Classical Receptions Journal Vol 8. Iss. 3 (2016) pp. 295–314
David Melnick’s Men in Aı̈da
Sean Alexander Gurd*
This article reads Men in Aı̈da, David Melnick’s ‘Homophonic Translation’ of Iliad
1–3, as the product of a poetic technique cognate with both the philological
practice of etymology (though refracted through a heterodox prism) and the
twentieth-century tradition of sound poetry. In Men in Aı̈da we encounter a subversive
re-telling of the Iliad as ‘gay utopia’ (in the words of one of the poem’s
commentators) combined with an invocation and extraordinary poetic manipulation
of levels of linguistic structure normally far beyond the awareness of native
speakers of English.
***
Hide our wrapper coat. Ink I, proct yon amp pain name moan to.
Guy Sestos ‘n’ Guy Abydos neck on Guy Dionne. Airy Spain!
Tune out tour, tacky days. Sir Cassius sore. Come, us sand Ron
As you, Sir Tacky Days, on a respite tempera, nip poi,
Heighten ass, make a leap at a moo up a silly yen: toes.
Hippo those, dog. A pool, a pale lass goin’ ink, kiss a moron.
Tone high? Larissa an air rib, bollock an eye, yet ass scone.
Tone irk? Hip boat host appeal lie. You stows dose, array O’s.
We ate due woe. Late, though, you pale us, goo. T’ you, Tommy Dao.
Out art! Rake Cossack, gawk a mast. I pare rosy rows.
‘Oh sue us, Hellespont! Oh saga!,’ Rose sent to Sergei.
Euphemous dark husk eco-known. In ache mate town.
We owes Troezen, know Yod, Dio. Trap fey husk, ya Dao.
That is how David Melnick’s Men in Aı̈da renders the second book of the Iliad, lines
835–47:
O7 d’ 4ra P "rkÞthn ka1 Pr0ktion 2m’"n"#monto
ka1 Shst1n ka1 Abudon
!
e! con ka1 d8an +r0sbhn,
t8n aBq’ &Yrtak0 dh” 9rc’ Asio”
!
5rcamo” 2ndr8n,
Asio”
!
&Yrtak0 dh” 6n +r0sbhq"n ’"#ron 6ppoi
a4qwn"” m"g0loi potamoN 4po S "ll–"nto”.
*Correspondence: Department of Classical Studies, 405 Strickland Hall, Columbia, MO
65211-4150, USA. [email protected]
ß The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For Permissions, please email: [email protected]
doi:10.1093/crj/clv007
SEAN ALEXANDER GURD
I&pp0qoo” d’ 4g" ’Nla P "lasg8n "*gc"simÞrwn
t8n o7 L0risan "*ribÞlaka nai"t0askon
t8n 9rc’ I&pp0qo0” t" P0lai0” t’ 5zo” Arho”,
!
uJ" d0w L–qoio P "lasgoN S "utam0 dao.
A2t1r r–Eka” 9g’ +k0ma” ka1 P "0 roo” 6rw”
7ssou” ÐEll–sponto” 2g0rroo” "*nt1” ""* #rg"i.
E6’hmo” d’ 2rc1” Jik0nwn 9n a2cmht0wn
u31” Sroiz–noio diotr"’"#o” J"0dao.
Students of ancient Greek should not use this, or any of the rest of Men in Aı̈da, as a
crib; their professors expect translations to communicate a text’s ‘meaning’, and
Melnick’s translation does no such thing.1 Its aim, rather, is to translate the sounds
of the Greek text into English vocables; this is a ‘homophonic translation’. The text
has been anthologized repeatedly, and is regularly cited as a leading example of
translation by poets and theorists associated with the movement now known as
‘language poetry’.2 It emerged from a series of weekly meetings run out of the
New School of California by Robert Duncan and dedicated to Homer.3
According to David Levi Strauss, almost none of the group had any knowledge of
ancient Greek when the meetings began.4 In email correspondence with me,
Melnick confirms that at the beginning he had enough Modern Greek to read a
newspaper slowly and with great labour; he had acquired this much after a trip
through Greece with his lover David Doyle.5 A homophonic translation of Iliad I
was published as Men in Aı̈da in 1983; A rendering of Iliad II appeared online twenty
years later, in 2003; a version of Iliad III was completed and circulated privately, and
a complete text has recently been issued by uitgeverij.6
Men in Aı̈da’s uncompromising technique brings unusual clarity to that quasinostalgic longing for origin which has been a central concern for poets working in
long forms since Eliot and Pound.7 Indeed, Melnick’s project of voicing the sounds
1 An early version of this article was read at the ‘What is a Classic?’ conference at
Dartmouth University in October 2014. I am grateful to the organizers of that delightful
event, as well as to Joshua T. Katz, the anonymous readers of this article at CRJ, Charles
Bernstein, and especially David Melnick for his tireless assistance and generous
communication.
2 Usually in anthologies representing the American avant-garde of the late 1970s (Silliman
1986: 94; Dworkin and Goldsmith 2011: 416). The exception, Rasula and McCaffery
(1998: 284), is an epic overview of approaches to the concrete element in language in
global history. For discussions of the poem see Levi Strauss (1989); Bernstein (2011:
201–02); Reynolds (2011); Hilson (2013: 102–04).
3 Levi Strauss (1989); Reynolds (2011). An important biographical statement can be found
in Silliman (1986: 623).
