VIRGINIA WOOLF, "A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN": OR RATHER, "A LIFE OF ONE’S OWN".

 

VIRGINIA WOOLF, A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN: OR RATHER, A LIFE OF ONE’S OWN.

52 Tavistock Square, London, WC1, a plaque now remembers Virginia Woolf (*1882- †1941), the basement from where she ran, as from 1924, together with her husband, the Hogarth Press, and whether she also had her “writing-room”. We presume that this is where she fine-tuned the final written version of the lectures delivered at Cambridge University in 1928, “On Women and Fiction”, to appear in 1929 as “A room of one’s own”, subsequent to be rescued as one of the pillars of modern “feminism”, at least in the realm of literature. Much later, in the year 2004, a bust of Woolf was added to the garden of the square.

We had the pleasure of “co-habitating” with the spirit of Virginia Woolf in Tavistock Square (not forgetting that of Charles Dickens, who lived in Tavistock House between 1851-1860), as the writer of these lines occupied an office, thanks to an “Honorary Position” a the University of London, between 1988-90, on the street of the square looking straight onto Woburn Place. Bloomsbury indeed, as our daily rhythm oscillated between a brief check of the post arriving at my office in Tavistock Square, a brief interlude in the garden of the square, and then a visit to the British Library, to work there, entering either from the Senate House side, or from the Great Russell Street side. The routine extended itself onto the 1990 and early 1991, including a rather rushy and fragmentary consultation of some of the main literary opus of Woolf, above all Orlando: A Biography (1928), and The Waves (1931), as appropriate as it ought to have been, in the main Reading Room of the British Library. It is precisely there where Virginia Woolf consulted the sources related to women and literature since the 16^th century:

“… a thousand questions at once suggested themselves. But one needed answers, not questions; and an answer was only to be had by consulting the learned and the unprejudiced, who have removed themselves above the strife of tongue and the confusion of body and issued the result of their reasoning and research in books which are to be found in the British Museum. If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth?”¹

 

 

Let us underline that charming homage to the British Library (then hosted by the British Museum, nowadays in Euston Road, near St-Pancras), and reiterate our thanks to the personnel of that honourable institution, perhaps the most enlightening and productive “office” the author of these lines has ever had, from 1981 onward, and which has helped writers, artists, scholars and politicians from all over the world since its first opened.

Years ago, while scribbling away on a notebook the next authors who were to appear in the blog, I did engrave the name of Virginia Woolf, even taking into account that my familiarity with her literary opus should be described as rather tentative and incomplete. The fact that she appears now, much earlier than planned, is all the fault of the Greeks, as always. In 2023 I received an email, which always begins with a vibrant χαῖρε!, from Antigone. An open forum for classics², a wonderful website dedicated to the celebration (and re-interpretation) of the Greek-Roman backbone of our so-called Western world, which keeps being eroded from the inside. It was an invitation to read an essay of Virginia Wolf On Not Knowing Greek³, published first in 1923.

I was all astonishment, as I began to be assaulted by the beauty and the rhythm of such love-declaration to Classical Greek, a text whose flow does indeed reverberate the “stream of consciousness”, a narrative device which she, together with Marcel Proust (1871-1922) and James Joyce (1882-1941), was to pioneer, helping her to be considered, at least by some, as one of the most innovative novelists of the 20^th century. Above all, Classical Greek continues to constitute a refuge, for everyone wanting to be exorcised of the malheur and the aimless forwardness of the epoch, be either that of Woolf, or ours. What the Germans at the most appropriate call “Weltschmerz” (badly translated as “the pain of being in the world”), was for the Ancient Greeks a normal, inescapable, unlamented “natural state of the world”:

“There is a sadness at the back of life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.”⁴

But it is the language in itself that perseveres, at one level the rhythm, at other the “compactness”:

“Chief among these sources of glamour and perhaps misunderstanding is the language. We can never hope to get the whole ting of a sentence in Greek as we do in English. We cannot hear it, now dissonant, now harmonious, tossing sound from line to line across a page. We cannot pick up infallibly one by one all those minute signals by which a phrase is made to hint, to turn, to live. Nevertheless, it is the language that has us most in bondage; the desire for that which perpetually lures us back. First there is the compactness of the expression. Shelley (Percy Bysshe Shelley, *1792-†1822) takes twenty-one words in English to translate thirteen words of Greek.

