This Craft of Verse by Jorge Luis Borges.srt

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This Craft of Verse by Jorge Luis Borges. Following are the six lectures that

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Jorge Luis Borges delivered at Harvard University in the fall of 1967 and the

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spring of 1968. Born in 1899, he was by this time almost completely blind and

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thus addressed his audience without the aid of written notes. He learned his

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fluent English from his paternal grandmother, who had come to Buenos Aires

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from Staffordshire. His mother, a translator, and his father, a professor of

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psychology and modern languages, also knew English. These recordings, only

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lately rediscovered in the Harvard University archives, testify to his love

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of the language as well as his wit, erudition, and remarkable literary

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sensibility. Borges died in 1986.

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Lecture 1. The Riddle of Poetry. Ladies and gentlemen, I feel quite overwhelmed

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by the very generous injustice of Juan Marichal, but at the outset I would like

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to give you a fair warning of what to expect, or rather of what not to expect

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from me. I find that I have made a slip in the very title of my first lecture.

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The title is, if I have not mistaken, "The Riddle of Poetry," and the stress, of

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course, is on the first word, the word "riddle." So that you may think that the

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riddle is all-important, or what might still be worse, you may think that I have

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deluded myself into believing that I have somehow discovered the true reading

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of the riddle. The truth is that I have no revelations to offer. I have spent my

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life reading, analyzing, writing, or trying my hand at writing, and enjoying.

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This is the most important thing of all, drinking in poetry, and I have come to no

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final conclusion about it. Indeed, every time I am faced with a blank page, I feel

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that I have to rediscover literature for myself, that the past is of no avail,

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whatever, to me. So, as I have said, I have only my perplexities to offer you. I am

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nearing 70. I have given the major part of my life to literature, and I can only

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offer you doubts. The great English writer and dreamer Thomas de Quincy wrote,

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in some of the thousands of pages of his 14 volumes, that to discover a new

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problem was quite as important as to discovering the solution of an old one.

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But I cannot even offer you that. I can only offer you time-honored perplexities.

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And yet, why need I worry about that? What is the history of philosophy but a

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history of the perplexities of the Hindus, of the Chinese, of the Greeks, of

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the schoolmen, of Bishop Berkeley, of Hume, of Schopenhauer, and so on? I merely

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wish to share those perplexities with you. I have dipped into books of aesthetics,

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but I had an uncomfortable feeling that I was reading the works of astronomers

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who had never looked at the stars. I mean that they were writing about poetry as

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if poetry were a task and not, as it really is, a passion and a joy. For

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example, I have read with great respect Benedito Croce's book on aesthetics, and

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I have been handed the definition that poetry and language are an expression.

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Now, if we think of an expression of something, then we are landed back into

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the old problem of form and matter. And if we think about the expression of

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nothing in particular, that gives us really nothing. So that we receive

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respectfully that definition, and then we go on to something else. We go on to

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poetry. We go on to life, and life is, I am sure, made of poetry. Poetry is not

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alien. Poetry is, as we shall see, lurking around the corner. It may spring on us at

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any moment. Now, we are apt to fall into a common confusion. We think, for

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example, that if we study Homer or the Divine Comedy or Fray Luis de Leon or

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Macbeth, we are studying poetry. But books are only occasions for the poetry. I

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think Emerson wrote somewhere that a library is a kind of magic cabinet. It is

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full of dead men, but those dead men can be brought, can be reborn, can be brought

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into life when you open their pages. I spoke a few minutes ago of Bishop Barclay.

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Barclay, who may remind you, was a prophet of the greatness of America. And Barclay

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wrote that the taste of the apple is neither in the apple itself—the apple

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cannot taste itself—nor in the mouth of the eater. It requires a contact between

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them. The same thing happens to a book or to a collection of books, to a library.

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What is a book in itself? A book is a physical object in a world of physical

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objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the reader, the right reader, comes

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along and the words, or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words

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themselves are mere symbols, spring into life and we have a resurrection of the

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world. And I am reminded now of a poem that you all know by heart, and perhaps

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you may never have noticed how strange it is. For perfect things in poetry do

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not seem strange, they seem inevitable. And so we hardly thank the writer for

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his pains. I am thinking of a sonnet written more than a hundred years ago by

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a young man in London, in Hampstead, I think, a young man who died of lung

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disease, John Keats, and of his famous and perhaps hackneyed sonnet, "On First

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Looking into Chapman's Homer." Now, what is strange about that poem, and I only

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thought about it three or four days ago when I was pondering over my lecture, is

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the fact that it is a poem written on the poetic experience itself. You know it

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by heart, and yet I would like you to hear once more the surge and thunder of

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its lines, of its final lines. "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a

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new planet swims into his skin, or like stout Cortes when with eager eyes he

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stared on the Pacific, and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise,

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silent upon a peak in Darien." So here we have the poetic experience itself. We

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have Chapman, George Chapman, the friend and rival of Shakespeare, being dead and

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suddenly coming into life, suddenly coming back into life when John Keats

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read his "Iliads" or his "Odysseys." I think it was of George Chapman, but I am not a

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Shakespearean scholar, that Shakespeare was thinking when he wrote, "Was it the

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proud full sail of his great verse bound for the prize of all too precious you?"

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And there is a word that seems to me very important, and the word is "on first

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looking" into Chapman's Homer. Because this first may, I think, prove most helpful to

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us. At the very moment when I was going over those mighty lines of Chapman, I was

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thinking that perhaps I was only being loyal to my memory. Perhaps the real

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thrill I got out of the verses of Keats lay in that distant moment of my

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childhood in Buenos Aires when I first heard my father reading them up aloud,

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and when the fact that poetry, that language, was not only a medium for

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communication but could also be a passion and the joy was revealed to me.

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I do not think I understood the words, but I felt that something was happening

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to me, was happening not to my mere intelligence but to my whole being, to my

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flesh and blood. Now let's go back to the words "on first looking" into Chapman's

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Homer. I wonder if John Keats felt that thrill when he had gone through the many

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books of the Iliads and the Odyssey. I think the first reading of a poem is the

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true one, and after that we delude ourselves into the belief that the

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sensation, that the impression is repeated. But as I say, it may be a mere

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loyalty, a mere trick of the memory, a mere confusion between our passion and

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the passion we once felt. Thus it might be said that poetry is a new experience

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every time. Every time I read a poem, the experience occurs or happens to occur,

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and that is poetry. I read once that the American painter Whistler was in a

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cafe in Paris and people were discussing the influence of heredity, of the

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environment, of the political state of the times, and so on, on the artist. And

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then Whistler said, "Art happens." That is to say, there is something mysterious

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about art. And I would like to take his words, but to take them in a new sense. I

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should say, "Art happens every time we read a poem." And this may help us to

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clear away—I hope I am mistaken here—the time-honored notion of the classics, the

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idea of everlasting books, of books where one may always find beauty. Perhaps I may

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give a brief survey of the history of books. As far as I remember, the Greeks

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had no use for books or no great use for them. It is a fact, indeed, that most of

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the great teachers of mankind have been not writers but speakers. Let us think

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of Pythagoras, of Christ, Socrates, of the Buddha, and so on. And since I have

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spoken of Socrates, I would like to say something about Plato. I remember Bernard

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Shaw said that Plato was the dramatist who invented Socrates, even as the four

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evangelists were the dramatists who invented Jesus. This may be going too far,

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but there is a certain truth in it. In one of the dialogues of Plato, he speaks

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about books in a rather disparaging way. And he says, "What is a book? A book seems

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like a picture to be a living being, and yet if we ask it something it does not

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answer, and then we see it is dead." And in order to make the book into a living

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thing, he invented, happily for us, the Platonic dialogue, the dialogue that

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forestalls the reader's doubts and questions. But we might say also that Plato

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was wistful about Socrates, that after Socrates' death, he would say to himself,

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"Now, what would Socrates have said about this particular doubt of mine?" And then,

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in order to hear once again the voice of the master he loved, he wrote the

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dialogues. In some of these dialogues, Socrates stands for the truth. In others,

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Plato has dramatized his many moods, and some of those dialogues come to no

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conclusion, whatever, because Plato was thinking as he wrote them. He did not

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know the last page when he wrote the first. He was letting his mind wander,

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and he was dramatizing that mind into many people. But I suppose his chief aim

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was the illusion that, despite the fact that Socrates had drunk the hemlock,

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Socrates was still with him. I feel that to be true, because I have had many

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masters in my life. I am proud of being a disciple, a good disciple, I hope. When I

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think of my father, when I think of the great Jewish Spanish author, Rafael

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Cancinos, a sense, when I think of Macedonio Fernandez, I would also like to

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hear their voices. And sometimes I train my voice into a trick of imitating their

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voices in order that I may think as they would have thought. They are always about

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me. There is another sentence, one of the fathers of the church. He said that it

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was as dangerous to put a book into the hands of an ignorant man as to put a

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sword into the hands of children. So that books to the ancients were mere

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makeshifts. In one of his many letters, Seneca wrote against large libraries, and

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Schopenhauer wrote long afterwards that many people mistook the buying of a book

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for the buying of the contents of the book. Sometimes, looking at the many books

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they have at home, I feel I shall die before I have come to the end of them.

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And yet, I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. When I go, when I walk

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inside the library, I find a book on one of my hobbies, for example, Old English or

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Old Norse poetry, and then I say to myself, "What a pity I can't buy that

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book because I already have a copy at home."

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And then, after the ancients, there came from the East a different idea of a book.

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There came the idea of holy writ, of books written by the Holy Ghost. There came

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Korans, Bibles, and so on. And following the example of Spengler in his

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"Untergang des Abendlandes," in his "Decline of the West," I shall take the Koran as

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an example. For, if I am not mistaken, the Muslim theologians think of the Koran as

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being prior to the creation of the world. The Koran is written in Arabic, but the

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Muslims think of it as being prior to the language. Indeed, I have read that they

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think of the Koran not as a work of God, but as an attribute of God, even as His

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justice or His mercy or His whole wisdom are. And thus there came into Europe the

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idea of holy writ. And this idea is, I think, a not wholly mistaken one. Bernard

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Shaw, and I am always going back to Bernard Shaw, was asked once whether he

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really thought that the Bible was a work of the Holy Ghost. And he said, "I think

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the Holy Ghost has written not only the Bible, but all books." This is rather

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harsh on the Holy Ghost, of course. "But all books worth rereading, I suppose."

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This, I think, is what Homer meant when he spoke to the muse. And this is what the

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Hebrews and what Milton meant when they talked of the Holy Ghost, whose temple is

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the upright and pure heart of man. And in our less beautiful mythology, we speak of

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the subliminal self, of the subconscious. Of course, those words are rather uncouth

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if we compare them with the muses or with the Holy Ghost. But still, we have to

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put up with the mythology of our time. For the world means essentially the same

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thing. Now, we come to the notion of the classics.

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But I think that a book is really not an immortal object to be picked up and duly

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worshipped, but rather an occasion for beauty. And it has to be so, for language

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is shifting all the time. I am very fond of etymologies, and I may recall to you

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rather, for I'm sure you know much more about these things than I do, some rather

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curious etymologies. For example, we have in English the verb "to tease." That

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word is a mischievous word. It means kind of joke. And yet, in Old English, "tézane"

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meant to wound with a sword, even as in French, "navrer" meant to thrust a sword

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through somebody. Or let us take a different word, the word "threat." Well, in

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Old English, as you may find out from the very first verses of Beowulf, a threat,

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a "threat," meant an angry crowd. That is to say, the cause of the threat. And

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thus, we might go on endlessly. But now, let us consider some particular verses.

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And I take my examples from the English, since I have a particular love for the

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English literature, though my knowledge is, of course, limited. There are cases

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where poetry creates itself. For example, I don't think that the words "creators"

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and "bodkin" are especially beautiful. Indeed, I should say they were rather

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uncouth.

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But if we think of when he himself might his creators make with a bare bodkin,

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we are reminded of the great speech of Hamlet. And thus, the context creates

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poetry for those words, those words that no one would ever dare to use nowadays,

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because they would be mere quotations. And then there are other examples, and

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perhaps simpler ones. Let us take the title of one of the most famous books in

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the world, "Historia del Ingenioso Hidalgo, Don Quixote," or "Don Quixote," as I

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suppose Cervantes would pronounce it, "de la Mancha." Now, the word "hidalgo" has today a

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peculiar dignity all its own. And yet, when Cervantes wrote it, the word "hidalgo"

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meant, I suppose, a country gentleman. As to the name "Quixote," it was meant to be a

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rather ridiculous word, as the names of many of the characters in Dickens, names

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such as "pickwick" and "swiveler" and "chiselwit" and "twist" and "squeers"

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and "quilp" and so on. And then you have "de la Mancha." Now, this sounds noble and

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Castilian to us, but when Cervantes wrote it down, he intended the word to sound,

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perhaps—I ask the apology of any citizen of that city who may be here—as if he

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wrote "Don Quixote of Kansas City." And yet, nowadays, I'm not speaking against

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Kansas. Let us say "Pewahaw" or "Buenos Aires." And yet, you see how those words

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have changed, how they have been ennobled. You see a strange fact. That's because

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the old soldier, Miguel de Cervantes, poked mild fun at "la Mancha." Now "la

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Mancha" is one of the everlasting words of literature.

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And let us take another example of verses that have changed. I am thinking of a

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sonnet of Rossetti, a sonnet that labors under the not-too-beautiful name

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"Inclusiveness." But the sonnet begins thus. "What man has bent, were his son

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sleep to brood? How that face shall watch his when cold it lies? Or thought, as his

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own mother kissed his eyes, of what her kiss was, when his father would." Now I

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think that those verses are more vivid, perhaps, than when they were written some

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eighty years ago, because the cinema has taught us to follow quick sequences of

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visual images. And thus we have in the first line, "What man has bent, were his

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son sleep to brood?" There we have the father bending over the face of the

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sleeping son. And then in the second image, as in a good film, we have the same

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images reversed. We see the son bending over the face of that dead man, his

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father. And perhaps our recent study of psychology has made us more sensitive to

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those verses. "Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes, of what her kiss

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was, when his father would." There is, of course, the beauty of the soft English

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vowels. Brood, would. And the additional beauty of would being by itself. Not

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would her, but simply would by itself. The world goes on ringing. Here we have one

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example. And there is also a different kind of beauty. Let us take an adjective

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that once was commonplace. I have no Greek, but I think that the Greek is

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"Oinopa pontos." And the common English rendering is "the wine dark sea." I suppose the

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word "dark" is slipped in to make things easier for the reader. Perhaps it would

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be "the winey sea" or something of the kind. But I am sure that when Homer, or

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when the many Greeks we call Homer, wrote it, they were simply thinking of the sea.

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I mean, the adjective was straightforward. But nowadays, after trying many

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fancy adjectives, if I, or if any of you, write in a poem "the wine dark sea," this

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is not a mere repetition of what the Greeks wrote. It is rather a going back

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to tradition. It means, rather, that when we speak of the wine dark sea, we are

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thinking of Homer and of the many centuries, perhaps the 30 centuries,

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between us and Homer. So that though the words may be much the same, when we write

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"the wine dark sea," we're really writing something quite different from what

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Homer was writing. So that thus, the language is shifting. The Latins knew all

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about that. And the reader is shifting also. And this brings us back to the old

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metaphor of the Greek. The metaphor, or rather, the truth about no man going

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down twice to the same river. And there is, I think, an element of fear here.

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Because at first, we are apt to think of the river as flowing. We think, well, of

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course, the river goes on, but the water is changing. And then, with a beginning

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sense of awe, we feel that we also are changing, that we are shifting and as

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evanescent as the river is. But we need not worry too much about the fate of the

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classics, because beauty is always with us. And here, I would love to quote another

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verse, perhaps by a now forgotten poet, Browning. He says, "Just when we are safest,

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there's a sunset touch, a chorus ending from Euripides, somebody's death." But the

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first verse is enough. "Just when we are safest." That is to say, beauty is lurking

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all about us. It may come to us in the name of a film. It may come to us in some

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popular lyric. We may even find it in the pages of a great and famous writer.

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And since I have spoken of a dead master of mine, Raphael Cancinos Assens, maybe

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this is the second time you hear his name. I don't quite know why he's forgotten.

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Remember that Cancinos Assens wrote a very fine prose poem wherein he asked God

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to defend him, to save him from beauty, because he says, "There is too much beauty

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in the world." And he thought that beauty was overwhelming it. And though I do not

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know if I've been a particularly happy man, but I hope I'm going to be happy at

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the right age, at the ripe age of 67, I still think that beauty is all around us.

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And as to the fact of a poem being written by a great poet or not, this is only

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important to historians of literature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument,

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that I have written a beautiful line. Let us take this as a working hypothesis.

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Once I have written it, that line does me no good, because, as I already said,

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that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps,

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as I often find out, I'm merely quoting something I read some time ago.

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And then it's a rediscovering. So that perhaps it is better that a poet

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should be nameless. I spoke about the wine dark sea, and now, as my hobby is Old

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English, and I'm afraid if you have the courage or the patience to come back to

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some of my lectures, you may have more Old English inflicted on you,

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I would like to recall some lines that I think beautiful. I will say them firstly

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in English, and then in the stark and vowelled Old English of the ninth century.

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"It snowed from the north, rime bound the fields, hail fell on earth,

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the coldest of seeds, northern snow, grim rusan bond, hail fell on earth,

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corna, caldest." Now, going back to what I said about Homer, when the poet wrote

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that, he was merely recording things that had happened. This was, of course,

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very strange in the ninth century, when people thought in terms of mythology,

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of allegorical images, and so on. He was merely telling very commonplace things.

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But nowadays, when we read, "It snowed from the north, rime bound the fields,

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hail fell on earth, the coldest of seeds," there is an added poetry.

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There is the poetry of a nameless Saxon having written those verses by the shores

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of the North Sea in Northumberland, I think, and of those verses coming to us

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so straightforward, so plain, and so pathetic throughout the centuries.

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So that we have both cases. There is the case, and it hardly dwell upon it,

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when time debases a poem, when the words lose their beauty.

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But there is also the case when time enriches and does not debase a poem.

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I have talked at the beginning about definitions. And to end up, I would like

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to say that we make a very common mistake when we think that we are ignorant

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of something because we are unable to define it. But if we are in a

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Chestertonian mood, that is one of the best moods to be in, I think,

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then we might say that we can only define something when we know nothing

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whatever about it. For example, if I have to define poetry,

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then if I feel rather shaky about it, if I'm not too sure about it,

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then I say something like, "Poetry is the expression of the beautiful

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through the medium of words artfully woven together."

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And that definition may be good enough for a dictionary or for a textbook,

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but we all feel that it's rather feeble. At the same time, there's something

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far more important, something that may encourage us to go on,

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not only trying our hand at writing poetry, but enjoying it and feeling that we know

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all about it. And that is that we know what poetry is.

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We know it so well that we cannot define it in other words,

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even as we cannot define the taste of coffee, the color of red or of yellow,

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or the meaning of anger, of love, of hatred, of the sunrise,

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of the sunset, of our love for our country.

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Those things are so deep in us that they can only be expressed by those

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common symbols that we share. So why should we need other words?

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You may not agree with examples I have chosen. Perhaps tomorrow I may think

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of better examples. I may think I might have quoted other lines.

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But as you can pick and choose your own examples, it is not needful that you care

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greatly about Homer or about the Anglo-Saxon poets or about Rossetti,

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because everyone knows where to find poetry. And when it comes,

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he feels the touch of poetry. He feels that particular tingling

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of poetry. And to end with, I have a quotation from St. Augustine.

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And this comes in very fitly, I think. St. Augustine said, "What is time?

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If people do not ask me what time is, I know. If they ask me what it is,

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then I do not know. And I feel in the same way about poetry,

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when it's hardly trouble about definitions." This time, I have a rather

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sea, because I am no good at all at abstract thinking. But in our next lectures,

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if you're good enough to put up with me, then we'll take more concrete examples.

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I will speak about the metaphor, about world music, about the possibility

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or impossibility of verse translation, about the telling of a tale.

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That is to say, about epic poetry, the oldest and perhaps the bravest kind

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of poetry. And then I will end with something that I can hardly divine now.

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I will end with a lecture called "A Poet's Creed," wherein I will try to justify

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my own life and the confidence some of you may have on me, despite this rather

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awkward and fumbling first lecture of mine.

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[ Applause ]

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>> Lecture 2, The Metaphor.

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>> Ladies and gentlemen, as the subject of today's talk is a metaphor,

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I shall begin by a metaphor. And this first of the many metaphors,

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I shall try to recall, comes from the Far East, from China.

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If I am not mistaken, the Chinese call the world the 10,000 things,

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or this depends on the taste and fancy of the translator, the 10,000 beings.

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Now, we may accept, I suppose, this very conservative estimate, 10,000,

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for of course there are more than 10,000 ants, than 10,000 men,

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than 10,000 hopes, fears, or nightmares in the world.

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But if we accept this number, 10,000, and if we think that all metaphors

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are made by linking two different things together, then had we time enough,

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we might work out an almost unbelievable sum of possible metaphors.

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I have forgotten my algebra, but I think that the sum should be 10,000

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multiplied by 99,999, and so on. Of course, the sum of possible combinations

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is not endless, but it staggers the imagination. And so we might be led to think,

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why on earth should poets all over the world and all over time

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be using the same stock metaphors when there are so many possible combinations?

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The Argentine poet, Lugones, wrote way back in the year 1909,

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that he thought that poets were always using the same metaphors,

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and that he would try his hand at discovering new metaphors for the moon.

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And in fact, he concocted some many hundreds of them.

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He also said, this is in forward to a book called Lunario Sentimental,

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that every word is a dead metaphor. This statement is, of course, a metaphor.

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And yet I think that we all feel the difference between dead and living metaphors.

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If we take any good etymological dictionary, I am thinking of my old unknown friend,

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Dr. Skeetch, and if we look up any word, we are sure to find a metaphor

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tucked away somewhere. For example, the word threat meant,

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you can find this in the very first lines of Beowulf, freat meant an angry mob.

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But now the word is given to the effect and not to the cause.

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Then we have the word king. King was originally kuning,

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and this meant a man who stood for the king, for the people.

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So etymologically, king, kinsman, and gentleman are the same word.

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And yet, if I say the king sat in his counting house, counting out his money,

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we don't think of the word king as being a metaphor.

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In fact, if we go in for abstract thinking, we have to forget that words were metaphors.

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We have to forget, for example, that in the word consider,

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there is a suggestion of astrology. Because in consider, we're thinking of making a horoscope.

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So what is important about the metaphor, I should say, is the fact of its being felt

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by the reader or the hearer as a metaphor.

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And I will confine this talk to metaphors that are felt as metaphors by the reader,

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not to such words as king or threat.

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And we might go on, perhaps, if forever.

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In the first case, I would like to take some stock patterns of metaphor.

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I use the word pattern because the metaphors I will quote will be to the imagination quite different,

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and yet to the logical thinker, they would be almost the same.

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So that we might speak of them as equations.

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And let us take the first that comes to my mind.

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Let us take the stock comparison, the time-honored comparison of eyes and stars,

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or inversely, of stars and eyes.

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And the first example I remember comes from the Greek anthology.

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And I think Plato is supposed to have written it.

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The verses, I have no Greek, run more or less as follows.

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"I wish I were the night, and so that I might watch your sleep with a thousand eyes."

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Now here, of course, what we feel is the tenderness of the lover.

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What we feel is his wish to be able to see his beloved from many points at once.

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But we feel the tenderness behind those verses.

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Now let us take another and less illustrious example.

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The stars look down.

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Now here, of course, we have, if we take the logical thinking seriously,

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here, of course, we have the same metaphor.

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And yet, the effect on our imagination is quite different.

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Because the stars look down, do not make us think of tenderness.

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They rather give the idea of generations and of generations of men toiling on.

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And the stars look down with a kind of lofty indifference.

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And we'll take another, a different example.

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This is one of the verses, one of the stanzas that have most struck me.

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They come from a poem of Chesterton called "A Second Childhood."

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And therein we read, "But I shall not be too old to see in almost night arise a cloud

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that is larger than the world, and a monster made of eyes."

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Not a monster full of eyes.

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We know those monsters from the revelation of St. John.

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But this is far more awful, a monster made of eyes.

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As if his eyes were the living tissue of him.

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Well, now we have seen those three images.

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And they can all, of course, be traced back to the same pattern.

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But the point I would like to emphasize, and this is really one of the two important points

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in my talk, is that though the pattern is essentially the same, yet in the first case,

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in the Greek example, "I wish I were the night," what the poet makes us feel is his tenderness,

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his anxiety.

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In the second, we feel a kind of divine indifference to things human.

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And in the third, the night, the familiar night, becomes a nightmare.

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And now, let us take another pattern, a different one.

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Let us take the idea of time flowing, flowing even as a river does.

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And the first example comes out of a poem that Tennyson wrote when he was, I think,

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13 or 14.

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Then he destroyed it.

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But happily for us, a line survives, a single line.

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I think you can find it in Tennyson's biography written by Andrew Lang.

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The line is this, "Time flowing in the middle of the night."

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I think that Tennyson has chosen his time very wisely, because all things are silent.

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Men are sleeping, and yet time is flowing noiselessly on.

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This is one example.

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There is also a novel, I'm sure you're thinking of it, called simply "Time and the River."

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And the mere putting together of the two words suggests the metaphor, time and the river,

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they both flow on.

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And then of course, that famous sentence of a Greek philosopher about no man steps down

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twice to the same river.

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And here, we have a beginning of terror, because at first we think of the river as flowing

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00:56:48,820 --> 00:56:50,060
on.

415
00:56:50,060 --> 00:56:52,620
The drops of water are different.

416
00:56:52,620 --> 00:57:02,860
And then we are made to feel that we are the river, that we are as fugitive as the river.

417
00:57:02,860 --> 00:57:12,100
And we have of course, those verses by Manrique, "Nuestras vidas son los rios que van a dar

418
00:57:12,100 --> 00:57:14,980
en la mar, que es el morir."

419
00:57:14,980 --> 00:57:23,340
Our lives are the rivers that flow into that sea, death.

420
00:57:23,340 --> 00:57:27,700
This statement is not too impressive in English.

421
00:57:27,700 --> 00:57:34,260
I wish I could remember how Longfellow translated it in his "Coplas de Manrique."

422
00:57:34,260 --> 00:57:40,020
But of course, and we shall go into this question in another lecture.

423
00:57:40,020 --> 00:57:48,300
Of course, behind the stock metaphor, we have the grave music of the words.

424
00:57:48,300 --> 00:57:54,180
"Nuestras vidas son los rios que van a dar en la mar, que es el morir.

425
00:57:54,180 --> 00:57:58,580
Allá van los señorios derechos hacia acabar y consumir."

426
00:57:58,580 --> 00:57:59,940
And so on.

427
00:57:59,940 --> 00:58:06,940
But the metaphor, of course, is exactly the same in these cases.

428
00:58:06,940 --> 00:58:15,620
And now, we will go on to something very trite, something that may cause you to smile.

429
00:58:15,620 --> 00:58:25,020
The comparison of women to flowers and flowers to women also.

