{"id":136360,"date":"2019-05-15T13:00:55","date_gmt":"2019-05-15T17:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=136360"},"modified":"2019-05-16T13:15:56","modified_gmt":"2019-05-16T17:15:56","slug":"et-in-arcadia-ego","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/05\/15\/et-in-arcadia-ego\/","title":{"rendered":"Et in Arcadia Ego"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Titian, Portrait of Jacopo Sannazaro, ca. 1514\u201318.<\/p><\/div>\n

\n
\n

One winter morning, seventeen years ago, Nadya woke me up with the words \u201cAnthony, get dressed.\u201d She explained there was a house on 57th Street (Hyde Park, Chicago), with all the windows and doors open, students everywhere, people walking out with grocery bags of books. \u201cEverything\u2019s free. He just wants the house emptied ASAP.\u201d<\/p>\n

I got down there quick as I could, but most of what had been in the house had already taken a walk. I gathered that the previous owner of the place had been a high school French teacher, age 1,000. The current owner of the house, age I-wanna-say-sixty, was visibly drunk, grinning and gabby, on the porch. Somebody said he worked in Hollywood.<\/p>\n

I went upstairs. There was a hill of books in the middle of the floor of a ransacked bedroom. I picked up a book and bagged it. Here are photos of the book I bagged, 9 February 2002:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get too excited. It\u2019s a 1772 Venice print of Jacopo Sannazaro\u2019s\u00a0Arcadia<\/i>. As you can see, it\u2019s bound in vellum. In the condition shown in the photograph, the book is probably worth a hundred bucks.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Any Italian literary person would know the name \u201cSannazaro\u201d in the same way people in my village would know the name \u201cSir Philip Sidney.\u201d I\u2019m not saying their merits are equivalent, just talking about name recognition. Both writers are classics, but the fame of each is hobbled by his investment in Renaissance pastoral, a much-maligned department of literature.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Just four months before I inherited, so to speak, the book in the picture, I had purchased\u00a0this<\/i>\u00a0book at Powell\u2019s Hyde Park, just down the street:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That, friends, is the only English translation ever of Sannazaro\u2019s Arcadia<\/i>. For reasons I don\u2019t understand, that little feller will run you more than twice what an eighteenth-century print of Sannazaro would, online. 1966, Wayne State University Press\u2014mine was $16, October 1, 2001. I actually have two copies. And I saw one on a shelf in San Antonio last December for like $12, so I don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n

Anyhow, I have read Sannazaro\u2019s\u00a0Arcadia<\/i>\u00a0two or three times. It\u2019s not that great, except for the last chapter, which is magnificent\u2014and a game-changer. I\u2019ve read\u00a0that<\/i>\u00a0part at least a dozen times, sometimes aloud to friends. That last chapter taught me how to read Virgil! And more. But in order to get you anywhere near where I want you to be, I have to say something about pastoral in general.<\/p>\n

I shall now defend pastoral. Step one, you have to get past the assumption that pastoral was merely a bunch of aristocratic dress-up and make-believe. It was dress-up all right, but it had a deep and emphatically legit purpose.<\/p>\n

Let me give you a parallel case: writing poetry in Latin, in England, in the eighteenth century. Now, why would anyone do that. The mistake the modern interpreter is almost certain to make lies in assuming that the eighteenth-century literati must have done \u201cX\u201d for the same reasons we would do \u201cX\u201d now. And so we research the question by consulting our own bosoms. Today, May 15, 2019, anyone writing a poem in Latin would be doing it to strike awe in the rest of us. The person would rightly believe that almost nobody\u2019s equipped to judge if the poet has, for example, botched the meter. More, virtually none of us know enough about the deep contents of Virgil, Horace, or Ovid to pick up on any but the grossest allusions. The poet could get away with anything; the incentive to pastiche would be very high. \u201cSay something Catullus would say\u201d would probably be the person\u2019s MO, in a nutshell.<\/p>\n

But in the eighteenth century, no part of the above hypothesis is safe. Most importantly, people\u2019s sense of what Latin poetry was for\u00a0was completely different. Samuel Johnson, for instance, is much more personal in his Latin poetry than he ever is in his English stuff. One of his Latin poems is a little reminiscence of a swimming hole near where he grew up. It\u2019s just a tender little meditative thing. And why could he write that way in Latin but never in English? Because of conventions! One doesn\u2019t\u00a0write\u00a0that way in English; that\u2019s what Latin\u2019s for.<\/p>\n

