You Know, If You Say The Word ‘Epic’ Often Enough It Starts To Sound Rather Silly
by and published in Edition Two of Pomegranate
You hear the word ‘epic’ a lot these days, mostly in movie trailers – especially since the roaring success of The Lord of the Rings. ‘This film is epic!’ bellows the announcer, and the screen flashes up, in the following order: scowling antihero, weeping child, city in ruins, natural disaster, fight scene, passionate kiss with popular starlet, fight scene redux now with elephants, and a big damn explosion. Got to love a summer blockbuster! (That wasn’t sarcasm. I really do love a summer blockbuster. Especially with explosions.)
Right now you’re probably thinking ‘I could swear this was supposed to be a poetry article.’ Don’t worry! It is! Epic didn’t start with cinema – epic didn’t even start with novels. Epic narrative – fight scenes, ruined cities and all – began with poetry. In fact, you could go further, and say that epic began poetry too. Ask any classicist where the western world’s literary tradition started, and the answer will be the same: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – two monster poems, each twenty-four books and thousands of lines long, one telling a tragic story of friendship and loss in wartime (well… you saw Troy, didn’t you?) and the other memorable as the world’s first bona fide adventure story, with a bildungsroman thrown in on top. Both these poems show all the signs of originating in the oral tradition – regularly repeated lines or whole chunks of text are a dead giveaway, a performing bard’s aide-memoire when faced with a 600-line extract to recite in one evening and no crib sheet. (The most famous of these lines is probably the one that crops up dozens of times in the Odyssey – ‘Then early rosy-fingered Dawn appeared’.) Both of them were probably in circulation for years if not centuries before they were eventually written down – the date of composition has been estimated at around 800 BC. And both of them are still around and intact (and, for that matter, getting made into movies) today, nearly three thousand years later.
These are the poems – the originals, the old firm. They bear very little resemblance to any poetry getting written today, or indeed to most of the poetry that we’ve been writing for the last five hundred years: they are too briskly narrative, with no meandering to enjoy an image or linger over a metaphor. The occasional simile is a big production, separated out from the rest of the text by a linebreak, and usually a caesura too. Sometimes the same simile gets repeated word for word in another section – another oral poet’s trick, one that looks pretty startling to those of us who agonise for days over whether an image really fits.
And they are most definitely epic, with battle scenes on a Lord of the Rings scale. Parts of the Iliad are incredibly slow and difficult for the modern reader to read – the long, long roll-call of Greek nations and the ships they sent to Troy in the second book, for example, or the sections of aristeia, when the poet focuses on a single warrior and describes his achievements on the battlefield to us in a breathless play-by-play – then he threw his bronze spear at Thingummy! And he threw his other spear at Whosis, and it went straight through him and killed the guy behind him too! And then he threw a rock at Whatsisname, who was the son of someone unimportant! And then he drew his sharp sword and killed six people in a row!
It feels sort of like listening to the football commentary on the radio when you don’t understand football. But as I was plodding through the duel between Hector and Ajax for my AS Greek exam last year, I had a revelation: this is cinema. The difference between an epic poem and an epic on the big screen is smaller than it looks.
Modern novels – for it’s novels where narrative happens now, not poetry – tell you a story. Oh, the good ones ‘show don’t tell’, but even when they’re showing, they’re telling: what you get shown invariably advances the story. When I was reading these lengthy fight sequences, I was reading them in a prose translation, and so I’d been considering them as prose – and as prose, they’re slow, unwieldy, offering no character development or plot advancement. Return to the original – or even to a decent verse translation (I recently bought Christopher Logue’s War Music, haven’t read it yet, I’ll let you know how that goes) – and suddenly they come alive, like beautifully choreographed action set-pieces. What was dull repetition suddenly becomes a shuddering build-up of suspense: randomly gory deaths become tragic and moving, drawn out line by line, the literary equivalent of soft-focus panning over the body of an unnamed soldier. Every caesura is a change of camera angle, every enjambement a lingering establishing shot: ponderous meter that was lost in translation is divine thunder, and quick polysyllables are the beating of horses’ hooves. The whole thing practically sparks with energy. No wonder similes and metaphors are so rare – they interrupt the good bit!
I don’t think I’ve ever been more struck by the power of poetry. These days what we write is very seldom narrative – there’s a general feeling that if you want to write a great big story, you should go ahead and attempt a novel. But it isn’t story alone that’s kept the Iliad and Odyssey alive and admired for two and a half thousand years. Modern creators of epic have it easy – the medium of cinema gives you faces and places, dialogue, stuntmen, special effects, a sweeping symphonic soundtrack. How hard is it to transport people to another world when you’ve got all that? Ancient epic poets had only words to bring their mythological superheroes to life, only words in place of stunts and computer-puppet monsters and a helicopter shot. And with those words they created something huge and powerful and wholly immersive. You could never do it in prose, but Homer’s poetry is so powerful that the mere cinema of Troy looks rather silly by comparison. People who say ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ have been reading the wrong words.
Emily Tesh
Emily Tesh is first mate to Char’s captain and the oldest member of the team. As befits someone of such advanced years, she likes very old poetry e.g. Ovid, Catullus, Sappho and Homer, although she has been known to read poems written as recently as 1963. She therefore had no choice but to study Classics, which she is doing at Trinity College, Cambridge. Emily is a Londoner and her poetry has been published in Mimesis and Magma. She also designed the Pomegranate logo.