“limbo like me”: A Reading of Kamau Brathwaite’s “Caliban”

Kamau Brathwaite, image from New Directions Books

Someone called Edward Brathwaite makes a brief appearance in Roberto Fernández Retamar’s famous 1974 essay “Caliban: Notes toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America.”  Like Caliban in Aimé Césaire’s play A Tempest, Edward Brathwaite later changed his name.  But whereas Césaire’s Caliban demands that Prospero “call me X” (20), Brathwaite chose the name Kamau. It was suggested to him by the grandmother of the Kenyan novelist and theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who currently teaches at UC Irvine!  The name Kamau itself ultimately comes from the east African Kikuyu language and is said to mean “quiet warrior.”

Brathwaite’s journey from a highly conventional English name to a subtle and empowering African one is a journey toward an ancestral identity that holds the possibility of self-determination. A similar journey was taken by Brathwaite’s native island Barbados, which gained independence from its 341-year-old identity as an English sugar colony in 1966. Like many other Caribbean islands, Barbados has long had a large, poor population of African descent; its own name means ‘bearded ones’ in Spanish and might refer to the hanging roots of trees or to the beards worn by the indigenous people encountered by the Spanish when they arrived in the fifteenth century. The island’s original name in Arawakan is “Icirougandin,” meaning red land with white teeth; today the people who live there simply call it Bim.

The people of Bim speak a ‘creolized’ English that is richly mixed with the rhythms and vocabularies of the African cultures of their ancestors. The uniquely fluid music and dance forms of the island grow out of those same traditions. Distinctive to Barbados and shaped by the embodied history of its people, the rhythms of these songs and movement patterns infuse Kamau Brathwaite’s poems. The poems themselves have been published in books whose titles— The Arrivants, Middle Passages, and Masks—retrace Afro-Caribbean histories of slavery and dislocation. Yet Brathwaite’s poems are vibrant with life and hope as they embrace the possibilities of an ever-changing world. Brathwaite himself coined the phrase “tidalectics” to describe linguistic patterns in which different idioms, sounds, voices, rhythms, and moods flow, unite, disperse, and then reunite in new configurations.

The cover of then-Edward Brathwaite’s Masks (1968), later appearing in the collection The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1978).

These fluid energies animate Brathwaite’s poem “Caliban,” which first appeared in his 1968 volume Masks. What is a mask? It is an assumed identity, one that often frees the person behind the mask to access and express buried parts of his or her own identity. Masks also play a vital role in African religious rituals, where they sometimes channel supernatural powers and sometimes provide protection from them. By calling his collection of poems Masks, Brathwaite tells us that he is interested in ways to tap into one’s deepest identity while also playing with alternative identities. Shielded by a mask, we are sometimes emboldened to speak the truth.

In “Caliban,’ Brathwaite puts on the ‘mask’ of Shakespeare’s Caliban so he can speak the truth of a decolonizing subject’s search for identity. Written in Caliban’s own voice, Brathwaite’s poem starts in an unidentified Caribbean city that sometimes seems to be Cuba’s capital, Havana. The city is awash in the grim debris of colonization. As colonization’s high tide has receded and European powers have departed, the island peoples have been left destitute, invisible, erased by history. Brathwaite’s poem starts out with a grim tally whose heavy weight is reinforced by repetition and a ponderous rhythm from which it seems there can be no escape:  “Ninety-five per cent of my people poor /ninety five percent of my people black/ ninety-five percent of my people dead.” Caliban speaks not for himself but for “my people.” He even speaks as his people, or allows them to speak through him.

So as to make the plight of  “my people” universal, Brathwaite’s Caliban next invokes the prophet Jeremiah, the biblical book of Leviticus (which is preoccupied with laws that separate the living from the dead, the pure from the corrupt), and the modern existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Caliban’s island—apparently Cuba—suffers under the weight of dead modern machines left behind on land that also seems dead, incapable of yielding the vital substances that the living need, such as cotton or bread. Echoing Shakespeare,  Brathwaite’s Caliban turns to Ariel’s beautiful song of transformation from death to life (“Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made”). But when Caliban echoes Ariel’s song, life becomes death. Caliban’s modern island has become a world of dead ends: “out of the living stone out of the living bone/of coral, these dead/towers.” Caliban remembers political revolutions that should have brought freedom but resulted only in more oppression in the form of police abuse and even addiction to the toys of capitalism. While there is the hint of an impending storm (“the sky was cloudy, a strong breeze”), the weather only marks the Caribbean islands’ vulnerability to hurricanes, today thought to be more intense and destructive than in the past, thanks to global warming—a legacy of the European scientific enlightenment, and thus also a legacy of European colonialism. The Europeans, other words, are gone but they have left death, sorrow, and devastation in their wake. Caliban’s “people,” lifeless and impoverished, must somehow recreate themselves out of these materials.

And yet Braithwaite’s poem does not end in this world of death. Far from it! The final lines are bright with hope, and alive with new rhythms and images: “the dumb gods are raising me/up/up/up/and the music is saving me.” Caliban, who at first could only helplessly lament the plight of his people, now feels himself lifted and saved. Those early, ponderous verses sinking into blocks have dissolved and the poem stretches out long, its verse suddenly free and lithe, pulsing with life as it moves “up/up/up” along with Caliban himself.

