Odysseia — Proémio

Ὀδυσσείας τὸ φροίμιον

Άνδρα μοι έννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
πλάγχθη, επεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον έπερσε·
πολλῶν δ' ανθρώπων ίδεν άστεα καὶ νόον έγνω,
πολλὰ δ' ὅ γ' εν πόντῳ πάθεν άλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν,
αρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων.
αλλ' ουδ' ὧς ἑτάρους ερρύσατο, ἱέμενός περ·
αυτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ατασθαλίῃσιν όλοντο,
νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος Ηελίοιο
ήσθιον· αυτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν αφείλετο νόστιμον ῆμαρ.
τῶν ἁμόθεν γε, θεά, θύγατερ Διός, ειπὲ καὶ ἡμῖν.

Fala-me, Musa, do homem astuto que tanto vagueou,
depois que de Tróia destrui a cidadela sagrada.
Muitos foram os povos cujas cidades observou,
cujos espíritos conheceu; e foram muitos no mar
os sofrimentos por que passou para salvar a vida,
para conseguir o retorno dos companheiros a suas casas.
Mas a eles, embora o quisesse, não logrou salvar.
Não, pereceram devido à sua loucura,
insensatos, que devoraram o gado sagrado de Hiperíon,
o Sol – e assim lhes negou o deus o dia do retorno.
Destas coisas fala-nos agora, ó deusa, filha de Zeus.

Homero. Odisseia. I.1-11. Tradução de Frederico Lourenço.

School Latin project lands European language award

School Latin project lands European language award

Mais uma vez, desta vez de Inglaterra, nos chegam notícias de como um reestabelecimento do ensino das línguas clássicas não tem necessariamente que passar pelo aparto estatal. São boas notícias, especialmente porque, ao que me parece, revela que o ensino do Latim está a ser repensado a par do ensino das outras línguas, deixando para trás as bolorentas noções de que há uma categoria (línguas vivas) e outra (línguas mortas), cada qual com métodos diferentes — o que curiosamente leva a que as línguas vivas se aprendam as mortas não. Parabéns a toda a gente envolvida, pelo prémio e pela motivação.

Vergílio e a Prophecia

Quando chegaram à porta a jovem disse: «Chegou a hora
De interrogar o oráculo. O Deus! Eis o Deus!» Estava a meio da frase
Em frente à entrada quando de súbito a sua expressão e a sua cor
Se desfizeram e os cabelos se engrenharam. Respiração agitada.
O seu peito encheu-se de cólera feroz, e parecia maior do que era.
A voz não era já a duma mortal — e falou como quando a força
De Deus está por perto.

Vergilii Æneis [VI. 45-51]. Tradução minha.

Ventum erat ad limen, cum virgo 'Poscere fata
tempus' ait; 'deus ecce deus!' cui talia fanti
ante fores subito non vultus, non color unus,
non comptæ mansere comæ; sed pectus anhelum,
et rabie fera corda tument, maiorque videri
nec mortale sonans, adflata est numine quando
jam propiore dei.

As Trindades do Pico della Mirandola

Aquele que entender profundamente com o seu intelecto como é que a divisão da Unidade de Vénus se articula com a Trindade das Graças, a Unidade do Destino com a Trindade das Parcas, e a Unidade de Saturno com a Trindade de Júpiter, Neptuno e Plutão, verá a maneira devida de proceder na theologia órphica. 

Pico della Mirandola. 900 Teses [39.8].

Tradução minha.

Qui profunde et intellectualiter divisionem unitatis Veneris in trinitatem Gratiarum, et unitatis fatalis, in trinitatem Parcarum, et unitatis Saturni in trinitatem Jovis, Neptuni et Plutonis intellexerit, videbit modum debitum procedendi in Orphica theologia.

Imagem: Cosimo Rosselli. Detalhe d'O Milagre do Sacramento com Marsilio Ficino, Pico Mirandulensis e Angelo Poliziano. @ Igreja de St. Ambrósio a Firenze.

Maravilhosa Justiça

a justiça é a melhor das virtudes,

nem a estrela vespertina nem a estrela matutina são tão maravilhosas quanto ela.

καὶ διὰ τοῦτο πολλάκις κρατίστη τῶν αρετῶν εῖναι δοκεῖ ἡ δικαιοσύνη

καὶ ούθ᾽ ἕσπερος ούθ᾽ ἑῷος οὕτω θαυμαστός

Aristóteles. Ethica Nicomachea V I. 1129b.
Tradução minha.

