Trustees of Boston University

Writing on the World: Simonides, Exactitude and Paul Celan

Author(s): Anne Carson
Source: Arion, Third Series, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Fall, 1996), pp. 1-26
Published by: Trustees of Boston University
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Writing on the World: Simonides, Exactitude
and Paul Celan

ANNE CARSON

A
H POET IS someone who writes on the world.

Simonides used different instruments and various surfaces?the

human voice, the human body, lyres, flutes, drums, silence, ritual
occasions, private gestures, all of which have passed away. He also
wrote on stone. The many ascribed, however
epigrams dubiously,
to his name by ancient authorities and editions of inscriptional
verse suggest that he may have been the most highly esteemed epi
grammatist of the early fifth century and certainly made a good
part of his living from these commissions. We do not know much
about the practical side of such a life, about the relations between
poem and stone, poet and engraver, poetics and cash. Who chose
the stone, the stonecutter, the place where the stone would stand,
the direction it would face? Was the stonecutter a free man or a
slave? Paid by day or by item? By Simonides or by his patron? Who
set the price for an inscription? How was the price calculated?by
number of letters? Of words? Of verses? By metrical nicety, allu
sions to Homer, original figures of speech? Did Simonides himself
know much about the cutting of letters, about how stone thrusts
certain lettershapes forward and fills others with shadow, about
why stonecutters disliked cutting iota?1
The fifth century BCwas a good time to interest oneself in the
art of epigraphy. Simonides' lifetime coincided with the period of
highest development in ancient engraving techniques. During this
period, as the various epichoric alphabets of the Greeks found
their way to became more in
regularization, lettershapes precise
their construction and engravers began to develop a feeling for the
form and arrangement of an inscription, as well as its relationship
to the stone on which itwas inscribed. They began to think about
details like the proportions of the stele; how to place the text on the
stone at a convenient for the reader to read, how to use let
height

tering of a different size in the heading for increased legibility and

liveliness.2 Moreover, the fifth century saw the old boustrephedon
of
style writing give way to a more pleasing and intelligible left-to
2 WRITING ON THEWORLD

right convention. In particular, the stoichedon style which had

been introduced in the sixth century began to find extensive pub

lic use after the Persian Wars.

Stoichedon is the term for a style of writing inwhich letters are

aligned vertically as well as horizontally and placed at equal inter
vals along their respective alignments like ranks of men inmilitary
formation.3 This precisionist style of inscriptional writing, which
reached the high point of its technical development and popularity
in Simonides' day, arguably had some influence on Simonides' own
cognitive designs. Historians suppose that the main motive for
of stoichedon was aesthetic control?"a
adoption style practical

expression of the Greek

feeling for order and beauty"?especially
in light of the particular aptness of the letterforms of the Greek
alphabet, with their numerous vertical strokes, for this type of
alignment.4 Aesthetic control of alphabetic form was also a con
cern of Simonides; his biographical notice in the Suda tells us that
this poet took it upon himself to design four new letters for the
Greek alphabet (eta, omega, phi, and chi). Apocryphal or not, this
story reminds us that, inasmuch as the evolution of Greek let

tershapes was not complete until the end of the fifth century,
Simonides was in a unique as well as temper
position, historically
to the communication of his art. An epi
amentally, perfect design

graphic poet is someone interested in making every letter count.

letters was an with which engravers of sto

Counting activity
ichedon style were becoming closely and professionally familiar in
the early fifth century due to an important advance in their tech
nique, the introduction of the chequer. The chequer was a grid of
horizontal and vertical lines marked on the stone before cutting so
as to divide its surface into equal rectangles. The text could then
be engraved in perfect stoichedon sequence by placing one letter in
each rectangular space or, alternately, by placing the letters at the
points of intersection of horizontal and vertical lines. Using the
the engraver could estimate the exact area that would be
chequer,

required for inscribing his text and fix precisely the point to which
the text would run on the stone.5 Historians tell us that fifth-cen
tury engravers ruled out their stone beforehand with remarkable
exactitude; the margin of error on well-cut stones due to variation

in the size of the unit between one part of the stone and
chequer
another is found to be not more than half a millimeter.6
Simonides, for his part, must have spent a good deal of time
drawing mental lines and positioning data, measuring shapes in
 Anne Carson 3

his mind's eye and cutting away the inessential, counting off letters
and reckoning prices. "Exactitude" on every level of poetic design
was the conspicuous feature of his style, in the opinion of ancient
critics:

SuiCDV??ov ?? jrapaxriQei tf]v ?xX,oyr|v x v ovou?xcov, xfj?

?w08?8coc TTjvaxpi?etav

Watch very carefully Simonides' choice of words and the

exactitude with which he puts things together....

says Dionysius of Halicarnassos (Vet. Script. 420 Reiske). For

"exactitude" Dionysius has chosen the critical term akribeia; it is
a word with two meanings that reflect the two most constant fea
tures of Simonides' ancient Akribeia can mean
reputation. "preci
sion, accuracy, exactness of or
language" "parsimony, frugality,

stinginess with money" (LSJ).We find a homologous term used by

the Aristophanic scholia (on Peace 699) :

2ifxo)vi?T]? ?oxe? Jto?rcoc auixooXoyiov e?aeveYxe?v ei? x?

gauaxa xai aauxx
ypaipai \110dov

Simonides appears to have been the first to introduce meticu

lous calculation into and to write songs for a
songmaking
.. .
wage.