Please take a second and savor it<\/i>: In eighteenth-century Britain, Latin wasn\u2019t a means of escape from the personal\u2014it was a way in. Johnson wrote Latin so he could take off a mask, not so he could put one on.<\/p>\n

Pastoral is like that. You do shepherds and sheep and cheese bags and so on, the better to descend from \u201caffairs of state\u201d into the personal. Love, friendship, food, the little swimming hole.<\/p>\n

Whoever sits around wondering how in the world pastoral could possibly have achieved (for hundreds and hundreds of years!) such widespread approval doesn\u2019t understand this principle of disguising oneself the better to act naturally.<\/p>\n

And so to return to Sannazaro. You have to understand that he showed up fairly late in the game. Like everybody else in the Renaissance, he knew what he was up against. \u201cWhy read\u00a0me<\/i>, when you could read Virgil?\u201d\u2014big, big question for any fifteenth-, sixteenth-century Italian poet, but especially for somebody like Sannazaro, who sincerely loved Virgil as much as anybody ever did, even as much as Dante had, two hundred years before Sannazaro\u2019s time.<\/p>\n

Sannazaro really got it about\u00a0lacrimae rerum<\/i>. You know that bit in Virgil\u2019s first eclogue, where there\u2019s a guy whose land has been confiscated by the emperor? The guy is packing up and leaving right this minute, but then there\u2019s the other guy who has been\u00a0given<\/i> land by the same decree. The fortunate one comforts the less fortunate, if only for one night. And all through their discourse, the one who\u2019s lost everything declines to rebuke or curse the emperor in any way. (As Ezra Pound says, in a very different context, \u201cThe poem is especially prized because [the wronged person] offers no direct reproach.\u201d) Key to the poem\u2019s immense power: the tenderness that the unjustly lucky shows the unjustly wretched. And both leave unsaid the terribleness of it all. To say it again: Sannazaro got this<\/i>; he knew sadness was where it\u2019s at: the sadness that\u2019s there, no need for words (and it\u2019s a good thing there\u2019s no need, \u2019cuz the words would probably kill us). He got it\u2014but what could he add?<\/p>\n

The true answer is, for the most part, nothing. His \u201csinging contest\u201d and \u201crural games\u201d chapters are mere facsimiles. He\u2019s in perfect control of the material, it\u2019s all choice Italian: inefficient, slo-mo, heaving with emotion. But it\u2019s nothing new. Then, at the end, something wonderful happens in the narrative, and it changes the meaning of everything.<\/p>\n

Arcadia<\/i> has twelve chapters. At the end of the eleventh chapter, it seems like there\u2019s nowhere else to go. This one shepherd had announced rural games for the one-year anniversary of his mother\u2019s death. Maybe you\u2019ve seen this painting:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a>

Nicolas Poussin,\u00a0Et in Arcadia ego<\/em>, 1637\u20138.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yeah, ET IN ARCADIA EGO<\/small>\u2014the painting (illustrating the beginning of Chapter 11) is the source of that famous tag. The line is not actually in Sannazaro, but it\u2019s supremely in the right vein. Arcadia! Shangri-La! But death is here, too.<\/p>\n

Right, so the games happen, prizes are distributed, cue night canopy. You would think the opera\u2019s over, but no. The main character, called Sincero and Sannazaro interchangeably, cannot sleep. He has a bad dream, heavy with symbolism. Someone has destroyed his precious orange tree. Who has done this? Where am I supposed to compose now? The nymphs (or whoever) point to a funeral cypress. He wakes up in a sweat, full of foreboding.<\/p>\n

He gets up. He wanders outside. Ah, Arcadia! But it\u2019s no good, because he doesn\u2019t really belong here; it\u2019s not his country. Also, wherever he goes he takes his private grief with him. Also, Arcadia, after all, is not heaven. There\u2019s still death. There\u2019s still failure and shame. A nymph appears and beckons him to follow her.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re not sure if he\u2019s dreaming. The landscape becomes liquid. They travel a long way\u2014like in\u00a02001: A Space Odyssey<\/i>. Arcadia is long gone. They go into the hollow earth. They see the source of all rivers, and the contented gods associated with them. Sannazaro is feeling sick. He wants to see his little river, the Sebeto (which is gone now, but which used to run through the middle of Napoli, Sannazaro\u2019s hometown). Everybody around him turns gray, like he\u2019s asking to see his chart and they know he has cancer. They take him to his little river, and here\u2019s what happens. Summary will not suffice:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n