4 Levi Strauss (2010: 197 n. 12).
5 Personal Communication.
6 Melnick (1983; 2003; 2015).
7 See, with further bibliography, Moffett (2007).
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of Homeric verse in English seems to invite comparison with Eliot’s invocation of
the ‘auditory imagination’, that
feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and
feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to
the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through
meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and
obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most ancient and most
civilized mentality.8
Eliot was trying to articulate a disagreement with Arnold, who (according to Eliot)
was so concerned with the uses of poetry that he seriously downplayed the value of its
music, the necessary play of sound, style, and artifice: it was these latter, more than
any moral or intellectual content, which facilitated intercourse between present and
(deep) past. Craig Raine suspects that Eliot was cribbing (in part) from Max Müller,
who proposed that the long and deep affiliation between cognate words in the IndoEuropean family tree linked past and present in an almost-transhistorical union, or
(to put this differently) that etymology could explain ideas.9 Seamus Heaney read
Eliot as referring to ‘the relationship between the word as pure vocable, as articulate
noise, and the word as etymological occurrence, as symptom of human history,
memory and attachments’;10 a persistent equivocation between the deep-temporal
affiliations revealed by etymology and the immediate communication effected by
sound and form. But, while Men in Aı̈da interfaces with this mainstream element of
American modernism, it does so with such fanatical literalism that it seems to reverse many of its terms. As we will see, a kind of etymological thinking is central to
Men in Aı̈da, but it is a decidedly unorthodox one, practiced in defiance of all the
rules of historical-linguistic derivation; in addition, it is one in which Homeric
Greek seems to recall English, and not (as mainstream chronologies would imply)
the reverse. To put it briefly — I will expand a little further on — Men in Aı̈da’s
English resonances of Greek reveal the Iliad as a poem that is riotously and sensuously queer.
This sort-of-etymological configuration of the Iliad as a queer epic coexists with
an equally strong emphasis on sound. Men in Aı̈da’s work with linguistic sound far
exceeds that even of its closest analogue, the translation of Catullus published in
1969 by Celia and Louis Zukofsky; the Zukofskys’ Catullus attends to the sounds of
the original but ultimately prioritizes semantics.11 In this far more radical project,
Melnick works with structuring but normally occluded levels of language, where
language is understood both as a historical and as a cognitive process. This poem
‘includes history’ (as Pound famously demanded); but it does so by working with
8
9
10
11
Eliot (1964: 111).
Raine (2006: 142). See also Adames (2000).
Heaney (1984: 150).
Zukofsky and Zukofsky (1969). See Hooley (1986); Wray (2004).
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linguistic competencies ‘below the conscious levels of thought and feeling’, as Eliot
proposed. As a result, it raises questions about the levels at which ancient texts are
engaged with in modern cultures. In one of the founding documents of the modern
study of reception, Charles Martindale argued that acts of reception were, in effect,
producers of meaning; that, if I can put this another way, the meanings of classical
texts were instantiated in their receptions.12 In Iphigenias at Aulis I suggested that
the reception of classical texts began in the formation of the texts themselves.13 What
Men in Aı̈da prompts us to realize, I believe, is that there is another place we might
look for classical receptions: in the movements of the vocal tract and in the sounds
that result, where, perhaps, there are meetings and meldings of ancient and modern
languages of which most modern speakers remain almost entirely unaware.
What emerges from this dual reflection on sound and sense — dual, but strangely
and unusually binaural, as though the two tracks were developed independently of
each other, the resulting counterpoint a consequence of chance operations — is an
archaism of the unthought, a poetry that evokes both the self-conscious philological
enterprise of etymology and the barely-conscious experience of phonology. Part One
discusses Men in Aı̈da as a quasi-etymological ‘queering’ of the Iliad (though it was
conceived nearly a decade before the classical statements of queer theory). Part Two
turns to the poem’s work with sound, where the contemplation of an unexpected
plurality of dialects, accents and pronunciation systems runs up against the limits of
linguistic awareness, forcing us to come to terms with levels of cognition normally
ignored in the everyday procedures of reading and speaking.
I
Men in Aı̈da has inspired a truly remarkable level of interpretive unanimity.
According to Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery, the poem ‘uncovers a homosexual
pandemic riotously lurking in the very sound shape of Homer’s Iliad’;14 the anthologists of Against Expression see it as ‘outrageously and exuberantly gay’;15 Ron
Silliman calls it a ‘ludic gay utopia’; Bob Perelman, a ‘hyperbolic gay comedy’.16
Sean Reynolds finds a similar emphasis, capitalizing on this to develop a series of
critically productive puns (Melnick puts his mouth on Homer’s; he erects Homer
into an icon of a certain gay performativity).17 The poetry centre at San Francisco
State university calls it a ‘homosexualized translation’.18
12 Martindale (1993). The insight is fundamental to nearly all reception work that has
followed.
13 Gurd (2005).
14 Rasula and McCaffery (1998: 246).
15 Dworkin and Goldsmith (2011: 416).
16 Perelman (1996: 24).
17 Reynolds (2011).
18 http://www.sfsu.edu/poetry/archives/m.html. [accessed 1 March 2015].
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Given the context Melnick emerged out of, this unanimity among his interpreters
exceeds strange. Melnick is closely associated with the short-lived but important
journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, edited between 1978 and 1981 by Charles
Bernstein and Bruce Andrews. Though its editors have denied that
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E embodied the work of a movement or ‘school’, the journal was crucial in bringing to visibility what has since come to be known as ‘language
poetry’, a style of radically concrete verse which works with and on language as a
plastic material unconstrained by commonly held expectations of meaning or demands to ‘make sense’. Often in very close contact with what was at the time the
cutting edge of critical theory (Barthes, Derrida, De Man), poets working in this
mode aimed, as Linda Reinfeld put it, ‘to resist both the definition of content and the
invisibility of form [. . .] by making it impossible for readers to ignore the materials,
the structures, and the contextuality of writing’.19 Jackson Mac Low observed that
‘language poetry’ was a misnomer: with its refusal to make easy sense, its regular
demand that we notice the material and constraints of language and then work
actively with the text, this poetry was better described as ‘perceiver-centered
poetry’.20 The technique of Men in Aı̈da is unquestionably in this line. Syntax is
resisted and flow is fractured in ways strongly reminiscent of the language movement. But interpretive univocity of any kind isn’t what we should expect from a
poetry that putatively focuses on the reader’s role in making meaning, for the simple
reason that it suggests an interpretive essentialism ill-at-ease among poets and critics
who were often radically constructivist. And yet once the suggestion has been made,
it is hard to ignore it.