πᾶς γοῦν ποιητὴς γίγνεται, κἂν ἄμουσος ᾖ τὸ πρίν, οὗ ἂν Ἔρως ἅψηται. ⁵ (13 words)

…For everyone, even if before he were ever so undisciplined, becomes a poet as soon as he is touched by love. (21 words)

Every ounce of fat has been pared off, leaving the flesh firm. Then, spare and bare as it is, no language can move more quickly, dancing, shaking, all alive, but controlled.”

The key problem in Shelley’s translation is the word ἄμουσος, which he adroitly transforms into “undisciplined”, μουσος being related to the “Muses” (Μοῦσαι, the nine inspirational goddesses of the arts and science), ἄ acting as an “inverting” prefix, “those not inhaling the spirit of the “Muses”. In German we have the adjective “musisch”, derived straight from Greek, hence “unmusisch” would be a person who, alas, has not been permeated by the “Muses”. Thus, a German version, aspiring at the same “compactness” would be:

“Alle werden Dichter, selbst die früher Unmusischen, alsbald denen Liebe anfällt.“(11 words)

An even shorter version, replacing “Unmusischen” for “Unfähigkeit', and getting rid of one article and one personal pronoun, would be:

„Alle werden Dichter, alsbald Liebe anfällt, trotz früher Unfähigkeit'' (9 words)

A possible English version:

“Everyone, self those earlier unenlightened, becomes a poet, as soon Eros imperates…” (12 words)

In Spanish:

“Todos devienen poetas, incluso aquellos que eran incapaces, apenas Eros impere...” (11 words).

Yet the version which upholds the compactness of the Greek original and does not alter the substance is in Latin, provided by a Latinist, an acquaintance of the writer of these lines:

AMŌRE QVICVMQVE RAPIĀTVR, QVAMQVAM LONGISSIME A MVSIS AFVERIT, ARTIFEX FIT.  (10 words)

But was Shelley perhaps, by enlarging the number of words, just trying to extend the fragrance, to enhance the enjoyment of the “concentrated substance” contained in the Greek original? Or, as he might have been “paid” by the number of words contained in his opus, did he simply stretch the phrase as far as possible, in order to get more money? Let us be magnanimous.

So it is indeed possible to force other languages to abandon a little bit of their carcass (perhaps superfluous), but we are pushed towards such an attempt by the Greek language. It is she who is illuminating the path to be entered to obtain “semantic concentration” …

Hence Woolf’s insistence on going to the original:

“It is useless, then, to read Greek in translations. Translators can but offer us a vague equivalent; their language is necessarily full of echoes and associations.“⁶

“And, although it seems ungracious to add this when we have owned so much indebtedness to translators, some knowledge of the language is a possession not to be done without. With the best will in the world the translators are bound to stamp their individuality or that of their age upon the text. Our minds are so full of echoes that a single word such as “aweary” will flood a whole page for an English reader with the wrong associations. And such is the power of the Greek language that to know even a little of it is to know that there is nothing more beautiful in the world.“⁷

The last phrase “… nothing more beautiful in the world…” could sound nowadays as an excessive romantic over-appraisal. Yet that eulogy, formulated in the 1920s, has not lost its pertinence. Even more, it has been retaken and popularised, hence reaching larger audiences, over the last years. One example is the considerable success (more so taking into account the subject) of a delightful book (more than 300.000 copies sold) written by the Italian hellenist and essayist, Andrea Marcolongo, “La Lingua Geniale. 9 ragioni per amare il greco” (2016), The ingenious language. Nine epic reasons to love Greek” “ , translated into many languages, and well-received everywhere in spite of some shortcomings and errors. 

