London Grip Poetry Review – David Constantine

Poetry review – A BIRD CALLED ELAEUS: Edmund Prestwich admires David Constantine’s contemporary renderings of selections from an anthology spanning some 2000 years of Greek poetry

A Bird Called Elaeus
David Constantine
Bloodaxe
ISBN: 9781780377223
112pp    £12

David Constantine’s A Bird Called Elaeus has the subtitle ‘poems for here and now from The Greek Anthology’. The Greek Anthology itself is a huge collection of short Greek poems written in pre-classical, classical, Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods. Although part of my pleasure in this selection relates to my amateur interest in the worlds of ancient Greece, I recommend it above all for the brilliance with which its translations bring those worlds and their poetry to life. I believe people with little or no existing interest in ancient Greek writing will be won over by these versions’ beauty and force.

Diane Rayor is a scholar whose translations have given me great pleasure. Comparing her and Constantine’s versions of a poem by Anyte of Tegea seems to me to throw Constantine’s quality into sharp relief. In Sappho’s Lyre: Archaic Lyric and Women Poets of Ancient Greece, Rayor renders it like this:

I, Hermes, stand here by the windy tree-lined
crossroads near the white coastal water,
sheltering men weary from the road –
my fountain murmurs cold and clear.

Constantine has:

I, Hermes, stand here by a row of windswept trees
Where three roads meet near the grey shore.
Tired wayfarers, this is a place of ease
And the spring gives water that is cold and clear.

The last line of Diane Rayor’s version beautifully captures the graceful simplicity and feeling for elemental realities that is one of the pleasures of reading the better Greek lyric poetry in a good translation. Overall, though, Constantine seems to me to have a clear edge. His version leaps off the page from the beginning. Each line makes a complete, vivid impression in itself, and the third gives dramatic immediacy to the idea of the tired wayfarers by addressing the reader as one of them. His rhythms are marvellously expressive too, as we see again in his rendering of another poem by Anyte:

Here Kypris stands for she is pleased to be
On land a watcher of the shining sea
And helper of those who sail it. From her bright face,
Wherever she turns, the light shivers the surface. 

The movement of the lines beautifully paces out and amplifies the release of meaning. I wondered for a moment how line two gives such a strong impression of looking out into radiant space, at the sea’s brightness stretching out from the land; then I realised that it involves the way the line end pauses before ‘on land’ and after ‘shining sea’ emphasise those two phrases and make the whole line consist of an imaginary movement out from the land over the sea. Contrasting with the way this line unfolds in a single iambic sweep, line four is broken between two clauses, with four amphibrachs replacing the five iambs in each of the first two lines. Doubling the unstressed syllables between the stresses, this builds a little tremor or hesitation into the rhythm, giving body to the idea of the water’s shivering. The whole poem is spaced out between pauses in a way that allows ideas and associations to grow in the reader’s mind. ‘Kypris’ is a name for Aphrodite, the goddess of love (it’s a pity that there aren’t notes giving background information of that kind) and one of her functions was to protect sailors by giving smooth seas. Here, a statue of Aphrodite is being talked of as if it were the goddess herself. ‘She is pleased to be’ uses language befitting her divine status. The last line and a half superbly capture the awe her power and beauty inspire. The effect isn’t simple though. Awe includes terror, as the word ‘shivers’ implies.

For each poem he’s translated, Constantine gives a reference to its position in the 1918 Loeb edition of The Greek Anthology, with translations by W. R. Paton. He does this in a low-key way, using a very small font to avoid interrupting poetic involvement. Comparing Paton’s prose rendering of a poem by Satyrus with Constantine’s version is interesting. Paton gives it like this:

Already the moist breath of Zephyr, who giveth birth to the grass, falls gently on the flowery

meads. The daughters of Cecrops call, the becalmed sea smiles, untroubled by the cold winds.

Be of good heart, ye sailors, loose your hawsers and spread out the delicate folds of your ships’

wings.  Go to trade trusting in gracious Priapus,  go obedient to the harbour god.