One reason for the disarming unanimity about Men in Aı̈da’s apparent meaning
may be less an abandonment of the principle of interpretive multiplicity than the
articulation of a new strategy for drawing attention to how readers make meaning:
here, rather than being confronted with a text that demands to be made sense of but
offers no conventional assistance (the usual strategy since at least Gertrude Stein),
Men in Aı̈da comes with an interpretive tradition that invites us to find a specified
meaning in the text — and the text, in turn, though providing a modicum of clues to
support such a reading, nonetheless presents enough difficulty to fuel radical doubt
about any claim to meaningfulness on its behalf. As a consequence, we are made
aware of the degree to which our own desire for sense compels us to find confirmation of what pre-existing authority tells us is there.
Now Men in Aı̈da’s readers also insist that the poem has a transitive effect on the
meaning of the Iliad. It isn’t just a poem with gay themes; it is a ‘homosexualization’
of the Iliad, it ‘uncovers’ the latter as a gay poem (in Steve McCaffery and Jed
Rasula’s formulation, cited above). We might be tempted to see this as an interpretive amplification of themes evident in the Iliad itself. It was suspected as early as
Plato’s Symposium that the intimacy between Achilles and Patroclus was more than
19 Reinfeld (1992: 15).
20 Silliman (1986: 494).
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just a close friendship, and that Achilles’ love and grief for his older friend was that
of a lover.21 The Iliad itself licenses this suspicion.22 During book nine, when the
Greek generals visit Achilles and beseech him to end his anger and rejoin the war,
Phoenix offers Achilles the exemplary or admonitory tale of Meleager, hero of
Calydon, who withdrew from battle with the besieging Anatolians in a rage similar
to Achilles’. Meleager was entreated to return to combat only at the very last
moment; his rage very nearly proved the downfall of his city. Meleager, in withdrawing from his war, spends his days with his wife Cleopatra, just as Achilles
spends time with his friend Patroclus.23 The Iliad creates from this parallelism a
suggestive rhyme: Is Patroclus Achilles’ lover? Remarkably, ‘Patroclus’ and
‘Cleopatra’ are the same name, with the elements (kleo- and patr-) reversed. Even
Men in Aı̈da’s connection between homophony and homoeroticism might be an
amplification of Iliadic word-play.
As the Iliad’s play with the names Patroclus and Cleopatra suggests, the rhetoric
of Men in Aı̈da has something to do with the figure known as the schema etymologicum, in which meaning is produced using the sonic similarity of words. Ancient
and medieval etymologizing happily linked homophonic types of word-play to
allegory and other meaning-effects in a discursive form whose goal was often to
interpret the world through speech.24 Reading this tradition, Davide Del Bello
emphasizes that etymologizing often commonly proceeds along simultaneous homophonic and semantic tracks: a word is offered as etymon because it (a) sounds like
and (b) explains the word it is joined to; ultimately it is the explanatory force of the
etymon that is valued.25 Men in Aı̈da’s ability to ‘reveal’ the Iliad as ‘a ludic gay
utopia’ (vel sim.) seems to me to rely on very similar principles. Indeed, etymology is
only one of a suite of related language games based on the exploitation of sonic
similarities between words. In both etymology and word-play, for example,
the same process occurs: two similar-sounding but distinct signifiers are brought together,
and the surface relationship between them is invested with meaning through the inventiveness and rhetorical skill of the writer. If that meaning is in the form of a postulated connection between present and past, what we have is etymology; if it is in the form of a postulated
connection within the present, the result is word-play.26
21 Plato, Symp. 179e – 180b. For an exhaustive overview of ancient receptions of Achilles’
relationship with Patroclus, see Fantuzzi (2012:187–264), with further bibliography.
22 Surprisingly little has been written on the Iliad’s queerness. A great start is Peraino
(2006).
23 See Kirk (1985) ad Il. 9.524-605 for further discussion and bibliography.
24 On etymologizing see Struever (1983); Attridge (1988); Del Bello (2007); Harpham
(2009); Katz (2009; 2010b).
25 Del Bello (2007 passim).
26 Attridge (1988: 108). Shortly after he writes, ‘word-play, in other words, is to etymology
as synchrony is to diachrony’. (109).
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Etymologies, so defined, can serve as the material for a kind of subversive historiography, a way of short-circuiting the difference between past and presence, or
perhaps a way of establishing surprising resonances between them. Reorienting
our perspective so that Men in Aı̈da’s ‘homophonic translation’ seems like a ludic
rewiring of etymology, perhaps in tune with ancient practices, offers the advantage
of contextualizing the remarkable agreement of its critics about its meaning,
strengthens the import of its orientation to a canonical text in the European tradition, and helps to explain the shared impression that it is doing something, having an
effect. Like folk-etymologies in Jonathan Culler’s description, Men in Aı̈da ‘intently
or playfully work[s] to reveal the structure of language, motivating linguistic signs,
allowing [its] signifiers to affect meaning by generating new connections’.27
Indeed, not only its form, but also its meaning can perhaps be related to the
history of etymology in the humanities after 1960. The fact that etymology works
by exploiting similarities in the sound-form of words, that is, in the concrete signifiers, recommended itself to a generation of thinkers who were already committed to
critiquing the metaphysics of sense, and critical theory in France and then the US
enthusiastically adapted it to its own purposes.28 In critical gender studies, etymology presented itself as a particularly pressing theme. Discussing the implications
and valences of the term ‘queer’ — a word once used to marginalize and injure, but
reappropriated and repurposed in the early 1990s — Judith Butler remarked that:
The expectation of self-determination that self-naming arouses is paradoxically contested by
the historicity of the name itself: by the history of the usages that one never controlled, but
that constrain the very usage that now emblematizes autonomy [. . .] If the term ‘‘queer’’ is to
be a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and
futural imaginings, it will have to remain that which it is, in the present, never fully owned,
but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of
urgent and expanding political purposes.29
‘Queer’, on Butler’s account, exists against a background of meanings and usages
from which it must be wrested — but which can never, in fact, be completely
eliminated. Butler proposes critical appropriations of such terms with the aim of
reorienting them and actualizing their disruptive capacities. ‘Queering’ practices
and words which seemed to have safe, sanitized, heteronormative associations by
demonstrating their affiliations with sexualities and embodied relations far outside
the conservative mainstream has become central to the practice of queer theory; and
it is often etymology, or at least a neo- or quasi-etymology which delights in puns
and word-play, that does this work. Exemplary is Jeffery Masten’s recovery of the
