by Tom Willis and the Pericles at Play team and contributors
Trench 1:
Pericles at Play has been active for a year now, digitally printing and disseminating prose, poetry, and translations that interact with antiquity. With one of our poets, we say
Yes, that’s right, I’m in Greece, not San Francisco,
even if we are currently in San Francisco. We perform a spin from ‘shrill America’ toward subtle Greece. A sentiment against the trend of the globe. But we are an electronic magazine, so eventually have to face up and stumble back to Stanford and Silicon Valley:
So I’m in Greece,
though I’ll be heading
back to San Francisco soon,
Another memory intrudes, superimposed upon the last
Trench 2:
In our latest (III) issue Jordan Maly-Preuss riffs and remixes modern and ancient poems, creating a sequence of five poems that stand at an angle to tradition and modernity, poems that bedevil their historical condition to make meaning retroactively in the now.
Homer! Thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee.
Homer and Wordsworth come together in two lines that could have been written in the Romantic period, but were (re)written in our post-postmodernity. Because we live in our historical moment we either:
- Smirk with/against Wordsworth—there is no saviour who will come and teach us our manners and sensibility. Milton has gone and we’re left with savage, leathery Homer. No glimpse of Paradise. Odysseus over Satan. Always on the move.
- Hope against hope that perhaps there is something sincere here that we can use for redemption, faith, sacrifice.
12.5 lines of Wordsworth’s sonnet are cancelled out, 1.5 lines cloaked in the shades and shadows of the cut.
In another of Maly-Preuss’s remixes, Pound’s condensed and ludic
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
becomes
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Aeneas with a wet, golden bough.
This reception, collaborating with Pound’s Imagism, makes a double-helix of Pound’s poem, glancing at his receptions of antiquity and adding gilded new classical elements to his poem. In myth Aeneas requires the ticket of the golden bough to descend to the underworld. Pound’s technomodernity exists in its own katabasis ‘In a Station of the Metro’. Modern and ancient underworlds cohabit this new poem.
engaged in a constant process of reconciliation between a love of the classics and the realisation that this love can risk the elision or the obscuring of modern Greece
Trench 3:
From our first issue,
Of all the trade-offs I have made, this is the one
I will remember least and with most satisfaction:
My Ancient History seminar bartered for you,
Jean-skirted, in a café, smoking. A definition of value.
Four lines on the act of teaching/learning/doing classics centred on the quintessential, über-emotive seminar, containing the human, the inhuman, and their syntheses. There is the inside: the melodrama of the seminar, the economics of student and institution, the transaction-reception of knowledge etc. (and all the possibilities of failure, crash, deception, and inversion in economics—as in poetics—as in pedagogy—as in this poem: ‘this is the one / I will remember least and with most satisfaction:’) and the bugbear calculations of desire + value, value + desire; the hypermodern horror of the possibility of the poetic narrator not being a part of a student-student transaction. Throughout the poem there is an insistence on value, iterated in all but the second line, always re-infusing the text with the economic, as with Joyce’s Bloom bartering and defecating and transacting and eating and exchanging his way through a 24hr odyssey through ‘the Greeks the Jews the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe’. The extra-ancient, the post-antique, is irrevocably informed by the ancient. We come to this realisation like a trapped Kafka protagonist; as Paul de Man knew, the faster we run from an old towards a new, the more circular our trajectory. Repetition, but with a difference.
I rose through sleep to waking the next morning from a vivid dream about a man’s leg, landmine-splintered so that the ends had feathered almost perfectly
Trench 4:
We also have the totally unsympathetic and anti-sentimental, the economic and the communitarian from the Greek writer Kostas Peroulis (specially translated by Joshua Barley),
He had to tell the ticket collector that he was getting off. They went up the flyover at the junction and for a moment the whole of the city appeared like a photograph, behind the scrapyards and the factories… He had to get off, otherwise they would go towards Eleusis and at the next stop he’d have to walk half an hour back on the motorway.
Eleusis is of no use.
Recognising the failure of the Ideal is succeeded by the lifting of the muteness it had enforced
Trench 5:
In Richard G. Ll. Kendal’s Aion, a lone Soviet demiurge-artist attempts to distil human history into layers of coloured paint depicting its population movements, empires, wars, expulsions, and ethic cleanings,
‘In 1971, as war split East from West Pakistan, the dark blue of Sea Peoples overran the Mediterranean basin.
In 1973, the pale blue of Greece first stopped the advance of Persian green, and then, later in the year, as the Six-Day War threw the Middle East into conflict, spread across Asia into the Upper Ganges.
1975 saw Roman purple spread itself across Europe, and the yellow and pink of Maurya and Gupta empires rise and fall in South Asia, while the red of China stretched ever wider.’
It ends in a Russian manner. The lone demiurge, channelling private grief into an epic project, succumbs to failed transcendence and base materiality: physics, chemistry, biology: lessons of antiquity.
A change came over the place, barely perceptible yet catholic
Trench 6:
The justly celebrated Dimosthenis Papamarkos, featured in a unique translation from the Greek by Joshua Barley, shows us that archaic modes can still make terrible sense.
‘Until I left for the war, all day long I was out in the open with the animals, then up in the mountains with my regiment.’
And everything in between: rust, death, Tolstoyesque field hospitals, the daily shade and yearly harvest cycles of the olive tree, sorcery, zombies.
‘Only the old woman, every evening that I went about my business, shook her head and said, it’s a sin to dine with the dead.’
shall we follow the poet-philosopher’s hint and venture the hypothesis that when living matter became living matter it was sundered into tiny particles
Next season’s Dig:
Our next issue and first of 2020 reflects on and is inspired by the recent exhibition at the Freud Museum London, ‘Between Oedipus and the Sphinx’, investigating in various literary ways things Freudian and Egyptological.
In our restively short history we have already been blessed to receive and honoured to provide the platform for sharing original work that in its adroit interaction with the classical world and its literature is not only aesthetically dazzling, but is capable of navigating serious and provoking questions about aspects of our ancient and modern worlds. We hope that this will continue in future issues.
We continue to refuse to hold a mirror up to society—we are no good for anything except taking the world apart and putting it together again in new, old, and weird shapes (and we manage the latter less and less frequently).
But, hey, this is just a theory. Why take it seriously. Take it or leave it.