Hic
depositum est corpus
JONATHAN
SWIFT S.T.D.
Huyus
Ecclesiae Cathedralis
Decani
Ubi saeva indignatio
Ulterius
Cor
lacerare nequit
Abi Viator
Et
imitare, si poteris
Strenuum
pro virili
Libertatis
Vindicatorem
Swift’s
most recent biographer, Leo Damrosch, renders a literal translation:
“Here is deposited the
body
of Jonathan Swift S.T.D.
[Sacrae Theologiae Doctor]
of this Cathedral church
the Dean
where savage indignation
can no longer
lacerate his heart.
Go, traveler,
and imitate, if you can,
a valiant champion
of manly freedom.”
Aware
of myriad mistranslations and misunderstandings, Damrosch writes (in Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World,
2013): “Swift left directions in his will for an epitaph in Latin, and it was
duly engraved on a large black wall plaque. It should be read as he intended
it, not as a prose statement but as a series of telling phrases.” The
best-known version of Swift’s epitaph is Yeats’:
“Swift
has sailed into his rest;
Savage
indignation there
Cannot
lacerate his breast.
Imitate
him if you dare,
World-besotted
traveller; he
Served
human liberty.”
In
a 1971 essay, “Yeats and Swift” (The
Avoidance of Literature: Collected Essays, 1978), C.H. Sisson pokes fun at Yeats’
lifelong attraction to and distaste for his Irish forebear, noting, “there is
an irony in a man with his head full of the clumsy generalities of A Vision living familiarly with the
writings of the Dean of St. Patrick’s….No doubt Yeats liked the idea of Swift—his idea of him—but if he read him with
attention it was certainly not in order to take what he said seriously.” And a
few paragraphs later: “Yeats’s struggles against his romantic self are not
without their comic element.” Sisson (for whom Swift was a hero) documents
Yeats’ use of Swift in his poems, and judges the epitaph his “best tribute.”
Then Sisson gets serious:
“Yeats
weakens the whole by substituting the first ten words—mere fact, he must have thought, and therefore beneath an artist’s
notice…The version is vague `and thus has passion’ [quoting a Yeats letter], he
might have said. The rest of the translation attempts the impossible, as
translations are doomed to do.”
Sisson
speculates that the antecedent to Yeats’ “there” is “that shadowy land where
Swift was taking his rest with the Irish heroes.” He continues to boost the
withering irony, pointing out, “It is moreover not `Imitate him if you
dare’—with a boyish or romantic flourish—but if you can [see Damrosch’s
translation]. It is not a `world-besotted’ traveler—no Swiftian epithet
that—but the passer who stands there, who is addressed. `Human’ liberty? Not at all in Swift’s words; that emphasis belongs
to the world after Rousseau. The call is to a civic virtue.”
Damrosch
the biographer bolsters Sisson’s argument: “The Latin indignatio comes from the satirist Juvenal, and perhaps
from the Bible as well: `Who can stand before his indignation? and who can
abide in the fierceness of his anger?’ In his will, Swift used the word vindex, translated here as
`champion.’ It’s not clear why the word
on the plaque is vindicator, whose
meaning is closer to avenger. The challenge to the viewer is not in doubt: go
and imitate if you can, but you probably can’t.”
The
pithiest understanding of Swift I know comes from, of all people, Coleridge. In
his Table Talk entry for June 15,
1830 (The Table Talk and Omniana, Oxford University Press, 1917), in which he talks
at length about Rabelais, the bloviating poet says: “Swift was anima Rabelaisii habitans in sicco—the soul
of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place.” If Yeats is warm and moist, Swift is cool
and dry, like a good place to camp for the night.
No comments:
Post a Comment