Writing on the World: Simonides, Exactitude and Paul Celan

Trustees of Boston University

Writing on the World: Simonides, Exactitude and Paul CelanAuthor(s): Anne CarsonSource: Arion, Third Series, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Fall, 1996), pp. 1-26Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20163613 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 07:07

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Trustees of Boston University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Arion.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.20 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 07:07:25 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=tbu

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20163613?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Writing on the World: Simonides, Exactitude

and Paul Celan

ANNE CARSON

A H POET IS someone who writes on the world.

Simonides used different instruments and various surfaces?the

human voice, the human body, lyres, flutes, drums, silence, ritual

occasions, private gestures, all of which have passed away. He also

wrote on stone. The many epigrams ascribed, however dubiously,

to his name by ancient authorities and editions of inscriptional verse suggest that he may have been the most highly esteemed epi

grammatist of the early fifth century and certainly made a good

part of his living from these commissions. We do not know much

about the practical side of such a life, about the relations between

poem and stone, poet and engraver, poetics and cash. Who chose

the stone, the stonecutter, the place where the stone would stand,

the direction it would face? Was the stonecutter a free man or a

slave? Paid by day or by item? By Simonides or by his patron? Who

set the price for an inscription? How was the price calculated?by number of letters? Of words? Of verses? By metrical nicety, allu

sions to Homer, original figures of speech? Did Simonides himself

know much about the cutting of letters, about how stone thrusts

certain lettershapes forward and fills others with shadow, about

why stonecutters disliked cutting iota?1

The fifth century BC was a good time to interest oneself in the art of epigraphy. Simonides' lifetime coincided with the period of

highest development in ancient engraving techniques. During this

period, as the various epichoric alphabets of the Greeks found

their way to regularization, lettershapes became more precise in

their construction and engravers began to develop a feeling for the

form and arrangement of an inscription, as well as its relationship to the stone on which it was inscribed. They began to think about

details like the proportions of the stele; how to place the text on the stone at a height convenient for the reader to read, how to use let

tering of a different size in the heading for increased legibility and

liveliness.2 Moreover, the fifth century saw the old boustrephedon style of writing give way to a more pleasing and intelligible left-to



2 WRITING ON THE WORLD

right convention. In particular, the stoichedon style which had

been introduced in the sixth century began to find extensive pub lic use after the Persian Wars.

Stoichedon is the term for a style of writing in which letters are

aligned vertically as well as horizontally and placed at equal inter

vals along their respective alignments like ranks of men in military formation.3 This precisionist style of inscriptional writing, which

reached the high point of its technical development and popularity in Simonides' day, arguably had some influence on Simonides' own

cognitive designs. Historians suppose that the main motive for

adoption of stoichedon style was aesthetic control?"a practical

expression of the Greek feeling for order and beauty"?especially in light of the particular aptness of the letterforms of the Greek

alphabet, with their numerous vertical strokes, for this type of

alignment.4 Aesthetic control of alphabetic form was also a con

cern of Simonides; his biographical notice in the Suda tells us that

this poet took it upon himself to design four new letters for the

Greek alphabet (eta, omega, phi, and chi). Apocryphal or not, this

story reminds us that, inasmuch as the evolution of Greek let

tershapes was not complete until the end of the fifth century, Simonides was in a unique position, historically as well as temper

amentally, to perfect the communication design of his art. An epi

graphic poet is someone interested in making every letter count.

Counting letters was an activity with which engravers of sto

ichedon style were becoming closely and professionally familiar in

the early fifth century due to an important advance in their tech

nique, the introduction of the chequer. The chequer was a grid of

horizontal and vertical lines marked on the stone before cutting so

as to divide its surface into equal rectangles. The text could then

be engraved in perfect stoichedon sequence by placing one letter in

each rectangular space or, alternately, by placing the letters at the

points of intersection of horizontal and vertical lines. Using the

chequer, the engraver could estimate the exact area that would be

required for inscribing his text and fix precisely the point to which

the text would run on the stone.5 Historians tell us that fifth-cen

tury engravers ruled out their stone beforehand with remarkable

exactitude; the margin of error on well-cut stones due to variation

in the size of the chequer unit between one part of the stone and

another is found to be not more than half a millimeter.6

Simonides, for his part, must have spent a good deal of time

drawing mental lines and positioning data, measuring shapes in



Anne Carson 3

his mind's eye and cutting away the inessential, counting off letters

and reckoning prices. "Exactitude" on every level of poetic design was the conspicuous feature of his style, in the opinion of ancient

critics:

SuiCDV??ov ?? jrapaxriQei tf]v ?xX,oyr|v x v ovou?xcov, xfj?

?w08?8coc TTjv axpi?etav

Watch very carefully Simonides' choice of words and the

exactitude with which he puts things together....

says Dionysius of Halicarnassos (Vet. Script. 420 Reiske). For

"exactitude" Dionysius has chosen the critical term akribeia; it is

a word with two meanings that reflect the two most constant fea

tures of Simonides' ancient reputation. Akribeia can mean "preci

sion, accuracy, exactness of language" or "parsimony, frugality,

stinginess with money" (LSJ). We find a homologous term used by the Aristophanic scholia (on Peace 699) :

2ifxo)vi?T]? ?oxe? Jto?rcoc auixooXoyiov e?aeveYxe?v ei? x?

gauaxa xai ypaipai

aauxx \110dov

Simonides appears to have been the first to introduce meticu

lous calculation into songmaking and to write songs for a

wage. .. .

