When Greek meets Greek

There have been strong and mutual links between Greece and Britain for many centuries: from the visits of the more adventurous Tourists in the eighteenth century, through Byron's gallant if quixotic efforts to expel the Turks in the nineteenth, to the respective armies fighting alongside each other during the Second World War.  There is also a close parallel between the way in which the Greek Empire and its artistic and philosophical achievements were assimilated by the Romans in the last years of the pre-Christian epoch, and the similar take-over of Britain's imperial role and cultural assumptions by the Americans in the 1950s. 

The two peoples also have much in common linguistically.  Greek obviously has the more ancient literary tradition, but English can trace back its roots to an equivalent epoch.  The language of Homer, probably dating from around 700 BC, though treating of events five hundred years before, is essentially that of a heroic society of warriors who were primarily concerned with matters of war and its contingent conflicts of love and honour.  In Anglo-Saxon there is the Beowulf epic, composed around 750 AD, but located in the fourth or fifth century AD, which deals with precisely these same themes.  Indeed, even the poetic technique used by each – the so-called oral-formulaic approach of set, almost cliched phrases woven together to form a new and brilliant tapestry - is identical. 

Thereafter the trajectory of both languages is remarkably close.  Both became subject tongues: Greek became the secondary language to first Latin and then later to Turkish, while English was subsidiary to the Anglo-Norman spoken by the invaders of 1066.  The effect of these centuries-long subjugations was the same; both languages lost much of their original complexity as the ruling classes, hitherto the guardians of correct morphology and grammar, switched to the speech of the conqueror. 

Partly as a result of this erosion, and partly through the increased importance of the accented syllable, English reduced most unaccented vowels to the 'schwa' sound; so 'photographer', becomes 'fuh-tog-ruh-fuh’.  Modern Greek has analogously reduced many of its vowel sounds to that of 'ee'.  One language is now full of thuds, and the other of squeaks.

Modern Greek does, however, differ from English in one crucial regard: a few years back the decision was taken to 'simplify' the spelling by removing most of the ancient accents, reducing them to just one.  Logical enough in the sense that nothing was lost in terms of pronunciation.  But as the recent uproar over the proposed simplification of French orthography showed, language has little to do with logic.  Rather, it is an organic record of a speech, of a nation; in its crazy, archaic forms it presents fossils for us to recognise and admire. The fear must be - as the French rightly feared - that fiddling with the orthography would eventually lead to one of those emasculated factitious spelling systems periodically proposed by various do-gooders and cranks.  Greece's misguided simplification of its accents might be just the first step along this slippery road to deracination.  Let us hope that in this respect at least, English does not follow suit, and that if any attempts are made to do so, that there will be a suitable tug of war over our words.

(25.12.91)

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The Golden Gate

Originally all novels were in verse.  Except that they used to be called epics: the Iliad, the Aeneid.  The introduction of writing weakened the oral tradition which lay at the root of these works, and allowed the form to be watered down by prose.  Prose was also simpler to write, and better suited to the years following the fall of the Roman Empire when civilisation itself was enfeebled and precarious.

The verse novel made a come-back in the later Middle Ages, when a new spirit of poetry was in the air.  If Dante’s Commedia is backward-looking in its inclusiveness, its attempt to explain everything and assign it its place in an ordered universe, there were many other works which were more modern, and paradoxically truer to their hidden ancient roots.  Works such as Le Roman de la Rose, all the Arthurian poetic cycles, and the new epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso.

Later still, this poetry became merely the heightened form of prose, and produced glittering Augustan gems like Pope’s Essay on Man, or Swift’s diatribes.  It took the passion of the Romantics, heirs to the medieval story-tellers in verse, to marry verse and narrative once more.  The prime examples are probably Byron’s Don Juan, and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.

And so the cycle goes on.  After falling into decades of neglect, the verse novel has burst upon the scene once more.  Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate is a tale for our times, an everyday story of yuppies in San Francisco as they battle with the tricky years of their twenties.  If nothing else, the book is a remarkable tour-de-force.  Using Pushkin’s verse form,  Seth manages to produce smooth-running lines which rarely seem short-breathed despite their unusual tetrameter length.  Equally the rhyme scheme is never obtrusive, and there are some masterly matches worthy of Byron.

And yet there is something not quite right about the enterprise.  It would be too easy to lay this at the door of Mr Seth’s English.  He wield a formidable vocabulary with an assurance that passes beyond dictionary definitions.  His dodgem skill at careering round the corners of short lines and awkward rhymes is exemplary.  The problem lies deeper, and has to do with overall pace and structure.

Certain forms require a certain breadth of approach.  It is no accident that Wagner’s operas are monster: he was attempting the largest of themes, and needed space to accommodate them.  Similarly, it is instructive to note that Byron’s Don Juan is conceived on the largest scale.  Seth’s work is not.  A lot happens – these are, after all, yuppies; many characters are introduced, and rounded sketches attempted.  But there is jut not enough space.  This problem is exacerbated by the fine but totally unbalancing sermon in chapter seven.

Having mastered the form so fluently, and writing compellingly about issues which affect even non-yuppies, Seth should have had the courage to write at the length they deserved.  In the end, the book’s worst fault is that there is not enough of it; some fault.

(27.8.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - Pushkin’s “What if?”

Index