The Parallel Suppliants

Les suppliants parallèles

Saint Petersburg, January 9/22, 1905

Petition of the workers to the tsar, in the cahier of Étienne Avenard. — January 22, new style, — fifth cahier of this seventh series:

Sire! We, workers of the city of Saint Petersburg, our wives, our children, and our invalid old parents, have come to you, Sire, to seek justice and protection. We have fallen into misery: we are oppressed, burdened with crushing labor, insulted; we are not recognized as men, we are treated as slaves who must patiently endure their bitter and sorrowful lot and keep silent!

οἱ ἱκεται, the suppliants; there was already in Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, 14 and following:

ΙΕΡΕΥΣ

Ἀλλ᾽, ὦ κρατύνων Οἰδίπους χώρας ἐμῆς,
ὁρᾷς μὲν ἡμᾶς ἡλίκοι προσήμεθα
βωμοῖσι τοῖς σοῖς· οἱ μὲν οὐδέπω μακρὰν
πτέσθαι σθένοντες, οἱ δὲ σὺν γήρᾳ βαρεῖς,
ἱερεὺς ἐγὼ μὲν Ζηνός, οἵ δ᾽ επ᾽ ᾐθέων
λεκτοί· τὸ δ᾽ἄλλο φῦλον ἐξεστεμμένον
ἀγοραῖσι θακεῖ, πρός τε Παλλάδος διπλοῖς
ναοῖς, ἐπ᾽ Ἰσμηνοῦ τε μαντείᾳ σποδῷ.

the priest

Yes, (well then) O Oedipus, master of my country, you see us, of what age, prostrate at the foot of your altars: some not yet having the strength to fly a long stretch, the others heavy with old age, and I priest of Zeus, and these chosen from among the young men: and the rest of the people, girded with crowns, is seated in the public squares, and at the double temple of Pallas, and on the prophetic ash of the Ismenus.

Petition of the workers to the tsar, continuing:

And we have endured it. But we are pushed more and more into the abyss of misery, of the absence of right, of ignorance; despotism and arbitrariness crush us and we suffocate. We are at the end of our strength, Sire! The limit of patience is passed. We have reached that terrible moment when death is better than the prolongation of unbearable sufferings. And so we have abandoned work and we have declared to our employers that we will not begin to work again until they have satisfied our demands.

Sophocles, continuing:

Πόλις γάρ, ὥσπερ καὐτὸς εἰσορᾷς, ἄγαν
ἤδη σαλεύει κἀνακουφίσαι κάρα
βυθῶν ἔτ᾽ οὐχ οἵα τε φοινίου σάλου,
φθίνουσα μὲν κάλυξιν ἐγκάρποις χθονός,
φθίνουσα δ᾽ ἀγέλαις βουνόμοις τόκοισί τε
ἀγόνοις γυναικῶν ·

For the city, as you see there (and) yourself, now rolls with a violent rolling, henceforth incapable of raising again its head from the depths of this rolling red with blood, perishing through the buds of the fruits of the earth, perishing through the grazing herds of oxen and through the sterile birthings of women;

What we ask is a small thing. We desired only that without which life is not a life, but a galley-prison and an infinite torture.

ἀγόνοις γυναικῶν · ἐν δ᾽ ὁ πυρφόρος θεὸς
σκήψας ἐλαύνει, λοιμὸς ἔχθιστος, πόλιν,
ὑφ᾽ οὗ κενοῦται δῶμα Καδμεῖον · μέλας δ᾽
Ἅιδης στεναγμοῖς καὶ γόοις πλουτίζεται.

and (within it) the fire-bearing god, having darted forth, pursues, supreme enemy plague, the city, plague by which is emptied the Cadmean house; and black Hades is enriched with lamentations and cries.

Our first demand was that our employers examine together, with us, our needs; but even that was refused us, the right to speak of our needs was refused us, on the ground that the law does not recognize this right in us.

θεοῖσι μέν νυν οὐκ ἰσούμενόν σ᾽ ἐγὼ
οὐδ᾽ οἵδε παῖδες ἑζόμεσθ᾽ ἐφέστιοι,
ἀνδρῶν δὲ πρῶτον ἔν τε συμφοραῖς βίου
κρίνοντες ἔν τε δαιμόνων συναλλαγαῖς·

Not equalled to the gods, (then), judging you, neither I nor these children whom you see here, we are seated at the foot of your altars, but (judging you) the first of men both in the conjunctures of life and in the commerce of the divinities;

Illegal also was found our demand to reduce the number of working hours to eight per day; to establish the price of our work together, with us, and with our consent; to examine our misunderstandings with the subaltern administration of our factories; to raise the wages of laborers and women to 1 ruble per day; to suppress supplementary labor; to give us attentive medical assistance without insulting us; to arrange our workshops in such a way that we may work in them and not find our death from the terrible draughts, the rain, and the snow. According to our employers, everything was found illegal: our whole demand was a crime, and our desire to improve our condition — an insolence, outrageous toward our employers.

ὅς γ᾽ ἐξέλυσας, ἄστυ Καδμεῖον μολὼν,
σκληρᾶς ἀοιδοῦ δασμὸν ὃν παρείχομεν,
καὶ ταῦθ᾽ ὑφ᾽ ἡμῶν οὐδὲν ἐξειδὼς πλέον
οὐδ᾽ ἐκδιδαχθείς, ἀλλὰ προσθήκῃ θεοῦ
λέγει νομίζει θ᾽ ἡμὶν ὀρθῶσαι βίον ·

you who (at least) loosed, coming into the city of Cadmus, the tribute of the harsh songstress, which we furnished, and this knowing nothing more from us, nor having been taught it, but it is by a divine assistance that one says and one thinks that you set up our life for us;

Sire! we are here more than 300,000, and all men only by appearance, by aspect; in reality, no human right is recognized in us, not even the right to think, to assemble, to examine our needs, to take measures to improve our situation. Whoever among us dares to raise his voice in defense of the interests of the working class is thrown into prison, sent into exile. They punish among us, as a crime, a good heart, a compassionate soul. To take pity on a man oppressed, tortured, without rights — is to commit a very grave crime.

νῦν τ᾽, ὦ κράτιστον πᾶσιν Οἰδίπου κάρα,
ἱκετεύομέν σε πάντες οἵδε πρόστροποι
ἀλκήν τιν᾽ εὑρεῖν ἡμίν, εἴτε του θεῶν
φήμην ἀκούσας εἴτ᾽ ἀπ᾽ ἀνδρὸς οἶσθά του ·

and now, O head of Oedipus, the most powerful over all (or over all men), we all supplicate you, who are here turned toward you, to find for us a force of succor, whether having heard the voice of some one of the gods, or whether you know it from some man;

Sire! is this in conformity with the divine laws, by whose grace you reign? And can one live under such laws? Is it not better to die, better for us all, workers of all Russia? Let the capitalists and the functionaries alone then live, and let them rejoice. That is what is before us, Sire, and that is what has gathered us close to the walls of your palace. It is here that we seek our last salvation. Do not refuse protection to your people; bring it forth from the tomb of arbitrariness, of misery, and of ignorance; give it the possibility of disposing of its own fate; deliver it from the intolerable oppression of the functionaries; destroy the wall between you and your people, — and let it govern the country with you. For you reign for the happiness of the people, — and it is that happiness which the functionaries snatch from our hands: it does not reach us; we receive only suffering and humiliation.

ὡς τοῖσιν ἐμπείροισι καὶ τὰς ξυμφορὰς
ζώσας ὁρῶ μάλιστα τῶν βουλευμάτων.

for I see even the conjunctures live by men of experience (or through men of experience) principally, of the counsels. And I see above all that I am entangling myself inextricably in my translation. Happy time of our studies, when in such translations we entangled ourselves no less. How many times, in fifth form, how many times, in fourth, in third, how many times, in rhetoric even, how many times did we not stumble in this way, how many times did we not run aground on a text, on two lines of Greek, on two verses of Sophocles. But then there were two cases, and there were only two cases, very clearly characterized, two distinct cases, and even contrary ones, of inextricable embarrassments: there were the times when one understood perfectly the word-for-word and when one did not understand the French, and on the contrary there were the cases when one understood perfectly the French, but where one did not understand the word-for-word. No living man was the dupe of these innocent formulas; no one was deceived by these habitual displacements; no one, neither our good masters, nor our affectionate and cordial master M. Simore, nor our severe master M. Doret, who perhaps wrote himself Doré, nor our regretted master M. Paul Glachant; no one, and above all not our good comrades, who spoke the same conventionally-indulgent language, — the same usual, well-worn language, of all the ancient languages the one we had learned the most quickly, and the one we spoke, familiarly, conveniently, the best: Sir, I understand the French well, but I cannot do the word-for-word. — Sir, I understand the word-for-word well, but I cannot do the French: Amant alterna Camenae, that was the alternating song of the ancient classes of grammar and of the ancient classes of letters in secondary instruction, and this song, much older but less shapeless than the famous “coarse songs of the Arval Brothers,” was sweet and good like a return of strophe, that mutual refrain functioned as a complicity.

Everyone perfectly understood what that meant: that one saw no more clearly, that one was utterly lost, as in a forest, that one understood absolutely nothing of it any longer. Since then I have gone to the old École Normale, and put into the hands of the noble old man the former M. Tournier, I have learned that one gives a wholly other name, a bizarre name, to the passages one does not understand, when one wishes precisely to signify that one does not understand them: they are then called interpolated passages. And there is no longer anything to do but find readings. And when one does not find readings, one makes conjectures. One names readings the conjectures that are in the manuscripts, and conjectures the readings that are not in the manuscripts.

ὡς τοῖσιν ἐμπείροισι καὶ τὰς ξυμφορὰς
ζώσας ὁρῶ μάλιστα τῶν βουλευμάτων.

It is at such passages that translators become wise, vague, supreme, and that the glories today the most well-established at the origin made themselves prudent. Leconte de Lisle, Sophocles, II, Oidipous-Roi: for I know that wise counsels bring happy events. He understands his French, that one, but I should very much like to know how he does his word-for-word, and what he makes of καὶ and of μάλιστα; and of τοῖσιν ἐμπείροισι, and of the dative, and of the whole articulation of the sentence, and of everything. But just go and ask Leconte de Lisle for his word-for-word. — Sir, our old masters used to say to us when our French became all too superior, sir, show me then your word-for-word; sir, do the word-for-word. But just dare to tell Leconte de Lisle to do his word-for-word.

ὡς τοῖσιν ἐμπείροισι καὶ τὰς ξυμφορὰς
ζώσας ὁρῶ μάλιστα τῶν βουλευμάτων.

The translation of Jules Lacroix, on which were made the triumphant performances at the Français, compromises itself even less:

* Often experience has vanquished misfortune. —

We shall not ourselves get out of it without trying a juxtalinear:

ὡς for ὁρῶ I see καὶ even τὰς ξυμφορὰς the events (the issues, the results) τῶν βουλευμάτων of the counsels ζώσας to live (living) μάλιστα most, principally, above all τοῖσιν ἐμπείροισι through the men of experience (or) to the men of experience, which would give in French:

for I see the events even, the results, of the counsels (eventus consiliorum) to live above all through the men of experience; or: succeed above all with the men of experience. — At last it is one of those little-compromising thoughts that made up a part of the wisdom of the antique chorus.

