When I was thirteen I came across a poem by Sappho. I hadn’t heard of her, didn’t know who she was. To be honest, I had rather vague ideas about what a poem, as such, could be. But it made some sort of impression on me and I couldn’t stop re-reading the lines with their strangely formed meanings and beautiful sounds that I assumed were hers, though I later learned that they had been articulated by an old philologist from Finland, the translator Emil Zilliacus. It was a shocking meeting, with deep and long-term consequences. Poetry became an obsession, and so did Sappho. Twenty-eight years later I published the work of the Greek poetess in the most complete edition we have in Swedish. But in the first instance, it was a meeting that opened up a certain historicity, a certain aspect of – or angle toward, or a certain quality in – time. A temporality, let’s say, that was and still is accessible for me only when I work with, translate, or interpret poetry. Let us simply call it “philological time”.
But where does it reside?
I use to define poetry, with Joseph Brodsky, as “language in its highest potentiality”. That is, language at its most. Language as silent as it may be, as noisy, as condensed, as causal, as comic, as enigmatic, as touching, as cerebral, as truthful, as clinging, as deaf, as normal, as opaque or transparent, etc. Poetry as the utmost possibility of language. But since the poem is not an object, is never per se an object, but only a poem to someone, the definition should be: “poetry is language in its highest potentiality, to someone.” And one unique possibility in poetry is, of course, its capacity of nuancing history, and of presenting a complex and living experience of time. Not only past time, but also present and coming time. There is no comparable phenomenon; poetry allows us to sense and attend to time in more nuanced forms than any other artefact.
Time, in the sense that we may experience it through poetry is, thus, always, “poly-time”. I say this in contrast to the modernist idea of a “pan- time” that is found, for example, in T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” opening. His idea is also rooted in a philological experience, in the act of reading, interpreting, actualizing old texts, but it’s rather more ideological than empirical in its reference to actualization. It reflects a universalism, a longing to rest in wholeness and sameness, in an equal condition, something common to all humans. But I would argue that philological actualization does reveal to us quite the opposite in terms of time. Eliot demands the universal, but history can only be shared when reduced and poetry is, as we have said, potentiality. Time in the poetic sense is, if not difference, at the very least a set of nuances folded up, or better, crumpled like a paper bag in a garbage can. A numberless amount of creases and wrinkles.
Our epoch wants to insist that there is only one time and one world that we are all simultaneously sharing. In fact this is the main, if not the only, idea of equality in global capitalism; but it is, of course, false. There are a multitude of worlds and times that exist, not simultaneously but intermingled, opposing each other or living independently side by side.
Eliot was however right in that poetical time is eternal time, but his concept of eternity needs to be modified. The idea of eternity as something universal is far from an archaic concept in western thinking. The Greek word aiôn is usually translated by the Latin aeternitas; but the concept is, most probably, founded through a misinterpretation. The Dutch philologist Heleen M. Keizer has shown how the concept of “eternity” was originally formed in the Septuaginta – the first and extremely influential translation of the Jewish Torah into Greek from the third century BC onwards. The word aiôn came to translate the Hebrew word ôlam. However, if the Hebrew word means something like “in all time”, the Greek means something more like “time as a whole”. Nowadays, translators often use the English word “lifetime” for aiôn – that is, as I understand it, “the time you may conceptualize from the point of view of your personal life.”
