Gabriele D’Annunzio: The Collection of Poems in English. The most comprehensive English translation of the poetry of Gabriele
D'Annunzio.
Available as eBook on Amazon Kindle and Kobo, and as printed edition on Amazon and Lulu.
The Shepherds
September, let’s go. It is time to migrate.
Now in the land of Abruzzi my shepherds
leave the pens and take it to the sea:
they descend to the wild Adriatic
that is green like the pastures of the mountains.
They drank deeply at the alpine
springs, so that the flavour of native water
may dwell in their exiled hearts as a comfort,
and deceive at length their thirst on the way.
They renewed their crook of avellana. (*)
And so they walk the ancient path to the plain,
almost as through a silent river of grass,
following the vestiges of the forefathers.
Oh, voice of whom for the first time
knows the shimmering of the sea!
By the coastline presently walks
the flock. Motionless is the air.
The sun lights up the blonde living wool
that almost does not differ from the sand.
Splashing, stamping, sweet sounds.
Alas, why am I not with my shepherds?
(*) Corylus avellana, the Common Hazel
Gabriele D’Annunzio: The Collection of Poems in English. The most comprehensive English translation of the poetry of Gabriele
D'Annunzio.
Available as eBook on Amazon Kindle and Kobo, and as printed edition on Amazon and Lulu.
I pastori (from “Alcyone, Sogni di Terre Lontane” - 1903)
Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.
Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII
In London, in early June of the year
1929, the rare book dealer Joseph Cartaphilus, of Smyrna, offered the princess
de Lucinge the six quarto minor volumes (1715-1720) of Pope’s Iliad. The princess purchased them; when
she took possession of them, she exchanged a few words with the dealer. He was,
she says, an emaciated, grimy man with gray eyes and gray beard and singularly
vague features. He expressed himself with untutored and uncorrected fluency in
several languages; within scant minutes he shifted from French to English and
from English to an enigmatic cross between the Spanish of Salonika and the
Portuguese of Macao. In October, the princess heard from a passenger on the Zeus that Cartaphilus had died at sea
while returning to Smyrna, and that he had been buried on the island of Cos.
In the last
volume of the Iliad she found this
manuscript.
It is written
in an English that teems with Latinisms; this is a verbatim transcription of
the document.
I
As I recall,
my travails began in a garden in hundred-gated Thebes, in the time of the
emperor Diocletian. I had fought (with no glory) in the recent Egyptian wars
and was tribune of a legion quartered in Berenice, on the banks of the Red Sea; there, fever and magic consumed many men
who magnanimously coveted the steel blade. The Mauritanians were defeated; the
lands once occupied by the rebel cities were dedicated in œternitatem to the
Plutonian gods; Alexandria, subdued, in vain sought Caesar’s mercy; within the
year the legions were to report their triumph, but I myself barely glimpsed the
face of Mars. That privation grieved me, and was perhaps why I threw myself
into the quest, through vagrant and terrible deserts, for the secret City of
the Immortals.
My travails,
I have said, began in a garden in Thebes. All that night I did not sleep, for
there was a combat in my heart. I rose at last a little before dawn. My slaves
were sleeping; the moon was the color of the infinite sand. A bloody rider was
approaching from the east, weak with exhaustion. A few steps from me, he
dismounted and in a faint, insatiable voice asked me, in Latin, the name of the
river whose waters laved the city’s walls. I told him it was the Egypt, fed by
the rains. “It is another river that
I seek,” he replied morosely, “the
secret river that purifies men of death.” Dark blood was welling from
his breast. He told me that the country of his birth was a mountain that lay
beyond the Ganges; it was rumored on that mountain, he told me, that if one
traveled westward, to the end of the world, one would come to the river whose
waters give immortality. He added that on the far shore of that river lay the
City of the Immortals, a city rich in bulwarks and amphitheaters and temples.
He died before dawn, but I resolved to go in quest of that city and its river.