Consider without anger and with attention our demands: they tend not toward evil, but toward good, Sire! It is not arrogance that speaks in us, it is the consciousness that it is necessary to come out of a situation that is intolerable for us. Russia is too great, her needs are too varied and important, for the functionaries to be able to govern her all by themselves. The people themselves must come to her aid: they alone know their true needs. Do not therefore reject their succor, but accept it, order immediately the convocation of representatives of the Russian land, of all classes and of all orders. Let them all be present here, both the capitalist, and the worker, and the priest, and the doctor, and the schoolmaster, and let all, whoever they may be, elect their representatives; and let each be equal and free in his right of election. And for that, order that the elections to the Constituent Assembly be made on the basis of universal, secret, and equal suffrage.

Ἴθ᾽, ὦ βροτῶν ἄριστ᾽, ἀνόρθωσον πόλιν·
ἴθ᾽, εὐλαβήθηθ᾽· ὡς σὲ νῦν μὲν ἥδε γῆ
σωτῆρα κλῄζει τῆς πάρος προθυμίας·

Go, O best of mortals, set the city upright; go, take care (take heed); for at present this land names you savior for (because of) your zeal of before;

This is our most important demand: in it and on it all rests; it is the principal balm for our wounds, without which they will always bleed and push us to a near death. But this measure, by itself alone, cannot heal all our wounds. Others are necessary for us and we speak to you of them, Sire, as to our father, frankly and openly.

ἀρχῆς δὲ τῆς σῆς μηδαμῶς μεμνώμεθα
στάντες τ᾽ ἐς ὀρθὸν καὶ πεσόντες ὕστερον,
ἀλλ᾽ ἀσφαλείᾳ τήνδ᾽ ἀνόρθωσον πόλιν.

that we may in no way recall your rule, having stood up first upright only to have fallen back afterwards, but in stability set this city upright again.

Necessary are:

I. — Measures against the ignorance and arbitrariness which reign among the Russian people.

1° Individual liberty and inviolability, freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of conscience in matters of religion;

2° Universal and compulsory public instruction at the expense of the State;

3° The responsibility of ministers before the people, and legality guaranteed in the administration;

4° Equality of all before the law;

5° The immediate release of all those who have suffered for their convictions.

II. — Measures against the misery of the people.

1° The abolition of indirect taxes and their replacement by a direct and progressive tax on income;

2° The abolition of the redemption annuities, cheap credit, and the gradual return of the land to the people.

III. — Measures against the oppression of Labor by Capital.

1° The protection of labor by law;

2° Freedom of consumer, producer, and personal societies;

3° The eight-hour day and the regulation of supplementary labor;

4° Freedom in the struggle of labor against capital;

5° The participation of representatives of the working classes in the elaboration of the bill on the governmental insurance of the workers;

6° A normal wage.

ὄρνιθι γὰρ καὶ τὴν τότ᾽ αἰσίῳ τύχην
παρέσχες ἡμῖν, καὶ τανῦν ἴσος γενοῦ.

For by a bird of good omen too you furnished us the fortune of that time, and now also become equal (to yourself).

There, Sire, are the principal needs that we have come to present to you. Order and swear to have them carried out, and you will make Russia glorious and happy, and you will leave your name graven forever in the hearts of our grandsons and our great-grandsons. But if you do not order it, if you do not respond to our prayers, we shall die on this very square, before your palace.

Ὡς εἴπερ ἄρξεις τῆσδε γῆς, ὥσπερ κρατεῖς,
ξὺν ἀνδράσιν κάλλιον ἢ κενῆς κρατεῖν·

For if you command (since you will command) this land, as you are master of it, it is finer to be master of it with men than empty;

We have nowhere else to go, and to what end? Only two roads offer themselves to us: one toward liberty and happiness, the other toward the tomb. Show us which to follow, Sire: we shall follow it without murmur, even were it the way of death. May our life serve as sacrifice to agonizing Russia. This sacrifice, we accomplish it willingly and without regret.

ὡς οὐδέν ἐστιν οὔτε πύργος οὔτε ναῦς
ἔρημος ἀνδρῶν μὴ ξυνοικούντων ἔσω.

for it is nothing, neither a tower nor a ship deserted of the men who do not dwell together within.

I have, so to speak, not faked anything in order to finish at the same time the antique supplication and the modern supplication; these two supplications, the Greek supplication and the modern supplication, are parallel with a parallelism so far carried that they have noticeably the same number of paragraphs. Such parallelisms cannot be passed over in silence. The difference of extension which they present represents very exactly the proportion, the relation that there must be between a real supplication and an art supplication, particularly a dramatic, scenic supplication, namely a tragic supplication, by name a supplication of Greek tragedy. This is to say that the difference one sees between the one and the other supplication, between the antique supplication and the modern supplication, comes in no way from the fact that one is an antique supplication and the other a modern supplication, but solely from the fact that one is a supplication, — extended, — of reality, — extended, — the other a supplication, — gathered, all in outline, — of Greek tragedy.

This singular parallelism, singularly pushed, continues and folds back, replies in the king’s response:

One reads today in the Official Messenger:

H. M. the Emperor, having deigned to receive, on Wednesday, January 19, at Tsarskoe Selo, 34 worker delegates from the factories and works of Saint Petersburg and the suburbs, addressed to them the following words:

“I have summoned you that you might hear personally My will, and communicate it directly to your comrades. The unfortunate events which have lately occurred and which have had sad but inevitable consequences, were caused by the fact that you allowed yourselves to be led into error by traitors and enemies of our Fatherland, and because these people deceived you.

Just as Oedipus will accuse, in a fit of anger and blindness, perhaps not so blind as that, Creon, Tiresias, of politicians’ machinations and of conspiracy.

“In inviting you to come and hand over to Me a petition concerning your needs, they incited you to take part in the sedition which was directed against Me and My government; they made you quit your honest labor at a moment when all true Russians ought to work in concert and without truce, in order to vanquish our so stubborn external enemy.

“Strikes and seditious assemblies only push the idle crowd to disorders which have always forced and will always force the authorities to have recourse to armed force, which necessarily causes the death of innocent victims.

“I know that the worker’s life is not easy. There are many things to improve and to organize; but be patient. You understand yourselves, in all conscience, that one must be equally just toward your employers and take into consideration the interests of Our industry.

“But it is a crime to gather a seditious crowd to declare to Me your needs.

“In My solicitude for the workers, I will see to it that all that is possible to do for the improvement of their condition shall be done, and that they shall be given the means and the possibility to make their new needs known, as those needs manifest themselves.

“I believe in the honor of the workers and in their unalterable devotion toward Me, and I forgive them their fault.

“Return now to your peaceable labors; set yourselves to the task, you and your comrades, making the sign of the cross. May God be your help.”

It may seem at first sight that the parallelism here turns about, folds back only, contradicts itself; but it becomes quickly evident that in reality it is pursued, that it is continued as much as and more than it is folded back. Mutations being made, and the circumstantial variations omitted for an instant, it is indeed a response of the same sense to supplications of the same sense:

ΟΙΔΙΠΟΥΣ

Ὦ παῖδες οἰκτροί, γνωτὰ κοὐκ ἄγνωτά μοι
προσήλθεθ᾽ ἱμείροντες. Εὖ γὰρ οἶδ᾽ ὅτι
νοσεῖτε πάντες, καὶ νοσοῦντες, ὡς ἐγὼ
οὐκ ἔστιν ὑμῶν ὅστις ἐξ ἴσου νοσεῖ.
Τὸ μὲν γὰρ ὑμῶν ἄλγος εἰς ἕν᾽ ἔρχεται
μόνον καθ᾽ αὑτὸν κοὐδέν᾽ ἄλλον, ἡ δ᾽ ἐμὴ
ψυχὴ πόλιν τε κἀμὲ καὶ σ᾽ ὁμοῦ στένει.
Ὥστ᾽ οὐχ ὕπνῳ γ᾽ εὕδοντά μ᾽ ἐξεγείρετε·
ἀλλ᾽ ἴστε πολλὰ μέν με δακρύσαντα δή,
πολλὰς δ᾽ ὁδοὺς ἐλθόντα φροντίδος πλάνοις.
Ἣν δ᾽ εὖ σκοπῶν ηὕρισκον ἴασιν μόνην,

ταύτην ἔπραξα· παῖδα γὰρ Μενοικέως
Κρέοντ᾽, ἐμαυτοῦ γαμβρόν, ἐς τὰ Πυθικὰ
ἔπεμψα Φοίβου δώμαθ᾽, ὡς πύθοιθ᾽ ὅ τι
δρῶν ἢ τί φωνῶν τήνδε ῥυσαίμην πόλιν.
Καί μ᾽ ἦμαρ ἤδη ξυμμετρούμενον χρόνῳ
λυπεῖ τί πράσσει· τοῦ γὰρ εἰκότος πέρα
ἄπεστι πλείω τοῦ καθήκοντος χρόνου.
Ὅταν δ᾽ ἵκηται, τηνικαῦτ᾽ ἐγὼ κακὸς
μὴ δρῶν ἂν εἴην πάνθ᾽ ὅσ᾽ ἂν δηλοῖ θεός.

Oedipus

O lamentable children, desiring things known and not unknown, you have come to me. For I know well that you are all sick, and being sick, like me there is not one of you who is sick equally. For your pain goes toward a single one alone, in what concerns himself, and no other person; but my soul groans for the city, and for me, and for you, together.

My soul groans, my soul weeps for the city, and for me, and for you, together: we have here all perfect and in all its purity the very formula of the antique lamentations. He does not separate himself from the city, nor from his interlocutor. The antique supplicated, himself a suppliant, supplicated by men, suppliant to the gods, does not separate himself from the inferior suppliant. The antique supplicated, himself a suppliant of the second degree, does not separate himself from the suppliant of the first degree. The supplication encompasses both the one and the other, and no citizen, whether priest, whether king, separates himself from the city, as no suppliant separates himself from the common civic supplication. The formula of Christian supplication, and more generally of Christian lamentation, and originally of messianic lamentation, will be given, perfect also and in all its purity, as in all its plenitude, in the Misereor super turbam. I weep, I have pity on the crowd. Misereor super turbam: quia ecce jam triduo sustinent me, nec habent quod manducent. Mark, VIII, 2. I have pity on the crowd: because behold three days now they have been with me, and they have nothing to eat. And the lamentations of the Old and of the New Scriptures, on the ruin of Jerusalem, so marvelously taken up again in the choruses and in the recitations of Athalie, the lamentations on Jerusalem emptied.

So that you do not wake me asleep in slumber; but know that I have shed many tears, and that I have threaded many roads in the wanderings of solicitude. But the only remedy that, well considering, I have found (I was finding), that one, I have done it: for the son of Menoeceus, Creon, my brother-in-law, I have sent him…

This Creon, his brother-in-law, and let this be said without offending anyone, this Creon whom he sends on extraordinary embassy, this Creon, is a grand duke, quite simply. He is the perpetual grand duke. He is the prince of the blood. He is Monsieur, brother of the king. He is Gaston d’Orléans. This Creon, who will succeed, the catastrophe having come about, is the younger branch always ready to succeed, the perpetual d’Orléans, the four successive families of Orléans, it is Philippe-Égalité, Louis-Philippe, who will succeed, for the last always ends by succeeding.

for the son of Menoeceus, Creon, my brother-in-law, I have sent toward the Pythian dwellings of Phoebus, that he might inquire and learn what doing or what saying I might save this city. And me already, the day, calculated in comparison with the time, pains me (making me ask myself) what is he doing? for beyond the suitable he is absent for a time longer than the suitable time. And when he shall come, at that moment I should be a bad man, not to do all that the god manifests.

