Pennar Davies
I Was with Ulysses
I was with Ulysses, Odysseus son of Laertes.
We besieged the ancient city of Troy,
valiant and adventurous men
and wiser than our comrades,
since we saw the end before the beginning,
all the emptiness of heroic boasting,
all the futility of consuming wrath.
We went to war at last to spare the son,
Telemachus, better wisdom's final battle.
Laughing mockingly, we gazed at the marvels,
the arms of Achilles, the arms of Hercules,
the hateful deceit of the Wooden Horse.
We applied ourselves to cutting to bits and to killing
without the comfort of a feeble conscience
or any of Big Ajax's childish purity.
I was with Ulysses on his journey home,
home through the perils of wind and wave,
home in spite of envy and revenge,
home in spite of barbarian atrocities.
The goal was home, the home that the lustful
plundered and polluted and ruined.
We headed homewards,
thankful for the cunning of Penelope
and the fervour of Telemachus,
for the devotion of Eumaeus and the old dog Argus,
vowing to establish in Ithaca
a purer heritage, a more mannerly tribe,
and a land that would be a joyful paradise.
We held there was nothing better
than fashioning from the chaos of the age
home patch and recognition and lineage and a stubborn nation.
I was with Ulysses, the man of many wiles,
who naked aroused the naked Nausicaa,
the privileged adventurer on sea and land
who defied all the sleights of the persistent ravager,
unsparing, unwearying, unyielding death.
I almost ate the lotus,
the Cyclops almost dined on me,
I nearly became a meal for the people of Lamus.
I remember feasting in the halls of Circe.
I ventured safely to Persephone's Grove.
I heard with longing the song of the Sirens.
I sailed astonished
between the gullet of Charybdis and the hideous heads of Scylla.
I know that Odysseus wasn't completely alone
when he landed after the storm on the isle of Ogyia
and when he lingered long in Calypso's luxurious cave.
Between glittering terror and fearful entertainment
and imagination and yearning
I wasted gifts and days.
I was with the Ulysses Dante knew.
I turned my back with him on wife and son
and the feeble old man, my father,
to cross the ocean and explore the nations' shores
and weight the good and the evil in earthly cravings.
Outwards, questioning the distances, we sailed
to the west, past island and promontory,
across the cunning smiles of the bright waters,
through the Pillars of Hercules to the deep beyond,
with the words of the Prince always in our hearing
talking of the unpopulated regions beyond the sunset
and man's appetite, compared with the poor beasts,
for the splendour of knowledge and achievement.
As we rode the cruel seas
we saw the heavens alter their appearance
and marvelled until we saw in the furthest reaches of the south
the greatest mountain that we'd ever seen,
its summit beyond our eyes and our hope
with mist half-concealing the steep hillsides:
the Mount of Purgatory, probably,
with an invisible paradise above.
I was with many another Ulysses
down to our own time:
Tennyson's, the Ulysses who boasted
of his courage and his comrades
before venturing on the last mad quest;
Kazantzakis', the Odysseus
who saw the fall of other cities
and sought other worlds until he met
a little Negro fisherman
and recognised him as a mirror
of the Fighter who left his bloody footprints
on the long path of the ascent of human kind;
and the one Joyce hurtled through the day
in Dublin,
the unheroic hero, the many-sided Jew,
with the yearning in him for a son transfiguring
the ordinariness of Adam's race.
I wonder whether it's the disappointment and the comfort of every Odysseus
that it's in the son Telemachus, after all,
the final battle will be fought?
Welsh; trans. Joseph P. Clancy
Pennar Davies, Welsh, trans. Joseph P. Clancy.