Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 1. Poetry and its Creation
Section 3. Poetic Technique
Examples of Grades of Perfection in Poetic Style

Examples from Classical and Mediaeval Writers [1]

Would you please tell me where in Homer the “descent of Apollo” {{0}}occurs?[[See page 186 — Ed.]]

It is in the first fifty or a hundred lines of the first book of the {{0}}Iliad.[[The passage begins with line 44 of the first book of the Iliad: bē de kat’ Oulumpoio karēnōn chōomenos kēr. — Ed.]]

I don’t suppose Chapman or Pope have rendered it adequately.

Of course not — nobody could translate that — they have surely made a mess of it.

Homer’s passage translated into English would sound perfectly ordinary. He gets the best part of his effect from his rhythm. Translated it would run merely like this, “And he descended from the peaks of Olympus, wroth at heart, bearing on his shoulders arrows and doubly pent-in quiver, and there arose the clang of his silver bow as he moved, and he came made like unto the night.” His words too are quite simple but the vowellation and the rhythm make the clang of the silver bow go smashing through the world into universes beyond while the last words give a most august and formidable impression of godhead.

Would you consider this line of Dante’s as miraculously inevitable as Virgil’s “O passi graviora”?

e venni dal martiro a questa pace

That is rather the adequate inevitable.

And, is it possible to achieve a prose-inevitability — with rhythm and everything as perfectly wonderful as in poetry? Take, for instance (I quote from memory):

O mors quam amara est memoria tua homini pacem habenti in substantiis suis.

or

Fulcite me floribus stipate me malis quia amore langueo

or

Et his malis omnibus mors furibunda succedit.

I don’t think any of these has at all the same note as poetry gets — it is fine writing, but not the inevitable.

18 September 1934