Parallel suppliants; but the antique τύραννος, he, had received his suppliants on the threshold of his palace:

ΟΙΔΙΠΟΥΣ

Ὦ τέκνα, Κάδμου τοῦ πάλαι νέα τροφή,
τίνας ποθ᾽ ἕδρας τάσδε μοι θοάζετε
ἱκτηρίοις κλάδοισιν ἐξεστεμμένοι;
πόλις δ᾽ ὁμοῦ μὲν θυμιαμάτων γέμει,
ὁμοῦ δὲ παιάνων τε καὶ στεναγμάτων·
ἁγὼ δικαιῶν μὴ παρ᾽ ἀγγέλων, τέκνα,
ἄλλων ἀκούειν αὐτὸς ὧδ᾽ ἐλήλυθα,
ὁ πᾶσι κλεινὸς Οἰδίπους καλούμενος.
ἀλλ᾽ ὦ γεραιέ, φράζ᾽, ἐπεὶ πρέπων ἔφυς
πρὸ τῶνδε φωνεῖν, τίνι τρόπῳ καθέστατε,
δείσαντες ἢ στέρξαντες; ὡς θέλοντος ἂν
ἐμοῦ προσαρκεῖν πᾶν· δυσάλγητος γὰρ ἂν
εἴην τοιάνδε μὴ οὐ κατοικτίρων ἕδραν.

Oedipus

O children, of the Cadmus of long ago new nursling generation, what sessions, then, of tumultuous agitations are you holding here before me, these here, crowned with suppliant olive boughs?

Thus in Sophocles the supplication is at the very beginning, at the very first beginning, at the magnificent beginning, outwardly and inwardly sumptuous, of the antique tragedy.

and the city is filled together with the perfumes of burnt incense and together with paeans and lamentations;

And the lamentations accompany the supplications like a still deeper voice and as anterior; like a parallel voice of a tone still deeper, graver and as it were inferior.

judging it just, children, not to hear from messengers, others, I myself have come thus, here, the celebrated to all called Oedipus. But (well then), O old man, speak, since by birth it befits you to speak for these, tell me in what attitude you are there, of fear, or affectionate? in the thought that I want to suffice for all: for I would be hard to pain, not having in pity such a session as this.

When in fifth, in third, and even in rhetoric we had splashed about enough, when we had finished struggling in the word-for-word and in the French of the dismembered sentences, custom would have it, tradition required, that one should make at one go all the French, that one should take up the French again from one end to the other. It is just indeed, and one may say that it is even a tardy reparation, that, having dislocated this poor text by an use and an abuse of all the known apparatus, one should strive, too late, unfortunately, to restore it, unequally, fruitlessly, to grasp it again whole, in a single piece, as it was. Vain attempt. What is broken is broken. I should very much like to conform to that ancient, ill-founded habit. Besides, and since the question here is of parallel supplications, since on the other hand our subscribers in Avenard’s cahier had in a single piece the modern supplication and the modern response to that supplication, it is equitable, in conformity with the parallelism that I propose to respect, since we began by noting it, since it imposed itself upon us from the outset, it is equitable to give in a single piece also the Hellenic supplication and the Hellenic response to that supplication. We must not dream of giving here that translation of Jules Lacroix on which were made the triumphant performances at the Français. That translation, begun in grandeur, continues quickly in weakness and pursues itself into misinterpretation. Let us not say that it is almost perpetually grotesque, first because it is not true, then because we must eternally respect the art-emotions we have once received. What man of my generation, young at the time, does not recall, like a sacred initiation, the scenically sumptuous beginning of the tragedy in its French version, and Mounet standing at the highest of the steps, on the right, receiving like a God the supplication of a whole people. That people, you tell me, was a people of supernumeraries. Whence do you take that in the modern world the theater supernumeraries, by their social situation (ἕδρα), are not excellently disposed to become the representatives, the images of the suppliants of antiquity. It is as if you said that M. Mounet-Sully is not a king of the modern world, and is thus not eminently designated, by his very social situation, to become an image, a representative of the kings of antiquity. We still have the rocky and buttery timbre of his voice sounding in our memories:

Children, of old Cadmus young posterity,
Why have your cries risen toward this palace,…

He had a superb white mantle in which he draped himself like an ancient, better than an ancient, for we have never seen an ancient drape himself, and the least of his gestures has remained intact in the memory of our glances. But spectators, my brothers, companions of the heights, little chicks of the upper gallery, angels of Paradise, young people of that time, who in the fervor and piety of the performances of that time went to buy the new translation in the bookshop (translated literally in French verse), let us live piously in the memory of our glances and in the memory of our hearts; let us live in the memory of what we heard then and of what we loved; let us above all beware of casting our eyes upon that old text; not even old, outdated: the disillusion would be too strong, and would reach to the depths of a demolition. From the two following lines on the French text weakens:

And why these suppliant boughs, these garlands?
The whole city is full both of incense and of offerings,

The rest is not worth the honor of being cited, that rest which seemed to us as taut, as constant, as continued as a text of Racine:

Full of plaintive songs, of sobs and of tears! —

And if there were need to convince oneself once more that the art of the theater has doubtless nothing in common with the art of writing, and in any case has no need whatever of the art of writing, it would suffice to confront the unique and real and really sovereign grandeur of those performances with the poverty, with the weakness, with the inanity of the text formed by the assembled words themselves which were so great in the heart of the performances.

Let us leave this outdated text. Let us seek an ancient text. Shall we be more fortunate with Leconte de Lisle? He was a great poet, one of the greatest French poets, one of the greatest modern poets. His translation of the great antique poems, generally considered as a preparation for his own antique poems, which it was, and as an integral part of the work and of the œuvre of those same antique poems, which perhaps it was not, has not ceased to receive the greatest reputation.

Leconte de Lisle, Sophocles, II, Oidipous-Roi:

OIDIPOUS.

O children, new race of the antique Cadmus, why do you stand thus before me with these suppliant boughs? The whole City is full of the incense that burns and of the resounding of the Paeans and of the lamentations. I did not think that I should have to learn this from others, O children! And I have come myself, I, Oidipous, celebrated among all men. Come now! speak, old man, for it is fitting that you speak for them. What is it? What is your thought? Do you dread some danger? Do you desire to be succored in a present calamity? Certainly, I shall come to your aid. I should be without pity, if I were not touched by your sorrowful attitude.

the sacrificator

Oidipous, O you who command the land of my fatherland, you see us all prostrate before your altars: these here who cannot yet walk much, these sacrificators heavy with years, and myself, servant of Zeus, and this elite of our young men. The rest of the multitude, carrying the suppliant boughs, is seated in the Agora, before the two temples of Pallas and the prophetic hearth of the Ismenian. Indeed, as you see, the City, beaten by the storm, can no longer raise her head submerged in the bloody foam. The fruits of the earth perish, still enclosed in the buds, the herds of oxen languish, and the germs conceived by women are not born. Brandishing her torch, the most hateful of Goddesses, the Plague has hurled herself upon the City and has devastated the dwelling of Cadmus. Black Hades is enriched by our groanings and our lamentations. And here these children and I have come to your threshold, not that you seem to us equal to the Gods, but because, in the evils that life brings or those that the angered Daimones inflict, you are for us the first of men, you who, on your arrival in the city of Cadmus, freed us from the tribute paid to the cruel Divineress, having been warned of nothing, nor informed by us. Indeed, it is with the help of a God that you have saved our life. All think it and believe it. Now, however, Oidipous, the most powerful of men, we have come toward you as suppliants, that you may find some remedy for us, whether a divine oracle instruct you, or whether a man advise you, for I know that wise counsels bring happy events. Come, O best of men, restore this city to its ancient glory, and take care for your own! This land, remembering your first service, names you still its savior. May it please the Gods that, thinking of the days of your power, we shall not say that, raised up by you, we have fallen once more! Restore therefore and tranquilize this city. Already, by a happy destiny, you have re-established us. Be today equal to yourself. For, if you command still upon this earth, it is better that it be full of men than deserted. A tower or a ship, indeed, however vast it be, is nothing, empty of men.

OIDIPOUS.

O lamentable children! I know, I am not unaware of what you come to implore. I know of what evil you all suffer. But whatever be the pains that afflict you, they are not equal to mine; for each of you suffers for himself, without feeling the evil of others, and I, I groan at once for the City, for you, and for myself. Certainly, you have not awakened me while I slept; but rather, know that I have wept much and stirred in my mind many anxieties and many thoughts; so that the only remedy I found in reflecting, I have attempted. That is why I have sent to Pytho, to the dwellings of Phoebus, the son of Menoeceus, Creon, my brother-in-law, in order to learn by what action or what speech I can save this city. Already, counting the days since his departure, I am uneasy at what he is doing; for it is long since he is absent, and beyond what is likely. When he shall have returned, may I be held for a bad man, if I do not do what the God shall have prescribed!

Copying out this translation to send to the printers, it too brings me a great disappointment. It is rapid, which would be a good thing. But it is slack. But it is vague. But it is distant. But it is superior. And it seems to me to swarm with the gravest misinterpretations. These misinterpretations would still be nothing, because a good misinterpretation, as our good masters used to say with a sense of relief, is a perfectly characterized fault, clearly delimited. But what is much more grave than all the misinterpretations is this continual wavering, this slackness, this vagueness, this offhandedness with a text, this garment too loose and in no way draped, in no way pulled tight, in no way fitted, this ready-made garment, this off-the-rack, ill-adjusted, ill-fitting, applied to the figures that deserved it least, to the antique forms, that is to say, of all forms, to those that bear it least. Was it impatience of genius of a great poet? incapable, by his activity, by his own thrust, of following in some pushed detail the work of another, even of another great poet, and above all of another great poet, of an elder, of an ancient. But genius bursts forth nowhere so much as in pushed detail. Was it, at the same time, incapacity to work long, and at length, at a work of this kind? Too great a man. Too great a poet. Too Olympian. To translate from Greek. Was it, inseparably, in principle an impatience of genius, manifesting itself in fact by an impatience of work and even by a negligence of work. It is evident that in such exercises attention dulls rapidly. The embrace tires, as in every art, in every science, in every philosophy. Fatigue comes quickly. The eyes blur, and the mind. Time is lacking. The scroll runs on. One cannot ask a man to work days and days as one works a quarter of an hour, and years as one works a few weeks. Freshness is what is the first to fail. Suddenness. Instantaneousness. One cannot ask a great man to work like a schoolboy, nor a very great poet to toil all his life like a four-week beggar. One cannot ask a modern this form of patience in work, this conscientiousness at once eternal and instantaneous, immediate and ideal, direct and infinite, which in the Middle Ages dwelt in the hearts of the humble of a whole world. If Leconte de Lisle had taken a whole month to translate the first 77 lines of Oedipus Rex, the whole of Oedipus Rex, fifteen hundred and thirty lines, I say 1530, would have demanded of him twenty months; the whole of Sophocles, seven tragedies, which make a seven-fifty, would have demanded of him a hundred and forty months, twelve years. Aeschylus, who makes a seven-fifty, twelve years. The Iliad, which makes a seven-fifty, twelve years. The Odyssey, which makes a seven-fifty, twelve years. Hesiod, a seven-fifty, twelve years. Here we are at sixty years. There would not have remained to him an hour to be what he was, that is to say Leconte de Lisle, one of the greatest French poets, one of the greatest modern poets.