But just how does Caliban find his way from death to life, from stasis to movement, from despair to hope? He is, to course, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Caliban, who likewise longs to break free of the chains Prospero has put on him. This modern Caliban takes Shakespeare’s own imagery and plays with it until it begins to play for him. But in order to revitalize that imagery, he infuses it with the tempos and cadences of Caribbean speech, dance, and and music. This is a poem that celebrates the sound of the human voice. The best way to appreciate that is to listen to this recording of Brathwaite reading the poem.

When you listen, you will hear the voice of the Caribbean islands, melodious, playful, its own thing. That doesn’t mean that Brathwaite’s Caliban leaves Shakespeare’s Caliban behind. The middle part of his poem is an extended riff on Caliban’s euphoric “‘Ban, Ban, Caliban; have a new master, get a new man.” This is the song Shakespeare’s Caliban sings when he believes he has found a way to break free of Prospero’s tyranny. Without escaping from Prospero’s language, Shakespeare’s Caliban plays with it, rearranging its syllables to suggest new meanings, “new” possibilities of identity and power, and even “freedom.”

But Caliban fails to break free of Prospero. By the end of the play, he is back under the magician’s thumb. That isn’t true of Brathwaite’s Caliban: he has broken the spell! But how? Is it just because he has access to other traditions and realities that belong to him and his people, not the colonial powers that have killed and erased “ninety-five percent of” them?

The key is what we might call the “middle passage” of Brathwaite’s poem—the part between its beginning and its end. I borrow this term from Brathwaite’s later volume of poems Middle Passages, where you can find his other Tempest-inspired poem, Letter Sycorax, in which Caliban steals Prospero’s laptop and uses it to reconnect with his mother’s language and “curse [Prospero] wid his own cursor.” The “middle passage” refers to the forced transportation of human beings from Africa to the Caribbean; many went to the North American colonies, and many others died in transit. Throughout his work, Brathwaite is keenly aware of the middle passage as part of the tragic history of ‘my people.’  The middle passages of his poems—the parts in the center that move us from the beginning to the end—are always important.

So what happens in the middle passage of Caliban?  This is where Caliban breaks into dance, and as he “prance[s],” he begins breaking words down, experimenting with new ways of ordering them, literally creating space for himself with dashes and wide-open margins:

And
Ban
Ban
Cali-
Ban
like to play
pan
at the Car-
nival;
pran-
sing up to the lim-
bo silence
down
down
down

Here the playful, lifting cadences of island music displace the heavy, meter of the first part of the poem. The longer this Caliban sings in his native voice, the more possible it is to “ban”—get rid of—the legacies of colonial rule. Brathwaite’s Caliban liberates himself through free “play” and unbridled pleasure, through joyful experiment with what words might do spontaneously. The middle of the poem—again, the part that connects but also separates the bleak, heavy scene at the beginning from the energy of hope at the end—consists entirely of such play, thus showing how creative language can be a passport to freedom, allowing Caliban to create himself as he wishes. Hence Caliban dances as well as sings, “pran-/cing up to the lim–’/bo silence..”

But just what is the “lim–/bo silence”? Limbo in Catholic theology is the suspended state between heaven and hell. By suspending the word “limbo’ itself between two lines, Brathwaite captures this sense of suspense and makes it part of the active experience of his poem. By isolating the syllable “lim,” Brathwaite also echoes the word “limb,” evoking the part of a tree that can be turned into a stick.

The limbo itself is a dance involving a stick. You may have done the limbo yourself at a skating rink. This internationally popular game originated in the Caribbean islands. There dancers pass under a horizontal stick suspended between two vertical ones which is lowered after everyone has gone under it. Of course, not every dancer manages this; those who do not are eliminated, while those who succeed get more and more creative, often showing off their talent for contortion and fluid movement. Because of the physical skill and personal creativity involved, the limbo is a popular tourist attraction in Barbados, and even a source of income for many Caribbeans. This gives it a double meaning: the limbo celebrates versatility, flexibility, and originality. But it is also performed by acrobatic native dancers for the pleasure of American and European visitors whose money holds up the islands’ fragile economies. Here ‘s a picture of  a street performance of the limbo:

The Irwin Clement Caribbean steel band in London, 1963. Image from Heritage Images/Getty.

Caliban imports all of these aspects of the limbo dance in his poem: “down/down/down”; “knees spread wide.” And the “limbo stick” itself appears many times in the poem, as if to transform Prospero’s magic stick—an instrument of domination—into a toy for Caliban to play and dance with. Appropriating Prospero’s stick into a new dance allows Caliban to appropriate its power for his own purposes of freedom and self-creation. As he dances, the verse form of the poem mirrors the alternation between flattening and lengthening that is part of the dance.

It would be very nice if this were all that is going on in the middle passage. But as Caliban dances the limbo, more troubling elements creep in. This is a dance for tourist consumption and as such it suggests continuing dependence on American and European money. More significant still: where did the limbo come from? As he dances, Caliban tells us;

limbo like me
long dark deck and the water surrounding me
long dark neck and the silence is over me
limbo
limbo like me
stick is the whip and the dark deck is slavery . . .