 

 

A very much recommendable Italian television programme, Otto e Mezzo, la 7, broadcasted on the 3^rd of January of 2017 the refreshing encounter, LUNGA VITA ALLE LINGUE MORTE, under the supervision of Lilli Gruber, between Marcolongo, the Latinist and professor at Oxford, Nicola Gardini, author of a book also successful, “Viva il latino, Storia et Belleza di una lingua inutile” (2016), and the art historian Vittorio Sgarbi. (…) Gardini will publish in 2021 “Viva il Greco. Alla scoperta della lingua madre”, to underline, once more, what he said in that television programme, “… il lavoro sul il latino y il greco è davvero un addestramento a la densità del significato…”, motivated by “un desiderio de parola ultima…”

 

 

I cannot but insist upon every reader of this blog to watch that programme (available in Internet), even if their Italian was too basic, and listen to that joyous, enlightening exchange between connoisseurs and amateurs of the classical languages, and how the supposedly “dead languages” help to understand the whirlwinds of our epoch, the fate of Italy and Europe, and even that of the Catholic Church. 

Yet this Classical Greek tsunami keeps expanding its waves. Less than two months ago, Le Figaro, one of the major French newspapers, carry a long article, entitled “Why Ancient Greek is essential to enjoy happiness” (free translation), in which Laure de Chantal, “écrivaine et agrégée de lettres classiques”, “Si vous faites du grec, vous serez toujours heureux!”, “If you do Ancient Greek, you will always be happy!”. 

 

 

 

Whether this propaganda for Ancient Greek as the ultimate panacea for the malheurs of our epoch reflects to a large extent the current French crisis and national disorientation, which looms becoming one of the most earthshaking of the “5^th Republic”, remains a valid question mark. Whatever the answer, the embrace of Ancient Greek, either seeking refuge or seeking wisdom, emerges more and more as the last anchor in a so-called Western World which has lost its compass.

DO MATERIAL CONDITIONS NECESSARILY DETERMINE THE POSSIBILITY AND THE QUALITY OF LITERARY PRODUCTION?

A first impression, after reading Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”, is that the English writer was adamant that only “economic independence” would guarantee that a woman could express herself, and be herself, in the unpredictable industry of “writing fiction”.

“All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point – a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. I have shirked the duty of coming to a

conclusion upon these two questions – women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. ⁸

Yet there is more than the postulate of a mechanic synergy between material conditions and literary creation. It is also a somewhat whimsical yet relevant and humour-blessed panorama of the absurdities uttered on women and their supposed inabilities over the last centuries, including Napoleon and Benito Mussolini, the latter finding women incapable, the former despising them. No wonder that these two “war lords” ended their career under lugubrious circumstances. On the “other side” were both Dr. Samuel Johnson and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, admiring women and seeking their companionship, recognising their cogitations as no way underneath the level of men.

Woolf goes further, that of the two news which landed more or less at the same time, “votes for women”, and a “legacy of an aunt”, it was the legacy that counted the most. A lesser dependency on men implied also a reappraisal of their role in the world:

 

“The news of my legacy reached me one night about the same time that the act was passed that gave votes to women. A solicitor’s letter fell into the post-box and when I opened I found that she had left me five hundreds pounds a year for ever. Of the two – the vote and the money – the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important. (…) So imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race. It was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. (…) I need not flatter any man; ...”⁹

Mrs. Woolf takes a particular interest in the Elizabethan Era, the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603), considered by many as the “golden age” in English history, a sort of “English Renaissance”, with considerable achievements at all levels, in literature above all the name William Shakespeare will be engraved in gold.

“...ask the historian (,,,) to describe under what conditions women lived (…) in the time of Elizabeth. For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. ¹⁰

(…) One only has to think of those Elizabethan tombstones will all those children kneeling with clasped hands; and their early deaths; and to see their houses with their dark, cramped rooms; to realize that no women could have written poetry then.” ¹¹

“Judith Shakespeare” appears, a fictional character created by Virginia Wool, “the sister of William”, to demonstrate that a woman with all the capabilities of the great English writer, could not have been allowed to implement all her talent, she would not be sent to school, that she would, at the end, simply die, forgotten, leaving no written traces of her artistic ambitions.

Albeit material conditions do impact upon artistic creation, it is risky at the utmost to reject the possibility of literary creation emerging even under the direst conditions, be either man or woman. As has been said, even slaves may be touched by the “Muses”, and respond by composing a song or a sonnet, precisely in order to elevate themselves above the misery and the exploitation.. A recent book by the Renaissance scholar Ramie Targoff, appropriately titled “Shakespeare's Sisters” disagree at strength with Woolf’s assessment of the Elizabethan epoch, proving that that era did indeed produce its share of great women writers. 