homoerotic elements of Horatio’s farewell to the dying Hamlet in the words
27 Culler (1988: 3).
28 A superb overview of how this took place is offered in Blank (2011).
29 Butler (1993: 228).
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‘goodnight sweet prince’.30 Masten’s goal, as he puts it, is to use the techniques of
traditional philology, and especially those of etymology, ‘to reinvigorate [the queerness of ‘‘sweet’’ as it is used between men], to bring it back to legibility. Or rather: to
bring it back upon the palate’.31
Elements of the same rhetoric are at work in Men in Aı̈da, though the poem was
begun more than a decade before the major statements of queer theory appeared.
Part of the brilliance of choosing Iliad 2 as a source-text, for example, is that the
second half of this book is an extended catalogue of the generals in the war and the
number of soldiers they brought with them. What better place from which to begin
what Perelman identifies as a ‘gay orgy’32 than this book, densely packed as it is with
so many men? When Homer’s stately catalogue of fleets and soldiers is transformed,
in Men in Aı̈da, into lewd and leering descriptions (maybe) of compromising
tableaux. . .
Lokr8n d1 3g"m0n"u"n *OEl8o” tac1” A4a”
m"0 wn, o6 ti t0so” g" 7so” S"lamÞnio” A4a”
2ll1 pol1 m"0 wn 2l0 go” m";n e!hn linoqÞrhx,
"*gc"0 : d1 "*k"#kasto Pan"#llhna” ka1 +caio0”
o7 JNn0n t1 "*n"#mont1 *Op0"nt0 t" Jall0 ar0n t"
B8ss0n t" Sk0r’hn t" ka1 A2g"i1” "*rat"in1”
S0r’hn t" r0nion t" Boagr0 ou 2m’1 ø""# qra
tM d1 6ma t"ssar0konta m"#lainai n8"” "2 ponto
Lokr8n, o7 na0 ousi p"#rhn 3 "r8” E2bo0 h”.
Locrian’s day game moan new in oil, lay a stack, cuss Ajax.
Mayo newt tit us, so’s gay hose as Telamonian Ajax.
Hullaballoo may own a league, goes many anal in a thorax.
Ink, eh? A deck o’ cast to pan Helen as Guy a guy use.
Hike Cyne tenement, Opus, and tot tickle ye, Aaron.
Bessa, Auntie Scarphe take I, Augeiae air rotting us.
Tarp pain ‘n’ throw neon tea, Boagrius. Ampère ate raw.
Toad am at Tess, are a cone, Tamerlaine. Nine ace up punt, too.
Low crony nigh use sea. Perry near his Euboea.
Il. 2. 527–35)
. . . we have a radical example of critical reappropriation taking place: Homer’s
martial catalogue becomes an erotic scene, and the ‘homosexualization’ of the
Iliad is also a subversive transformation of war into orgy. Generalship is turned
into erotic ecstasy (3g"m0n"u"n *OEl- à ‘. . .moan new in oil’); running speed becomes the ability to copulate with epic numbers of partners ( *OEl8o” tac1” à ‘. . .
30 Masten (2004).
31 Ibid., 370.
32 Perelman (1996: 24).
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lay a stack. . .’); a comparison of might becomes a contemplation of sexual organs (g"
7so” S "lamÞnio” A4a” à ‘gay hose as Telamonian Ajax’). Lesser Ajax, short and
protected by a linen breastplate, turns out capable of anatomically improbable conjugations (2l0 go” m";n e!hn linoqÞrhx à ‘. . . goes many anal in a thorax;’). ‘And
Achaians’ (ka1 +caio0”) becomes ‘Guy a guy use’. Get the point? The (homo)eroticization of war is the argument of the project: as L8nin 4"id" becomes ‘Men in Aı̈da’,
rage becomes love.
When queer theory deploys etymology, it does so in the name of a critical performativity rooted ultimately in difference and flux, in unstable moments of identity-transformation and slippage. In this, queer theory shares a value with the poets
associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, who like Butler tend to insist that language and social discourse work to constrain identity (they share a genealogy, too,
including an intense engagement with classical deconstruction). Language poetry’s
tactic of drawing attention to the materiality of language is meant, in an almost
Brechtian alienating gestus, to increase awareness of how we are fabricated as readers
when we read ‘mainstream’ texts.
Melnick’s main strategy for drawing attention to the presence of language is to
overload his lines with what appear to be highly significant statements — and then to
systematically withhold any indication of their narrative context. Consider the following passage, in which Homer dreams of a transcendent poetic power and point of
view, while Melnick hears an exhausted and/or sexual sigh, uttered with a nervous,
caffeinated tension:
nNn moi LoNsai *Ol0mpia dÞmat’ e!cousai
3m"8” g1r q"a0 "*st" p0r"st"# t" 4st"# t" p0nta,
3m"8” d"; kl"#o” o9 on 2ko0om"n o2d"# ti 4dm"n
o6 tin"” 3g"m0n"” Dana8n ka1 ko0ranoi 9san
plhq1n d’ o2k 5n "*g1 muq–somai o2d’ 2nom–nw,
o2d’ "4 moi d"#ka m";n gl8ssai, d"#ka d"; st0mat’ "9"n,
’wn1 d’ 4rrhkto”, c0lk"on d"# moi 9tor "*n"0 h,
"2 m1 *Olumpi0d"” LoNsai Di1” a2gi0coio
qugat"#r"” mnhsa0 aq’ 7soi 3p1 Ilion 9lqon
2rco1” aB nh8n "*r"#w n80” t" prop0sa”.
e!sp"t"
‘His better none,’ my Muse sigh. (Olympia dome ought to cool sigh.)
