5 - E. V. Rieu's Translation: A Modern Homer?

Summary

Patrick Kavanagh's poem ‘On Looking into E. V. Rieu's Homer’ (1951) clearly borrows its title from Keats, but not much else:

Like Achilles you had a goddess for mother,

For only the half-god can see

The immortal in things mortal;

The far-frightened surprise in a crow's flight

Or the moonlight

That stays for ever in a tree.

In stubble fields the ghosts of corn are

The important spirits that imagination heeds.

Nothing dies; there are no empty

Spaces in the cleanest-reaped fields.

It was no human weakness when you flung

Your body prostrate on a cabbage drill –

Heart-broken with Priam for Hector ravaged;

You did not know why you cried,

This was the night he died –

Most wonderful-horrible

October evening among those cabbages.

The intensity that radiated from

The Far Field Rock – you afterwards denied –

Was the half-god seeing his half-brothers

Joking on the fabulous mountain-side.

Where Chapman appears in Keats's poem both in person and implicitly in the person of Cortez, it is, as we shall see, characteristic that E. V. Rieu should be absent from a poem named after him. But his approach to Homer is nevertheless very much a subject of Kavanagh's poem. On one level, like Kavanagh's better-known ‘Epic’, it describes a marvelling vision of the presence of Homer and Homeric heroes in rural Ireland. But on another level it is a meditation on the four-way relationship between the epic and the everyday, the poetic and prose. Where Rieu's Homer is a translation of epic poetry into everyday prose, Kavanagh is showing not only that the epic exists in the everyday but that the everyday does not have to be prose.

Kavanagh's is not a poetry that Pope, for example, would recognize. Where there is elevation of diction, it is almost immediately repudiated; the rhyme scheme is spontaneous and slips into and out of view; the vocabulary is indecorous. It is typical that the reader is left unsure whether ‘ravaged’ is really meant to rhyme with ‘cabbages’. Nevertheless it is undoubtedly poetry, as, for example, defined by George Steiner:

The distinctive beat of any given tongue, that sustaining undercurrent of inflexion, pitch relations, habits of stress, which give a particular motion to prose, is concentrated in poetry so that it acts as an overt, characteristic force….