And I have counted neither Horace, text and translation, nor Euripides, new translation, nor Virgil, text and translation. And here I perceive that under an eminent form and in a particularly eminent case we here rejoin that old interior contrariety of the so-called scientific historical methods, — I say old because I have already been able to point out its capital importance, — first, in this sense that such methods would lead the translator, great modern poet, to take much more time to make the translation of a tragedy than the first poet, ancient, given his known fecundity, had taken to make the text itself; secondly, in this sense that they would lead the same modern poet to take much more time to make the translation of an ancient tragedy than to make himself a new tragedy.

I am therefore forced to fall back upon my poor schoolboy translation. The persons who, in order to have at a single piece the tenor of the antique supplication, and of the response, as they had in Avenard at a single piece the tenor of the modern supplication, and of the response, shall have the courage to reread it, as I have had the patience to recopy it whole, are requested to be so kind as to read it as an indulgent master reads an applied exercise, a pupil’s copy, to be so good as to read it as I have made it, as I present it, as a rather aged schoolboy exercise, as a schoolboy exercise in return:

Oedipus

O children, of the Cadmus of long ago new nursling generation, what sessions then of tumultuous agitations are you holding here before me, these here, — crowned with suppliant olive boughs? And the city is full together of the perfumes of burnt incense, and together of paeans and of lamentations; judging it just, children, not to hear from messengers, others, I myself have come thus, here, the celebrated to all called Oedipus. But, O old man, speak, since by birth it befits you to speak for these, tell me in what attitude you are there, of fear, or affectionate? in the thought that I want to suffice for all: for I would be hard to pain, not having in pity such a session as this.

the priest

Yes (well then), O Oedipus, master of my country, you see us, of what age, prostrate at the foot of your altars: some not yet having the strength to fly a long stretch, the others heavy with old age, and I priest of Zeus, and these chosen from among the young men; and the rest of the people, girded with crowns, is seated in the public squares, and at the double temple of Pallas, and on the prophetic ash of the Ismenus. For the city, as you see there (and) yourself, now rolls with a violent rolling, henceforth incapable of raising again its head from the depths of this rolling red with blood, perishing through the buds of the fruits of the earth, perishing through the grazing herds of oxen and through the sterile birthings of women; and (within it) the fire-bearing god, having darted forth, pursues, supreme enemy plague, the city, plague by which is emptied the Cadmean house; and black Hades is enriched with lamentations and cries. Not equalled to the gods (then), judging you, neither I nor these children here, we are seated at the foot of your altars, but (judging you) the first of men both in the conjunctures of life and in the commerce of the divinities; you who (at least) loosed, coming into the city of Cadmus, the tribute of the harsh songstress, that we furnished, and this knowing nothing more from us, nor having been taught of it, but it is by a divine assistance that one says and one thinks that you set up our life for us; and now, O head of Oedipus most powerful over all (or over all men), we all supplicate you, who are here turned toward you, to find for us a force of succor, whether having heard the voice of some one of the gods, or whether you know it from some man; for I see the events even of the counsels live above all by the men of experience. Go, O best of mortals, set the city upright; go, take care; for at present this land names you savior for your zeal of before; that we may in no way recall your rule, having stood up first upright only to have fallen back afterwards, but in stability set this city upright again. For by a bird of good omen also you furnished us the fortune of that time, and now become equal. For if you command this land, as you are master of it, it is finer to be master of it with men than empty; for it is nothing, neither a tower nor a ship deserted of men who do not dwell together within.

Oedipus

O lamentable children, desiring things known and not unknown you have come to me. For I know well that you are all sick, and being sick, like me there is not one of you who is sick equally. For your pain goes toward a single one alone, in what concerns himself, and no other person; but my soul groans for the city, and for me, and for you, together. So that you do not wake me asleep in slumber; but know that I have shed many tears, and that I have threaded many roads in the wanderings of solicitude. But the only remedy that, well considering, I have found, that one, I have done it: for the son of Menoeceus, Creon, my brother-in-law, I have sent toward the Pythian dwellings of Phoebus, that he might inquire and learn what doing or what saying I might save this city. And me already, the day, calculated in comparison with time, pains me, what is he doing? for beyond the suitable he is absent for a time longer than the suitable time. And when he shall come, at that moment I should be a bad man, not to do all that the god manifests.

Rereading my translation, I am well aware that such a poor translation, honest but poor, abundantly justifies all the slacknesses, — I take this word in an almost physical sense, — all the slackenings of a Leconte de Lisle. And even of another. One could not in fact read many pages of a French like that one; one would go mad before the catastrophe; with all the more reason the wretch who should undertake to write it. It is the common misery of all translations. When they are flowing, they do not grip the text. And when they grip the text, or when they strive to grip it, they are unreadable. And even being unreadable they are still defective. Even at this condition, they do not obtain repose. My poor translation, which is grotesque almost from one end to the other, by dint of wishing to grip the text: for whoever has the text before his eyes it is still itself too slack and still does not grip the text enough. A translation that wishes to grip a text is long. My translation seems to me on reading much longer, slower than that of Leconte de Lisle. A translation that wishes to grip a text is slow. It has its takings-up-again, its returns, its remorses. It reproaches itself. The text, master and pretext and despair of the translator-plaything, the text enemy of every translation. So true is it that texts are literally incommunicable, and that we must renounce that unsustainable hypothesis, that indefensible postulate of so-called scientific, modern, historical methods: that there can be, that there are transcriptions, transpositions, translations, transfers, exactly exact communications. What is true, on the contrary, what reality teaches us pitilessly and without any exception, is that every operation of this order, every operation of displacement, without any exception, entails pitilessly and irrevocably a loss, an alteration, and that this loss, this alteration is always considerable.

For whoever has not the text before his eyes, a translation is always too complicated. For whoever has the text before his eyes, a translation is always too slack.

It is the common misery of all human work; the mysterious balancing: when one has the freshness, one has not the competence. And when competence comes a little, one perceives that one has no longer the freshness, which will never return, which nothing replaces, which is the first of goods.

When one puts the question thus, moreover, it is impossible to escape the observation of this elementary truth; but the game of the partisans of the so-called scientific, modern, historical methods is to pretend not to see that the question puts itself thus.

All I have permitted myself with regard to Leconte de Lisle was to spare myself the trouble of not translating proper names, as he does. I have also translated ἱερεύς by priest, which is less learned, than by sacrificator.

I have translated Οἰδίπους by Oedipus and not by Oidipous, as in the Iliad I would translate Ἀχιλλεύς by Achilles and not by Akhilleus. And so forth. I ask myself with disquiet whether in Leconte de Lisle this ostentatious transcription of the proper name, in place of an ordinary translation, does not constitute the essential piece of an artful apparatus designed to give the modern an illusion as to the degree of strict tightness of the translation. As much as anyone, better than anyone he knew what to think about his translation; better than anyone he knew how slack and floating it was. Better than anyone he also knew, better than anyone having the sense of form and of forms, how much a translation is worth by strict tightness; by adjustment; better than anyone he knew that a translation is worth by no quality so much as by the close worked detail, by the worked rendering, by the fitted, by the wrought, by the detailed, by the pushed. Better than anyone he knew what a nuance is worth, a form, a gesture, an attitude, the infinite price of a line, the eternity of the line, the incommutability of the exact stroke. And that art is nothing if it is not an adjusted embrace of some reality. Even had he not known it as translator, which is improbable, the very great poet that Leconte de Lisle was could not be ignorant of it, and showed well that he was not ignorant of it as soon and every time that it was no longer a question of anything but establishing his own texts. I fear that in affecting not to translate the proper names, he may have had the thought of giving the modern reader an illusion as to the degree of tightness of his translation, of making a sort of compensation, between the slackness of all the rest and the strict application of this proper name transcribed not translated, glued like a label; as of a coat that would not fit, of a ready-made garment, of a slack tissue (text) that one would want to take in again, that one would hastily pinch back together with a few pins, — let us say with a few fibulas, — pricking, at the risk of pricking the skin itself.

Since one translates, I ask myself in vain why one would not translate everything. Since one translates all the other words, and particularly the common nouns, there is no reason why one should not also translate the proper names, which are of the same language, and particularly of the same text. Since one goes so far as to translate, I ask myself why one does not translate everything. If I translate ἱερεύς, βωμοί, τέκνα, by priest, altars, children why not translate equally and similarly Οἰδίπους by Oedipus. If I translate to drink and to eat, to come and to go, why not translate similarly the name of him who drinks and who eats, of him who sleeps, of him who comes and goes. Why this inequality, this imparity, why introduce into the translation this artificial disharmony, this lack, this rupture of harmony, of symmetry, this rupture of equilibrium, this stuck-on piece, this dead body in a living organism, this dead fragment in a living sentence, this ancient fragment in a translation which is necessarily a new text, this fossil in an organism, this splinter, this ready-made piece in a whole that one is making, this immobile and stiff piece, frozen, fixed, in a sentence moving and living and supple. Why finally do you refuse to translate the same man, Oedipus, when he appears under his name of Οἰδίπους, and consent to translate him when he appears under his name of τύραννος, which you translate neither by tyrant, nor even by tyrannos, but quite simply by the word king. And this for historical reasons. You are led thus to content yourself with the following translation: Oidipous-Roi. You are not consistent with yourself. You are not strict. You should have translated this title thus: Oidipous Tyrannos; or translated like everyone else Œdipe-roi. And the hyphen, will you put this hyphen, which did not exist in the Greek, I think, and which today makes the joy of our good comrade M. Gabriel-Ellen Prévost?

There is much childishness in your case and much ostentation. You reply to me that Οἰδίπους is not Oedipus, and that there are incalculable distances from the one to the other. You are a hundred times right. But this argument goes not only against the translation of proper names; it goes not only against the translation of Οἰδίπους into Oedipus: it goes equally and totally against every sort of translation, and notably against the translation of common nouns. If you signify only by what you say that every translation entails an alteration, brings a loss, that is what we have said a hundred times, but it is true of common nouns at least as much as of proper names. If you signify thus that every translation is an operation essentially imperfect and that there is always between a text and every translation of this text an irremissible distance, you abound in my sense, since we here rejoin that capital insufficiency of the so-called scientific, modern, historical methods to operate a single perfect reproduction, a single exactly exact communication. Only you can conclude from it nothing but this: that every translation is a vain operation, an impossible operation, and that it would perhaps be better not to meddle with it at all; and in my turn I shall abound in your sense; but you cannot conclude from it that one must translate all the rest and not translate proper names. One must not translate at all, or all the translation must be a common, ordinary, modest, customary, usable translation.

You tell me that Οἰδίπους is not Oedipus. Do you believe that Τύραννος makes king? Do you believe that ἱερεύς makes priest, and even sacrificator? in the sense that these two words awaken in a mind, in a modern soul, admitting that the second awakens a sense in a modern mind or soul. Do you believe that βωμοί are altars, in the sense in which we understand altars? And do you even believe that τέκνα are children, and do you not know that there are also irremissible distances between what τέκνα awakened in the echoes of the antique soul and what children awakens in the other echoes of the modern soul. Τέκνα even is not children, τροφή is not nourishment, πόλις is not only town nor city; since it is by name a Greek city; nothing is anything; nothing remakes itself perfectly, nothing begins again, nothing reproduces itself exactly, nothing ancient is at the same time new, nothing new is at the same time ancient; from everything to everything there subsist eternally irremissible distances; and this is why every operation of translation is essentially, irrevocably, irremissibly a miserable operation, a wretched and vain operation, a condemned operation.