For "meticulous calculation" the scholiast uses the word smik

rologia, a double-edged word whose referents include "minute care about details of language, exact expression" and "minute care

about financial expense, miserliness" (LSJ). Simonides made an

impact in both spheres of operation?language and money?so far

as we can judge from history and anecdote,7 for his art was shaped

by unique cultural pressures. As the first Greek poet to make his

living by fixing a price to a poem, Simonides was probably a

wealthy man, possibly a curmudgeon, and not surprisingly attracted a reputation for avarice and greed. Yet it would be a crass

hermeneutics that took the money of Simonides entirely literally. I

suspect Simonides himself rarely did so. Everything gets more

interesting if we understand his greed as a biographical trope for the whole burgeoning fifth-century money economy, this cultural

process that was reducing to commodity certain hitherto sacred




activities like the transmission of wisdom within a deeply tradi

tional society. Money had a radical impact on ancient culture; Simonides reacted to it by inventing a poetry of radical economy.

And it is plausible, considering how much of his work was com

posed for inscription on stone, that he learned a great deal from

the stonecutters, practitioners of an art that is radically frugal. But ancient stones were also, in their frugal way, radical?much

more so than their mortal remains suggest to us now. Stonecutters

designed their work so as to interrupt and arrest the attention of a

passerby, to make him stop, stand still and read. The striking

beauty and order of stoichedon style were especially conducive to

this end. Historians tell us that engravers liked to further enhance

its effect (particularly on small monuments like gravestones8) by

special spatial arrangement of the text (perhaps a single line given to each word) or by painting the letters after they were cut, usually in red paint but sometimes in alternating lines of red and black.

Imagine an epitaph like Simonides' for Spinther (fr. 126B, 133D) inscribed in such a way.

SAMA TOMB TODE HERE

SPINTHER SPINTHER SPINTHER UPON SPINTHER EPETHEKE SET

THANONTI DEAD9

We may be inspired to think again about Simonides' well-worn

dictum "poetry is painting that talks" (Plutarch Mor. 346f) when

we visualize Spinther pulsing at the world from a gravestone in

alternating verses of red and black. And surely this is what the cus

tomer pays for when he buys an epitaph?a moment of second

thought purchased from passing time through the attention of

someone still alive.

We should not, however, oversimplify the epitaphic transaction.

When a wandering passerby stops to read Spinther's epitaph one

day in the fifth century BC, much more than a purchase on visual

attention is involved. Ancient inscriptions were truly "talking stones," in the sense that silent reading was not a usual nor a

practical mode of deciphering them.10 Generally inscribed in

scriptio continua with no spaces between the words, stones

demanded to be read aloud so that the reader could "recognize"



Anne Carson 5

(anagign?skein) the words. What is recognized in such reading is

not individual letters or visual facts so much as a sequence of

sounds ordered in viva voce as the reader hears himself pronounce them. Words and word-groups obscure to the eye will shape them

selves upon the ear and unlock the codes of memory. So the verbs

for "to read" in Greek typically begin with a prefix like ana

("again") or epi- ("on top of") as if reading were essentially

regarded as a sort of sympathetic vibration between letters com

posed by a writer and the voice in which a reader pulls them out of

silence.11 It is interesting that the second most conspicuous feature

of Simonides' style (after exactitude) in the opinion of ancient crit

ics is a quality they call to sympathes.12 Generally translated into

English as "sympathy" or "pathos," the term implies some shared

movement of soul between writer and reader (cf. Quintilian's miseratio commovenda: "pity moving together with pity"13), as if

words could have a power to enter the reader and design an emo

tion there from inside his own voice. Consider this epitaph for men

fallen in battle:

"Aa?eoxov xX?o? o??e (j)i?r)i jieoi Jtaxot?i 0?vxe? xu?veov Gav?xou au^e?aXovxo v?<|)o?

ovb? xeGv?ai Gavovxe?, ?jtet acj>' ?oexr] xaGimepGev Kvba?vovo' av?yei ? uaxo? ?| 'Ai?e .

Asbestos glory these men set around their dear fatherland

and in a dark blue death cloud they wrapped themselves.

Not dead having died. Because virtue down from above

keeps pulling them up glorying out of Hades' house.

(fr. 59B, 121D)

"Glory" here is an asbestos energy that works itself out through the surfaces of the words, like the glow from a funeral pyre. There are different surfaces, which open and shift as unexpectedly as

smoke. There are questions and answers, mysteriously disoriented

from one another. What is burning? Apparently not that which has

been set on fire. Who is dead? Apparently not those who have died.

Out of these mysteries the poet creates a general mood of disorien

tation, which is spatial, aural and temporal as well as cognitive. The reader has the sense that he is staring down into a tomb. He is

listening hard, he is expecting to hear a door slam shut. Instead he

hears his own voice open and stall on the unusually14 awkward




hiatus of vowels between "death" (thanatou) and "wrapped them

selves" (amphebalonto) at the middle of the poem. As he looks

down from above at the doorway of death, he is expecting to see

darkness. Instead there is a passageway out of which very bright

living beings are rising and keep rising up into the moment of his own reading. The verb tenses control this action, moving from the

aorist instant of death described in the first couplet ("set,"

"wrapped"), to a verb in the perfect tense denying the closure of

death at the center ("not dead having died"), to end in the present

progressive ("keeps pulling") like a slow leak of immortality. A

final gaping vowel (Aideo) at the very end of the poem leaves

Hades' house standing open. Losing life upward. This poem is one of the finest examples of the Simonidean epi

taphic method. Before we analyze the method further, let us con

sider a comparison. Here is a poem of the twentieth-century

Romanian writer Paul Celan, called "Epitaph For Francois":15

Die beiden T?ren der Welt

stehen offen:

ge?ffnet von dir in der Zwienacht.

