Douglas L. Talley's Blog

Once over lunch I wondered aloud to my wife whether there were some way to make the ancient classics in their original language of interest to the common reader. My wife, who enjoys romance and historical fiction and reads only in English, replied that most of her book club friends require literature depicting characters they care about. In short, they desire an honest portrayal of human personality. I have occasionally given a poetry reading to such book clubs, typically composed of women, and have always been impressed by the intelligence and wisdom of their members. These good women, who make up the common readers of our communities, will read and discuss both Jane Austen and Dan Brown, but will not be fooled into thinking that The DaVinci Code merits the same praise as Pride and Prejudice.

Henry David Thoreau had written in Walden that the adventurous reader will always study the classics, however ancient they may be or however foreign their language. “They are the only oracles which are not decayed,” he notes, and adds that “we might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.” There is good reason the classics simply will not die, because they offer the most compelling portrayal of those impulses that define us as human.

The barrier to ancient classics may not lie solely in the language, but if we are truly honest, may also lie in a natural resistance to anything the least bit foreign. Or more bluntly, the barrier may lie in a kind of slothfulness, the tendency to evade deep examination. Shakespeare wrote and spoke in good, honest English, but so many contemporary readers will avoid him because his grammar may be a tad unusual, his vocabulary too rich or his thought at times too dense. And yet no human emotion may be more gripping as that related in the play King John when Constance, the mother of Prince Arthur, grieves the loss of her son after the king had taken him captive. In Act III, scene iv, as she embraces a death wish, her grief and the language expressing it are exquisite:

Death, death; O, amiable, lovely death!

Thou odoriferous stench! Sound rottenness!

Arise forth from the couch of lasting night,

Thou hate and terror to prosperity,

And I will kiss thy detestable bones,

And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows,

And ring these fingers with thy household worms,

And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust,

And be a carrion monster like thyself.

Come, grin on me; and I will think thou smil’st

And buss thee as thy wife! Misery’s love,

O, come to me. (ll. 25-35)

There is, perhaps, no expressed despair in any language that is more powerful or more horrifying. This is not just death personified, but made a lover by an absolutely distraught woman, so that the grave’s slow decay is made to look like an act of lingering intimacy. The pathos is overwhelming and as skillful an expression of human irony as language can offer. Later in the same scene Constance personifies grief into the form of her lost son:

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form:

Then have I reason to be fond of grief.

Fare you well: had you such a loss as I,

I could give better comfort than you do. (ll. 93-100)

When I think of my wife’s own taste in literature and those of her book club friends, their deep interest in human relationships and all the corresponding emotions of those relationships, I am convinced they would naturally be inclined to the classics, including those of a foreign tongue, if only there were someone that might help them past the obstacle of language, in short, someone who would translate, but lose nothing in translation. It calls to mind the experience of the apostle Philip with an Ethiopian who was returning in his chariot from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, as related in chapter 8 of the book of Acts:

29 Then the Spirit said unto Philip, Go near, and join thyself to this chariot.

30 And Philip ran thither to him, and heard him read the prophet Esaias, and said, Understandest thou what thou readest?

31 And he said, How can I, except some man should guide me?

Someday, perhaps, we might all receive a seer stone that would serve as a universal translator and help us understand the literature of another language, just as Joseph Smith was assisted by the Urim and Thummin when translating the Book of Mormon, but until that day we must necessarily settle for the guidance of another person to lead us through the classical texts of another language. And unfortunately it always seems as though something is lost in translation.

The Middle English of our own mother tongue might provide a good starting point to explore great literature in language that is somewhat ancient, but not altogether foreign. Chaucer began writing his Tales in 1387, and when he died in 1400 the work was left unfinished. By this time the early Anglo-Saxon roots of our English language were already well washed with a Latin influence imported from the French after William the Conqueror had invaded England. Our modern English in all probability derives in great part from Chaucer’s influence, as explained in the following quote:

Above all, Chaucer fully grasped the ‘gret diversite in English’, and deliberately (and probably for the first time) used dialect in literature, making the students in the Reeve’s tale speak with a northern one. As was customary at the time, he used the language of London (with features of the dialect of the south, such as hem for them, yive for give); it gained popularity from the resounding success of his work, and he was soon to be praised as ‘the first finder of our language’. Philippe Wolff, Western Languages AD 100-1500, McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York (1971) at p. 208.

At first glance the original text of the Tales might intimidate a reader unfamiliar with Middle English, and yet much of our current language would be immediately recognizable. Moreover, the Tales provide such a compelling expression of the richness and diversity of human personality that it would be a shame for any avid book reader to avoid the original text simply because of a few archaic words and usages. A single passage from the text will suffice to prove the point.

