Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Influenceandintertextuality: Areappraisal
Influenceandintertextuality: Areappraisal
A REAPPRAISAL
ABSTRACT
between European literatures and English literature had not yet come into
being, but when it did, the shape of the curriculum in schools and universities
enforced the separate study of literatures uncompromisingly.
When I was a student, that kind of thinking had fossilised into sharp divisions
between subjects, reinforced by the existence of a great many single-subject
departments. One went up to university to work in a specialised field: general
than literary, and ultimately turned the search for influences into a kind of
treasure hunt. It did not seem to be a very useful approach to pursue, though
nevertheless it did offer the idea of influence-tracking as a research possibility.
Un marito. Anna Livia Schmitz seemed to have been a model of sorts for Anna
Livia Plurabella, and it appeared not totally absurd to suggest that Svevo might
have even been a model in some way for Leopold Bloom, given his Jewish back-
ground, the age difference between the two men and the nature of the Svevo –
Joyce relationship.
But ultimately, the case rested on speculation. Probably the friendship with
range of plot variants actually is. There is indeed connection everywhere. Every
text, as Roland Barthes reminds us, has meaning in relation to other texts.4
Heaney’s “Purgatorio”
Much more useful than endeavouring to prove the unprovable existence of
These three descriptive lines of location serve as a key to the reader in what
follows. Heaney describes the slow drive out past the glow of filling stations into
the countryside, where streetlights give way to stars. There is a hint of menace
in a reference to Sweeney fleeing before a demon pack of hounds, “blazing out
of the ground, snapping and squealing”. Then suddenly comes the road block,
the armed men and brutal murder:
What blazed ahead of you? A faked road block?
The red lamp swing, the sudden brakes and stalling
Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun?
Or in your driving mirror, tailing headlights
That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down
Where you weren’t known and far from what you knew:
The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,
Church island’s spire, its soft treeline of yew.5
Heaney’s use of Dante here goes much further than parallels in terms of the
description of place. In the lines Heaney quotes from the first canto of Purgatorio,
Dante has just emerged from the depths of Hell into the pale light of early
morning, and finds himself on the shores of Mount Purgatory. The poet is cleansed
and prepared for his upward journey, given a rope girdle made of reeds that grow
back instantly, as soon as they are plucked. In Heaney’s poem, the speaker
plucks rushes for his murdered cousin, to whose memory the poem is dedicated,
and performs a ritual cleansing of the corpse. The start of the journey for the dead
soul, for Dante and for Heaney the poet, is symbolised in the ritual of purification.
Reading the Heaney poem, with its deliberate reference to Purgatorio, we have an
entwining of two texts that deepens the resonances of grief and loss, but which also,
by the choice of Dante as a point of reference, offers a hint of hope in the life
hereafter.
Heaney returned to the same subject in “Station Island”, a few years later.
This time, though, there is a reference to Purgatorio inside the poem. The dead
140 SUSAN BASSNETT
cousin accuses the poet of failing him through the way he wrote his earlier
poem about the shores of Lough Beg where he met his death:
You whitewashed ugliness and drew
The lovely blinds of the Purgatorio
And saccharined my death with morning dew.6
Weaving connections
The web of connectedness takes on another dimension when we consider that
Dante, of course, took his inspiration for a journey to the underworld from
Virgil, the poet whom he recreates in The Divine Comedy as his guide. Dante, a
poet of the Middle Ages, created a Christian afterworld, with clear divisions
between the realm of the saved or potentially saved and the realm of the
damned, but the theme of a living man’s journey to the world of the dead is the
same as that of the Latin poet. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas is confronted with
the accusing dead, the forgotten dead and the beloved dead in the Underworld,
and the darkness and sadness of the place are recreated in the retellings of later
poets.
In 2000, Philip Pullman used the same imagery in the third book in his Dark
Materials trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, only now the protagonists, Will and Lyra,
free the dead from eternal darkness:
The first ghosts trembled with hope, and their excitement passed back like a ripple over
the long line behind them, young children and aged parents alike looking up and ahead
with delight and wonder as the first stars they had seen for centuries shone through into
their poor starved eyes.7
Here Pullman reverses the image of horror in The Aeneid Book VI, ll.425– 9
(“Continuo auditae voces vagitus . . .”):
At once are heard voices and wailing sore – the souls of infants weeping, whom, on the
very threshold of the sweet life they shared not, torn from the breast, the black day swept
off and plunged into bitter death.8
I N F L U E N C E A N D I N T E RT E X T UA L I T Y 141
The powerful image of the dead babies, placed at the entrance to the under-
world because they have barely known life, serves as a source of inspiration for
a novelist writing for teenagers two thousand years after Virgil conceived his
vision of the realm of the dead.