For "meticulous calculation" the scholiast uses the word smik

rologia, a double-edged word whose referents include "minute

care about details of exact and "minute care
language, expression"
about financial expense, miserliness" (LSJ). Simonides made an
impact in both spheres of operation?language and money?so far
as we can judge from history and anecdote,7 for his art was shaped
by unique cultural pressures. As the first Greek poet to make his
living by fixing a price to a poem, Simonides was probably a
wealthy man, possibly a curmudgeon, and not surprisingly
attracted a reputation for avarice and greed. Yet itwould be a crass
hermeneutics that took the money of Simonides entirely literally. I
suspect Simonides himself rarely did so. Everything gets more
interesting ifwe understand his greed as a biographical trope for
the whole burgeoning fifth-century money economy, this cultural

process that was reducing

to
commodity certain hitherto sacred
 4 WRITING ON THEWORLD

activitieslike the transmission of wisdom within a deeply tradi

tional society. Money had a radical impact on ancient culture;
Simonides reacted to it by inventing a poetry of radical economy.
And it is plausible, considering how much of his work was com
posed for inscription on stone, that he learned a great deal from
the stonecutters, practitioners of an art that is radically frugal.
But ancient stones were in their radical?much
also, frugal way,
more so than their mortal remains suggest to us now. Stonecutters

designed their work so as to interrupt and arrest the attention of a

passerby, to make him stop, stand still and read. The striking
beauty and order of stoichedon style were especially conducive to
this end. Historians tell us that engravers liked to further enhance
its effect (particularly on small monuments like gravestones8) by
special spatial arrangement of the text (perhaps a single line given
to each word) or by painting the letters after they were cut, usually
in red paint but sometimes in alternating lines of red and black.
Imagine an epitaph like Simonides' for Spinther (fr. 126B, 133D)
inscribed in such a way.

SAMA TOMB
TODE HERE
SPINTHER SPINTHER
SPINTHER UPON SPINTHER
EPETHEKESET
THANONTI DEAD9

We may be inspired to think again about Simonides' well-worn

dictum "poetry is painting that talks" (Plutarch Mor. 346f) when
we visualize Spinther pulsing at the world from a gravestone in
alternating verses of red and black. And surely this iswhat the cus
tomer pays for when he buys an epitaph?a moment of second
thought purchased from passing time through the attention of
someone still alive.

We should not, however, oversimplify the epitaphic transaction.

When a wandering passerby stops to read Spinther's epitaph one
day in the fifth century BC,much more than a purchase on visual
attention is involved. Ancient inscriptions were truly "talking
stones," in the sense that silent was not a usual nor a
reading

practical mode of deciphering them.10 Generally inscribed in

continua with no spaces between the words, stones
scriptio
demanded to be read aloud so that the reader could "recognize"
 Anne Carson 5

(anagign?skein) the words. What is recognized in such reading is

not individual letters or visual facts so much as a sequence of
sounds ordered in viva voce as the reader hears himself pronounce
them. Words and word-groups obscure to the eye will them
shape
selves upon the ear and unlock the codes of memory. So the verbs

for "to read" in Greek typically begin with a prefix like ana
("again") or epi- ("on top of") as if reading were essentially
as a sort of vibration between letters com
regarded sympathetic
posed by a writer and the voice inwhich a reader pulls them out of
silence.11 It is interesting that the second most feature
conspicuous
of Simonides' style (after exactitude) in the opinion of ancient crit
ics is a quality they call to sympathes.12 Generally translated into
English as "sympathy" or "pathos," the term implies some shared
movement of soul between writer and reader (cf. Quintilian's
miseratio commovenda: "pity moving together with pity"13), as if
words could have a power to enter the reader and an emo
design
tion there from inside his own voice. Consider this epitaph for men
fallen in battle:

"Aa?eoxov xX?o? o??e (j)i?r)i jieoi Jtaxot?i 0?vxe?

xu?veov Gav?xou au^e?aXovxo v?<|)o?
ovb? xeGv?ai Gavovxe?, ?jtet acj>'?oexr] xaGimepGev
Kvba?vovo' av?yei ? uaxo? ?| 'Ai?e .

Asbestos glory these men set around their dear fatherland

and in a dark blue death cloud they wrapped themselves.
Not dead having died. Because virtue down from above
keeps pulling them up glorying out of Hades' house.
(fr. 59B, 121D)

"Glory" here is an asbestos energy that works itself out through

the surfaces of the words, like the glow from a funeral pyre. There
are different surfaces, which open and shift as unexpectedly as
smoke. There are questions and answers, disoriented
mysteriously
from one another. What is burning? Apparently not that which has
been set on fire.Who is dead? Apparently not those who have died.
Out of these mysteries the poet creates a general mood of disorien
tation, which is spatial, aural and temporal as well as cognitive.
The reader has the sense that he is staring down into a tomb. He is
listening hard, he is expecting to hear a door slam shut. Instead he
hears his own voice open and stall on the awkward
unusually14
6 WRITING ON THEWORLD

hiatus of vowels between "death" (thanatou) and "wrapped them

selves" (amphebalonto) at the middle of the poem. As he looks

down from above at the doorway of death, he is expecting to see
darkness. Instead there is a passageway out of which very bright
living beings are rising and keep rising up into the moment of his
own The verb tenses control this action, from the
reading. moving
aorist instant of death described in the first couplet ("set,"
"wrapped"), to a verb in the perfect tense denying the closure of
death at the center ("not dead having died"), to end in the present
progressive ("keeps pulling") like aslow leak of immortality. A
final gaping vowel (Aideo) at the very end of the poem leaves
Hades' house standing open. Losing life upward.
This poem is one of the finest examples of the Simonidean epi
taphic method. Before we analyze the method further, let us con
sider a
comparison. Here is a poem of the twentieth-century
Romanian writer Paul Celan, called "Epitaph For Francois":15

Die beiden T?ren der Welt

stehen offen:
ge?ffnet von dir
in der Zwienacht.
Wir h?ren sie schlagen und schlagen
und tragen das Ungewisse,
und tragen das Gr?n in dein Immer.