 

Let us now jump into the nineteenth century, where we will see the emergence of the British “middle class”.

“… which Miss Emily Davies a litter later was so strikingly to demonstrate, that the middle class family in the early nineteenth century was possessed only of a single sitting-room between them. If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain, ‘women never have an half four … that they can call their own’ – she was always interrupted. Still it would be easier to write prose and fiction than to write poetry or a play. Less concentration is required. Jane Austen wrote like that to the end of her days. ‘How she was able to effect all this’, her nephew writes in his Memoir, ‘is surprising, for she had no separate study to repair to, and most of the work must have in the general sitting-room, subject to all kind of interruptions. “¹²

So, notwithstanding the lack of “a room of one’s own”, Jane Austen was capable of writing great novel. Was she perhaps just an exception?

It is in the comparison between Jane Austen (*1775- †1817 ), whom Mrs Woolf admires all heartedness, to the point of comparing her to the great Ancient Greeks, and Charlotte Brontë (*1816- †1855), where we could pinpoint the seeds of Woolf’s final formulation of his theory about women’s writing, but also her contradictions:

“One might say, I continued, laying the book beside Pride and Prejudice, that the woman who wrote those pages (Jane Eyre) had more genius in her than Jane Austen; but if one reads them over and marks the jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she (Charlotte) will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly (…) She was at war with her lot.”¹³

That Charlotte Brontë had genius was recognised first by William Makepeace Thackeray, who eulogised Jane Eyre as “the work of a great genius”. I happen to disagree with Mrs. Woolf, to the point perhaps of abandoning my politeness. What the Bloomsbury lady says is that (my reformulation):

“… Jane Austen wrote, abandoning herself to simplicity and spontaneity (and humour), as a woman, without any existentialist Angst. Charlotte Brontë wrote as a woman, who kept complaining about the world treated her, hence…”

Yet where then not sufficient, solid arguments for Charlotte, and most women, to complain about the way society was treating them? And to let that transpires through a novel is to be welcomed.

Woolf’s then begins to formulate her view of how women should “exist” in literature:

“But this creative power differs greatly from the creative power of men. And one must conclude that it would be a thousand pities if it were hindered or wasted, for it was won by centuries of the most drastic discipline, and there is nothing to take its place. It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sees are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring our and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? ¹⁴

This is a powerful statement, and nowadays perhaps even more relevant. It is followed by another crucial warning:

“Even so, the very first sentence that I would write here, I said, crossing to the writing-table and taking up the page headed Women and Fiction, is that it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It its fatal to be a a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman.”¹⁵

One might be tempted to interpret the above-quoted as an indirect appeal for some kind of “androgyny" ”, yet I believe it is just another way of underlying, again, that simple, unequivocal appeal for anyone venturing into the varied avenues of the belles lettres, at times thorny, at times flowery: when you write, you should forget about your sex.

It must be said that Wool’s tour de force through the steppes and the mountains of “Women and Fiction” circumscribed itself, mostly, to the English-speaking word. In particular the French-speaking world will provide, not doubt whatsoever, a more complex, and perhaps even more intriguing panorama. From the 16^th century, French women writers (albeit almost always coming from the aristocracy, be either the well-endowed or the less fortunate regarding property and cash) would play a key role in the emergence and development of the French novel.

Even the way Mrs. Woolf used the English language does provide difficulties for other languages. The very expression “of one’s own” is almost untranslatable in many languages. In German, for example, the usual translation is “Ein Zimmer für sich allein”, which, retranslated into English, means in fact “a room for oneself alone”. Far away from the emphasis on possession, of “property”, evident in the English original, though Woolf does not specify throughout the whole essay whether that “room” should be legally “owned” by the woman.

Summa summarum, rather “A life of one’s own”, that writing would be more inspiring, more enlightening and could reach peaks of spontaneous, contagious beauty, if it is rooted in a life constructed beyond sex, beyond false allegiances, beyond fashionable disguises.

Virginia Woolf enjoys the privilege of being re-born incessantly, and sought-after as a feminist of la première heure, very much alive in our epoch. See, for example, a recent article in Le Figaro, France.