What is happening here? It turns out that the limbo is not just a popular nightclub dance. It was originally developed by African slaves who had survived the middle passage. It was even performed at wakes—rituals in which survivors sit beside the bodies of the dead. The pattern of increasing confinement mimics the often fatal experience of being crowded into the hold of a slave ship and dehumanized inside its “long dark neck.” Here is a schematic image of that crowding so you can see what it was like:

A plan of a British slave ship, showing how 454 slaves were placed on board. According to transport records, however, this same ship reportedly carried as many as 609 people. This image was published by the Plymouth Chapter of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and is now held by the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division.

As the limbo “stick” lowers, dancers reenact that suffocating confinement. When they manage to come out of it, they celebrate the triumph of release. But each time the is stick lowered, fewer people make it under, through, and up. The limbo is thus a dance of elimination, if also of triumph for those who survive. In this way, the dance is a form of living cultural memory. In its negative side, it recreates the condition of death. In its positive side, people survive and emerge on the other side, unfold and rise in the miracle of survival.  Even the spirits of those who die might be imagined to have been released by death into the freedom of an afterlife that this very ritual perpetuates. But the message is a mixed one.

By turning Shakespeare’s ship of nobles into a slave ship and Prospero’s wand into a stick he can play with and master, Caliban finds his own voice. He gives “My people” a common history and shows them how to use it to move forward. We hear “drummers” and feel the action of “dumb gods” who can still speak through the body. That is why. at the end of the poem, Caliban sings that “the music is saving me.”

The last thing we experience in the poem, is Caliban’s “hot/slow/step/on the burning ground.”  He is remembering how to walk again on the shores of a foreign land. But this is also an image of hell. Destruction goes with creation. And Caliban’s steps are slow. The way forward is painful and difficult. Will he find his way? If he does, it will not only be because he transforms the dark past but because he has learned to traverse its troubling surface.

Works Cited/Referenced

Brathwaite, Edward. Masks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. Print.

Césaire, Aimé. A Tempest. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: TCG Translations, 2002. Print.

Retamar, Roberto Fernández. Caliban and Other Essays. Translated by Edward Baker. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Print.


Jayne Lewis is a professor of English at UC Irvine, a faculty lecturer in the current cycle of Humanities Core, and the director of the Humanities Honors Program at UCI. Her most recent book, Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660-1794 (Chicago, 2012) looks at how, when and where “atmosphere” emerged as a dimension of literary experience—an emergence which links the history of early fiction with those of natural philosophy and the supernatural. She is also the author of The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1650-1740 (Cambridge, 1995), Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (Routledge, 2000), and The Trial of Mary Queen of Scots: A Documentary History (Bedford, 2000). Her present research and much of her ongoing teaching focuses on middle modern generic forms in relation to changing narratives of illness and healing, including a course on the “sick imagination” that explores illness narratives from the Book of Job through 21st-century poetry and graphic fiction. She has previously contributed to the HC Research Blog on the topic of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.

Rape and the Aeneid

Dido and Aeneas. Ancient Roman fresco in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples; fresco from the House of Citharist in Pompeii, Italy (c. 10 BCE–45 CE)

How does our re-reading of favorite texts and images change over time, as the world changes around us? Like so many readers before me, I’ve always noticed how Virgil presents the queen of Carthage as a strong, intelligent ruler and civic planner who “plans her escape, collects her followers” and their treasures: “and a woman leads them all.” (1.440-448). By the time Virgil shows us Aeneas’s inspection of her achievements, the “ramparts” of the “new city of Carthage” are rising, along with the “gates,” “laws,” “harbor,” and “theatre” (1.510–519). After Aeneas, having inspired her passion and learned from her example, abandons her to found his own new city, I used to thrill to their passion, and think I could only mourn her self-destructive suicide.

But today, driving into work and listening to the radio stories of women assaulted and raped, I thought about Dido differently. Where does the fire of her passion come from? I wondered if I could read it differently: Venus plopping Cupid into her lap, forcing love on her, telling him to “breathe [your] secret fire into her,/ poison the queen and she will never know.” (1.818-820). “She will never know–“ I thought of her listening to the tales of assault and Roofies. Giving sexual targets Rohypnol and other drugs if they’re not aware of it, I think, that’s rape. So do I think Venus has arranged for the rape of Dido so that Aeneas can gain power? I didn’t think of it this way before, but I did this morning. I wouldn’t quite say Rome was founded on rape, but the thought occurred to me. I rejected it, but I thought it.

And then I thought, parking the car and getting out: Where do the Romans find the other founders of Rome, the women who bear their children? That’s the Rape of the Sabine Women, isn’t it? The historian Livy (59 BCE–17CE) tells their abduction this way: “When the hour for the games had come, and their eyes and minds were alike riveted on the spectacle before them, the preconcerted signal was given and the Roman youth dashed in all directions to carry off the maidens who were present. The larger part were carried off indiscriminately, but some particularly beautiful girls who had been marked out for the leading patricians were carried to their houses by plebeians told off for the task.”

Still thinking about the women whose defeat built Rome, I looked “Sabines” up in the index to our edition of the Aeneid and I found that Virgil treats this incident as an important factor in Aeneas’s triumph, depicted on his shield by the god Vulcan: “the workmanship of the shield,/ no words can tell its power… […] and the Sabine women brutally/ dragged from the crowded bowl when the Circus games were played” (8.738–739, 748–749). Not a game for them, as the translator’s words “brutally” and “dragged” suggest. The end of the story is supposed to be a happy one: years later, the women prefer to remain with their abductors and the families they have established. Our edition’s introduction by scholar Bernard Knox is more upbeat than the translation by Robert Fagles that it precedes, pointing out that “the Romans carried off the Sabine women to marry them” (34). As classicist Mary Beard points out, Roman plots involving rape “are not now best known for their subtlety. The ‘happy ending’ to some of [Plautus and Terence’s comedies] can appal modern readers: ‘Good news — the rapist was her fiancé all along'” (202). There’s no happy ending here for Dido, of course, whatever the Sabines’ decision.