The two doors of the world

stand open:

opened by you
in the twinight.
We hear them slam and slam
and carry the thing that's uncertain

and carry the green thing into your Ever.

(All translations from Celan's German, unless otherwise

noted, are by Michael Hamburger.)

It is a poem whose premise is precision. It is concerned with reck

oning. The poet's neologism Zwienacht ("twinight"), made out of

the number two and the noun for night, is an attempt to count out

the moment of death. This count ismade audible in the slamming

of two doors ("schlagen und schlagen," "we hear them slam and
 Anne Carson 7

slam") which echo through the final verse ("und tragen und tra
gen," "and carry and carry") into eternity. Like Simonides, Celan
uses sound effects to draw the reader into the mood of the epi
taphic situation. An epitaph is a mysterious place, where catego
ries like noun and number, question and answer, open and closed,
may disorient themselves. Celan contrives to keep these disorien
tations suspended in a curious greenish light and shifting continu
ally over the surface of the poem until suddenly we see them all
disappear through a doorway into the word "Ever." Like Simon
ides, Celan uses verbs and verb tenses to project this disappearance
into paradox. For we listen to doors slam shut while being told
that they also stand open, perhaps eternally. And the final three
words of the poem prop this question open like a doorstop upon
the hypostasized adverb Immer: "into your Ever."
Like Simonides, Celan constructs his as an act of atten
epitaph
tion shared between poet and reader, which moves out from the
reader's voice through all the surfaces of the poet's language. For
Celan this act of attention originated in a religious sensibility.
"Attention is the natural prayer of the human soul," he said once
in an interview.161 think we can
perceive also within the artistry of
Simonidean verse a method as concentrated as It is a
prayer.
method of attention that translates words and sounds and num
bers into the profound poetic experience called "pathos" or "sym
pathy": such pathos is a function of poetic exactitude.
Let us consider now another of Simonidean
example pathos,
where the poet turns his attention to the smaller, sadder ghostli
ness of a private tomb. The epitaph inscribed toMegakles17 gives
a sense of constriction rather than openness, of grief secret:
kept

2fjua xaxa<J)Gifx?voio MeyaxX?o? e?x' ?v ?? um

o?xx?q?) ce, x?Xav KaMxa, o?' ?jtaGe?.

Whenever I see the tomb of dead Megakles

I pity you, sad Kallias, what you suffered.
(fr. 113B, 84D)

The emotion of the poem is eerily three-cornered and works by

deflection. Itmoves out from the reader to touch Megakles' tomb
but is then bounced off Megakles onto a third, unanticipated
presence. Kallias materializes silently by the reader's side, more

mysterious and more pitiable than the dead man. It is as if you

 8 WRITING ON THEWORLD

were
standing alone (you thought) in a room and suddenly heard
someone breathing. This deflection reminds me of what happens
in the painting of Giotto called Joachim Retiring To His Sheep
fold (Figure 1). This painting shows Joachim, after his expulsion
from the temple in Jerusalem, arriving back at his sheephold into
the presence of two shepherds with their sheep and a small jump
ing dog. Joachim is in deep dejection and fixes his eyes on the
evidently unconscious of his surroundings. It is a moment
ground,
of profound emotion, which Giotto has painted in such a way as
to deliberately disorient the viewer's perception of it. For as we
contemplate Joachim, our sympathy for him is intercepted by the
shepherd who is staring straight out of the painting "towards us,
sympathetically, as though we had all witnessed a disaster
The stare has a strange tension?at once
together."18 shepherd's

gathering us into the suffering of Joachim and setting up a barrier

that keeps it private. The shepherd's eye makes contact with our
sympathy but also marks the place where sympathy stops short.
Joachim's grief is and remains beyond us. In somewhat the same
way Simonides' three-cornered makes one spare fact
epigram
the of No one else can really know what
explicit: privacy grief.
Kallias suffered when he lostMegakles.
An entirely different set of tactical problems was posed for
Simonidean sympathy by the commission to celebrate death as an
occasion of political prevarication. We still do not know quite how
to read the inscription he wrote for the sensational statues of Har

modios and Aristogeiton in Athens (Figure 2). This monument19

was erected soon after 510 BC, to commemorate the
probably

expulsion of Hippias, the so-called "last tyrant of Athens." Hip

pias was driven out of the city in 511/510 in a complicated coup
engineered by the Alkmaionid family. But political rivals of the
Alkmaionids were soon scheming to defraud them of credit for
this action and amyth began to be generated ascribing the "libera
tion of Athens" to two young men named Harmodios and

Aristogeiton.
two men had in fact murdered the brother of Hippias
These
(Hipparchos) three years before.20 The real motive for this murder,
as historians since attest,21 was sexual
Thucydides jealousy.

According to Thucydides, Harmodios and Aristogeiton were lov

ers.When Hipparchos the brother of the tyrant became enamored
of the young Harmodios and made overtures to him, Harmo

dios the matter to his lover who took immediate action.

reported
 Anne Carson g

"f-':^^B?'i' '; ???"l

?s|if

gi|p;.;|||ff

mv?

gp^^...,??

- ??P
-iliSfc

Fig. 1 Joachim Retiring To His Sheepfold. Giotto di Bondone.

Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy (Photo: Alinari/Art Resource,
NY).
 IO WRITING ON THEWORLD

mSW.
:::=^y|?:
?li?P:;|::"--'

S&S

^^^^fcs

Fig. 2 Harmodios and Aristogeiton (The Tyrant Slayers).