Wir h?ren sie schlagen und schlagen und tragen das Ungewisse,

und tragen das Gr?n in dein Immer.

The two doors of the world

stand open:

opened by you in the twinight.

We hear them slam and slam

and carry the thing that's uncertain

and carry the green thing into your Ever.

(All translations from Celan's German, unless otherwise

noted, are by Michael Hamburger.)

It is a poem whose premise is precision. It is concerned with reck

oning. The poet's neologism Zwienacht ("twinight"), made out of

the number two and the noun for night, is an attempt to count out

the moment of death. This count is made audible in the slamming of two doors ("schlagen und schlagen," "we hear them slam and



Anne Carson 7

slam") which echo through the final verse ("und tragen und tra

gen," "and carry and carry") into eternity. Like Simonides, Celan uses sound effects to draw the reader into the mood of the epi taphic situation. An epitaph is a mysterious place, where catego

ries like noun and number, question and answer, open and closed,

may disorient themselves. Celan contrives to keep these disorien tations suspended in a curious greenish light and shifting continu

ally over the surface of the poem until suddenly we see them all

disappear through a doorway into the word "Ever." Like Simon

ides, Celan uses verbs and verb tenses to project this disappearance into paradox. For we listen to doors slam shut while being told

that they also stand open, perhaps eternally. And the final three

words of the poem prop this question open like a doorstop upon the hypostasized adverb Immer: "into your Ever."

Like Simonides, Celan constructs his epitaph as an act of atten

tion shared between poet and reader, which moves out from the

reader's voice through all the surfaces of the poet's language. For

Celan this act of attention originated in a religious sensibility. "Attention is the natural prayer of the human soul," he said once

in an interview.161 think we can perceive also within the artistry of

Simonidean verse a method as concentrated as prayer. It is a

method of attention that translates words and sounds and num

bers into the profound poetic experience called "pathos" or "sym pathy": such pathos is a function of poetic exactitude.

Let us consider now another example of Simonidean pathos,

where the poet turns his attention to the smaller, sadder ghostli ness of a private tomb. The epitaph inscribed to Megakles17 gives a sense of constriction rather than openness, of grief kept secret:

2fjua xaxa<J)Gifx?voio MeyaxX?o? e?x' ?v ?? um

o?xx?q?) ce, x?Xav KaMxa, o?' ?jtaGe?.

Whenever I see the tomb of dead Megakles I pity you, sad Kallias, what you suffered.

(fr. 113B, 84D)

The emotion of the poem is eerily three-cornered and works by deflection. It moves out from the reader to touch Megakles' tomb but is then bounced off Megakles onto a third, unanticipated presence. Kallias materializes silently by the reader's side, more

mysterious and more pitiable than the dead man. It is as if you




were standing alone (you thought) in a room and suddenly heard

someone breathing. This deflection reminds me of what happens in the painting of Giotto called Joachim Retiring To His Sheep

fold (Figure 1). This painting shows Joachim, after his expulsion from the temple in Jerusalem, arriving back at his sheephold into

the presence of two shepherds with their sheep and a small jump

ing dog. Joachim is in deep dejection and fixes his eyes on the

ground, evidently unconscious of his surroundings. It is a moment

of profound emotion, which Giotto has painted in such a way as

to deliberately disorient the viewer's perception of it. For as we

contemplate Joachim, our sympathy for him is intercepted by the

shepherd who is staring straight out of the painting "towards us,

sympathetically, as though we had all witnessed a disaster

together."18 The shepherd's stare has a strange tension?at once

gathering us into the suffering of Joachim and setting up a barrier

that keeps it private. The shepherd's eye makes contact with our

sympathy but also marks the place where sympathy stops short.

Joachim's grief is and remains beyond us. In somewhat the same

way Simonides' three-cornered epigram makes one spare fact

explicit: the privacy of grief. No one else can really know what

Kallias suffered when he lost Megakles. An entirely different set of tactical problems was posed for

Simonidean sympathy by the commission to celebrate death as an

occasion of political prevarication. We still do not know quite how to read the inscription he wrote for the sensational statues of Har

modios and Aristogeiton in Athens (Figure 2). This monument19 was erected probably

soon after 510 BC, to commemorate the

expulsion of Hippias, the so-called "last tyrant of Athens." Hip

pias was driven out of the city in 511/510 in a complicated coup

engineered by the Alkmaionid family. But political rivals of the

Alkmaionids were soon scheming to defraud them of credit for

this action and a myth began to be generated ascribing the "libera

tion of Athens" to two young men named Harmodios and

Aristogeiton.

These two men had in fact murdered the brother of Hippias

(Hipparchos) three years before.20 The real motive for this murder, as historians since Thucydides attest,21 was sexual jealousy.

According to Thucydides, Harmodios and Aristogeiton were lov

ers. When Hipparchos the brother of the tyrant became enamored

of the young Harmodios and made overtures to him, Harmo

dios reported the matter to his lover who took immediate action.



Anne Carson g

"f-':^^B?'i' '; ???"l ?s|if

gi|p;.;|||ff

mv?

m

gp^^...,??

- -iliSfc ??P

Fig. 1 Joachim Retiring To His Sheepfold. Giotto di Bondone.

Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy (Photo: Alinari/Art Resource,

NY).



IO WRITING ON THE WORLD

?li?P:;|::"--' mSW. ::: =^y|? :

S&S

^^^^fcs

Fig. 2 Harmodios and Aristogeiton (The Tyrant Slayers). Roman copies after the Greek originals ascribed to Kritios and

Neslotes, from Tivoli. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples,

Italy (Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY).



