A review of Alice Oswald's Memorial
Can anyone read the Iliad and not be moved? Homer’s 15,000-line poem tells myriad stories, starting with Achilles’ anger and ending with the funeral of Hector, crown prince of Troy. In between, many Greeks and Trojans die often graphic deaths. It’s not the deaths themselves — terrible as they are — that invoke tears, though, but the way they intrude rudely into the rhythm of life. Perhaps the most poignant moment comes in the 22nd book. It is evening. Andromache is running a bath for her husband Hector, who will soon come back caked in the sweat and dust of battle. She hears the keening of Trojan women and runs up to the battlements to see his corpse being dragged behind the chariot of a triumphant Achilles.
The trouble is, most translations fail to bring the reader anywhere near such an emotional pitch as Homer’s simple verse does. And thus it becomes one of those books everyone has but no one ever reads. Which is why Alice Oswald’s Memorial is so welcome. As both a poet and a classicist, she is well-positioned to try and convey something of the original spirit of the poem.
Oswald’s slim volume aims to capture the enargeia of the poem. Gone is the narrative, and most of the gods. The main characters are reduced to bit players. This is no longer a story of Greek and Trojan leaders, but of the war dead. Hence the title Memorial, the first seven pages of which list, in block capitals, names of casualties not unlike a war bulletin. This is unusual because the ‘fighting books’ in the middle of the epic are often overlooked; too gruesome , too unrelenting, too many unknown names. “Little is known of him except his death,” says Oswald of Leukos. How true for almost all of them. Yet Homer honours each man with a few details: how he came to the war, his mastery of the bow or harp, how anxiously his parents are awaiting news, and how he’s killed. With these, Oswald creates a miniature epitaph for each.
Like Homer, she doesn’t spare the reader the gritty detail of each man’s slaughter:
Brave Hypsenor the stump of whose hand
Lies somewhere on the battlefield.
Oswald’s poetic skill is not used only to mourn the dead. She’s also selected some of Homer’s similes and reworked them into her own, self-contained poems:
The fear flutters his knees it
Sucks him white he steps back
The similes are interspersed with the deaths and appear twice, perhaps to allow us to savour the beauty of the images, and to relieve the horror of the deaths. The Andromache scene described earlier is not covered but if we can judge by another scene from the original that Oswald does include, that of Patroclus’ death, she seems indeed to touch the reader just as Homer does:
That was Patroclus nicknamed the Innocent
Who grew up blurred under the background noise
Of his foster-brother’s voice
And borrowed his armour
In the mess of war he forgot his instructions
He kept killing and killing
Until the crack of his spear splintering
And the hush of his helmet spinning through the air
And the rare and immediate light
Of Apollo with one hand
Stopped him.