Theodore Weissfrom Interview by Reginald Gibbons
Reginald Gibbons: I could say one word, "Greeks," and you could go wherever you wish.Theodore Weiss: What makes you ask about Greeks? Because I have written so much about them?
RG: Yes, because the Greeks are all through your work.
TW: It's an interesting complication. Someone once protested against my Greekiness, "But you're Jewish!" I replied, "Well, I know that. Greek is not so much greater in my mind than Hebrew, but different." I wanted to reach out beyond the confines of a very insistent religion and ideology. I do have an immense admiration for, and, I gladly admit, numerous debts (would they were many more!) to the prophets, in particular; their writing, as in the best of Shakespeare, surprises their language with its own dazzling resources. I continue to be astonished at what Isaiah, say, quarries out of Hebrew, gets it, listening, to say things it did not know it could. I have learned a deal of what I know about the resourcefulness of my own language from the prophets. And from Job, of course. And The Song of Songs. Homer, on the other hand, has been so important to me that it's pointless to try to fathom the extent of his influence. He isn't as imposing because he isn't immediately my own. He doesn't entangle me in an overheated family affair, doesn't corner me in the corner I'm already in, being Jewish.
But alas, I have little Greek (two years of undergraduate classes and, much later, a oneterm Oxford course with Professor Dodds, lecturing on Agamemnon) and less Hebrew (three months of living in its lively midst in Jerusalem at Mishkenot). Recently, in a program here at Princeton, devoted to Yehuda Amichai, several of the participants read his poetry in Hebrew, and I realized again what a mouthfilling, dramatic, assertive language it is. It comes as near to being action as language can. If one listened hard enough, he might overhear the echo of the stones fitting together to compose the Great Temple and, at the same time, the cry of those stones as the Temple was being leveled, and behind it all the rumble of the Tower of Babel, itself.
RG: The ancient Greek of Homer and the playwrights seems so close to the physical world.
TW: Their language at times seems like nature talking. And the closeness you mention also occurs in their expression of the feelings and the passions. They devised a wonderful, direct, physical way of explaining human conduct. When Achilles, for instance, aroused as he is, is about to kill Agamemnon, Pallas Athene, catching Achilles by the hair, exhorts him to stop, even as she assures him of rewards for his restraint. Such an explanation of motive is, I think, rather more telling than our modern psychologizing. Stripping the gods of their personalities and their powers, we have tried to make abstract, internal forces do the work.
RG: And the contrast with monotheism--the language of the prophets, even at its most beautiful and concrete, suggests a perspective that is so...mountaintop.
TW: And rigidly prescribed. For there is, of course, a buoyancy and a madeathome livingness in the Greeks. Whereas the Jews tend to be sufferers wherever they are. Driven as they have been from one place to another, they carry their Wailing Wall with them. (Those stones again!) Yet at the same time, the Jews love the goods of the world--for the goods' own sake and as they are gifts from God.
It may be that I learned just enough to be in awe of both languages. If that is so, I'm willing to accept it. In short, I think of Greek as a kind of Braille, a bas relief, that one can almost feel with one's fingers. And the same may be true of Hebrew. As for English, beyond Shakespeare, only in Hopkins have I encountered a kindred ruggedness and a delicacy as well. He too carved out of rock, the rock of the language, an ecstasy in which, as he says, "The heart rears wings bold and bolder/ And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet."
RG: When you first encountered the Greeks and began to read Homer, what sorts of translations did you choose, or which ones chose you?
TW: I read most of those available. I was especially taken with Richmond Lattimore's Iliad and Robert Fitzgerald's Odyssey. Lattimore's language had a fitting austere strength. Fitzgerald, a fine lyric poet, neglected today, was able to accommodate his gifts to the buoyancy and basic serenity of the Odyssey. Now we are lucky enough to have Robert Fagles's versions, simultaneously true to the originals and most agreeably uptodate. I've never been able to understand Chapman's attraction for many readers. But Pope is another story. His translations are, I believe, great, original performances. He proved that his seemingly limited minuet couplet could, in its own special way, undertake the epical. His versions may not be Homer, but they are certainly Pope. One regret I have is that Pound did not, after his stunning translation of Canto I, go on to translate the whole of the Odyssey. That would have been a poem to conjure with!
RG: You mentioned Hopkins. When I think about the difference in our ages, yours and mine, which is thirty years, I realize that if Pound and Eliot, who were still alive, were ancient presences for me when I graduated from high school, for you, thirty years before, they were really the active fathers at the beginning of your writing. Hopkins was more or less, for you, the notsodistant antecedent while Williams, Stevens, and others were really your contemporaries. And not only they.
TW: And Lorca, Rilke, Mallarme...In my graduate days I kept great company.
RG: You were in your twenties when Lorca was executed. I think of what a historical difference there was between your generation and mine.
TW: I get a twinge now and then, in part I suppose because it describes my own age, to think that Eliot and Pound and Stevens have receded, and are now becoming, increasingly, something that sits on a shelf and waits, like old pensioners, for someone to be interested in their dusty story. But this that is happening to them is not only inevitable but necessary: making room for the new and the now. But for me, they were poetry. When I had an interview with Eliot in London, it was as though I were talking to Donne or Browning, one of the makers of the language. Who do the young go to today, if they go to anybody? I suppose, like most wouldbe poets, they are principally occupied with their immediate predecessors and their competitor contemporaries.
RG: For your generation, and then for mine, some of these presences were impressive because they were ambitious for poetry, and they carried it to tasks that were almost too much for it. And then in your generation, there were some who still had this sort of ambition for poetry. But though many people say that this age of ours now is a golden age for poetry, I'm not sure how many of the poets who have ascended to greatest influence have been ambitious for poetry.
TW: You know Pound's magnanimous statement, that I quote often: "Great poetry must be written; it doesn't matter by whom." For a man generally judged to be very arrogant and selfabsorbed (and he often was), that sentiment marked the greatness in the middle of his confusion. Pound and Eliot are fascinating figures to me still because they're thought to be great experimenters, and yet in some ways their major experiment was bringing old work back into liveliness and contemporariness. They were not really the American ideal--a person who seems to break away from it all, and, out of himself, out of nothing, really, makes a great work.
Reginald Gibbons has published six books of poems, most recently Sparrow: New and Selected Poems (LSU) and Homage to Longshot O'Leary (Holy Cow! Press). His translation of Euripides' Bakkhai was published in January by Oxford University Press. He teaches at Northwestern University.