Gratias Sergio.

... Ancient without Modern, Modern without Ancient ...

 

[Gotthold Ephraim] Lessing had in his mind, as well as Latin and Greek, English, French and German always, Italian, even Spanish to some extent. And he read the Latin and the Greek in themselves — and with all due apparatus of technical scholarship considering his time. He was far from the twice- and thrice-garbled sciolism of the average French, and even English, critic of the late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth century, as from the arid pedantry of the Dutch and German scholars of the same date. To him, more perhaps than to any one else, it is due that modern criticism has not followed, more than it has done, the mere foolishness of the "modern" advocates in the Quarrel — that it has fortified itself with those sound and solid studies which antiquity alone can supply. For once more let it be said that if, from the pure critical point of view, Ancient without Modern is a stumbling-block, Modern without Ancient is foolishness utter and irremediable.

George Saintsbury, (1904) A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe (vol.3) Aqui.

Newness of Sense, Antiquity of Voice! [Hino à Filologia — Ben Jonson]

So that my Reader is assur'd, I now

Mean what I speak, and still will keep that Vow,
Stand forth my Object, then, you that have been
Ever at home; yet have all Countries seen:
And like a Compass, keeping one Foot still
Upon your Center, do your Circle fill
Of general Knowledge; watch'd Men, Manners too,
Heard what times past have said, seen what ours do:
Which Grace shall I make love to first? your Skill,
Or Faith in things? or is't your Wealth and Will
T' instruct and teach? or your unweary'd pain
Of Gathering? Bounty in pouring out again?
What Fables have you vext! what Truth redeem'd!
Antiquities search'd! Opinions dis-esteem'd!
Impostures branded, and Authorities urg'd,
What Blots and Errors have you watch'd and purg'd
Records and Authors of! how rectified,
Times, Manners, Customs! Innovations spied!
Sought out the Fountains, Sources, Creeks, Paths, Ways,
And noted the Beginnings and Decays!
Where is that Nominal Mark, or Real Rite,
Form, Act or Ensign, that hath scap'd your sight?
How are Traditions there examin'd! how
Conjectures retreiv'd! and a Story now
And then of Times (besides the bare Conduct
Of what it tells us) weav'd in to instruct.
I wonder'd at the Richness, but am lost,
To see the Workmanship so 'xceed the Cost!
To mark the excellent seas'ning of your Stile!
And Manly Elocution, not one while
With Horror rough, then rioting with Wit!
But to the Subject still the Colours fit,
In sharpness of all Search, wisdom of Choice,
Newness of Sense, Antiquity of Voice!

Ben Jonson. An Epistle to Master John Selden [27-60] in Underwoods. Aqui.

Homenagem a Seamus Heaney (†2013) — A Vigia de Mycenas

Obiit hodie diem supremum Seamus Heaney, amantissimus nobis et carminum excultor subtilis. Sit igitur terra, quam sæpe dulcemque canebas, nunc tibi levis. (1939-2013)

Há alguns anos atrás (2011) partilhámos neste blog a maravilhosa sequência Mycean Outlook (§0, §1, §2, §3, §4, §5) do livro do Seamus The Spirit Level. É talvez a mais tocante leitura da peça Agamémnon que eu conheço. Seja este um sinal de lembrança, e, ut aiunt Grai, a marca dum μνημόσυνον.

Mycenae Lookout

The ox is on my tongue.

Aeschylus, Agamemnon

1. The Watchman's War

Some people wept, and not for sorrow — joy
That the king had armed and upped and sailed for Troy,
But inside me like struck sound in a gong
That killing-fest, the life-warp and world-wrong
It brought to pass, still augured and endured.
I'd dream of blood in bright webs in a ford,
Of bodies raining down like tattered meat
On top of me asleep — and me the lookout
The queen's command had posted and forgotten,
The blind spot her farsightedness relied on.
And then the ox would lurch against the gong
And deaden it and I would feel my tongue
Like the dropped gangplank of a cattle truck,
Trampled and rattled, running piss and muck,
All swimmy-trembly as the lick of fire,
A victory beacon in an abattoir...
Next thing then I would waken at a loss,
For all the world a sheepdog stretched in grass,
Exposed to what I knew, still honour-bound
To concentrate attention out beyond
The city and the border, on that line
Where the blaze would leap the hills when Troy had fallen.