He himself, Leconte de Lisle, even translator, does not conform to the end to his doctrine. He says Oidipous, but he says Sophocle, and not Sophoclès. And he says Homère. And his editor says it still much more than he. And he himself, Leconte de Lisle, here is how I am told that he names the seven tragedies of Sophocles: Oidipous-Roi, Oidipous à Kolônos, Antigone, Philoktètès, Aias, Elektra.

The editor, in such matters, even if he were, as Alphonse Lemerre was, a prince of editing, who has attached his name to a whole great unforgettable poetic movement, even if he were a sumptuous, a very notable merchant, by the very fact that he exercises trade, the editor is brought back, automatically, to more common conditions of life, to more natural conditions of language, to more current, more simple conditions of trade and announcement. Leconte de Lisle may say Oidipous, Odysseus, Akhilleus: M. Lemerre, in his catalogues, on his covers, says and announces Eschyle, Homère, Sophocle, Euripide, Hésiode, — Virgile, Horace, — for the same question arises, less acutely, but it arises for the Latins. It is because M. Lemerre sold some. One can still write Sophoclès, by a sort of wager and amusement, but one can only sell Sophocle. And even one has much trouble selling that.

I fear that there is here in Leconte de Lisle a survival, an inheritance of that base mania of the romantics of épater le bourgeois. For after all one must choose: either read in the Greek, or speak, write in French if one has that misfortune, of making a translation. One must read, write, trade, converse in Greek, or honestly do everything in French. To translate a poem from Greek into French can have only one sense, a sense quite miserable, I admit, but it can have only one sense: to try to obtain in the French reader and for the French reader by the French translation an effect that is, mutations being made, as far as possible symmetric, homothetic, of the effect obtained in the spectator, in the reader, in the auditor Greek and for the spectator, for the reader, for the Greek auditor by the original Greek text. Now these names of Οἰδίπους, Ὀδυσσεύς, Ἀχιλλεύς were quite familiar to the ancient Greeks, and when they met these names in discourse, they were no more surprised to meet them there than we are surprised to meet in our discourses those names so widespread of Henri, of Albert or of Meunier. They said Κρέων exactly as we say Durand. It is therefore better, it is more intelligent, it is, at bottom, more exact and better translated, that in our translations we find at the same places names that likewise do not surprise us. When I find Akhilleus in a French sentence, unexpectedly I receive a jolt, a certain shock, an impression of the heterogeneous, of a foreign body, that by definition the Greek did not receive, absolutely not, at the same place. Is that what is asked? Is that what one wants to obtain? Is that what a translation proposes to itself? to make the modern undergo, at certain well-determined moments, a treatment that the ancient did not undergo at those moments, to make the one who reads the translation precisely give a start that one is sure the original did not give. When I find Akhilleus in a translation, I stumble, because it is Greek, in French, a State within the State, a kingdom of language in a kingdom of language. At the same place the Greek did not stumble, he continued, he passed, evenly, because he found Ἀχιλλεύς, and that Ἀχιλλεύς, for the Greek, was Greek, in homogeneous Greek. Where the Greek might have shown a certain astonishment, legitimate, was if he had found in his text Dupont or Durand. That is, however, what one makes us do when one makes us find Akhilleus in our texts.

There is no more reason for us to find a Greek word, even were it a proper name, in bulk, untranslated, in a translation which is, after all, itself a French text, than there is reason to thrust a French word, even were it a proper name, in bulk, untranslated, into a Greek text, into the original Greek text.

This is so true that one asks oneself and there is really absolutely no reason that one should have put in the nominative these proper names that one refused to translate. It is a formal misinterpretation, it is a formal non-sense, it is anything you like, but it is no longer Greek at all, and it is no more French, to say, to write: the goddess took Odysseus by the hand, or: the god pursued Akhilleus. One should say at least: the goddess took Odysséa by the hand, or: the god pursued Akhilléa. Since one is speaking Greek, one must decline. And here, at this eminent point, appears all the vanity of this ostentation. The nominative is for us an eminent case only because we use it artificially to designate in French the declinable Greek word; because we use dictionaries; and we use it to designate the Greek word in French, in our Greek-French dictionaries, and in all that there is of dictionary in our exercises even oral, only because it is the case that is first in the declensions of the grammars; but when we say that Achilles in Greek is Ἀχιλλεύς, we lie: Achilles in Greek is Ἀχιλλεύς, Ἀχιλλέως, and so on, and as much Ἀχιλλέως as Ἀχιλλεύς, and as much Ἀχιλλέα as Ἀχιλλέως. It is only too evident, and there is some shame in saying it, that in discourse, real discourse, in the living language, all the cases are equal among themselves, have grammatically and organically the same importance, equally represent the word; what then becomes the difficulty when it is a question of a word like Ζεύς, Ζηνός, or Δίος, Διῑ, Δία, where the nominative is so far removed from all the other forms; let us note that in these cases it is not the other forms that are removed, — as much as this word can have a sense, — from the nominative, but it is the nominative, by which you designate vocabularly the word, that is set apart from the most numerous forms of the word. — And if one believes that dieu translates θεός, and that déesse translates θεά. Given everything there is for us moderns in this word Dieu. Which among us moderns, and to hold to the most apparent and most gross morphological difference, is always masculine, but no longer has a feminine. And when will he or will he not put a great capital to the word Dieu. When will he write Dieu? and when will he write simply dieu? And when will he put it in the plural? What is, for a Christian, the plural of God? and above all for a Jew? And when he translates δαίμων, in the singular he will put daimôn, with long ô, and in the plural he puts daimones, with a short o, because of δαίμονες, that is to say that refusing to transcribe the accusative singular morphologically distinct from the nominative singular, he transcribes all the same the nominative plural morphologically distinct from the nominative singular.

This is so true that Leconte de Lisle, for his personal use, for his own poems, knew perfectly well when one had to translate, and not merely to transcribe. Antique Poems. Venus of Milo:

Thou art not Aphrodite, in the rocking of the wave,…

Thou art not Cytherea, in thy supple pose,…

And thou art not the Muse with the eloquent lips,…

The difficulty, the debate, the question, the appearance of question, the specious solution came precisely from the gods. It is altogether evident, it is established, and no one today contests it, that when one translated Ζεύς by Jupiter, one made a gross misinterpretation, because Ζεύς and Jupiter, the Greek god and the Latin god, were in no way the same god, made two different personages, notably distinct. Similarly there was danger in translating Ἡρακλῆς by Hercules. But the misinterpretation did not come from the fact that one had proposed to translate the Greek name into French. It came solely from the fact that, imagining oneself to be translating the Greek name into French, one had translated it into Latin. And the rectification that has been made proves in no way that one must not, in Greek versions, translate the proper names from Greek into French. It proves only that one must not, under pretext of French, translate them into Latin.

An example will let one grasp the whole difference: when one translated Ἀφροδίτη by Vénus, one committed this misinterpretation; but it does not in any way follow that it is not permitted to translate and even that it is not necessary to translate separately Venus by Vénus, and Ἀφροδίτη by Aphrodite. And again Ἡρακλῆς by Héraklès, and the Latin Hercules by the French Hercule.

All the more so does the difficulty fall away everywhere else, since there is not a Latin Homerus that is the correspondent of the Greek Ὅμηρος and yet that is other than this Ὅμηρος, as there is a Jupiter who is the correspondent of Ζεύς in a half-filial and half-parallel mythology, and who nevertheless is other than Ζεύς.

Reason, common sense, taste, sovereign master, taste, unmoveable master, harmony, homogeneity, the bearing of discourse demand that in a French text all the speech, all the discourse, all the language be French, be French language. To give and to retain is not valid: since one goes so far as to translate, one cannot, at the same time, translate and not translate. Our ancients, our great Frenchmen, went very far in the sense of translation. Émilie, Fulvie, says the great Corneille, Évandre, Curiace, Horace.

Behold the misfortune of Brute and of Cassie.

This does not prevent Cinna and les Horaces from being two extraordinary masterpieces and two almost extraordinarily Roman tragedies. — I say this on purpose because it is true and to vex our modern exegetes, and I am told that I only succeed too well at it. — I do not speak of Pompée, of Nicomède, tragedy of great joy and of amusement, of Polyeucte, a Christian tragedy. After all, do we not ourselves say Athènes, Rome, the sénat, which is almost a proper name, a triumvirat, which is almost also a proper name.

And the great Racine, from the fact that he said Andromaque, Oreste, Hermione, and that he named Phèdre his immortal Phèdre, had he the less for that a divination, a penetration of Hellenic antiquity almost improbable.

And when we say the sky, what difference with οὐρανός, and even with caelum. And on the contrary are we much closer when we say Paians than when we say péans. At bottom, it is neither the one nor the other; they are παιάνες.

And the great Leconte de Lisle, when he opened up on his own account, knew perfectly what he had to do. He knew when one had to translate altogether into the most common language, when on the contrary one had to transcribe purely, or to translate halfway; he knew all the intercalary nuances. I shall give no other witness than this antique poem, this so perfect and admirable invocation to the Venus of Milo. And were it only this title: Vénus de Milo: what a concession to the most common usage. I quote this invocation entirely because it presents precisely all the desirable degrees from pure transcription to ordinary translation for proper and half-common nouns, and also, in another sense, all the desirable degrees from the pure proper noun to the commonly common noun. I quote it entirely above all because when one has spoken so long of a great poet one must, unless one is oneself a Boeotian, end by a quotation from him, by a whole poem, intact, that may make the reader forget all that one has been able to say oneself.

I take my text in my old edition issued from Poulet-Malassis and de Broise, printers-booksellers-publishers, 9, rue des Beaux-Arts, 1858. I do not think he changed anything in the Lemerre edition:

VENUS OF MILO

Sacred marble, clothed in strength and in genius,
Irresistible Goddess of victorious bearing,
Pure as a lightning-flash and as a harmony,
O Venus, O beauty, white mother of the gods!

Thou art not Aphrodite, in the rocking of the wave,
On thy conch of azure setting a snowy foot,
While round about thee, vision rose and blond,
Fly the vermilion Laughters with the swarm of Sports.

Thou art not Cytherea, in thy supple pose,
Perfuming with kisses the blessed Adonis,
And having for witnesses on the bending branch
Only doves of alabaster and amorous wood-pigeons.

And thou art not the Muse with the eloquent lips,
Modest Venus, nor soft Astarte
Who, brow crowned with roses and acanthus,
On a bed of lotus dies of voluptuousness.

No! the Laughters and the Sports, the entwined Graces,
Blushing with love, do not accompany thee.
Thy cortège is formed of cadenced stars,
And the globes in chorus link themselves upon thy steps.

Of impassive happiness, O adorable symbol,
Calm as the sea in its serenity,
No sob has broken thy unalterable breast,
Never have human tears tarnished thy beauty.

Hail! at thy aspect the heart precipitates itself.
A marble flood inundates thy white feet;
Thou walkest, proud and naked, and the world palpitates,
And the world is thine, goddess with large flanks!

Blessed Phidias, Lysippus or Praxiteles,
Those creators marked by a radiant sign;
For their hand kneaded this immortal form,
For they have sat in the senate of the gods!

Blessed the children of sacred Hellas!
Oh! that I had been born in the holy archipelago,
In the glorious centuries when the inspired earth
Saw the heavens descend at her first call?

