Dulce et Decorum

The new British poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has recently published a poem to commemorate the deaths of the last survivors of the First World War trenches:
Last Post Carol Ann Duffy
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud . . .
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home —
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce — No — Decorum — No — Pro patria mori.
You walk away.
You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too —
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert —
and light a cigarette.
There’s coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.
You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.
At its heart this poem quotes Wilfred Owen in turn quoting Horace from his poem Dulce et Decorum Est. Perhaps more about this later: is Duffy being fair to Horace by wrenching him so far out of context and so far away from what he may really have meant? But for the moment a question of pronunciation. How should the Latin in this poem be pronounced? There is an audio recording of the poet herself reading her poem in which she pronounces “dulce” as if it were Italian (doolchay). Where has this pronunciation come from? Is it because of Catholic Latin where schools and churches perhaps founded by Italian orders used this sound in their services? Almost certainly Owen himself would have said in the old English pronunciation of Latin dulce (dulcie), as in the girl’s name, with a soft “c” pronounced as “s”. He would probably not have used the pronuntiatio restituta as used in Latin teaching in most European countries today dulce with a hard “c” (dulke) unless he was taught Latin by a particularly radical young teacher. Rather he would have used the current English style which had been used for many years, until recent scholarship had established that this pronunciation was inauthentic. The battle over this change in sound lasted for many years until the last of those taught the old pronunciation had died out. The British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was apparently one of the last survivors who persistently stuck to the old pronunciation until the end of his life in 1986. Owen’s Latin was apparently fairly minimal and he could not go beyond the basics when he was engaged as a private tutor to a family in France. In the end what sound should be adopted here in this new poem? An authentic or restored pronunciation would be understood by modern listeners with a basic knowledge of Latin; the traditional English pronunciation would be historically accurate, reflecting the usage of the poet who is being quoted (Owen, not Horace). But certainly not an Italian style which makes Wilfred Owen sound either like a Catholic priest trained in Rome or a waiter asking what you would like after your pasta.

Paul Delvaux and the Ancient World

Paul Delvaux was one of the Belgian surrealists best known for his Sleeping Venus pictures and his railway stations. He was for a long time resident in our part of Brussels (Watermael-Boitsfort) and you can sometimes see a background to his paintings as you go around the commune. He was particularly fond of Watermael station which turns up in several works. A small exhibition at the Musee Royale in Brussels is devoted to the influence on him from antiquity. He studied (as many young Belgians still do) Latin and Greek at school and he testifies to the impact the Iliad and the Odyssey made on him. He visited Italy and Greece in the late thirties and then in the fifties when travel to such exotic places was not easy. The open spaces of Pompeii and Herculaneum appear often as backgrounds to the moonlit settings of his female nudes, giving them dream-like quality. His female figures (often recalling the waxwork Sleeping Venus he saw exhibited in Brussels) are inspired by classical sculpture in their simple elegance but are unnervingly modern in their just not quite realistic depiction. Placing a porcelain-skinned female nude before a deserted Greek temple at night he achieves a disturbing nightmarish quality. He makes use of the figure of Venus as a signature to many paintings, but he also uses mythology in, for example, his Pygmalion which reverses the usual story. This use of the ancient world for visual inspiration from the material remains seems to anticipate one of our modern approaches to Classics: Delvaux discovered the power of the stories in school, and then he then went on trips to most rewarding sites to see for himself. In the exhibition there are sketches he did on site from Paestum, Pompeii and Herculaneum, and also from Olympia and Athens. He made sketches of the sculptures from the temple of Zeus at Olympia when they were scarcely known to a wider public. All these influences consequently find their way into his surrealist images transformed by his imagination into an entirely new vision of what are now familiar images. His view of the classical world is not the philological, text-based image often portrayed in critical comment by administrators wishing to show off their modernity by dismissing Classics: this is how the early introduction to the ancient world can work on the imagination of a creative artist who can absorb these ideas and aspects to change the way we look at ourselves.