Or a most interesting podcast in the London Review of Books, by David Runciman, quite recently:

“This week our review of the greatest essays and essayists reaches the twentieth century and Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece, “A Room of One’s Own” (…) And how, despite all that, it sill manages to be as fresh and funny as anything written since.”

Some readers of this blog might ask themselves why did I begin the contribution on Mrs. Woolf by her essay on the Greek language, and not on the one providing the title of the contribution. I wanted to explain why is it that Virginia Woolf appears now, rather than much later, but above all, I wished the reader to understand that only a woman who has bathed herself in that glorious ocean of Ancient Greek, who took possession of the tools provided by that “mother of all languages”, “that were everything began”, “the language of the Gods”, could have written such a splendid and lively essay on the destiny of women, which confirms her status as one of the most intelligent, one of the most original and penetrating female minds of the 20^th century.

JCHK 2024.

1Woolf, Virginia, “A Room of One’s Own”, Grafton. An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 1977, first edition 1929, Pg. 30. Out underlying.

2https://antigonejournal.com/

3Consult https://antigonejournal.com/2023/on-not-knowing-greek/. First edition 1923.

4Woolf (1923), p. 23.

5Woolf (1923), p. 20. Plato Symposium 196e; the phrase “even if he was formerly uncultured” is a quotation from a lost play of Euripides, Stheneboea (fr. 663)

6Woolf (1923), p. 20.

7THE PERFECT LANGUAGE. Review of the second volume of W.R. Paton’s Greek Anthology (Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann, 1917), Times Literary Supplement 801 (24 May 1917) , following Woolf (1923 ( p. 32).

8Woolf (1929(, PP. 7-8.

9PP. 42-43.

10PP. 43-44.

11Pg. 64.

12Pg. 73.

13Pg. 76.

14Pg. 95.

15Pg. 112.

--

 

T. S. ELIOT, THE WASTE LAND: “I believe that only the poet can now change the things…”

 

T. S. ELIOT, THE WASTE LAND: “I believe that only the poet can now change the things…”

Video-link:

https://youtu.be/oPUhRW-LYYM

The French are accused, sometimes and not everywhere, of being too arrogant and of having crowned themselves as the “nation of literature”, la patrie des lettres, par excellence. Yet I owe it to a magnificent French website devoted to literature the privilege of having been alerted to the centenary of The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot (*1888-†1965), first edition in England, October of 1922, in the publication The Criterion.

“Le (premier) centenaire d'un grand poème“ is the title of the blog contribution published on the 18^th of May of this year in “La République des Livres”, conceived and entertainingly managed by Pierre Assouline. He begins by excoriating the mediocre status accorded to poetry in France, arguing that there has never been a celebration of the anniversary of a great poem in French. In Italy, Spain, Germany, Russia, a poet is someone who enjoys esteem and recognition‒so it would seem.

Nothing comparable to the pageantry surrounding the first hundred years of “un grand poème unanimement tenu pour un classique moderne et qui ait dominé le XX siècle”¹. Indeed, The Waste Land is arguably a milestone of English poetry in the 20^th century, both midwife and crowning-jewel of modernism. It remains firmly anchored, even in this epoch of ours (which dislikes poetry so much), in the awareness of readers across the world as one of the indestructible monuments in world literature. Not to be forgotten: On the 2^nd of February 1922 Ulysses, by James Joyce, was also published, another monument, to which we hope to return in this blog in a few months.

The voyage through The Waste Land remains a very personal experience. It is a private affair. It would be absurd to repeat herewith even just a portion of the hundreds and hundreds of readings, interpretations, versatile exercises in hermeneutics and exegesis, critical appraisals, as well as the explanations and translations of the many references to other authors, be it from Dante Alighieri to Richard Wagner, from Shakespeare to Baudelaire, from the Romans to the sources in Sanskrit.

At one level The Waste Land is a re-visitation of the pillars of Western culture, but also, to some extent, of Eastern culture, which are being put “back into this life”, that is, the interregnum between the First and the Second World War. Eliot’s poem is largely a “child” of the First World War, of that ominous carnage which destroyed the European belle époque, and created the conditions for the weakening of European world-dominance, thus the emergence of the American empire. And others. It begs for “peace” to be considered as the most valuable asset, as indicated by the words in Sanskrit in the last lines of the poem.

