[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]
After a year in which so many colleagues have insisted that Classics is not political, while others have been called fascists for insisting that it is, it was jarring to read the introductory essay to Brill’s Companion to Classical Reception and Modern World Poetry, which explicitly uses Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 (pp. 2, 3) to situate the volume within current discussions on the use of classics and classical reception in our contemporary “mean-spirited time” (p. 2).[1] In place of a discursive essay, however, Polina Tambakaki offers a series of “snapshots” (p. 9) of persons, texts, and events that proceed by association (etymological, temporal, etc.) and that are intended to intimate at the key themes and questions of the book “in a more polyphonic way” (p. 9) than a formulaic series of definitions of the volume’s key terms: the “classical”, “classical traditions”, the “twentieth century”, the “West” (p. 9). This style can be frustrating for the reader, particularly given the high stakes of the debate into which the volume seeks to insert itself. The snapshots are never explicitly deployed in service of an argument, and much is implied but never explained; indeed, the implications of the volume’s opening vignette are likely not the ones intended. After raising Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Tambakaki notes that this context prompted Edith Hall to publish a blog post two days later (26 February 2022) on Ukrainian feminist poet Lesya Ukrainka (1871-1913) and her adaptation of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris (p. 4). Tambakaki then links this blog post to an event at the British Library, which celebrated, in part, a new translation of Ukrainka’s Cassandra, and which aimed to situate Ukrainka “‘firmly in the European literary canon’” (p. 4):[2]
Ukrainka’s case study straddles the chronological boundaries of the present volume: from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century (when Ukrainka lived and wrote her poetry, through a long period with many political and cultural watersheds (during which Ukrainka’s name was given to national libraries in many cities in Ukraine) until today (when Ukrainka’s work has emerged in both the fields of Classical Reception and World Literature, while the Ukrainka Library in Mariupol has, in all probability, been destroyed). At the same time, her case poses a key question: how does a poet come to be regarded as a member of the world literary community? (pp. 4-5)
The answer immediately offered is “cosmopolitanism” (p. 5), after Kwame Anthony Appiah (via the Greek Cynics), a characteristic the Introduction associates with both the classicist (p. 3) and the classical reception practitioner (p. 6).[3] We are then told that the archetype for Appiah’s cosmopolite is Victorian Orientalist Richard Francis Burton, a figure who encapsulates the cosmopolitan’s global travel, multilingualism in modern and ancient languages, and learnedness. This example concludes with the observation that “[q]uestions of traveling and exile crop up in all chapters of the volume” (p. 6).
Yet the case study of Ukrainka offers a second, grim answer to the question posed above, one that positions classicists as the arbiters of entry to this “world literary community” and a classical reception case study as the price of entry. In contrast to the current silence of classicists on Israel’s invasion of Palestine, a country whose history and archaeology classicists know intimately, the case study thus also supplies an object lesson in how the political and scholarly engagements of classicists remain circumscribed by the discipline’s Orientalism.[4] It is instructive to read Appiah’s description of the Orientalist Burton in context, which concludes that Burton, undoubted scholar and irredeemable racist, is “a standing refutation… to those who imagine that prejudice derives only from ignorance, that intimacy must breed amity”.[5] (Edward Said’s assessment of Burton reminds us that the European system of ‘knowledge about the Orient… becomes synonymous with European domination of the Orient’).[6] The implications for the “cosmopolite” classicist seem clear; and the Introduction fails to imagine what it might mean for classicists to practice cosmopolitanism as Appiah defined it—as an ethics—in this “mean-spirited time”.
The individual contributions, however, contain many nuanced analyses of cultural, political, and social power, poetic agency, the ongoing legacies of colonialism, and the ideological instrumentalization of the “sign” of classics (after Waquet 2001).[7] What follows is an overview of the volume as a collection, with highlights from a selection of the individual chapters.
The volume centers on the reception of Graeco-Roman antiquity in “modern” (p. 9) “world poetry” composed predominantly between the 1890s and 1960s, with a few more contemporary comparanda. While the chapters “are arranged not thematically or geographically, but in alphabetical order based on the English name of the language in which the poems discussed in each chapter have been written” (p. 1), themes and groupings do emerge. Chapters 1 (DeYoung; Arabic), 2 (Yeh; Chinese), 8 (Ticotsky; Hebrew), and 11 (Bonaddio; Spanish), for example, foreground the syncretism of world and local cultural and mythological traditions in works of reception; chapters 3 (Rankine; the sonnet) and 4 (Vandiver; Sapphic and tragic meters) share technical and metrical concerns (reception as an engagement with classical forms); chapters 8 (Ticotsky; Hebrew), 9 (Gardini; Italian) and 11 (Bonaddio; Spanish) discuss classicism as it interacts with nationalism; chapters 1 (DeYoung; archaeological ruins in the Middle East), 6 (Louth; Rilke’s aqueducts), 7 (Tambakaki; Seferis and Keats’ ekphrastic poetry), and 11 (Bonaddio; Lorca and the ruins of Roman Andalusia) foreground material intertexts; while chapters 8 (Ticotsky; Hebrew) and 10 (Yatsuhashi; Japanese) document classicizing ekphrastic “firsts” in their respective literary traditions. Five chapters (2, 6, 7, 10, and 11) provide single-author studies; three chapters (1, 8, and 9) provide surveys of Greco-Roman classical reception in a particular linguistic tradition; and the remaining three chapters—3 (Rankine; socially-oriented poets of the Black Atlantic, English), 4 (Vandiver; the Imagists, English), and 5 (James, Presocratic French poetics)—survey groups of poets writing in a shared language with a shared thematic interest. Tambakaki also draws out and neatly weaves through the Introduction the shared themes of all the chapters, showcasing the coherence of the volume’s varied essays: language and identity, “we” and “the others” (p. 6), time and space, presences and absences, specificity and universality, material culture, and translation (passim); the Anglophone Modernists Eliot and Pound also recur as touchstones in all but one chapter (3).