Roman copies after the Greek originals ascribed to Kritios and
Neslotes, from Tivoli. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples,
Italy (Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY).
 Anne Carson 11

a to assassinate
Aristogeiton organized conspiracy Hipparchos

along with his powerful brother amid the crowds and confusion
on the city streets of Athens during the annual Panathenaic proces
sion. The conspirators did in fact succeed in despatching Hip
parchos according to plan?but then the bodyguards of Hippias
appeared and cut Harmodios down. Aristogeiton was captured
alive, imprisoned, tortured and later executed.

the events of this romantic tragedy nor its confused

Neither
aftermath can be shown to have provoked the political action that
ousted three years later. Yet soon after the a
Hippias expulsion22
statue of Harmodios and Aristogeiton as "liberators of Athens"
was set up in the Athenian agora, inscribed with a couplet alleg
edly by Simonides:23

TrI uiy' AGrrvatoioi y?veG', rrv?x'Aqioxo

<|>??>c
ye?xcDv litnacypv xxetve xai 'Apu?otoc.

Surely a great light for the Athenians came into being when
Aristogeiton and Harmodios killed Hipparchos.
(fr. 13 IB, 76D)

Translation cannot convey the verbal tensions of the Greek origi

nal. The first verse sets up "a great light" surrounding "the Atheni
ans" on both sides. The second verse shows us Hipparchos
stranded between Aristogeiton and Harmodios as the direct object
of their verb "killed"; the verb is singular, despite its compound
subject, to this unit of murderous enclosure. With
emphasize typi
cal economy, Simonides renders the impassioned facts of the story
as structure rather than surface rhetoric. We may presume that
Simonides' commission was to the murder as disinterested
glorify
democratic action. Yet he has managed to suggest the darker pres
sure of a private erotic agenda behind political myth.
It is a story of close cuts and deadly contiguities. It is an epigram
that begins with "a remarkable breach of one of the most funda
mental rules of verse."24 The rule that a
elegiac word-boundary
should invariably occur at verse-end is first stated by Hephaistion,
the lexicographer to whom we owe preservation of this poem.
"Every metrical line ends in a complete word, hence such verses as

these from the epigrams of Simonides are incorrect," saysHephais

tion (Encheiridion 28). This incorrect prosodie impulse permits
Aristogeiton to overstep his place in the hexameter verse and join
 12 WRITING ON THEWORLD

his beloved in the next line as they close in upon the intrusive Hip
But every license has a The structure of the
parchos. price. elegiac
couplet divides Aristogeiton's name in half as violently as jealousy
did cut through his life.
The physical facts of the monument on which this epigram was
inscribed may have emphasized some of these tensions, by an
interplay between text and figures. Neither the statue itself nor any
detailed ancient description is extant but a number of copies have
been identified. It seems clear that the two figures stood side by
side, forming a vigorous composition25 with Simonides' epigram
inscribed below. We are in fact able to visualize how the epigram
looked due to the discovery, in the Athenian agora in 1936, of a
base of Pentelic marble containing the end of the pentameter verse
of this couplet.26 Simonides' text will then have run continuously
across the base from left to right beneath the two statues. The first
half of Aristogeiton's name would be cut directly under his own
figure, surging forward on the left with sword raised in the direc
tion of Harmodios. And the latter half of the name thrusts itself
across the gap between the two figures, with the gestural energy
appropriate to a lover ousting a rival from his beloved's side. Now
it is true (and no Greek reader of the would be unaware)
epigram
that the name Aristogeiton, with its opening cretic rhythm,
scans
no matter where you put it in a hexameter. But
awkwardly dactylic
Iwould suggest that the way Simonides plays this acoustic fact into
his is meant to tell us less about metrical recalcitrance than
design
about emotions of murder in a p?d?rastie police state. His exacti
tude has a power to carry the reader's eye around the
sculptural
back of the forms into human causes. Here we see the
again "sym

pathy" for which Simonides was celebrated arising directly from

the physical facts of his akribeia.
And surely this is one function of great poetry, to remind us that
human meaning does not stop with the physical facts. Facts live in
their relation to one another; and language is able to objectify facts
insofar as it can name (or as the Greeks say, imitate) these rela

tions. When we speak of the Simonidean quality of sympathy as a

function of this exactitude, we are Simonides' abil
poet's noticing
to make the same relations occur among a set of words in a
ity
poem as obtain among a set of facts in the world. "To chew this

bread with writing teeth" as Paul Celan calls it.27Let us consider

another example of such imitative action in an epitaph composed
by Simonides for a woman named Archedike:
 Anne Carson 13

'
Av?q?? ?oioxeijoavxo? ?v 'EX?a?i x v ecj)' tavxov
'Ijtmou ?qx8??xt]v f]?8 x?xevOe xovt?,
f] jtaxoo? X8 xal ?v?o?? ?bek^Cov x' o? aa xvoavv v
jtai?cov x' ovK t\qQ?) vovv ?? ?xacOcAinv.

Of aman who himself was best inGreece of themen of his day:

Hippias' daughter Archedike this dust hides,
She of a father, of a husband, of brothers, of children all
tyrants being.
Nor did she push her mind up into presumption.
(fr. 111B,85D)

Archedike was the daughter of Hippias (last tyrant of Athens, as

above) a man whose presence and power, all the
accompanied by
rest of the men of his day in the first verse of the poem, effectively
buries Archedike in the middle of the second verse, boxed in
between her father's name and the dust of her own grave. The
third verse locates her total claim to fame in a participle: "being,"
and specifies the mode of her being in virtue of its fourfold relation
to men. It is noteworthy that this claim, which informs us

Archedike played the roles of daughter, wife, sister and mother,

does not use any of these nouns to designate her. Archedike's func
tions are indicated exclusively by her grammatical dependence on
the nouns father, husband, brother, children. The fourth verse

does at last ascribe a quality to Archedike but it is a quality named

for its absence. This woman's lack of presumption comes as little

surprise at the end of an epitaph that refers every aspect of her

being to male derivation.
There are a number of (by now familiar) things one could say at
this point about masculine discourse and patriarchal codes and the
suppression of female voice. Simonides, I suspect, had none of
them inmind when he composed this poem, but was in fact enter
taining quite other, honorific purposes with a measurable success.