430
00:58:25,020 --> 00:58:31,660
Here, of course, there are far too many easy examples.

431
00:58:31,660 --> 00:58:35,660
But there is one I would like to recall.

432
00:58:35,660 --> 00:58:44,780
Perhaps it may not be familiar to you from that unfinished masterwork, Robert Louis Stevenson's

433
00:58:44,780 --> 00:58:47,780
"Weir of Hermiston."

434
00:58:47,780 --> 00:58:54,820
Stevenson tells of his hero going into a church in Scotland.

435
00:58:54,820 --> 00:59:01,980
Then he sees a girl, a lovely girl, were made to feel.

436
00:59:01,980 --> 00:59:09,020
And one feels that he's already beginning to fall in love with her, that he's about

437
00:59:09,020 --> 00:59:10,860
to fall in love with her.

438
00:59:10,860 --> 00:59:22,020
Because he looks at her, she... and then he thinks.

439
00:59:22,020 --> 00:59:32,500
He thinks whether there is an immortal soul within that beautiful frame, or whether she

440
00:59:32,500 --> 00:59:40,420
is a mere animal, the color of flowers.

441
00:59:40,420 --> 00:59:50,300
The word, the brutality of the word animal is, of course, destroyed by the color of flowers.

442
00:59:50,300 --> 00:59:55,060
I don't think we need any other examples of this pattern.

443
00:59:55,060 --> 01:00:03,060
Of course, it can be found in all ages, in all tongues, in all literatures.

444
01:00:03,060 --> 01:00:11,580
Now we will go on to another of the essential patterns of metaphor.

445
01:00:11,580 --> 01:00:18,460
The pattern of life being a dream.

446
01:00:18,460 --> 01:00:24,860
The feeling that comes over us of life being a dream.

447
01:00:24,860 --> 01:00:36,220
And the evident example that comes to us is, we are such stuff as dreams are made on.

448
01:00:36,220 --> 01:00:44,260
Now it may sound like a blasphemy, but I love Shakespeare too much to care about that.

449
01:00:44,260 --> 01:00:51,100
But I think that here, if we care to look at it, and I don't think we should look at

450
01:00:51,100 --> 01:00:58,540
it too closely, we should rather be grateful to Shakespeare for this and his many other

451
01:00:58,540 --> 01:00:59,540
gifts.

452
01:00:59,540 --> 01:01:09,060
If we care to look at it, I think there is a slight, a very slight contradiction between

453
01:01:09,060 --> 01:01:21,980
the fact of our lives being dreamlike or having a dreamlike essence in them and the rather

454
01:01:21,980 --> 01:01:30,100
sweeping statement, we are such stuff as dreams are made on.

455
01:01:30,100 --> 01:01:36,940
Because if we are really dreams, or if we are merely dreamers of dreams, then I wonder

456
01:01:36,940 --> 01:01:42,020
if we can make such sweeping statements.

457
01:01:42,020 --> 01:01:48,740
I mean, this sentence of Shakespeare belongs rather to philosophy or to metaphysics than

458
01:01:48,740 --> 01:01:49,740
to poetry.

459
01:01:49,740 --> 01:01:57,220
Though of course, it is heightened, it is lifted up into poetry by the context.

460
01:01:57,220 --> 01:02:06,740
Now I will take another example of the same pattern by a great German poet, a minor poet

461
01:02:06,740 --> 01:02:15,780
besides Shakespeare, but I suppose all poets are minor besides two or three of them.

462
01:02:15,780 --> 01:02:26,540
I remember reading that very famous piece by Walter von der Vogelweide, and I suppose

463
01:02:26,540 --> 01:02:29,780
I should say it thus.

464
01:02:29,780 --> 01:02:33,740
I wonder how my Middle German goes, but you'll excuse me.

465
01:02:33,740 --> 01:02:39,740
"Is mir mein Leben getraumet oder ist es wahr?

466
01:02:39,740 --> 01:02:44,740
Have I dreamt my life or was it a true one?"

467
01:02:44,740 --> 01:02:52,420
And I think that this comes nearer to what the poet is trying to say, because instead

468
01:02:52,420 --> 01:02:56,940
of a sweeping affirmation, we have a question.

469
01:02:56,940 --> 01:02:59,180
The poet is wondering.

470
01:02:59,180 --> 01:03:05,220
This has happened to all of us, but we are not worried as Walter von der Vogelweide did.

471
01:03:05,220 --> 01:03:13,540
He's asking himself, "Is mir mein Leben getraumet oder ist es wahr?"

472
01:03:13,540 --> 01:03:28,940
And this hesitation gives us that dreamlike essence of life, I think.

473
01:03:28,940 --> 01:03:37,460
I don't remember whether in my last lecture, because this is a sentence I'm quoting over

474
01:03:37,460 --> 01:03:40,900
and over again, I've quoted all through my life.

475
01:03:40,900 --> 01:03:48,260
I wonder if I gave you a quotation from the Chinese philosopher, the Zhuangzi.

476
01:03:48,260 --> 01:03:54,340
Zhuangzi dreamt that he was a butterfly, and on waking up, he did not know whether he was

477
01:03:54,340 --> 01:04:00,460
a man who had a dream of being a butterfly or a butterfly who's now dreaming he was a

478
01:04:00,460 --> 01:04:01,460
man.

479
01:04:01,460 --> 01:04:05,980
And this, I think, is the finest of all.

480
01:04:05,980 --> 01:04:13,580
Firstly, because he begins by a dream, so that afterwards, when he wakes up, when he

481
01:04:13,580 --> 01:04:19,740
awakens, his life has still something dreamlike about it.

482
01:04:19,740 --> 01:04:28,580
And secondly, because with a kind of almost miraculous happiness, he has chosen the right

483
01:04:28,580 --> 01:04:29,580
animal.

484
01:04:29,580 --> 01:04:38,020
Had he said, "Zhuangzi had a dream that he was a tiger," then there would be nothing

485
01:04:38,020 --> 01:04:39,900
in it.

486
01:04:39,900 --> 01:04:49,660
Because while a butterfly has something delicate and evanescent about it, that is to say, if

487
01:04:49,660 --> 01:04:59,980
we are dreams, the true way to suggest a dream is a butterfly and not a tiger.

488
01:04:59,980 --> 01:05:04,940
Or for example, "Zhuangzi had a dream that he was a typewriter," that would be no good

489
01:05:04,940 --> 01:05:05,940
at all, no.

490
01:05:05,940 --> 01:05:09,900
Or that he was a whale, that would do him no good.

491
01:05:09,900 --> 01:05:19,060
I think he's chosen just the right word for what he's trying to say.

492
01:05:19,060 --> 01:05:24,860
And we will try and follow another pattern.

493
01:05:24,860 --> 01:05:27,380
This is a very common one.

494
01:05:27,380 --> 01:05:44,980
The idea, the linking up of the ideas of life, no, of sleeping and dying.

495
01:05:44,980 --> 01:05:49,260
This is quite common, in common speech also.

496
01:05:49,260 --> 01:05:56,620
And yet, if we look for examples, we shall find that they are very different.

497
01:05:56,620 --> 01:06:06,380
I think that somewhere in Homer, he speaks of the iron sleep, the iron sleep of death.

498
01:06:06,380 --> 01:06:10,540
And here, he gives us the two opposite ideas.

499
01:06:10,540 --> 01:06:21,300
Death is a kind of sleep, and yet, sleeping, and yet that kind of sleep is made of a hard

500
01:06:21,300 --> 01:06:25,860
and ruthless and cruel metal, of iron.

501
01:06:25,860 --> 01:06:32,020
It is a kind of sleep that is unbroken and unbreakable.

502
01:06:32,020 --> 01:06:40,620
Of course, we have Hyne here also, "Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht."

503
01:06:40,620 --> 01:06:51,740
And since we are north of Boston, I think we might speak also, we might remember those

504
01:06:51,740 --> 01:07:01,540
verses, those perhaps two well-known verses of Robert Frost.

505
01:07:01,540 --> 01:07:11,460
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before

506
01:07:11,460 --> 01:07:16,780
I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep."

507
01:07:16,780 --> 01:07:25,780
Those verses are so perfect that we hardly think of a trick, and yet, unhappily, all

508
01:07:25,780 --> 01:07:28,460
literature is made of tricks.

509
01:07:28,460 --> 01:07:35,460
Those tricks get, in the long run, found out, and then the reader tires of them.

510
01:07:35,460 --> 01:07:42,940
But in this case, the trick is so unobtrusive that I feel rather ashamed of myself for calling

511
01:07:42,940 --> 01:07:44,380
it a trick.

512
01:07:44,380 --> 01:07:49,220
It is merely for want of a better word.

513
01:07:49,220 --> 01:07:59,780
Because Frost has attempted something very daring here, we have the same verses repeated,

514
01:07:59,780 --> 01:08:06,460
word by word, twice over, and yet the sense is different.

515
01:08:06,460 --> 01:08:12,940
And "miles to go before I sleep," this is merely physical.

516
01:08:12,940 --> 01:08:22,700
The miles are miles in space in New England, and sleep means, well, it means going to sleep.

517
01:08:22,700 --> 01:08:31,540
And then, "and miles to go before I sleep," then we are made to feel that the miles are

518
01:08:31,540 --> 01:08:40,980
not only in space but in time, and that sleeping means dying or resting.

519
01:08:40,980 --> 01:08:50,540
Now, had the poet said so in so many words, then he would have been far less effective.

520
01:08:50,540 --> 01:09:00,540
Because as I understand it, everything, anything suggested is far more effective than anything

521
01:09:00,540 --> 01:09:03,260
laid down.

522
01:09:03,260 --> 01:09:10,380
Perhaps the human mind has a tendency to deny a statement.

523
01:09:10,380 --> 01:09:16,460
I remember what Emerson said, "Arguments convince nobody."

524
01:09:16,460 --> 01:09:21,500
They convince nobody because they are presented as arguments.

525
01:09:21,500 --> 01:09:28,340
And then we look at them, we weigh them, we turn them over, and we may decide against

526
01:09:28,340 --> 01:09:29,340
them.

527
01:09:29,340 --> 01:09:37,300
But when something is merely said, or better still, hinted at, then there's a kind of hospitality

528
01:09:37,300 --> 01:09:39,300
in our imagination.

529
01:09:39,300 --> 01:09:41,780
We are ready to accept it.

530
01:09:41,780 --> 01:09:52,460
I remember having read some 30 years ago the works of Martin Buber, and I thought of them

531
01:09:52,460 --> 01:09:54,900
as being wonderful poems.

532
01:09:54,900 --> 01:10:02,700
And then when I went to Buenos Aires, I read a book by a friend of mine, Duchovny, and

533
01:10:02,700 --> 01:10:11,020
I found in its pages, much to my astonishment, that Martin Buber was a philosopher, and that

534
01:10:11,020 --> 01:10:18,460
all his philosophy lay in those books I had read as poetry.

535
01:10:18,460 --> 01:10:29,180
And perhaps I had accepted those books because they came to me through poetry, through suggestion,

536
01:10:29,180 --> 01:10:33,540
through the music of poetry, and not as arguments.

537
01:10:33,540 --> 01:10:43,220
And I think that somewhere in Walt Whitman, maybe found the same idea, the idea of reasons

538
01:10:43,220 --> 01:10:48,820
being unconvincing.

539
01:10:48,820 --> 01:10:58,220
I think he says somewhere that he finds the night air, the large few stars, far more convincing

540
01:10:58,220 --> 01:11:06,260
than mere theogonies.

541
01:11:06,260 --> 01:11:16,700
And I suppose we may think of other trends, of other patterns of metaphor.

542
01:11:16,700 --> 01:11:21,940
For example, this is not as common as the other ones.

543
01:11:21,940 --> 01:11:30,900
We have the idea of a battle and of a fire, and we find this in the Iliad, the idea of

544
01:11:30,900 --> 01:11:34,700
a battle blazing like a fire.

545
01:11:34,700 --> 01:11:41,060
And also, we have the same idea in the heroic fragment of Finsburg.

546
01:11:41,060 --> 01:11:50,140
In that fragment, we are told of the Danes fighting the Frisians, of the glitter of the

547
01:11:50,140 --> 01:11:54,700
weapons, the shields, the swords, and so on.

548
01:11:54,700 --> 01:12:02,540
And then the writer says that it seemed as if all Finsburg, as if the whole castle of

549
01:12:02,540 --> 01:12:07,300
Fin were on fire.

550
01:12:07,300 --> 01:12:11,500
This of course is not as common as the other ones.

551
01:12:11,500 --> 01:12:19,300
Now we may suppose that I have left out some quite common patterns.

552
01:12:19,300 --> 01:12:33,980
We have taken so far eyes and stars, women and flowers, time and rivers, life and a dream,

553
01:12:33,980 --> 01:12:38,100
death and sleeping, fire and battles.

554
01:12:38,100 --> 01:12:47,100
And perhaps had we time and learning enough, we might find half a dozen other patterns.

555
01:12:47,100 --> 01:12:53,820
And perhaps those might give us most of the metaphors in literature.

556
01:12:53,820 --> 01:13:03,540
Now what is really important is the fact not of there being a few patterns, but of those

557
01:13:03,540 --> 01:13:09,740
patterns being capable of almost endless variations.

558
01:13:09,740 --> 01:13:20,980
So that perhaps a reader who care for poetry and not for the theory of poetry might read,

559
01:13:20,980 --> 01:13:29,940
for example, "I wish that I were the night," and then afterwards, "A monster made of eyes,"

560
01:13:29,940 --> 01:13:41,140
or "The stars look down," and never stop to think that those can be traced back to a single

561
01:13:41,140 --> 01:13:43,180
pattern.

562
01:13:43,180 --> 01:13:49,900
Now if I were a daring thinker, but I am not, I'm a very timid thinker, I'm groping my way

563
01:13:49,900 --> 01:14:01,940
along, I could of course say that only a dozen or so patterns exist and that the rest of

564
01:14:01,940 --> 01:14:06,460
metaphors are mere arbitrary games.

565
01:14:06,460 --> 01:14:17,300
This of course would amount to a statement that between the 10,000 things of the Chinese

566
01:14:17,300 --> 01:14:26,140
definition only some 12 essential affinities might be found.

567
01:14:26,140 --> 01:14:34,660
Because of course you can find other affinities that are merely astonishing, and astonishment

568
01:14:34,660 --> 01:14:38,700
hardly lasts for more than a moment.

569
01:14:38,700 --> 01:14:49,380
I remember now that I have forgotten quite a good example of the dream and life equation,

570
01:14:49,380 --> 01:14:58,820
which I think that I can recall it now, by the American poet Robert, by the American

571
01:14:58,820 --> 01:15:02,420
poet Cummings.

572
01:15:02,420 --> 01:15:04,540
These are four verses.

573
01:15:04,540 --> 01:15:07,660
I think I must apologize for the first.

574
01:15:07,660 --> 01:15:15,540
Evidently it was written by a young man writing for young men, and I can no longer claim that

575
01:15:15,540 --> 01:15:16,540
privilege.

576
01:15:16,540 --> 01:15:20,220
I think I'm far too old for that kind of game.

577
01:15:20,220 --> 01:15:24,740
But the stanza should be quoted in full.

578
01:15:24,740 --> 01:15:30,420
God's terrible face, brighter than a spoon.

579
01:15:30,420 --> 01:15:37,580
I'm rather sorry about the spoon, because of course one feels that he thought at first

580
01:15:37,580 --> 01:15:44,300
of a sword, or of a candle, or of the sun, or of a shield, or of something traditionally

581
01:15:44,300 --> 01:15:45,300
shining.

582
01:15:45,300 --> 01:15:51,340
And then he said, "No, after all I'm modern, so I'll work in a spoon."

583
01:15:51,340 --> 01:15:55,220
So he got his spoon.

584
01:15:55,220 --> 01:15:59,300
But we may forgive him that for what comes afterwards.

585
01:15:59,300 --> 01:16:08,780
God's terrible face, brighter than a spoon, collects the image of one fatal word.

586
01:16:08,780 --> 01:16:13,700
This second line is better, I think.

587
01:16:13,700 --> 01:16:20,420
And as my friend Merchants said to me, "In a spoon, we also have many images collected."

588
01:16:20,420 --> 01:16:25,380
I had never thought of that, because I had been taken aback by the spoon, and so I did

589
01:16:25,380 --> 01:16:27,860
not want to think much about it.

590
01:16:27,860 --> 01:16:36,140
So God's terrible face, brighter than a spoon, collects the image of one fatal word, until

591
01:16:36,140 --> 01:16:40,140
my life that light the sun and moon.

592
01:16:40,140 --> 01:16:51,900
Here there is a kind of strange simplicity, resembles something that has not occurred.

593
01:16:51,900 --> 01:16:55,020
Resembles something that has not occurred.

594
01:16:55,020 --> 01:17:02,700
And this, I think, gives us the dreamlike essence of life better than those more famous

595
01:17:02,700 --> 01:17:08,340
poets, Shakespeare and Walter von der Etefogelweide.

596
01:17:08,340 --> 01:17:18,340
But of course, I have chosen a few examples, and I'm sure that your memories are full of

597
01:17:18,340 --> 01:17:27,900
metaphors, that you have treasured up of metaphors that you may be hoping I may quote, because

598
01:17:27,900 --> 01:17:34,860
I know that after this lecture, I shall feel an amount of remorse coming over me, thinking

599
01:17:34,860 --> 01:17:38,100
of the many beautiful metaphors I have missed.

600
01:17:38,100 --> 01:17:46,340
And of course, you will say to me in an aside, "But why did you omit that wonderful metaphor

601
01:17:46,340 --> 01:17:52,980
by so and so and so?" and then I have to fumble and to apologize.

602
01:17:52,980 --> 01:18:04,180
But now, I think that we might go on to metaphors that seem to stand outside in a known pattern.

603
01:18:04,180 --> 01:18:10,180
And since I have spoken of the moon, I'll take a Persian metaphor.

604
01:18:10,180 --> 01:18:15,780
I read it somewhere in Brown's history of Persian literature.

605
01:18:15,780 --> 01:18:23,380
Let us say it came from Farid ud-Din Atar or Umar Khayyam or Hafiz, one of the great

606
01:18:23,380 --> 01:18:24,980
Persian poets.

607
01:18:24,980 --> 01:18:32,540
He speaks of the moon, and he says, and he calls the moon the mirror of time.

608
01:18:32,540 --> 01:18:40,620
Of course, I suppose that from the point of view of astronomy, the idea of the moon being

609
01:18:40,620 --> 01:18:49,620
a mirror is as it should be, but this is quite irrelevant from the poetical point of view.

610
01:18:49,620 --> 01:18:56,300
The fact of the moon being or not being a mirror has no importance, whatever, since

611
01:18:56,300 --> 01:19:00,580
poetry talks to the imagination.

612
01:19:00,580 --> 01:19:05,380
Now let us look at the moon as a mirror of time.

613
01:19:05,380 --> 01:19:10,540
I think it a very fine metaphor.

614
01:19:10,540 --> 01:19:19,220
The first instance, because the idea of a mirror gives us the brightness and the fragility

615
01:19:19,220 --> 01:19:20,900
of the moon.

616
01:19:20,900 --> 01:19:30,220
And secondly, the idea of time makes us suddenly remember that that very clear moon we are

617
01:19:30,220 --> 01:19:41,540
looking at is very ancient, is full of poetry and mythology, is as old as time.

618
01:19:41,540 --> 01:19:48,180
And since I spoke of as old as time, I must quote another verse, a verse that perhaps

619
01:19:48,180 --> 01:19:52,340
is bubbling up in your memory.

620
01:19:52,340 --> 01:19:54,900
I can't recall the name of the author.

621
01:19:54,900 --> 01:20:04,180
I found it quoted by Kipling in a not too rememorable book of his called "From Sea to

622
01:20:04,180 --> 01:20:10,580
Sea", "A rose-red city, half as old as time."

623
01:20:10,580 --> 01:20:16,260
Had the poet written "A rose-red city, as old as time," he would have written nothing

624
01:20:16,260 --> 01:20:17,260
at all.

625
01:20:17,260 --> 01:20:23,620
But "Half as old as time" gives it a kind of magic precision.

626
01:20:23,620 --> 01:20:32,780
The same kind of magic precision that is achieved by that strange and common English phrase,

627
01:20:32,780 --> 01:20:37,780
"I will love you forever and a day."

628
01:20:37,780 --> 01:20:41,900
Forever means a very long time.

629
01:20:41,900 --> 01:20:48,620
But it's too abstract to appeal to the imagination.

630
01:20:48,620 --> 01:20:54,860
We have the same kind of trick, I apologize for the use of that word, in the name of that

631
01:20:54,860 --> 01:20:59,260
famous book, "The Thousand and One Nights."

632
01:20:59,260 --> 01:21:08,460
For the thousand nights mean to the imagination the many nights, even as 40 used to mean many

633
01:21:08,460 --> 01:21:10,740
in the 17th century.

634
01:21:10,740 --> 01:21:16,200
When 40 winters shall be sieged by brown, writes Shakespeare.

635
01:21:16,200 --> 01:21:21,740
And I think of the common English expression, "Forty winks for a nap."

636
01:21:21,740 --> 01:21:24,180
For 40 means I suppose many.

637
01:21:24,180 --> 01:21:32,540
And here we have the thousand nights and a night, even as a rose-red city, and then the

638
01:21:32,540 --> 01:21:39,860
fanciful precision, "Half as old as time," which makes it of course longer.

639
01:21:39,860 --> 01:21:47,660
And now let us consider different metaphors.

640
01:21:47,660 --> 01:21:55,900
And I will go back, inevitably, we will say, to my favorite Anglo-Saxons.

641
01:21:55,900 --> 01:22:04,540
Remember that very common kenning, calling the sea the whale road.

642
01:22:04,540 --> 01:22:13,380
Now I wonder whether the unknown Saxon who first coined that kenning knew how fine it

643
01:22:13,380 --> 01:22:14,380
was.

644
01:22:14,380 --> 01:22:22,200
I wonder whether he felt, for this need hardly concern us, that the hugeness of the whale

645
01:22:22,200 --> 01:22:27,620
emphasized or suggested the hugeness of the sea.

646
01:22:27,620 --> 01:22:30,260
There is another metaphor.

647
01:22:30,260 --> 01:22:34,900
This is an old one, about blood.

648
01:22:34,900 --> 01:22:44,260
And the common kenning for blood is the water of the serpent.

649
01:22:44,260 --> 01:22:53,180
And in that metaphor, we have the suggestion to be found also among the Saxons of a sword

650
01:22:53,180 --> 01:23:02,260
as being an essentially evil being, a being that lapped up the blood of men as if it were

651
01:23:02,260 --> 01:23:03,260
water.

652
01:23:03,260 --> 01:23:08,740
And now we have the metaphors for battle.

653
01:23:08,740 --> 01:23:11,660
Some of them are quite trite.

654
01:23:11,660 --> 01:23:14,740
For example, meeting of men.

655
01:23:14,740 --> 01:23:20,580
Here perhaps there is something fine in the idea of men meeting to kill each other.

656
01:23:20,580 --> 01:23:23,620
It is as if no other meetings were possible.

657
01:23:23,620 --> 01:23:30,500
But we also have the meeting of swords, the dance of swords, the clash of banners, the

658
01:23:30,500 --> 01:23:31,500
clash of shields.

659
01:23:31,500 --> 01:23:36,140
All of them may be found in the old of Brunnenburg.

660
01:23:36,140 --> 01:23:44,180
And there's another, I think, a fine one, torn yemeot, a meeting of anger.

661
01:23:44,180 --> 01:23:52,620
Here perhaps the metaphor is impressive because when we think of meeting, we think of fellowship

662
01:23:52,620 --> 01:23:53,980
and of friendship.

663
01:23:53,980 --> 01:23:57,820
And then there comes the contrast, the meeting of anger.

664
01:23:57,820 --> 01:24:07,020
But these metaphors are nothing, I should say, compared to a very fine Norse and strangely

665
01:24:07,020 --> 01:24:13,820
enough Irish metaphor about the battle.

666
01:24:13,820 --> 01:24:18,340
The battle is called the web of men.

667
01:24:18,340 --> 01:24:24,580
The word web is really wonderful here.

668
01:24:24,580 --> 01:24:32,620
For in the idea of a web, we get the pattern of a medieval battle.

669
01:24:32,620 --> 01:24:40,660
We have, for example, the swords, the shields, the crossing of the weapons.

670
01:24:40,660 --> 01:24:50,580
And then also there is the nightmare touch of a web being made of living beings, a web

671
01:24:50,580 --> 01:24:57,900
of men, a web of men who are dying and killing each other.

672
01:24:57,900 --> 01:25:07,220
And there suddenly comes to my mind a metaphor from Gongore that is rather like the web of

673
01:25:07,220 --> 01:25:08,220
men.

674
01:25:08,220 --> 01:25:13,900
I will quote it first in English and then in Spanish.

675
01:25:13,900 --> 01:25:25,020
He's speaking of a traveler, a traveler who comes to a barbarous village.

676
01:25:25,020 --> 01:25:38,020
And then that village weaves a rope of dogs around him.

677
01:25:38,020 --> 01:25:45,500
Como suele tejer, I suppose you pronounce it that way, barbara aldea, soga de perros

678
01:25:45,500 --> 01:25:47,540
contra forastero.

679
01:25:47,540 --> 01:25:56,920
So that we have, strangely enough, we have the same image, the idea of a rope or a web

680
01:25:56,920 --> 01:25:59,180
made of living beings.

681
01:25:59,180 --> 01:26:05,860
And yet even in those cases that may seem to be synonyms, there is a difference.

682
01:26:05,860 --> 01:26:15,820
There is quite a difference because a rope of dogs is somehow baroque and grotesque while

683
01:26:15,820 --> 01:26:24,300
a web of men has something terrible, something awful about it.

684
01:26:24,300 --> 01:26:33,780
And to end up, I will take a metaphor or a comparison, but after all I am not a professor

685
01:26:33,780 --> 01:26:43,780
and those differences need hardly worry me, from Byron, from the now forgotten Byron.

686
01:26:43,780 --> 01:26:48,620
Suppose I read the poem when I was a boy.

687
01:26:48,620 --> 01:26:52,220
Suppose you read it at a very tender age.

688
01:26:52,220 --> 01:27:00,140
And two or three days ago, I suddenly discovered that that image was a very complex one.

689
01:27:00,140 --> 01:27:06,500
I had never thought of Byron as being specially complex.

690
01:27:06,500 --> 01:27:13,060
And you all know the words, "She walks in beauty like the night."

691
01:27:13,060 --> 01:27:20,140
Now the verse is so perfect that you take it for granted.

692
01:27:20,140 --> 01:27:27,860
We think, well, we could have written that had we cared to, but only Byron cared to write

693
01:27:27,860 --> 01:27:28,860
it.

694
01:27:28,860 --> 01:27:37,380
And I will come now to the complexity, to the hidden and secret complexity of the verse.

695
01:27:37,380 --> 01:27:42,020
She walks in beauty like the night.

696
01:27:42,020 --> 01:27:47,700
I suppose you already found out what I am now going to reveal to you, because this always

697
01:27:47,700 --> 01:27:49,380
happens with surprises, no?