Anne Carson 11

Aristogeiton organized a conspiracy to assassinate Hipparchos

along with his powerful brother amid the crowds and confusion on the city streets of Athens during the annual Panathenaic proces sion. The conspirators did in fact succeed in despatching Hip

parchos according to plan?but then the bodyguards of Hippias

appeared and cut Harmodios down. Aristogeiton was captured alive, imprisoned, tortured and later executed.

Neither the events of this romantic tragedy nor its confused

aftermath can be shown to have provoked the political action that

ousted Hippias three years later. Yet soon after the expulsion22 a

statue of Harmodios and Aristogeiton as "liberators of Athens"

was set up in the Athenian agora, inscribed with a couplet alleg

edly by Simonides:23

TrI uiy' AGrrvatoioi <|>??>c y?veG', rrv?x' Aqioxo

ye?xcDv litnacypv xxetve xai 'Apu?otoc.

Surely a great light for the Athenians came into being when

Aristogeiton and Harmodios killed Hipparchos. (fr. 13 IB, 76D)

Translation cannot convey the verbal tensions of the Greek origi nal. The first verse sets up "a great light" surrounding "the Atheni

ans" on both sides. The second verse shows us Hipparchos

stranded between Aristogeiton and Harmodios as the direct object of their verb "killed"; the verb is singular, despite its compound subject, to emphasize this unit of murderous enclosure. With typi

cal economy, Simonides renders the impassioned facts of the story as structure rather than surface rhetoric. We may presume that

Simonides' commission was to glorify the murder as disinterested

democratic action. Yet he has managed to suggest the darker pres

sure of a private erotic agenda behind political myth. It is a story of close cuts and deadly contiguities. It is an epigram

that begins with "a remarkable breach of one of the most funda

mental rules of elegiac verse."24 The rule that a word-boundary

should invariably occur at verse-end is first stated by Hephaistion, the lexicographer to whom we owe preservation of this poem.

"Every metrical line ends in a complete word, hence such verses as

these from the epigrams of Simonides are incorrect," says Hephais tion (Encheiridion 28). This incorrect prosodie impulse permits

Aristogeiton to overstep his place in the hexameter verse and join




his beloved in the next line as they close in upon the intrusive Hip

parchos. But every license has a price. The structure of the elegiac

couplet divides Aristogeiton's name in half as violently as jealousy did cut through his life.

The physical facts of the monument on which this epigram was

inscribed may have emphasized some of these tensions, by an

interplay between text and figures. Neither the statue itself nor any detailed ancient description is extant but a number of copies have

been identified. It seems clear that the two figures stood side by side, forming a vigorous composition25 with Simonides' epigram inscribed below. We are in fact able to visualize how the epigram looked due to the discovery, in the Athenian agora in 1936, of a

base of Pentelic marble containing the end of the pentameter verse

of this couplet.26 Simonides' text will then have run continuously across the base from left to right beneath the two statues. The first

half of Aristogeiton's name would be cut directly under his own

figure, surging forward on the left with sword raised in the direc

tion of Harmodios. And the latter half of the name thrusts itself across the gap between the two figures, with the gestural energy

appropriate to a lover ousting a rival from his beloved's side. Now it is true (and no Greek reader of the epigram would be unaware)

that the name Aristogeiton, with its opening cretic rhythm, scans

awkwardly no matter where you put it in a dactylic hexameter. But

I would suggest that the way Simonides plays this acoustic fact into

his design is meant to tell us less about metrical recalcitrance than

about emotions of murder in a p?d?rastie police state. His exacti

tude has a sculptural power to carry the reader's eye around the

back of the forms into human causes. Here again we see the "sym

pathy" for which Simonides was celebrated arising directly from

the physical facts of his akribeia.

And surely this is one function of great poetry, to remind us that

human meaning does not stop with the physical facts. Facts live in

their relation to one another; and language is able to objectify facts

insofar as it can name (or as the Greeks say, imitate) these rela

tions. When we speak of the Simonidean quality of sympathy as a

function of this poet's exactitude, we are noticing Simonides' abil

ity to make the same relations occur among a set of words in a

poem as obtain among a set of facts in the world. "To chew this

bread with writing teeth" as Paul Celan calls it.27 Let us consider

another example of such imitative action in an epitaph composed

by Simonides for a woman named Archedike:



Anne Carson 13

' Av?q?? ?oioxeijoavxo? ?v 'EX?a?i x v ecj)' tavxov

'Ijtmou ?qx8??xt]v f]?8 x?xevOe xovt?,

f] jtaxoo? X8 xal ?v?o?? ?bek^Cov x' o? aa xvoavv v

jtai?cov x' ovK t\qQ?) vovv ?? ?xacOcAinv.

Of a man who himself was best in Greece of the men of his day:

Hippias' daughter Archedike this dust hides, She of a father, of a husband, of brothers, of children all

tyrants being. Nor did she push her mind up into presumption.

(fr. 111B,85D)

Archedike was the daughter of Hippias (last tyrant of Athens, as

above) a man whose presence and power, accompanied by all the

rest of the men of his day in the first verse of the poem, effectively buries Archedike in the middle of the second verse, boxed in

between her father's name and the dust of her own grave. The

third verse locates her total claim to fame in a participle: "being," and specifies the mode of her being in virtue of its fourfold relation to men. It is noteworthy that this claim, which informs us

Archedike played the roles of daughter, wife, sister and mother, does not use any of these nouns to designate her. Archedike's func tions are indicated exclusively by her grammatical dependence on

the nouns father, husband, brother, children. The fourth verse

does at last ascribe a quality to Archedike but it is a quality named for its absence. This woman's lack of presumption comes as little

surprise at the end of an epitaph that refers every aspect of her

being to male derivation.