But aiôn is even more important as a word to help us understand poetical or philological time. Heraclitus (c. 500 BC), the philosopher from the ancient city Ephesus, in what is today Turkey, wrote: “aiôn pais esti paizôn, pesseuôn, paidos hê basilêiê.” (“Eternity is a child playing, playing checkers; the kingdom belongs to a child.”) [1] This translation is more of an interpretation. I would rather suggest something like: “Aiôn is a child, a playing child, a child who reigns.” The point is that the word “child” (país) appears three times in this short fragment. According to Heraclitus, aiôn is without a doubt something fundamentally childish. But what, then, is a child? A child is a topos within ourselves, usually created when we are about three years old. At the age of three, kids start saying “when I was little” or “when I was a baby”. The child is, from this perspective, a position taken towards ourselves, opened up for us to reflect upon the qualities of time, now and then, here and there, within the “self” understood as our “life-time” (i.e. what we already have experienced, and what we may in the future experience according to our present being, our dasein, to speak Heideggerian). To act as a child, to play or to reign like a child, means to play and reign in and through time. Aiôn then is, according to Heraclitus, this possibility of elaborating, exploring and experiencing time through play over the spatial and temporal limit that the concept “child” opens up and establishes.
Yes, the “child”, understood as another, preceding, but still accessible to us, is the topos through which we may elaborate time while philologically actualizing poetry.
Poems are never, as already mentioned, as such but always to someone. It means that poetry depends on the act. I used to speak about this act, the poetical act, as “making oneself the place where the poem may come in to being.” Since we speak about language in its highest potentiality, the poem is always more than what a single attention, a single person, might actualize. The poem is always bigger than us. It is always greater, wider, deeper, yet unknown, unexpected. And the limits of the poem as potentiality are thus set by the readers’ lust, interest, knowledge, skill, perception, patience, etc. Bad poems are those that don’t make us explore them further. Good poems, on the other hand, never really leave us, they keep coming back in different ways, sometimes anonymously. But the point is that they keep making us act upon them. And one part of this actualization through ourselves is the temptation to explore time’s qualities. To play and reign – desire and enjoy, think, rethink and feel – the aiôn.
There is a fragment by Sappho that goes: “mnásesthaí tiná phaimi kaì heteron amméôn.” (“Someone, I say, will remember us in the future.”) This fragment is among the best texts I know of to illustrate how time is articulated in poetry. If you confront the fragment with the key question of poetical hermeneutics, according to the German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer – “Who am I, and who are you?” – a complex schema appears:
I am Sappho, you are a fictive person in the poem.
I am Sappho (the I), you are Sappho (the self).
I am Sappho (the body), you are Sappho (the signature).
I am Sappho, you are the reader of the poem.
I am Sappho, you are the fragment as text.
I am the reader, you are Sappho.
I am the reader, you are another reader.
I am the reader, you are the text.
I am the reader (the I), you are the reader (the self).
I am the text, you are Sappho.
Etc...
This schema could go on for much longer, of course. But the important thing here is that each revealed relation might be valued and read as a certain quality of time. The fragment, as such, speaks to memory as actualization. And since the act may take place in any moment it is perfectly open in its precise significations of time. All the potential moments signified by this extraordinary fragment work behind and within each other, time appears as a weave of different temporal relations that could be carefully unraveled, but, when taken together, form an incomparable and complex experience and concept of time.
However, the potentiality of the poem goes beyond what we usually refer to as meaning. The poem is equally a thing, a text or formed sounds that have their historicity as all things do. Old texts, found on mummy wraps, stones or papyrus, bear witness to their own history. While translating Sappho, for example, you are always aware of the text missing in the existing fragments. There are wounds to be dealt with; lacks and losses that you must not read, since reading here is an obscenity, a hermeneutic violence contradicting the previously mentioned nature of the poem as potential language, since there is no language there to be actualized.
How, then, to deal with these non-poetical wounds, for example, in the midst of interpretation or translation? I suggest that they should be understood as materialized oblivion, bite-marks on the face of history; testimonies of the blank and indifferent time that exists outside of aiôn, the time which we only may develop an abstract or mathematical understanding of. I would say that poetry, even newly written, always allows us to touch this radically unknown; but when you work with very old texts it becomes even more apparent. Translating Sappho implies extraordinary experiences of temporal simultaneity. While doing it I often find phrases on my messy desk that I first think are my own, but soon understand as translations of her poems. Many of her lines are as convenient to my daily life as they were to hers, five centuries before Christ. But on the other hand, they always have a side of them that points towards something absolutely foreign, something that one might recognize as beyond the reach of understanding and even experience; the cool breeze of time as oblivion. In this sense poetry is not only, as Pindar proposes, a servant of Mnemosyne, but equally a servant of Lethe. Aristotle has a term for this potentiality that escapes actualization, or rather, that is actualized as potentiality. He calls it adynamis. In terms of poetry the adynamis represents what is brought by the poem across history though never interpreted or read; the dark matter that swallows not only experience and understanding, but also time as it may be conceptualized from our human point of view; the ôlam that, after all, is just barely graspable as belonging to the unhuman perspective of a God.
