POETRY
Le Pont Mirabeau
by Rachel Smith
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine
Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure
Les mains dans les mains restons face à face
Tandis que sous
Le pont de nos bras passe
Des éternels regards l’onde si lasse
Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure
Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
— Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools, 1912
The Mirabeau Bridge
Under the Mirabeau Bridge runs the Seine
And our loves
Must it remind me then
Joy came after pain again
Let the night come, let the bells the hour play
The days go by, I stay
Hand in Hand, we stay face to face
While under
The bridge of our arms waves
Wearily our eternal gaze
Let the night come, let the bells the hour play
The days go by, I stay
The days pass and the weeks pass in vain
Neither time past
Nor love comes back again
Under the Mirabeau Bridge runs the Seine
ΦιλοκτHτης
by John Prado
ὦ πῦρ σὺ καὶ πᾶν δεῖμα καὶ πανουργίας
δεινῆς τέχνημ᾽ ἔχθιστον, οἷά μ᾽ εἰργάσω,
οἷ᾽ ἠπάτηκας: οὐδ᾽ ἐπαισχύνει μ᾽ ὁρῶν
τὸν προστρόπαιον, τὸν ἱκέτην, ὦ σχέτλιε;
ἀπεστέρηκας τὸν βίον τὰ τόξ᾽ ἑλών.
ἀπόδος, ἱκνοῦμαί σ᾽, ἀπόδος, ἱκετεύω, τέκνον:
πρὸς θεῶν πατρῴων, τὸν βίον με μὴ ἀφέλῃ.
ὤμοι τάλας. ἀλλ᾽ οὐδὲ προσφωνεῖ μ᾽ ἔτι,
ἀλλ᾽ ὡς μεθήσων μήποθ᾽, ὧδ᾽ ὁρᾷ πάλιν.
ὦ λιμένες, ὦ προβλῆτες, ὦ ξυνουσίαι
θηρῶν ὀρείων, ὦ καταρρῶγες πέτραι,
ὑμῖν τάδ᾽, οὐ γὰρ ἄλλον οἶδ᾽ ὅτῳ λέγω,
ἀνακλαίομαι παροῦσι τοῖς εἰωθόσιν,
οἷ᾽ ἔργ᾽ ὁ παῖς μ᾽ ἔδρασεν οὑξ Ἀχιλλέως:
ὀμόσας ἀπάξειν οἴκαδ᾽, ἐς Τροίαν μ᾽ ἄγει:
προσθείς τε χεῖρα δεξιάν, τὰ τόξα μου
ἱερὰ λαβὼν τοῦ Ζηνὸς Ἡρακλέους ἔχει,
καὶ τοῖσιν Ἀργείοισι φήνασθαι θέλει:
ὡς ἄνδρ᾽ ἑλὼν ἰσχυρόν ἐκ βίας μ᾽ ἄγει,
κοὐκ οἶδ᾽ ἐναίρων νεκρὸν ἢ καπνοῦ σκιάν,
εἴδωλον ἄλλως: οὐ γὰρ ἂν σθένοντά γε
εἷλέν μ᾽: ἐπεὶ οὐδ᾽ ἂν ὧδ᾽ ἔχοντ᾽, εἰ μὴ δόλῳ.
νῦν δ᾽ ἠπάτημαι δύσμορος. τί χρή με δρᾶν;
ἀλλ᾽ ἀπόδος, ἀλλὰ νῦν ἔτ᾽ ἐν σαυτῷ γενοῦ.
τί φής; σιωπᾷς; οὐδέν εἰμ᾽ ὁ δύσμορος.
ὦ σχῆμα πέτρας δίπυλον, αὖθις αὖ πάλιν
εἴσειμι πρὸς σὲ ψιλός, οὐκ ἔχων τροφήν:
ἀλλ᾽ αὐανοῦμαι τῷδ᾽ ἐν αὐλίῳ μόνος,
οὐ πτηνὸν ὄρνιν οὐδὲ θῆρ᾽ ὀρειβάτην
τόξοις ἐναίρων τοισίδ᾽, ἀλλ᾽ αὐτὸς τάλας
θανὼν παρέξω δαῖθ᾽ ὑφ᾽ ὧν ἐφερβόμην,
καί μ᾽ οὓς ἐθήρων πρόσθε θηράσουσι νῦν:
φόνον φόνου δὲ ῥύσιον τίσω τάλας
πρὸς τοῦ δοκοῦντος οὐδὲν εἰδέναι κακόν.
ὄλοιο—μή πω, πρὶν μάθοιμ᾽ εἰ καὶ πάλιν
γνώμην μετοίσεις: εἰ δὲ μή, θάνοις κακῶς.