When interrogated by the torturer, some of the Mauritanian prisoners confirmed
the traveler’s tale: One of them recalled the Elysian plain, far at the ends
of the earth, where men’s lives are everlasting; another, the peaks from which the
Pactolus flows, upon which men live for a hundred years. In Rome, I spoke with
philosophers who felt that to draw out the span of a man’s life was to draw out
the agony of his dying and multiply the number of his deaths. I am not certain
whether I ever believed in the City of the Immortals; I think the task of
finding it was enough for me. Flavius, the Getulian proconsul, entrusted two
hundred soldiers to me for the venture; I also recruited a number of
mercenaries who claimed they knew the roads, and who were the first to desert.
Subsequent
events have so distorted the memory of our first days that now they are
impossible to put straight. We set out from Arsinoë and entered the ardent
desert. We crossed the lands of the Troglodytes, who devour serpents and lack
all verbal commerce; the land of the Garamantas, whose women are held in common
and whose food is lions; the land of the Augiles, who worship only Tartarus.
We ranged the
width and breadth of other deserts — deserts of black sand, where the traveler
must usurp the hours of the night, for the fervency of the day is unbearable.
From afar I made out the mountain which gives its name to the Ocean; on its
slopes grows the euphorbia, an antidote to poisons, and on its peak live the
Satyrs, a nation of wild and rustic men given to lasciviousness. That the bosom
of those barbaric lands, where the Earth is the mother of monsters, might
succor a famous city — such a thing seemed unthinkable to us all. Thus we
continued with our march, for to have regressed would have been to dishonor
ourselves. Some of the men, those who were most temerarious, slept with their
faces exposed to the moon; soon they burned with fever. With the depraved water
of the watering holes others drank up insanity and death. Then began the desertions;
a short time afterward, the mutinies. In repressing them I did not hesitate to
employ severity. In that I acted justly, but a centurion warned me that the
mutineers (keen to avenge the crucifixion of one of their number) were weaving
a plot for my death. I fled the camp with the few soldiers who were loyal to
me; in the desert, among
whirlwinds of sand and the vast night, we became separated. A
Cretan arrow rent my flesh. For several days I wandered without finding water —
or one huge day multiplied by the sun, thirst, and the fear of thirst. I left
my path to the will of my horse. At dawn, the distance bristled with pyramids
and towers. I dreamed, unbearably, of a small and orderly labyrinth at whose
center lay a well; my hands could almost touch it, my eyes see it, but so
bewildering and entangled were the turns that I knew I would die before I
reached it.
II
When I
disentangled myself at last from that nightmare, I found that my hands were
bound behind my back and I was lying in an oblong stone niche no bigger than a
common grave, scraped into the caustic slope of a mountain. The sides of the
cavity were humid, and had been polished as much by time as by human hands. In
my chest I felt a painful throbbing, and I burned with thirst. I raised my head
and cried out weakly. At the foot of the mountain ran a noiseless, impure
stream, clogged by sand and rubble;
on the far bank, the patent City of the Immortals shone dazzlingly in the last
(or first) rays of the sun. I could see fortifications, arches, frontispieces,
and forums; the foundation of it all was a stone plateau. A hundred or more
irregular niches like my own riddled the mountain and the valley. In the sand
had been dug shallow holes; from those wretched holes, from the niches, emerged
naked men with gray skin and neglected beards. I thought I recognized these
men: they belonged to the bestial lineage of the Troglodytes, who infest the
shorelines of the Persian Gulf and the grottoes of Ethiopia; I was surprised neither by the fact that they
did not speak nor by seeing them devour serpents.
Urgent thirst
lent me temerity. I estimated that I was some thirty paces from the sand; I
closed my eyes and threw myself down the mountain, my hands bound behind my
back. I plunged my bloodied face into the dark water and lapped at it like an
animal. Before I lost myself in sleep and delirium once more, I inexplicably repeated
a few words of Greek: Those from Zeleia,
wealthy Trojans, who drink the water of dark Aisepos…
I cannot say
how many days and nights passed over me. In pain, unable to return to the
shelter of the caverns, naked on the unknown sand, I let the moon and the sun
cast lots for my bleak fate. The Troglodytes, childlike in their barbarity,
helped me neither survive nor die. In vain did I plead with them to kill me.