Philology, thus, not only sharpens our knowledge and sensibility to the nuances of time, but in addition lets us touch time outside our possible comprehension, the indescribable condition of time as we may understand and experience it.
And if speaking about poetical philology, all this has to be processed by the very body of the reader. The poetic attention, the one capable of answering language in its highest potentiality, capable of becoming the place where the poem as such may come into being, is of course an attention that demands all we have, and still more. To actualize language at this supreme vista, the reader has to mobilize all the senses, the experience, the mind, the memory, the musicality, the sense of rhythm and intertextuality, the hermeneutic skills, the cognitive sharpness, the full sensibility of his or her own being. Nothing less. Since the poem is actualized as a poem only by the reader’s attention, we have to rework ourselves while reading. This process, the becoming the place where the actual poem may come in to being, is what I mean by poetic philology. It is a philology that could never be understood according to the idea of language as “communication”. There are no places for senders and receivers, no “signs” in any Saussurean meaning of the word. In poetry nothing is communicated. Nothing ever becomes “common”. The poetry-reader is particular, lonely and always disagrees (with everybody, including himself).
Our time, the globalized and digitalized era of worldwide capitalism, tries to convince us that poetry, as I have tried to speak for it above, is obsolete, pseudo-cultural and pretentious: an ultra-exclusive article for an exceedingly small number of elite consumers. But that is nothing but propaganda based on the idea that poetry is a certain form of text, a type of object or a category of product. Understood as “language in its highest potentiality, to someone”, poetry is to be found wherever language is used. That is one thing we might learn by adopting old and ancient poetical traditions. Philology shows us that greater attention equals greater complexity. The temporality of the poem becomes more complicated, more diverse, the more we read it. Philology reveals time as something neither consumable nor communicable. Philology let us experience the ever-dividing edge of the becoming, time as a weave that constantly unweaves itself under the pressure of our finite presence. Time as broken time harboring time, always fractured, split, smashed into innumerable splinters of time.
[1] Reality (1994), by Carl Avren Levenson and Jonathan Westphal, p. 10. See
Magnus William-Olsson (b. 1960, Stockholm, Sweden), poet, literary critic, and translator, has published nine volumes of poetry, four books of essays on poetry, and two books of autobiographical tales. He has translated poetry from ancient and modern Greek (Sappho and Cavafy), Spanish (Antonio Gamoneda, Alejandra Pizarnik and Gloria Gervitz), Portuguese (Paulo Henriques Britto) and Danish (Pia Tafdrup) into Swedish. His collected poems, titled Ögonblicket är för Pindaros ett litet rum i tiden (The Moment for Pindar is a Small Space in Time) was published 2006. A book of twenty-seven sonnets followed in 2010. In 2011 came a book on poetry and poetics, Läsningen föregår skriften - poesins aktualitet (Reading Precedes Writing - the Actuality of Poetry). His poems have been translated into more than fifteen languages. In 2013, a new collection of poetry, Homullus absconditus, was published. William-Olsson is also the editor-in-chief of two series of books, W&W - Internationell poesi (the most prestigious series in Sweden for international poetry) and Ariel/Litterär Kritik, a series of Scandinavian essays. He has been awarded several prizes, among others the Karl Vennbergs pris (2005), the Bellmanpriset (2010) and the Gunnar Ekelöfpriset (2011).