Philoctetes
Oh, you demon! You absolute monster! You’re the wretched architect of this disgusting lie! What you’ve done to me! How you’ve tricked me! Are you not ashamed to look at me, who trusted you, who supplicated you? You bastard! By taking my bow, you’ve robbed me of my life. I beg you—give it back. I beg you, I pray, child! By your father’s gods, do not take my life! Goddammit! He’s not going to say anything to me; he’s looking away as if he’ll never give it back. Oh, inlets, headlands, fellow mountain-dwelling beasts, jagged rocks: I know I have nobody else to speak with and it’s to you, you all who have been there for me, that I lament the things which the son of Achilles has done to me. He swore to take me home, but sails for Troy; he offered his right hand, but has taken the sacred bow of Zeus’ son, Herakles, and wants to show it off to the Argives; he compels me by force, as if capturing a strong man, but does not realize he is killing a corpse, a shadow, a ghost, mere smoke. He wouldn’t have captured me with the strength I had, or even now, except by treachery. But I’ve been fooled! God, what do I do? Oh, give it back! Be yourself again! What do you say? You’re silent? I’m nothing, ill-fated! To you, double-mouthed cave, I go back again, naked, without a means to live. I’ll wither away in that chamber, alone, felling neither winged bird nor mountain-roaming beast with such a bow. I’ll die in misery, food for those who fed me; those whom I hunted will now hunt me. I will pay for blood with blood, mine spilled by him who seemed to know no evil. Curses!—but not until I know whether you’ll change your mind. If not, may you be utterly destroyed!
What do we risk when we break a promise?
In this passage, Philoctetes, who has been stranded alone on Lemnos, has fought for his life against the wild beasts there, against all odds, for nearly a decade; he has suffered his curse alone—an excruciating, unhealing wound to Philoctetes’ leg—all this time. One day, Neoptolemos, a son of Achilles, lands on Lemnos with Odysseus. The two newcomers need Philoctetes’ sacred bow to win the Trojan War, but they do not need Philoctetes himself. Neoptolemos, still a boy and still impressionable to his much older companion, participates in the design to fool Philoctetes out of his bow and to abandon the man to die on this desolate rock. At this moment, Neoptolemos has promised to deliver Philoctetes to Greece, to bring him home at last, but now, under Odysseus’ wicked influence, he is reconsidering. When Philoctetes realizes he has handed over his bow to a boy whose hands hold Philoctetes’ fate, he is affected miserably.
The Greeks of the Classical period—during which time the Philoctetes of Sophocles premiered—had conventionalized a powerful speech act known as supplication (GRC ἱκεσία). A supplication was a desperate request for something, often for the supplicant’s life to be spared on the battlefield. The pledge to fulfill the request by the supplicandus created a sacred bond just as powerful as the request itself. Philoctetes has already uttered the traditional supplication formula, and Neoptolemos already made his pledge. But Philoctetes has detected a terrible betrayal. People have been doing these things with words for millennia: the “bonds” between supplicant and supplicandus are real things. Language philosopher J. L. Austin (1911–1960) writes about them. Every time you make a promise, you make something happen: you do things with words, and these speech acts have material effects on the people you address them to (cf.Austin 1955). It’s easy to see why the ancient Greeks and Romans ascribed such religious significance to speech acts of this type. To say “I beg” or “I promise” is not just to utter something; it is to perform something in the very act of utterance. The words themselves commit their speaker. They realize a contract, a special one—one unchanged (apparently, as we see) since antiquity—between two communicants.
Think about the last time you heard “I promise.” What was promised to you? What did itmean to hear those words uttered? What did you expect of their speaker? To promise or to convince or to inspire are special kinds of acts, and to violate the terms of the contracts they draw is to do harm in ways not nearly as immediately visible as the unhealing wound on the castaway’s leg.
To return to the concrete: this passage is a representation, in a language no longer spoken,in a high style fit to meter, of broken trust. But I encourage you not to read this passage or its translation as drama. We all know what it is to experience broken trust. We all know what it is to see a promise unfulfilled. Instead, read this passage of Sophocles as a consequence you can prevent, and see Philoctetes’ pain. You can speak with sincerity that Neoptolemos does not. (A spoiler: Neoptolemos’ conscience proves the more powerful force, and Odysseus does not get his way. Philoctetes joins them in battle, Troy is defeated, and his curse is finally lifted.)
My name is John Prado. I am a classical language teacher and a post-baccalaureate linguistics student at Columbia University. In the course of earning my MA in Latin at the University of Texas at Austin, I had the outstanding privilege of teaching Latin at a local high school and was inspired by the linguistic diversity in my classroom to take a strongly anti- imperialist approach to my teaching. I chose this passage because it speaks to a fundamental social property of human language. I also intend to caution my fellow Classicists against glorifying the atrocities committed during the centuries of Greek and Roman colonialism. It is in the misuse of language—to dishonor the commitments our words make—that Philoctetes’ trauma is continued and, indeed, the traumas of all victims of empire. Trust has stakes, and this passage makes them visible.
by Zoe Gallis
Κηδεiα
Όπου οι άνθρωποι στοιβάζονται σαν παλιά παλτά σε μια ντουλάπα.