Let such a historical contextualization be reminded, but let us also not allow it to overshadow the recreation of the dreams and fears of the individuals, who perhaps are being let down by history, or simply forgotten. From the high-brow cogitations of the Greeks and Romans we go down to the colloquial and the dialects, the daily kicking-around in London, propelled by the whim of events, which anticipate the arrival of uncontrollable whirlwinds. This is also a poem about London, about that London which has almost disappeared. It is about solitude and “what to do next?”, of avoiding ennui and keep searching for love.

There is a distinctive Englishness in Eliot’s poem (although he was born in the U.S., but naturalised as a British citizen in 1927), yet by that we mean the old Englishness, which now runs the risk of being considered an extinct species. That of being on an island, though by no means an “islander”. Of an Englishman who feels at home being re-born in Italy or in Greece. Even in Germany. Or perhaps it is precisely that “American-Englishness” of him that allowed him to remain, unassumingly, a “citizen of the world”. A very honest author, who never attempted to hide or devalue the decisive role played by Ezra Pound (*1885-†1972) in the construction of the final form of the poem. Ezra Pound, that writer who was generosity in itself, a prodigious poet, who took the risky and perhaps unnecessary decision of getting involved with “politics” – on the wrong side, on top of that.

The Waste Land remains a healing experience, as pertains to someone having been bathed in a pond full of flowers and ashes, full of bones and amiable turtles, still alive, in spite of centuries and centuries, who then emerges out of water to land onto terra, whispering “keep going, keep going…” As someone said to me some time ago, “I read it, but I did not understand it…”. My answer: “This is not a to-be-understood poem, it is a to-be-felt poem…”

It remains also a lighthouse, always beaming yet not blending, whispering cotton-words which have captured the untranslatable experience of every individual, struggling not to lose the compass, still alive today, despite having been conceived in Greek and Latin more than two thousand years ago.

It is as a very private encounter, everyone possessing his or her The Waste Land, each personal parcours remaining unique, yet also universal.

 

Of course, we need translations, but can The Waste Land really be appreciated, and understood, in any other language but English? Just the title of the poem (which hints doubtless at “infertility”) poses a gigantic challenge to the eventual translator. In French, for example, there are at least three variants, La Terre vaine² ,Terre inculte, La Terre vague. In German Das wüste Land or Das öde Land, or even more complex, Das brache, öde, wüste Land.

In Spanish, La Tierra Baldía, La Tierra Yerma, La Tierra Agostada, La Tierra Estéril, although the first version seems to remain the “usual” one. In Italian, one approach is La terra desolata.

First page of The Waste Land, containing the epigraph and the dedication to Ezra Pound. The text, in Latin and Ancient Greek, comes from chapter 48 of Satyricon, written 62-65 A.D. by Petronius (?- 66 A.D., ordered by Nero to commit suicide)⁴. This copy belongs to the author. It was bought in London in 1999, as the first copy, bought in London in 1988, was stolen in 1997. The handwritten notes in German were an attempt to produce a German translation of the epigraph, on the 13^th of April 2011, and we do hope that they are blurred enough. It is extremely difficult to translate from Latin and Ancient Greek, keeping the melody of the original, as Latin does not have articles, and in Ancient Greek you can conclude phrases without inserting personal pronouns. Hence this possibility in English: “Indeed I myself saw Sibyl of Cumae (with my own eyes), hanging in a jar, and when the boys said, “Sibyl, you desire?”, Sibyl answered, “To die I desire”. The latter sentence in Ancient Greek is simpler: To desire (or “to want”), conjugated in the first-person, to die: Only one word, and the infinitive in Greek is composed of only one word.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Perhaps we can just console all translators by reminding them that, as E.M. Foster said once: “It is just a personal comment on the universe, as individual and as isolated as Shelley's Prometheus”³.

Let us just keep repeating that, notwithstanding its role as lingua mundi, in particular in the globalised business world, one of the most humane reasons to learn English is to be able to read T.S. Eliot in his language.