Constantine like this:

Zephyrus, begetter of grass, now moistens
The meadows into flowers with his breath.
The arriving swallows swap stories of life and death.
In the warmer sun the sea smiles and quietens. 
Go then, take heart, cast off the cables, spread
Wide the wings of your sails. Priapus, god
Of the waterfront, ushers us out to trade
The little we can spare for the much we need. 

Paton’s version is pleasant in its own quaint way, but archaic language makes the scene it evokes seem remote and merely pretty. Constantine weaves ceremoniously heightened language and colloquial immediacy together, drawing on their complementary strengths, creating a dynamic interplay in which each element both feeds on and feeds the other. In his version almost the whole poem is alive with changing tones and suggestions. The idea of Zephyrus as begetting grass tunes our imaginations to a way of seeing the world as a pagan Greek might have done, as pervaded and fertilised by divine energies. In a sense, of course, that idea is present in Paton’s version but it’s the sensuousness and touches of colloquial immediacy in Constantine’s that give it body. Notably, Constantine allows Zephyrus his clearly masculine role as begetter, where Paton oddly makes him give birth to grass, as if he were its mother. Within the phrase ‘Zephyrus, begetter of grass’ there’s a delightful little modulation of tone. ‘Zephyrus, begetter’ sounds grand. ‘Of grass’ comes beautifully down to earth in what may initially seem like an anticlimax but on reflection isn’t, because grass is so fundamental to life. Reverence for life is suggested by the almost breathtaking loveliness of sound and image in ‘moistens / The meadows into flowers with his breath’ and ‘In the warmer sun the sea smiles and quietens.’ The word ‘reverence’ shouldn’t take on misleading connotations, though. This is an essentially pagan reverence, as the eroticizing of nature’s processes in the personification of wind and sea imply. Such intense lyricism and the homeliness of ‘swap stories’ complement and underwrite each other, making one feel how the beauty is in touch with and grows out of ordinary life.

Explaining his procedures in an introduction, Constantine says he has ‘quite often taken the liberty of bringing already urgent poems closer to home and our accelerating drift towards the Sixth Extinction.’ We see this in the last line of the poem, though with a focus on economic pressure rather than ecology. Some people will particularly like this line for the sharpness with which it makes its point. I imagine that it would work very well in a public reading, where simple, clear-cut expression is needed to gather the audience round a shared response. However, I must say that as a private reader I find it disappointing: the very explicitness with which it expresses a stance that I share deadens the living, shifting flow of responses that’s come before. In the first seven lines I have a continuous sense of expanding emotional and imaginative horizons. In line 8 I’m thrown back on what I take for granted. Many readers will no doubt like its challenging political explicitness. To me, it comes as a sledgehammer after the subtlety with which Constantine has suffused the rest of the poem with awareness that the halcyon weather the speaker now celebrates is a temporary respite from the hardships and dangers of the seafarer’s life, making it necessary for a sailor to ‘take heart’ before committing himself to sail.

The final section of the book – its ‘Coda’ – consists of two sequences of quatrains directly addressing issues of war and ecocide in the present. Drawing inspiration from Brecht’s War Primer as well as from The Greek Anthology, these poems are radically didactic in intention. They’re also highly impressive. Instead of feeling a sense of deflation, as I did when a didactic ending was grafted onto an imaginatively open-ended and expansive body, I was impressed by the imaginative richness of their build-up to the final punch and by the metrical skill and fine sense of timing that I found in them. “Laws of War” is an example:

We too had laws of war: don’t poison wells
Don’t fell the olive trees (they take so long to grow)
Don’t bomb the schools, don’t bomb the hospitals …
Stranger seeking our monument, look around you.

There’s no need to know that ‘We too had laws of war’ recalls Yeats’ line in “Meditations in Time of Civil War”, ‘We too had many pretty toys when young’, or that the last line ironically recalls Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph, but such allusions deepen the power of the poem if you do spot them.