But the image of that “so-called rape” stayed in my mind from a picture by Nicolas Poussin, a painting I knew and was shocked by as a child, because it’s in my hometown of New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

Nicolas Poussin, The Abduction of the Sabine Women, oil on canvas (probably 1633-4)

These women are being taken to increase the power of Rome. Their twisted limbs, their signals to their husbands, their forced abandonment of their children and parents at the signal from the red-clad ruler on the pillar – that’s rape to me.

So how does this change my reading of Dido? I used to think the two ways I had of seeing her were in conflict – the leader and builder, the self-destructive victim. But now I think that if she went on the radio with her story, Dido would say: Look! Even capable, intelligent, strong women can be taken advantage of, in the power structure I know.

I’ll hope that message can make changes.

Works Cited

Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. New York: W.W. Norton, 2015. Print.

Livy. History of Rome. Trans. Canon Roberts. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co, 1912. Print.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.


Vivian Folkenflik is an emeritus lecturer in the Humanities Core Program, where she taught for over three decades. She is the editor and translator of Anne Gédéon Lafitte, the Marquis de Pelleport’s novel The Bohemians (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and An Extraordinary Woman: Selected Writings of Germaine de Staël (Columbia University Press, 1992). She is also the author and archivist of our program’s institutional history at UC Irvine. Her thought and teaching have been at the center of many cycles of Humanities Core, and she continues to act as a pedagogical mentor for seminar leaders in our program. She has blogged previously for the Humanities Core Research Blog on the intersection of race and gender in past course texts.

Is the Aeneid We Are Reading the Same One That Virgil Wrote?

Aeneas and Achates entering Carthage, as pictured in the Vergilianus Vaticanus folio 13r, found at the Apostolic Library, Vatican

Aeneas and Achates entering Carthage, as pictured in the Vergilianus Vaticanus folio 13r. Image reproduction courtesy of the Apostolic Library, Vatican. All rights reserved.

This post was originally published on September 29, 2016.

For educated people in the European Middle Ages, the Aeneid was probably the most important piece of literature next to the Bible: it was the greatest epic poem written in Latin which was the standard language of learning across Europe. It is no accident that Dante chose Virgil to lead him through the Nine Circles of Hell in Inferno. As a scholar of Late Roman and Medieval European literature, then, the Aeneid is an important book for me to be pretty familiar with.

One of the most important questions I have to ask myself at the start of any research project – but particularly about such an old text – is whether or not I can trust the edition I am working with. This is obviously a problem when we are reading in translation, but even if we were all reading the Aeneid in Latin in Humanities Core, we would still have to ask… is this really what Virgil wrote? Here’s why.

The version of Virgil’s Aeneid that we are reading is an excellent translation by Robert Fagles. But let me ask you a question: where did he find his text to translate from? The Aeneid was written between 29 and 19 BCE, but printed type was not introduced into Europe until around 1440 CE. How did the poem exist between when Virgil composed it and when Fagles translated it into English for us?

You may be surprised to know that there is no single “original” version of the Aeneid from 19 BCE that all of our printed copies comes from. Virgil, like most Romans, probably wrote his works on papyrus sheets or scrolls. Now in a dry environment like Egypt, papyrus can last a very long time, but in a more humid climate like Italy, a papyrus scroll would begin to fall apart within a century. This meant that scribes had to make new hand-written copies (manu scripta in Latin) of important texts like Virgil’s works in order to preserve them. Almost all of these scrolls turned to dust long ago.

Near the end of the Roman Empire, however, it became more common for scribes to write on a new material made of dried and stretched animal skin called parchment, and to bind these pieces of parchment together into a codex: what we would call a book. The Getty Museum has produced a short but excellent video about how manuscripts were made.

Parchment is far more durable than papyrus, and it is no coincidence that the seven earliest versions of the Aeneid that still exist today are parchment copies from around the year 400 CE, more than four centuries after Virgil’s death (Courtney 13). Thanks to a number of digitization projects at archives and libraries around the world, you can actually look at digitized versions of some of these manuscripts online, like the Vergilius Vaticanus and Vergilius Romanus, both preserved at the Apostolic Library of the Vatican. All of these surviving manuscripts are incomplete, damaged, or compromised in some way. There were in all likelihood many other parchment and papyrus copies from this early date that were completely lost or destroyed during the violent dissolution of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries.

Even if we had a totally complete, undamaged copy of the Aeneid from 400 CE, however, it still might be affected by scribal errors. Since each copy was made by hand, it is easy to see how scribal mistakes, mis-readings, and other variations could grow and become compounded in later copies. It is unknown how many copies of copies were made between Virgil’s own text of the Aeneid and these seven “witnesses,” but the text of all seven differ from each other. Some of these variations are clearly mistakes or corruptions of the original text; other differences between the manuscripts are harder to adjudicate, and it takes scholarship known as “textual criticism” to be able to tell which text is closer to the original. Sometimes, mistakes in the manuscripts will not be noticed for more than a thousand years.