And therefore the epitaph to Archedike may stand as an all the

more evidence that a poet who forms his attention in
heartening
exactitude can end up telling more truth than he means to. For he
is drawn ever more deeply to the inside of the physical facts. As
Rilke says, "Like a drink through thirst, gravity plunges through
him."28 The act of poetic attention gathers to itself a directional
force as as from the instinct for true
mysterious gravity poet's

relationships.
 14 WRITING ON THEWORLD

The Greeks of the generation into which Simonides was born

had a name for this instinct and a profound faith in its truth-claim.
They called the instinct that makes a poet a poet simply sophia
("wisdom"). They believed the exercise of poetic wisdom to be the
clearest place where truth can obtain existence for itself. You and
I, on the other hand, belong to a generation that is no longer able
to use such a word nor command such a belief. We are part of an
age of dislocation, where art and truth have lost track of one
another, an age that Martin calls "the destitute time."29
Heidegger
It interests me very much, this destitution, for Heidegger says
that its primary characteristic is a use of language "that will not
trouble with precision." The complaint against imprecision has
been reiterated more recently by the Italian writer ?talo Cal vino.
Just before his death Calvino addressed himself to the question of
language and the future of language in art. His prognosis in gen
eral is grim but its terminology illuminating. Calvino attributes
the faltering of all our arts in the twentieth century, especially
those of language, to a failure of exactitude.
"Exactitude" was the title of a lecture written but never deliv
ered by ?talo Calvino, whose death preempted the Charles Eliot
Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1985. The essay, subsequently pub
lished in a volume of essays called Six Memos For The Next
Millennium, begins as a somewhat elegiac discussion of the disap
pearance of exactitude from all the literatures, imageries, and art

forms of our present "culture of the mediocre" as Calvino calls the

modern age. He goes on to describe this as "a
disappearance

plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition

and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expres
sion into the most anonymous and abstract formulas, to
generic,
dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing
the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new
"30
circumstances.

So Calvino. And it is interesting to hear him go on to character

ize his personal reaction to the "plague afflicting language" in
terms that would have made immediate sense to Simonides. "This
is the reason I try to talk as little as possible. . . " says Calvino.
Simonides also was celebrated for his conversational parsimony. "I

have often repented of talking but never of keeping silent," he is

recorded to have said; and Plutarch tells of a symposium where the
was seated beside a man who maintained total silence
poet

throughout the evening. Finally Simonides turned to him and said:

 Anne Carson 15

man, insofar as you are your action is wise and

"My good stupid,
if you are wise it is stupid."31
I think Simonides and ?talo Calvino might have agreed that
the true between and silence,
determining relationship speech
which is the essence of exactitude, is a matter so delicate it verges
on "Mortals insofar as
paradox. speak they listen," says Heidegger
in one of his essays on language.32 This is a philosopher's style of
saying something a poet might put the other way round. You have
to "listen your way inwith your mouth," says Paul Celan.33 There
is perhaps no more moving example of the dilemma of the artist in
a destitute time than this extreme and intractable Romanian poet.
Paul Celan committed suicide in 1970 after having spent his life
pursuing an ideal of precision so radical that, finally, no human
language could accommodate it. The poem called "Speak You
Also"34 records part of his to take the true measure of
struggle

speech:

Sprich auch du,

sprich als letzter,
sag deinen Spruch.

Sprich?
Doch scheide das Nein nicht vom Ja.
Gib deinem Spruch auch den Sinn:
gib ihm den Schatten.

Gibihm Schatten genug,

gib ihm so viel,
also du um dich verteilt wei?t zwischen
Mittnacht und Mittag und Mittnacht.

Blicke umher:
sieh, wie's lebendig wird rings?
Beim Tode! Lebendig!
Wahr wer Schatten
spricht, spricht.

Speak, you also,

speak as the last,

have your say.

Speak?
 16 WRITING ON THEWORLD

But yes and no

keep unsplit.
And give your say this meaning:

give it the shade.

Give it shade enough,

give it as much
as you know has been dealt out between
midnight and midday and midnight.

Look around:
look how it all leaps alive?
where death is!Alive!
He truly who the shade....
speaks speaks

What does itmean to speak the shade?What does itmean to keep

yes and no unsplit? For Paul Celan it meant a lifelong effort to
purify his poetic language of everything imprecise, overexplicit or
false. Significantly he withdrew from circulation, only a few
months after its publication in 1948, his first book of verse
because of the many it contained. on the
misprints Misprints

printed page were only a foreboding of what Celan came to regard

as misprints in the soul of his poetic language. His poems grew
smaller and smaller, his verses shorter and shorter, his own use of

words more more urgent and more con

progressively sparse,
densed, receding in the name of exactitude deeper and deeper into

what one German critic called "the no man's land between speech
and silence."35 He was to make a new The latter
trying language.
years of his life were so increasingly dominated by this project that
he turned against his own early work, especially his most famous
and most anthologized poem ("Death Fugue," concerned with the
Nazi death camps where both his parents died), refusing to have
this poem reprinted on grounds that it spoke too explicitly about
things which could not be said.36We find his later poetry every
where constricted by this worry:37

. . . du mir auf den Mund,

gleitest
mitten in meiner

dich Schatten beschwerenden

Rede.

... slide across my mouth

you
 Anne Carson 17

midway through the words

I address to you, shadow,
to give you weight.
("Mit Der Stimme Der Feldmaus," 7-10)

And he describes his own solution in another poem under the fig
ure of etching:38

WEGGEBEIZT vom
Strahlenwind deiner Sprache
das bunte Gerede des An
erlebten?das hundert

z?ngige Mein
gedicht, das Genicht.