698
01:27:49,380 --> 01:27:53,460
It happens to us when we're reading a detective novel.

699
01:27:53,460 --> 01:27:56,740
She walks in beauty like the night.

700
01:27:56,740 --> 01:28:01,540
We have, at the beginning, we have a lovely woman.

701
01:28:01,540 --> 01:28:05,500
Then you're told that she walks in beauty.

702
01:28:05,500 --> 01:28:12,180
This somehow suggests the French language, something like "vous êtes en beauté," and

703
01:28:12,180 --> 01:28:13,180
so on.

704
01:28:13,180 --> 01:28:17,860
But she walks in beauty like the night.

705
01:28:17,860 --> 01:28:28,640
So what we have in the first instance, a lovely woman, a lovely lady, likened to the night.

706
01:28:28,640 --> 01:28:36,820
But in order to understand the verse, we have to think of the night as a woman also, because

707
01:28:36,820 --> 01:28:40,100
if not, the verse is meaningless.

708
01:28:40,100 --> 01:28:45,420
So within those very simple words, we have a double metaphor.

709
01:28:45,420 --> 01:28:52,580
A woman is likened to the night, but the night is likened to a woman.

710
01:28:52,580 --> 01:28:57,380
I do not know, and I do not care, whether Byron knew this.

711
01:28:57,380 --> 01:29:01,660
I think if he had known it, the verse would hardly have been as good as it is.

712
01:29:01,660 --> 01:29:06,740
Perhaps before he died, he found it out, or somebody pointed it out to him.

713
01:29:06,740 --> 01:29:15,420
And now we are led to the two obvious and major conclusions of this lecture.

714
01:29:15,420 --> 01:29:22,940
The first is, of course, that though there are hundreds, and indeed thousands, of metaphors

715
01:29:22,940 --> 01:29:29,460
to be found, they may all be traced back to a few simple patterns.

716
01:29:29,460 --> 01:29:34,140
But this need not trouble us, since every metaphor is different.

717
01:29:34,140 --> 01:29:39,180
Every time that a pattern is used, the variations are different.

718
01:29:39,180 --> 01:29:50,300
And the second is that there are metaphors, for example, the web of men or the whale road,

719
01:29:50,300 --> 01:29:58,000
that may not be traced back to definite patterns.

720
01:29:58,000 --> 01:30:06,660
So that I think that the outlook, even after my lecture, is quite good for the metaphor.

721
01:30:06,660 --> 01:30:14,380
Because if we like, we may try our hands at new variations of the major trends.

722
01:30:14,380 --> 01:30:22,100
And the variations will be very beautiful, and only a few critics like myself will take

723
01:30:22,100 --> 01:30:26,780
the trouble to say, "Well, there we have eyes and stars, there we have time on the

724
01:30:26,780 --> 01:30:28,700
river over and over again."

725
01:30:28,700 --> 01:30:31,260
The metaphors will strike the imagination.

726
01:30:31,260 --> 01:30:36,660
But it is also given to us, and why not hope for that also?

727
01:30:36,660 --> 01:30:47,580
It may also be given to us to invent metaphors that do not belong, or that do not yet belong,

728
01:30:47,580 --> 01:31:04,420
to accepted patterns.

729
01:31:04,420 --> 01:31:08,180
Chapter 3, The Telling of the Tale.

730
01:31:08,180 --> 01:31:23,620
Ladies and gentlemen, verbal distinctions should be valued since they stand for mental,

731
01:31:23,620 --> 01:31:26,380
for intellectual distinctions.

732
01:31:26,380 --> 01:31:36,780
And yet, one feels that it is somehow a pity that the word "poet" should have been split

733
01:31:36,780 --> 01:31:37,780
asunder.

734
01:31:37,780 --> 01:31:51,980
For, nowadays, when we speak of a poet, we think, we only think, of the utterer of such

735
01:31:51,980 --> 01:32:05,740
lyric, bird-like notes as "With ships the sea was sprinkled, far and nigh, like stars

736
01:32:05,740 --> 01:32:14,940
in heaven," from Wordsworth, or "Music to hear, why hear without music, sadly, sweets

737
01:32:14,940 --> 01:32:18,460
with sweets worn out, joy delights, enjoy."

738
01:32:18,460 --> 01:32:31,540
While the ancients, when they spoke of a poet, a maker, as Dombar has it, thought of him

739
01:32:31,540 --> 01:32:41,580
not only as the utterer of those high, lyric notes, but also as the teller of a tale, a

740
01:32:41,580 --> 01:32:52,660
tale wherein all the voices of mankind might be found, not only the lyric, the wistful,

741
01:32:52,660 --> 01:33:00,980
the melancholy, but also the voices of courage and of hope.

742
01:33:00,980 --> 01:33:12,740
This means that I am speaking of the oldest form of poetry, I suppose, the epic.

743
01:33:12,740 --> 01:33:21,220
And since we are speaking of the epic, let us consider a few of them.

744
01:33:21,220 --> 01:33:31,020
I suppose that the first one that comes to our mind is what Andrew Lang, who so finely

745
01:33:31,020 --> 01:33:42,420
translated it, called "The Tale of Troy," and we will look into it for that very ancient

746
01:33:42,420 --> 01:33:45,420
telling of a tale.

747
01:33:45,420 --> 01:33:56,460
In the very first verse, we have something like, "Tell me, muse," I have no Greek, "Tell

748
01:33:56,460 --> 01:34:07,100
me, muse, of the anger of Achilles," or as Professor Rouse, I think, has translated it,

749
01:34:07,100 --> 01:34:11,180
"An angry man, that is my subject."

750
01:34:11,180 --> 01:34:23,860
Now perhaps, now perhaps Homer, or the man we call Homer, for that is a moot question

751
01:34:23,860 --> 01:34:33,620
of course, thought that he was writing his poem about an angry man.

752
01:34:33,620 --> 01:34:44,020
And this somehow disconcerts us, for we think of anger as a Latin state, "Ira furor brevis,"

753
01:34:44,020 --> 01:34:50,460
anger is a brief madness, or a brief or a fit of madness.

754
01:34:50,460 --> 01:35:06,620
And the plot of the Iliad is really in itself not a charming one.

755
01:35:06,620 --> 01:35:17,740
I mean, the idea of the hero sulking in his tents, feeling that the king has dealt unjustly

756
01:35:17,740 --> 01:35:25,740
with him, and then taking up the war as a private feud because his friend had been killed,

757
01:35:25,740 --> 01:35:32,220
and afterwards selling the dead man he had killed to his father.

758
01:35:32,220 --> 01:35:39,420
But perhaps, I may have said this before, I'm sure I have, perhaps the intentions of

759
01:35:39,420 --> 01:35:42,300
a poet are not very important.

760
01:35:42,300 --> 01:35:49,020
What is important nowadays is that though Homer may have thought he was telling that

761
01:35:49,020 --> 01:35:55,500
story, he was telling something far finer than that.

762
01:35:55,500 --> 01:36:06,780
The story of a man, the hero who is attacking a city he knows he will never conquer.

763
01:36:06,780 --> 01:36:11,500
He knows that he will die before the fall of Troy.

764
01:36:11,500 --> 01:36:23,500
And the still more stirring tale of men defending a city whose doom is already known to them,

765
01:36:23,500 --> 01:36:30,340
a city that is already in flames.

766
01:36:30,340 --> 01:36:37,820
So I think that this is a real subject of the Iliad.

767
01:36:37,820 --> 01:36:50,300
And it is a fact that men have always felt that the Trojans were the real heroes.

768
01:36:50,300 --> 01:37:02,700
We think of Virgil, but we may also think of Snorri Sturlason, who in his younger era

769
01:37:02,700 --> 01:37:15,340
wrote that Odin, the warden of the Saxons, the god, was the son of Praerium and the brother

770
01:37:15,340 --> 01:37:23,980
of Hector, so that men have sought kinship with the defeated Trojans and not with the

771
01:37:23,980 --> 01:37:33,380
victorious Greeks, perhaps because there is a dignity in defeat that hardly belongs to

772
01:37:33,380 --> 01:37:39,700
victory.

773
01:37:39,700 --> 01:37:47,500
And we have now a second epic, the Odyssey.

774
01:37:47,500 --> 01:37:51,500
And the Odyssey may be read in two ways.

775
01:37:51,500 --> 01:38:00,100
But I suppose that the man or the woman, Samuel Butler, Thorso, who had written it, felt that

776
01:38:00,100 --> 01:38:04,660
there were really two stories.

777
01:38:04,660 --> 01:38:20,780
That is to say, the homecoming of Ulysses and the marvels and the perils of the sea.

778
01:38:20,780 --> 01:38:30,820
If we take the Odyssey in the first sense, then we have that idea of homecoming, the

779
01:38:30,820 --> 01:38:40,180
idea that we are in banishment, that our true home is in the past or in heaven or somewhere

780
01:38:40,180 --> 01:38:44,260
else, that we are never at home.

781
01:38:44,260 --> 01:38:56,020
But of course, the seafaring or the homecoming had to be made interesting.

782
01:38:56,020 --> 01:39:00,860
And so the many marvels were worked in.

783
01:39:00,860 --> 01:39:08,420
And already, when we come to the Arabian Nights, we find that the Arabian version of the Odyssey,

784
01:39:08,420 --> 01:39:16,300
the seven voyages of Sinbad the sailor, are not a story of homecoming, but a story of

785
01:39:16,300 --> 01:39:17,780
adventure.

786
01:39:17,780 --> 01:39:20,260
And I think that we read it thus.

787
01:39:20,260 --> 01:39:31,100
I think that when we read the Odyssey, what we feel is the glamour, the magic of the sea.

788
01:39:31,100 --> 01:39:37,780
What we feel is what we find in the seafarer, for example.

789
01:39:37,780 --> 01:39:45,700
He has no heart for the harp, nor for the giving of rings, nor for the delight of a

790
01:39:45,700 --> 01:39:49,060
woman, nor for the greatness of the world.

791
01:39:49,060 --> 01:39:54,540
He thinks only of the long sea salt streams.

792
01:39:54,540 --> 01:39:59,020
So that we have both stories into one.

793
01:39:59,020 --> 01:40:05,620
We can read it as a homecoming, and we can read it as a tale of adventure, perhaps the

794
01:40:05,620 --> 01:40:10,500
finest that has ever been written or sung.

795
01:40:10,500 --> 01:40:22,020
And we come now to a third, we might call it poem, that looms, I should say, far above

796
01:40:22,020 --> 01:40:23,500
them.

797
01:40:23,500 --> 01:40:26,660
And I am thinking of the four Gospels.

798
01:40:26,660 --> 01:40:31,620
And the Gospels may also be read in two ways.

799
01:40:31,620 --> 01:40:40,660
By the believer, they are read as a strange story of a man, of a God, who atones for the

800
01:40:40,660 --> 01:40:43,860
sins of mankind.

801
01:40:43,860 --> 01:40:55,780
A God who condescends to suffering, to death, on the bitter cross Shakespeare has it.

802
01:40:55,780 --> 01:41:00,100
There is a still stranger interpretation.

803
01:41:00,100 --> 01:41:03,660
I found that in Langland.

804
01:41:03,660 --> 01:41:12,340
The idea that God wanted to know all about human suffering, and that it was not enough

805
01:41:12,340 --> 01:41:21,780
for him to know it intellectually, as a God might, but that he wanted to suffer as a man

806
01:41:21,780 --> 01:41:24,780
and with the limitations of a man.

807
01:41:24,780 --> 01:41:32,860
And if you are an unbeliever, many of us are, then you can read the story in a different

808
01:41:32,860 --> 01:41:33,860
way.

809
01:41:33,860 --> 01:41:41,860
You can think of a man of genius, of a man who thought that he was God, and who at the

810
01:41:41,860 --> 01:41:53,020
end found out that he was merely a man, and that God, his God himself, had forsaken him.

811
01:41:53,020 --> 01:42:04,220
And it might be said that for many centuries, those three stories, the tale of Troy, the

812
01:42:04,220 --> 01:42:12,580
tale of Ulysses, the tale of Jesus, have been sufficient for mankind.

813
01:42:12,580 --> 01:42:17,540
People have been telling and retelling them over and over again.

814
01:42:17,540 --> 01:42:19,820
They have been set to music.

815
01:42:19,820 --> 01:42:25,860
They have been painted.

816
01:42:25,860 --> 01:42:34,420
People have told them many times over, and yet the stories are still there, illimitable.

817
01:42:34,420 --> 01:42:41,860
You might think of somebody within a thousand years or ten thousand years writing them over

818
01:42:41,860 --> 01:42:42,860
again.

819
01:42:42,860 --> 01:42:48,780
But in the case of the Gospels, there is a difference.

820
01:42:48,780 --> 01:42:54,460
The story of Christ, I think, cannot be told better.

821
01:42:54,460 --> 01:43:05,380
It has been told many times over, and yet I think that a few verses, where we read,

822
01:43:05,380 --> 01:43:16,540
for example, of Christ being tempted by Satan, are stronger than the four books of Paradise

823
01:43:16,540 --> 01:43:19,420
regained.

824
01:43:19,420 --> 01:43:27,780
Perhaps one feels that Milton had no inkling of what kind of a man Christ was.

825
01:43:27,780 --> 01:43:37,460
Well, we have these stories, and we have the fact that men did not need many stories.

826
01:43:37,460 --> 01:43:45,620
I don't suppose Chaucer ever thought of inventing a story.

827
01:43:45,620 --> 01:43:51,140
I don't think people were less inventive in those days than they are today.

828
01:43:51,140 --> 01:44:01,100
I think that they felt that the new shadings brought into a story, that the fine shadings

829
01:44:01,100 --> 01:44:04,100
brought into it, were enough.

830
01:44:04,100 --> 01:44:10,180
Besides, it made things easier for the poet.

831
01:44:10,180 --> 01:44:17,780
His hearers or his readers knew what he was going to say, and so they could take in all

832
01:44:17,780 --> 01:44:19,780
the differences.

833
01:44:19,780 --> 01:44:29,980
Now, in the epic, as I say, and we might think of the Gospels as a kind of divine epic, all

834
01:44:29,980 --> 01:44:32,900
things could be found.

835
01:44:32,900 --> 01:44:38,580
But then poetry, as I say, has fallen asunder.

836
01:44:38,580 --> 01:44:47,100
Or rather, we have, on the one hand, we have the lyrical poem and the elegy, and then we

837
01:44:47,100 --> 01:44:50,440
have the telling of a tale.

838
01:44:50,440 --> 01:44:55,380
We have the novel.

839
01:44:55,380 --> 01:45:04,700
One is almost tempted to think of the novel as a degeneration of the epic, in spite of

840
01:45:04,700 --> 01:45:12,820
such writers as Joseph Conrad, for example, or Herman Melville, who the novel goes back

841
01:45:12,820 --> 01:45:15,540
to the dignity of the epic.

842
01:45:15,540 --> 01:45:25,580
If we think of the novel and the epic, we are tempted to fall into thinking that the

843
01:45:25,580 --> 01:45:35,220
chief difference lies in the difference between verse and prose, in the difference between

844
01:45:35,220 --> 01:45:38,880
singing something and stating something.

845
01:45:38,880 --> 01:45:43,420
But I think that there is a greater difference.

846
01:45:43,420 --> 01:45:54,460
I think the difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero,

847
01:45:54,460 --> 01:45:59,460
a man who is a pattern for all men.

848
01:45:59,460 --> 01:46:14,220
Well, as Menked pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a

849
01:46:14,220 --> 01:46:22,340
man, in the degeneration of character.

850
01:46:22,340 --> 01:46:32,260
Now this brings us to another question.

851
01:46:32,260 --> 01:46:40,980
This brings us to what we think of happiness, what we think of defeat and of victory.

852
01:46:40,980 --> 01:46:49,140
For nowadays, when people talk of a happy ending, they think of it as a mere pandering

853
01:46:49,140 --> 01:46:52,940
to the public, or they think it is a commercial device.

854
01:46:52,940 --> 01:46:55,180
They think of it as artificial.

855
01:46:55,180 --> 01:47:04,420
And yet, during centuries, men could very sincerely believe in happiness and in victory,

856
01:47:04,420 --> 01:47:11,060
though they felt, as I have said, the dignity, the essential dignity of defeat.

857
01:47:11,060 --> 01:47:20,380
For example, when people wrote about the golden fleece, that is one of the ancient stories

858
01:47:20,380 --> 01:47:30,780
of mankind, readers and hearers were made to feel from the beginning that the treasure

859
01:47:30,780 --> 01:47:32,940
would be found at the end.

860
01:47:32,940 --> 01:47:43,060
For nowadays, if an adventure is attempted, we know that it will end in failure.

861
01:47:43,060 --> 01:47:51,300
We know, for example, when we read, I'm taking an example I admire, the Asporn Papers, we

862
01:47:51,300 --> 01:47:55,860
know that the papers will never be found.

863
01:47:55,860 --> 01:48:03,700
When we read Franz Kafka's The Castle, we know that the man will never get inside the

864
01:48:03,700 --> 01:48:05,020
castle.

865
01:48:05,020 --> 01:48:10,820
That is to say, we cannot really believe in happiness and in success.

866
01:48:10,820 --> 01:48:15,860
And this may be one of the powers of our time.

867
01:48:15,860 --> 01:48:25,700
I suppose that Kafka felt much the same when he wanted his books to be destroyed, because

868
01:48:25,700 --> 01:48:34,340
he really wanted to write a happy and a victorious book, and he felt that he could not do it.

869
01:48:34,340 --> 01:48:39,380
He might have written it, of course, but people would have felt that he was not telling the

870
01:48:39,380 --> 01:48:45,820
truth, not the truth of facts, but the truth of his dreams.

871
01:48:45,820 --> 01:48:50,700
And we come to another fact.

872
01:48:50,700 --> 01:48:59,220
The fact that, let's say, at the end of the 18th or the beginning of the 19th century,

873
01:48:59,220 --> 01:49:08,460
we need hardly go into the discussion of dates, men began to invent stories.

874
01:49:08,460 --> 01:49:16,460
Perhaps one might say that the attempt began with Hawthorne and with Edgar Allan Poe.

875
01:49:16,460 --> 01:49:20,860
But of course, there are always forerunners.

876
01:49:20,860 --> 01:49:26,540
Nobody is, as Dario pointed out, the literary Adam.

877
01:49:26,540 --> 01:49:35,420
The fact remains, however, that Poe wrote that a story should be written for the sake

878
01:49:35,420 --> 01:49:43,140
of the last sentence, and a poem for the sake of the last verse.

879
01:49:43,140 --> 01:49:53,300
This degenerated into the trick story, and in the 19th and in our own centuries, people

880
01:49:53,300 --> 01:49:56,700
invent all kinds of plots.

881
01:49:56,700 --> 01:50:00,820
Those plots are sometimes very clever.

882
01:50:00,820 --> 01:50:08,660
Those plots, if merely told, are cleverer than the plots of the epic.

883
01:50:08,660 --> 01:50:15,540
And yet somehow we feel there is something artificial about them, or rather something

884
01:50:15,540 --> 01:50:25,900
is trivial about them.

885
01:50:25,900 --> 01:50:35,820
If we take two, well, if we take two cases, let us suppose the story of Dr. Jekyll and

886
01:50:35,820 --> 01:50:44,260
Mr. Hyde, and then if we take such a novel or a film, a psycho, perhaps the plot of the

887
01:50:44,260 --> 01:50:46,820
second is cleverer.

888
01:50:46,820 --> 01:50:54,420
But we feel that there is more behind Stevenson's plot.

889
01:50:54,420 --> 01:51:05,540
This idea that I spoke about in the beginning, the idea about there being a few plots, perhaps

890
01:51:05,540 --> 01:51:12,980
we should add to those plots, we should add those books where the interest lies not in

891
01:51:12,980 --> 01:51:18,660
the plot, but in the shifting, in the changing of many plots.

892
01:51:18,660 --> 01:51:24,140
I am thinking of the Arabian Nights, of the Furioso, and so on.

893
01:51:24,140 --> 01:51:30,580
We might add also the idea of an evil treasure.

894
01:51:30,580 --> 01:51:38,860
We get that in the World's Saga, perhaps at the end of Beowulf, the idea of a treasure

895
01:51:38,860 --> 01:51:42,620
bringing evil to the people who find it.

896
01:51:42,620 --> 01:51:54,300
Then we might come to that idea, the same idea I tried to work out in my last lecture

897
01:51:54,300 --> 01:52:04,980
on the metaphor, the idea that perhaps all plots belong to some, to a few patterns.

898
01:52:04,980 --> 01:52:12,780
Of course, nowadays, people are inventing so many plots that we are blinded by them.

899
01:52:12,780 --> 01:52:22,580
But perhaps this fit of inventiveness may flicker, and then we may find that those many

900
01:52:22,580 --> 01:52:28,780
plots are but appearances of a few essential plots.

901
01:52:28,780 --> 01:52:34,340
This, however, is not for me to discuss.

902
01:52:34,340 --> 01:52:46,700
Now there is another fact to be noticed, and it is that poets seem to forget that once

903
01:52:46,700 --> 01:52:54,100
the telling of a tale was essential, and that the telling of a tale and the authoring of

904
01:52:54,100 --> 01:52:59,980
verse were not thought of as different things.

905
01:52:59,980 --> 01:53:09,220
A man told a tale, he sang it, and his readers did not think of him as a man attempting two

906
01:53:09,220 --> 01:53:19,380
tasks, but rather attempting one task that had two sides to it, or perhaps they did not

907
01:53:19,380 --> 01:53:21,420
feel there were two sides to it.

908
01:53:21,420 --> 01:53:27,060
They thought of the whole thing as one essential thing.

909
01:53:27,060 --> 01:53:37,020
We come now to our time, and we find this very strange circumstance.

910
01:53:37,020 --> 01:53:51,060
We have had two world wars, and somehow no epic has come from them, except perhaps the

911
01:53:51,060 --> 01:53:54,180
seven pillars of wisdom.

912
01:53:54,180 --> 01:54:01,020
But in the seven pillars of wisdom, and I find many epic qualities there, in the seven

913
01:54:01,020 --> 01:54:10,940
pillars, the book is hampered by the fact that the hero is the teller.

914
01:54:10,940 --> 01:54:17,020
And so sometimes he has to belittle himself, he has to make himself human, he has to make

915
01:54:17,020 --> 01:54:21,020
himself far too believable.

916
01:54:21,020 --> 01:54:27,660
In fact, he has to fall into the tricks of the novelist.

917
01:54:27,660 --> 01:54:33,060
And there is another book, this must be a quite forgotten book now that I'm speaking

918
01:54:33,060 --> 01:54:34,060
of it.

919
01:54:34,060 --> 01:54:42,820
I read it, I think, 1915, a novel called Le Feu by Henri Barbus.

920
01:54:42,820 --> 01:54:45,620
Now Le Feu was written by a pacifist.

921
01:54:45,620 --> 01:54:59,060
It was a book written against war, and yet somehow epic, it thrust itself through the

922
01:54:59,060 --> 01:55:00,060
book.

923
01:55:00,060 --> 01:55:03,620
I remember a very fine bayonet charge.

924
01:55:03,620 --> 01:55:09,060
And there is another writer who had the epic sense.

925
01:55:09,060 --> 01:55:12,500
I'm thinking of Kipling.

926
01:55:12,500 --> 01:55:17,220
We get this in such a wonderful story as a sahib's war.

927
01:55:17,220 --> 01:55:25,180
But in the same way that Kipling never attempted the sonnet, because he thought that might

928
01:55:25,180 --> 01:55:33,900
estrange him from his readers, he never attempted the epic, though he might have done it.

929
01:55:33,900 --> 01:55:36,660
And I'm reminded now of Chesterton.

930
01:55:36,660 --> 01:55:46,180
Chesterton wrote the Ballad of the White Horse, a poem about King Alfred's wars with

931
01:55:46,180 --> 01:55:47,180
the Danes.

932
01:55:47,180 --> 01:55:52,340
And therein we find very strange metaphors.

933
01:55:52,340 --> 01:55:57,300
I wonder how I forgot to quote them last time.

934
01:55:57,300 --> 01:56:04,180
For example, "Marble like solid moonlight, gold like a frozen fire."

935
01:56:04,180 --> 01:56:07,980
And there we have marble and gold.

936
01:56:07,980 --> 01:56:15,460
And marble and gold are compared to two things that are even more elementary.

937
01:56:15,460 --> 01:56:19,780
They're compared to moonlight and to fire.

938
01:56:19,780 --> 01:56:27,060
And then not to fire itself, but to a magic frozen.

939
01:56:27,060 --> 01:56:30,420
It's the fire.

940
01:56:30,420 --> 01:56:42,980
But the people, in a way, are hungering and thirsting for epic, because I feel that epic

941
01:56:42,980 --> 01:56:47,780
is one of the things that men need.

942
01:56:47,780 --> 01:56:55,420
And of all places, epic has been furnished to the world.

943
01:56:55,420 --> 01:57:00,820
And this may come as a kind of anticlimax, but the fact is there.

944
01:57:00,820 --> 01:57:03,820
Well, it's in Hollywood.

945
01:57:03,820 --> 01:57:14,140
For all over the world, men, when they see a Western, when they are beholding the mythology

946
01:57:14,140 --> 01:57:22,900
of the rider and the desert and justice and the sheriff and the shooting and so on, get

947
01:57:22,900 --> 01:57:26,660
the epic feeling from it, whether they know it or not.

948
01:57:26,660 --> 01:57:30,580
But after all, knowing the thing is not important.

949
01:57:30,580 --> 01:57:38,660
Now, I do not want to prophesy, because those things are dangerous, though they may come

950
01:57:38,660 --> 01:57:41,340
true in the long run.

951
01:57:41,340 --> 01:57:52,300
But I think that if the telling of a tale and if the singing of verse could come together

952
01:57:52,300 --> 01:57:57,500
again, then a very important thing might happen.

953
01:57:57,500 --> 01:58:08,420
And perhaps this will come, I think, from America, because as you all know, America

954
01:58:08,420 --> 01:58:19,900
has an ethical sense, a sense of a thing being right or wrong that may be felt in other countries,

955
01:58:19,900 --> 01:58:32,420
but I do not think it can be found in such an obvious way as I find it here.

956
01:58:32,420 --> 01:58:43,660
And thus, if this could be achieved, if we could go back to the epic, then I think something

957
01:58:43,660 --> 01:58:46,660
very great would have been accomplished.

958
01:58:46,660 --> 01:58:51,940
Chesterton wrote "The Ballad of the White Horse."

959
01:58:51,940 --> 01:58:59,860
It got good reviews and so on, but the readers did not take kindly to it.

960
01:58:59,860 --> 01:59:09,620
In fact, when we think of Chesterton, we think of the Father Brown saga and not of that poem.

961
01:59:09,620 --> 01:59:17,300
I have been thinking about this subject, well, rather late in life, and besides, I do not

962
01:59:17,300 --> 01:59:26,100
think I could attempt the epic, though I may have worked in two or three lines of epic.

