30.4350, Review: Ling & Literature: Wong (2018)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-30-4350. Fri Nov 15 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.4350, Review: Ling & Literature: Wong (2018)

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Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2019 15:20:10
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: Thus Burst Hippocrene: Studies in the Olympian Imagination

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-2017.html

AUTHOR: Laurence K. P. Wong
TITLE: Thus Burst Hippocrene: Studies in the Olympian Imagination
PUBLISHER: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson, University of Sussex

SUMMARY

Laurence Wong uses the term “Olympian” to refer to the writers he regards as
the ‘ne plus ultra’ of world literature, whom he identifies as Homer,
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, the
authors of the Bible collectively, Li Bo (sometimes spelled Li Bai), and Du
Fu.  In nine chapters (four of which were previously published separately)
Wong looks at various properties of the Olympians’ writing, often comparing
one writer with another across widely-different cultures and languages. 
Specifically (identifying the chapters by number, though they are not numbered
in the book):

 Chapter 1 asks which is the grisliest of the Olympians, awarding first prize
to Homer for the description of the blinding of Polyphemus in Book 9 of the
Odyssey.

 Chapter 2 disagrees with Pope’s verdict that in Homer and only in Homer
“poetic fire” burns everywhere clearly and irresistibly: Wong argues that the
fight between Achilles and Hector in the Iliad is a regrettable anticlimax.

 Chapter 3 discusses the use of “epic similes”, that is, similes which extend
over a substantial portion of a work, temporarily eclipsing the main
narrative.  If an epic simile is a digression from that narrative, one might
suppose that epic similes would be found chiefly in passages where action is
largely in abeyance, so that a literary device is helpful in maintaining the
reader’s interest.  Surprisingly, it seems that in Homer at least just the
opposite is true.  Wong quotes Norman Austin (2006):  “where the drama is most
intense the digressions are the longest and the details the fullest. … The
more urgent the situation, the more expansive the speech …  The effect of this
style is to put time into slow motion and to create a ritual out of the
moment.”  Wong is particularly concerned in this chapter to argue that Dante’s
epic similes in the Divine Comedy attain a higher literary plane than those of
Homer, Virgil, or Milton.

 Chapter 4 looks at the problem created for writers in the Christian tradition
by the doctrine that God is indescribable and infinitely mysterious; Wong
contrasts the different approaches taken by Dante and by Milton towards
describing the indescribable in words.

 Chapter 5 is about the convention of dramatic unities deriving from
Aristotle:  a play must relate to a single action and take place in one
location over a single day.  It examines the pros and cons of conforming to
the unities, by comparing Sophocles’s Oedipus, which does conform, to
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which ignores the unities.

 Chapter 6 discusses the fact that figurative language has played strikingly
little part in the Chinese poetic tradition.  It is not that figurative
language is unknown in Chinese poetry:  similes do occur, but quite
infrequently, whereas those brought up in the Western tradition are inclined
to think of simile and metaphor as the lifeblood of poetry.

 Chapter 7 compares the poetic technique of Li Bo and Du Fu, two of the most
famous Chinese poets, who were contemporaries and indeed friends, living in
the middle of the eighth century A.D.  Some Chinese critics have seen one of
the two as a far superior poet to the other, though disagreeing about which
they prefer; others have held that they cannot be ranked.  Wong argues that
the issue can be settled relatively objectively, awarding the palm to Du Fu.

 Chapter 8 discusses a feature of Biblical, particularly Old Testament, prose,
namely the exhaustive enumeration of possibilities, which Wong relates to
characteristics of Jewish activity in areas other than literature, including
intellectual endeavours and warfare.

 Finally Chapter 9 notes that Pope’s translation of Homer’s Iliad has been
highly praised by some and heavily criticized by others; Wong argues that the
eighteenth-century convention of “poetic diction” created constraints which
were particularly adverse to faithful rendering of Homer, forcing Pope to
“channel the Amazon into a canal”.

