the musical instrument that traditionally accompanied the lyric poem, but the repetition carries within it a hint of that ecstatic power which suffuses lyric poetry in general. I'm sorry to say, the publisher thought that for a book like this an explicit rather than a suggestive title was better. This had something to do with marketing the book, and, since I don't know anything about such things, I quietly acquiesced. The fragment now appears as one of the epigraphs to the introduction.
BN: Did the play on "liar" figure into your thinking at all? I can't help but imagine that these early lyrics are exactly the beautiful lies that would've been banned in Plato's republic. A poem in which a warrior throws away his shield isn't one a philosopher-king wants his soldiers reading as they go into battle.
SS: It's funny you mention that because I'm never able to say that title without thinking of the pun – though of course that pun doesn't exist in ancient Greek – and I've often mused on its implications for both poetry and translation. The connection you make with Plato and the Archilochus poem hadn't occurred to me, though I think it's splendid, and I will add it to my growing list of associations.
BN: You call these poems "collaborations" that seek "to evoke rather than mimic." In this formulation there seems to be an implicit critique of some of the standard discourse about translation, for example, the license/fidelity binary that governs so much of translation theory. Would you call your translations "faithful" to the originals? Does this question even matter to you?
SS: As I said before, I was wholly dependent on my sources, on what might be called the "after-life" of the originals. This is a bit more significant with the early Greek poems than it is, say, with poems from the Italian Renaissance, for the early Greek poems come out of an oral tradition, so oftentimes we have them only by virtue of citations embedded in the texts of later writers, historians, scholiasts, and grammarians. Which is to say, by the time they come to us, those poems have already passed through many hands and many voices, so I see my versions simply as an ongoing part of that "after-life," that never-ending collaboration. For this reason, I have little interest in taking sides in that binary debate you mention. The continued life of a literary text, in my opinion, always requires both sides. In my introduction I quote the distinguished classicist D.S. Carne-Ross, who points out the obvious fact that, without scholarship, we would neither have nor be able to read a classical text. Yet he also makes clear that, in order to maintain that text as "a vital presence," we must have poets and good readers of poetry from one generation to another. To remain a living thing, poetry must always be stamped, as Horace observed, with the "mint-mark of the day."
BN: The first time I read these translations I thought, "They sound like Santos." Of course, that was complicated as I lived longer with the poems, but I do take a strange delight in that first impulse, that these poems sound through your line and voice and sensibility.
SS: To be honest, I'm never quite sure what people mean when they talk about "voice" in poetry. At one moment it seems to refer to some fixed attribute, like eye color, at another to a set of deliberate stylistic choices, like eliminating uppercase letters. If it's the former, then I suppose that "sound through" is inevitable; if the latter, then it's certainly something to be mindful of – though not necessarily avoided – when translations are involved.
BN: How do these translations relate to your own poems? What did a life filled with reading and writing poems bring to bear on the work of translation? Does translation pressure your own writing?
SS: I'm not sure I know the answer to those questions. In some way all the work seems the same work – reading, writing, translating. There are differences, of course, but they're so obvious they're not worth mentioning. At a deeper level, I suspect that each is nourished by the others, that each would be, in my case anyway, a smaller thing without the presence of the others. And no doubt there are other things one might add to that list – teaching, love, travel, for example. But how those interminglings occur remains a profound and abiding mystery.
Meridian
Issue 16
Fall/Winter 2005
University of Virginia
Managing Editor: Mike Rutherglen
Poetry Editor: Ryan Fox
Fiction Editor: Anna Shearer
© 2005 by Meridian
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Poetry Daily / Amazon.com
Selected books available by Sherod Santos:
Greek Lyric Poetry: A New Translation — Hardcover
The Perishing — Paperback