963
01:59:26,100 --> 01:59:42,100
This is for younger men to do, and I hope they will do it, because of course I think

964
01:59:42,100 --> 01:59:47,180
that we all feel that the novel is somehow breaking down.

965
01:59:47,180 --> 01:59:57,180
For example, if we think of the chief novels of our time, let us take Joyce's Ulysses,

966
01:59:57,180 --> 02:00:07,940
we think or we know that we are told thousands of things about the two characters, and yet

967
02:00:07,940 --> 02:00:09,660
we do not know them.

968
02:00:09,660 --> 02:00:21,180
I think of a better knowledge of characters in Dante or Shakespeare who come to us, who

969
02:00:21,180 --> 02:00:24,420
live and die in a few sentences.

970
02:00:24,420 --> 02:00:31,660
We do not know thousands of circumstances about them, but we know them intimately, and

971
02:00:31,660 --> 02:00:39,780
that of course is far more important.

972
02:00:39,780 --> 02:00:46,100
I think that the novel is breaking down.

973
02:00:46,100 --> 02:00:55,300
I think that all these, those very daring and very interesting experiments with a novel,

974
02:00:55,300 --> 02:01:04,460
for example, the idea of the shifting of time, the idea of a story being told by different

975
02:01:04,460 --> 02:01:14,240
characters, all those are leading to the moment when we shall feel that the novel is no longer

976
02:01:14,240 --> 02:01:15,240
with us.

977
02:01:15,240 --> 02:01:24,420
But there is something about a tale, a story, that will always be going on.

978
02:01:24,420 --> 02:01:32,040
I do not think men will tire of telling or of hearing stories, and if to the pleasure

979
02:01:32,040 --> 02:01:41,260
of being told a story we get the additional pleasure and the dignity of verse, then something

980
02:01:41,260 --> 02:01:44,460
great will have happened.

981
02:01:44,460 --> 02:01:54,940
And maybe I am an old-fashioned man from the 19th century, but I have optimism, I have

982
02:01:54,940 --> 02:02:05,260
hope, and as the future holds many things, as the future perhaps holds all things, I

983
02:02:05,260 --> 02:02:09,100
think that the epic will come back to us.

984
02:02:09,100 --> 02:02:16,260
I think that a poet shall once again be a maker.

985
02:02:16,260 --> 02:02:24,940
I mean he will tell a story and he will also sing it.

986
02:02:24,940 --> 02:02:30,700
And we will not think of those two things as different, even as we do not think they

987
02:02:30,700 --> 02:02:47,740
are different in Homer or in Virgil.

988
02:02:47,740 --> 02:02:53,700
Lecture Four, Word Music and Translation.

989
02:02:53,700 --> 02:03:03,460
Ladies and gentlemen, for the sake of clarity, I shall confine myself tonight to the problem

990
02:03:03,460 --> 02:03:11,100
of verse translation, a minor problem but also a very relevant one.

991
02:03:11,100 --> 02:03:21,060
And this lecture should pave us the way to the topic of my forthcoming lecture, word

992
02:03:21,060 --> 02:03:31,580
music, perhaps word magic, sense and sound in poetry.

993
02:03:31,580 --> 02:03:40,100
According to a widely held superstition, all translations betray their matchless originals.

994
02:03:40,100 --> 02:03:49,980
This is eked out by the well-known, the too well-known Italian pun, traduttore e traditore,

995
02:03:49,980 --> 02:03:52,580
and is supposed to be unanswerable.

996
02:03:52,580 --> 02:04:00,100
Now since this pun is very popular, I suppose there must be a kernel of truth, a core of

997
02:04:00,100 --> 02:04:03,340
truth hidden somewhere in it.

998
02:04:03,340 --> 02:04:12,580
And we'll go into the discussion of the possibilities or otherwise the success or otherwise of verse

999
02:04:12,580 --> 02:04:15,580
with the translation.

1000
02:04:15,580 --> 02:04:21,780
And according to my habit, I'll begin by a few examples.

1001
02:04:21,780 --> 02:04:27,540
I don't think any discussion can be carried on without examples.

1002
02:04:27,540 --> 02:04:38,700
And as my memory is sometimes quite akin to oblivion, I shall choose brief examples since

1003
02:04:38,700 --> 02:04:48,300
it would be beyond our time and my capacity to analyze stanzas or poems.

1004
02:04:48,300 --> 02:05:02,580
Now we will begin by the ode of Runenburg and Stennison's translation.

1005
02:05:02,580 --> 02:05:08,680
This ode, if what my dates are all is rather shaky, was composed at the beginning of the

1006
02:05:08,680 --> 02:05:10,500
10th century.

1007
02:05:10,500 --> 02:05:22,140
It was written or composed to celebrate a victory of the Wessex men against the Dublin

1008
02:05:22,140 --> 02:05:26,100
Vikings, the Scotsman, and the Welsh.

1009
02:05:26,100 --> 02:05:33,460
And we will go into the examination of a verse or so.

1010
02:05:33,460 --> 02:05:43,260
In the original, we find something that runs more or less like this, "Zun ne up on morien

1011
02:05:43,260 --> 02:05:45,860
tid, mere tungon."

1012
02:05:45,860 --> 02:05:53,260
That is to say, the sun at morning tide or at morning time, and then that famous star

1013
02:05:53,260 --> 02:06:00,500
or that mighty star, or famous is of course a better translation, "mere tungon."

1014
02:06:00,500 --> 02:06:07,620
And then the poet goes on to speak of the sun as "goddes condel beorgd," the bright

1015
02:06:07,620 --> 02:06:09,700
candle of God.

1016
02:06:09,700 --> 02:06:19,780
Now this ode was done into English prose by Stennison's son.

1017
02:06:19,780 --> 02:06:28,220
It was published in a magazine, and you may suppose that Stennison had some essentials

1018
02:06:28,220 --> 02:06:31,780
of old English verse explained to him by his son.

1019
02:06:31,780 --> 02:06:37,380
His son may have explained about the beat of the old English verse, about the alliterations

1020
02:06:37,380 --> 02:06:39,780
instead of the rhymes, and so on.

1021
02:06:39,780 --> 02:06:47,660
And then Stennison, who was very fond of experiments, tried his hand at writing old English verse

1022
02:06:47,660 --> 02:06:49,620
in modern English.

1023
02:06:49,620 --> 02:06:58,580
And it is noteworthy to remark that though the experiment was quite successful, he never

1024
02:06:58,580 --> 02:07:00,780
came back to it again.

1025
02:07:00,780 --> 02:07:08,620
So if we had to look for old English verse in Lord Alfred Stennison's works, we should

1026
02:07:08,620 --> 02:07:14,460
have to be content with that one outstanding example of the ode of Runenburg.

1027
02:07:14,460 --> 02:07:24,220
Well, we have already seen those two fragments, the sun, that famous star, or the famous star,

1028
02:07:24,220 --> 02:07:33,620
and later on the sun, the bright candle of God, "goddes condel beorgd."

1029
02:07:33,620 --> 02:07:44,700
And when Stennison came to that particular line, he translated it thus, "When first the

1030
02:07:44,700 --> 02:07:48,380
great sun star of morning tide."

1031
02:07:48,380 --> 02:07:56,220
Now, sun star of morning tide is, I think, a very striking translation.

1032
02:07:56,220 --> 02:08:03,180
It is even more Saxon than the Saxons, since we have those two compound Germanic words,

1033
02:08:03,180 --> 02:08:05,060
sun star of morning tide.

1034
02:08:05,060 --> 02:08:13,420
And of course, though the word morning tide can be easily explained as morning time, we

1035
02:08:13,420 --> 02:08:24,580
are also, we may also think that Stennison wanted to suggest to us the image of the dawn

1036
02:08:24,580 --> 02:08:27,780
as overflowing the sky.

1037
02:08:27,780 --> 02:08:36,340
So we have this very strange verse, "For when first the great sun star of morning tide."

1038
02:08:36,340 --> 02:08:43,700
And then a verse or so later, when Stennison comes to the bright candle of God, he translates

1039
02:08:43,700 --> 02:08:53,260
it as, "The lamp of the Lord."

1040
02:08:53,260 --> 02:09:02,700
And we'll now take another example of a, not only of a blameless, but of a fine translation.

1041
02:09:02,700 --> 02:09:09,060
And this time, we shall consider a translation from the Spanish.

1042
02:09:09,060 --> 02:09:19,500
It is the wonderful poem, "Noche oscura del alma," "Dark Night of the Soul," written in

1043
02:09:19,500 --> 02:09:28,860
the 16th century by one of the greatest, we may safely say the greatest of Spanish poets,

1044
02:09:28,860 --> 02:09:33,860
of all men who had used the Spanish language for the purposes of poetry.

1045
02:09:33,860 --> 02:09:39,100
I am speaking, of course, of San Juan de la Cruz.

1046
02:09:39,100 --> 02:09:48,100
And the first stanza runs thus, "En una noche oscura, con ansias en amores inflamada, oh

1047
02:09:48,100 --> 02:09:55,300
dichosa aventura, salí sin ser notada, estando ya mi casa, sosegada."

1048
02:09:55,300 --> 02:10:01,020
Now this stanza is, of course, a wonderful stanza.

1049
02:10:01,020 --> 02:10:10,420
But if we consider the last verse, it is taken by itself, torn from its context, and of course,

1050
02:10:10,420 --> 02:10:12,180
we are not allowed to do that.

1051
02:10:12,180 --> 02:10:14,980
It is an undistinguished verse.

1052
02:10:14,980 --> 02:10:25,300
We have "estando ya mi casa, sosegada," "when my house was quiet," and then we have the

1053
02:10:25,300 --> 02:10:33,580
rather hissing sound of the three S's, "mi casa, sose," and then "sosegada" is hardly

1054
02:10:33,580 --> 02:10:34,580
a striking word.

1055
02:10:34,580 --> 02:10:38,300
I am not trying to disparage the text.

1056
02:10:38,300 --> 02:10:44,620
I am merely pointing out, and in a short time you will see why I am doing this.

1057
02:10:44,620 --> 02:10:51,260
I am trying to point out that the verse taken by itself, torn from the context, as I said,

1058
02:10:51,260 --> 02:10:52,260
is unremarkable.

1059
02:10:52,260 --> 02:10:59,980
And now this poem was translated into English by Arthur Simons, I think at the end of the

1060
02:10:59,980 --> 02:11:00,980
last century.

1061
02:11:00,980 --> 02:11:07,100
The translation is not a good one, but if you care to look at it, you may find it in

1062
02:11:07,100 --> 02:11:20,940
Yeats' Oxford book of modern verse, and some years ago, a great Scottish poet who was also

1063
02:11:20,940 --> 02:11:28,780
South African, Roy Campbell, attempted a translation of "The Dark Night of the Soul."

1064
02:11:28,780 --> 02:11:37,540
Now I wish I had the book by me, but we will confine ourselves to the verse I have just

1065
02:11:37,540 --> 02:11:48,220
quoted, "estando ya mi casa, sosegada," and we'll see what Roy Campbell made of it.

1066
02:11:48,220 --> 02:11:56,820
He translated it thus, "When all my house was hushed," and then you have the word "all"

1067
02:11:56,820 --> 02:12:04,380
that gives a sense of space, a sense of vastness to the lines, and then the beautiful, the

1068
02:12:04,380 --> 02:12:07,380
lovely English word "hushed."

1069
02:12:07,380 --> 02:12:15,020
"Hushed" seems to give us somehow the very music of silence.

1070
02:12:15,020 --> 02:12:22,100
Now I have taken those two very favorable examples of the art of translation, and I

1071
02:12:22,100 --> 02:12:27,020
will add to them a third one.

1072
02:12:27,020 --> 02:12:34,420
This I will not discuss, since it is not a case of verse rendered into verse, but rather

1073
02:12:34,420 --> 02:12:40,260
of prose being lifted up into verse, into poetry.

1074
02:12:40,260 --> 02:12:49,740
We have that common Latin tag, done from the Greek, of course, "ars longa vita brevis,"

1075
02:12:49,740 --> 02:12:54,780
or as I suppose you ought to pronounce it, "vita brevis."

1076
02:12:54,780 --> 02:13:00,820
Now this is, of course, very ugly, and let us go back to "vita brevis," and let us go

1077
02:13:00,820 --> 02:13:06,220
back to "verge," and not to "vergilius," no?

1078
02:13:06,220 --> 02:13:13,100
Well, here we have a plain statement, a statement of an opinion.

1079
02:13:13,100 --> 02:13:14,900
This is quite plain sailing.

1080
02:13:14,900 --> 02:13:16,940
This is straightforward.

1081
02:13:16,940 --> 02:13:18,980
It strikes no deep chord.

1082
02:13:18,980 --> 02:13:25,020
In fact, it is a kind of prophecy of the telegram and of the literature evolved by it.

1083
02:13:25,020 --> 02:13:30,380
So we have art, Islam, life is short.

1084
02:13:30,380 --> 02:13:39,860
And this tag was repeated over ever so many times, and then we come to the 14th century,

1085
02:13:39,860 --> 02:13:48,380
and then a great translator, a great translator, Master Geoffrey Chaucer, needed that verse.

1086
02:13:48,380 --> 02:13:51,340
Of course, he wasn't thinking about medicine.

1087
02:13:51,340 --> 02:13:59,340
He was thinking perhaps about poetry, or perhaps the text is not by me, so he can choose.

1088
02:13:59,340 --> 02:14:09,300
Perhaps he was thinking of love, and he wanted to work in that line, and then he wrote, "The

1089
02:14:09,300 --> 02:14:17,980
life so short, the craft so long to learn," or as you may suppose he pronounced it, "The

1090
02:14:17,980 --> 02:14:21,660
life so short, the craft so long to learn."

1091
02:14:21,660 --> 02:14:30,660
And there we get not only the statement, but we also get the very music of wistfulness.

1092
02:14:30,660 --> 02:14:39,940
We can see that the poet is not merely thinking of the art was art and of the brevity of life,

1093
02:14:39,940 --> 02:14:42,260
but he's also feeling it.

1094
02:14:42,260 --> 02:14:52,500
And of course, this is given by the apparently invisible, inaudible key word, the word so,

1095
02:14:52,500 --> 02:14:58,620
the life so short, the craft so long to learn.

1096
02:14:58,620 --> 02:15:03,500
And now, let us go back to two examples.

1097
02:15:03,500 --> 02:15:11,980
The example of the famous ode of Brunnenburg and Tennyson, and the example of the Noche

1098
02:15:11,980 --> 02:15:16,980
Oscura del Alma and San Juan de la Cruz.

1099
02:15:16,980 --> 02:15:25,780
Now if we consider the two translations I have quoted verbally, then they are, I should

1100
02:15:25,780 --> 02:15:33,100
say, not inferior to the original, and yet we feel that there is a difference.

1101
02:15:33,100 --> 02:15:38,460
And the difference is beyond what a translator can do.

1102
02:15:38,460 --> 02:15:43,380
It depends rather on the way we read poetry.

1103
02:15:43,380 --> 02:15:58,380
For if we look back on the ode of Brunnenburg, then we know that the ode came from deep emotion.

1104
02:15:58,380 --> 02:16:07,260
We know that the Saxons had been beaten many times over by the Danes, that they hated this,

1105
02:16:07,260 --> 02:16:15,660
and we must have thought, we must think of the joy the Saxons, the West Saxons felt when

1106
02:16:15,660 --> 02:16:21,980
after a long day's struggle, the battle of Brunnenburg was one of the greatest in the

1107
02:16:21,980 --> 02:16:24,220
medieval history of England.

1108
02:16:24,220 --> 02:16:32,900
When after a day's struggle, they defeated Olaf, the king of the Dublin Vikings, and

1109
02:16:32,900 --> 02:16:37,260
the hated Scotsman and the Welshman.

1110
02:16:37,260 --> 02:16:40,940
We may think of what they felt.

1111
02:16:40,940 --> 02:16:45,020
We may think of the man who wrote the ode.

1112
02:16:45,020 --> 02:16:46,980
Perhaps he was a monk.

1113
02:16:46,980 --> 02:16:54,260
The fact remains that instead of thanking God in the Orthodox fashion, he thanked the

1114
02:16:54,260 --> 02:17:00,360
sword of his king and the sword of Prince Edmund for the victory.

1115
02:17:00,360 --> 02:17:04,940
He does not say that God vouchsafed the victory to them.

1116
02:17:04,940 --> 02:17:11,020
He says that they won it, "Sworda edium," by the edge of their swords.

1117
02:17:11,020 --> 02:17:17,580
And the whole poem is filled with a fierce, ruthless joy.

1118
02:17:17,580 --> 02:17:21,420
He mocks at those who have been defeated.

1119
02:17:21,420 --> 02:17:27,600
He is very happy that they have been defeated.

1120
02:17:27,600 --> 02:17:34,220
He talks of the king and his brother going back to their own Wessex, their own West Saxon

1121
02:17:34,220 --> 02:17:37,300
land, as Tennyson has it.

1122
02:17:37,300 --> 02:17:43,180
And he says, "They returned to their own West Saxon land, glad of the war."

1123
02:17:43,180 --> 02:17:49,600
And then after that, he goes back to the past of English history.

1124
02:17:49,600 --> 02:17:54,540
He thinks of the men who came over from Jutland and the Hengist and Horsa.

1125
02:17:54,540 --> 02:18:01,020
And this is very strange because I do not suppose many men had that historical sense

1126
02:18:01,020 --> 02:18:02,780
in the Middle Ages.

1127
02:18:02,780 --> 02:18:14,060
So that we have to think of the poem as coming out of a deep emotion.

1128
02:18:14,060 --> 02:18:20,820
We have to think of it as a kind of onrush of great verse.

1129
02:18:20,820 --> 02:18:29,620
And then when we come to Tennyson's version, much as we may admire it, and I knew it before

1130
02:18:29,620 --> 02:18:39,260
I knew the Saxon original, we think of it as a successful experiment in Old English

1131
02:18:39,260 --> 02:18:44,020
verse wrote by a master of modern English verse.

1132
02:18:44,020 --> 02:18:47,940
That is to say, the context is different.

1133
02:18:47,940 --> 02:18:52,300
And of course, the translator is not to be blamed for this.

1134
02:18:52,300 --> 02:18:58,560
And the same thing happens in the case of San Juan de la Cruz and Roy Campbell.

1135
02:18:58,560 --> 02:19:08,020
We may think, as we're allowed to think, that when all my house was hushed is verbally,

1136
02:19:08,020 --> 02:19:14,300
from the point of view of literature, from the point of view of mere literature, superior

1137
02:19:14,300 --> 02:19:19,020
to "Estando ya mi casa sosegada."

1138
02:19:19,020 --> 02:19:27,760
But that is of no avail as regards our judgment of the two pieces, of the Spanish original

1139
02:19:27,760 --> 02:19:30,740
and of the English rendering.

1140
02:19:30,740 --> 02:19:35,820
Because in the first case, we think of San Juan de la Cruz.

1141
02:19:35,820 --> 02:19:46,860
We think that he reached somehow the highest experience of which the soul of a man is capable.

1142
02:19:46,860 --> 02:19:57,660
The experience of ecstasy, the blending together of a human soul to the soul of divinity, to

1143
02:19:57,660 --> 02:20:00,180
the soul of God.

1144
02:20:00,180 --> 02:20:09,900
And then, after he had had that experience, he had to communicate it somehow in metaphors.

1145
02:20:09,900 --> 02:20:15,180
And then he found ready to his hand the song of songs.

1146
02:20:15,180 --> 02:20:23,020
And he took, many mystics have done this, he took the image of sexual love as an image

1147
02:20:23,020 --> 02:20:33,460
for the mystic union between man and his God, and he wrote the poem.

1148
02:20:33,460 --> 02:20:40,540
And thus, we are hearing, we're overhearing, we may say, as in the case of Saxon, the very

1149
02:20:40,540 --> 02:20:44,860
words that he uttered.

1150
02:20:44,860 --> 02:20:48,460
And then we come to Roy Campbell's translation.

1151
02:20:48,460 --> 02:20:55,180
We find it good, but we are apt to say, or to think perhaps, that well, of course, the

1152
02:20:55,180 --> 02:20:58,860
Scotsman made, after all, quite a good job of it.

1153
02:20:58,860 --> 02:21:01,580
But this, of course, is different.

1154
02:21:01,580 --> 02:21:09,420
That you say, the difference between a translation and the original is not a difference in the

1155
02:21:09,420 --> 02:21:10,420
text themselves.

1156
02:21:10,420 --> 02:21:16,620
I suppose if we did not know whether one was original and the other the translation, we

1157
02:21:16,620 --> 02:21:18,300
could judge them fairly.

1158
02:21:18,300 --> 02:21:21,100
But unhappily, we cannot do this.

1159
02:21:21,100 --> 02:21:29,180
And so the translator's work is always supposed to be inferior, or what is worse, is felt

1160
02:21:29,180 --> 02:21:36,500
to be inferior, even though verbally, one may be, the rendering may be as good as the

1161
02:21:36,500 --> 02:21:37,500
text.

1162
02:21:37,500 --> 02:21:44,580
Now, leaving this for the moment, we'll come to another problem.

1163
02:21:44,580 --> 02:21:49,740
The problem of a literal translation.

1164
02:21:49,740 --> 02:21:55,540
Of course, when I speak of literal translations, I am using a wide metaphor.

1165
02:21:55,540 --> 02:22:01,500
Since if a translation cannot be true word to word with the original, it can still less

1166
02:22:01,500 --> 02:22:04,300
be true letter to letter.

1167
02:22:04,300 --> 02:22:14,260
Now, in the 19th century, a quite forgotten Greek scholar, Newman, attempted a hexameter

1168
02:22:14,260 --> 02:22:17,100
literal translation of Homer.

1169
02:22:17,100 --> 02:22:26,700
It was his purpose to publish a translation, let us say, against Pope's Homer.

1170
02:22:26,700 --> 02:22:37,620
And so he used words such as wet, waves, wine, dark sea, and so on.

1171
02:22:37,620 --> 02:22:43,780
Now, Matthew Arnold had his own theories on translating Homer.

1172
02:22:43,780 --> 02:22:48,460
And when Mr. Newman's book came out, he reviewed it.

1173
02:22:48,460 --> 02:22:50,140
Newman answered him.

1174
02:22:50,140 --> 02:22:52,220
Matthew Arnold answered back.

1175
02:22:52,220 --> 02:22:58,380
And in the essays of Matthew Arnold, you could read that very lively and very intelligent

1176
02:22:58,380 --> 02:23:05,140
discussion, since both men had much to say on the two sides of the question.

1177
02:23:05,140 --> 02:23:13,260
Newman supposed that literal translation was the most faithful one.

1178
02:23:13,260 --> 02:23:18,380
And Matthew Arnold began by a theory about Homer.

1179
02:23:18,380 --> 02:23:24,620
He said that in Homer, several qualities were to be found.

1180
02:23:24,620 --> 02:23:31,220
Those qualities were clarity, nobility, simplicity, and so on.

1181
02:23:31,220 --> 02:23:38,940
And he thought that the translator should always convey the impression of those qualities,

1182
02:23:38,940 --> 02:23:43,460
even when the text did not bear him out.

1183
02:23:43,460 --> 02:23:54,820
Now, Mr. Matthew Arnold pointed out that a literal translation made for oddity and

1184
02:23:54,820 --> 02:23:56,820
for uncouthness.

1185
02:23:56,820 --> 02:24:07,580
For example, in the Romance languages, we do not say it is cold, but it makes cold.

1186
02:24:07,580 --> 02:24:12,380
Il fait froid, il fait froid, fa' fredo, hace frio, and so on.

1187
02:24:12,380 --> 02:24:23,340
Yet, I don't think anybody should translate it's cold by -- no, it should translate il

1188
02:24:23,340 --> 02:24:26,460
fait froid for it makes cold.

1189
02:24:26,460 --> 02:24:33,060
Or, for example, in English, one should say good morning.

1190
02:24:33,060 --> 02:24:37,340
In Spanish, one should say buenos dias, good days.

1191
02:24:37,340 --> 02:24:45,100
And yet, if good morning should be translated as buena mañana, then we should feel that

1192
02:24:45,100 --> 02:24:50,060
this is a literal translation, but hardly a true one.

1193
02:24:50,060 --> 02:24:58,820
Now, Mr. Matthew Arnold pointed out that if a text be translated literally, then false

1194
02:24:58,820 --> 02:25:01,820
emphases are created.

1195
02:25:01,820 --> 02:25:11,540
I do not know whether he came across -- perhaps, rather, it was too late -- he came across

1196
02:25:11,540 --> 02:25:14,740
Captain Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights.

1197
02:25:14,740 --> 02:25:22,620
For Burton translates Kita, Valhalla, Valhalla as book of the thousand nights and a night,

1198
02:25:22,620 --> 02:25:25,140
instead of book of the thousand and one nights.

1199
02:25:25,140 --> 02:25:28,060
Now, this translation is a literal one.

1200
02:25:28,060 --> 02:25:36,740
It is true word by word to the Arabic, but yet it is false in the sense that the words

1201
02:25:36,740 --> 02:25:42,820
book of the thousand nights and a night are common form in Arabic.

1202
02:25:42,820 --> 02:25:55,140
While in English, they -- while in English, we have a slight shock of surprise.

1203
02:25:55,140 --> 02:25:58,180
And this, of course, has not been intended by the original.

1204
02:25:58,180 --> 02:26:05,900
Now, Timothy Arnold advised a translator of Homer to have the Bible at his elbow.

1205
02:26:05,900 --> 02:26:13,580
He said that Bible English might be a kind of standard to the translation of Homer.

1206
02:26:13,580 --> 02:26:20,220
And yet, if Matthew Arnold had looked closely into his Bible, he might have seen that the

1207
02:26:20,220 --> 02:26:27,780
English Bible is full of literal translations and that part of the beauty, of the great

1208
02:26:27,780 --> 02:26:32,820
beauty of the English Bible lies in those literal translations.

1209
02:26:32,820 --> 02:26:37,740
For example, in the English Bible, we have a tower of strength.

1210
02:26:37,740 --> 02:26:48,980
Now, this is a sentence translated, I suppose, by Luther as a "in feste burg," a mighty or

1211
02:26:48,980 --> 02:26:50,540
a firm stronghold.

1212
02:26:50,540 --> 02:26:55,020
And then we have the song of songs.

1213
02:26:55,020 --> 02:27:04,140
Now, I read in Phileas and Leon that the Hebrews had no superlative, so they could not say

1214
02:27:04,140 --> 02:27:06,820
the highest song or the best song.

1215
02:27:06,820 --> 02:27:13,580
So they said the song of songs, even if they might have said the king of kings, not the

1216
02:27:13,580 --> 02:27:20,700
emperor, but the highest king, or the moon of moons, the highest moon, or the night of

1217
02:27:20,700 --> 02:27:25,100
nights, the most hallowed of nights.

1218
02:27:25,100 --> 02:27:34,580
Now, if we compare the English rendering, song of songs, to the German by Luther, we

1219
02:27:34,580 --> 02:27:41,340
see that Luther, who had no care for beauty, Luther, who merely wanted his Germans to understand

1220
02:27:41,340 --> 02:27:47,540
the text, translated it as "das hohe Lied," the high lay.