 Many of these topics are very interesting ones; however it is fair to say
that they overlap only to a limited extent with the usual concerns of the
discipline of linguistics.  After reading the book, I felt a little surprised
that the Linguist List had offered it for review.  In view of the forum in
which I am writing, I shall try to focus the Evaluation section of this review
particularly on those areas of the book which can be brought into a
relationship with linguistics (which were not necessarily the most important
aspects for the author of the book).

 Readers may be puzzled by Wong’s title.  In a footnote to his Preface, he
explains that Hippocrene (“spring of the horse”) was a spring on Mount
Helicon, sacred to the Muses and consequently poetic shorthand for literary
inspiration, which according to Greek myth was brought into being by a stroke
of the hoof of Pegasus, the winged horse which was the Muses’ favourite steed.

EVALUATION

>From the linguist’s point of view, a key point in Wong’s book occurs in his
last chapter, on Pope’s translation of the Iliad.  Let me first explain that
Wong thinks it clear that Pope’s translation is a poor one, and that this was
unavoidable given the genre of English that Pope chose to use.  This genre
included both a convention of “poetic diction”, and the use of rhyming
couplets.  Wong remarks that it is uncontroversial to say that
“eighteenth-century writers [in English] believed that poetry had to be
written in a special poetic diction; adhering to this belief, writers, even
when engaged in original writing, invariably ‘translated’ their perceptions,
feelings, and thoughts into a language a degree or two removed from what is
most natural, most precise for the occasion.”  An example would be a quatrain
by William Shenstone:

 Romantic scenes of pendent hills
 And verdant vales, and falling rills,
 And mossy banks, the fields adorn
 Where Damon, simple swain, was born

in connexion with which Wong quotes Thomas Quale (1924) as saying that poets
of this period “either could not, or would not, try to convey their
impressions in language of their very own, but were content in large measure
to draw upon a common stock of dead and colourless epithets”.  Wong applies
this to Pope’s Iliad via far more and longer quotations than I have room for,
but consider a few lines near the opening of the Iliad, where Apollo is moved
by the prayer of Chryses to intervene against the Greeks.  In E.V. Rieu’s 1950
prose translation, the lines run:

Phoebus Apollo heard his prayer and came down in fury from the heights of
Olympus with his bow and covered quiver on his back.  As he set out, the
arrows clanged on the shoulder of the angry god; and his descent was like
nightfall.

Pope renders the lines as:

 Thus Chryses pray’d:  the fav’ring Pow’r attends,
 And from Olympus’ lofty tops descends.
 Bent was his bow, the Grecian hearts to wound;
 Fierce as he mov’d, his silver shafts resound.
 Breathing revenge, a sudden night he spread, …

One problem, as Wong sees it, is that (by comparison with many other
languages) English is rhyme-poor, so that the need to find rhymes imposes a
severe constraint on Pope’s attempt to match the literary effect of Homer’s
Greek, even accepting eye-rhymes like wound/resound.  But also (Wong says in
connexion with another example, however the point is almost as relevant to
this example) Pope’s poetic diction (“lofty tops”, for instance) and rhyming
couplets result “in the loss of the action’s speed and ferocity and,
consequently, of the gripping drama of the entire passage.”

 One might object that it is odd to find poetic diction unsuitable because of
its use of stock “dead epithets”, considering what heavy use Homer makes of
standard epithets, such as those commonly translated into English as
“wine-dark (sea)” or “rosy-fingered (dawn)”.  Nevertheless, I personally
entirely agree with Wong in finding Pope’s version of Homer mimsy and
lifeless, relative to the original; experts on Ancient Greek agree in seeing
Homer’s style as notably vivid and colloquial, and my very limited knowledge
of that language suggests that this is right.  However, both Wong and I are
products of the twentieth century rather than the eighteenth.  As Wong quotes
Douglas Knight (1951) saying in defence of Pope:  “As a translator, Pope
cannot deny his own time and his own language”.