One day, with the sharp edge of a flake of rock, I severed my bonds. The next,
I stood up and was able to beg or steal — I, Marcus Flaminius Rufus, military
tribune of one of the legions of Rome — my first abominated mouthful of
serpent’s flesh.
Out of
avidity to see the Immortals, to touch that more than human City, I could
hardly sleep. And as though the Troglodytes could divine my goal, they did not
sleep, either. At first I presumed they were keeping a watch over me; later, I
imagined that my uneasiness had communicated itself to them, as dogs can be
infected in that way. For my departure from the barbarous village I chose the most
public of times, sunset, when almost all the men emerged from their holes and
crevices in the earth and gazed out unseeingly toward the west. I prayed aloud,
less to plead for divine favor than to intimidate the tribe with articulate
speech. I crossed the stream bed clogged with sandbars and turned my steps
toward the City.
Two or three
men followed me confusedly; they were of short stature (like the others of that
species), and inspired more revulsion than fear. I had to skirt a number of
irregular pits that I took to be ancient quarries; misled by the City’s
enormous size, I had thought it was much nearer. Toward midnight, I set my foot
upon the black shadow — bristling with idolatrous shapes upon the yellow sand —
of the City’s wall. My steps were halted by a kind of sacred horror. So
abhorred by mankind are novelty and the desert that I was cheered to note that
one of the Troglodytes had accompanied me to the last. I closed my eyes and
waited, unsleeping, for the dawn.
I have said
that the City was builded on a stone plateau. That plateau, with its
precipitous sides, was as difficult to scale as the walls. In vain did my weary
feet walk round it; the black foundation revealed not the slightest
irregularity, and the invariance of
the walls proscribed even a single door. The force of the day drove me to seek refuge in a cavern; toward the rear there
was a pit, and out of the pit, out of the gloom below, rose a ladder. I
descended the ladder and made my way through a chaos of squalid galleries to a
vast, indistinct circular chamber. Nine doors opened into that cellar- like place; eight led to a maze
that returned, deceitfully, to the same chamber; the ninth led through another
maze to a second circular chamber identical to the first. I am not certain how
many chambers there were; my misery and anxiety
multiplied them. The silence was hostile, and virtually perfect; aside from a
subterranean wind whose cause I never discovered, within those deep webs of
stone there was no sound; even the thin streams of iron-colored water that
trickled through crevices in the stone were noiseless. Horribly, I grew used to
that dubious world; it began to seem
incredible that anything could exist save nine-doored cellars and long, forking
subterranean corridors. I know not how long I wandered under the earth; I do
know that from time to time, in a confused dream of home, I conflated the
horrendous village of the barbarians and the city of my birth, among the
clusters of grapes.
At the end of
one corridor, a not unforeseen wall blocked my path — and a distant light fell
upon me. I raised my dazzled eyes; above, vertiginously high above, I saw a
circle of sky so blue it was almost purple. The metal treads of a stairway led
up the wall. Weariness made my muscles slack, but I climbed the stairs, only
pausing from time to time to sob clumsily with joy. Little by little I began to
discern friezes and the capitals of columns, triangular pediments and vaults,
confused glories carved in granite and marble. Thus it was that I was led to
ascend from the blind realm of black and intertwining labyrinths into the
brilliant City.
I emerged
into a kind of small plaza — a courtyard might better describe it. It was surrounded
by a single building, of irregular angles and varying heights. It was to this
heterogeneous building that the many cupolas and columns belonged. More than
any other feature of that incredible monument, I was arrested by the great
antiquity of its construction. I felt that it had existed before humankind,
before the world itself.
Its patent
antiquity (though somehow terrible to the eyes) seemed to accord with the labor
of immortal artificers. Cautiously at first, with indifference as time went on,
desperately toward the end, I wandered the staircases and inlaid floors of that
labyrinthine palace. (I discovered afterward that the width and height of the
treads on the staircases were not constant; it was this that explained the
extraordinary weariness I felt.) This
palace is the work of the gods, was my first thought. I explored the
uninhabited spaces, and I corrected myself: The
gods that built this place have died. Then I reflected upon its
peculiarities, and told myself: The gods
that built this place were mad. I said this, I know, in a tone of
incomprehensible reproof that verged upon remorse — with more intellectual
horror than sensory fear.