1221
02:27:47,540 --> 02:27:55,060
So we find that these two literal translations make for beauty.

1222
02:27:55,060 --> 02:28:05,660
In fact, it might be said that literal translations make not only, as Matthew Arnold pointed out,

1223
02:28:05,660 --> 02:28:12,580
for uncouthness and oddity, but also for strangeness and beauty.

1224
02:28:12,580 --> 02:28:16,580
And this, I think, is felt by all of us.

1225
02:28:16,580 --> 02:28:28,500
For if we look into a literal version of some outlandish poem, then we expect something

1226
02:28:28,500 --> 02:28:29,500
strange.

1227
02:28:29,500 --> 02:28:34,540
If we do not find it, we feel somehow disappointed.

1228
02:28:34,540 --> 02:28:41,500
And now we come to one of the finest, one of the most famous English translations.

1229
02:28:41,500 --> 02:28:48,500
I am speaking, of course, of Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

1230
02:28:48,500 --> 02:28:52,740
Now, the first stanza runs thus.

1231
02:28:52,740 --> 02:28:59,500
Awake for morning in the bowl of night, has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight.

1232
02:28:59,500 --> 02:29:06,260
And lo, the hunter of the east has caught the sultan's turret in a noose of light.

1233
02:29:06,260 --> 02:29:15,860
Now, as we know, the book was discovered in a bookstall by Swimble and Rossetti, and they

1234
02:29:15,860 --> 02:29:17,900
were whelmed by its beauty.

1235
02:29:17,900 --> 02:29:21,100
They knew nothing whatever of Edward Fitzgerald.

1236
02:29:21,100 --> 02:29:24,100
He was a quite unknown man of letters.

1237
02:29:24,100 --> 02:29:31,700
They tried his hand at translating Calderon and Fariduddin Zatar's Parliament of Birds.

1238
02:29:31,700 --> 02:29:35,140
These books were not too good.

1239
02:29:35,140 --> 02:29:41,340
And then there came this famous book, now a classic.

1240
02:29:41,340 --> 02:29:48,820
Now I said that Rossetti and Swimble felt the beauty of the translation, and yet we

1241
02:29:48,820 --> 02:29:57,180
wonder if they would have felt this beauty had Fitzgerald presented the Rubaiyat as an

1242
02:29:57,180 --> 02:29:58,180
original.

1243
02:29:58,180 --> 02:30:02,140
Partly it was an original and not as a translation.

1244
02:30:02,140 --> 02:30:08,580
Would I think Fitzgerald have been allowed to say, "Awake for morning in the bowl of

1245
02:30:08,580 --> 02:30:13,580
night, has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight"?

1246
02:30:13,580 --> 02:30:20,500
This second verse sends us to a footnote, and there it is explained that to fling a

1247
02:30:20,500 --> 02:30:24,580
stone into a bowl is a sign for the parting of the caravan.

1248
02:30:24,580 --> 02:30:30,020
And then I wonder whether Fitzgerald would have been allowed the noose of light and the

1249
02:30:30,020 --> 02:30:34,180
sultan's turret in a poem of his own.

1250
02:30:34,180 --> 02:30:40,380
But I think that we can safely dwell on a single line.

1251
02:30:40,380 --> 02:30:50,460
The line, it is to be found in one of the other stanzas, and it runs thus, "Dreaming

1252
02:30:50,460 --> 02:30:56,420
when dawn's left hand was in the sky, I heard a voice within the tavern cry, 'Awake,

1253
02:30:56,420 --> 02:31:02,380
my little ones, and fill the cup before life's liquor in its cup be dry.'"

1254
02:31:02,380 --> 02:31:08,300
We may dwell, I suppose, on the first line, "Dreaming when dawn's left hand was in

1255
02:31:08,300 --> 02:31:09,300
the sky."

1256
02:31:09,300 --> 02:31:16,020
Of course, the key word in that line is the word "left."

1257
02:31:16,020 --> 02:31:21,140
Had any other adjective been used, the line would be meaningless.

1258
02:31:21,140 --> 02:31:27,220
But "left hand" makes us think of something strange, of something sinister.

1259
02:31:27,220 --> 02:31:32,500
We know that the right hand is associated with right, with another word, righteousness,

1260
02:31:32,500 --> 02:31:34,740
direct, and so on.

1261
02:31:34,740 --> 02:31:39,340
Well, we have the ominous word "left."

1262
02:31:39,340 --> 02:31:46,420
Let me remember in Spanish, "Lanzada de moro izquierdo que atraviesa el corazón."

1263
02:31:46,420 --> 02:31:53,340
The idea of something sinister, something, and we feel there is something certainly wrong

1264
02:31:53,340 --> 02:31:55,100
about dawn's left hand.

1265
02:31:55,100 --> 02:32:03,180
If the person was dreaming when dawn's left hand was in the sky, then his dream may become

1266
02:32:03,180 --> 02:32:05,820
a nightmare at any moment.

1267
02:32:05,820 --> 02:32:08,740
And of this, we're slightly aware.

1268
02:32:08,740 --> 02:32:14,340
We don't have to dwell on the word "left," but the word "left" makes all the difference.

1269
02:32:14,340 --> 02:32:18,940
So delicate and so mysterious is the art of verse.

1270
02:32:18,940 --> 02:32:26,180
Now we accept "dreaming when dawn's left hand was in the sky" because we suppose that

1271
02:32:26,180 --> 02:32:29,100
there is a Persian original behind it.

1272
02:32:29,100 --> 02:32:36,060
As far as I'm aware, Omar Khayyam does not bear physical doubt.

1273
02:32:36,060 --> 02:32:46,900
And this brings us to an interesting problem, the problem that a literal translation has

1274
02:32:46,900 --> 02:32:50,820
created a beauty all of its own.

1275
02:32:50,820 --> 02:32:57,100
And I have always wondered about the origin of literal translations.

1276
02:32:57,100 --> 02:33:00,620
Nowadays we're fond of literal translations.

1277
02:33:00,620 --> 02:33:12,900
In fact, many of us only accept literal translations because we want to give every man his due.

1278
02:33:12,900 --> 02:33:16,660
That would have seemed a crib to them.

1279
02:33:16,660 --> 02:33:20,880
They were thinking of something far worthier.

1280
02:33:20,880 --> 02:33:29,340
They wanted to prove that the vernacular was as capable of a great poem as the original.

1281
02:33:29,340 --> 02:33:36,060
And I suppose that Don Juan de Jauregui, when he rendered Lucan into Spanish, thought of

1282
02:33:36,060 --> 02:33:38,260
that also.

1283
02:33:38,260 --> 02:33:47,500
And I don't think any contemporary of Pope thought about Homer and Pope.

1284
02:33:47,500 --> 02:33:54,300
I suppose that the readers, the best readers, anyhow, thought of the poem in itself.

1285
02:33:54,300 --> 02:34:05,740
They were interested in the Iliad, in the Odyssey, and they had no care for verbal.

1286
02:34:05,740 --> 02:34:14,620
Now all throughout the Middle Ages, people thought of translation not in terms of a literal

1287
02:34:14,620 --> 02:34:23,060
rendering, but in terms of something being recreated, of a poet having read a work and

1288
02:34:23,060 --> 02:34:29,940
then somehow evolving that work from himself, from his own might, from the possibilities,

1289
02:34:29,940 --> 02:34:33,700
hidden or known, of his language.

1290
02:34:33,700 --> 02:34:39,540
And how did the literal translations begin?

1291
02:34:39,540 --> 02:34:42,220
I do not think they came out of scholarship.

1292
02:34:42,220 --> 02:34:45,740
I do not think they came out of scruples.

1293
02:34:45,740 --> 02:34:49,580
I think they had a theological origin.

1294
02:34:49,580 --> 02:34:57,900
For though people would think of Homer as the greatest of poets, still they knew that

1295
02:34:57,900 --> 02:35:06,180
Homer was human, "quandoque dormitat bonus homerus," and so on, and so they could reshape

1296
02:35:06,180 --> 02:35:07,820
his words.

1297
02:35:07,820 --> 02:35:14,820
But when it came to translating the Bible, that was something quite different, because

1298
02:35:14,820 --> 02:35:19,740
the Bible was supposed to have been written by the Holy Ghost.

1299
02:35:19,740 --> 02:35:28,580
And if we think of the Holy Ghost, if we think of the infinite intelligence of God undertaking

1300
02:35:28,580 --> 02:35:36,920
a literary task, then we're not allowed to think of any chance elements, of any haphazard

1301
02:35:36,920 --> 02:35:38,860
elements in his work.

1302
02:35:38,860 --> 02:35:39,860
No.

1303
02:35:39,860 --> 02:35:47,620
If God writes a book, if God condescends to literature, then every word, every letter,

1304
02:35:47,620 --> 02:35:51,980
as the Kabbalist said, must have been thought out.

1305
02:35:51,980 --> 02:35:58,700
And it might be blasphemy to tamper with a text written by an endless, by an eternal

1306
02:35:58,700 --> 02:35:59,700
intelligence.

1307
02:35:59,700 --> 02:36:09,820
And thus, I think, the idea of a literal translation came from the translations of the Bible.

1308
02:36:09,820 --> 02:36:11,320
This is merely my guess.

1309
02:36:11,320 --> 02:36:18,280
I suppose there are many scholars here who may correct me if I make a mistake, but I

1310
02:36:18,280 --> 02:36:21,080
think that this is highly probable.

1311
02:36:21,080 --> 02:36:30,140
And then, when very fine translations of the Bible were undertaken, men began to discover,

1312
02:36:30,140 --> 02:36:36,300
began to feel that there was a beauty in alien ways of expression.

1313
02:36:36,300 --> 02:36:42,820
And now, everybody likes, everybody's fond of literal translations, because a literal

1314
02:36:42,820 --> 02:36:49,980
translation always gives us those small jolts of surprise that we expect.

1315
02:36:49,980 --> 02:36:56,940
In fact, it might be said that perhaps no original is needed.

1316
02:36:56,940 --> 02:37:04,740
Perhaps a time will come when a translation will be considered a something in itself.

1317
02:37:04,740 --> 02:37:10,660
We may think of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnets from the Portuguese.

1318
02:37:10,660 --> 02:37:17,820
Sometimes I have attempted a rather bold metaphor.

1319
02:37:17,820 --> 02:37:21,540
And I have seen that nobody will accept it if it came from me.

1320
02:37:21,540 --> 02:37:23,500
I am a mere contemporary.

1321
02:37:23,500 --> 02:37:30,260
And then, I have attributed it to some out-of-the-way Persian or Norseman.

1322
02:37:30,260 --> 02:37:33,740
And then, my friends have said it's quite fine.

1323
02:37:33,740 --> 02:37:38,280
And of course, I have never told that I had invented it, because I was fond of the metaphor.

1324
02:37:38,280 --> 02:37:42,740
And after all, the Persians and the Norsemen may have invented that metaphor, or far better

1325
02:37:42,740 --> 02:37:44,540
ones.

1326
02:37:44,540 --> 02:37:51,020
Thus, we go back to what I said at the beginning.

1327
02:37:51,020 --> 02:37:56,100
The fact that a translation is never judged verbally.

1328
02:37:56,100 --> 02:37:58,900
It should be judged verbally, but it never is.

1329
02:37:58,900 --> 02:38:05,260
For example, and I hope you won't think that I'm uttering a blasphemy, I have looked very

1330
02:38:05,260 --> 02:38:12,100
carefully, but this was some 40 years ago, and I can plead the mistakes of youth.

1331
02:38:12,100 --> 02:38:19,220
I have looked into Baudelaire's Fleur du Mal, and into Stéphane-Georges' Blumen des

1332
02:38:19,220 --> 02:38:20,220
Bösel.

1333
02:38:20,220 --> 02:38:25,740
And I think that Baudelaire was, of course, a greater poet than Stéphane-Georges.

1334
02:38:25,740 --> 02:38:29,940
But Stéphane-Georges was a far more skillful craftsman.

1335
02:38:29,940 --> 02:38:36,220
And so, I think that if we compare them line by line, we should find Stéphane-Georges'

1336
02:38:36,220 --> 02:38:37,220
Umdichtung.

1337
02:38:37,220 --> 02:38:41,180
This is a fine German word.

1338
02:38:41,180 --> 02:38:48,340
It means not a poem translated from another, but a poem, let's say, woven around another.

1339
02:38:48,340 --> 02:38:54,300
And we also have Nachdichtung, an after poem, a translation, and then the mere translation,

1340
02:38:54,300 --> 02:38:55,300
Übersetzung.

1341
02:38:55,300 --> 02:39:02,260
I think that Stéphane-Georges' translation is perhaps better than Baudelaire's book.

1342
02:39:02,260 --> 02:39:08,780
But of course, this will do Stéphane-Georges no good, since people who are interested in

1343
02:39:08,780 --> 02:39:14,500
Baudelaire, and I have been very much interested in Baudelaire, think of his words as coming

1344
02:39:14,500 --> 02:39:15,500
from him.

1345
02:39:15,500 --> 02:39:18,380
That is to say, the thing of the context of his whole life.

1346
02:39:18,380 --> 02:39:25,340
While in the case of Stéphane-Georges, we have an efficient, but a rather priggish 20th

1347
02:39:25,340 --> 02:39:33,420
century poet turning Baudelaire's very words into an alien language, into German.

1348
02:39:33,420 --> 02:39:35,620
Now I have spoken of the present.

1349
02:39:35,620 --> 02:39:42,500
I say that we are burdened, overburdened by historical sense.

1350
02:39:42,500 --> 02:39:51,020
We cannot look at intonation texts as the men of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance

1351
02:39:51,020 --> 02:39:53,420
or even of the 18th century did.

1352
02:39:53,420 --> 02:39:56,660
No, we are worried by circumstances.

1353
02:39:56,660 --> 02:40:04,420
We want to know exactly what Homer meant when he wrote about the why in the dark sea, if

1354
02:40:04,420 --> 02:40:08,980
why in dark sea be the right translation, I do not know.

1355
02:40:08,980 --> 02:40:19,060
But if we are historically minded, I think we may perhaps suppose that a time will come

1356
02:40:19,060 --> 02:40:24,060
when men will no longer be as aware of history as we are.

1357
02:40:24,060 --> 02:40:32,100
A time will come when men shall care very little about the accidents and circumstances

1358
02:40:32,100 --> 02:40:33,100
of beauty.

1359
02:40:33,100 --> 02:40:37,500
They shall care for beauty itself.

1360
02:40:37,500 --> 02:40:43,460
Perhaps they shall not even care about the names or the biographies of the poets.

1361
02:40:43,460 --> 02:40:45,820
That is all to the good.

1362
02:40:45,820 --> 02:40:49,300
We may think that there are whole nations who think in this way.

1363
02:40:49,300 --> 02:40:55,260
For example, I do not think in India people have a historical sense.

1364
02:40:55,260 --> 02:41:02,420
One of the great, one of the thorns in the flesh for Europeans who write, who have written

1365
02:41:02,420 --> 02:41:07,940
histories of Indian philosophy is that all philosophy is treated as contemporary by the

1366
02:41:07,940 --> 02:41:08,940
Indians.

1367
02:41:08,940 --> 02:41:18,100
That you say they are interested in the problems themselves, not in the mere biographical fact

1368
02:41:18,100 --> 02:41:25,140
or chronological fact that so and so was, what's his name, master, that he came before,

1369
02:41:25,140 --> 02:41:26,900
that he wrote under that influence.

1370
02:41:26,900 --> 02:41:28,620
All these things are nothing to them.

1371
02:41:28,620 --> 02:41:31,140
They care about the riddle of the universe.

1372
02:41:31,140 --> 02:41:38,220
But I suppose in a time to come, and I hope this time is around the door, in a time to

1373
02:41:38,220 --> 02:41:43,900
come men will care for beauty, not from the circumstances of beauty.

1374
02:41:43,900 --> 02:41:50,780
And then we'll have translations not only as good, because maybe we have them already,

1375
02:41:50,780 --> 02:42:02,140
but as famous as Chapman's Homer, as Orchard's Ravelais, as Pope's Odyssey.

1376
02:42:02,140 --> 02:42:08,660
And I think that this is a consummation devoutly to be wished for.

1377
02:42:09,660 --> 02:42:12,660
[APPLAUSE]

1378
02:42:12,660 --> 02:42:27,660
Lecture 5, Thought and Poetry.

1379
02:42:31,660 --> 02:42:41,660
Ladies and gentlemen, Walter Pater wrote that all arts aspired to the condition of music.

1380
02:42:41,660 --> 02:42:49,660
The reason, the obvious reason, I speak as a layman of course, would be that in music

1381
02:42:49,660 --> 02:42:55,660
form and substance cannot be torn asunder.

1382
02:42:55,660 --> 02:43:07,660
A melody, any piece of music, I suppose, is a pattern of sounds and pauses unwinding itself

1383
02:43:07,660 --> 02:43:09,660
in time.

1384
02:43:09,660 --> 02:43:12,660
I do not suppose it can be told.

1385
02:43:12,660 --> 02:43:22,660
The melody is merely the pattern and of course the emotions it sprang from and the emotions

1386
02:43:22,660 --> 02:43:24,660
it awakens.

1387
02:43:24,660 --> 02:43:36,660
The Austrian critic, Hans Lick, wrote that music is a language that we can use, that

1388
02:43:36,660 --> 02:43:41,660
we can understand, but that we are unable to translate.

1389
02:43:41,660 --> 02:43:51,660
Now, in the case of literature, and especially of poetry, the case is supposed to be far.

1390
02:43:51,660 --> 02:43:54,660
The other wise.

1391
02:43:54,660 --> 02:44:02,660
For we might tell the plot of the Scarlet Letter to a friend of ours who has not read

1392
02:44:02,660 --> 02:44:03,660
it.

1393
02:44:03,660 --> 02:44:13,660
And I suppose that we could even tell the pattern, the framework, the plot of Yeats,

1394
02:44:13,660 --> 02:44:16,660
Sonnet, Lieder, and so on.

1395
02:44:16,660 --> 02:44:26,660
So that we fall to thinking of poetry as being a bastard art, as being something [inaudible]

1396
02:44:26,660 --> 02:44:34,660
and Robert Louis Stevenson has also spoken of this.

1397
02:44:34,660 --> 02:44:41,660
He has also spoken of this supposed dual nature of poetry.

1398
02:44:41,660 --> 02:44:49,660
He says that, in a sense, poetry is nearer to the common man, to the man in the street,

1399
02:44:49,660 --> 02:44:52,660
for the materials of poetry are words.

1400
02:44:52,660 --> 02:44:57,660
And those words are, he says, the very dialect of life.

1401
02:44:57,660 --> 02:45:02,660
Words are used for everyday, hundred purposes.

1402
02:45:02,660 --> 02:45:13,660
And words are the material of the poet, even sounds are the material of the musician.

1403
02:45:13,660 --> 02:45:20,660
And he speaks of words as being mere blocks, as being mere conveniences.

1404
02:45:20,660 --> 02:45:31,660
And then he wonders at the poet who is able to weave those rigid symbols meant for everyday

1405
02:45:31,660 --> 02:45:36,660
purposes, or for abstract purposes, into a pattern.

1406
02:45:36,660 --> 02:45:39,660
He calls it the web.

1407
02:45:39,660 --> 02:45:47,660
Thus, if we accept what Stevenson says, we have a theory of poetry.

1408
02:45:47,660 --> 02:45:57,660
The theory of words being made by literature to serve for something beyond what they have

1409
02:45:57,660 --> 02:45:59,660
been intended for.

1410
02:45:59,660 --> 02:46:08,660
Words, says Stevenson, are meant for the common, everyday commerce of life, and the poet takes

1411
02:46:08,660 --> 02:46:13,660
them, and somehow he makes of them something.

1412
02:46:13,660 --> 02:46:15,660
It's magic.

1413
02:46:15,660 --> 02:46:21,660
Now, I suppose most of us agree with Stevenson.

1414
02:46:21,660 --> 02:46:26,660
And yet, I think that he may perhaps be proved wrong.

1415
02:46:26,660 --> 02:46:27,660
I'll say something.

1416
02:46:27,660 --> 02:46:29,660
He wrote the elegies.

1417
02:46:29,660 --> 02:46:38,660
We know that those lonely and admirable men were able to convey to us their loneliness,

1418
02:46:38,660 --> 02:46:46,660
their courage, their loyalty, their feeling for the bleak seas and the bleak moors.

1419
02:46:46,660 --> 02:46:57,660
And yet, I suppose that those men who wrote those poems that seem so near to us and come

1420
02:46:57,660 --> 02:47:04,660
through centuries, we know that those men, for having hard put to it, had they been made

1421
02:47:04,660 --> 02:47:06,660
to reason out something in prose.

1422
02:47:06,660 --> 02:47:13,660
Even in the case of King Alfred, his prose is straightforward.

1423
02:47:13,660 --> 02:47:19,660
It is efficient for its purposes, but it rings no deep note.

1424
02:47:19,660 --> 02:47:21,660
He tells us a story.

1425
02:47:21,660 --> 02:47:25,660
The story may or may not be interesting, but that is all.

1426
02:47:25,660 --> 02:47:34,660
While there were contemporaries who wrote poetry that still rings, poetry that is still

1427
02:47:34,660 --> 02:47:36,660
very much living.

1428
02:47:36,660 --> 02:47:44,660
Then, if from the historical argument, and of course I have taken this example at random,

1429
02:47:44,660 --> 02:47:52,660
it might be parallel all over the world, we came to a case of philology, then we find

1430
02:47:52,660 --> 02:48:03,660
that words began not by being abstract, but rather they began by being concrete.

1431
02:48:03,660 --> 02:48:10,660
And concrete, I suppose, would be much the same thing as poetic in this case.

1432
02:48:10,660 --> 02:48:15,660
For example, let us consider such a word as dreary.

1433
02:48:15,660 --> 02:48:18,660
The word dreary meant bloodstained.

1434
02:48:18,660 --> 02:48:23,660
The word glad meant polished.

1435
02:48:23,660 --> 02:48:27,660
The word threat meant a threatening crowd.

1436
02:48:27,660 --> 02:48:38,660
That is to say, those words that now are abstract once had a strong meaning.

1437
02:48:38,660 --> 02:48:44,660
And we might go on to other examples.

1438
02:48:44,660 --> 02:48:48,660
Let us take the word thunder.

1439
02:48:48,660 --> 02:48:56,660
Let us think, let us look back on the god, Thunor, the Saxon counterpart of the Norse

1440
02:48:56,660 --> 02:48:57,660
Thor.

1441
02:48:57,660 --> 02:49:04,660
Now, the word Thunor stood for thunder and for the god.

1442
02:49:04,660 --> 02:49:12,660
But had we asked the men who came to England with Hengist, had we asked them whether the

1443
02:49:12,660 --> 02:49:19,660
word stood for the rumbling in the sky or for the angry god, I do not think he would

1444
02:49:19,660 --> 02:49:24,660
have been subtle enough to understand the difference.

1445
02:49:24,660 --> 02:49:32,660
I suppose that the word carried both meanings without committing itself very closely to

1446
02:49:32,660 --> 02:49:34,660
any one of them.

1447
02:49:34,660 --> 02:49:44,660
I suppose that when they uttered or they heard the word thunder, they felt at the same time

1448
02:49:44,660 --> 02:49:50,660
the low rumbling in the sky.

1449
02:49:50,660 --> 02:49:58,660
And then that comes after lightning, and then they thought of the god so that the words

1450
02:49:58,660 --> 02:50:01,660
were packed with magic.

1451
02:50:01,660 --> 02:50:07,660
They did not have a hard and fast meaning.

1452
02:50:07,660 --> 02:50:15,660
And therefore, if we speak of poetry, we may say that poetry is not doing what Stevens

1453
02:50:15,660 --> 02:50:16,660
had thought.

1454
02:50:16,660 --> 02:50:25,660
Poetry is not trying to take a set of logical coins and work them into magic.

1455
02:50:25,660 --> 02:50:32,660
Rather, poetry is bringing language back to its original source.

1456
02:50:32,660 --> 02:50:40,660
Remember that Alfred North Whitehead wrote that among the many fallacies, there is one,

1457
02:50:40,660 --> 02:50:47,660
the fallacy of the perfect dictionary, the fallacy of thinking that for every perception

1458
02:50:47,660 --> 02:50:58,660
of the senses, for every statement, for every abstract idea, there may be found a counterpart,

1459
02:50:58,660 --> 02:51:02,660
a very exact symbol in the dictionary.

1460
02:51:02,660 --> 02:51:09,660
And the very fact that languages are different makes us suspect that this does not exist.

1461
02:51:09,660 --> 02:51:17,660
For example, in English, or rather in the Scots, we have such words as eerie and uncanny.

1462
02:51:17,660 --> 02:51:22,660
Those words cannot be found in other languages.

1463
02:51:22,660 --> 02:51:25,660
Well, we have the German unheimlich, of course.

1464
02:51:25,660 --> 02:51:26,660
Why?

1465
02:51:26,660 --> 02:51:32,660
Because men who spoke other languages had no need for those words.

1466
02:51:32,660 --> 02:51:37,660
I suppose a nation evolves the words it needs.

1467
02:51:37,660 --> 02:51:47,660
And there is also an observation of Chesterton, I think in his book on Watts, and he says

1468
02:51:47,660 --> 02:51:55,660
that language is not, as we are led to suppose by the dictionary, language is not the invention

1469
02:51:55,660 --> 02:52:05,660
of academicians or philologists, but rather language has been evolved through time, through

1470
02:52:05,660 --> 02:52:12,660
a long time by peasants, by fishermen, by hunters, by riders.

1471
02:52:12,660 --> 02:52:14,660
It did not come from the libraries.

1472
02:52:14,660 --> 02:52:26,660
It came from the fields, from the sea, from rivers, from night, from the dawn.

1473
02:52:26,660 --> 02:52:38,660
Thus, we have in language the fact, I suppose, it seems obvious to me, that words began in

1474
02:52:38,660 --> 02:52:41,660
a sense as magic.

1475
02:52:41,660 --> 02:52:51,660
Perhaps there was a moment when the word light seemed to be flashing, when the word night

1476
02:52:51,660 --> 02:53:00,660
was a dark word, and in the case of night, we may surmise that night at first stood for

1477
02:53:00,660 --> 02:53:10,660
the night itself, for its blackness, for its threats, for the shining stars, and then after

1478
02:53:10,660 --> 02:53:17,660
much time, after ever so long a time, then we come to the abstract sense of the word

1479
02:53:17,660 --> 02:53:30,660
night meant the period between the twilight of the raven as the Hebrews had it and the

1480
02:53:30,660 --> 02:53:33,660
twilight of the dove, the beginning of day.

1481
02:53:33,660 --> 02:53:41,660
And since I've spoken of the Hebrews, we might find an additional example in Jewish mysticism,

1482
02:53:41,660 --> 02:53:42,660
in the Kabbalah.

1483
02:53:42,660 --> 02:53:50,660
For to the Jews, it seemed obvious that there lay a power in words.