Let me give you a few examples to illustrate what I mean. Take the scene from Book I (lines 423-29) when Aeneas and Achates have entered Carthage and are marveling at all of the city construction projects as they climb the hill to the top. Fagles translates this as follows:

The Tyrians press on with the work, some aligning the walls,
struggling to raise the citadel, trundling stones up slopes;
some picking the building sites and plowing out their boundaries,
others drafting laws, electing judges, a senate held in awe.
Here they’re dredging a harbor, there they lay foundations
deep for a theater, quarrying out of rock great columns
to form a fitting scene for stages still to come.
(Book I, lines 513-19, pp. 61-62)

If we look at our manuscript witnesses from the Vatican, we can see that they disagree about a few of the details. Neither one is totally correct; instead, both have to be compared because they equally point back towards their lost original exemplar. Since it may be difficult to read the manuscripts, I’ve written out a transcription of the two texts:

Image found at the Apostolic Library, http://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.3225

Detail from  Vat. f13v [MSS Vat. lat. 3225]. Image reproduction courtesy of the Apostolic Library, Vatican. All rights reserved.

INSTANTARDENTESTYRIIPARSDUCEREMUROS
MOLIRIQUEARCEM·ETMANIBUSSUBUOLUERESAXA
PARSOPTARELOCUMTECTOETCONCLUDERESULCO
IURAMAGISTRATUSQ·LEGUNT·SANCTUMQUESENATUM
HICPORTUSALIIEFFODIUNTHICLATATHEATRIS
FUNDAMENTAPETUNTALIIIMMANISQUECOLUMNAS
RUPIBUSEXCIDUNTSCAENISDECORAALTAFUTURIS˙

Image from the Apostolic Library, Vatican

Detail from Rom. f89v [MSS Vat. lat. 3867] Image reproduction courtesy of the Apostolic Library, Vatican. All rights reserved.

INSTANT·ARDENTES·TYRII·PARS·DUCERE·MUROS
MOLIRI·QUE·ARCEM·ET·MANIBUS·SUBUOLUERE·SAXA
PARS·APTARE·LOCUM·TECTO·ET·CONCLUDERE·SULCO
IURA·MAGISTRATUSQ:LEGUNT·SANCTUM·Q:SENATU
HIC·PORTUS·ALII·EFFODIUNT·HIC·ALTA·THEATRIS·
FUNDAMENTA·LOCANT·ALII·IMMANIS·Q:COLUMNAS
RUPIBUS·EXCIDUNT·SCAENIS·DECORA·ALTA·FUTURIS

Notice that in the third line Rom. has the word aptare, while Vat. has optare. Fagles (or, rather, the edition of the Latin text that Fagles translated) chose to use optare here, since he translates the line as “some picking the building sites.” If he had translated aptare, it would have said something like “fitting the building sites” instead. Yet he chooses against the Vat. text two lines later: the workers “lay foundations / deep for a theater,” matching alta theatris / fundamenta locant. Had he followed the Vat. text, he might have translated lata theatris / fundamenta petunt as “they seek foundations broad for a theater,” which doesn’t make quite as much sense. Still, some editors choose to read the text this other way (cf. Conington 75). Switching alta for lata is probably the scribal equivalent of a “typo.” Mixing up locant and petunt, on the other hand, is harder to explain. We moderns are not the first to notice this discrepancy, however: if you look closely, an early medieval reader has put a little mark that looks like a percentage sign (%) over the word petunt, and noted a correction “LOCANT” in the left-hand margin.

Even if all the manuscripts agree, however, this still doesn’t mean that we have access to the original text as Virgil wrote it: it just means that all of the manuscripts we have are descended from a common source which may not be Virgil’s original. In this same passage given above about city projects from Book I, you may have noticed something strange. The poem focuses here on the physical work of building a city, except for one line. It may not strike you at first, but the central line about “drafting laws” and a “senate held in awe” doesn’t totally match its surroundings, does it? In fact, even though this line appears in this spot in all seven witnesses, some readers from the classical era to the present day doubt that this line was in the original poem, and believe that it was added by a later scribe.

Why should you care about such minutiae as this? There are at least two reasons, the first more general, and the second more specific for Humanities Core. First, what I have said above about how texts change from manuscript to manuscript does not just apply to the Aeneid, or to ancient literature, or to things written by hand. In fact, all texts are subject to this kind of corruption and variation, even texts that might seem totally modern and well-established, which is why many important books are released in critical editions even if they were written in America in the 20th century. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the interaction between Bilbo and Gollum in the first edition of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien compared to the second edition that came out after he had written The Lord of the Rings. There are also differences between the British and American versions of the Harry Potter series. Needless to say, if there are variations in these texts, there are also variations in the various printings and editions of books like Waiting for the Barbarians, The Tempest, and every other thing you will read this year in Humanities Core.