There is possibly no better indicator of the impact of a literary opus upon its reader than his decision, ex post, to write in the language of that work, which may happen to be not its first. Although I had been aware of the poem decades ago, an intimate get-to-know took place first in London, between 1988 and 1989, “years of transition”, when the author of this blog spent a lot of time kicking around Bloomsbury, yet also doing some relevant work. The Waste Land became an intimate companion, indeed a more relevant one, as the poem seems to supplicate “do not try to understand me”, “just feel me”, “just let me inhabit your dreams, and then you will see…”

What shall I see? Sibyl in a jar, begging for death to arrive, as she has been granted eternal life, but alas not eternal youth…

I shall see the vanity of hoping for eternal youth, realizing that only the “spirit” may survive, if it happens to have been crystallised in words. T.S. Eliot did achieve it.

“I wish I could write English as T.S. Eliot did…”, an impossible task, an unmentionable, even preposterous desire.

The text from line 232 to 248 is recited by Anthony Blanche (Nickolas Grace) in the 1981 film-version of Brideshead Revisited, the novel by Evelyn Waugh. Lines 253 to 256 are the ones most at heart by the writer of these lines.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anthony Blanche, the flamboyant and Machiavellian cosmopolite in the 1981 TV series of Brideshead Revisited, reciting through a megaphone some lines of The Waste Land, from a balcony in Oxford, to a bemused and spontaneous audience, down on the green.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The impact of that liaison was such, that in those years the first poems in English, and also some short-stories, to be ascribed to the author of these lines, did materialise. There is enough self-respect, and also courtesy vis-à-vis the readers of this blog, inhabiting the mind and the soul of this humble scribbler. Hence no endeavour will be dared to extract those attempts from their deserved clandestine storage, and throw them into the eyes of the public. Yet, as one young lady, then, did utter: “They ain’t that bad…”

What about poetry in “our age”? Again, it remains very much a private affair, at one level. At the other, perhaps we should go back to an interview conducted by the French television personality, Bernard Pivot, for its much vaunted literary emission “Apostrophes”, on the 13th of November 1981. The German writer Ernst Jünger (*1895-†1998) was in Paris, partly to celebrate the publication of a new translation of his diaries during the Second World War, the Pariser Tagebuch, Premier Journal Parisien, 1941-43, Second Journal Parisien, 1943-45.

Bernard Pivot was adamantly hostile towards the German writer, trying to corner him down, because of his attempts, as Pivot said, to remain an “aesthete” during those abysmal years. At the end Pivot sort of give in, but only just, quoting the French writer Michel Tournier (*1924-†2016):

“-Est-ce que, Michel Tournier, dans un papier chronique sur vous, il écrit ceci: „Au salut militaire, Jünger préfère le salut par l’écriture ».

-Ah bon…-Vous êtes d’accord avec cette formule ? 

-Oui, parfaitement.

-Vous pensez que vous l’avez appliquée tout le temps ?

-J’espère…

-Vous pensez d’ailleurs que c’est le salut par l’écriture, finalement, c’est la seule chose qui importe aux vrais écrivains, non?

-Je crois que le poète est le seul qui peut maintenant changer les choses. »

“I believe that the poet is the only one who can now change the things…”

End of the interview. And of the fruitless assault.

What did Ernst Jünger mean by that phrase? We know that he was a reasonable man, not someone who would assert that changes did not occur, be either through technique, or war, or demographic, political upheavals. He was hinting, in a very elegant way, to the fact that, as nowadays almost everything tends to change, at an ever increasing rate-of-increase, the only possibility of we changing vis-à-vis the world, of we taking distance from the world, and also positioning ourselves into it, is through poetry. If we cannot change “the things”, at least we can change the perception of our way of dealing with “those things”. And perhaps that’s the only thing that matters.

Are we to hope for another T.S. Eliot to appear in the 21^st century? If it does, then the chance of survival might increase.

1La République des Lettres, 18.05.2022.

2 La Terre vaine (dans la traduction de Pierre Leyris ou encore Terre inculte dans la version de Pierre Vinclair ou même ailleurs La Terre vague dans celle de Michel Vinaver pour France-Culture) est un poème réputé difficile d’accès, jugé hermétique au premier abord et même aux suivants, truf, La République des Livres, opus cit.

3Forster 1940, pp. 91–92 ▪ Forster, E. M. (1940). "T.S Eliot", pp. 91-92.

4T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land an other poems, faber and faber, London, 1988.