As the Introduction concedes, “[t]he great majority of poets dealt with in the present volume are men… from middle-class backgrounds” (pp. 22-23), many of whom were educated either at elite institutions in the US and UK or at British colonial institutions, and who were familiar with Latin (p. 23). The main exception may be found in Chapter 3, where Rankine discusses a number of Black women poets, from Phillis Wheatley to Rita Dove and Ruth Ellen Kocher; H.D. [Hilda Doolittle], Lea Goldberg, and Giovanna Bemporad appear in chapters 4 (Vandiver, English), 8 (Ticotsky, Hebrew), and 9 (Gardini, Italian), respectively. This comment could usefully have been supplemented by some reflection on the implications of this limitation for the volume’s claims for relevance and significance.
DeYoung’s chapter (1) begins by sketching a brief history of oblique correspondences with and rejections of Graeco-Roman literature in Arabic literature from the sixth to fifteenth centuries CE, before turning to the rapid shift towards explicit engagement in the late nineteenth century, a shift accelerated, in part, by the French and British occupations across the MENA region and the fixing of canonical Graeco-Roman works in colonial education (p. 55). DeYoung shows how Egyptian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian, and Iraqi poets all “counter[ed] such initiatives by laying claim to a cultural heritage whose physical reminders were clearly visible around them” (p. 56; also p. 61). At the same time, Arabic poets’ engagement with ancient Graeco-Roman texts “clearly transcends the limitations of a mere tactical interest in opposing the practices of colonialist discourse” (p. 57), with the Arabic Modernists blending “Ancient Sumerian myths, Jewish, Christian and Muslim symbols, Arab folklore, Indian myth, Sufi mystical tales, heroic figures from Islamic and European history… alongside Greek and Roman gods in a drama of death and rebirth that appears in poem after poem” (p. 66).
Yeh’s chapter (2) offers a focused study of Taiwanese poet Yang Mu [the pen name of Wang Ching-hsien], and proposes a theoretical framework of “cross-cultural intertextuality, creative rewriting, and cultural translation” (p. 83) that brings into focus how the artfulness of Yang’s allusions to Pindar and Virgil—which often also bring that which is marginal in the original sources to the fore—is informed by the Chinese classical tradition (pp. 99, 102, 109). Paying attention to Yang’s “Modernist historical sense” (p. 83), Yeh also shows how Yang uses images that evoke the Aeneid in his poem “Virgil” (1975)—“I rest my head on Virgil and | hear the burning and fall of citadels”—to contemplate “the choice between art and activism” (p. 95) as he observes the burgeoning democracy movement in Taiwan from his established position in American academia (p. 94).
After carefully parsing the terms of his chapter (poetry; the Black poet; the Black poet and the classics), Rankine (Chapter 3) thinks with the Black Atlantic—after Paul Gilroy, on that deadly triangle of relationships within which new cultural artefacts appear—to analyse the “constant tension that Black Atlantic authors express vis-à-vis the classical form, that of whether poetry itself can bear witness to Blackness” (p. 114). As Rankine shows, inter alia, the poets of the Black Atlantic contend with and confound a classicizing, racializing readerly gaze (pp. 128, 130) with an abundance of poetic strategies. While Jamaican dub and performance poet Mbala stages his “aware[ness] of other forms—Dadaism, but also the rhapsodist of ancient Greek epic—but chooses something else” (p. 124), Ruth Ellen Kocher, in a breathtaking poem, “Response to Pasiphae” (2006), moves the myth of Pasiphae into a wholly “new framework” (p. 134). Kocher reworks the myth’s theme of a consuming obsession as metaphors for the social realities of addiction and incarceration (pp. 132–135).