There are a number of (by now familiar) things one could say at

this point about masculine discourse and patriarchal codes and the

suppression of female voice. Simonides, I suspect, had none of

them in mind when he composed this poem, but was in fact enter

taining quite other, honorific purposes with a measurable success.

And therefore the epitaph to Archedike may stand as an all the more

heartening evidence that a poet who forms his attention in

exactitude can end up telling more truth than he means to. For he is drawn ever more deeply to the inside of the physical facts. As

Rilke says, "Like a drink through thirst, gravity plunges through him."28 The act of poetic attention gathers to itself a directional force as mysterious as gravity from the poet's instinct for true

relationships.




The Greeks of the generation into which Simonides was born

had a name for this instinct and a profound faith in its truth-claim.

They called the instinct that makes a poet a poet simply sophia

("wisdom"). They believed the exercise of poetic wisdom to be the

clearest place where truth can obtain existence for itself. You and

I, on the other hand, belong to a generation that is no longer able

to use such a word nor command such a belief. We are part of an

age of dislocation, where art and truth have lost track of one

another, an age that Martin Heidegger calls "the destitute time."29

It interests me very much, this destitution, for Heidegger says that its primary characteristic is a use of language "that will not

trouble with precision." The complaint against imprecision has

been reiterated more recently by the Italian writer ?talo Cal vino.

Just before his death Calvino addressed himself to the question of

language and the future of language in art. His prognosis in gen eral is grim but its terminology illuminating. Calvino attributes

the faltering of all our arts in the twentieth century, especially those of language, to a failure of exactitude.

"Exactitude" was the title of a lecture written but never deliv

ered by ?talo Calvino, whose death preempted the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1985. The essay, subsequently pub

lished in a volume of essays called Six Memos For The Next

Millennium, begins as a somewhat elegiac discussion of the disap

pearance of exactitude from all the literatures, imageries, and art

forms of our present "culture of the mediocre" as Calvino calls the

modern age. He goes on to describe this disappearance as "a

plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expres sion into the most generic, anonymous and abstract formulas, to

dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new

circumstances. "30

So Calvino. And it is interesting to hear him go on to character

ize his personal reaction to the "plague afflicting language" in

terms that would have made immediate sense to Simonides. "This

is the reason I try to talk as little as possible. . . " says Calvino.

Simonides also was celebrated for his conversational parsimony. "I

have often repented of talking but never of keeping silent," he is

recorded to have said; and Plutarch tells of a symposium where the

poet was seated beside a man who maintained total silence

throughout the evening. Finally Simonides turned to him and said:



Anne Carson 15

"My good man, insofar as you are stupid, your action is wise and

if you are wise it is stupid."31 I think Simonides and ?talo Calvino might have agreed that

determining the true relationship between speech and silence,

which is the essence of exactitude, is a matter so delicate it verges

on paradox. "Mortals speak insofar as they listen," says Heidegger

in one of his essays on language.32 This is a philosopher's style of

saying something a poet might put the other way round. You have to "listen your way in with your mouth," says Paul Celan.33 There is perhaps no more moving example of the dilemma of the artist in a destitute time than this extreme and intractable Romanian poet. Paul Celan committed suicide in 1970 after having spent his life

pursuing an ideal of precision so radical that, finally, no human

language could accommodate it. The poem called "Speak You

Also"34 records part of his struggle to take the true measure of

speech:

Sprich auch du,

sprich als letzter,

sag deinen Spruch.

Sprich? Doch scheide das Nein nicht vom Ja. Gib deinem Spruch auch den Sinn:

gib ihm den Schatten.

Gib ihm Schatten genug,

gib ihm so viel, also du um dich verteilt wei?t zwischen

Mittnacht und Mittag und Mittnacht.

Blicke umher:

sieh, wie's lebendig wird rings? Beim Tode! Lebendig!

Wahr spricht, wer Schatten spricht.

Speak, you also,

speak as the last, have your say.

Speak?




But keep yes and no unsplit.

And give your say this meaning:

give it the shade.

Give it shade enough,

give it as much as you know has been dealt out between

midnight and midday and midnight.

Look around:

look how it all leaps alive?

where death is! Alive!

He speaks truly who speaks the shade....

What does it mean to speak the shade? What does it mean to keep

yes and no unsplit? For Paul Celan it meant a lifelong effort to

purify his poetic language of everything imprecise, overexplicit or

false. Significantly he withdrew from circulation, only a few

months after its publication in 1948, his first book of verse

because of the many misprints it contained. Misprints on the

printed page were only a foreboding of what Celan came to regard as misprints in the soul of his poetic language. His poems grew smaller and smaller, his verses shorter and shorter, his own use of

words progressively more sparse, more urgent and more con

densed, receding in the name of exactitude deeper and deeper into

what one German critic called "the no man's land between speech

and silence."35 He was trying to make a new language. The latter

years of his life were so increasingly dominated by this project that

he turned against his own early work, especially his most famous

and most anthologized poem ("Death Fugue," concerned with the

Nazi death camps where both his parents died), refusing to have

this poem reprinted on grounds that it spoke too explicitly about

things which could not be said.36 We find his later poetry every where constricted by this worry:37

. . . gleitest du mir auf den Mund,

mitten in meiner

dich Schatten beschwerenden

Rede.

... you slide across my mouth



Anne Carson 17

midway through the words

I address to you, shadow,

to give you weight.

("Mit Der Stimme Der Feldmaus," 7-10)

And he describes his own solution in another poem under the fig ure of etching:38

WEGGEBEIZT vom

Strahlenwind deiner Sprache das bunte Gerede des An

erlebten?das hundert

z?ngige Mein

gedicht, das Genicht.