Who may scar the eye? A step? Arrest it. Tasty tea, Panda!
He may stake Cleo’s O. You knock, woman? Ooh, Daddy, eat men!
Hi, Tina! Say, game o’ ‘Nest’ Danny own? Guy Goy ran (oyez!) on.
Play tune, Duke. Can ego, Mute Ace. Some eye you don’ know may know.
Who, Dame, I? Dick o’ men (glow, sigh!) deck a day’s torment (a yen).
Phonied a rictus? Toss skulk. Yond Dame I ate, or any, eh?
Aim: May Olympia days, Muse, idea-psych Yoko, you.
Two gotta race ‘em. Nay, sigh at those ‘Oh you Poe! Ilion, hell!’ tone.
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SEAN ALEXANDER GURD
‘Ark,’ coos sow. Neigh ‘Oh nary a neigh!’ as step. Prop us, ass!
(Il. 2.484–493)
The passage’s heaps of short, paratactically connected phrases suggest a dialogic
occupation of the line by multiple voices. Who speaks, here and throughout? I can
imagine — as a working theory — that these lines report expressions overheard at a
party, in a bar or a roomful of slightly inebriated acquaintances. Or perhaps they are
the disjointed expressions of a single voice, overwhelmed by a string of apparently
unrelated thoughts, compelled to give voice to each one as it arises, no matter how
fragmentary. Or is it as when we gaze into a mist and see patterns: are these the
specters of English vocables heard by an ear attuned only to the acoustic qualities of
the Greek, theories of phonic identity half hallucinated, half theorized by an uncomprehending hearer?
Here Men in Aı̈da might be said to work against the epic it translates. As the
passage I have just quoted indicates, the Iliad configures its poetic voice as emanating from the divine Muse: crucially, the Muse’s is a single voice, one which sublimely
supercedes the many rumours and noises we hear without her. Through the Muse,
the singer brings univocal order to an impossibly complex world. In contrast, collective or multiple vocal sounds (such as the ‘ten voices’ in this passage) tend to be
indications of social disorder, or of cultural moments of political or military chaos.33
Conversely, ordered and marshalled troops are silent, the sound of their marching
feet accompanied only by the commands of their masters.34 Homer’s contrast between the singer of ten tongues and the divine knowledge of the Muses in the
passage just quoted is thus thematically motivated: on the plane of poetic ideology,
his voice without the Muse would be a kind of cacophony, an untransfigured human
din. Melnick’s translation, on the other hand, finds in the Greek text just the multiple voices unified and transfigured by the Homeric Muse.
In fact, however, multiple voices are now widely thought to be fundamental
elements of the Greek epic tradition. Most contemporary scholars see the
Homeric epics as stabilizations of an oral culture in which singing and storytelling
went on unrecorded for centuries.35 Such knowledge nonetheless jars with the way
even professionals habitually read the Iliad: here, again, despite acknowledging the
work’s traditionality and its implicit diachronicity, we depend on the idea of a single
voice telling a single story. I can credit as a historical likelihood the idea of the Iliad
as an oral tradition. But I cannot abide it when I read: when I read, I want one
narrator, one story. Indeed, the Homeric text itself responds to this desire for coherence, unfolding as a single, coherent narrative told by a single, consistently
33 See, e.g. Il. 1.46–49; 2.87–100; 2.143–153; 2.188–210; 2.212–213; 2.222–224; 2.246–266;
2.333-4, 394-5; 2.394-6; 2.459; 4.446–456.
34 Il. 4.429–431.
35 Standard accounts are Foley (1995); Nagy (1996); Lord (2000), but the bibliography is
vast.
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D A V I D M E L N I C K ’ S M E N I N A Ï D A
located voice.36 Men in Aı̈da undoes precisely this desire by actualizing so many
voices in a manner often hard to contextualize. Here the poem emphasizes a level of
cultural poetics which was there in my awareness of the Iliad but hard to assimilate
to my reading of it. And this, more than any putative erotic content, is what makes
Men in Aı̈da a brilliant queering of the Iliad: it articulates a truth beneath or beyond
the myth that in reading we follow a single voice which stitches everything together
in a single aesthetic unity. To contest this myth, Men in Aı̈da gives us an overwhelming tide of voices — and reminds us that the Iliad, too, was built on similarly
unstable ground. Its quasi-etymological queering of the Iliad leads us to a contemplation of the tradition as plural, and irreducibly so.
II
Men in Aı̈da is in fact gruelling and sometimes simply impossible to read. True, the
text’s great difficulty has the virtue of forcing me to get down to work, to wrestle
with its opacity in much the same way that beginning readers of ancient Greek get
down to work: slowly, painstakingly, with only the slightest hope of reading fluently,
but with a quickening sense of the extraordinarily fine craftsmanship that only such
slow reading can produce. The difference between slowly reading the Iliad and
slowly reading Men in Aı̈da, however, is that the latter is a hopeless undertaking.
If the Iliad can one day be read and understood, Men in Aı̈da will never be made
sense of in the same way, and as a result I find myself unable to tackle more than a
few lines at a time before I start to zone out, not quite falling asleep, but certainly
surfing on a level of experience just beneath what in other contexts I wouldn’t
hesitate to call consciousness. I don’t think it is at all accidental that it is exactly
when I drop into this state that I begin to read the poem aloud. In the European
tradition since at least Augustine, silent reading has been connected with practices of
contemplation and the metaphysical business of making meaning;37 when Men in
Aı̈da induces me to give up on meaning, it also invites me to open my mouth, to
sensualize the reading process, to feel the text as a vibration in my throat and hear it
as sounds in my ears. Indeed, Men in Aı̈da’s use of English seems a bit like a tactic of
seduction; it gets me reading because I expect it to make sense, but soon I am just
listening, transformed into a mouth and an ear.
Men in Aı̈da’s focus on its sonorous fabric is evident, for example, in the way it
habitually breaks Greek multisyllabic words down into English monosyllables.