This brings me to the second reason you should care about textual criticism. Let’s say I was writing a paper about the Aeneid and I wanted to make the claim that for Virgil there was an implicit connection between the physical foundation of a city and the institutional foundation of its laws. I might want to use this passage from Book I, since it shows the senate and the laws coming into being at the same moment, even in the same sentence, as the pillars and stones of the city. If I simply quoted this section, however, and my reader knew that the line about the laws was probably added later (or taken from a different section of the poem, see Campbell 161), they could trash my argument, saying it proved nothing because the line wasn’t original to the poem. If, on the other hand, I incorporated textual criticism into my research, I could argue that constructing the law and constructing the city were tied together in the Roman mind, and that this is demonstrated by the fact that some Roman editor or scribe added the line about the laws and the Senate to the original, and most people after that either didn’t notice it as strange or felt that the poem was better or more interesting this way. My argument has changed and deepened from one about Virgil’s psychology – something that is ultimately impossible to prove – to one about critical reception and the history of the Aeneid within Roman culture.

Works Cited

Campbell, A. Y. “Aeneidea.” The Classical Review 52, 2 (Nov. 1938): 161-63. Print.

Conington, John and Virgil. The Works of Virgil with a Commentary by John Conington, M.A. Vol. II. London: Whittaker & Co., 1876. Print.

Courntey, E. “The Formation of the Text of Virgil.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 28 (1981): 13-29. Print.

Virgil. Bucolics, Aeneid, and Georgics of Virgil. Edited by J.B. Greenough. Boston: Ginn & Co., 1900. Digital text available online at The Perseus Project. Accessed 30 Aug. 2016. Web.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Translated by Robert Fagles. Introduction by Bernard Knox. New York, Penguin Books, 2006. Print.


Ben Garceau pictureBen Garceau is a scholar of medieval literature with particular interests in early Britain, translation, and critical theory. He received a dual Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and English from Indiana University in 2015. His article “Passing Over, Passing On: Survivance in the Translation of Deor by Seamus Heaney and J. L. Borges” is forthcoming in PMLA. When he isn’t leading seminars in Humanities Core, he likes hiking, working on his science fiction novel, and digging through record shops in Los Angeles.

“sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt”

Aeneas and Achates Outside the Temple of Juno (ca. 1615) Collection of the Louvre. Image and further information available at the Frick Collection.

Sebastiaen Vrancx, Aeneas and Achates Outside the Temple of Juno (ca. 1615). Louvre Collection. Image and further information available at the Frick Collection.

This post was originally published on October 14, 2016.

Close Reading, In Translation, With Readers From The Past

Writing your first essay in the Humanities Core Course, a literary analysis of a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid, you will have been reading and re-reading Virgil’s text in Robert Fagles’ translation in order to make claims about the text and find appropriate textual support.

 It might be hard at this point to remember exactly what you knew about Virgil’s Aeneid before you started reading it in the context of the Humanities Core. Some of you may have never encountered Virgil or the Aeneid, while others may have read all of the Aeneid before they started the course. Most students, however, will fall somewhere in between these extremes, and soon after you started attending Professor Zissos’ lectures, you started to accumulate information about Roman culture and society and the structure of the Aeneid that turned your reading experience into an informed, guided reading experience.

You can think of this kind of reading experience as part of a discussion — literally so in your discussion sections, but also metaphorically as a conversation with anyone in the past who has read Virgil’s Aeneid and left us a record of his or her reading. A text as old as the Aeneid has produced many such records of past readings, testimonies of readers that can direct our attention in turn to specific aspects of the text that we would have otherwise missed. Reading such accounts allows us to enter into a virtual conversation with past readers that enriches our present understanding of the text. First, let us recall a scene from Book 1:

…, uidet Iliacas ex ordine pugnas
bellaque iam fama totum uulgata per orbem,
Atridas Priamumque et saeuum ambobus Achillem.
constitit et lacrimans ‘quis iam locus,’ inquit, ‘Achate,
quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris ?
en Priamus. sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi,
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
solue metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem.’
sic ait atque animum pictura pascit inani
multa gemens, largoque umectat flumine uultum.  (Virgilius Maronis, I, 456 – 465)

Translated by Fagles, in our Penguin edition, as follows:

… — all at once he sees,
spread out from first to last, the battles fought at Troy,
the fame of the Trojan War now known throughout the world,
Atreus’ sons and Priam — Achilles, savage to both at once.
Aeneas came to a halt and wept, and “Oh, Achates,”
he cried, “is there anywhere, any place on earth
not filled with our ordeals?  There’s Priam, look!
Even here, merit will have its true reward …
even here, the world is a world of tears
and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.
Dismiss your fears.  Trust me, this fame of ours
will offer us some haven.”

So Aeneas says,
feeding his spirit on empty, lifeless pictures,
groaning low, the tears rivering down his face … (Virgil 63)

In this blog post I want to focus on one such example of a past reader’s reaction to this specific passagea remark by Denis Diderot, the editor of the most famous publication during the European Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie, a friend of Rousseau, and one of the first to write evaluative essays about publicly exhibited paintings:

Un des plus beaux vers de Virgile et un des plus beaux principes de l’art imitatif, c’est celui-ci:
Sunt lacrymae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.
Il faudrait l’écrire sur la porte de son [i.e. a painter’s] atelier: Ici les malheureux trouvent des yeux qui les pleurent.  (Diderot 392)

One of the most beautiful verses of Virgil, and one of the most beautiful principles of imitative art, is the following:
sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.
One ought to write it above the entrance to the painter’s studio: ‘Here the unfortunate ones will find eyes that shed tears for them.’ (my translation, O.B.)

The inscription Diderot proposes for a painter’s door as a reminder for the artist that his supreme aim should be to move the beholder is clearly less a translation of the Latin quotation than a metonymical summary of the whole scene.