My sentry work was fate, a home to go to,
An in-between-times that I had to row through
Year after year: when the mist would start
To lift off fields and inlets, when morning light
Would open like the grain of light being split,
Day in, day out, I'd come alive again,
Silent and sunned as an esker on a plain,
Up on my elbows, gazing, biding time
In my outpost on the roof... What was to come
Out of that ten years' wait that was the war
Flawed the black mirror of my frozen stare.
If a god of justice had reached down from heaven
For a strong beam to hang his scale-pans on
He would have found me tensed and ready-made.
I balanced between destiny and dread
And saw it coming, clouds bloodshot with the red
Of victory fires, the raw wound of that dawn
Igniting and erupting, bearing down
Like lava on a fleeing population...
Up on my elbows, head back, shutting out
The agony of Clytemnestra's love-shout
That rose through the palace like the yell of troops
Hurled by King Agamemnon from the ships.

2. Cassandra

No such thing
as innocent
bystanding.

Her soiled vest,
her little breasts,
her clipped, devast-

ated, scabbed
punk head,
the char-eyed

famine gawk—
she looked
camp -fucked

and simple.
People
could feel

a missed
trueness in them
focus,

a homecoming
in her dropped-wing,
half-calculating

bewilderment.
No such thing
as innocent.

Old King Cock-
of-the-Walk
was back,

King Kill-
the-Child-
and-Take-

What-Comes,
King Agamem-
non's drum-

balled, old buck's
stride was back.
And then her Greek

words came,
a lamb
at lambing time,

bleat of clair-
voyant dread,
the gene-hammer

and tread
of the roused god.
And a result-

ant shock desire
in bystanders
to do it to her

there and then.
Little rent
cunt of their guilt:

in she went
to the knife,
to the killer wife,

to the net over
her and her slaver,
the Troy reaver,

saying, 'A wipe
of the sponge,
that's it.

The shadow-hinge
swings unpredict-
ably and the light's

blanked out.'

3. His Dawn Vision

Cities of grass. Fort walls. The dumbstruck palace.
I'd come to with the night wind on my face,
Agog, alert again, but far, far less

Focused on victory than I should have been÷
Still isolated in my old disdain
Of claques who always needed to be seen

And heard as the true Argives. Mouth athletes,
Quoting the oracle and quoting dates,
Petitioning, accusing, taking votes.

No element that should have carried weight
Out of the grievous distance would translate.
Our war stalled in the pre-articulate.

The little violets' heads bowed on their stems,
The pre-dawn gossamers, all dew and scrim
And star-lace, it was more through them

I felt the beating of the huge time-wound
We lived inside. My soul wept in my hand
When I would touch them, my whole being rained

Down on myself, I saw cities of grass,
Valleys of longing, tombs, a wind-swept brightness,
And far-off, in a hilly, ominous place,

Small crowds of people watching as a man
Jumped a fresh earth-wall and another ran
Amorously, it seemed, to strike him down.

4. The Nights

They both needed to talk,
pretending what they needed
was my advice. Behind backs
each one of them confided
it was sexual overload
every time they did it
and indeed from the beginning
(a child could have hardly missed it)
their real life was the bed.

The king should have been told,
but who was there to tell him
if not myself? I willed them
to cease and break the hold
of my cross-purposed silence
but still kept on, all smiles
to Aegisthus every morning,
much favoured and self-loathing.
The roof was like an eardrum.

The ox's tons of dumb
inertia stood, head-down
and motionless as a herm.
Atlas, watchmen's patron,
would come into my mind,
the only other one
up at all hours, ox-bowed
under his yoke of cloud
out there at the world's end.

The loft-floor where the gods
and goddesses took lovers
and made out endlessly
successfully, those thuds
and moans through the cloud cover
were wholly on his shoulders.
Sometimes I thought of us
apotheosized to boulders
called Aphrodite's Pillars.

High and low in those days
hit their stride together.
When the captains in the horse
felt Helen's hand caress
its wooden boards and belly
they nearly rode each other.
But in the end Troy's mothers
bore their brunt in alley,
bloodied cot and bed.
The war put all men mad,
horned, horsed or roof-posted,
the boasting and the bested.

My own mind was a bull-pen
where homed King Agamemnon
had stamped his weight in gold.
But when hills broke into flame
and the queen wailed on and came,
it was the king I sold.
I moved beyond bad faith:
for his bullion bars, his bonus
was a rope-net and a blood-bath.
And the peace had come upon us.