According to Jeff Hilson, this,
. . . coupled with the fact that homophony’s relationality often produces agrammatical word
strings, results in a text where sound is frequently focused down onto the single word [. . .]
rather than on its assimilation into what might be called higher order meaning. This semantic
non-recuperability is intensified throughout the text in the recurrent use of an exclamatory
36 See Clay (2011); Graziosi (2013).
37 See above all Stock (1998; 2001a; 2001b; 2003).
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SEAN ALEXANDER GURD
register. Words like ‘eh?’, ‘o,’ ‘oh!,’ ‘ah!,’ ‘oy,’ ‘ooh,’ ‘ook,’ ‘eek,’ and ‘ow!’ are encountered so
frequently that their collective force makes them a powerful and significant event in the
text.38
That we should be so focused on auditory experience makes sense in the context of
Melnick’s broader oeuvre. Before Men in Aı̈da, Melnick’s poetry often used the letter
as its primary unit of construction, building poems full of uncannily familiar wordlike objects:
thoeisu
thoiea
akcorn woi cirtus locqvump
icgja
cvmwoflux
epaosieusl
cirtus loquvmp
a nex macheisoa39
The logoid forms of Pcoet hint at the possibility of sense — is that theos and iesu in
the first line of the poem? A strange feminine form of theos in the second? Acorn and
citrus, deformed, in the third? Is ‘nex macheisoa’ somehow Latinate? — but ultimately stymie any attempt to go further than vague suspicion. These lines don’t
‘mean:’ they cut into us, lodge themselves like bones in our throat. ‘What can
such poems do for you?’ Melnick wrote in the first issue of
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: ‘You are a spider strangling in your own web, suffocated
by meaning. You ask to be freed by these poems from the intolerable burden of
trying to understand. The world of meaning: is it too large for you? Too small? It
doesn’t fit. Too bad. It’s no contest. You keep on trying. So do I.’40 Men in Aı̈da’s
procedures are similar. If Pcoet is a fantastic bestiary of weird and unfamiliar language, Men in Aı̈da is populated primarily by recognizable words and phrases
arranged in jarring and uncomfortable collocations. If Pcoet stripped expression of
any signification or self-evidence, Men in Aı̈da appears to react to the Iliad as though
it too were devoid of sense, treating it as sound poetry long before the fact. In both
works, Melnick is working along the sensual edge of language. ‘Melnick separates
sound from reference in language,’ says Barrett Warren, ‘to produce an acoustic
spectacle in the reading of the text’.41
Perhaps this comes as no surprise. A homophonic translation is fundamentally
and unavoidably about sound, or at least about phonetics, that layer of language in
38
39
40
41
Hilson (2013: 104).
From Pcoet (Silliman (1986: 90)).
Ibid., 603.
Ibid., 603.
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D A V I D M E L N I C K ’ S M E N I N A Ï D A
which are organized the physical gestures which manipulate the voice, and since
Men in Aı̈da makes little effort to accommodate the semantics of its source and offers
an English text of such exhausting intransigence, it can hardly be inappropriate to
think of it as a kind of sound poem. But what is sound, here? Not ‘pure sound’, that’s
for sure: Men in Aı̈da is grounded in a confrontation of phonetic systems, and
phonetic systems are linguistic. Not the consequence of an ascendency of the ear
over the eye or any other sense, either: reading Men in Aı̈da entails the simultaneous
operation of sight (our eyes move over the page), hearing (we listen to the words we
utter) and kinesthesia, as we feel the vibrations in our vocal tract.42 Nor the defeat of
meaning by sensual presence: Men in Aı̈da, despite its aggressive esotericism, can
and even demands to be interpreted (as we have seen). Here, rather, sonority lies at
the roots of language (where the vocal tract is organized into a phonetic and phonological system) and the very limits of language’s ability to have or make meaning, and
functions as the vector of a search for structuring but subliminal origins.
When, for example, Barrett Warren compares Melnick’s poetry to zaum, the
‘trans-rational’ sound poetry developed in Russia in the early decades of the past
century by Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh, he invokes zaum’s longing
for a more archaic form of communication, a formal and affective universal language
stripped of signification but enriched by its close connection to the soil.43 Sound
poetry never shed this uneasy nostalgia for meanings more original than those of
conventional language. In the Dada-connected Hugo Ball, for example, we find the
idea that by producing poems voided of all denotation one might recover a language
of pure (and plural) connotation, one in which tone and mood were all.
The sound poem is a departure not from semantics per se but rather from the doxa of
conventional meaning. Indeed, the mantic power within the Lautgedichte creates a semantic
condition in which meaning is potentialized and that way unconventionalized.44
Steve McCaffery points out that this particular aspiration is at least symbolist in
provenance: it was Mallarmé, after all, who dreamed of a ‘pure word’ to be recovered
in poetry and in contrast to the fallen languages of the market and the bourgeois
drawing room. In Crise de Vers, Mallarmé lamented the ill fit between language and
experience in every realm except the commercial. Poetry can ‘make up for the failure
of language’, however, when a ‘line of several words which recreates a total word,
new, unknown to the language and as if incantatory’ rescues signifying words from
their arbitrariness or, to put this a different way, restores their relationships with
things. Mallarmé’s goal was the redemption of language through the radical
42 Such a resonant movement between the senses is just what is imagined in Janus 2011. See
Ibid.
43 The most consistent discussions of sound poetry and its nostalgic implications are by
Steve McCaffery: McCaffery and pbNichol (1979); McCaffery (1998; 2009).
44 McCaffery (2009: 124).
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SEAN ALEXANDER GURD
estrangement of words; in the sound-poetries of the early twentieth century, even
the word was rejected, though the aim of a redeemed speech remained the same.