1484
02:53:50,660 --> 02:53:57,660
This is the idea, of course, behind all our stories of talismans, of rakalabras, the stories

1485
02:53:57,660 --> 02:53:59,660
we found in the Arabian Nights.

1486
02:53:59,660 --> 02:54:08,660
And as I read in the first page of the first chapter of the Torah that God said, "Let there

1487
02:54:08,660 --> 02:54:17,660
be light," and there was light, so it seemed obvious to them that in the word light, there

1488
02:54:17,660 --> 02:54:28,660
lay a strength, a strength sufficient to cause light to shine all over the world, a strength

1489
02:54:28,660 --> 02:54:34,660
sufficient to engender, to beget light.

1490
02:54:34,660 --> 02:54:45,660
I have done some thinking over this problem, a problem that I will not solve, of course,

1491
02:54:45,660 --> 02:54:49,660
of thought and meaning.

1492
02:54:49,660 --> 02:55:00,660
We spoke some time ago about the fact that in music you had, that in music the sound,

1493
02:55:00,660 --> 02:55:09,660
the form and the substance could not be torn asunder, that they were, in fact, the same

1494
02:55:09,660 --> 02:55:10,660
thing.

1495
02:55:10,660 --> 02:55:18,660
And it may be suspected that to a certain degree, the same thing happens in poetry.

1496
02:55:18,660 --> 02:55:25,660
Let us consider now two fragments by two great poets.

1497
02:55:25,660 --> 02:55:35,660
The first fragment would come from a short piece by the great Irish poet William Butler

1498
02:55:35,660 --> 02:55:41,660
Yeats, and it runs thus, "Bodily decrepitude is wisdom.

1499
02:55:41,660 --> 02:55:45,660
Young, we loved each other and were ignorant."

1500
02:55:45,660 --> 02:55:52,660
Now, here we find at the beginning a statement, "Bodily decrepitude is wisdom."

1501
02:55:52,660 --> 02:55:56,660
This, of course, should be read ironically.

1502
02:55:56,660 --> 02:56:05,660
Yeats knew quite well that we may attain bodily decrepitude without attaining wisdom.

1503
02:56:05,660 --> 02:56:12,660
I suppose that wisdom is more important than love, love than mere happiness.

1504
02:56:12,660 --> 02:56:14,660
There is something trivial about happiness.

1505
02:56:14,660 --> 02:56:21,660
We get the statement about happiness in the other part of the stanza.

1506
02:56:21,660 --> 02:56:24,660
"Bodily decrepitude is wisdom.

1507
02:56:24,660 --> 02:56:29,660
Young, we loved each other and were ignorant."

1508
02:56:29,660 --> 02:56:43,660
Now, I will take a verse by George de Meredith, and it runs thus, "Not till the fire is dying

1509
02:56:43,660 --> 02:56:48,660
in the great look we for any kinship with the stars."

1510
02:56:48,660 --> 02:56:52,660
Now, this statement, taken at its face value, is false.

1511
02:56:52,660 --> 02:57:01,660
The idea that we are only interested in philosophy when we are through with bodily lusts or when

1512
02:57:01,660 --> 02:57:06,660
the lusts of the body are through with us, this is, I think, false.

1513
02:57:06,660 --> 02:57:09,660
We know of many passionate young philosophers.

1514
02:57:09,660 --> 02:57:13,660
Let us think of Berkeley, of Spinoza, and of Schopenhauer.

1515
02:57:13,660 --> 02:57:15,660
This is quite irrelevant.

1516
02:57:15,660 --> 02:57:23,660
What is really important is the fact that both fragments, bodily decrepitude is wisdom,

1517
02:57:23,660 --> 02:57:31,660
young, we loved each other and were ignorant, and Meredith, not till the fire is dying in

1518
02:57:31,660 --> 02:57:39,660
the great look we for any kinship with the stars, mean, taken in an abstract way, much

1519
02:57:39,660 --> 02:57:45,660
the same thing, and yet they strike quite different chords.

1520
02:57:45,660 --> 02:57:53,660
When we are told, or now when I tell you, that they mean the same thing, you all feel,

1521
02:57:53,660 --> 02:58:00,660
you all instinctively and rightly feel that this is irrelevant, that the verses are really

1522
02:58:00,660 --> 02:58:02,660
different.

1523
02:58:02,660 --> 02:58:14,660
I have suspected many a time that the meaning is really something added to the verse, and

1524
02:58:14,660 --> 02:58:27,660
I know it for a fact that we feel the beauty of a poem before we even begin to think of

1525
02:58:27,660 --> 02:58:29,660
the meaning.

1526
02:58:29,660 --> 02:58:34,660
We do not know, but I already quoted an example from Shakespeare.

1527
02:58:34,660 --> 02:58:40,660
It runs from one of the sonnets of Shakespeare.

1528
02:58:40,660 --> 02:58:48,660
It runs thus, "The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured, and the sad ogres mock their own

1529
02:58:48,660 --> 02:58:49,660
pretty sage.

1530
02:58:49,660 --> 02:58:57,660
Uncertainties now crown themselves assured, and peace proclaims olives of endless age."

1531
02:58:57,660 --> 02:59:05,660
Now, if we look at the footnotes, we find that the first two verses, "The mortal moon

1532
02:59:05,660 --> 02:59:11,660
hath her eclipse endured, and the sad ogres mock their own pretty sage," is supposed to

1533
02:59:11,660 --> 02:59:20,660
be an allusion to Queen Elizabeth, the virgin queen, the famous queen compared by the court

1534
02:59:20,660 --> 02:59:25,660
poets to Diana, the chaste, the maiden.

1535
02:59:25,660 --> 02:59:33,660
Now, I suppose that when Shakespeare wrote these verses, he had both moons in mind.

1536
02:59:33,660 --> 02:59:44,660
He had that metaphor of the moon, the virgin queen, and I do not think he could help thinking

1537
02:59:44,660 --> 02:59:49,660
of the moon in the sky.

1538
02:59:49,660 --> 02:59:57,660
But the point I would like to make is that we do not have to commit ourselves to a meaning,

1539
02:59:57,660 --> 03:00:00,660
to any one of the meanings.

1540
03:00:00,660 --> 03:00:09,660
We feel the verses before we adopt one, the other, or both those hypotheses.

1541
03:00:09,660 --> 03:00:16,660
"The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured, and the sad ogres mock their own pretty sage"

1542
03:00:16,660 --> 03:00:26,660
has, at least to me, a beauty far beyond the mere fact of how it's interpreted.

1543
03:00:26,660 --> 03:00:36,660
And there are, of course, verses that are beautiful and meaningless, and yet they have

1544
03:00:36,660 --> 03:00:43,660
a meaning, not to reason, but to the imagination.

1545
03:00:43,660 --> 03:00:50,660
Let me take a very simple example, "Two red roses across the moon."

1546
03:00:50,660 --> 03:00:57,660
Here it might be said that the meaning is the image given by the words, but to me at

1547
03:00:57,660 --> 03:00:59,660
least, there is no definite image.

1548
03:00:59,660 --> 03:01:06,660
There is a pleasure in the words and, of course, in the lilt of the words, in the music of

1549
03:01:06,660 --> 03:01:07,660
the words.

1550
03:01:07,660 --> 03:01:14,660
Or to take another example from William Morris, "Therefore," said Fair Euland of the flowers,

1551
03:01:14,660 --> 03:01:19,660
Fair Euland is a witch, "this is the tune of seven towers."

1552
03:01:19,660 --> 03:01:25,660
Those verses have been told from their context, and yet I think they stand.

1553
03:01:25,660 --> 03:01:36,660
Somehow, though I love English, when I am recalling English verse, I find that my language,

1554
03:01:36,660 --> 03:01:39,660
Spanish, is calling to me.

1555
03:01:39,660 --> 03:01:43,660
And I would like to quote a few verses.

1556
03:01:43,660 --> 03:01:50,660
If you do not understand them, you may console yourselves by thinking that I do not understand

1557
03:01:50,660 --> 03:01:53,660
them either, and that they are meaningless.

1558
03:01:53,660 --> 03:01:57,660
They are beautifully, they are in a quite lovely way, meaningless.

1559
03:01:57,660 --> 03:02:00,660
They are not meant to mean anything.

1560
03:02:00,660 --> 03:02:10,660
They come from that rather forgotten, that too forgotten Bolivian poet, Ricardo Jaimes

1561
03:02:10,660 --> 03:02:18,660
Freire, a friend of Darío and of Lugones, and he wrote them in the last decade of the

1562
03:02:18,660 --> 03:02:19,660
19th century.

1563
03:02:19,660 --> 03:02:23,660
I wish I could remember the whole sonnet.

1564
03:02:23,660 --> 03:02:29,660
I think that something of its onorous quality would come through to you, but there is no

1565
03:02:29,660 --> 03:02:30,660
need.

1566
03:02:30,660 --> 03:02:37,660
I think that these verses should be sufficient, all is sufficient.

1567
03:02:37,660 --> 03:02:47,660
They run thus, "Peregrina, paloma, imaginaria, que nardeces los últimos amores.

1568
03:02:47,660 --> 03:02:50,660
Alma de luz, de música y de flores.

1569
03:02:50,660 --> 03:02:52,660
Peregrina, paloma, imaginaria."

1570
03:02:52,660 --> 03:02:59,660
They do not mean anything, they're not meant to mean anything, and yet they stand.

1571
03:02:59,660 --> 03:03:02,660
They stand as a thing of beauty.

1572
03:03:02,660 --> 03:03:05,660
They are, at least to me, inexhaustible.

1573
03:03:05,660 --> 03:03:11,660
And now, since I have quoted Meredith, I will take another example.

1574
03:03:11,660 --> 03:03:14,660
And this example is different from the others.

1575
03:03:14,660 --> 03:03:22,660
Since it bears a meaning, we feel a conviction that it corresponds to an experience of the

1576
03:03:22,660 --> 03:03:23,660
poet.

1577
03:03:23,660 --> 03:03:29,660
And yet, had we to put our finger on that experience, or had the poet to tell us how

1578
03:03:29,660 --> 03:03:36,660
he came to those verses, how he attained them, I think we should be at a loss.

1579
03:03:36,660 --> 03:03:45,660
The verses are, the four lines are, "Love that had robbed us of immortal things, this

1580
03:03:45,660 --> 03:03:47,660
little moment mercifully gave.

1581
03:03:47,660 --> 03:03:54,660
For I have seen across the twilight wave, the swan sail with her young beneath her wings."

1582
03:03:54,660 --> 03:04:03,660
We find in the first verse something that, on reflection, may strike us as strange.

1583
03:04:03,660 --> 03:04:12,660
"Love that had robbed us of immortal things," not love that had, as you might fairly suppose,

1584
03:04:12,660 --> 03:04:15,660
made us a gift of immortal things.

1585
03:04:15,660 --> 03:04:21,660
No, "Love that had robbed us of immortal things, this little moment mercifully gave.

1586
03:04:21,660 --> 03:04:26,660
For I made to feel that he's speaking of himself and of his beloved.

1587
03:04:26,660 --> 03:04:33,660
For I have seen across the twilight wave, the swan sail with her young beneath her wings."

1588
03:04:33,660 --> 03:04:38,660
We have the threefold beat of the verse.

1589
03:04:38,660 --> 03:04:47,660
We do not need any anecdotes about the swan, about how she sailed into a river, and then

1590
03:04:47,660 --> 03:04:51,660
into Meredith's verse, and then forever into my memory.

1591
03:04:51,660 --> 03:04:57,660
We know, or at least I know, that I have heard something unforgettable.

1592
03:04:57,660 --> 03:05:03,660
And I may say of this what Hanslik said of music.

1593
03:05:03,660 --> 03:05:06,660
I cannot, I can't recall it.

1594
03:05:06,660 --> 03:05:12,660
I can understand it, not with a mere reason, but with a deeper imagination.

1595
03:05:12,660 --> 03:05:18,660
But I cannot translate it, and I do not think it needs any translation.

1596
03:05:18,660 --> 03:05:27,660
And since I have used the word "threefold," I am reminded of a metaphor, a metaphor by

1597
03:05:27,660 --> 03:05:31,660
a Greek poet of Alexandria.

1598
03:05:31,660 --> 03:05:44,660
He wrote about the lion of the threefold night.

1599
03:05:44,660 --> 03:05:50,660
And this strikes me as being a mighty lion.

1600
03:05:50,660 --> 03:05:59,660
When I looked into the notes, I found that the lion was Hercules, and that Hercules had

1601
03:05:59,660 --> 03:06:07,660
been begotten by Jupiter in a night that had the length of three nights, so that the pleasure

1602
03:06:07,660 --> 03:06:14,660
of the god might be vast.

1603
03:06:14,660 --> 03:06:20,660
Now this explanation, I think, is quite irrelevant.

1604
03:06:20,660 --> 03:06:25,660
In fact, perhaps it rather does damage to the verse.

1605
03:06:25,660 --> 03:06:34,660
It provides us with a small anecdote, and I think it takes away something from that

1606
03:06:34,660 --> 03:06:44,660
riddle, from that wonderful riddle, the threefold, the night, the lion of the threefold night.

1607
03:06:44,660 --> 03:06:46,660
That should be enough.

1608
03:06:46,660 --> 03:06:49,660
The riddle, we have no need to read it.

1609
03:06:49,660 --> 03:06:52,660
The riddle is there.

1610
03:06:52,660 --> 03:07:01,660
I have spoken of words, I have spoken of words standing out in the beginning when men invented

1611
03:07:01,660 --> 03:07:02,660
them.

1612
03:07:02,660 --> 03:07:09,660
I have thought that the word thunder might be not only the sound, but the god, and I

1613
03:07:09,660 --> 03:07:12,660
have spoken of the word night.

1614
03:07:12,660 --> 03:07:21,660
And when I speak of night, I am inevitably, and happily for us, I think, reminded of the

1615
03:07:21,660 --> 03:07:34,660
last sentence, the first chapter in Finnegan's Wake, wherein Joyce speaks of the hithering

1616
03:07:34,660 --> 03:07:41,660
waters of night.

1617
03:07:41,660 --> 03:07:51,660
Now this is an extreme example of an elaborate style.

1618
03:07:51,660 --> 03:07:59,820
We feel that such a line could only have been written after centuries of literature.

1619
03:07:59,820 --> 03:08:09,220
We feel that that line is an invention, is a poem, is a very complex web, as Stevenson

1620
03:08:09,220 --> 03:08:11,100
would have had it.

1621
03:08:11,100 --> 03:08:20,860
And yet, I suspect that there was a moment when the word night was quite as impressive,

1622
03:08:20,860 --> 03:08:35,420
was quite as strange, was quite as, oh, striking as this beautiful winding sentence, the hithering

1623
03:08:35,420 --> 03:08:41,900
and the hither and thithering waters of night.

1624
03:08:41,900 --> 03:08:47,780
Of course, there are two ways of using poetry, at least two opposite ways.

1625
03:08:47,780 --> 03:08:50,540
There are many others, of course.

1626
03:08:50,540 --> 03:09:00,460
And one of the ways of the poet is to use common words and somehow to make them uncommon,

1627
03:09:00,460 --> 03:09:06,900
somehow to use, to evolve magic from them.

1628
03:09:06,900 --> 03:09:15,660
And I suppose quite a good example would be that very English poem made of understatement

1629
03:09:15,660 --> 03:09:18,940
of Edward Blunden.

1630
03:09:18,940 --> 03:09:24,940
I have been young, and now I'm not too old, and I have seen the righteous forsaken, his

1631
03:09:24,940 --> 03:09:28,900
health, his honor, and his quality taken.

1632
03:09:28,900 --> 03:09:32,420
This is not what we were formerly told.

1633
03:09:32,420 --> 03:09:37,020
Here we have plain words.

1634
03:09:37,020 --> 03:09:42,700
We have a plain meaning, or at least a plain feeling, and this is more important.

1635
03:09:42,700 --> 03:09:50,860
But the words do not stand out as they did in Deslats, the example of Joyce, and in this

1636
03:09:50,860 --> 03:09:54,500
one, this will be mere quotation.

1637
03:09:54,500 --> 03:10:03,940
It will be three words, and they run thus, "Glitter gates of Elfinbone."

1638
03:10:03,940 --> 03:10:11,060
Now glitter gates is Joyce's gift to us, and then you have Elfinbone.

1639
03:10:11,060 --> 03:10:18,980
Of course, when Joyce wrote this, he was thinking of the German for ivory, Elfenbein.

1640
03:10:18,980 --> 03:10:25,580
Elfenbein is, of course, a distortion of Elefantenbein, elephant bone.

1641
03:10:25,580 --> 03:10:34,420
But Joyce saw the possibilities of that word, and he translated it into English, and then

1642
03:10:34,420 --> 03:10:36,340
you have Elfinbone.

1643
03:10:36,340 --> 03:10:40,460
And I think that Elfin is more beautiful than Elfen.

1644
03:10:40,460 --> 03:10:47,460
And besides, as we have heard Elfen times, Elfenbein so many times over, they do not

1645
03:10:47,460 --> 03:10:53,900
come to us with that shock of surprise, with a shock of amazement that we find in that

1646
03:10:53,900 --> 03:11:00,780
new and delicate word Elfinbone.

1647
03:11:00,780 --> 03:11:05,820
So that we have two ways of writing poetry.

1648
03:11:05,820 --> 03:11:11,620
People speak generally of a plain style and of an elaborate style.

1649
03:11:11,620 --> 03:11:19,860
Now I think this is wrong, because what is important, what is all-meaning, is the fact

1650
03:11:19,860 --> 03:11:30,180
that poetry should be living or dead, not that the style should be plain or be elaborate.

1651
03:11:30,180 --> 03:11:32,940
That depends on the poet.

1652
03:11:32,940 --> 03:11:42,620
You may have, for example, very striking poetry written plainly, and that poetry is to me

1653
03:11:42,620 --> 03:11:43,620
no less admirable.

1654
03:11:43,620 --> 03:11:48,980
In fact, I sometimes think it is more admirable than the other.

1655
03:11:48,980 --> 03:11:55,300
For example, when Stevenson, and as I have disagreed with Stevenson, I want to worship

1656
03:11:55,300 --> 03:12:05,260
him now, when Stevenson wrote his Requiem, "Under the white and starry sky, dig the grave

1657
03:12:05,260 --> 03:12:06,260
and let me lie.

1658
03:12:06,260 --> 03:12:12,060
Glad did I live and gladly die, and they laid me down with a will.

1659
03:12:12,060 --> 03:12:14,180
Here he lies where he longed to be."

1660
03:12:14,180 --> 03:12:19,540
No, "Let this verse be written for me.

1661
03:12:19,540 --> 03:12:21,780
Here he lies where he longed to be.

1662
03:12:21,780 --> 03:12:26,580
Home is a sailor, home from the sea, and a hunter, home from the hill."

1663
03:12:26,580 --> 03:12:29,180
This verse is plain language.

1664
03:12:29,180 --> 03:12:32,140
But of course, it is not.

1665
03:12:32,140 --> 03:12:40,900
It is plain and living, but also, I suppose, the poet must have worked very hard to get

1666
03:12:40,900 --> 03:12:41,900
it.

1667
03:12:41,900 --> 03:12:49,100
I do not think that such lines as "Glad did I live and gladly die" come, except in those

1668
03:12:49,100 --> 03:12:54,700
moments, those very rare moments, when the muse is generous.

1669
03:12:54,700 --> 03:13:03,900
I think that our idea of words being a mere algebra, of words being an algebra of symbols,

1670
03:13:03,900 --> 03:13:05,460
comes from the dictionaries.

1671
03:13:05,460 --> 03:13:09,180
I do not want to be ungrateful to dictionaries.

1672
03:13:09,180 --> 03:13:19,020
My favorite reading would be Dr. Johnson, Dr. Skeet, and that composite author, the

1673
03:13:19,020 --> 03:13:23,420
short, the rocksword.

1674
03:13:23,420 --> 03:13:29,700
And yet, I think that the fact of having long catalogs of words and explanations make us

1675
03:13:29,700 --> 03:13:38,380
think that the explanations exhaust the words, that any one of those kinds of words can be

1676
03:13:38,380 --> 03:13:41,020
changed for another.

1677
03:13:41,020 --> 03:13:52,460
But I think we know, and the poet should feel, that every word, that every word stands by

1678
03:13:52,460 --> 03:13:58,340
itself, that every word is unique.

1679
03:13:58,340 --> 03:14:03,620
And we get that feeling when a writer uses a little-known word.

1680
03:14:03,620 --> 03:14:13,500
For example, we think of the word "sedulous" as being a rather far-fetched, but in a sense,

1681
03:14:13,500 --> 03:14:15,220
uninteresting word.

1682
03:14:15,220 --> 03:14:22,740
And yet, when Stevenson—I greet Robert Louis Stevenson again—when Stevenson wrote that

1683
03:14:22,740 --> 03:14:30,660
he played the sedulous ape to Haslet, then suddenly the word comes into life.

1684
03:14:30,660 --> 03:14:35,300
So in this theory—this theory is not mine, of course.

1685
03:14:35,300 --> 03:14:43,180
I suppose, I'm sure it is to be found in other authors.

1686
03:14:43,180 --> 03:14:50,860
So this idea of words beginning as magic and being brought back to magic by poetry is,

1687
03:14:50,860 --> 03:14:52,500
I think, a true one.

1688
03:14:52,500 --> 03:14:59,860
And now we will come to another question, and this is quite important.

1689
03:14:59,860 --> 03:15:02,860
The question of conviction.

1690
03:15:02,860 --> 03:15:10,460
When we read an author, and we may be thinking of verse, we may think of prose, it is all

1691
03:15:10,460 --> 03:15:11,460
one.

1692
03:15:11,460 --> 03:15:19,340
I think it is essential that we should believe in him, or rather that we should attain that

1693
03:15:19,340 --> 03:15:25,760
willing suspension of disbelief of which Coleridge spoke.

1694
03:15:25,760 --> 03:15:32,620
When I spoke of elaborate verses of words standing out, I should have remembered, of

1695
03:15:32,620 --> 03:15:39,060
course, "Weave a circle round him thrice, and close your eyes with holy dread, for he

1696
03:15:39,060 --> 03:15:43,180
on honeydew hath fed and drunk the milk of paradise."

1697
03:15:43,180 --> 03:15:50,840
But let us go—and this will be the last subject I should speak of today—let us speak

1698
03:15:50,840 --> 03:16:00,180
about this conviction that is needed, that is a need of aesthetics, of poetry, both of

1699
03:16:00,180 --> 03:16:04,720
poetry in prose or in verse.

1700
03:16:04,720 --> 03:16:12,980
I think that in the case of a novel, for example—and why should we not speak of novels when we're

1701
03:16:12,980 --> 03:16:13,980
speaking of poetry?

1702
03:16:14,540 --> 03:16:24,100
I think that in the case of a novel, our conviction lies in the fact that we believe in the central

1703
03:16:24,100 --> 03:16:25,100
character.

1704
03:16:25,100 --> 03:16:29,060
If we believe in him, all is well.

1705
03:16:29,060 --> 03:16:37,740
I am—and I hope this will not come as a heresy to you—I am not quite sure about

1706
03:16:37,740 --> 03:16:41,660
the adventures of Don Quixote.

1707
03:16:41,660 --> 03:16:45,760
I may disbelieve in some of them.

1708
03:16:45,760 --> 03:16:52,100
I think that some of them may be exaggerated.

1709
03:16:52,100 --> 03:17:09,460
I feel quite sure that when the knight spoke to his choir, he was not weaving those long

1710
03:17:09,460 --> 03:17:14,180
sad speeches, and yet those things are not important.

1711
03:17:14,180 --> 03:17:19,580
What is really important—sad speeches—and yet those things are not important.

1712
03:17:19,580 --> 03:17:26,140
What is really important is the fact that I believe in Don Quixote himself.

1713
03:17:26,140 --> 03:17:33,340
That is why books such as Amorín, such as Asorín's La Ruta de Don Quixote, or even

1714
03:17:33,340 --> 03:17:40,580
Unamunos, Ví Don Quixote y Sancho, strike me as somehow irrelevant, for they take the

1715
03:17:40,580 --> 03:17:47,980
adventures too much in earnest, while I really believe in the knight himself.

1716
03:17:47,980 --> 03:17:52,940
Even if somebody told me that those things had never happened, I would still go on believing

1717
03:17:52,940 --> 03:17:57,500
in Don Quixote, as I believe in the character of a friend.

1718
03:17:57,500 --> 03:18:05,820
I have had the luck to possess many admirable friends, and there are many anecdotes told

1719
03:18:05,820 --> 03:18:06,820
of them.

1720
03:18:06,820 --> 03:18:15,020
Some of those anecdotes have, I am sorry to say, I am proud to say, been coined by myself.

1721
03:18:15,020 --> 03:18:16,020
But they are not false.

1722
03:18:16,020 --> 03:18:19,020
They are essentially true.

1723
03:18:19,020 --> 03:18:25,380
Mr. D. Quincy said that all anecdotes are apocryphal.

1724
03:18:25,380 --> 03:18:30,540
I think that had he cared to go deeper into the matter, he would have said that they are

1725
03:18:30,540 --> 03:18:35,220
historically apocryphal, but essentially true.

1726
03:18:35,220 --> 03:18:40,500
If a story is told of a man, then that story resembles him.

1727
03:18:40,500 --> 03:18:42,540
That story is his symbol.

1728
03:18:42,540 --> 03:18:51,700
And when I think of such dear friends of mine as Don Quixote, Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Sherlock

1729
03:18:51,700 --> 03:18:58,740
Holmes, Dr. Watson, Huckleberry Finn, Per Gint, and so on, I'm not sure I have many

1730
03:18:58,740 --> 03:18:59,740
more friends.

1731
03:18:59,740 --> 03:19:07,860
I feel that the men who wrote their histories were drawing the long bow, but that the adventures

1732
03:19:07,860 --> 03:19:11,500
they evolved were mirrors.

1733
03:19:11,500 --> 03:19:15,660
Mirrors were adjectives of attributes of those men.

1734
03:19:15,660 --> 03:19:23,940
That is to say, if, to go back to one of the examples, we believe in Mr. Sherlock Holmes,

1735
03:19:23,940 --> 03:19:29,100
then we may look with derision on the hound of the Baskervilles.

1736
03:19:29,100 --> 03:19:30,500
We need not fear him.

1737
03:19:30,500 --> 03:19:37,300
So I should say that what is important is our believing in a character.

1738
03:19:37,300 --> 03:19:44,780
Now in the case of poetry, there might seem to be a difference, for a writer works with

1739
03:19:44,780 --> 03:19:45,780
metaphors.

1740
03:19:45,780 --> 03:19:49,740
Now, the metaphors need not be believed in.

1741
03:19:49,740 --> 03:19:59,180
What is really important is the fact that we should think that they correspond to the

1742
03:19:59,180 --> 03:20:01,820
writer's emotion.

1743
03:20:01,820 --> 03:20:07,460
That is, I should say, quite, it is sufficient.

