Arts and Letters

Richmond Lattimore, who died last year at the age of 77, illustrated the three professions in which love of what is professed must be the reward as well as the source of decorum—professions which indeed constitute their own reward in America, for we do not account worthily for their intrinsic distinction as it was practiced and perfected by this poet, this teacher, this translator.

His father was a professor, his mother a teacher, his brother—like himself born in China where their parents served on the faculty of a provincial college—is the distinguished Orientalist Owen Lattimore of Cambridge, England; and certainly the official academic career of Richmond Lattimore suggests an adequate scholarly splendor. After studies at Dartmouth and Illinois, Richmond Lattimore received a Rhodes Scholarship from Christ Church College, Oxford, and two years later, in 1932, he held a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. Though his thirty-six years of teaching at Bryn Mawr identify him most closely with that institution, he held lectureships at Chicago, at Columbia, at Johns Hopkins, and at University College, London. Twice he was awarded Fulbright grants, once as a Research Fellow in Greece, and ten years later, in 1963, as a lecturer at Oxford. A good deal of critical and scholarly writing accompanies all this teaching, all this lecturing—in especial the formidable Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs of 1942, the kind of production from which the untutored hand draws back, on the library shelf, as if in contact with a book red-hot, or perhaps ice-cold.

It is less arduous, of course, to discover the passionate allusive glories of Pindar in Richmond's first-published classical translations, and I remember the sense of completion I enjoyed upon discovering, as a freshman, that translated words could so take hold—the words which Valéry had quoted in Greek and which I had to consult in that first translation:

With our mortal minds we should seek from the gods what becomes us,
knowing the way of the destiny ever at our feet…
Dear soul of mine, never urge a life beyond
mortality, but work the means at hand to the end.*

But not even the most grateful reader of Greek literature who had no Greek could have anticipated, on such close-worked evidence, the achievements to come, two in particular. The translation of the Oresteia in 1953, which afforded me the revelation that Aeschylus could be as interesting—which in those days meant: could be as difficult, as demanding—as Claudel or Eliot; and the Iliad of two years before, which gave that poem its severest intonation, the quick, often harsh accents that had brought Simone Weil to call it the poem of force. What followed, of course, was prodigious: a translation of Aristophanes' Frogs, which was given the Bollingen Translation Prize; a generous volume of Greek Lyrics from Archilochus to Bacchylides, by way of Sappho, which remains unsurpassed for the range of its tone, the reach of its temper; five plays of Euripides; and then, in 1967, the Odyssey. For wonder's sake, I must not neglect translations of the Four Gospels and of Revelations (of which Richmond remarked that to go from Matthew to John of the Revelation is like going from Carlyle to Ruskin—and Richmond was a man who could go from Carlyle to Ruskin!); and lastly, in 1982, of the Acts and Letters of the Apostles. These Greek Testament versions are not essays in replacement, of course, but they are in themselves acts of attention, a way of listening afresh.

And throughout this extraordinary, this unparalleled career of impassioned rendering, as notable for its focus as for its scope, there persisted—beginning in 1957—a continuous production of Richmond's own poems, of which the fifth volume, appropriately entitled Continuing Conclusions, was published as recently as 1983, the year before he died. I find that twenty-two years ago, I had something to say about the second of these volumes; I was reviewing the book for Poetry, and referred to the longer flights as "utterances of great nobility and, to use an old word, propriety. In a poem like 'Details from the Nativity Scene' Lattimore is able to swell his themes as they deserve, so that here is the first American poem since 'Sunday Morning' to deserve the epithet Lucretian…. The eagerness of Lattimore's heart and the bitter rightness of his diction keeps these poems vivid, and whenever he gives himself room it is easy to forget that he is merely the incomparable translator"—I was writing this in 1963, I am proud to say—"and to remember instead the eloquence of his own lament:

Where is the king? Where is the tyrant child?
Where is the bud from thunder and the nymph
born with his crown askew in the green vines?
Oh, where are our lost afternoons displayed
in careless love, our elderly pursuits
in the hot grass? Where is the infant king?
Their fury strangled in the bloody dark.
The sound died and the echoes were lost in the snow." **

I have tried to account a little for our colleague's high achievements in the various scenes of his endeavor, but of course such tribute is inefficient if I cannot rejoice with you in the wholeness of the enterprise, in the wonderful weaving of Richmond Lattimore's accomplished strands into the single effort, the unique understanding. For him the life of translating and the life of teaching, with all the observations of scholarship and scruple they exacted, were assimilated to the life of poetry, were one with it, so that he had made something exceptional, fierce and gentle, knowing and innocent, out of his great achievements on all sides. Some sense of this, some intimation of the labor and the losses engaged in the task, can be heard in a very late poem of Richmond's—a poem from the collection called Poems of Three Decades and appropriately enough concerned with the walls and lanes of the Greek island of Andros. I was on the island myself, last spring, and I can readily report that the poem is all true, but it is more than that—it is, especially in the last of its three stanzas, a confidence Lattimore has entrusted to us of his method and his accomplishment:

Small blackish flat stones are laid
one on another. Dry walls
hold weather and wind, made
with ten foot intervals
for heavy stones set upright.
Huge flags have been laid between.
Stone lanes promenade the bight
and slant of the island scene.

Grubbed gathered and set by hand,
the stoneways promenade
length and breadth of the land.
Millions of motions made
them. Hard muscles of men
knotted like oak; the slight lift
of childish hands; careful women
piled stone: walls and ways, gift
of the people. Grace from all
this gone invisible strength
has patterned with lane and wall
the whole of the island length,
a monument put together
by millions of motions lost
and gone into wind and weather
of the island coast.***

*From The Odes of Pindar, translated by Richmond Lattimore. Copyright © 1947 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
**First published in The New Republic, Dec. 22, 1958. Reprinted by permission of Mrs. Richmond Lattimore.
***Copyright © Four Quarters, 1970.