If my cradle floating on the antique Thetys
Was not caressed by her tepid crystal;
If I have not prayed beneath the Attic pediment
Victorious Venus, at thy native altar;

Light in my breast the sublime spark;
Shut not my glory in the anxious tomb;
And make my thought stream in rhythms of gold
Like a divine metal in the harmonious mold!

[At the moment when we go to press, someone sends me a slip from which it would result that in the great Lemerre edition, at seven-fifty, of the same antique poem, they had multiplied the great capitals: thus Gods, Sea, Goddess, and not only Hellas or Hellade, but Archipelago, Earth, Heaven or Heavens, which would give:

O Venus, O beauty, white mother of the Gods!

Calm as the Sea in its serenity,…

And the world is thine, Goddess with large flanks!

Oh! that I had been born in the holy Archipelago,
In the glorious centuries when the inspired Earth
Saw the Heavens descend at her first call?

And even:

Hail! At thy aspect the heart precipitates itself.

One cannot deny the importance of this systematic enlargement and of this personalization of certain common nouns into proper nouns by the systematic capitalization, — from the poor, first and improvised edition, to the solemn edition, to the great official and definitive edition, — of the initial letter. For the Gods, is no longer simply the gods, and which of the two is closest to θεοί, which itself was not what dii were, which themselves… But we should never come to an end.

Without exaggerating either the importance of these typographies; for I fear that these editions, I am ashamed to say it, are negligent. One could read in the Poulet-Malassis text:

If my cradle floating on the antique Thetys…

From the slip that is sent me it would result that in the great Lemerre edition one could read:

If my cradle floating on the antique Thetis…

Now the dictionaries give: θέτις, in transcription Thétis, wife of Peleus, mother of Achilles, divinity of the sea, and ΤηΘίς, in transcription Téthys, wife of Oceanus, nurse of Hera: it is this latter, Tèthys, that the poets invoke when they wish to signify the sea itself. There is a piquant contrast between these two orthographical faults, in two successive editions, one improved, made at leisure and definitive, and this pretentious apparatus of pure transcription of proper names. But all the same, if I had been the editor of Leconte de Lisle, the day Leconte de Lisle had brought me a poem like that one, I should have made an effort not to make orthographical mistakes in it.]

Porché will forgive me for having introduced here the text, or one of the most eminent texts, of antique invocation, of antique lamentation, of antique supplication. It is he who forced me to it, by taking for his poem this title: the suppliants. We know that he had first given to this poem this title: the icon, which led us gently toward making of it a Christmas cahier. But, taking up again his vision, and substituting for a central physical and moral image a still deeper idea, he did not delay to give to the poem that we are publishing this essential title, which commands not only his poem, which commands as well the whole cahier, which commands, which expresses all reality itself: the suppliants. And following his example I have permitted myself, restoring a Greek word, a Greek epithet, to give to this brief study this title: the parallel suppliants.

The suppliants: it is the property of the poet, it is a gift of the poet, to seize in a word, to gather in a word all the reality of an event, the profoundly essential reality of a history, of a movement, of an individual or collective gesture. For whoever is willing to look at the reality of an event, and not stop at the politicians’ appearances, this immense manifestation of the 22nd of January was indeed an immense supplication, and not an immense attempt at revolutionary movement. And in the whole attitude, in the whole gesture, in the whole slow operation of this immense people, or rather of all these immense peoples, every man who shall look at the realities of political and social events will see an immense, an infinite supplication, an infinite supplicating operation, and not a revolutionary operation.

It is our Frenchmen who carry out revolutionary operations, and who consequently imagine that the other peoples carry out revolutionary operations; too; for they judge all the other peoples by themselves. But they alone carry out, or at least they used to carry out, truly revolutionary political and social operations, that is to say, they begin by demolishing a regime and putting another, more or less new, in its place, only to perceive the next day that the new was no better than the old, if it even was as good as the old.

That is why our Frenchmen generally understand nothing of the events of other peoples, and, less than of any others, of the events of Russia. In that same Humanité, where nevertheless appeared Avenard’s correspondences, the self-sufficiency, the silliness, the presumption, the assurance with which a Longuet, — not to speak any further of his two masters Herr and Jaurès, — the assurance with which a Longuet disposed as sovereign master of the men and of the most formidable Russian and Japanese events, made a spectacle that was itself grotesquely lamentable.

For whoever applies himself to follow on the contrary, and modestly, the reality of what is happening, for whoever knows how to read the little that is told us of truth, and not to read the rest, for whoever has known how to read notably the cahier of Avenard, it has become evident that the whole Russian movement is not what we call in France a revolutionary movement; it is what in French language we are constrained to call an immense movement of supplication. Particular supplication of the 22nd of January new style, culminating, eminent supplication, eminent symbol, eminent reality, supplication of the entire working people of a whole capital city to the tsar that the whole people demanded at the threshold of his city palace; but a supplication that was itself only the symbol and the representative of all the immense supplications of all the peoples of an immense empire: Supplications of so great a number of oppressed races, who address themselves to the capitals, to the important cities. Supplication of so many classes who address themselves to the eminent classes. Supplications of the workers to the intellectuals. Supplications of the peasants to the workers. Confused supplications of everyone to the military. And among the military, particularly, supplications of the land armies to the sailors, who are more advanced. And brusque returns of barbarism, inverse, going back up, or rather going back down the direction of the supplications; since it is the supplications that mount.

To understand what I mean, to seize exactly and entirely what this essential and titular and liminal word of Porché signifies, the suppliants, we must try to set ourselves a little to speaking French again, as far as that is permitted to men who were born in time to live in this modern age. We must strip this idea of supplication, this image of suppliants, we must cleanse it of every idea of flatness. It is among the moderns that a supplication is an operation of flattening. But let us beware of extending, even in imagination, in reasoning, to more intelligent civilizations, our modern vices. Among the moderns a supplication is an operation of flattening, a manifestation of flatness; the prostration is a prostration, physical and moral; to say everything in a word, the suppliant is a candidate. Such has been the resounding of our parliamentary political mores upon all of life, upon all our social relations, and such the smudging. Infinitely more profound, and I could almost say incomparably, infinitely more true, quite other, quite wise, quite informed, the antique supplication. In Homer, in the tragics, the suppliant is not a candidate; he is not a demander; he is not a man who lowers himself, who humiliates himself, even Christianly; I hardly need say that he is not a modern, who flattens himself. The antique supplication, the only one which, being worthy of this name of supplication, ought to retain us, the antique supplication is in no sense, in no form, an operation of flatness. On the contrary. Read attentively on the contrary one of those admirable antique supplications, the supplication of all that people at the feet of Oedipus, or the one which is still more admirable, assuredly, the one which is perhaps the most admirable of all, the supplication of old Priam at the feet of Achilles. Reread them attentively: it is not the supplicated, it is the suppliant on the contrary who holds the high ground of the situation, the high ground of the dialogue, at bottom. In all antique supplication, one might almost say pedantically: in all the particular cases of this supplication, the supplicated is a man who appears to have a fine situation; he is even a man who has, as one says, a fine situation, who has what one calls a fine situation: he is a king; he is a tyrant; he is some chief; in war he is a victor; he is a man who has some apparent domination; real? he is a powerful one of the earth; in peace he is a rich man, a powerful man, a man who has many oxen; let us say it in a word: he is a happy man, a man who appears to be, who is happy. But that is precisely why in this encounter of the suppliant and the supplicated which is the supplication it is not he, the supplicated, who holds the high ground of the dialogue. He is a happy man. Therefore he is, for the Greeks, a man to be pitied. In this dialogue of the suppliant and the supplicated, the supplicated can speak only in the name of his happiness, at most in the name of happiness in general. That is little. That is nothing. That is less than nothing. It is even the contrary of any advantage. Happiness, understood in this sense, as the success of the event, the somewhat insolent and as it were injurious success, is for the Greeks the most infallible sign that a man is marked for Fatality, — by Fatality. — Innumerable Greeks have desired, coveted, pursued with all their strength the goods of this world, like the moderns, as much as the innumerable moderns, and by all sorts of means: gold, power, enjoyments of all kinds; they were men like us; they preferred happiness to unhappiness, and commonly fine weather to rain. But it nonetheless remains acquired, and it nonetheless remains entire, that happiness, understood technically as the success of the event, is for the Greeks the most infallible sign that a man is marked for Fatality. So that in this encounter, in this dialogue of the suppliant and the supplicated, which makes the whole antique supplication, it is the suppliant, whoever he be, whoever he is, whether he be the beggar wandering along the roads, whether he be the wretched blind man, whether he be the proscribed, the exterminated, the citizen driven from the city, guilty or not guilty, the child driven from the family, guilty or not guilty, this in the political order and in the order of peace, or, in the order of war, the prisoner, the vanquished, the impotent old man, whether he be the orphan or on the contrary the counter-orphan, the old man stripped of his descendants, always it is the suppliant who in reality holds the upper hand, who holds the high ground of the dialogue, the high ground of the situation.

The supplicated, he, has a great, a high human situation. But it is never anything but a quite miserable human situation. Whatever his situation, this situation, the supplicated never has anything but this situation. And that is all. It is nothing. Above all in comparison with other grandeurs. Comparison which imposes itself by the very operation of the supplication. What makes the weakness, the smallness of the supplicated, is that he is only himself, and his little piece of human situation. He does not represent.

The suppliant represents. He is no longer only himself. He is no longer even himself. He no longer exists, he. It is no longer a question of him. And that is why the other must beware. Stripped of everything by this same event which precisely made the dangerous happiness of the supplicated, citizen without a city, head without a glance, child without a father, father without children, belly without bread, neck without a bed, head without a roof, man without goods, he no longer exists as himself. And it is from this instant that he becomes redoubtable. He represents.

Because he has been handled, kneaded, manipulated by the superhuman human fingers of the gods, he has become suddenly dear to the superhuman human heart of the gods. Because he has been a wax to the surdivine divine fingers of fatality, he has become mysteriously dear to the surdivine divine heart of fatality. Because the powers from on high have weighed their hand upon him, by a singular return, — not by a compensation, — by a sort of filiation, rather, of superior begetting, of particular adoption, he has become their protégé, their son. The gods, and above them, behind them, fatality, took his father from him. But the gods have become his father. The gods, and behind them fatality, the gods took the city from him. But the gods have in some sense conferred upon him their own city. The gods, under-orders of fatality, took his goods from him. But these same gods have given him this good which no good can replace, the gods have given him this first of goods: that he has become a representative of the gods.

No idea of compensation, nor even of justice; such an idea would be a Christian idea, at least a relatively recent idea, in a certain sense a modern idea; of course no idea of romantic antithesis. But an idea much more profound, a sentiment much more profound and much more true, as much as it is permitted to recognize oneself a little in these mysterious, profound, true sentiments, a sentiment of life, of art and of work: that these men have given proof that they were men plastic to the statuary fingers of fatality.

The gods, fatality, have made themselves his father and mother; he has become, orphan, the son and the representative of the subfatalized gods. But the fact is that for the ancients, for the Greeks, by a second generation, by a second begetting, he has really become as a son of the gods.

It sufficed for that that he should be in their fingers a plastic matter, and one that has given proof of plasticity. He has become their son as the statue is born of the statuary. With this aggrandizement, with this elevation that the statuary is god, more than god, fatal.