What seems to be lost in Diderot’s version is the heart-rending conflict in which Aeneas finds himself caught, between grief (hence his own tears) at being confronted with a rendition of his own past, and hope, which he tries to impart to Achates even as he is crying. This hope is also founded on tears: the tears Aeneas assumes the inhabitants of this strange new land to have shed over his fate. It gives him reason to believe that he and his companions will finally meet with a friendly reception, quite unlike the series of encounters with monsters he has just survived, when he re-traced part of Odysseus’ itinerary on his voyage from Troy before landing in Carthage.

Diderot’s metonymy can be resolved in different ways: Diderot may be admonishing the painter to identify with his subject emotionally (the painter’s tears), or he may exhort him to paint so that someone visiting his atelier will be moved to cry. But what is missing from Diderot’s version are tears of recognition, the tears which Aeneas sheds upon recognizing his father and himself (‘se quoque‘, l.488), depicted in their most desperate moment.

Diderot then proposes that the ideal scene of reception for a painting adhering to this criterion would be for a criminal who carries his secret unrecognized in society to dread the steps leading to the public exhibition space for paintings in his contemporary Paris, the Salon, where a painting depicting his crime would have such a powerful effect on him that he would willingly sign his own sentence.

In quoting the line, as Diderot does, a reader re-contextualizes it.  Part of this process is the interruption of the narrative sequence of the original, including its sequence of emotions.

Sebastian Brant, Image of The Mural on Juno’s Temple, Publii Vergilii Opera (Strasbourg, 1502). For more information, see the digitized manuscript at the University of Heidelberg and additional commentary from Dickinson College.

Sebastian Brant, Image of The Mural on Juno’s Temple, Publii Vergilii Opera (Strasbourg, 1502). For more information, see the digitized manuscript at the University of Heidelberg and additional commentary from Dickinson College.

In this particular scene, Aeneas’ conflicted emotions of grief and joy eventually are transferred onto Achates, his companion, who has accompanied him to Carthage from the ships and now stands with Aeneas magically hidden by Venus invisibly before the artwork in Juno’s temple. It is as if Aeneas has brought in the form of his companion Achates his own, representative audience and engages before our very eyes in narrating the temporal sequence of the scene, which most commentators assume to be a mural painting.

And Achates does indeed exhibit the precise mix of fear and hope characteristic of Aeneas’ first reaction: “simul percussus Achates / laetitiaque metuque” (513-4)  Achates was simultaneously shaken both by joy and by fear. But these emotions of Achates are emotions occasioned by Dido, whose appearance with her followers and some of Aeneas’ companions, whom he had left behind at the ships, interrupts Aeneas’ contemplation of the artwork on the wall.

Achates’ reaction might then be described as a delayed emotional reaction that re-enforces the hierarchy separating him from Aeneas  his emotions are slower, he feels only now what Aeneas has felt since he laid recognizing eyes on the representation of scenes from the Trojan War. They also might be described as testifying to the effect of Aeneas’ (and, by extension, Virgil’s) ekphrasis: Aeneas’ re-telling of the scenes that Achates sees in front of him gradually awakens in him the mix of fear and joy Aeneas has been feeling from the very start.

Yet, whatever hierarchical distance between Achates and Aeneas had separated them in their initial reaction is finally effectively closed again in the next line, when both are united in an emotional confusion related to the decision whether or not they should discover themselves to their companions. They both burn with a desire to re-join them, yet they still fear to give up their supernatural disguise for fear that Dido and her people might turn out to be hostile: “auidi coniungere dextras / ardebant, sed res animos incognita turbat” (514-5).

In his commentary on the scene, Lee Fratantuono suggests that Aeneas’ initial mix of fear and joy had to have given way to “increasing horror”:

The pictures follow the story of the fall of Troy to the very point where Aeneas’ story in Book 2 [of the Aeneid] will begin; Aeneas himself will paint the rest of these pictures, as it were, when he tells the story of what happened after the Ethiopian and Amazonian allies came to Priam’s aid.  Aeneas knows that the pictures of Memnon and Penthesilea presage the final chain of events leading to the sacking of the city; the sum total of the pictures, especially in the situational context of Juno’s temple, should not be consolatory to a Trojan. These are images not set up as memorials of human compassion, but as triumphant records of the victories of Juno’s beloved Greeks over the enemies she so hates. In the first excitement of seeing the early scenes from the war that so changed his life … it is as if Aeneas momentarily forgot the dreadful context of the artwork … The scene is one of increasing horror as Aeneas surveys the paintings in their terrible order, before he finally cries out after seeing the desecration of his friend Hector’s body: tum vero ingentem gemitum dat pectore ab imo (1.485) Then indeed he gave a mighty groan from deep in his breast. The pictures might have been fitting to help rouse Carthaginian morale during the Punic Wars; they celebrate the worst degradation of the Trojans. Aeneas stares fixed and agape at these images as Dido finally enters the temple and interrupts the tour of her art gallery. (Fratantuono 19)

Fratantuono’s more detailed and more faithful reading of the scene allows us to see that in quoting and re-contextualizing Aeneas’ initial emotional reaction to the artwork in Juno’s temple Diderot seems to have effectively blinded us to the narrative sequence of pathos that leaves Aeneas much more troubled, and much less relieved, than we might initially assume.