 As linguists we take for granted that each language or language-variety has
its own rules of grammar, which a translation into that language must obey.  A
poetic translation into English in which plural subjects were followed by
third-person singular verbs, say, would just be an unacceptable translation,
and the fact that agreement failure allowed the English wording to fit the
metre would be no excuse.  But how far does this kind of constraint extend
from syntax narrowly understood into other aspects of language, such as those
covered by the term “poetic diction”?  (Why should it be restricted to syntax
alone?)  If we moderns find Pope’s Iliad poor stuff, does that mean only that
it is a poor translation for us, or that it is poor in some more absolute
sense?  And if the latter, can it make sense to say that for some audiences a
good translation of a given work is unachievable, because their linguistic
expectations are incompatible with the nature of the language to be
translated?  For an eighteenth-century readership, I could imagine that a
Homer translation which avoided poetic diction might jar just as much as one
which violated verb agreement:  would it follow that Homeric Greek and
eighteenth-century English is a “less translatable” language-pair than the
former and 21st-century English?  Or alternatively, is this concept of more
and less translatable language-pairs spurious, and could we say that Pope’s
Homer was as vivid for his eighteenth-century readership, relative to their
linguistic expectations, as Rieu’s is for us?  This seems to be a real
alternative, though (since we cannot inhabit the mind of an eighteenth-century
English-speaker) I am not sure how it could be resolved.

 What to me seems clear is that such a question can only be addressed in terms
of subjective considerations, not as an empirical scientific issue. 
“Jarring”, in the sense used in the previous paragraph, is a subjective
phenomenon, whether the thing that jars is syntax or poetic diction.  I have
argued (in my 2017 book ‘The Linguistics Delusion’) that the discipline of
linguistics is mistaken to call itself “the scientific study of language”,
because most aspects of language discussed by linguists are by nature not open
to investigation by the scientific method.  If that is true for syntax, the
main focus of that book, it is surely more clearly true for literary style. 
The issue running through Wong’s book on which I most differ from him is
Wong’s belief that the literary issues he discusses can and should be resolved
by objective, scientific tests.

 Again and again in this book, Wong treats literary discussion as something
like a sports competition in which the aim is to identify who wins first
prize.  In a footnote to Chapter 2, for instance, he writes “With respect to
structure and aesthetics, while one must admit that the ‘Iliad’, ‘War and
Peace’, and ‘The Lord of the Rings’ are all great works of art/literature …
they are inferior to the ‘Symphony No. 5’, ‘The Divine Comedy’, and
‘Terminator II’, even though ‘Terminator II’ is by no means comparable to the
‘Iliad’ and ‘War and Peace’ in literary merit.”  Unlike other “Olympians” who
wrote on similar topics, Dante in the Divine Comedy “reaches the highest point
which the human intellect is capable of reaching” (Chapter 4).  Many other
passages throughout the book are in a comparable vein.  And Wong argues that
these prizes are to be allocated objectively.  In Chapter 7, for instance,
comparing Li Bo and Du Fu as poets, he objects that “traditional Chinese
literary criticism” has compared them in merely “impressionistic” terms,
whereas his comparison is based on “evidence that can be verified”.  In his
anxiety to demonstrate objectivity, Wong sometimes appeals to factors whose
relevance is questionable; for instance, although ultimately he judges Du Fu
to be the better poet, as counter-evidence he points out that while both poets
wrote about mountain scenery, Du Fu as a physically weaker man never climbed
mountains as high as some of those which Li Bo scaled successfully.

 A more central and more interesting example of Wong’s urge to evaluate
literature objectively occurs in the chapter on Pope’s Homer, where Wong
discusses the longstanding question whether Pope’s mastery of Greek was
adequate to allow him to translate directly rather than depending on prior
translations, and argues (giving extensive line-counts) that Pope’s version
cannot be seen as “translation in the strict sense” but only as “a piece of
rewriting”, because it consistently expands passages of the Iliad into more
lines of English poetry than they occupy in Greek.

 The implication seems to be that a thoroughly satisfactory translation of
poetry in language A into poetry in language B ought to agree with the
original in line-count.  That seems wrong to me.  It happens that I am
currently working on a new translation of an anthology of Chinese poems dating
from 1000–600 B.C., usually called in English the ‘Book of Odes’.  Most of
these poems consist of rhyming tetrameters (because almost all Old Chinese
words are single syllables, a tetrameter contains four words).  An early
decision I made was that it would not work to divide the translation into
lines corresponding to the Chinese lines, because they are too short.  Take
the opening quatrain of Ode 1, with the rhyme-scheme A A B A.  If I divided my
translation to match the Chinese line-division, it would run:

 ‘Kròn, kròn,’ calls the fish-hawk
 on an islet in the river.
 A girl who is really gorgeous
 is the fit match for a princely man.