Once we begin to sketch connectedness, a kind of energy field opens up. In
this example, we have moved from Seamus Heaney to Dante to Virgil and on
Canon formation has been heavily influenced by translation. So, for example,
today children in the former Soviet state that is now the republic of Uzbekistan
who study English literature are given the work of those writers who have
entered the canon: Shakespeare, of course; Charles Dickens, who has always
enjoyed enormous success in Russia as a realist writer who exposed the horrors
of capitalism; Byron, the rebel poet whose impact on writers in Central, Eastern
and through which, and into which ideas are constantly rushing”.12 The rush of
ideas came from different sources, effectively dissolving fixed notions of origin-
ality and derivation, something that Pound would challenge explicitly in his
writings about translation.
Charles Tomlinson praises Pound as a great translator and argues that
Pound’s ideas of the vortex struck a particularly resonant chord in 1914. “The
Pound, of course, was not consciously producing poems about the war. His
objective was primarily aesthetic, and as he tells us in his ABC of Reading his
translation endeavours were intended to give English readers some sense of a
world-wide history of the art of poetry. He translated from ancient languages
(from Latin, Greek, Provençal and Anglo-Saxon), and from French, Italian,
Chinese and Japanese – a huge range of different languages. He has often been
accused of producing “unfaithful” translations, an accusation that is both point-
less and silly, since Pound never sought to produce anything like a literal or
“faithful” translation of anything and made his views explicit and often chal-
lenged people who attacked his so-called inaccuracy. His Homage to Sextus
Propertius, which was attacked for its incorrect rendering of the Latin, effectively
creates a new genre that blurs the boundaries between ideas of translation, imi-
tation and borrowing and adopts the term “homage” for a poem that uses
another’s work as a starting point for creative rewriting. But crucial to how we
I N F L U E N C E A N D I N T E RT E X T UA L I T Y 145
today approach Pound’s Cathay is not so much what he may have thought he
was doing with the poems he translated, as what has happened to them since
their appearance. Small wonder, when we come across lines like these from
“Lament of the Frontier Guard”, that Gaudier Brzeska read them to his
companions in the trenches:
Bones white with a thousand frosts.
Studying connections
There is immense value in studying literatures in terms of connections. As indi-
cated earlier, today’s students are not only trained in making connections, but are
highly responsive to a methodology that emphasises connectivity. Post-colonial
studies, alongside translation studies, have highlighted links, exchanges, border
crossings in exciting new ways, drawing attention to the power relationships that
underpin textual practices. The role of the reader is, of course, vitally important,
for the web of connections woven by a writer will be enhanced by the web woven
by a reader, resulting in a far more dynamic model of literary study than old-style
influence-tracking.
Octavio Paz famously distinguishes between the task of the poet and that
of the translator. The poet, he argues, fixes verbal signs into an ideal
immutable form, whereas the translator frees those fixed signs into
circulation through another linguistic medium.17 This view of translation estab-
lishes a clear distinction between the different roles but avoids any
suggestion that the one literary activity is superior to the other. Paz acknowl-
edges also that translation involves reading as a first stage in the process of
rewriting, for a translator has to be fully aware of the ways in which the source
146 SUSAN BASSNETT
text works. His witty interpretation of the parallel yet dissimilar tasks of writer
and translator can also be helpfully applied to the tasks of writer and reader,
inextricably joined and mutually dependent, coexisting in an ever-enlarging
web of words.
SUSAN BASSNETT
NOTES
This paper is a written version of the keynote lecture delivered at the University of St Andrews in
March 2005, at a conference entitled Bridging the Gap: Teaching Foreign Language Literary and Cultural
Studies.
1
M. Arnold, On the Modern Element in Literature (Inaugural Lecture delivered in the University of
Oxford, 14 November, 1857).
2
R. Wellek, “The Name and Nature of Comparative Literature”, in Discriminations (New Haven
& London, 1970) p. 35.
3
L. Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London & New York, 1989), p. 89.
4
R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath (London, 1977).
5
S. Heaney, “The Strand at Lough Beg”, in Field Work (London, 1979), ll. 9– 16 ( p. 17).
6
S. Heaney, Station Island (London, 1984), viii, ll.74–6 ( p. 83).
7
P. Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (London, 2000), p. 382.
8
Virgil, The Aeneid (London & Cambridge MA, 1959).
9
J. Keats, “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer”, in Poems (London, 1967), p. 291.
10
D. Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton & Oxford, 2003) p. 288.
11
E. Pound, “A Retrospect”, in: Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London, 1954),
pp. 3– 14 ( p. 5).
12
E. Pound, Gaudier Brzeska (London, 1970), cited in G. Kearns, Pound: The Cantos (Cambridge,
1989), p. 34.
13
C. Tomlinson, Poetry and Metamorphosis (Cambridge, 1983), p. 96.
14
Cited in Tomlinson, Poetry and Metamorphosis, p. 91.
15
H. Kenner, The Pound Era (London 1971), p. 202.
16
E. Pound, “The Lament of the Frontier Guard”, in Translations (New York, 1963), pp. 194– 5
(ll. 8– 19).
17
O. Paz, “Translation: Literature and Letters”, in: Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from
Dryden to Derrida, ed. R. Schulte & J. Biguenet (Chicago & London, 1992), pp. 152–62.