That readers should be tempted to quote and re-contextualize the line like this has in part to do with the difficulty of translating it in a prosaic, straightforward way. In a literal, word-for-word translation we would read for ‘sunt lacrimae rerum / et mentem mortalia tangunt’: “there are tears of – or for – things (rerum) / and human things (mortalia) touch the mind”.

In translation, rerum and mortalia take on heightened affective qualities, as they are often generalized to stand in for the fate of being human. Thus, Ronald Austin in his 1971 Oxford edition translates: “even here tears fall for men’s lot, and mortality touches the heart” (Austin n.p.), while Allen Mandelbaum renders rerum in English with “passing things”, and mortalia with “things mortal” (Mandelbaum 17).

But beyond pathos there is also a second aspect that contributes to the temptation to quote and re-contextualize this line and in doing so to disturb its temporality, the temporality it has in the sequence of Virgil’s narrative — and this temptation has to do with the complex temporality of Virgil’s narrative itself, with a structure of prolepsis and analepsis that re-enforces the main themes of his epic, fuses together its parts and shackles those parts in turn to the Homeric tradition.

Inasmuch as Aeneas at first interprets the artwork in Juno’s temple as a sign that he will find refuge on these unknown shores he looks toward the future.  Inasmuch as he draws hope from a representation of his own past, he looks toward that past.  Both past and present are united in this moment.

His interpretation repeats an act of interpretation in which Dido herself engaged when she first arrived at the very same spot with her followers as refugees from the city of Tyre: “Now deep in the heart of Carthage stood a grove, / lavish with shade, where the Tyrians, making landfall, / still shaken by wind and breakers, first unearthed that sign: / Queen Juno had led their way to the fierce stallion’s head / that signaled power in war and ease in life for ages. / Here Dido of Tyre was building Juno a mighty temple, …” (Fagles 63).

For Aeneas, looking at his own representation in the battle scenes from Troy offers an anagnorisis, a literal, pictorial recognition of himself that is part of an emotional crisis: “Aeneas gives a groan, heaving up from his depths, / he sees the plundered armor, the car, the corpse / of his great friend, and Priam reaching out / with helpless hands … / He even sees himself / swept up in the melee, clashing with Greek captains, / sees the troops of the Dawn and swarthy Memnon’s arms.” (Fagles 64).

For Virgil’s Augustan reader, Dido’s interpretation of the stallion’s head as “… power in war and ease in life for ages …” is offered up as a fulfilled prediction, a proleptic description of the power and wealth of the Carthage that was to be Rome’s adversary in its two most desperate, formative wars, the first and second Punic War. Indeed, the Aeneid as a whole is structured proleptically by this conflict, and it has often been faulted for this constraint of imperial flattery, which projects existing history back in time to re-create a founding myth for the Augustan Roman empire, an analepsis that purports to be a prolepsis, a vaticinium ex eventu, a prophecy fulfilled that strains to pretend the outcome could be any different.

It’s now time to interrupt our close reading of this passage and take stock of what we have done.

(1) We have applied techniques of close reading to a sample passage from Virgil’s Aeneid.

(2) We have tried to account for the difference translation makes in our interpretation of this passage.

(3) We have applied technical terms from rhetoricart and literary criticism (ekphrasis, analepsis, prolepsis, anagnorisis, vaticinium ex eventu).

(4) By taking a closer look at this passage, we have become aware of some important themes and structures of Virgil’s Aeneid that we encounter elsewhere in the poem (e.g., ekphrasis in book 8; vaticinium ex eventu; structures of repetition and imitation that inform the relationship of parts of the Aeneid to each other, and to epic poetry that preceded it).

Where could one go from here?

One could contextualize the passage, either in the context of a reading of Diderot or of reading Virgil, with the ultimate goal of contributing to an interpretation of the work of one of these two authors.  One could also connect this sample reading to larger theoretical concerns.  One such concern that has informed my own approach to literature is reader-response criticism and hermeneutics, another a conscious application of rhetoric to the study of literature.  In order to do so, one would have to take into account more detailed readings of this passage by specialists like the classicist Michael Putnam, who dedicates a chapter to it in his 1998 book Virgil’s Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the AeneidOne could also engage in an informed visual analysis (Essay #2!) of art work depicting this passage in Virgil, like the works by Sebastian Brant and Sebastiaen Vrancx featured here.

Works Cited

Diderot, Denis.  Oeuvres Complètes.  Gen Ed. Herbert DieckmannJean Varloot,  Herrmann, 1975, vol. XIV.

Fratantuono, Lee.  Madness Unchained. A reading of Virgil’s Aeneid.  Lanham, 2007.

Virgilius Maronis, Publius. Aeneidos. Liber Primus. Ed. R.G. Austin, Clarendon Press, 1971.

Virgil. The Aeneid of Virgil.  Tr. Allen Mandelbaum. University of California Press, 1982.

Virgil. The Aeneid.  Tr. Robert Fagles.  Penguin, 2006.

Further Reading

Putnam, Michael C. J.  Virgil’s Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid.  Yale University Press, 1998.


berghofOliver Berghof received his PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Irvine in 1995.  He taught in the Humanities Core program as a graduate student between 1992 and 1995, and has done so again as a lecturer since 1999. A native of Germany, he specializes in European Literature, Literary Theory and Humanities Computing. In teaching Humanities Core, he particularly  enjoys the challenge of teaching students in UCI’s Honors Program.