(The English lines have more than four words:  Old Chinese uses a minimum of
“little words” like ‘the’ or ‘is’.)  To me this gives a childish,
nursery-rhyme effect, which can scarcely have been intended by the Chinese
poet; so I group pairs of Chinese lines into single English lines:

 ‘Kròn, kròn,’ calls the fish-hawk on an islet in the river.
 A girl who is really gorgeous is the fit match for a princely man.

My translation is into unrhymed prose, but if I had imitated the rhymes and
four-beat metre of the original I believe the nursery-rhyme effect would have
been even more pronounced.  Someone else might well disagree with my
judgement, and prefer English which matches the original line-division.  But
surely this can be discussed only in subjective terms?  The fact that  number
of lines is an objective fact cannot automatically give it weight as evidence
in literary evaluation.

  (I would also comment that occasionally Wong states as fact things which are
not necessarily so.  It has usually been believed that the hundreds of poems
in the Book of Odes were composed by different men and women over several
centuries, but Wong states in a throwaway footnote to Chapter 6 that they are
now known all to have been written by a single author – he quotes research by
Li Chendong.  I have not read this research, which was published in Taiwan,
but I note that Kuang Yu Chen (2005) describes Li’s work as having been
“received with little enthusiasm and, sometimes, downright hostility”, and as
“still considered to be heretical”. Given the nature of the poems, I certainly
find Li’s idea difficult to believe.  Wong may be more impressed by it, but he
should not quote Li’s theory as an established truth.)

 Wong’s book takes up many other fascinating issues.  For a Westerner who has
lived since birth in a culture soaked in Christianity, whether or not he is a
believer himself it must be refreshing to see literary reflections of the
religion through the eyes of someone who not only identifies himself as a
non-believer but does not hail from a Christian culture.  Sometimes this leads
to apparent naivety in failing to distinguish clearly between Christianity,
and the religion of the Old Testament which formed the culture into which
Christ was born.  Thus, in Chapter 4 Wong remarks “In the ‘Old Testament’, the
Christian God is anthropomorphic from beginning to end” – a Jew might retort
that the Old Testament is not about “the Christian God”.  However, Wong might
well respond to this criticism by arguing that the unclarity lies not with him
but with Christianity, because how far its “New Covenant” represents a sharp
break from the Old Testament is never precisely specified.  Christ said “Do
not suppose that I have come to abolish the Law and the prophets” (Matthew 5).

 However, to pursue this and many other interesting issues raised by Wong
would take us far from the proper concerns of the Linguist List.  I shall end
my review here.

REFERENCES

Austin, Norman (2006).  “The functions of digression in the ‘Iliad’ ”.  In
Harold Bloom, ed., Homer.  Chelsea House (Broomall, Pennsylvania).

Knight, Douglas (1951).  Pope and the Heroic Tradition.  Yale University
Press.

Kuang Yu Chen (2005).  “ ‘The Book of Odes’: a case study of the Chinese
hermeneutic tradition”.  In Ching-I Tu, ed., Interpretation and Intellectual
Change. Routledge.

Quale, Thomas (1924).  Poetic Diction.  Methuen.

Rieu, E.V., translator (1950).  Homer: the Iliad.  Penguin (Harmondsworth,
Mddx).

Sampson, Geoffrey (2017).  The Linguistics Delusion.  Equinox (Sheffield and
Connecticut).


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Chinese Studies from Cambridge University, and
his academic career was spent partly in Linguistics and partly in Informatics,
with intervals in industrial research. After retiring as professor emeritus
from Sussex University in 2009, he spent several years as Research Fellow at
the University of South Africa. He has published contributions to most areas
of Linguistics, as well as to other subjects. His latest book is ''The
Linguistics Delusion'' (2017).





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