ETCHEDAWAYfrom
the ray-shot wind of your language
the garish talk of rubbed
off experience?the hundred
tongued pseudo
poem, the noem....

("Weggebeizt," 1-6)

Two features of these verses, which particularly evoke Simon

ides, deserve remark. First, Celan's selection of the images of

"etched talk and "rubbed- / off suggests a par

away" experience"
allel withSimonides' experience of the art of stonecutting. Both
etching and epigraphy are processes of excision, which seek to
construct a moment of attention by cutting or biting or rubbing
away what is irrelevant so as to leave the meaning on the
exposed
surface. Second, but not unrelated, Celan like Simonides had a
notion tomake his metaphysics out of negativity. Witness his neol
ogism Genicht in verse 6: "noem" (from the noun Gedicht mean
ing "poem" and the adverb nicht meaning "not") reflects a
recurrent preoccupation in Celan's work with negation and the
dialectic of absence and presence that is implicit in negation. We
saw this dialectic recommended in the poem "Speak You Also" as
a kind of language that keeps "yes and no unsplit." Simonides too
was inclined to play with the dialectic of yes and no. His many and
various tactics of negation39 and double negation aim to make

the process of away or away a

explicit cutting etching language
 18 WRITING ON THEWORLD

surface. His purpose is to create a moment of attention

negative
where we see the truth gradually stand forth from what is not the
truth, like lettershapes on stone.40 A simple but striking epitaphic
example of this is Simonides' fragment 152E:

'AvGqojc', ov Kooixxru Xeu??eic x?c()ov ?lX? y?g ?v?Qo?

X8Qvr|xea) uxxqo? xvu?oc 8[xoiy' ixavo?.

You!?No you aren't at Kroisos' grave.

looking
Yes it belongs to a poor man (me) content with a little tomb.
(fr. 152E, 140D)

The poem sets up an imaginary dialectic of wealth and poverty,

of fame and nullity. Kroisos was the last king of the fabulously
wealthy kingdom of Lydia. When his armies were defeated by
those of Kyros the Great, Kroisos piled his wealth up into a vast
funeral pyre, placed himself on top and set it alight. Simonides'
poem trains our attention on the vast vault of Kroisos
glowing

only in order to etch it away?leaving exposed the tiny tomb of a

poor nameless man content with little It is a strange and
things.
moment of surrogate It is a masterstroke of
powerful expenditure.
poetic economy?as Simonides commandeers the whole wealth of
Kroisos in abeyance to light up the tomb of a man too poor to put
his own name on his gravestone. Such a moment of negative atten

tion, when yes and no remain is an interval of unique cog

unsplit,
nitive content, available to us nowhere but in language. Poets are

those deeply benevolent beings who take on themselves the task of

such facts to us. As Celan says in a poem called "Vast,
representing

Glowing Vault":41

... brenn ich dies Bild ein, zwischen

die H?rner....

Die Welt ist fort, ichmu? dich tragen.

... I brand this between

image,
the horns. ...

The world is gone, Imust carry you.

("Grosse, Gl?hende W?lbung," 6-7,14)

 Anne Carson 19

And in another poem he condenses this poetic responsibility to a

disturbingly simple double negative:42

MIT DEN VERFOLGTEN in sp?tem, un

verschwiegenem ,
strahlendem
Bund.

PLEDGEDTO THE PERSECUTED,by

a late, un

tacit, luminous

bond... .

("Mit Den Verfolgten," 1-4)

However "untacit"?Celan's to the meant

"pledge persecuted"
retreat into a language so private it silenced him. He predicted this
silence and even came to regard it as proper to the poetic task, or
so we might infer from one of the poems published by his editors
after his death:43

ERSTWENN ichdich
als Schatten ber?hre,
glaubst du mir meinen
Mund,

der klettert mit Sp?t

sinnigem droben
inZeith?fen
umher,

du zur Heerschar
st??t
der Zweitverwerter unter

den Engeln,

Schweigew?tiges
sternt.

NOT UNTIL
as a shade I touch you
will you believe
my mouth,
20 WRITING ON THEWORLD

that clambers about

with late-minded things

up there
in time-courts,

you come to the host

of the seconds-utilizers among
the angels,
and a body that rages for silence
stars.

("ErstWenn")

In this poem Celan manages to place himself exactly on that

boundary where yes and no remain unsplit by projecting his voice
into the future of his own death and speaking backward to the
world that will have silenced him. That is to say, he has written his
own For as we have seen from the poetry of Simonides,
epitaph.
this is the premise of epitaphic publication, that the dead may
speak to the living each time the inscription is read. Let us consider
one more example of such speech, composed by Simonides for men
fallen in the battle of the Eurymedon:

T v?? Jtox' ?v ox?ovoioi xavDytaoxwac

' ?iaxou?
Xovoev fyoiv?ooai Qo?qo? Aqtj? ipa/aoi*
?vxl ?' ?xovxoo?xoov ?v?o v \iva\ie?a Gav?vxov
?i|)ux' ?u/ijrux v ??8 x?xevGe xovi?.

In the chest cavities of these men once his sinsharp

arrowclaws did wild Ares wash: at a red drop.
An exchange of men who hold javelins for memorials that
hold corpses
-souls YES for souls NO?is what this dust hides.
(fr. 106B, 116D)

The translation is laborious because the diction and syntax of the

poem are so verge on a private Simonides
original they language.
has invented the word tachygl?chinas (here translated "sinsharp
arrowclaws" to get your attention) and also the word akontodo

k?n ("men who hold javelins") and he has used the words phoinis
sai psakadi in a dative construction that defies grammatical
description ("at a red drop").44 Perhaps we could call it the dative
 Anne Carson 21

of exactitude since Simonides seems to be using the phrase to mea

sure the difference between living and dead, between speech and
silence, between yes and no. The whole poem towards this
gathers
red drop, which is followed immediately by the preposition of
exchange (anti) zt the beginning of verse 3 and then by a statement
of what exactly is being exchanged for what in this epitaphic
transaction.