Let us not speak of creation, of second creation, of recreation, for we must carefully reserve the Christian expressions, the Christian language. Let us speak of what was everything for this people of fecundity: of a second begetting. Let us speak of what was everything for this people of art: of a begetting of art. The subfatalist gods love him with that love which for this people was more than a paternal love, with a love of art, with an artist’s love for the work, with a love where inseparably art is nourished by fecundity, where fecundity is formed of art. In short the gods love him as a clay, well plastic to their fingers, as a ductile metal, as a marble that has yielded well. Given moreover that the god, statuary, is more than man, and that the man, matter, is more than metal, clay, and marble.

Hence it comes, we cannot doubt it, hence it comes, at least in part, that the gods are to such a degree with the man, that fatality is to such a degree behind the man whom it has once worked. When we read in the texts that Ζεύς is ξένιος: that Zeus is hospitable, that he is the god of guests, that guests come from Zeus, that the stranger comes from the gods, that the beggar, that the suppliant, that the unfortunate is an envoy of the gods, let us beware above all of believing that these are metaphors and elegances. The moderns treat these grave questions with metaphors and elegances. The ancients understood these expressions literally. Really. These wretched men, the suppliants, were like wandering witnesses of fatality, twice works (let us not say twice creatures) of the gods.

That is why in antique supplication, — one can reread them all, and how I regret at present no longer to have the time to quote the very admirable supplication of Priam, — that one pays attention to it, in the antique supplication, in every antique supplication, at bottom, it is the suppliant who holds the high ground of the supplication. The other is all alone, all naked, and represents nothing. He has, behind him, all Olympus, and what dominates Olympus itself. He represents a whole world of gods, and he even represents what shall bury the gods themselves.

He represents misery, misfortune, every misfortune, sickness, death, fatality, which shall strike the gods themselves.

In every antique supplication, it is the suppliant who is the master, it is the suppliant who dominates. Please note that one may refuse him what he asks. If the other wishes to aggravate his case, he is free to do so. But it is he, the suppliant, the man bent at the feet of the other, who dominates the supplication, the operation, the commerce of the supplication; it is he who is the master, who speaks a great language, a masterful language come from afar, come from altogether elsewhere.

Note that the other may turn him away, foreclose him, mistreat him: so much the worse for the other. The other has a palace, a hearth, servants. He can repulse the suppliant to the hazards of the roads. So much the worse for him, the other.

In antique supplication, it is the suppliant who is the king of the supplication. Let one have recourse to the texts. Let one recall this tone, these expressions, this truly sovereign tone. They are all ambassadors. And the ambassadors of a great king.

Let one recall this tone of nobility and of firmness, this dignified and as if distant tone, faraway, this anterior tone. It is they who speak from highest. And it is they who speak from farthest. They know knowledges that the other shall never know. Unless he too has passed by the same great and irreplaceable trial.

Let us not speak of ascension; let us not even speak of elevation; for we must in these researches pushed in the antique world carefully reserve the Christian expressions, the Christian language. Let us speak of what was everything for this civic people: of a civic mutation, of a promotion, of a new right of citizenship. The promotion of misfortune is truly for them a promotion. Misfortune, defined technically as the non-success of the event, truly confers in their mind, in their statute, a singular right of citizenship, a superior right of citizenship, a right of entry as citizen into a singular superior city. That is what makes the unique, eminent, singular value of Oedipus Rex among all antique works. Oedipus Rex is essentially, eminently the history of a promotion (let us not say of an election). That is why Oedipus Rex is not only one of the first among antique works, but it gathers, it concentrates in itself, — as an eminent symbol, as an eminent reality representing all antique reality, — the whole antique problem of misfortune as promotion. Oedipus is a promoted man (let us not say an elect); a man who at the beginning of the tragedy was a man like us, a king, an ordinary and vulgar man, and through the ministry of misfortune, through the non-success of his event, more particularly, more tragically, more scenically through the discovery of this non-success, all along the course, the event, the development of this tragedy, behold he is not only promoted, but discovered to be promoted to the dignity of suppliant. He had begun, he was beginning as a simple king. He continues by a mutation, by a promotion. He rises. He rises. He ends as suppliant. Oedipus Rex is thus an eminent tragedy, a unique tragedy, more than rare, an essential tragedy, a model, a type, in the Greek sense of this word, the most Greek, the most tragic, the most profoundly Greek and the most essentially tragic of Greek tragedies, the type, the model, and in a Platonic sense, the idea of the tragedy, and particularly of Greek tragedy. Greek tragedy is essentially a demonstration, a manifestation of antique supplication introduced by an intervention of fatality. By this title Oedipus Rex is the most tragic, the most tragedy of Greek tragedies, Greek tragedy par excellence.

It is wholly the putting into work of antique supplication, invocation, imploration, lamentation, supplication; it wholly resides and consists in this supplication; it wholly puts into work this central, this essential supplication. Oedipus Rex is essentially, eminently tragedy, that is to say explicitly that this tragedy is the tragedy of antique supplication. And it is an admirable stroke of genius of great Sophocles to have signified it to us from the principle, from the opening of the tragedy by the admirable tableau of this supplication of a whole people at the feet of king Oedipus.

That is what signifies, in symbol, this admirable beginning. Whether it be a tragedy of Corneille, a tragedy of Racine, or whether it be Molière’s Tartuffe, the true dramatic genius, invention, scenic loyalty is always recognized by the decision of the opening. The beginning, the dramatic opening is worth not only by itself and does not signify only what it signifies; for these great masters, since it opens, it commands the whole work; there is as it were a responsibility, a sense engaged from the outset; from the principle; there is as it were an immense, a total reflection, a carry-over of the beginning, of the opening upon the whole work, like a great cast shadow that nothing shall ever efface again, an exterior expression and parallel symbol of the fact that in memory the first great impression shall no more efface itself either and shall bear upon the whole impression of the whole work. When therefore Sophocles presents to us at the opening of his tragedy this admirable supplication of a whole people at the feet of him who is at this moment the supplicated, but who shall be the definitive suppliant, not only is this tableau in reality the tableau of the supplication of a whole people at the feet of Oedipus, but it is, in symbol, in representation, in signification, the signification that a tragedy thus opened shall essentially and wholly be a tragedy, the tragedy of supplication.

This signification, this engagement, this promise of the opening, we know how it is held. The debate, the development of Oedipus Rex is not so much, as has commonly been said, to know whether there is a guilty one, that there is a guilty one, then who is the guilty one, and to ask oneself step by step whether it might not be Oedipus who is the guilty one, until it is he himself who asks it, and finally to acquire step by step the conviction that it is indeed he who is the guilty one, until it is he himself who is convinced of it. I do not deny the passionate interest of this inquiry and of this discovery. — It is passionate above all for moderns; for ancients… — I do not deny the passionate interest of this inquiry and of this discovery. — But it masks, but it covers another debate, sub-jacent, deeper, infinitely graver, sub-terranean, beneath the first, infinitely more profound: the debate of knowing who in the end shall be promoted, who in the end shall be the unfortunate; not the guilty one, not the criminal, but the unfortunate; what matters the criminal, and this debate of the criminal; for us Greeks, it is the unfortunate that matters, and the debate of the unfortunate; the debate of knowing who in the end shall be the suppliant.

This tragedy is wholly, wholly essentially the tragedy of supplication; opened upon and by this immense supplication of a whole people at the feet of Oedipus, it consists wholly in an immense overturning, in an immense operation of overturning which makes it that all this people who was suppliant at the beginning is no longer so at the end (it is dethroned), and that, on the contrary, he who at the beginning was the supplicated, by this overturning, by the ministry of his misfortune and by the accomplishment of his destiny, by the official discovery of his misfortune and of his destiny, is little by little openly, officially promoted to the rank and the dignity of suppliant.

He had entered as king. He goes out as suppliant. Mysterious promotion (let us not say mystical) and one that the few persons who could attend at Orange the very first ceremony, which was the first performance of Oedipus Rex, have not forgotten. Oedipus is great when he appears, for the first time, in the apparition of this sumptuous opening. How much greater Mounet blind going off by this theater path which, marvel not yet invented, continued insensibly into a real country path, into a real path of real earth, when he went off by a quite wretched but real common footpath that must end at some byroad of a French department. He had entered king of Thebes. He went off by a common road, blind like all the blind. He had entered king of purple and of gold. He went off in the common mud and in the common dust. He went off into the sharp pebbles to bruise his poor bleeding feet in the sandals. He was going, more wretched than everyone, to walk by the roads of everyone. He had entered as king. He went out as suppliant, and the eternal father of Antigone.

For so as not to triumph, myself, in my thesis, I have taken of Oedipus, the father, the king, the man. That is to say someone necessarily moderated and gross. What would it be, and what should we not have said, if I had had the grossness to examine before you what I am almost forced to call in spite of myself the vocation of Antigone: Antigone, little royal princess, little girl, the dauphine, little future woman of the gynaeceum. And after the catastrophe Antigone, the eternal Antigone, the Antigone of the accompaniment of Oedipus, the Antigone of the burial of the fraternal Polynices.

Before such promotions what becomes, for Greeks, the contrariety nevertheless so important of the just and of the unjust, of innocence and of crime. What becomes the category of the just? What becomes justice. What human honor or what human dishonor, or if this is a modern word, what human advantage or what human disadvantage can confront the advantage of having been chosen to become the plastic matter of the gods, and of her who dominates and who shall model the gods themselves and who shall govern them in the sleep of death. And that is why the criminal suppliant, or, to speak exactly, former criminal, — for, since he is a suppliant, he can no longer be a criminal, — that is why the supposed criminal suppliant is among the Greeks a man infinitely more wise, closer to the gods, more innocent than the wisest and the most innocent of happy men. He can always give lessons to the happy man, lessons of wisdom and of innocence. The happy man is always guilty. At least of being happy. But that is the greatest of crimes.

[I use this word fatality rather than the word destiny or destinies because it is more general and less marked, as is fitting, and because since Vigny the word les Destinées, contrary to what one could and should have expected, has taken a more particularly modern and Christian sense.]

Innumerable Greeks coveted, pursued happinesses, as did innumerable men of all times. But it nonetheless remains entire that for the Greek happiness, defined as the success of the event, is at bottom not enviable, and is not envied.

The parallel suppliants: restoring a Greek word, a Greek epithet, in memory of the illustrious Greek who wrote the Parallel Lives, I have permitted myself to entitle thus this preliminary study. The lives of individual men, and notably the Lives of Illustrious Men are not the only ones that can be put in parallel, in parallel lives. There are lives of peoples, and in and among these lives of peoples there are also lives that are also parallel lives. That is, lives that on two different but parallel planes of existence, on two parallel planes of civilization, follow apparently the same direction. And in these parallel lives there are parallel words, gestures, attitudes. Which of us, reading innocently this petition of the workers to the tsar, has not suddenly heard resound in the depths of his memory, — and was it really only of his individual memory, — the momentarily muffled echo, always alive, of antique supplication. The fact is that, in the sense we have restored to this word, in this sense of misery and of dignity, of informedness and of firmness, the whole movement of the present Russian uprising is a movement of supplication. And in all this movement, standing forth from all the rest of the movement, eminently this supplication of the 22nd of January new style. And if the Russian “revolutionaries” who reside at Paris did not persist in making themselves believe that they are revolutionaries like us, and if in return we did not exhaust ourselves in imagining also that they are revolutionaries like us, there would be from them to us a little less sadness because there would be a little less misunderstanding.