The Canterbury Tales, of course, is a compendium of stories that Chaucer says he overheard from a company of travelers that he joined on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury. In the General Prologue of the Tales Chaucer provided a succinct description of all those in his party. Among those introduced was a Monk whose personality Chaucer depicted through a technique, perhaps utilized for the first time in English, of narrating the man’s thought pattern. The Monk, whom Chaucer calls “a manly man”, was one who loved to hunt and thought it no sin to escape the cloister and ride his horse in a “whistlynge wynd”. The Monk’s disdain for the rigid rules of his order are expressed as the Monk himself might have debated in his own mind. His justification in forsaking solitude and reflection for a robust outdoor life is offered in a mental diatribe against the order as though he were speaking it aloud. The following passage is remarkably concise on this point and can be fully appreciated without translation through the aid of a glossary:

He yaf nat of that text a pulled hen (gave not)

That seith that hunters ben nat hooly men . . .

What sholde he studie and make hymselven wood,

Upon a book in cloystre alwey to poure, (cloister)

Or swynken with his handes, and laboure, (work)

As Austyn bit? How shal the world be served? (Augustine bid)

Lat Austyn have his swynk to hym reserved. (work)

Therfore he was a prikasour aright: (hunter by horseback)

[General Prologue, ll. 177-189]

So much of what we later receive from Shakespeare’s portrayal of human personality has its beginnings in Chaucer. One can almost hear in this narration the great comic Falstaff bellowing all his well-reasoned arguments for being a cutpurse and a lover of sack. Chaucer’s Monk and Shakespeare’s Falstaff are stitched from the same cloth.

Even the most slothful of English-speaking readers cannot blame archaic language for failing to learn something of Chaucer’s humanity. A side-by-side dual translation of the Tales can be purchased in virtually any bookstore. To paraphrase Thoreau again, it is worth the expense of costly hours to learn some few words of an earlier language derived from a classic, if only to serve as “perpetual suggestions and provocations” and to spur in each of us a greater personal humanity.

Rules were made to be broken, runs the old saw, offering convenient justification for a thousand personal whims.  In truth, any rule made to be broken, on close scrutiny, is no rule at all.  Do not commit adultery, is a rule, an injunction designed to be absolutely inviolable.   But rules we mean to break are something altogether different – a parent's arbitrary standard of behavior, a social stricture dictated by our neighbor's opinion, a self-imposed obligation deemed virtuous, but perhaps a touch sanctimonious instead.  Such a rule remains in force only until good sense or expediency suggests another rule.  Perhaps such rules become a trick of habit merely, or a custom more honored in the breach than the observance, as Shakespeare once slyly observed.

Rules made to be broken lie at the heart of a good many hypocrisies and generate a multitude of delicious ironies and scandals.  This hidden connection between the observance of supposed good form and the inevitable hypocrisy to follow is the very formula of Wilde's zany comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest.  Virtually every character in the play is a surrogate for Wilde's take on the rules of society.  From our infancy we are taught never to tell lies.  But Wilde's spokesman, Algernon, replies:  My experience of life is that whenever one tells a lie one is corroborated on every side.  When one tells the truth one is left in a very lonely and painful position, and no one believes a word one says.  So Algernon eats all the cucumber sandwiches before a tea with his aunt, the Lady Bracknall, then tells her with an undisturbed conscience that there were simply no cucumbers at market that morning, not even for ready money.  The lie is outrageous, and still we smile all the way through it.  Algernon's devotion to his gullet, we understand implicitly, must supersede any requirement for strict truth.  The rules of good society, even honesty, can be bent so long as one maintains a certain decorum.

For a number of years, I wrote a poetry column for an Internet website, Meridian Magazine.com.  From the outset, one of my rules for the column was that I would never publish my own poetry.  The only exception would not really be a departure from the rule; from time to time I would have to provide my own translations for poems in a foreign language.  But the source poems would always be the work of another writer.  I considered the rule sensible for two reasons.  First, I wanted to promote the best poetry I could and would critique Dante and Borges, but declined to consider my own work in that company. Second, I wanted to avoid even the appearance of self-promotion, always thinking it rather distasteful – an unseemly imposition on the readership, a breach of decorum – to trot out and display one's own work, like the overbearing parent who invariably raves about Johnny's latest report card.