Μάτια σαν πηγάδια, ένα τρέμουλο χέρι ακουμπώντας μία πλάτη.
Στην σιωπή, αυτά που λέγονται: άσε με να το κουβαλήσω,
αυτό το βάρος, και: είμαι εδώ, είμαι εδώ.
Η αγάπη παραμένει, αν και μας αφήνει να πεινάμε.
Και πραγματικά, πόση ευθύνη μπορεί να δοθεί
στη μνήμη για ένα μισοθυμημένο αστείο; Αντί για την ατάκα,
κάποιο σκοτεινό πράγμα σφηνωμένο σαν κουκούτσι στο λαιμό.
Υπάρχουν πράγματα που δεν μπορώ να εξηγήσω: ο τρόπος
που το πρόσωπο ενός πατέρα, με δάκρυα,
γίνεται ξανά αγόρι. Ο τρόπος που η συγχώρεση
είναι τώρα τόσο δύσκολο να βρεθεί.
Ένας αναστεναγμός που αναπνέει απλές λέξεις,
ο τρόπος που μια ζωή μαζεύει
τόση σκόνη.
Funeral
Where people pile in like old coats in a closet.
Eyes like wells, a trembling hand upon one’s back.
In the quiet what’s said: let me carry it, this weight,
and: I am here, I am here. The love remains although
it leaves us starving. And really how much blame
can one’s memory be given for a half-remembered joke?
In lieu of the punchline, some dark thing lodged
like a peach pit in a throat. There are things
I can’t explain: the way a father’s face, with tears,
becomes a boy again. The way forgiveness
is now so hard to find. A sigh that breathes
simple words, the way a life gathers
so much dust.
Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.173-205: Actaeon makes his fateful mistake and draws Diana’s ire.
by Francesca Carrillo
Actaeon has called off the hunt, calmly instructing his companions to hang up their nets and swords for the day, with the midday sun shining directly upon them–the shadowless bloodstained mountain the setting for the fateful error. Ovid proclaimed Actaeon’s innocence in the first few lines of this episode, asking what criminality did error hold, his crime against Diana simply being a misdemeanor of Fortune (fortunae crimen… error habebat, 141-142). Most striking to me, and symptomatic of this work of Ovid, is the careful balance the entire episode is held in–teetering on the edge of Fortune and Fate, being sympathetic to Diana in one moment and condemning her rashness the next.
Prior to this passage, the audience is given an image of the stage of Diana, her ars-ful accustomed bathing spot, where Actaeon wanders into on unsure steps (175). Sic illum fata ferebant, thus the Fates were drawing him, transforming this error of Fortune into one determined by fate, his unsure feet treading an inevitable path (176). Notably when he wanders (errans) into this grove, he is no longer a grandson or a Boeotian youth, but he becomes a man (viro) in that moment, upon his moment that foretells his death. This represents one of the moments of rapidfire switching between the perspective and sentiments of Actaeon and Diana, as Diana does not see the placid young man (iuvenis) that we have come to know, she sees a threatening man. Her immediate reaction is not to throw him to the dogs per se, but to silence him with a form befitting their surroundings, a deer. Seeing a goddess nude without consent is an obvious transgression of mortal and godly boundaries, regardless of intention, and she did not directly condemn him to his gruesome fate. However, how could Diana, goddess of the hunt and wild beasts, not presume that a deer’s fate is to be killed by hunters like herself (like Actaeon himself), or that his trained hunting dogs were likely trotting at his heels? These questions of flexible intentionality have arisen repeatedly in our readings, especially the mortals of the episodes and even those more “guilty” than Actaeon, seeking to understand the god-adjacent Niobe and the unsubtle Arachne.
Mentioned previously, something that gives another level to this moment, this fateful meeting of eyes and this overall episode, is Diana and Actaeon’s basic similarity as well as their obvious difference. Our impression of hunter Actaeon is one of rugged independence, calmly commanding his men, and reasonable in his demands–“enough” (satis), while our impression of huntress Diana is very different. Each item of clothes and weaponry Diana discards is scooped up by a waiting nymph, accustomed to bathe in a grove akin to a theatrical set, showing the aesthetic discipline of Diana. This underlying tension, of art (ars) and nature (natura), that preludes the error, questions the authenticity of the gods (who is the real hunter here?) and harkens our Niobe. What makes a god, contrivance or authenticity?