This longing to know (touch, write, place on the lips and roll around in the
mouth) an older, truer, more originary language reminds me again of the philological
impulses lying behind etymology and historical linguistics.45 If there is little resemblance between ‘trans-rational language’, sound poetry, and the construction of
proto-Indo-European, the reason may be a difference in procedure, not in guiding
assumptions; all seek out archaic strata lurking beneath language. Indeed, if IndoEuropean bears no resemblance to zaum, this may only be because it isn’t old
enough: some evolutionary theorists give credence to the hypothesis that language
and music arose out of an earlier vocalic practice that, while not linguistic per se, was
crucial in the communication and synchronization of affect within complex social
groups.46 In these theoretically primal contexts, vocal sound, rhythm, and form —
not signification — maintained the group. According to some, this primal vocal
gesturalism gave rise to both music and language, each developing in a different
direction: while music focused on rhythm and tone, language elaborated semantics
and syntax. Sound poetry might be said to return along this line of descent, performing an enactment of a language before speech.
Others have found evidence for an auditory pre-linguistic sphere in ontogeny
rather than phylogeny. Julia Kristeva imagined a stage of infant development in
which the voice preceded language and exceeded all the limitations of phonetics and
semantics: this was the semiotic sphere of the chora where, as Adriana Cavarero puts
it, ‘vocalic drives reign’.47 On Kristeva’s thesis much poetry, but especially that of
the post-Mallarméan avant-garde, resonates with this archaic vocal space. Writing
has a similar effect for Hélène Cixous, transforming the writer into ‘an ear, [. . .] a
rhythm’.48 Mladen Dolar, troping Lacan, refers to the voice as the objet petit a, that
real whose present is felt above all as a disconcerting absence.49 Reacting to the
sometimes explicit archaism in these accounts — they speak of what came before
language and the symbolic order — Charles Bernstein counter-proposes that we err
if we understand these hearkenings as chronological, as aiming ‘back in time:’ to the
contrary, they call up other strata of present consciousness. Thus ‘rather than speak
of the preverbal, we might speak of the omniverbal. Rather than referring to the
presymbolic, we might say asymbolic or heterosymbolic’.50
45 Compare H. U. Gumbrecht’s (2003) diagnosis of a ‘desire for presence’ in classical
philology.
46 See Mithen (2005); Morley (2013).
47 Cavarero (2005: 133). The reference is to Kristeva (1984). These ideas are given definitive historical context in Heller-Roazen (2005).
48 Negron (1994: 59).
49 Dolar (2006).
50 McCaffery (1998: 20).
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Sound is language’s flesh, its opacity as meaning marks its material embeddedness in the
world of things [. . .] The most resonant possibilities for poetry as a medium can be realized
only when the performance of language moves from human speech to animate, but transhuman, sound: that is, when we stop listening and begin to hear, stop decoding and begin to get
a nose for the sheer noise of language.51
I follow Bernstein in resisting appeals to a sonic realm where language’s protocols do
not prevail. Melnick’s poetry brings us only so far as the limits of language, its verge:
even where the business of making sense is made difficult, I am still sensing linguistically in distinguishing /t/ from /d/, /a/ from /i/, and these ‘sounds’ from others
that are not part of my language(s). I am sensing linguistically when I utter or hear a
word as a word, even if its context makes it nearly impossible to say what the word
‘means’, and even when the sounds, like allophones of the phoneme /t/, are part of the
language but beyond my attention. All of this linguistic circuitry is still working when I
read Men in Aı̈da aloud. But while it is present, it is normally not an active or conscious
concern to me when I speak, listen or read. Men in Aı̈da, on the other hand, makes me
aware of it; it brings attention to the unthought in language by working with material
from just below or outside of habitual forms of linguistic awareness.
This starts to become clear when we reflect on the fact that the phonetics of ancient
Greek, even in antiquity, have never been stable. However we answer the (probably
vexed) questions of when the Iliad was written down, when a definitive text emerged,
and how close this was to those edited today, it is an unavoidable conclusion from what
we now think we know that the epics are a kind of charter of long-term linguistic
instability. They were initially performed as elements of an oral tradition, and they
may have continued to be so performed for centuries after their textualization began;
oral traditions rapidly adapt to contemporary linguistic usage, but the use of formulae
in Homeric singing provided a kind of break in this process, the result of which is that
the text we have shows elements of great age mixed with dialectal material which may
be nearly contemporary with the works’ transcriptions. Indeed, Alexandrian editors,
working centuries even after this, sometimes reflected contemporary spellings and
pronunciations in their texts, and by the time of the renaissance the pronunciation
of classical texts had changed so much that reforms were felt to be needed — first
among Greek scholars, and then among the European humanists they trained.52
Nor did the humanist reforms stop the language’s pronunciation from continuing
to morph. An overview of the history of Greek in England offers a convenient
illustration of what I mean. Initially promulgated by Thomas Smith and John
Cheke in the later 1500s, the ‘reformed’ pronunciation was almost immediately
submitted to an indigenous sequence of alterations as the English ‘great vowel
51 Ibid., 21–22.
52 On the dialectology and historical development of Greek phonetics, see Grammont
(1948); Bubenı́k (1983); Lejeune (1987); Brixhe (1996). On the language of Homer,
see the overview and bibliography collected in Horrocks (2007), as well as (among
many others) Palmer (1962); Parry (1971); Chantraine (1986).