5. His Reverie of Water

At Troy, at Athens, what I most clearly
see and nearly smell
is the fresh water.

A filled bath, still unentered
and unstained, waiting behind housewalls
that the far cries of the butchered on the plain

keep dying into, until the hero comes
surging in incomprehensibly
to be attended to and be alone,

stripped to the skin, blood-plastered, moaning
and rocking, splashing, dozing off,
accommodated as if he were a stranger.

And the well at Athens too.
Or rather that old lifeline leading up
and down from the Acropolis

to the well itself, a set of timber steps
slatted in between the sheer cliff face
and a free-standing, covering spur of rock,

secret staircase the defenders knew
and the invaders found, where what was to be
Greek met Greek,

the ladder of the future
and the past, besieger and besieged,
the treadmill of assault

turned waterwheel, the rungs of stealth
and habit all the one
bare foot extended, searching.

And then this ladder of our own that ran
deep into a well-shaft being sunk
in broad daylight, men puddling at the source

through tawny mud, then coming back up
deeper in themselves for having been there
like discharged soldiers testing the safe ground,

finders, keepers, seers of fresh water
in the bountiful round mouths of iron pumps
and gushing taps.

Seamus Heaney. (1996) The Spirit Level. faber & faber.

Tradição, Renascimento, e Hannah Arendt

§1

We need no longer be concerned with [the] scorn for the “educated philistines”, who all through the nineteenth century tried to make up the loss of authentic authority with a spurious glorification of culture. To most people today this culture looks like a field of ruins which, far from being able to claim any authority, can hardly command their interest. This fact may be deplorable, but implicit in it is the great chance to look upon the past with eyes undistracted by any tradition, with a directness which has disappeared from Occidental reading and hearing ever since Roman civilization submitted to the authority of Greek thought. [... <—]

The discovery of antiquity in the Renaissance was a first attempt to break the fetters of tradition, and by going to the sources themselves to establish a past over which tradition would have no hold.

Hannah Arendt. (1968) Between Past and Future: Tradition and the Modern World. Penguin. P28/25

§2

Humanists of the fifteenth century [...] articulated an entirely new, lay view of Christian society that fused traditional Christian values with the civic values of the ancient pagan world. While they offered no direct challenge to the ecclesiastical polity of the Church and evaded issues of church and state, much of what they said had the effect of undermining the political claims of the late medieval Church. Often hiding behind the personæ of interlocutors in their dialogues, humanists called into question the ideological bases of clericalism, hierarchy, monasticism and the subordination political to religious ends. Sometimes humanist criticism of contemporary Christianity presented itself as a movement of reform, an attempt to return to the supposedly purer Christianity of the ancient world; sometimes it appears that preserving clerical orthodoxies was of less concern to humanist intellectuals than recovering the glories of classical civilization. In any case, it is clear that, at least in some matters, lay Christians were beginning to mount a serious intellectual resistance to the tutelage of their clerical superiors.

The emergence of a new humanist vision of Christian society had one other effect that is significant for the history of political thought. Humanist cultural criticism presented its audience with a choice between a powerful, united and highly civilized Golden Age in ancient Italy and a weak, corrupt and divided contemporary world. When preening themselves on their own achievements or flattering a prince, humanists praised the triumph of classical values over 'medieval' or 'Gothic' rudeness. In both cases, the mere existence of alternatives itself undermined the chief support of any traditional society: its inability to recognize the value and the possibility of other ways of doing things. The humanists' 'culture war' turned that inability into possibility, even actuality. Their intimate knowledge of another culture, their habit of comparing that culture with their own age, their realism and their habit of arguing both sides of a question led in the end to an incipient form of cultural relativism. [...] A major lesson of cultural relativism, of course, is that what one is in the habit of thinking of as a given of nature may in fact be a product of culture. And what belongs to culture, not nature, is within human power to change. Applied to the sphere of high culture, the will to reject tradition and embrace change can lead to a Renaissance; applied to the political sphere, it can lead to a Utopia.

James Hankins. (1996) Humanism and Modern Political Thought in Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism. CUP P127-128

Breaking News!

Entretanto, perto da antiga cidade de Amfípolis, é possível que o túmulo de Alexandre o Grande tenha sido descoberto (ou, vá, de um monarca helenístico mais modesto). Ler mais aqui.