My Year With Proust - Day 269

The people of bygone ages seem infinitely remote from us.  We do not feel justified in ascribing to them any underlying intentions beyond those they formally express; we are amazed when we come up a sentiment more or less akin to what we feel to-day in a Homeric hero, or a skillful tactical feint by Hannibal during the battle of Cannae . . .

   This imagined remoteness of the past is perhaps one of the things that may enable us to understand how even great writers have found an inspired beauty in the works of mediocre mystifiers such as Ossian.  We are so astonished that bards long dead should have modern ideas that we marvel if in what we believe to be an ancient Gaelic ode we come across one which we should have thought at most ingenious in a contemporary.  A translator of talent has only to add to an ancient writer whom he is reconstructing more or less faithfully a few passages which, signed with a contemporary name and published separately, would seem agreeable merely; at once he imparts a moving grandeur to his poet, who is thus made to play upon the keyboards of several ages at once.  The translator was capable of only of a mediocre book, if that book had been published in his original form.  Offered as a translation, it seems a masterpiece.  The past is not fugitive, it stays put.

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, p. 433

I've commented before about how - and this clearly says something bad about me - I've always felt closer to historical or literary figures than to my own family.  There was a time when I could easily name all the monarchs of England or the officials who worked under Elizabeth Tudor or the main characters in the Iliad than I could my own cousins.  Sadly, I guess this has never changed.  As I read the passage above I reflected back upon Book Six, "Interludes in Field and City," from Homer's Iliad, and found that I could still remember it freshly and vividly, and not simply because I've been working, endlessly,on my long-delayed book on the epics.  Rather, for some reason it always seemed more real and alive to me than so much of my own life.

Andromakhe to Hektor:

"Oh, my wild one, your bravery will be
your own undoing! No pity for our child,
poor little one, or me in my sad lot -
soon to be deprived of you!  soon, soon
Akhaians as one man will set upon you
and cut you down! Better for me, without you,
to take cold earth for mantle.  No more comfort,
no other warmth, after you meet your doom,
but heartbreak only . . .

Hektor's response:

"Lady, these many things beset my mind
no less than yours.  But I should die of shame
before our Trojan men and noblewomen
if like a coward I avoided battle,
nor am I moved to.  Long ago I learned
how to be brave, how to go forward always
and to contend for honor.  Father's and mine.
Honor - for in my heart and soul I know
a day will come when ancient Ilion falls,
when Priam and the folk of Priam perish. . . .

                   . . . Unquiet soul, do not be too distressed
by thoughts of me.  You know no man dispatches me
into the undergloom against my fate;
no mortal, either, can escape his fate,
coward or brave man, once he comes to be.
Go home, attend to your own handiwork
at loom and spindle, and command the maids
to busy themselves, too.  As for the war,
that is for men, all who were born at Ilion,
to put their minds on - most of all for me."

Hektor is visiting his wife Andromakhe for the last time, stealing away from the battlefield.  The love and fear and pain and over-arching impending doom is so tangible.  One of these days I'll sort out why this seems to real to me, and my own life seems so vague and unreal.