The
impression of great antiquity was joined by others: the impression of
endlessness, the sensation of oppressiveness and horror, the sensation of
complex irrationality. I had made my way through a dark maze, but it was the
bright City of the Immortals that terrified and repelled me. A maze is a house
built purposely to confuse men; its architecture, prodigal in symmetries, is
made to serve that purpose. In the palace that I imperfectly explored, the
architecture had no purpose. There
were corridors that led nowhere, unreachably high windows, grandly dramatic
doors that opened onto monklike cells or empty shafts, incredible upside-down
staircases with upside-down treads and balustrades. Other staircases, clinging
airily to the side of a monumental wall, petered out after two or three
landings, in the high gloom of the cupolas, arriving nowhere. I cannot say
whether these are literal examples I have given; I do know that for many years they
plagued my troubled dreams; I can no longer know whether any given feature is a
faithful transcription of reality or one of the shapes unleashed by my nights. This City, I thought, is so horrific that its mere existence, the
mere fact of its having endured — even
in the middle of a secret desert — pollutes
the past and the future and somehow compromises the stars. So long as this City
endures, no one in the world can ever be happy or courageous. I do not want
to describe it; a chaos of heterogeneous words, the body of a tiger or a bull
pullulating with teeth, organs, and heads monstrously yoked together yet hating
each other — those might, perhaps, be approximate images.
I cannot
recall the stages by which I returned, nor my path through the dusty, humid
crypts. I know only that I was accompanied by the constant fear that when I
emerged from the last labyrinth I would be surrounded once again by the
abominable City of the Immortals. I remember nothing else. That loss of memory,
now insurmountable, was perhaps willful; it is possible that the circumstances
of my escape were so unpleasant that on some day no less lost to memory I swore
to put them out of my mind.
III
Those who
have read the story of my travails attentively will recall that a man of the
Troglodyte tribe had followed me, as a dog might have, into the jagged shadow
of the walls. When I emerged from the last cellar, I found him at the mouth of
the cavern. He was lying in the sand, clumsily drawing and rubbing out a row of
symbols that resembled those letters in dreams that one is just on the verge of
understanding when they merge and blur. At first I thought that this was some
sort of barbaric writing; then I realized that it was absurd to imagine that
men who had never learned to speak should have invented writing.
Nor did any
one of the shapes resemble any other — a fact that ruled out (or made quite
remote) the possibility that they were symbols. The man would draw them, look
at them, and correct them. Then suddenly, as though his game irritated him, he
would rub them out with his palm and forearm. He looked up at me, though he
seemed not to recognize me. Still, so great
was the relief I felt (or so great, so dreadful
had my loneliness been) that I actually thought that this primitive Troglodyte
looking up at me from the floor of a cave had
been waiting for me. The sun warmed
the plain; as we began our return to the village, under the first stars of
evening, the sand burned our feet. The Troglodyte walked ahead of me; that
night I resolved to teach him to recognize, perhaps even to repeat, a few
words. Dogs and horses, I reflected, are able to do the first; many birds, like
the Caesars’ nightingale, can do the second.
However
scant a man’s understanding, it will always
be greater than that of unreasoning beasts.
The
Troglodyte’s lowly birth and condition recalled to my memory the image of
Argos, the moribund old dog of the Odyssey,
so I gave him the name Argos, and tried to teach it to him. Time and time
again, I failed. No means I employed, no severity, no obstinacy of mine availed.