It seems that living men are being exchanged for memories and
souls positive for souls negative. But we should note that the terms
of the exchange are The preserve a read
problematic. manuscripts

ing (apsych'empsych?n) which has been emended since Bergk to

empsych' apsych?n. That is, we emend a phrase that would mean
"souls NO for souls YES" to a phrase meaning "souls YES for
souls NO." Both readings scan the same way; the emendation jus
tifies itself on grounds of sense. Denys Page sums up editorial
opinion of the manuscript reading when he calls it "a heavy and
graceless phrase" that "substitutes chaos for clarity."45
Iwould not presume to disagree with Denys Page, but it occurs
to me to be grateful that Simonides has left us a text that, inmany
more ways than one, keeps yes and no unsplit. I suppose the gift is
providential; yet we should note in passing that Simonides himself
held some bizarre beliefs about the split between yes and no that
happens at death and ismemorialized on an epitaph. "It is not the
soul which deserts the body but the body which deserts the soul,"
he is recorded to have said.46 This seems to me a mysterious and

disorienting notion. Iwonder where the soul is and what its life is
like after the body has deserted it. On the other hand, it is surely
one of the functions of great poetry to pose and disori
mysterious
enting questions about the life of the soul. We see Simonides
administering this function intrepidly in a sharp little anecdote
from his biographical tradition. It relates a dispute between the
poet and some anonymous the value of
philistine concerning epi

taphic poetry. The philistine sets himself to disparage epitaphs

by calling them "jabbering corpses that do not know how to lie
quiet." Then comes the Simonidean riposte: "My good man, you
are more dead in the midst of your life than those who lie buried
underground!"47
A poet is someone who writes on the world. In order to do so he
has to station himself idiosyncratically, in a kind of no man's land
between negative and positive, between soul and body, between
silence and He has to reinvent the surfaces on which
speech.
22 WRITING ON THEWORLD

Fig. 3 Wheat field With Crows. Vincent Van Gogh (Photo: AH

nari/Art Resource, NY).
 Anne Carson 23

human are inscribed?whether these consist

writings commonly
in stone or printed pages or the face of a coin or the phenomena we
call reason and memory. He has to apply himself to the surfaces of
the world with tools of such exactitude that they can cut away
everything that seems to him untruth. It is lonely, stingy, demoral
izing work, for it impels him to begrudge common cultural expen
ditures like time, grammar, virtue and conversation. One final, in

fact posthumous, poem of Paul Celan's shows how precariously he

stands. In fact it is a poem conceived for inscription
on a
painting,
Wheat field With Crows by Vincent Van Gogh:48

Raben?berschw?rmte Weizenwoge.
Welchen Blau? Des untern? Obern?
Himmels
Sp?ter Pfeil, der von der Seele schnellte.
St?rkres Schwirren. N?h'res Gl?hen. Beide Welten.

of ravens over a wheat billow.

Swarming
Blue of which heaven? The higher? Nether?
Late arrow that the soul released.

Louder whirring. Nearer glow. This world and the other.

("Unter Ein Bild")

Wheatfield With Crows was Van Gogh's last canvas (Figure 3).
Upon finishing it he shot himself in the diaphragm and died three
later. If it were true, as some commentators like to
days imagine,
that the crows swarming off into the blue sky in this painting had
been startled by the painter's own rifle shot, Van Gogh will have
achieved something that both Simonides and Paul Celan would
commend. He has his own It seems
painted epitaph. appropriate
then that a poet should have reinscribed this epitaph in language so
exact that it makes visible the point where yes and no are written

on the world unsplit, makes audible the sound of a soul being

deserted by its body.

NOTES

1. R. P. Austin, The Stoichedon Style In Greek Inscriptions (New York 1973),

104,111.
2. W. Woodhead, The Study Of Greek Inscriptions (Cambridge 1959), 89-90.
3. Austin (note 1), 1.
4. Austin (note 1), 119.
24 WRITING ON THEWORLD

5. Austin (note 1), 30.

(note 1), 31.
6. Austin
7. J.M. Bell, "Kimbix kai sophos: Simonides in the ancient anecdotal tradition,"
QUCC 28 (1978), 29-86.
8.Woodhead(note2),28.
9.1 owe this design to Robert W. Connor doodling.
10. P. Bourdieu, "La lecture: une pratique culturelle," in R. Chartier, Pratiques
de la lecture (Marseilles 1985); P. Chantraine, "Les verbes grecs signifiant 'lire,'"
M?langes Gr?goire II (Brussels 1950), 110-31; B. M. W. Knox, "Silent Reading In