1744
03:20:07,460 --> 03:20:18,660
For example, when, well, for example, when Ecteluones wrote about a sunset being un violento

1745
03:20:18,660 --> 03:20:25,740
pavo real verde delirado en oro, there is no need to worry about the likeness or the

1746
03:20:25,740 --> 03:20:30,820
unlikeness of the sunset to a green peacock.

1747
03:20:30,820 --> 03:20:39,860
What is important is that we remain to feel that he felt that he was stirred by the sunset,

1748
03:20:39,860 --> 03:20:46,540
that he needed that metaphor to convey his feelings to us.

1749
03:20:46,540 --> 03:20:50,180
This is what I mean by conviction in poetry.

1750
03:20:50,180 --> 03:20:58,580
This has, of course, little to do with plain or what is called elaborate language.

1751
03:20:58,580 --> 03:21:04,140
When Milton writes, for example, and I'm sorry to say, perhaps to reveal to you that these

1752
03:21:04,140 --> 03:21:12,300
are the last verses of Paradise Regained, when Milton wrote, "Unobserved he to his mother's

1753
03:21:12,300 --> 03:21:16,340
house private return," the language is plain enough.

1754
03:21:16,340 --> 03:21:19,260
At the same time, it is dead.

1755
03:21:19,260 --> 03:21:26,140
When he wrote, "When I consider how my light is spent, here half my days in this dark world

1756
03:21:26,140 --> 03:21:33,460
and wide," and so on, the language may be elaborate, but it is a living language.

1757
03:21:33,460 --> 03:21:43,140
And in that sense, I think that writers, let us say, writers like Gondora, writers like

1758
03:21:43,140 --> 03:21:51,140
John Donne, like William Butler Yeats, like James Joyce, those writers are justified.

1759
03:21:51,140 --> 03:21:58,300
Their words, their stances may be far-fetched.

1760
03:21:58,300 --> 03:22:06,180
We may find strange things in them, but we are made to feel that the emotion behind those

1761
03:22:06,180 --> 03:22:08,740
words is a true one.

1762
03:22:08,740 --> 03:22:11,740
And this should be sufficient.

1763
03:22:11,740 --> 03:22:16,500
This should be sufficient for us to tender them our admiration.

1764
03:22:16,500 --> 03:22:25,340
I have spoken of several poets today, and I'm sorry to say that in the last lecture,

1765
03:22:25,340 --> 03:22:31,060
but of course this last lecture will have a personal character.

1766
03:22:31,060 --> 03:22:34,060
I suppose we are all friends now.

1767
03:22:34,060 --> 03:22:42,340
In the last lecture, I shall have to speak of a lesser poet, a poet whose words I never

1768
03:22:42,340 --> 03:22:48,140
read, but a poet whose works I have to write.

1769
03:22:48,140 --> 03:23:09,380
I shall speak of myself, and I hope that you will forgive me this quite affectionate anticlimax.

1770
03:23:09,380 --> 03:23:14,220
Lecture 6, A Poet's Creed.

1771
03:23:14,220 --> 03:23:26,140
Ladies and gentlemen, my purpose was to speak about a poet's creed, but looking into myself,

1772
03:23:26,140 --> 03:23:31,340
I have found that I have some faltering kind of creed.

1773
03:23:31,340 --> 03:23:34,780
Perhaps it may be useful to me, but hardly to others.

1774
03:23:34,780 --> 03:23:42,540
In fact, I think of all poetical theories as being mere tools for the writing of a poem,

1775
03:23:42,540 --> 03:23:50,820
and I suppose there should be as many creeds, as many religions, as the poets.

1776
03:23:50,820 --> 03:23:59,500
So though at the end I will say something about my likes and dislikes as to writing

1777
03:23:59,500 --> 03:24:08,900
of poetry, I think I will begin by some personal memories.

1778
03:24:08,900 --> 03:24:15,020
The memories not only of a writer, but also of a reader.

1779
03:24:15,020 --> 03:24:24,220
For really, I think of myself as being essentially a reader, but of course, as you are aware,

1780
03:24:24,220 --> 03:24:30,900
I have ventured into writing, but I think that what I have read is of course far more

1781
03:24:30,900 --> 03:24:33,660
important than what I have written.

1782
03:24:33,660 --> 03:24:41,900
For one reads what one likes, and one writes not what one would like to write, but what

1783
03:24:41,900 --> 03:24:44,620
one is able to write.

1784
03:24:44,620 --> 03:25:00,460
My memory carries me back to a certain evening, some 60 years ago, to my father's library

1785
03:25:00,460 --> 03:25:03,820
in Buenos Aires.

1786
03:25:03,820 --> 03:25:13,580
I see him, I see the gaslight, I could place my hand on the shelves, I know exactly where

1787
03:25:13,580 --> 03:25:22,460
to find Burton's Arabian Nights and Prescott's Conquest of Peru, though of course, the library

1788
03:25:22,460 --> 03:25:25,980
exists no longer.

1789
03:25:25,980 --> 03:25:35,900
And I go back to that already ancient South American evening, and I see my father, I'm

1790
03:25:35,900 --> 03:25:45,340
seeing him at this moment, and I hear his voice saying words that I understood not,

1791
03:25:45,340 --> 03:25:48,940
but yet that I felt.

1792
03:25:48,940 --> 03:25:57,780
Those words came from Keats, from his ode to A Nightingale, and of course, I have reread

1793
03:25:57,780 --> 03:26:03,140
them ever so many times, as you have, but I think I will go over them.

1794
03:26:03,140 --> 03:26:08,220
I think it might please my father's ghost if he's around.

1795
03:26:08,220 --> 03:26:13,300
The verses I remember are those that you're recalling at this moment.

1796
03:26:13,300 --> 03:26:19,900
Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird, no hungry generations tread thee down.

1797
03:26:19,900 --> 03:26:25,660
The voice I hear this passing night was heard in ancient days by emperor and clown, perhaps

1798
03:26:25,660 --> 03:26:31,020
the self-same song that found a path to a sad heart of Ruth, when sick for whom she

1799
03:26:31,020 --> 03:26:34,380
stood in tears amidst the alien corn.

1800
03:26:34,380 --> 03:26:45,540
Well, of course, I thought I knew all about words, all about language, but when as a child,

1801
03:26:45,540 --> 03:26:52,220
one feels that one knows many things, but those words came as a revelation to me.

1802
03:26:52,220 --> 03:26:55,020
Of course, I did not understand them.

1803
03:26:55,020 --> 03:27:03,660
How could I understand those lines about birds, about animals being somehow eternal, timeless,

1804
03:27:03,660 --> 03:27:08,340
because they live in the present, and we are mortal because we live in the past and in

1805
03:27:08,340 --> 03:27:15,780
the future, because we remember a time when we did not exist, and we foresee a time when

1806
03:27:15,780 --> 03:27:17,140
we shall be dead.

1807
03:27:17,140 --> 03:27:24,980
Well, those verses came to me, but they came to me through their music.

1808
03:27:24,980 --> 03:27:35,380
I had thought of language as being, let's say, a way of saying things, of uttering complaints,

1809
03:27:35,380 --> 03:27:39,460
of saying that one was glad or sad or so on.

1810
03:27:39,460 --> 03:27:47,580
Then when I heard those lines, and I've been hearing them in a sense ever since, I knew

1811
03:27:47,580 --> 03:28:01,020
that language could also be a music and a passion, and thus was poetry revealed to me.

1812
03:28:01,020 --> 03:28:10,820
I have toyed with an idea, the idea that though a man's life is compounded of thousands and

1813
03:28:10,820 --> 03:28:20,380
thousands of moments and days, yet those many instants and those many days may be reduced

1814
03:28:20,380 --> 03:28:28,340
to a single one, the moment when a man knows who he is, when he sees himself face to face.

1815
03:28:28,340 --> 03:28:39,220
I suppose that when Judas kissed Jesus, if indeed he did so, he felt at that moment that

1816
03:28:39,220 --> 03:28:46,660
he was a traitor, that to be a traitor was his destiny, and that he was being loyal to

1817
03:28:46,660 --> 03:28:47,660
that evil destiny.

1818
03:28:47,660 --> 03:28:55,700
We all remember the red badge of courage, the story of the man who does not know whether

1819
03:28:55,700 --> 03:29:05,300
he's a coward or a brave man, and then the moment comes and he knows who he is.

1820
03:29:05,300 --> 03:29:13,980
When I heard those verses of Keats, I suddenly felt that that was a great experience.

1821
03:29:13,980 --> 03:29:20,940
I've been feeling it ever since, and perhaps since then, I suppose we may exaggerate for

1822
03:29:20,940 --> 03:29:30,220
the purposes of a lecture, perhaps since then I thought of myself as being literary.

1823
03:29:30,220 --> 03:29:35,100
That is to say, many things have happened to me, as to all men.

1824
03:29:35,100 --> 03:29:44,860
I have felt joy in many things, for example, in swimming, in riding, in looking at a sunrise

1825
03:29:44,860 --> 03:29:52,780
or a sunset, in being in love, and so on, but somehow the central fact of my life has

1826
03:29:52,780 --> 03:29:59,980
been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.

1827
03:29:59,980 --> 03:30:09,300
At first, of course, I was only a reader, or rather I think that the happiness of a

1828
03:30:09,300 --> 03:30:21,180
reader is beyond that of a writer, for a reader need feel no trouble, he need not feel no

1829
03:30:21,180 --> 03:30:29,540
anxiety, he's merely out for happiness, and happiness, when you're a reader, is frequent.

1830
03:30:29,540 --> 03:30:38,860
Thus, before I go on to speaking of my literary output, I would like to say a few words about

1831
03:30:38,860 --> 03:30:46,660
books that have been important to me, and I know that this list will abound in omissions,

1832
03:30:46,660 --> 03:30:47,900
as all lists do.

1833
03:30:47,900 --> 03:30:53,340
In fact, the danger of making a list is that the omissions stand out, and that people think

1834
03:30:53,340 --> 03:30:57,460
of you as being insensitive.

1835
03:30:57,460 --> 03:31:04,940
I spoke a few moments ago about the Arabian Nights, and I spoke of Bertrand's Arabian

1836
03:31:04,940 --> 03:31:10,740
Nights, but when I really think about the Arabian Nights, I am thinking not of those

1837
03:31:10,740 --> 03:31:18,260
many and ponderous and pedantic, or rather stilted volumes, but of what I may call the

1838
03:31:18,260 --> 03:31:27,340
true Arabian Nights, the Arabian Nights of Gallant, and perhaps of Edward William Lane.

1839
03:31:27,340 --> 03:31:31,140
I have done most of my reading in English.

1840
03:31:31,140 --> 03:31:37,660
Most books have come to me through the English language, and I am duly grateful for that

1841
03:31:37,660 --> 03:31:38,660
privilege.

1842
03:31:38,660 --> 03:31:47,860
When I think of the Arabian Nights, the first feeling I have is a feeling of a vast freedom,

1843
03:31:47,860 --> 03:31:57,300
and yet at the same time, I know that the book, though vast and free, is limited to

1844
03:31:57,300 --> 03:31:58,300
a few patterns.

1845
03:31:58,300 --> 03:32:11,220
We have, for example, the number three, very frequently, and we have no characters, or

1846
03:32:11,220 --> 03:32:16,340
rather flat characters, except perhaps the silent barber.

1847
03:32:16,340 --> 03:32:24,940
And then we have evil men and good men, rewards and punishments, and magic rings and talismans,

1848
03:32:24,940 --> 03:32:25,940
and so on.

1849
03:32:25,940 --> 03:32:34,620
And though we are apt to think of mere size as being somehow brutal, yet I think there

1850
03:32:34,620 --> 03:32:39,140
are many books whose essence lies in their being lengthy.

1851
03:32:39,140 --> 03:32:47,220
For example, in the case of the Arabian Nights, we must need think that the book is a large

1852
03:32:47,220 --> 03:32:50,180
one, that the story goes on.

1853
03:32:50,180 --> 03:32:52,740
We may never come to the end of it.

1854
03:32:52,740 --> 03:32:59,700
We may never have gone through all the thousand and one nights, but the fact that they are

1855
03:32:59,700 --> 03:33:06,380
there somehow lends a wideness to the whole thing.

1856
03:33:06,380 --> 03:33:13,500
We know that you can delve deeper, that you can roam on, and that the marvels, the magicians,

1857
03:33:13,500 --> 03:33:19,820
the three beautiful sisters, and so on, will always be there awaiting us.

1858
03:33:19,820 --> 03:33:24,900
And there are other books I would like to recall.

1859
03:33:24,900 --> 03:33:30,780
And I think that one of the very first was Huckleberry Finn.

1860
03:33:30,780 --> 03:33:39,140
I have reread it ever so many times since, and also roughing it, the first days in California,

1861
03:33:39,140 --> 03:33:41,980
life on the Mississippi, and so on.

1862
03:33:41,980 --> 03:33:50,460
And now, having to analyze Huckleberry Finn, I would say that perhaps in order to make,

1863
03:33:50,460 --> 03:33:59,300
to create a great book, perhaps only one central and one very simple fact is needed.

1864
03:33:59,300 --> 03:34:06,020
There should be something pleasing to the imagination in the very framework of the book.

1865
03:34:06,020 --> 03:34:16,260
In the case of Huckleberry Finn, we feel that the idea of the black man, and the boy, and

1866
03:34:16,260 --> 03:34:23,820
the raft, and the Mississippi, and the long nights, those are somehow agreeable to the

1867
03:34:23,820 --> 03:34:24,820
imagination.

1868
03:34:24,820 --> 03:34:29,860
Those are accepted by the imagination.

1869
03:34:29,860 --> 03:34:34,260
I also would like to say something about Don Quixote.

1870
03:34:34,260 --> 03:34:37,300
That was one of the first books I ever read through.

1871
03:34:37,300 --> 03:34:41,020
I remember the very engravings.

1872
03:34:41,020 --> 03:34:47,100
And one knows so little about oneself that when I read Don Quixote, I thought I read

1873
03:34:47,100 --> 03:34:53,500
it because of the pleasure I found in the archaic style, and in the adventures of the

1874
03:34:53,500 --> 03:34:55,660
knight and the squire.

1875
03:34:55,660 --> 03:35:01,580
But now, I think that my pleasure lay elsewhere.

1876
03:35:01,580 --> 03:35:05,140
I think that it came from the character of the knight.

1877
03:35:05,140 --> 03:35:12,420
I'm not sure now that I believe in the adventures or in the conversations between the knight

1878
03:35:12,420 --> 03:35:17,140
and the squire, but I know that I believe in the knight's character.

1879
03:35:17,140 --> 03:35:25,180
And I suppose that the adventures were invented by Cervantes in order to show us the character

1880
03:35:25,180 --> 03:35:26,940
of the hero.

1881
03:35:26,940 --> 03:35:33,820
And the same might be said of another book that we may call a minor classic.

1882
03:35:33,820 --> 03:35:42,420
The same, I suppose, might be said of Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

1883
03:35:42,420 --> 03:35:47,180
I'm not sure I believe in the Hound of the Baskervilles.

1884
03:35:47,180 --> 03:35:55,060
I sure do not believe in being terrified by a dog painted over with luminous paint, but

1885
03:35:55,060 --> 03:36:03,580
I'm sure that I believe in Mr. Sherlock Holmes and in the strange friendship between Sherlock

1886
03:36:03,580 --> 03:36:06,460
Holmes and Dr. Watson.

1887
03:36:06,460 --> 03:36:09,820
And of course, one never knows what the future may bring.

1888
03:36:09,820 --> 03:36:14,620
I suppose the future will bring all things in the long run.

1889
03:36:14,620 --> 03:36:24,420
And so, we may imagine a moment when Don Quixote and Sancho, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson,

1890
03:36:24,420 --> 03:36:30,860
exist, though all their adventures, for all I know, may have been blotted out.

1891
03:36:30,860 --> 03:36:42,100
And yet, still men in other languages may go on inventing stories to fit those characters,

1892
03:36:42,100 --> 03:36:46,740
stories that should be as mirrors to the characters.

1893
03:36:46,740 --> 03:36:50,620
This, for all I know, may happen.

1894
03:36:50,620 --> 03:36:56,940
And now, I will jump over the years and go to Geneva.

1895
03:36:56,940 --> 03:37:01,180
I was then a very unhappy young man.

1896
03:37:01,180 --> 03:37:04,420
Supposed young men are fond of happiness.

1897
03:37:04,420 --> 03:37:09,300
They do their best to be unhappy, and they generally achieve it.

1898
03:37:09,300 --> 03:37:17,580
And yet, and then I was shamed because I discovered an author who was, doubtless, a very happy

1899
03:37:17,580 --> 03:37:18,580
man.

1900
03:37:18,580 --> 03:37:24,780
It must have been 1916 that I came to Walt Whitman.

1901
03:37:24,780 --> 03:37:27,900
And then, I felt ashamed of my own happiness.

1902
03:37:27,900 --> 03:37:39,540
I felt ashamed of having tried to be still more unhappy by the reading of Dostoyevsky.

1903
03:37:39,540 --> 03:37:45,980
And now, that I have read, re-read Walt Whitman, his biographies, I suppose that perhaps when

1904
03:37:45,980 --> 03:37:51,820
Walt Whitman read "His Leaves of Grass," he may have said to himself, "Oh, if only I were

1905
03:37:51,820 --> 03:37:54,660
Walt Whitman, a gospel of Manhattan, the sun."

1906
03:37:54,660 --> 03:37:58,220
Because, doubtless, he was a very different kind of man.

1907
03:37:58,220 --> 03:38:04,020
Doubtless he evolved Walt Whitman from himself, a kind of fantastic projection.

1908
03:38:04,020 --> 03:38:10,900
Then, at the same time, I also discovered a very different writer.

1909
03:38:10,900 --> 03:38:14,900
I also discovered, and I was also overwhelmed by him.

1910
03:38:14,900 --> 03:38:18,020
I also discovered Thomas Carlisle.

1911
03:38:18,020 --> 03:38:22,820
I read Sartre, "Ressartre."

1912
03:38:22,820 --> 03:38:25,860
I can recall many of its pages.

1913
03:38:25,860 --> 03:38:28,780
I knew them by heart.

1914
03:38:28,780 --> 03:38:34,260
And Carlisle sent me to study of German.

1915
03:38:34,260 --> 03:38:42,940
I remember I bought "Heinz Lüdisches Intermezzo," a German-English dictionary, and after a time,

1916
03:38:42,940 --> 03:38:49,620
I found I could dispense with dictionary, and that I could go on reading about his nightingales,

1917
03:38:49,620 --> 03:38:54,820
and his moons, and his pine trees, and his love, and so on.

1918
03:38:54,820 --> 03:39:05,780
But what I really wanted, and what I did not find at the time, was the idea of the Germanism.

1919
03:39:05,780 --> 03:39:13,220
Because the idea, I suppose, was evolved not perhaps by the Germanic people themselves,

1920
03:39:13,220 --> 03:39:16,700
but by a Roman gentleman, Tacitus.

1921
03:39:16,700 --> 03:39:21,660
And I was led by Carlisle to think I could find it in German literature.

1922
03:39:21,660 --> 03:39:23,540
I found many other things.

1923
03:39:23,540 --> 03:39:30,820
I am very grateful to Carlisle for having sent me to Schopenhauer, and to Hölderling,

1924
03:39:30,820 --> 03:39:34,900
and to Lessing, and so on.

1925
03:39:34,900 --> 03:39:44,700
But the idea I had, the idea of men, not at all intellectual, but of men given over, let

1926
03:39:44,700 --> 03:39:55,860
us say, to loyalty, to braveness, to a manly submission to fate, that I did not find, for

1927
03:39:55,860 --> 03:39:58,580
example, in the Nibelungen Lied.

1928
03:39:58,580 --> 03:40:01,140
All that seemed too romantic for me.

1929
03:40:01,140 --> 03:40:08,660
And I was to find it years and years afterwards in the Norse sagas, and in the study of Old

1930
03:40:08,660 --> 03:40:09,980
English poetry.

1931
03:40:09,980 --> 03:40:16,100
There, I found at last what I had been looking for when I was a young man.

1932
03:40:16,100 --> 03:40:25,660
I found in Old English a harsh language, but a language whose harshness made for a certain

1933
03:40:25,660 --> 03:40:34,940
kind of beauty, and also very deep feeling, and perhaps not very deep thinking.

1934
03:40:34,940 --> 03:40:40,220
But of course, in poetry, I suppose feeling is enough.

1935
03:40:40,220 --> 03:40:47,660
If the feeling comes through to you, that should be sufficient.

1936
03:40:47,660 --> 03:40:55,780
I was led to the study of Old English by my inclination to the metaphor.

1937
03:40:55,780 --> 03:41:03,580
I had read in Lugones that the metaphor was the essential element of literature, and I

1938
03:41:03,580 --> 03:41:05,060
accepted that dictum.

1939
03:41:05,060 --> 03:41:10,860
Lugones wrote that all words were originally metaphors.

1940
03:41:10,860 --> 03:41:16,460
This is true, but it is also true that in order to understand most words, you have to

1941
03:41:16,460 --> 03:41:20,780
forget about the fact of their being metaphors.

1942
03:41:20,780 --> 03:41:30,020
For example, if I say, "Style should be plain," then I don't think we should remember that

1943
03:41:30,020 --> 03:41:36,900
style, stylus, meant an iron, pen, and that plain means flat, because in that case, I

1944
03:41:36,900 --> 03:41:39,020
would never understand it.

1945
03:41:39,020 --> 03:41:48,220
Now, we'll go back to my boyhood days, and remember other authors who struck me.

1946
03:41:48,220 --> 03:41:59,580
I wonder if it has been often remarked that Poe and Oscar Wilde are really writers for

1947
03:41:59,580 --> 03:42:00,580
boys.

1948
03:42:00,580 --> 03:42:08,180
At least the stories of Poe impressed me when I was a boy, and now I can hardly reread them

1949
03:42:08,180 --> 03:42:13,580
without feeling rather uncomfortable over the style of the author.

1950
03:42:13,580 --> 03:42:18,660
In fact, I can quite understand, though I remember this year since we are speaking of

1951
03:42:18,660 --> 03:42:25,900
a man of genius, I can quite understand what Emerson meant when he called Edgar Allan Poe

1952
03:42:25,900 --> 03:42:29,380
the jingle man.

1953
03:42:29,380 --> 03:42:41,260
And I suppose that this fact of being a writer for boys might be applied to many other writers.

1954
03:42:41,260 --> 03:42:43,420
In some cases, it is unjust.

1955
03:42:43,420 --> 03:42:49,620
In the case of Stevenson, for example, or of Kipling, for though they write for boys,

1956
03:42:49,620 --> 03:42:51,660
they also write for men.

1957
03:42:51,660 --> 03:42:58,100
But there are other writers who one must read when one is young, because if one comes to

1958
03:42:58,100 --> 03:43:05,380
them when one is old and gray and full of days, then the reading of those writers can

1959
03:43:05,380 --> 03:43:08,020
hardly be pleasant.

1960
03:43:08,020 --> 03:43:15,060
It may be a blasphemy to say that in order to enjoy Baudelaire and Poe, one should be

1961
03:43:15,060 --> 03:43:16,060
young.

1962
03:43:16,060 --> 03:43:18,780
Afterwards, it is difficult.

1963
03:43:18,780 --> 03:43:21,540
One has to put up with so many things.

1964
03:43:21,540 --> 03:43:24,740
One has to think about history, and so on.

1965
03:43:24,740 --> 03:43:34,100
As to the metaphor, I should add that now I see that metaphor is a far more complicated

1966
03:43:34,100 --> 03:43:35,860
thing than I thought.

1967
03:43:35,860 --> 03:43:42,100
It is not merely comparing a thing to another, saying the moon, like, and so on.

1968
03:43:42,100 --> 03:43:45,540
No, it may be done in a more subtle way.

1969
03:43:45,540 --> 03:43:48,060
I was thinking of Robert Frost.

1970
03:43:48,060 --> 03:43:57,540
Of course, you remember the lines, "For I have promises to keep, and miles to go before

1971
03:43:57,540 --> 03:44:01,700
I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep."

1972
03:44:01,700 --> 03:44:11,660
Now, if we take the two verses, the first verse, "And miles to go before I sleep," is,

1973
03:44:11,660 --> 03:44:14,140
I suppose, a statement.

1974
03:44:14,140 --> 03:44:17,580
The poet is thinking of miles and of sleep.

1975
03:44:17,580 --> 03:44:26,340
Meanwhile, when he repeats those lines, "And miles to go before I sleep," those verses

1976
03:44:26,340 --> 03:44:27,820
are a metaphor.

1977
03:44:27,820 --> 03:44:36,340
For miles, I suppose, should stand for days, for years, for a long stretch of time, and

1978
03:44:36,340 --> 03:44:40,740
sleep, I suppose, should stand for death.

1979
03:44:40,740 --> 03:44:45,540
Perhaps I am doing Frost no good by pointing this out.

1980
03:44:45,540 --> 03:44:54,220
Perhaps the pleasure lies not in our translating miles into years and sleep into death, but

1981
03:44:54,220 --> 03:44:57,300
rather in feeling the implication.

1982
03:44:57,300 --> 03:45:03,300
The same thing might be said of that other very fine poem of his, "Acquainted with the

1983
03:45:03,300 --> 03:45:04,300
Night."

1984
03:45:04,300 --> 03:45:09,180
In the beginning, "I have been one acquainted with the night," we mean literally what he's

1985
03:45:09,180 --> 03:45:10,180
telling you.

1986
03:45:10,180 --> 03:45:17,740
But in the end, after, "When luminary clock against the sky proclaimed the time was neither

1987
03:45:17,740 --> 03:45:24,340
wrong nor right, I have been one acquainted with the night," then you are made to think

1988
03:45:24,340 --> 03:45:31,940
of the night as an image of evil, of sexual evil, I suppose.

1989
03:45:31,940 --> 03:45:41,980
I spoke a moment ago about Don Quixote, Sherlock Holmes, and I said that I could believe in

1990
03:45:41,980 --> 03:45:48,380
the characters, but not in the adventures, and hardly in the words that the authors put

1991
03:45:48,380 --> 03:45:49,380
in their mouths.

1992
03:45:49,380 --> 03:45:55,700
Now, I wonder where we could find a book where the exact contrary occurred.

1993
03:45:55,700 --> 03:46:03,300
Could we find a book in whose characters we disbelieved, but where we might believe the

1994
03:46:03,300 --> 03:46:04,300
story?

1995
03:46:04,300 --> 03:46:10,860
And here, I remember another book that has struck me.

1996
03:46:10,860 --> 03:46:19,900
I remember Melville's "Moby Dick," because I'm not sure that I believe in Captain Ahab.

1997
03:46:19,900 --> 03:46:25,900
I'm not sure that I believe in his feud with the white whale.

1998
03:46:25,900 --> 03:46:32,580
I can hardly tell the other characters apart, and yet I believe in the story.

1999
03:46:32,580 --> 03:46:37,780
That you say, "Believe in it," has a kind of parable, though I don't know exactly a

2000
03:46:37,780 --> 03:46:39,620
parable of what.

2001
03:46:39,620 --> 03:46:45,700
I suppose it should be a parable of a struggle against evil, of the wrong way of fighting

2002
03:46:45,700 --> 03:46:47,500
evil.

