Collected Prose

it is her fate never to be believed. Madwoman, the daughter of Priam: “the shrieks of that ill-omened bird” from whom “… sounds of woe / Burst dreadful, as she chewed the laurel leaf, / And ever and anon, like the black Sphinx, / Poured the full tide of enigmatic song.” (Lycophron’s Cassandra ; in Royston’s translation, 1806). To speak of the future is to use a language that is forever ahead of itself, consigning things that have not yet happened to the past, to an “already” that is forever behind itself, and in this space between utterance and act, word after word, a chasm begins to open, and for one to contemplate such emptiness for any length of time is to grow dizzy, to feel oneself falling into the abyss.
    A. remembers the excitement he felt in Paris in 1974, when he discovered the seventeen-hundred line poem by Lycophron (circa 300 B.C.), which is a monologue of Cassandra’s ravings in prison before the fall of Troy. He came to the poem through a translation into French by Q., a writer just his own age (twenty-four). Three years later, when he got together with Q. in a cafe on the rue Condé, he asked him whether he knew of any translations of the poem into English. Q. himself did not read or speak English, but yes, he had heard of one, by a certain Lord Royston at the beginning of the nineteenth century. When A. returned to New York in the summer of 1974, he went to the Columbia University library to look for the book. Much to his surprise, he found it. Cassandra, translated from the original Greek of Lycophron and illustrated with notes ; Cambridge, 1806.
    This translation was the only work of any substance to come from the pen of Lord Royston. He had completed the translation while still an undergraduate at Cambridge and had published the poem himself in a luxurious private edition. Then he had gone on the traditional continental tour following his graduation. Because of the Napoleonic tumult in France, he did not head south—which would have been the natural route for a young man of his interests—but instead went north, to the Scandinavian countries, and in 1808, while traveling through the treacherous waters of the Baltic Sea, drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of Russia. He was just twenty-four years old.
    Lycophron: “the obscure.” In his dense, bewildering poem, nothing is ever named, everything becomes a reference to something else. One is quickly lost in the labyrinth of its associations, and yet one continues to run through it, propelled by the force of Cassandra’s voice. The poem is a verbal outpouring, breathing fire, consumed by fire, which obliterates itself at the edge of sense. “Cassandra’s word,” as a friend of A.’s put it (B.: in a lecture, curiously enough, about Hölderlin’s poetry—a poetry which he compares in manner to Cassandra’s speech), “this irreducible sign— deutungslos —a word beyond grasping, Cassandra’s word, a word from which no lesson is to be drawn, a word, each time, and every time, spoken to say nothing….”
    After reading through Royston’s translation, A. realized that a great talent had been lost in that shipwreck. Royston’s English rolls along with such fury, such deft and acrobatic syntax, that to read the poem is to feel yourself trapped inside Cassandra’s mouth.

line 240
An oath! they have an oath in heaven!
 
Soon shall their sail be spread, and in their hands
 
The strong oar quivering cleave the refluent wave;
 
While songs, and hymns, and carols jubilant
 
Shall charm the rosy God, to whom shall rise,
 
Rife from Apollo’s Delphic shrine, the smoke
 
Of numerous holocausts: Well pleased shall hear
 
Enorches, where the high-hung taper’s light
 
Gleams on his dread carousals, and when forth
 
The Savage rushes on the corny field
 
Mad to destroy, shall bid his vines entwist
 
His sinewy strength, and hurl them to the ground.
 
* 
line 426
… then Greece
 
For this one crime, aye for this one, shall weep
 
Myriads of sons: no funeral urn, but rocks
 
Shall hearse their bones; no friends upon their dust
 
Shall pour the dark libations of the dead;
 
A name, a breath, an empty sound remains,
 
A fruitless marble warm with bitter tears
 
Of sires, and orphan babes, and widowed wives!
 
*
line 1686
Why pour the fruitless strain? to winds, and waves,
 
Deaf winds, dull waves, and senseless shades of woods
 
I chaunt, and sing mine unavailing song.
 
Such woes has Lepsieus heaped upon my