Doing without consolation

Tamil poetry, Yeats and Simone Weil

I write a lot about reading in other languages, but anyone reading widely sometimes relies on translations and finds themselves working backwards from the strangeness of a translated text to imagine something about the language and literature of the original. This week I was particularly struck by two related poems at the very end of an old Princeton University Press edition of Poems of the Tamil Anthologies: Ancient Poems of Love and War, edited by the rather wonderfully named George L. Hart, III (the third! These American names with Roman numerals always seem so exotic to my British ears).¹ The book was published back in 1979 as part of the Princeton Library of Asian Translations, but I own one of the quite affordable Princeton Legacy Library reprints, chosen a bit randomly with a great bundle of other things a couple of years ago when Princeton were paying me in books for a reader’s report.

Here is the first poem, both of which are from the anthology Puranānūru.

With the tip of his spear,

the king wipes the sweat from his forehead

and curses.

And her father curses back,

without one kind word to say.

Such is their state.

That lovely dark woman,

her teeth sharp,

her lined eyes cool and glistening,

like a little fire kindled in a tree,

has become a scourge to the city she was born in.²

The second poem seems to describe the same scenario, which is summarised by the editor as: ‘the consequences of a lovely and high-born girl’s attaining puberty. She becomes the object of desire of a king or kings, and when her people will not give her to him, he attacks her city to take her by force.’

The moats are silted up,

the battlements weak,

the walls falling down.

What will become of our ancient town,

scarred as it is?

It cannot withstand a siege.

Their drums beating like thunder with falling rains,

their horses swift,

kings came in the morning

and roam about our towering gate.

Nor will her brothers be happy without a fight,

for they have the will and the strength to kill.

Her red eyes, blackened with collyrium,

seem sharp-bladed spears held high in the thick of battle.

Bangles slide on her young wrists.

And her lovely breasts are flushed with the spots of puberty.³

Tamil is a Dravidian language, structured quite differently from languages in the Indo-European family to which Latin, Greek and Sanskrit — as well as Russian, French and English, for instance — all belong. But, though I hope to learn some one day, I don’t have any Tamil, and I know very little about its literature.⁴ As I don’t know any language from this family, I can’t even really guess at the texture of the original. Some aspects of the imagery and expression of some of the poems in the anthology remind me of Sanskrit poetry I have read, though in which direction the influence runs I am not sure.

The most obvious parallel to these two pieces, though, is the story that stands behind the Iliad, of the abduction of Helen and the siege of Troy to secure her return. The way this text specifies a very young girl, just coming into puberty, reminded me in particular of the glimpse of Helen in Yeats’ ‘Long-Legged Fly’, a poem that has always stayed with me partly because I read it for the first time when I was myself just on the cusp of adolescence. Here the ‘topless towers’ are those of Troy:

That the topless towers be burnt

And men recall that face,

Move most gently if move you must

In this lonely place.

She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,

That nobody looks; her feet

Practise a tinker shuffle

Picked up on the street.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

Her mind moves upon silence⁵

The Fall of Troy by Johann Georg Trautmann (1713–1769).

The overlap with the scenario of the Iliad gave me a way into these particular Tamil poems, despite the strangeness (to me) of their detail. But they also struck me because they connected unexpectedly to a sentence from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace which I’ve been puzzling over this week:

To love God through and across the destruction of Troy and of Carthage — and with no consolation. Love is not consolation, it is light.⁶

Gravity and Grace is a collection of semi-separate sentences or aphorisms organised into titled sections. This sentence is from the section titled ‘Detachment’. But what does it mean? Why, firstly, ‘through and across’? My first thought, because Weil is so soaked in Greek, was to think of the ambiguities and difficulties of translating Greek prepositions. I wondered if the phrase ‘through and across’ might be related to Greek. When I checked the original French, however, I found that ‘through and across’ translates a single phrase, à travers:

Aimer Dieu à travers la destruction de Troie et de Carthage, et sans consolation. L’amour n’est pas consolation, il est lumière.

À travers is usually translated just as ‘through’ in English, though it means through in the sense of ‘to the other side of’, not ‘by means of’. In this particular sentence, a bare ‘through’ might be taken to mean ‘by means of’, rather than ‘by passing through’. The translator must have chosen the consciously strange ‘and across’ to emphasise the idea of movement, and perhaps also to hint at the etymology of travers, from Latin transversum, ‘crosswise’ or ‘across’.

But what might it mean to love God through the destruction of Troy and Carthage? Do Troy and Carthage here stand just for ‘Greek and Roman civilisation’? Or even ‘the classics’? (Since the destruction of Troy is foundational to Greek identity and to Greek literature, as the destruction of Carthage is to Roman.) Is Weil saying that to love God means going beyond these points of reference, though necessarily via them? Or does the emphasis upon the destruction of these cities point to something more general and more basic — the broader patterns of human destructiveness?

Weil’s remark about Troy and Carthage becomes a bit clearer in context; in the preceding paragraphs the text focuses on the idea of the ‘void’ and the ‘consolations’ which may falsely fill the void:

Always, beyond the particular object whatever it may be, we have to fix our will on the void — to will the void. For the good which we can neither picture nor define is a void for us. But this void is fuller than all fullnesses.

[. . .]

We must leave on on one side the beliefs which fill up voids and sweeten what is bitter. The belief in immortality. The belief in the utility of sin: etiam peccata. The belief in the providential ordering of events — in short the ‘consolations’ which are ordinarily sought in religion.

The austere difficulty of this message seems to me to have something in common with both those Tamil poems and with the Yeats. With the Tamil poems because they depict the reality of the cycle of war and destruction without any attempt at consolation, without the consolatory emphasis that we might expect — and find, for instance, though uncertainly, in the Iliad — upon the possibility of glory or the immortality of fame. And in Yeats because all the strivings of civilisation — of war and politics and (in the final stanza) of art — are set against the recurring image of the fly somehow poised upon the water, the mind that ‘moves upon silence’. Perhaps this is what it means to go à travers the destruction of Troy and of Carthage.

1. Wikipedia would suggest that Professor Hart, though long retired from UC Berkeley where he founded the Tamil department, is still with us. Many thanks from me to him in the unlikely even that this piece ever reaches him.

2. This is Puranānūru 349, ascribed to Maturai Marutan Ilanākanār. Note that I cannot reproduce all of the diacritics used by Hart in his transliteration of Tamil.

3. This is Puranānūru 350, ascribed to Maturaiyōlaikkataik Kannampukuntārāyattanār. I’m not sure what the ‘spots of puberty’ on the girl’s breasts are. Perhaps the Montgomery glands?

4. I can, however, strongly recommend David Shulman’s ‘biography’ of the language. I hope to learn Tamil at some point both because it is, with Sanskrit, the other classical language of India, and also because several of my ancestors on my father’s side came from Madras (now Tamil Nadu) and probably spoke Tamil or a related Dravidian language. Tamil is taught in Paris at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO). Anyone who enjoys indulging in a spot of fantasy language-learning as much as I do, might want to set aside an hour or so to exploring the list of languages they teach.

5. You can read the whole thing here. I love a lot of Yeats, but I think this may actually be my single favourite poem.

6. Quoted from a very ancient Routledge paperback copy published in 1963, which is the one I happen to own. It cost 70p or 14 shillings new, and it cost me, apparently, £4 secondhand at some point (probably from SKOOB books in London, which is often good for theology, though possibly from a branch of Oxfam Books). The translation is by Emma Craufurd, and the edition is introduced by Gustave Thibon. Obviously, Weil wrote in French so I should really get hold of her works in the original now.