ETCHED AWAY from the ray-shot wind of your language the garish talk of rubbed

off experience?the hundred

tongued pseudo

poem, the noem....

("Weggebeizt," 1-6)

Two features of these verses, which particularly evoke Simon

ides, deserve remark. First, Celan's selection of the images of

"etched away" talk and "rubbed- / off experience" suggests a par

allel with Simonides' experience of the art of stonecutting. Both

etching and epigraphy are processes of excision, which seek to

construct a moment of attention by cutting or biting or rubbing away what is irrelevant so as to leave the meaning exposed on the

surface. Second, but not unrelated, Celan like Simonides had a

notion to make his metaphysics out of negativity. Witness his neol

ogism Genicht in verse 6: "noem" (from the noun Gedicht mean

ing "poem" and the adverb nicht meaning "not") reflects a

recurrent preoccupation in Celan's work with negation and the

dialectic of absence and presence that is implicit in negation. We

saw this dialectic recommended in the poem "Speak You Also" as

a kind of language that keeps "yes and no unsplit." Simonides too

was inclined to play with the dialectic of yes and no. His many and various tactics of negation39 and double negation aim to make

explicit the process of cutting away or etching away a language




surface. His purpose is to create a moment of negative attention

where we see the truth gradually stand forth from what is not the

truth, like lettershapes on stone.40 A simple but striking epitaphic

example of this is Simonides' fragment 152E:

'AvGqojc', ov Kooixxru Xeu??eic x?c()ov ?lX? y?g ?v?Qo? X8Qvr|xea) uxxqo? xvu?oc 8[xoiy' ixavo?.

You!?No you aren't looking at Kroisos' grave.

Yes it belongs to a poor man (me) content with a little tomb.

(fr. 152E, 140D)

The poem sets up an imaginary dialectic of wealth and poverty, of fame and nullity. Kroisos was the last king of the fabulously

wealthy kingdom of Lydia. When his armies were defeated by those of Kyros the Great, Kroisos piled his wealth up into a vast

funeral pyre, placed himself on top and set it alight. Simonides'

poem trains our attention on the vast glowing vault of Kroisos

only in order to etch it away?leaving exposed the tiny tomb of a

poor nameless man content with little things. It is a strange and

powerful moment of surrogate expenditure. It is a masterstroke of

poetic economy?as Simonides commandeers the whole wealth of

Kroisos in abeyance to light up the tomb of a man too poor to put his own name on his gravestone. Such a moment of negative atten

tion, when yes and no remain unsplit, is an interval of unique cog

nitive content, available to us nowhere but in language. Poets are

those deeply benevolent beings who take on themselves the task of

representing such facts to us. As Celan says in a poem called "Vast,

Glowing Vault":41

... brenn ich dies Bild ein, zwischen

die H?rner....

Die Welt ist fort, ich mu? dich tragen.

... I brand this image, between

the horns. ...

The world is gone, I must carry you.

("Grosse, Gl?hende W?lbung," 6-7,14)



Anne Carson 19

And in another poem he condenses this poetic responsibility to a

disturbingly simple double negative:42

MIT DEN VERFOLGTEN in sp?tem, un

verschwiegenem ,

strahlendem

Bund.

PLEDGED TO THE PERSECUTED, by a late, un

tacit, luminous

bond... .

("Mit Den Verfolgten," 1-4)

However "untacit"?Celan's "pledge to the persecuted" meant

retreat into a language so private it silenced him. He predicted this

silence and even came to regard it as proper to the poetic task, or

so we might infer from one of the poems published by his editors

after his death:43

ERST WENN ich dich als Schatten ber?hre,

glaubst du mir meinen

Mund,

der klettert mit Sp?t

sinnigem droben

in Zeith?fen

umher,

du st??t zur Heerschar

der Zweitverwerter unter

den Engeln,

Schweigew?tiges sternt.

NOT UNTIL as a shade I touch you

will you believe

my mouth,




that clambers about

with late-minded things

up there

in time-courts,

you come to the host

of the seconds-utilizers among the angels,

and a body that rages for silence

stars.

("Erst Wenn")

In this poem Celan manages to place himself exactly on that

boundary where yes and no remain unsplit by projecting his voice

into the future of his own death and speaking backward to the

world that will have silenced him. That is to say, he has written his own

epitaph. For as we have seen from the poetry of Simonides,

this is the premise of epitaphic publication, that the dead may

speak to the living each time the inscription is read. Let us consider one more example of such speech, composed by Simonides for men

fallen in the battle of the Eurymedon:

T v?? Jtox' ?v ox?ovoioi xavDytaoxwac ?iaxou? Xovoev fyoiv?ooai Qo?qo?

' Aqtj? ipa/aoi*

?vxl ?' ?xovxoo?xoov ?v?o v \iva\ie?a Gav?vxov

?i|)ux' ?u/ijrux v ??8 x?xevGe xovi?.

In the chest cavities of these men once his sinsharp arrowclaws did wild Ares wash: at a red drop.

An exchange of men who hold javelins for memorials that

hold corpses -souls YES for souls NO?is what this dust hides.

(fr. 106B, 116D)

The translation is laborious because the diction and syntax of the

poem are so original they verge on a private language. Simonides

has invented the word tachygl?chinas (here translated "sinsharp arrowclaws" to get your attention) and also the word akontodo

k?n ("men who hold javelins") and he has used the words phoinis sai psakadi in a dative construction that defies grammatical

description ("at a red drop").44 Perhaps we could call it the dative



Anne Carson 21

of exactitude since Simonides seems to be using the phrase to mea

sure the difference between living and dead, between speech and

silence, between yes and no. The whole poem gathers towards this

red drop, which is followed immediately by the preposition of

exchange (anti) zt the beginning of verse 3 and then by a statement

of what exactly is being exchanged for what in this epitaphic transaction.