2003
03:46:47,500 --> 03:46:51,020
I wonder if there are any books of which it might be said.

2004
03:46:51,020 --> 03:46:59,860
In the pilgrim's progress, I think I believe both in the parable, both in the allegory,

2005
03:46:59,860 --> 03:47:02,940
and in the characters.

2006
03:47:02,940 --> 03:47:07,180
This should be looked into, I suppose.

2007
03:47:07,180 --> 03:47:17,300
Well, I remember the Gnostics said that the only way to be rid of a sin was to commit

2008
03:47:17,300 --> 03:47:23,460
it, because afterwards, you repented.

2009
03:47:23,460 --> 03:47:29,700
And I think that as regards literature, they were essentially right.

2010
03:47:29,700 --> 03:47:38,460
Therefore, if I have attained to the happiness of writing four or five tolerable pages, after

2011
03:47:38,460 --> 03:47:45,660
writing 15 tolerable volumes, I have come to that feat not only through the many years,

2012
03:47:45,660 --> 03:47:48,980
but also through the method of trial and error.

2013
03:47:48,980 --> 03:47:56,100
I think I've committed not all the possible mistakes, because mistakes are innumerable,

2014
03:47:56,100 --> 03:47:57,660
but many of them.

2015
03:47:57,660 --> 03:48:06,140
For example, I began, as most young men do, by thinking that free verse is easier than

2016
03:48:06,140 --> 03:48:09,100
the regular forms of verse.

2017
03:48:09,100 --> 03:48:19,940
Now I feel I am quite sure in thinking that free verse is far more difficult than the

2018
03:48:19,940 --> 03:48:23,580
regular, than the classic forms.

2019
03:48:23,580 --> 03:48:32,500
And the proof is, if a proof is needed, that literature begins by verse.

2020
03:48:32,500 --> 03:48:38,980
I suppose the explanation would be that once a pattern is evolved, a pattern, for example,

2021
03:48:38,980 --> 03:48:45,540
of rhymes, of assonances, of alliterations, of long and short syllables, and so on, you

2022
03:48:45,540 --> 03:48:48,540
only have to repeat the pattern.

2023
03:48:48,540 --> 03:48:56,100
While if you attempt prose, and prose of course comes long after verse, then you need, as

2024
03:48:56,100 --> 03:49:05,020
Stevenson pointed out, a more subtle pattern, because the ear is led to expect something,

2025
03:49:05,020 --> 03:49:10,260
and then it does not get what it expects, but something else is given to it, and that

2026
03:49:10,260 --> 03:49:19,660
something else should be, in a sense, a failure, and also a satisfaction.

2027
03:49:19,660 --> 03:49:27,020
And so I should say that unless you take the precaution of being Walt Whitman or Carl Sandburg,

2028
03:49:27,020 --> 03:49:29,940
then free verse is more difficult.

2029
03:49:29,940 --> 03:49:38,540
At least I have found, now when I am near my journey's end, that the classic forms of

2030
03:49:38,540 --> 03:49:40,460
verse are easier.

2031
03:49:40,460 --> 03:49:47,860
And another facility, another easiness, may lie in the fact that once you have written

2032
03:49:47,860 --> 03:49:52,940
a certain line, that once you have resigned yourself to a certain line, then you have

2033
03:49:52,940 --> 03:49:56,140
committed yourself to a certain rhyme.

2034
03:49:56,140 --> 03:50:05,260
And as rhymes are not infinite, then your work is made easier for you.

2035
03:50:05,260 --> 03:50:10,860
Of course, what is important is what is behind the verse.

2036
03:50:10,860 --> 03:50:21,420
I began by trying, as all young men do, I began by trying to disguise myself.

2037
03:50:21,420 --> 03:50:30,820
At first, I was so mistaken that at the time when I read Carlisle and Whitman, I thought

2038
03:50:30,820 --> 03:50:36,100
that Carlisle's way of writing prose was the only possible one, and that Whitman's way

2039
03:50:36,100 --> 03:50:39,300
of writing verse was the only possible one.

2040
03:50:39,300 --> 03:50:47,900
And I made no attempt whatever to reconcile this very strange fact of having two opposite

2041
03:50:47,900 --> 03:50:54,040
men having attained the perfections of prose and of verse.

2042
03:50:54,040 --> 03:51:02,820
When I began writing, I always said to myself that my ideas were very shallow, that if a

2043
03:51:02,820 --> 03:51:06,500
reader saw through them, he would despise me.

2044
03:51:06,500 --> 03:51:09,100
And so I disguised myself.

2045
03:51:09,100 --> 03:51:16,820
I disguised myself, in the beginning, I tried to be a 17th century Spanish writer with a

2046
03:51:16,820 --> 03:51:21,880
certain knowledge of Latin.

2047
03:51:21,880 --> 03:51:24,480
My knowledge of Latin was quite slight.

2048
03:51:24,480 --> 03:51:29,620
I do not think of myself now as a 17th century Spanish writer.

2049
03:51:29,620 --> 03:51:35,620
And my attempt to be Sir Thomas Brown in Spanish failed utterly.

2050
03:51:35,620 --> 03:51:41,060
Well, perhaps I evolved quite a dozen fine sounding lines.

2051
03:51:41,060 --> 03:51:45,120
Of course, I was out for purple patches.

2052
03:51:45,120 --> 03:51:47,800
Now I think that purple patches are a mistake.

2053
03:51:47,800 --> 03:51:53,040
I think they are a mistake because they're a sign of vanity.

2054
03:51:53,040 --> 03:51:57,360
And so the reader thinks of them as being signs of vanity.

2055
03:51:57,360 --> 03:52:02,480
And if the reader thinks of you and he thinks that you have a moral defect, there is no

2056
03:52:02,480 --> 03:52:07,600
reason whatever why he should admire you or put up with you.

2057
03:52:07,600 --> 03:52:11,600
Then I fell into a very common mistake.

2058
03:52:11,600 --> 03:52:17,440
I did my best to be, of all things, modern.

2059
03:52:17,440 --> 03:52:28,840
Now there is a character in Goethe's, in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's "L'Eriare," the character

2060
03:52:28,840 --> 03:52:37,640
says, "Well, you may say of me what you like, but nobody will deny that I am a contemporary."

2061
03:52:37,640 --> 03:52:44,720
Now I see no difference whatever between that quite absurd character in Goethe's novel and

2062
03:52:44,720 --> 03:52:49,680
the wish to be modern because we are modern.

2063
03:52:49,680 --> 03:52:52,200
We don't have to strive to be modern.

2064
03:52:52,200 --> 03:52:55,840
It's not a case of subject matter, of style.

2065
03:52:55,840 --> 03:53:02,360
I suppose that if you look into Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe or to take a lot of different

2066
03:53:02,360 --> 03:53:13,160
example into Flaubert's Salambo, you may tell the date when those books were written.

2067
03:53:13,160 --> 03:53:22,320
Although Flaubert spoke of Salambo as a Roman-Cartagenois, any reader worth his salt would know after

2068
03:53:22,320 --> 03:53:28,520
reading the first page that the book was not written in Carthage, that it was written by

2069
03:53:28,520 --> 03:53:32,240
a very intelligent Frenchman of the 19th century.

2070
03:53:32,240 --> 03:53:39,600
And as to Ivanhoe, we're not taken in by the castles and the knights and the Saxon swine

2071
03:53:39,600 --> 03:53:47,960
and so on, we know all the time that we're reading an 18th or 19th century author.

2072
03:53:47,960 --> 03:53:56,720
Besides we are modern by the very simple fact that we live in the present.

2073
03:53:56,720 --> 03:54:02,160
Nobody has discovered as yet the art of living in the past, and not even the futurists have

2074
03:54:02,160 --> 03:54:05,360
discovered the secret of living in the future.

2075
03:54:05,360 --> 03:54:12,280
We are modern whether we want it or not, and perhaps the very fact of my attacking

2076
03:54:12,280 --> 03:54:20,600
modernity now is in its way, I suppose, a way of being modern also.

2077
03:54:20,600 --> 03:54:28,640
When I began writing stories, I did my best to trick them out.

2078
03:54:28,640 --> 03:54:35,640
I labeled over the style, sometimes they were hidden under the many overlays.

2079
03:54:35,640 --> 03:54:43,440
For example, I thought of a quite good plot.

2080
03:54:43,440 --> 03:54:47,440
Then I wrote the story El Immortal.

2081
03:54:47,440 --> 03:54:54,600
Now the idea behind that story, and the idea will come as a surprise to any of you who

2082
03:54:54,600 --> 03:55:03,240
have read the story, is the idea that if a man were immortal, then in the long run, and

2083
03:55:03,240 --> 03:55:08,040
the run would be long of course, it would be endless.

2084
03:55:08,040 --> 03:55:16,280
Then in the long run, he would have said all things, done all things, written all things.

2085
03:55:16,280 --> 03:55:19,560
Then I took as my example, Homer.

2086
03:55:19,560 --> 03:55:25,400
I thought of Homer, if indeed he existed, as having written his Iliad.

2087
03:55:25,400 --> 03:55:31,480
Then Homer would go on living, and then he would change as the generations of men have

2088
03:55:31,480 --> 03:55:32,480
changed.

2089
03:55:32,480 --> 03:55:35,200
Then of course, he would forget his Greek.

2090
03:55:35,200 --> 03:55:38,920
In due time, he would forget that he had been Homer.

2091
03:55:38,920 --> 03:55:45,200
A moment might come when you would think of Pope's translation of Homer as being not only

2092
03:55:45,200 --> 03:55:52,560
a fine work of art, indeed it is, but as being true to the original.

2093
03:55:52,560 --> 03:56:00,200
That idea of Homer forgetting that he was Homer, that idea is hidden under the many

2094
03:56:00,200 --> 03:56:03,800
structures I wove around the book.

2095
03:56:03,800 --> 03:56:10,720
Indeed, whenever we read that story a couple of years ago, I found it awareness of the

2096
03:56:10,720 --> 03:56:17,720
flesh, and I had to go back to my old plan to see that the story would have been quite

2097
03:56:17,720 --> 03:56:28,120
good had I been content to write it down simply, and not to permit so many purple patches and

2098
03:56:28,120 --> 03:56:33,720
so many strange adjectives and metaphors.

2099
03:56:33,720 --> 03:56:43,480
Now I think I've come not to a certain wisdom, but perhaps to a certain sense.

2100
03:56:43,480 --> 03:56:50,840
I think of myself as a writer, and what does being a writer mean to me?

2101
03:56:50,840 --> 03:56:58,600
It means simply being true, being true to my imagination.

2102
03:56:58,600 --> 03:57:05,320
That is to say, when I write something, I do not think of it as being true to fact,

2103
03:57:05,320 --> 03:57:12,760
to mere fact, since mere fact, after all, is a web of circumstances and accidents, but

2104
03:57:12,760 --> 03:57:15,600
of being true to something deeper.

2105
03:57:15,600 --> 03:57:23,960
That is to say, when I write a story, I write it because somehow I believe in it, not as

2106
03:57:23,960 --> 03:57:32,680
one believes in mere history, but as one believes in a dream or in an idea.

2107
03:57:32,680 --> 03:57:40,960
I think that perhaps you're led astray by one of the studies I value most, the study

2108
03:57:40,960 --> 03:57:43,520
of the history of literature.

2109
03:57:43,520 --> 03:57:53,600
I wonder, and I hope this is not a blasphemy, I wonder if you're not too aware of history,

2110
03:57:53,600 --> 03:58:00,800
because being aware of the history of literature or of any other art, for that matter, is really

2111
03:58:00,800 --> 03:58:04,960
a form of unbelieving, a form of skepticism.

2112
03:58:04,960 --> 03:58:15,160
If I say to myself, for example, that Wordsworth or Verlaine were very good 19th century poets,

2113
03:58:15,160 --> 03:58:22,560
then I may fall into the danger of thinking that time somehow has destroyed them, that

2114
03:58:22,560 --> 03:58:26,520
they're not as good now as they were.

2115
03:58:26,520 --> 03:58:34,280
And yet, I think the ancient idea was a braver one, the idea that perfection might be allowed

2116
03:58:34,280 --> 03:58:39,400
to art without taking into account the dates.

2117
03:58:39,400 --> 03:58:47,880
I have read several histories of Indian philosophy, and the authors, Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen,

2118
03:58:47,880 --> 03:58:56,200
Americans, and so on, always wonder at the fact that in India, people have no historical

2119
03:58:56,200 --> 03:59:02,760
sense, that they treat all thinkers as if they were contemporary, that they translate

2120
03:59:02,760 --> 03:59:12,240
the words of an ancient philosophy into the, let us say, the modern jargon of today philosophy.

2121
03:59:12,240 --> 03:59:15,200
But this stands for something brave.

2122
03:59:15,200 --> 03:59:23,440
This stands for the idea that one believes in philosophy, or one believes in poetry,

2123
03:59:23,440 --> 03:59:30,720
that things beautiful once can go on being beautiful still.

2124
03:59:30,720 --> 03:59:36,960
And though I suppose I'm being quite unhistoric when I say this, since of course the meanings

2125
03:59:36,960 --> 03:59:43,200
of words are changing, the connotations of words are changing, it's still I think that

2126
03:59:43,200 --> 03:59:50,840
there are verses in Virgil, for example, I wonder if I'm scanning it as I should, because

2127
03:59:50,840 --> 03:59:52,560
my Latin is very rusty.

2128
03:59:52,560 --> 04:00:00,960
For example, I suppose that when Virgil wrote, "Iban topscuri, sola sub nocte, per umbram,"

2129
04:00:00,960 --> 04:00:08,920
or that when an old English poet wrote, "Northern's new day," and so on, or when we read, for

2130
04:00:08,920 --> 04:00:16,160
example, "Music to hear, why hear without music sadly, sweet sweet sweet swan, joy delights

2131
04:00:16,160 --> 04:00:20,920
in joy," I think that somehow we are beyond time.

2132
04:00:20,920 --> 04:00:24,760
I think that there is an eternity in beauty.

2133
04:00:24,760 --> 04:00:32,400
And this of course is what Keats had in mind when he wrote, "A thing of beauty is a joy

2134
04:00:32,400 --> 04:00:33,400
forever."

2135
04:00:33,400 --> 04:00:41,640
We accept this verse, but we accept it somehow as a kind of right, as a kind of formula.

2136
04:00:41,640 --> 04:00:52,040
And yet sometimes I have been, sometimes I am, well, courageous and hopeful enough to

2137
04:00:52,040 --> 04:01:01,440
think that it may be true, that though men write in time, that though men are involved

2138
04:01:01,440 --> 04:01:11,840
in the circumstances and accidents and failures of time, somehow things of eternal beauty

2139
04:01:11,840 --> 04:01:15,340
may be achieved.

2140
04:01:15,340 --> 04:01:24,520
When I write, I try, as I have said, to be loyal to the dream, not of being loyal to

2141
04:01:24,520 --> 04:01:26,060
circumstances.

2142
04:01:26,060 --> 04:01:32,120
Of course, in my stories, people tell me I should speak about them.

2143
04:01:32,120 --> 04:01:39,360
In my stories there are true circumstances, but somehow I have felt that those circumstances

2144
04:01:39,360 --> 04:01:44,200
should always be told with a certain amount of untruth.

2145
04:01:44,200 --> 04:01:49,160
I think there is no satisfaction in telling a story as it actually happened.

2146
04:01:49,160 --> 04:01:53,680
We have to change things, even if we think them insignificant.

2147
04:01:53,680 --> 04:02:01,840
If not, we should not think of ourselves as artists, but perhaps as mere, well, mere journalists

2148
04:02:01,840 --> 04:02:03,880
or mere historians.

2149
04:02:03,880 --> 04:02:09,640
Though I suppose all true historians have known that they can be quite as imaginative

2150
04:02:09,640 --> 04:02:11,640
as novelists.

2151
04:02:11,640 --> 04:02:20,840
For example, when we read Gibbon, I suppose the pleasure we get from Gibbon is quite akin

2152
04:02:20,840 --> 04:02:26,800
to the pleasure we get from reading a great novelist.

2153
04:02:26,800 --> 04:02:31,480
After all, he knew very little about his characters.

2154
04:02:31,480 --> 04:02:34,960
I suppose he had to imagine the circumstances.

2155
04:02:34,960 --> 04:02:40,400
I suppose he must have thought of himself as having created, in a sense, the decline

2156
04:02:40,400 --> 04:02:43,280
and fall of the Roman Empire.

2157
04:02:43,280 --> 04:02:59,800
He did it so wonderfully that I do not care to accept any other explanation.

2158
04:02:59,800 --> 04:03:07,960
So that, had I to give advice to writers, and I do not think they need it because everyone

2159
04:03:07,960 --> 04:03:14,520
has to find all things by himself, I would give them simply this one.

2160
04:03:14,520 --> 04:03:20,040
I would ask them to tamper as little as they can with their own work.

2161
04:03:20,040 --> 04:03:22,640
I do not think tinkering is any good.

2162
04:03:22,640 --> 04:03:29,520
I think that the moment comes when one has found out what one can do, when one has found

2163
04:03:29,520 --> 04:03:33,920
out one's natural voice, one's rhythm.

2164
04:03:33,920 --> 04:03:42,400
And then I do not think slight inundations should prove useful.

2165
04:03:42,400 --> 04:03:50,600
When I write, I think not of the reader, because the reader is, of course, an imaginary character.

2166
04:03:50,600 --> 04:03:52,640
I do not think of myself.

2167
04:03:52,640 --> 04:03:55,760
Perhaps I am an imaginary character also.

2168
04:03:55,760 --> 04:04:04,040
I think of what I am trying to convey, and I do my best not to spoil it.

2169
04:04:04,040 --> 04:04:07,520
When I was young, I believed in expression.

2170
04:04:07,520 --> 04:04:15,360
I had read Croce, and the reading of Croce did me no good.

2171
04:04:15,360 --> 04:04:18,200
I wanted to express everything.

2172
04:04:18,200 --> 04:04:26,840
I thought, for example, that if I needed a sunset, then I should find the exact word

2173
04:04:26,840 --> 04:04:33,280
for a sunset, or the exact, or rather the most surprising metaphor.

2174
04:04:33,280 --> 04:04:39,400
And now I have come to a conclusion, and this conclusion may sound sad.

2175
04:04:39,400 --> 04:04:43,800
The conclusion is that I no longer believe in expression.

2176
04:04:43,800 --> 04:04:49,760
I only believe in allusion, because after all, what are words?

2177
04:04:49,760 --> 04:04:54,240
Words are symbols for shared memories.

2178
04:04:54,240 --> 04:05:01,000
If I use a word, then you should have experience of what the word stands for.

2179
04:05:01,000 --> 04:05:05,320
If not, the word means nothing to you.

2180
04:05:05,320 --> 04:05:07,840
And I think we can only allude.

2181
04:05:07,840 --> 04:05:12,760
We can only try to make the reader imagine.

2182
04:05:12,760 --> 04:05:20,120
I think that the reader, if he's quick enough, can be satisfied with merely hinting at something.

2183
04:05:20,120 --> 04:05:29,640
And this makes, I think, for efficiency, and in my own case, it also makes for laziness.

2184
04:05:29,640 --> 04:05:34,360
I have been asked why I have never attempted a novel.

2185
04:05:34,360 --> 04:05:37,920
Well, laziness, of course, is the first explanation.

2186
04:05:37,920 --> 04:05:39,800
But there is another one.

2187
04:05:39,800 --> 04:05:45,080
I have never read any novel without feeling a certain weariness.

2188
04:05:45,080 --> 04:05:48,120
I think that novels include padding.

2189
04:05:48,120 --> 04:05:52,440
I think that padding may be an essential part of the novel, for all I know.

2190
04:05:52,440 --> 04:05:57,600
And yet, I have read many short stories over and over again.

2191
04:05:57,600 --> 04:06:05,080
And I find, for example, that in a short story by Henry James over Rudyard Kipling,

2192
04:06:05,080 --> 04:06:14,920
you get quite as much complexity and in a more pleasurable way as you may get out of a long novel.

2193
04:06:14,920 --> 04:06:20,560
And I think that this is what my creed comes to.

2194
04:06:20,560 --> 04:06:29,520
When I promised a poet's creed, I thought very credulously that once I had given five lectures,

2195
04:06:29,520 --> 04:06:38,800
I would be made, by the fact of having given five lectures, I would evolve a creed of some kind.

2196
04:06:38,800 --> 04:06:45,840
But I think I owe it to you to say that I have no particular creed,

2197
04:06:45,840 --> 04:06:56,360
except those few precautions and misgivings I have been talking to you about.

2198
04:06:56,360 --> 04:07:02,840
I try, when I'm writing something, I try not to understand it.

2199
04:07:02,840 --> 04:07:07,920
I do not think intelligence has much to do with the work of a writer.

2200
04:07:07,920 --> 04:07:17,800
I think that one of the sins of modern literature is the fact that it is too self-conscious.

2201
04:07:17,800 --> 04:07:24,600
For example, I think of French literature as being one of the great literatures in the world.

2202
04:07:24,600 --> 04:07:26,760
I don't suppose anybody could doubt that.

2203
04:07:26,760 --> 04:07:34,400
And yet, I have been made to feel how the authors are generally too self-conscious.

2204
04:07:34,400 --> 04:07:41,920
And suppose a French writer begins by defining himself before he quite knows what he is going to write.

2205
04:07:41,920 --> 04:07:47,280
And so he says, what should, for example, a Catholic born in such and such a province,

2206
04:07:47,280 --> 04:07:56,120
and being a bit of a socialist, write? Or how should we write after the Second World War?

2207
04:07:56,120 --> 04:08:03,680
And I suppose there are many people all over the world who labor under those illusory problems.

2208
04:08:03,680 --> 04:08:11,000
When I write, and of course I may not be a fair example, but merely an awful warning.

2209
04:08:11,000 --> 04:08:17,680
When I write, I try to forget all about myself. I forget about my personal circumstances.

2210
04:08:17,680 --> 04:08:25,080
I do not try, as I tried once, to be a South American writer.

2211
04:08:25,080 --> 04:08:29,760
I merely try to convey what the dream is.

2212
04:08:29,760 --> 04:08:34,040
And if the dream would be a dim one, then my guess in general is,

2213
04:08:34,040 --> 04:08:40,200
I do not try to beautify it or even to understand it.

2214
04:08:40,200 --> 04:08:47,600
And maybe I have done well, for every time I read an article about me,

2215
04:08:47,600 --> 04:08:53,040
and somehow there seem to be quite a lot of people doing that sort of thing,

2216
04:08:53,040 --> 04:09:00,480
I am generally amazed and very grateful for the deep meanings that I have read,

2217
04:09:00,480 --> 04:09:06,160
and the quite haphazard jottings of mine.

2218
04:09:06,160 --> 04:09:15,880
Of course, I am grateful to them, for I think of writing as being a kind of collaboration.

2219
04:09:15,880 --> 04:09:23,240
That is to say, the reader does his part of the work, he's enriching the book.

2220
04:09:23,240 --> 04:09:27,560
And the same thing happens, I suppose, when one is lecturing.

2221
04:09:27,560 --> 04:09:31,960
You may think that now and then I have given a good lecture.

2222
04:09:31,960 --> 04:09:36,520
In that case, I have to congratulate you, because after all, you have been working with me.

2223
04:09:36,520 --> 04:09:41,080
Had it not been for you, I don't think the lecture would have seemed particularly good,

2224
04:09:41,080 --> 04:09:43,600
or even tolerably.

2225
04:09:43,600 --> 04:09:46,960
I hope that you have been collaborating with me tonight.

2226
04:09:46,960 --> 04:09:54,720
And since this night is different from other nights, I would like to say something about myself.

2227
04:09:54,720 --> 04:10:00,280
Because I came to America six months ago.

2228
04:10:00,280 --> 04:10:08,400
In my country, I am practically, to repeat the title of a famous book by Wells,

2229
04:10:08,400 --> 04:10:11,560
I am practically the invisible man.

2230
04:10:11,560 --> 04:10:15,920
And here, I am somehow visible.

2231
04:10:15,920 --> 04:10:19,560
Here, people have read me, they have read me so much,

2232
04:10:19,560 --> 04:10:26,360
that they cross-examine me on stories they have forgotten all about.

2233
04:10:26,360 --> 04:10:37,040
They ask me, why did so-and-so, why so-and-so was silent before he answered?

2234
04:10:37,040 --> 04:10:44,280
And then, I wonder who so-and-so was, why he was silent, what he answered.

2235
04:10:44,280 --> 04:10:49,280
[laughter]

2236
04:10:49,280 --> 04:10:52,400
And then, I hesitate to tell them the truth.

2237
04:10:52,400 --> 04:10:55,600
I say that so-and-so was silent before he answered,

2238
04:10:55,600 --> 04:10:58,400
because one generally is silent before one answers.

2239
04:10:58,400 --> 04:11:00,400
[laughter]

2240
04:11:00,400 --> 04:11:10,400
[applause]

2241
04:11:10,400 --> 04:11:14,000
And yet, all these things have made me happy.

2242
04:11:14,000 --> 04:11:20,800
I think that you are quite mistaken if you admire, I wonder if you do, my writing.

2243
04:11:20,800 --> 04:11:25,120
But I think of it as a very generous mistake.

2244
04:11:25,120 --> 04:11:31,400
I think that one should try to believe in things, even if they let you down afterwards.

2245
04:11:31,400 --> 04:11:39,480
And if I am joking now, I am joking, well, because I feel something within me.

2246
04:11:39,480 --> 04:11:45,000
I am joking because I really feel what this means to me.

2247
04:11:45,000 --> 04:11:50,720
I know that I shall look back on this night, that I shall wonder,

2248
04:11:50,720 --> 04:11:53,960
why did not I say what I should have said?

2249
04:11:53,960 --> 04:11:59,160
Why did not I say what this month in America have meant to me?

2250
04:11:59,160 --> 04:12:02,920
What all these unknown, unknown friends have meant to me?

2251
04:12:02,920 --> 04:12:08,440
But I suppose that somehow my feeling is coming through to you.

2252
04:12:08,440 --> 04:12:14,200
I've been asked to say some verses of mine.

2253
04:12:14,200 --> 04:12:19,480
I will go over a sonnet, the sonnet on Spinoza.

2254
04:12:19,480 --> 04:12:28,120
The fact that many of you may have no Spanish will make it a finer sonnet, of course.

2255
04:12:28,120 --> 04:12:32,360
And as I have said, that meaning is not important.

2256
04:12:32,360 --> 04:12:38,880
That what is important is a certain music, a certain way of saying things.

2257
04:12:38,880 --> 04:12:43,640
Maybe, though the music may not be there, you will feel it,

2258
04:12:43,640 --> 04:12:48,560
or rather, since I know that you are very kind, you will invent it for me.

2259
04:12:48,560 --> 04:12:53,840
Now, we come on to the sonnet, Spinoza.

2260
04:12:53,840 --> 04:13:17,840
[ Foreign Language ]

2261
04:13:17,840 --> 04:13:46,840
[ Applause ]

2262
04:13:46,840 --> 04:13:55,680