Vandiver (Chapter 4) offers a technical analysis (and demolition) of the Imagists’ “repeated claim that their vers libre reflected the meters of Greek lyric poetry and tragic choruses” (p. 142); James (Chapter 5) tracks the conjunction of visual figuration and Presocratic thought in postwar French poetry; and Louth (Chapter 6) examines Rilke’s engagement with material culture and his imagery of aqueducts as “channels leading back to antiquity” (p. 234); while Tambakaki (Chapter 7) discusses new material from Seferis’ archive (letters, journals, manuscripts), alongside the poems, essays, and translations, to revisit his engagement with Keats’ Hellenism. Ticotsky (Chapter 8) documents Hebrew poetry’s encounters with Graeco-Roman literatures and cultures, from “polarized relations” between the fourth centuries BCE and CE to syncretic and “symbiotic interactions” (p. 297) in the twentieth century; while Gardini (Chapter 9) surveys the complexities of the classical legacy in Italy, from classicism’s intertwining with nationalism and Fascism, to the embrace of Greek tragedy by the 1960s and 1970s avant-garde (p. 357–359).
In Chapter 10, Yatsuhashi reassesses Nishiwaki Junzaburō’s “translations” of Catullus in his Ambarvalia (1933). Focusing on the poem “Catullus”, Yatsuhashi reveals the poem’s bricolage of Catullus and Tibullus, arguing that Nishiwaki’s experimental “‘translatory’ acts” create “a new form of literary Japanese full of lexical oddities, atypical syntax, and foreign loan words” “to articulate and promote a new kind of Japanese poetry” (p. 365). Nishiwaki erases the famous “confessional” voice of Catullus and replaces it with “artificial, non-natural, and ironical imagist poetics” in a poetic manifesto that also exemplifies the new poetry (p. 390). Finally, Bonaddio (Chapter 11) revisits the work of Federico García Lorca, arguing that Lorca’s “engagement with classical culture serves—indeed legitimizes—a specifically local agenda” (p. 394). Bonaddio shows how Lorca’s focus on the Andalusian roots of classical culture “stands in defiance of the cultural appropriations of the hegemonic north, be it Castile or Northern Europe, including its claims to exclusivity when it comes to defining the idea of modernity” (p. 396). A brief “Afterword” by A. E. Stallings reflects on the subject of the volume in relation to her own childhood encounters with classical reception and translation, and their subsequent influence on her own poetry.
The volume is well-edited and well-presented throughout, with all quotations provided in their original language and script, as well as in English translation, creating “a visual disruption of the dominant English text” (p. 2). The individual essays will be useful additions to many reception studies reading lists, and of interest to a broad range of scholars and students of classical reception and comparative literature.
Authors and Titles
Introduction: Modern World Poetry and the Graeco-Roman Reception. Themes and Approaches, Polina Tambakaki
- On Modern Arabic Poetry and the Graeco-Roman Classical Tradition, Terri L. DeYoung
- “Deeply Chiseled in a Calligraphic Style”: Graeco-Roman Appropriations and Modernist Historical Sense in Yang Mu’s Poetry, Michelle Yeh
- Black Poetry and the Classics: A Primer to the Power of Language, Patrice Rankine
- “A Group of Ardent Hellenists”: The Imagists, Greek Meter, and Making It New, Elizabeth Vandiver
- The Exalting Alliance: Presocratic Poetics in Twentieth-Century France, Alison James
- “der Aquädukte Herkunft”: Rilke and the Uses of Antiquity, Charlie Louth
- George Seferis Reads John Keats: Defending “Greek Hellenism” and the Question of the Renaissance, Language and Locality, Polina Tambakaki
- Belated Return: The Encounter of Modern Hebrew Poetry with the Graeco-Roman Classics, Giddon Ticotsky
- Italy’s Long-Standing Classical Vocation: Lyric Poetry in the Twentieth Century, Nicola Gardini
- Reimagining Catullan Poetics in Modern(ist) Japan: Nishiwaki’s Ambarvalia and “Translatory” Acts, Akira V. Yatsuhashi
- Andalusia and Antiquity: Classical Culture in the Poetry of Federico García Lorca, Federico Bonaddio
Afterword, A. E. Stallings
Notes
[1] The full phrase, “And what is the use of poets in a mean-spirited time?”, taken from Hölderlin’s Bread and Wine, lends an epigraph to George Seferis’ Logbook I (1940), discussed in Tambakaki’s chapter (p. 279).
[2] Edith Hall (2022), “The Founding Mother of Ukrainian Literature’s rousing Identification with Iphigenia”, The Edithorial, 26 February. https://edithorial.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-founding-mother-of-ukrainian.html
[3] Kwame Anthony Appiah (2006), Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton).
[4] On classicism building a “family relationship” between colonial powers, see Marchella Ward (2023), “On Tragedy and Occupation”, ReOrient, 10 November. https://criticalmuslimstudies.co.uk/project/on-tragedy-and-occupation/
[5] Appiah (2006: 8).
[6] Edward Said (2003 [1978]), Orientalism (London: Penguin), p. 197.
[7] Françoise Waquet (2001), Latin, or, The Empire of a Sign, trans. John Howe (London: Verso).