Motionless, his eyes dead, he seemed not even to perceive the sounds which I
was attempting to imprint upon him. Though but a few paces from me, he seemed
immensely distant. Lying in the sand like a small, battered sphinx carved from
lava, he allowed the heavens to circle in the sky above him from the first
dusky light of morning to the last dusky light of night. It seemed simply
impossible that he had not grasped my intention. I recalled that it is
generally believed among the Ethiopians that
monkeys deliberately do not
speak, so that they will not be forced to work; I attributed Argos’ silence to
distrust or fear. From that vivid picture I passed on to others, even more
extravagant. I reflected that Argos and I lived our lives in separate
universes; I reflected that our perceptions were identical but that Argos
combined them differently than I, constructed from them different objects; I
reflected that perhaps for him there were no objects, but rather a constant,
dizzying play of swift impressions. I imagined a world without memory, without time;
I toyed with the possibility of a
language that had no nouns, a language of impersonal verbs or indeclinable
adjectives. In these reflections many days went by, and with the days, years.
Until one morning, something very much like joy occurred — the sky rained slow,
strong rain.
Nights in
the desert can be frigid, but that night had been like a cauldron. I dreamed
that a river in Thessaly (into whose waters I had thrown back a golden fish)
was coming to save me; I could hear it approaching over the red sand and the
black rock; a coolness in the air and the scurrying sound of rain awakened me.
I ran out naked to welcome it. The night was waning; under the yellow clouds,
the tribe, as joyously as I, was offering itself up to the vivid torrents in a
kind of ecstasy — they reminded me of Corybantes possessed by the god. Argos,
his eyes fixed on the empyrean, was moaning; streams of water rolled down his
face — not just rain, but also (I later learned) tears. Argos, I cried, Argos!
Then, with
gentle wonder, as though discovering something lost and forgotten for many
years, Argos stammered out these words: Argos,
Ulysses’ dog. And then, without looking at me, This dog lying on the dungheap.
We accept reality
so readily — perhaps because we sense that nothing is real. I asked Argos how
much of the Odyssey he knew. He found
using Greek difficult; I had to repeat the question.
Very little, he
replied. Less than the meagerest
rhapsode. It has been eleven hundred years since last I wrote it.
IV
That day, all
was revealed to me. The Troglodytes were the Immortals; the stream and its
sand-laden waters, the River sought by the rider. As for the City whose renown
had spread to the very Ganges, the Immortals had destroyed it almost nine
hundred years ago. Out of the shattered remains of the City’s ruin they had
built on the same spot the incoherent city I had wandered through — that parody
or antithesis of City which was also a temple to the irrational gods that rule
the world and to those gods about
whom we know nothing save that they do not resemble man. The founding of this
city was the last symbol to which the Immortals had descended; it marks the
point at which, esteeming all exertion vain, they resolved to live in thought,
in pure speculation. They built that carapace, abandoned it, and went off to
make their dwellings in the caves. In their self- absorption, they scarcely
perceived the physical world.
These things
were explained to me by Homer as one might explain things to a child. He also
told me of his own old age and of that late journey he had made — driven, like
Ulysses, by the intention to arrive at the nation
of men that know not what the sea is, that eat not salted meat, that
know not what an oar might be. He lived for a
century in the City of the Immortals, and when it was destroyed it was he who counseled that this other one be built.
We should not be surprised by that — it is rumored that after singing of the
war of Ilion, he sang of the war
between the frogs and rats. He was like a god who created first the Cosmos, and then Chaos.
There is
nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind,
all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine,
terrible, and incomprehensible is to know
oneself immortal. I have noticed that in spite of religion, the conviction
as to one’s own immortality is extraordinarily rare. Jews, Christians, and
Muslims all profess belief in
immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that
they truly believe only in those hundred years, for they destine all the rest,
throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive. In my view, the Wheel
conceived by certain religions in Hindustan is much more plausible; on that
Wheel, which has neither end nor beginning, each life is the effect of the
previous life and engenderer of the next, yet no one life determines the
whole…. Taught by centuries of living, the republic of immortal men had
achieved a perfection of tolerance, almost of disdain. They knew that over an
infinitely long span of time, all things happen to all men. As reward for his
past and future virtues, every man merited every kindness — yet also every
betrayal, as reward for his past and future iniquities. Much as the way in
games of chance, heads and tails tend to even out, so cleverness and dullness
cancel and correct each other. Perhaps the rude poem of El Cid is the
counterweight demanded by a single epithet of the Eclogues or a maxim from
Heraclitus. The most fleeting thought obeys an invisible plan, and may crown,
or inaugurate, a secret design. I know of men who have done evil in order that
good may come of it in future centuries, or may already have come of it in
centuries past…. Viewed in that way,
all our acts are just, though also unimportant. There are no spiritual or
intellectual merits. Homer composed
the Odyssey; given infinite time,
with infinite circumstances and changes, it is impossible that the Odyssey should not be composed at least once. No one is someone; a single immortal
man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, hero, philosopher, demon, and
world — which is a long-winded way of saying that Aim not.