Antiquity," GRBS 9 (1968), 421-35; G. Nagy, "Sema and no?sis: some illustra
tions," Arethusa 16 (1983), 35-55.; J. Svenbro, Phrasikleia: anthropologie de la lec
ture en Gr?ce ancienne (Paris 1988).
11. It is fashionable to interpret this relationship between written text and read
er's voice as a "question of power" (Bourdieu in Chartier [note 10], 235; Svenbro
[note 10], 53) wherein the reader is dispossessed of his own voice in order to facili
tate realization of the inscription, or even as a "point neuralgique" (Svenbro [note
10], 207) whose structure replicates the p?d?rastie model of dominance and submis
sion that is presently seen to inform so many aspects of the ancient Greek cultural

experiment. "La voix se soumettre ? la trace ?crite," says Svenbro and characterizes
the reader's "service" to the writer
by direct analogy with the homosexual act of
love and its dark emotions of use. "Lire, c'est pr?ter son corps ? un scripteur peut
?tre inconnu, pour faire r?sonner des paroles '?trang?res,' 'd'autrui,' allotrioi"
(213). The remarkable humourlessness of this line of interpretation seems to belie
not only the terms inwhich the ancients themselves speak of written works of art
(e.g., poi?ma, kosmos, charis) but also the spirit of freedom in which artists like
of meaning available conjointly to writer
Simonides play through the possibilities
and reader within a piece of language. Perhaps exchange of power need not always
mean abuse of power. Meaning, after all, exists to be exchanged.
12. Vit. Aesch. 119.
13. Inst. Or. 10.1.64.
14. See D. L. Page, Further Greek Epigrams (Cambridge 1981), 200.
15. P. Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, trans. M. Hamburger (New York 1988), 78-9.
16. Quoting Malebranche; Celan (note 15), 31.
17. But the poem is so strange that completeness, authenticity and genre remain
in dispute. "Manifesto mutilatum" (Bergk); "of course not a fragment" (Wilamo
witz); Page (note 14), 295.
18.M. Meiss, Giotto andAssisi (New York 1960), 6; see also M. Barasch, Giotto
and the Language Of Gesture (Cambridge 1987), 42-4; H. Trost, Giotto (Berlin
1964), 26 and pi. 20.
19. An overview of the archaeological evidence for the statues of Harmodios and

Aristogeiton as well as further bibliography may be found inH. A. Thompson and

R. E. Wycherly, The Athenian Agora: Volume 14, The Agora of Athens: The His
tory, Shape and Uses of an Ancient City Center (Princeton 1972). For more detailed
studiessee S. Brunnsaker, The Tyrant Slayer ofKritios and Nesiotes (Lund 1955);
M. N. Taylor, The Tyrant Slayers: The Heroic Image in the Fifth Century B.c.
(New York 1981). Ancient testimonia for the statue group is collected in R. E.

Wycherly, The Athenian Agora: Volume 3, Literary and Epigraphical Testimonia

(Princeton 1957), 93-8.

20. See Plato Hipp. 228a; the Parian marble A 45; Attic skolia 893-96 PMG.
 Anne Carson 25

21. Thuc. 6.54ff; Page (note 14), 186-88.

22. If Page is correct that the monument was erected during the period when the
Alkmaionid Kleisthenes had been driven out of Athens by his rival Isagoras (508/
7): see Page (14), 187.
23. The monument was removed from Athens to Persia in 480, then replaced
with a new monument and reinscribed in 477/6: Pausanias 1.8.5; Pliny NH 34.70.
It is not known whether the present epigram, ascribed to Simonides by Hephais
tion, was composed for the first or the second monument.
24. Page (note 14), 188. See also M. Van Raalte, Rhythm and Metre: Towards a

Systematic Description of Greek Stichic Verse (Assen 1986), 64; R. Kassel, "Names
In Verse," ZPE 19 (1975), 211-18.
25. G. M. Richter, The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks (New Haven
1930), 200-1.
26. B. D. Meritt, "Greek Inscriptions," Hesperia 5 (1936), 355-56y believes this
stone to be from the base of the second monument (477 Be) with an inscription cop
ied from the original (510 BC) base.
27. P. Celan, Last Poems, trans. K. Washburn and M. Guillemin (San Francisco
1986), 118-19.
28. "Schwerkraft" in R. M. Rilke, S?mtliche Werke, vol. 2, (Wiesbaden 1963),
179.
29. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter, (New York
1971), 80; see also 141-42.
30.1. Calvino, Six Memos For The Next Millenium (Cambridge, Mass. 1988),
56.
31. Plutarch, Mor. 644f.
32. Heidegger (note 29), 209.
33. Celan (note 15), 343.
34. Celan (note 15), 98-9.
35. Celan (note 27), xxviii.
36. Celan (note 15), 22.
37. Celan (note 15), 322-23.
38. Celan (note 15), 231.
39. A. Carson, "Simonides Negative," Arethusa 21 (1988), 147-57.
40. Heidegger would like us to think of the Greek word for truth, al?theia, as
derived from concepts of "uncovering" or "exposure."
41. Celan (note 15), 266-67.
42. Celan (note 15), 224-25.
43. Celan (note 15), 334-35.
44. Still tricked out in red, the dative of exactitude reappears in Rudyard Kip
ling's account of German positions at the beginning of the British attack on the
Somme: "Here the enemy had sat for two years, looking down upon France and

daily strengthening himself. His trebled and quadrupled lines of defense, worked
for him by his prisoners, ran below and along the flanks and on the tops of ranges
of five-hundred-foot downs. Some of these were studded with close woods, dead
lier even than the fortified villages between them; some cut with narrowing valleys
that drew machine gun fire as chimneys draw draughts; some opening into broad,

seemingly smooth slopes, whose very haunch and hollow covered sunk forts, care
fully placed mine fields, machine gun pits, gigantic quarries. . . .Belt upon belt of

fifty-yard deep wire protected these points, either directly or at such angles as
26 WRITING ON THEWORLD

should herd and hold up attacking infantry to the fire of veiled guns. Nothing in the
entire system had been neglected or unforeseen, except knowledge of the nature of
the men who, in due time, should wear their red way through every yard of it." Kip

ling's chill professional description gathers, like Simonides' epigram, to a single hot
red drop of pathos. See P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford
1975), 172, who finds the irony in such a passage to be wholly and uniquely "mod
ern," that is, invented by World War 1.1 wonder.
45. Page (note 14), 272.
46. Myth.Vat. 3.27 Mai; fr. 138E.
47. Aristides, peri paraphthegmatos 2.513.
48. Celan (note 15), 106-7.