It seems that living men are being exchanged for memories and

souls positive for souls negative. But we should note that the terms

of the exchange are problematic. The manuscripts preserve a read

ing (apsych'empsych?n) which has been emended since Bergk to

empsych' apsych?n. That is, we emend a phrase that would mean

"souls NO for souls YES" to a phrase meaning "souls YES for

souls NO." Both readings scan the same way; the emendation jus tifies itself on grounds of sense. Denys Page sums up editorial

opinion of the manuscript reading when he calls it "a heavy and

graceless phrase" that "substitutes chaos for clarity."45

I would not presume to disagree with Denys Page, but it occurs

to me to be grateful that Simonides has left us a text that, in many more ways than one, keeps yes and no unsplit. I suppose the gift is

providential; yet we should note in passing that Simonides himself

held some bizarre beliefs about the split between yes and no that

happens at death and is memorialized on an epitaph. "It is not the soul which deserts the body but the body which deserts the soul," he is recorded to have said.46 This seems to me a mysterious and

disorienting notion. I wonder where the soul is and what its life is

like after the body has deserted it. On the other hand, it is surely one of the functions of great poetry to pose mysterious and disori

enting questions about the life of the soul. We see Simonides

administering this function intrepidly in a sharp little anecdote

from his biographical tradition. It relates a dispute between the

poet and some anonymous philistine concerning the value of epi

taphic poetry. The philistine sets himself to disparage epitaphs

by calling them "jabbering corpses that do not know how to lie

quiet." Then comes the Simonidean riposte: "My good man, you are more dead in the midst of your life than those who lie buried

underground!"47

A poet is someone who writes on the world. In order to do so he

has to station himself idiosyncratically, in a kind of no man's land

between negative and positive, between soul and body, between

silence and speech. He has to reinvent the surfaces on which




Fig. 3 Wheat field With Crows. Vincent Van Gogh (Photo: AH nari/Art Resource, NY).



Anne Carson 23

human writings are commonly inscribed?whether these consist

in stone or printed pages or the face of a coin or the phenomena we

call reason and memory. He has to apply himself to the surfaces of

the world with tools of such exactitude that they can cut away

everything that seems to him untruth. It is lonely, stingy, demoral

izing work, for it impels him to begrudge common cultural expen ditures like time, grammar, virtue and conversation. One final, in

fact posthumous, poem of Paul Celan's shows how precariously he

stands. In fact it is a poem conceived for inscription on a painting,

Wheat field With Crows by Vincent Van Gogh:48

Raben?berschw?rmte Weizenwoge.

Welchen Himmels Blau? Des untern? Obern?

Sp?ter Pfeil, der von der Seele schnellte.

St?rkres Schwirren. N?h'res Gl?hen. Beide Welten.

Swarming of ravens over a wheat billow.

Blue of which heaven? The higher? Nether?

Late arrow that the soul released.

Louder whirring. Nearer glow. This world and the other.

("Unter Ein Bild")

Wheatfield With Crows was Van Gogh's last canvas (Figure 3).

Upon finishing it he shot himself in the diaphragm and died three

days later. If it were true, as some commentators like to imagine,

that the crows swarming off into the blue sky in this painting had

been startled by the painter's own rifle shot, Van Gogh will have

achieved something that both Simonides and Paul Celan would

commend. He has painted his own epitaph. It seems appropriate

then that a poet should have reinscribed this epitaph in language so

exact that it makes visible the point where yes and no are written

on the world unsplit, makes audible the sound of a soul being deserted by its body.

NOTES

1. R. P. Austin, The Stoichedon Style In Greek Inscriptions (New York 1973),

104,111. 2. W. Woodhead, The Study Of Greek Inscriptions (Cambridge 1959), 89-90.

3. Austin (note 1), 1.







7. J. M. Bell, "Kimbix kai sophos: Simonides in the ancient anecdotal tradition,"

QUCC 28 (1978), 29-86.

8.Woodhead(note2),28. 9.1 owe this design to Robert W. Connor doodling. 10. P. Bourdieu, "La lecture: une pratique culturelle," in R. Chartier, Pratiques

de la lecture (Marseilles 1985); P. Chantraine, "Les verbes grecs signifiant 'lire,'"

M?langes Gr?goire II (Brussels 1950), 110-31; B. M. W. Knox, "Silent Reading In

Antiquity," GRBS 9 (1968), 421-35; G. Nagy, "Sema and no?sis: some illustra

tions," Arethusa 16 (1983), 35-55.; J. Svenbro, Phrasikleia: anthropologie de la lec

ture en Gr?ce ancienne (Paris 1988).

11. It is fashionable to interpret this relationship between written text and read

er's voice as a "question of power" (Bourdieu in Chartier [note 10], 235; Svenbro

[note 10], 53) wherein the reader is dispossessed of his own voice in order to facili

tate realization of the inscription, or even as a "point neuralgique" (Svenbro [note

10], 207) whose structure replicates the p?d?rastie model of dominance and submis

sion that is presently seen to inform so many aspects of the ancient Greek cultural

experiment. "La voix se soumettre ? la trace ?crite," says Svenbro and characterizes

the reader's "service" to the writer by direct analogy with the homosexual act of

love and its dark emotions of use. "Lire, c'est pr?ter son corps ? un scripteur peut

?tre inconnu, pour faire r?sonner des paroles '?trang?res,' 'd'autrui,' allotrioi"

(213). The remarkable humourlessness of this line of interpretation seems to belie

not only the terms in which the ancients themselves speak of written works of art

(e.g., poi?ma, kosmos, charis) but also the spirit of freedom in which artists like

Simonides play through the possibilities of meaning available conjointly to writer

and reader within a piece of language. Perhaps exchange of power need not always mean abuse of power. Meaning, after all, exists to be exchanged.