But I learned, at the risk of hypocrisy, that this rule, like so many others, also begged to be broken.  My reason for breaking it on a single occasion was due, in part, to desperation.  At the time, my column was well past deadline and I had nothing to show for it.  But another reason for breaking the rule arose from an experience I had with my family at roughly the same time.  Over the holidays my oldest daughter and her husband had visited from Utah, and one evening as I recounted the story of her birth, I remarked that I had written a poem about the experience, and rather uncharacteristically, since I do not even force my work on my own family, I retrieved a copy of the poem and read it for the group.  I was somewhat surprised by the reaction; those who listened visibly connected with the poem.

This was surprising, because poetry has not typically afforded me any kind of social benefit.  The reading of a poem is not so much conversation back and forth between reader and audience, but instead a rather demanding, unilateral monologue, and so poetry does not normally induce social intimacy, but instead, solitude.  At its deepest level, we do not read poetry to connect one with another at all, not even with the author, but to connect with ourselves alone.  We read it to find and to define our own nature, to sift out what is best in heart and mind.  And all too often, we do not grant ourselves sufficient permission for the privilege.

Much of our enjoyment in this life frequently derives from simply giving ourselves permission.  Time and again we deny ourselves a worthy and legitimate pleasure, only because we do not think to have the time, or the money, or the right.  Granting ourselves permission for some solitary enjoyment like reading poetry, we might rationalize, would only be an indulgence, a word pregnant with censure.  Yet behind such thinking lurks a rule made to be broken.  Reading or writing a poem is only the act of granting oneself time and freedom for reflection, an act as necessary to life as eating or sleeping or breathing.  Any rules contrived against honest reflection are rules to be broken indeed.

And so I granted myself permission to break a rule, and to offer one of my own poems in the column, with the expressed intention it would induce others likewise to break a rule and indulge, if only for an hour, in the pleasures of their own aspirations for poetry.  If that wistful notion thinly masked the desperation I felt to produce something for my editor, I now risk a breach of decorum again and reprint the same poem below, not in anxiety to meet another deadline, but rather to suggest the aesthetic sensibility of all that follows in this virtual booklet:

PARABLE FOR THE PULSE OF THE WRIST

One bleak winter evening a good doctor deftly cut

the umbilical cord wrapped three times around the neck

of my firstborn to save her from strangling to death.

An intern noted the moment precisely, seven past seven,

because, like a garden hose suddenly  gushing water,

the cord, once severed, whipped a circle of blood 

half way across the room against a pale yellow wall,

against the blue scrubs of those standing by the bed,

against the face of a clock fixed at seven past seven.

The splatter of blood on glass could have been a chime,

a red stripe announcing its own peculiar name for the hour.

Twenty years later on the eve of my daughter's birthday 

I recite the story again.  I never tire of its strange beauty,

its happy ending returning over and over to smile at me.

This time I wonder whose blood stained the clock that night –

my daughter's, or her mother's, or both – a blood shared

between them, a story they traded back and forth over time.

There was a dark moment also, if stories are believed,

when blood fell in Gethsemane for this child and mother.

Another good doctor wrote a most refined Greek

translated centuries later in the authorized English:

And his sweat was as it were great drops of blood . . . .

Walking to my car that night I heard those words again,

as though a sentinel of angels in a trail of streetlamps

were chanting them quietly from one century to the next,

staking a course through darkness no longer eternal.

Sharing blood, the Innocent returned our innocence.

Stains on my own blue scrubs marked the happy ending,

the eternal round, and whose blood it was etched its name

indelibly across the face of time and all who bore witness.

Having lived now to an age several years past fifty, I have gradually come to see the wisdom in declaring one's allegiance early and accepting whatever scandal might ensue.  As evident from this poem, mine is a decidedly Christian sensibility.  The name of Christ is a great sword, dividing households and nations alike, and only a skulking knave would try to shroud his belief from the reader for very long.  I came to my own aesthetic sensibility quite unexpectedly my senior year of college when, reading the Sermon on the Mount for the first time, I became utterly captivated by the beauty of a single verse, "Consider the lilies of the field. . . . "  The Master Teacher was also a Master Poet.  I saw potential for a perfect marriage of ethic and aesthetic.

After all is finally said, it pleases me to believe the Creator of this stunning universe inspires also stunning poetry and graced a child ofNazarethwith such a lilied tongue as has never before or since been surpassed.  Emerson once lamented of the Poet, "What he knows, no one wants," and yet however rejected a minstrel may be, there is reward in heaven for every one of his sainted canticles, and we have this divine assurance in modern revelation from Christ himself:

[M]y soul delighteth in the song of the heart; yea, the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me, and it shall be answered with a blessing upon their heads . . . .  

What follows is a modest enthusiasm, the song of a solitary heart.