The notion of
the world as a system of exact compensations had an enormous influence on the
Immortals. In the first place, it made them immune to pity. I have mentioned
the ancient quarries that dotted the countryside on the far bank of the stream;
a man fell into the deepest of those pits; he could not be hurt, could not die,
and yet he burned with thirst; seventy years passed before he was thrown a
rope. Nor was he much interested in his own fate. His body was a submissive
domestic animal; all the charity it required each month was a few hours’ sleep,
a little water, and a scrap of meat. But let no one imagine that we were mere
ascetics. There is no more complex pleasure than thought, and it was to thought
that we delivered ourselves over. From time to time, some extraordinary stimulus
might bring us back to the physical world — for example, on that dawn, the
ancient elemental pleasure of the rain. But those lapses were extremely rare;
all Immortals were capable of perfect quietude. I recall one whom I never saw standing — a bird had made its
nest on his breast.
Among the
corollaries to the doctrine that there is no thing that is not counterbalanced
by another, there is one that has little theoretical importance but that caused
us, at the beginning or end of the tenth century, to scatter over the face of
the earth. It may be summarized in these words: There is a river whose waters give immortality; somewhere there must be
another river whose waters take it away.
The number of rivers is not
infinite; an immortal traveler wandering the world will someday have drunk from
them all. We resolved to find that river.
Death (or
reference to death) makes men precious and pathetic; their ghostliness is
touching; any act they perform may be their last; there is no face that is not
on the verge of blurring and fading away like the faces in a dream. Everything
in the world of mortals has the value of the irrecoverable and contingent.
Among the
Immortals, on the other hand, every act (every thought) is the echo of others that
preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, and the faithful presage of
others that will repeat it in the future, advertiginem.
There is nothing that is not as though lost between indefatigable mirrors.
Nothing can occur but once, nothing is preciously in peril of being lost. The elegiac, the somber, the ceremonial are
not modes the Immortals hold in reverence. Homer and I went our separate ways
at the portals of Tangier; I do not think we said good-bye.
I wandered
through new realms, new empires. In the autumn of 1066 I fought at Stamford
Bridge, though I no longer recall whether I stood in the ranks of Harold, soon
to meet his fate, or in the ranks of that ill-fated Harald Hardrada who
conquered only six feet or a little more of English soil. In the seventh
century of the Hegira, on the outskirts of Bulaq, I transcribed with deliberate
calligraphy, in a language I have forgotten, in an alphabet I know not, the
seven voyages of Sindbad and the story of the City of Brass. In a courtyard of
the prison in Samarkand I often played chess.
In Bikanir I have taught astrology, as I have in Bohemia. In 1638 I was
in Kolzsvar, and later in Leipzig. In Aberdeen, in 1714, I subscribed to the
six volumes of Pope’s Iliad; I know I
often perused them with delight. In 1729 or thereabouts, I discussed the origin
of that poem with a professor of rhetoric whose name, I believe, was
Giambattista; his arguments struck me as irrefutable. On October 4, 1921, the Patna, which was taking me to Bombay,
ran aground in a harbor on the Eritrean coast.[1]
I
disembarked; there came to my mind other mornings, long in the past, when I had
also looked out over the Red Sea — when I
was a Roman tribune, and fever and magic and inactivity consumed the soldiers.
Outside the city I saw a spring;
impelled by habit, I tasted its clear water. As I scaled the steep bank beside
it, a thorny tree scratched the back of my hand. The unaccustomed pain seemed
exceedingly sharp. Incredulous, speechless, and in joy, I contemplated the
precious formation of a slow drop of blood. I
am once more mortal, I told myself over and over, again I am like all other men. That night, I slept until daybreak.