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SEAN ALEXANDER GURD
shift’ proceeded. As a result, ‘the English pronunciation of Greek developed as a
sub-dialect of English pari passu with the change in the pronunciation of English
itself – so that by the 19th century it bore little relation to the classical values or those
of the 16th century reformers’.53 Nor does the pronunciation today reflect the reconstruction perfectly: even today, pronunciations are tolerated that are not identical to the standard reconstruction. Thus (for example) one will hear teachers and
students alike pronouncing ’ as [ph] or [f]; q as [th] or [q]; z as [dz] or [zd]. The
phonetics of ancient Greek today, in other words, are best described as a plural
system with complex historical antecedents.54
So what’s a homophonic translator to do? What would have been the sound of his
source text? Melnick reports that he began by assuming a modern pronunciation,
but quickly abandoned this, attracted by the greater flexibility of the ancient pronunciation. This gave him a vocalic range easier to manipulate in English. But it also
gave him an opportunity to play with the inevitable plurality that lurks in the idea of
a ‘sound’ of ancient Greek. Thus, for example, Erasmus understood q as making the
sound of a fricative dental ([q]); but the modern reconstruction hears an aspirated
dental stop ([th]). Melnick knows about these differences, and he equivocates playfully and self-consciously:
L8nin 4"id" q"1 PhlhE0d"w +cil8o”
becomes
Men in Aı̈da, they appeal, eh? A day, O Achilles! (1.1)
but
S0 ” t’ 4r s’w" q"8n e!ridi xun"#hk" m0c"sqai;
is
The stars’ for at eon are radix unique make his thigh (1.8)
53 Allen (1987: 131).
54 ‘When classical scholars [. . .] read Ancient Greek or Latin aloud, they attempt to give an
approximate rendering of the ancient pronunciation, not an accurate reproduction of the
sound of the ancient languages, which is not feasible in any case. More effort is put into
achieving a basic distinction between the abstract units, the phonemes.’ Petrounias (2007:
1273). Petrounias gives an overview of national pronunciations of Greek on 1272–74.
Compare Katz (2010a). What is true of Greek is true also of English. Wray (2004) has
observed that some of the Zukofskys’ translations of Catullus only truly capture the Latin
if they are spoken in Zukofsky’s own New York dialect. ‘For the modernist poetics of the
Americas’, wrote Charles Bernstein in 2009, ‘the artifice of accent is the New Wilderness
of poetry performance, that which marks our poetries with the inflection of our particular
trajectories within our spoken language. [. . .] Performance is an open wound of accentual
difference from which no poet escapes. This is not the accent of stress but accents of
distressed language, words scarred by their social origins and aspirations’ (Bernstein
(2009: 146)).
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D A V I D M E L N I C K ’ S M E N I N A Ï D A
That Melnick knows what he’s doing is indicated by the playful ‘transliteration’ of
S0 ” in line 8 as ‘The s-’. As though winking at the fact that the same line will render q
as an unvoiced dental stop (the [t] of ‘at eon’), here he renders an unvoiced dental
stop (the [t] of t0 ”) as a dental fricative (the [q] of ‘the’). In the first 100 lines of book
one, Melnick renders q with the English fricative ‘th’ ([q]) 37 times; he renders it
with the English letter ‘t’ 17 times (once he renders it ‘f’ and he transliterates Greek
words three times). In book two, the distribution is different: here q is given as ‘th’
18 times; as the letter ‘t’ 31 times (twice he renders it as d, and he transliterates
Greek words twice). This distribution reveals a poet working with language as a
historical and changing sonic material.
In book three, however, he returned to the modern Greek pronunciation as his
source. His choice to do so certainly contests the authority of the reconstruction now
standard, if imperfectly implemented, in the Anglo-American academy, asserting in
opposition the legitimacy of contemporary and anachronistic accents. But in email
conversations with me Melnick has given another reason for returning to the modern
phonetics in book three: if books one and two, with their wide range of vowel sounds,
could be imagined as an open mouth making the sound of a long A, the modern
pronunciation, coming after a long process of iotacism, could be imagined as a single,
short I. Put together, Melnick says, the three books of the poem comprise a single
lamentatory syllable: AI.55 The poem was begun, he writes, in an optimistic spirit
provoked by the gay rights movement. Book Three, by contrast, was written after
Melnick’s lover David Doyle had been lost to AIDS. In what is surely not an accident,
the vocalic trajectory from long A to short I recapitulates the first two vowels of the
acronym AIDS; it also articulates the first two vowels of Aı̈da (which Melnick separates, in the most recent edition, with a diairesis). No mistake, either, surely, that
Melnick uses Aı̈da to express in English the Greek 4"id", ‘‘sing’’; the links between
4"id", Aı̈da, the lamentatory syllable AI, and AIDS seem to suggest that by the time
Melnick came to write book three song had been transformed into an imperative to
lament, lethally proximate to the letters used to designate a new plague. This background goes some way to explaining the remarkable interpretive univocity which has
surrounded the poem (discussed above): as playful as it is, as committed to emphasizing the materiality of communication and the ideological procedures inherent to the
making of meaning, Men in Aı̈da is also a lament, for an individual and (perhaps) for a
generation so indelibly marked by epidemic and loss. The poem’s joyful ludism is
balanced, in other words, by an undercurrent of grief tracked obliquely in the history
of Greek (much as it balances the madness and rage of the Iliad with its own riotous
copulations, of the linguistic and every other kind).
***
I have sought to argue that the exercise of ‘homophonic’ translation, in Melnick
closely associated with a transitive ‘homosexualization’ of the Iliad, is most closely
55 Personal Communication.
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SEAN ALEXANDER GURD
cognate to forms of etymological thinking developed in antiquity and appropriated
recently by queer theory, in which homophonic similarities between words are
exploited in order to create new and often subversive meanings from their conjunction; that this ‘queering’ of the Iliad is itself inseparable from a persistent engagement with pluralities of possible meanings and of pronunciation; and that the poem’s
interest in the history of pronunciation of Greek is accompanied by a remarkable
ability to manipulate phonemic elements of English that are not normally recognized
by native speakers. So great is Melnick’s technical ability in this regard that he was
able to modulate the homophonic translation into a cry of grief. Like Eliot’s ‘auditory imagination’, the procedures of Men in Aı̈da reach down towards archaic levels
of experience — both historical and psycho-linguistic — and express their acquisitions in the medium of linguistic sound. I suggested, as well, that we should resist
any attempt to read this focus on subliminal elements as a step ‘outside’ of language.
In many ways the poem’s value lies not in any attempt to transcend speech, but
rather in an engagement with its (nearly) inaudible roots. Nevertheless, there is one
movement ‘outside’ implicit here: with this poem we encounter a way of reading
Homer whose extraordinary gift is to remind us that encounters with classical literature sometimes take place at levels well beyond the areas of focus of traditional
hermeneutical practice.
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