12. Vit. Aesch. 119.

13. Inst. Or. 10.1.64.

14. See D. L. Page, Further Greek Epigrams (Cambridge 1981), 200.

15. P. Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, trans. M. Hamburger (New York 1988), 78-9.

16. Quoting Malebranche; Celan (note 15), 31.

17. But the poem is so strange that completeness, authenticity and genre remain

in dispute. "Manifesto mutilatum" (Bergk); "of course not a fragment" (Wilamo

witz); Page (note 14), 295.

18. M. Meiss, Giotto andAssisi (New York 1960), 6; see also M. Barasch, Giotto

and the Language Of Gesture (Cambridge 1987), 42-4; H. Trost, Giotto (Berlin

1964), 26 and pi. 20.

19. An overview of the archaeological evidence for the statues of Harmodios and

Aristogeiton as well as further bibliography may be found in H. A. Thompson and

R. E. Wycherly, The Athenian Agora: Volume 14, The Agora of Athens: The His

tory, Shape and Uses of an Ancient City Center (Princeton 1972). For more detailed

studies see S. Brunnsaker, The Tyrant Slayer ofKritios and Nesiotes (Lund 1955);

M. N. Taylor, The Tyrant Slayers: The Heroic Image in the Fifth Century B.c.

(New York 1981). Ancient testimonia for the statue group is collected in R. E.

Wycherly, The Athenian Agora: Volume 3, Literary and Epigraphical Testimonia

(Princeton 1957), 93-8.

20. See Plato Hipp. 228a; the Parian marble A 45; Attic skolia 893-96 PMG.



Anne Carson 25

21. Thuc. 6.54ff; Page (note 14), 186-88.

22. If Page is correct that the monument was erected during the period when the

Alkmaionid Kleisthenes had been driven out of Athens by his rival Isagoras (508/

7): see Page (14), 187.

23. The monument was removed from Athens to Persia in 480, then replaced with a new monument and reinscribed in 477/6: Pausanias 1.8.5; Pliny NH 34.70.

It is not known whether the present epigram, ascribed to Simonides by Hephais

tion, was composed for the first or the second monument.

24. Page (note 14), 188. See also M. Van Raalte, Rhythm and Metre: Towards a

Systematic Description of Greek Stichic Verse (Assen 1986), 64; R. Kassel, "Names

In Verse," ZPE 19 (1975), 211-18.

25. G. M. Richter, The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks (New Haven

1930), 200-1.

26. B. D. Meritt, "Greek Inscriptions," Hesperia 5 (1936), 355-56y believes this

stone to be from the base of the second monument (477 Be) with an inscription cop ied from the original (510 BC) base.

27. P. Celan, Last Poems, trans. K. Washburn and M. Guillemin (San Francisco

1986), 118-19.

28. "Schwerkraft" in R. M. Rilke, S?mtliche Werke, vol. 2, (Wiesbaden 1963), 179.

29. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter, (New York

1971), 80; see also 141-42.

30.1. Calvino, Six Memos For The Next Millenium (Cambridge, Mass. 1988), 56.

31. Plutarch, Mor. 644f.

32. Heidegger (note 29), 209.

33. Celan (note 15), 343.

34. Celan (note 15), 98-9.

35. Celan (note 27), xxviii.

36. Celan (note 15), 22.

37. Celan (note 15), 322-23.

38. Celan (note 15), 231.

39. A. Carson, "Simonides Negative," Arethusa 21 (1988), 147-57.

40. Heidegger would like us to think of the Greek word for truth, al?theia, as

derived from concepts of "uncovering" or "exposure." 41. Celan (note 15), 266-67.

42. Celan (note 15), 224-25.

43. Celan (note 15), 334-35.

44. Still tricked out in red, the dative of exactitude reappears in Rudyard Kip

ling's account of German positions at the beginning of the British attack on the

Somme: "Here the enemy had sat for two years, looking down upon France and

daily strengthening himself. His trebled and quadrupled lines of defense, worked

for him by his prisoners, ran below and along the flanks and on the tops of ranges of five-hundred-foot downs. Some of these were studded with close woods, dead

lier even than the fortified villages between them; some cut with narrowing valleys that drew machine gun fire as chimneys draw draughts; some opening into broad,

seemingly smooth slopes, whose very haunch and hollow covered sunk forts, care

fully placed mine fields, machine gun pits, gigantic quarries. . . . Belt upon belt of

fifty-yard deep wire protected these points, either directly or at such angles as




should herd and hold up attacking infantry to the fire of veiled guns. Nothing in the

entire system had been neglected or unforeseen, except knowledge of the nature of

the men who, in due time, should wear their red way through every yard of it." Kip

ling's chill professional description gathers, like Simonides' epigram, to a single hot

red drop of pathos. See P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford

1975), 172, who finds the irony in such a passage to be wholly and uniquely "mod

ern," that is, invented by World War 1.1 wonder.

45. Page (note 14), 272.

46. Myth.Vat. 3.27 Mai; fr. 138E.

47. Aristides, peri paraphthegmatos 2.513.

48. Celan (note 15), 106-7.



Documents

Writing on the World: Simonides, Exactitude and Paul Celan