Thus by degrees we began to see the little ripples of Sebeto; the Nymph,\u00a0 perceiving that I was rejoicing at this, sent forth a great sigh and turning to me all filled with pity she said: \u201cNow you can make your way by yourself\u201d\u2014and having said this she disappeared, nor did she reveal herself to my eyes again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

I remained in that solitude all fearful and sad, and seeing myself without my guide I would hardly have had the courage to move a step, except that I saw before my eyes my beloved little river. After a brief space drawing near to it, I walked along searching eagerly with my eyes if one might be able to see the source from which that water rose; for at every step its current seemed to be increasing and acquiring still greater impetus. So taking my way along a hidden channel I wandered hither and thither until, arrived at last at a cave hollowed out in the stern rock-face, I found the venerable God sitting on the ground, with his left side leaning on a stone urn that was pouring forth water: which (already in great plenty enough) he had made the more with that which he was continually adding as it rained down from his face, his hair, and the bristles of his dripping beard. His garments seemed to be of a greenish ooze; in his right hand he was holding a slender reed, and on his head a garland woven of rushes and other grasses growing in those very waters: and round about him were his Nymphs all weeping in an unaccustomed murmur, and cast on the ground without order or any dignity they never lifted up their sorrowful faces.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

A lamentable spectacle presented itself to my eyes, as I looked upon this; and now I began to be aware within myself of the reason my guide had abandoned me a little before. But finding myself led there, and lacking the confidence to turn back again, without taking further counsel, all sorrowful and full of mistrust I bowed down first to kiss the earth, and then began these words: \u201cO most lambent river, O Monarch of my countryside, O gracious and pleasant Sebeto, that with your clear cold waters refresh my beautiful homeland, may God exalt your condition: may God exalt your condition, O ye Nymphs, the noble offspring of your father: I pray thee, be propitious to my coming; and receive me among your forests with kindness and grace. Let my fortune be content to have led me through diverse chances to this point: now, whether reconciled or sated with my troubles, let her lay down her arms.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

I had not yet finished my speech when a pair of Nymphs detached themselves from that sorrowing band, and coming toward me with tearful faces placed me between them. One of them, with her face held somewhat higher than the other, taking me by the hand led me toward the debouch where that little stream is divided into two parts, the one spreading out over the fields, the other by a hidden route proceeding to the necessities and the ornaments of the city. There having come to a halt she showed me the road, signifying that now the issue lay in my will. Then to make clear to me who they were she said: \u201cThis one, whom now it seems that you do not recognize, oppressed as you are by cloudy ignorance, is the beautiful Nymph who laves the beloved nest of your sole Phoenix, whose waters so often have been augmented by your tears, even to the brim: I, who now speak, will straightway be found under the slopes of the mountain where she lies.\u201d\u2014And her saying these words, and her changing into water, and her departure by the hidden way, were one and the same thing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

Reader, I swear to you (even as that Goddess, who has thus far lent me grace for writing this, may grant an immortality to my writings, such as they may be) that I found myself at that moment so desirous of dying, that I would have been content with any manner of death whatever: and fallen into hatred of myself, I cursed the hour that ever I left Arcadia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n
\n

Reader,\u00a0wham<\/i>. \u201cFallen into hatred of myself, I cursed the hour that ever I left Arcadia\u201d\u2014in other words, Arcadia, which is not home, which is largely fantasy, which can\u00a0never<\/i>\u00a0be adequate, which does not relieve us of our sorrow one little dot and even instead almost seems to make things\u00a0worse<\/i>\u2014Arcadia! Shangri-La!\u2014is still better than facing the actual truth of ourselves: that we have no future, even if we have a future. We are nothing, forget it, it\u2019s over.<\/p>\n

The sickening evocation of irrational, eerie shame\u2014this goes way out of bounds of Theocritus and Virgil, let alone slush like Heliodorus and Longus. In Arcadia<\/em>, the masquerade and the need for it is thematized and made tragic, if I am not greatly mistaken, and this is what Sannazaro had to add to the history of pastoral.<\/p>\n

The way I see it, he sorta out-Virgils Virgil, which I think was only possible because he matched Virgil\u2019s special relation to sadness. As far as I know, Jacopo Sannazaro was the last European who did so.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Anthony Madrid lives in Victoria, Texas. His second book is\u00a0<\/em>Try Never<\/a>. He is a correspondent for the\u00a0<\/em>Daily.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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