… A year
has passed, and I reread these pages. I can attest that they do not stray
beyond the bounds of truth, although in the first chapters, and even in certain
paragraphs of others, I believe I detect a certain falseness. That is due,
perhaps, to an over-employment of circumstantial details, a way of writing that
I learned from poets; it is a procedure that infects everything with falseness,
since there may be a wealth of details in the event, yet not in memory…. I
believe, nonetheless, that I have discovered a more private and inward reason.
I will reveal it; it does not matter that I may be judged a fantast.
The story I have told seems unreal because the
experiences of two different men are intermingled in it. In the first chapter, the horseman wishes to know the
name of the river that runs beside the walls of Thebes; Flaminius Rufus, who had
bestowed upon the city the epithet “hundred-gated,” tells him that
the river is the “Egypt”; neither of those statements belongs to him, but rather to Homer, who in the Iliad expressly mentions “Thebes
Hekatompylos” and who in the Odyssey,
through the mouths of Proteus and Ulysses, invariably calls the Nile the
“Egypt.” In the second chapter, when the Roman drinks the immortal
water he speaks a few words in Greek. Those words are also Homeric; they may be
found at the end of the famous catalog of the
ships. Later, in the dizzying palace, he speaks of “a reproof that
was almost remorse”; those words, too, belong to Homer, who had foreseen
such a horror. Such anomalies disturbed me; others, of an aesthetic nature,
allowed me to discover the truth. The clues of this latter type may be found in
the last chapter, which says that I fought at Stamford Bridge, that in Bulaq I
transcribed the voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, and that in Aberdeen I
subscribed to Pope’s English Iliad.
The text says, inter alia: “In Bikanir I have taught astrology, as I have in
Bohemia.” None of those statements is false; what is significant is the
fact of their having been chosen to record. The first seems to befit a man of
war, but then one sees that the narrator pays little attention to the war, much
more to the fate of the men. The “facts” that follow are even more
curious. A dark yet elemental reason led me to put them to paper: I knew they
were pathetic. They are not pathetic when narrated by the Roman Flaminius
Rufus; they are when narrated by Homer. It is odd that Homer, in the thirteenth
century, should have copied down the adventures of Sindbad — another Ulysses — and
again after many hundreds of years have discovered forms like those of his own Iliad in a northern kingdom and a
barbaric tongue. As for the sentence that contains the name
“Bikanir,” one can see that it has been composed by a man of letters
desirous (like the author of the catalog of ships) of wielding splendid words.[2]
As the end approaches,
there are no longer any images from memory — there are only words. It is not
strange that time may have confused those that once portrayed me with those that were symbols of the
fate of the person that accompanied me
for so many centuries. I have been Homer; soon, like Ulysses, I shall be Nobody; soon, I shall be
all men — I shall be dead.
Postscript (1950):
Among the
commentaries inspired by the foregoing publication, the most curious (if not
most urbane) is biblically titled A Coat
of Many Colours (Manchester, 1948); it is the work of the supremely
persévérant pen of Dr. Nahum Cordovero, and contains some hundred pages. It
speaks of the Greek anthologies, of the anthologies of late Latin texts, of
that Ben Johnson who defined his contemporaries with excerpts from Seneca, of
Alexander Ross’s Virgilius evangelizans, of
the artifices of George Moore and Eliot, and, finally, of “the tale attributed
to the rare-book dealer Joseph Cartaphilus.” In the first chapter it
points out brief interpolations from Pliny (Historia
naturate, V:8); in the second, from Thomas de Quincey (Writings, III: 439); in the third, from a letter written by
Descartes to the ambassador Pierre Chanut; in the fourth, from Bernard Shaw (Back to Methuselah, V). From those “intrusions”
(or thefts) it infers that the entire document is apocryphal.
To my way of
thinking, that conclusion is unacceptable. As the end approaches, wrote Cartaphilus, there are no longer any images from memory — there are only words. Words, words, words taken out of place and
mutilated, words from other men — those were the alms left him by the hours and
the centuries.