That is what Porché has seen admirably, and that is what he has shown admirably by the imposition of this title, unforeseen by moderns: the Suppliants. I do not speak only of this resemblance, of this parallelism of details, suddenly revealed. I do not invoke only this distant evocation, sudden revelation, this almost frightening resemblance of certain words, of certain sentences, which makes of it as a survival and still more as a re-living, as a resurrection: Only two roads offer themselves to us; That is what is before us, Sire, and that is what has gathered us near the walls of your palace; But if you do not order it, if you do not respond to our prayers, we shall die on this very square, before your palace. I do not invoke only this frightening resemblance of details, this frightening parallelism that forms itself in I know not what form of Platonic reminiscence; I invoke the whole resemblance, the whole parallelism of the very soul, of the situations, of the physical, mental, sentimental attitudes.

All that one improperly calls the Russian revolutionary movement is an immense and perpetual oscillation, an immense vibration, a double movement, of unceasing going and returning: movement of going, of supplication mounting from the wretched to the apparently happy, to the powerful; movement of returning, of reaction, of repression, of barbarism from the powerful to the wretched.

And there is also, doubling the first, an immense movement of supplication of the populations, of the less intellectual elements, to the more intellectual elements, to the properly intellectual elements, because for these gross peoples intellectualism is still a power, and a happiness; and, in return, movements of return of barbarism and as of revenge of the less intellectual elements toward the intellectual elements.

And there is also, tripling the first, an immense movement of supplication of the populations, of the less (so-called) revolutionary elements toward the more (so-called) revolutionary elements, toward the properly (so-called) revolutionary elements, because for these childish and reactionary peoples the revolutionary pretension, which moreover often blends with intellectualism, is still an advantage, a power, and a happiness; and, in return, movements of return of barbarism and as of revenge of the less (so-called) revolutionary elements toward the (so-called) revolutionary elements.

It may have a certain appearance of presumption, or of strangeness, to declare that an immense movement which has before our eyes immense effects and immense repercussions, which has all the aspect of a revolutionary movement and which doubtless will have the effects of a revolutionary movement, is nevertheless not a revolutionary movement. It is nevertheless a simple observation. For a movement to be, in the technical sense of this word, a revolutionary movement, it does not suffice that it have all the force and all the extent of a revolutionary movement, nor that it have the effects of one, nor that it have that violence which one persists in believing indispensable to the constitution of the revolutionary movement; and it does not suffice that a people be in a state of revolt, even permanent, above all permanent, even general, even generalized, for this people to be in a state of revolution. What makes a revolution is neither merely the force, nor the extent, nor the effects, nor above all is it this violence, and finally it is not this state of revolt, permanent, general, generalized. What makes a revolution, what makes the revolution, is a certain rhythm, proper, it is a certain sense, a certain form, a certain nature, a certain movement, a certain life, a certain soul, a certain character, a certain style, because style is of the man himself.

One cannot give the name of revolutionary movement to this immense balance-wheel movement, of going and returning; a revolutionary movement is essentially on the contrary a movement that does not wait, — that does not wait for the response, the return of the pendulum, the counter-blow of the event, — that always goes ahead, on the contrary, always forward, that always attacks.

I cannot call a revolutionary movement a movement that only marches insofar as it receives excitations from the enemy reaction. A revolutionary movement is a movement that takes its point of support in itself, that starts from itself and rebounds from itself, that always attacks, that holds a perpetual offensive, that deliberately alters, that changes. Reality. On the contrary it is evident that the Russians only revolt, only march, only change insofar as and to the extent that it is reaction itself and conservation that compel them to it. One must not say that the Russian revolution is like those pilgrims who went to Jerusalem taking three steps forward and two and a half steps backward; but one must say that the Russian movement is like a pilgrim going to Jerusalem who, turning his back on Jerusalem, would thus take three steps backward and two and a half steps forward. Doubtless that is a means. Mathematically, arithmetically, it is an incontestable means of going to Jerusalem. It is also an incontestable means of attaining a new social situation. But this Russian means is not a revolutionary means.

A revolutionary makes only steps forward; or when he makes a step backward, when he retreats, it is because he cannot do otherwise, it is because he is constrained to it by the opposing reaction; the Russian, on the contrary, it is when he is constrained to it by reaction that he grows impatient, that at last he revolts, and it is when he cannot do otherwise that he takes a step forward. It is upon reaction that he takes his point of support, — to resist it, of course, — but all the same it is from reaction that he starts and it is from reaction that he rebounds. Every march of his, every movement forward is only a response given to an attack, to an excitation, to a truly unbearable excess of the reaction that is opposite, a counter-movement aroused by an excessive attack of the opposing reaction, a counter-movement backward, a movement backward literally turned about. Thus it is from the opposed reaction that comes the initiative, the point of departure, the original movement, and not from the posed revolution. In a word, in a revolutionary movement, it is the revolutionary movement which demands, which calls, which does all the action, which takes from its own force all its force, and it is reaction that makes the reaction. From the revolutionary movement comes the call of air. In the Russian movement, on the contrary, it is reaction that does the action: I mean it is reaction, constituted in political and social parties, that does the action, I take this word in the sense one can give it in social physics, and it is the so-called revolutionary movement that does the reaction, I take this word in the sense one can give it in social physics. That is to say it only does the response, when the other questions it. In a word everything is in its place in a revolutionary movement, truly revolutionary; everything responds to expectation, and each of the elements faces its natural function: the action does the action, is in its place of action; the reaction does the reaction, is in its place of reaction; in the Russian movement, on the contrary, everything is overturned: it is the action that does and that lets itself be done by the reaction, and it is the reaction that furnishes the action, initial. From the reaction, from the excesses of the reaction are born and come and move so many movements that pretend to be revolutionary, and these movements that pretend to be revolutionary function only insofar as all the same they must respond to the reactionary provocations, to unbearable reactionary excesses; they make the perpetual return of a perpetual movement of going and returning, of which it is the reactionaries who perpetually make the going; they make the perpetual second beat of a perpetual vibration of which it is the reactionaries who perpetually make the first beat, and, today, only the return of an immense perpetual oscillation.

That is why there were so many times when we believed in France that it was on, as they say in France; and it was not on at all; in conditions however where in France it would have been on infallibly; notably after this January 22 new style.

From the excesses of the reaction, from the excesses of despotism, from the excess of evil are born perpetually and come forth and move agitation, and it is this agitation which in the imaginary becomes the so-called revolutionary movement: we have therefore here obtained the most beautiful illustration we could ever have had of the Guesdist methods; but it is precisely by this illustration that one sees that the Guesdist methods, themselves corruptions and misunderstandings of the Marxist methods, are altogether the contrary of revolutionary methods.

A revolutionary method on the contrary is essentially positive; it affirms; it declares; it shows; it is fecund; it is all rebounding with force, all full of its force, and draws its force from itself. It is one of the greatest errors of modern times, one of the grossest, and consequently one of the most commonly widespread, to imagine that a revolution is essentially corrosive, that a revolution is essentially an operation that destroys. A revolution is essentially on the contrary an operation that founds.

If one does not make this necessary distinction, this indispensable recognition, one understands, one recognizes nothing of all the Russian movement, of all that is presently happening in Russia; one understands nothing in particular of the inveterate hatred of Tolstoy for the professional revolutionaries; these men who to us do not appear true revolutionaries, for him, a Christian, they are still infinitely too revolutionary, and it suffices to know how to read a little to feel, to know what hatred he has against them, what repulsion, what aversion he has for them.

And for lack of this recognition one understands nothing, one recognizes nothing either of the situation of the priest Gapon; it would evidently be to commit the grossest error, and consequently the most commonly widespread, to represent the priest Gapon as a chief, as a leader, as a revolutionary propagandist: he is a chief of antique chorus, a priest of the living God, a chief of supplication. Hence it comes that he has never agreed except momentarily and accidentally with the revolutionaries, I mean with these professional revolutionaries who nevertheless appear to us, to us, so little revolutionaries. And one knows how this conductor of a whole people of suppliants is the rival and at bottom the enemy of all these professional revolutionaries, and how in return he is not loved by them; what also is his ascendant over all his people, over all his old people of old suppliants, even over the workers, and it does not seem that the democrat or socialist or revolutionary chiefs have a comparable ascendant. Which would seem to prove that the troops themselves, the crowds, the people, are a people of suppliants and not a people of revolutionaries.

Their declaration is not like ours a declaration of rights, and the proof is that, when they wish to make one, they servilely copy this our French universal declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen; their true declaration, the one they do not copy, that they do not need to copy, that they have not copied, in Sophocles, is the declaration of the misery and the supplication of a whole people.

What prevented us from recognizing in this immense movement and uprising of all this people what it was, a supplication, is that, having done our studies rather badly ourselves, having read distractedly our texts, we imagined naively, little boys of the old French provinces, and a little grossly, that to be a suppliant was to be someone extremely bothered, that to make a supplication was above all to be afraid of being beaten, that it was to ask pardon, that it was to ask for something that one would have been very glad to have. My God, that was it; but it was also much more. That is what comes of reading one’s authors distractedly. We could not know, then, we could not feel, we should not even have understood what it meant to say that the antique supplication was a ritual ceremony, as regulated, as interior, as the pilgrimage in the Middle Ages could be.

[I was wrong to declare in a preceding cahier, — I believe it was in that same cahier of Avenard, — that we were doing nothing for the revolutionary movement in Russia; we have just invented something extremely new to help this revolutionary movement: we are going to hold, we are holding, we have just held a meeting. I read in fact in le Socialiste, today Organe Central du Parti Socialiste (Section Française de l’Internationale ouvrière: Parti Socialiste, — Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière, — Fédération de la Seine, — GRAND MEETING For the Revolutionary Struggle in Russia, — Monday, December 11, 1905, — at half past eight in the evening, — Salle du Trianon, boulevard Rochechouart; speakers: Jean Jaurès, Édouard Vaillant, Jean Allemane, Francis de Pressensé, Paul Lafargue, Marcel Sembat, Gustave Rouanet, Victor Dejeante, citizeness Woynarowska, E. Roubanovitch, Dr Leiteisen, Dr Mok, Maximoff, Dr Effron; admission: 30 centimes.

Among these names of speakers, so far as I know Russian, it seems to me I recognize some Russian names; it would be very disagreeable to me to pronounce, in such delicate matters, words that would be harsh or even simply severe; but I pity these Russians, I pity them sincerely, these Russians who speak, in Paris, in a meeting, while their comrades, while their brothers are getting killed, in Russia, fighting, really, for the liberation of their people.

I know well that I shall be told that one must, that the revolution too needs, — and all the more the Russian revolution because it is more distant, more isolated, — journalists, ambassadors, who communicate the news, transmit instructions, share notices, combat on the spot the calumnies which the reactionary enemies will never fail to bring. I know well that in every diplomatic war, — and there is also a diplomacy of revolutions, — one needs diplomats, and that plenipotentiaries be invested. I know that ambassadors at Paris are needed, according to the best mot that has been made about Zionism. But all the same I regret that the post of ambassador at Paris should be so much sought after. When a military war breaks out, an intendancy and storekeepers are needed: it is a function, they are functionaries strictly indispensable. I no less pity him who, instead of responding to the call on the firing-line, throws himself into the intendancy and into the elite corps of the storekeepers.

Among these names of speakers, so far as I know a little French, it seems to me I recognize French names. An extraordinary man, who in Paris still reads l’Humanité elsewhere than in the clippings of le Matin, a singular being, our collaborator M. Pierre Mille, of le Temps, told us recently in that latter journal that Jaurès is beginning to perceive that the Emperor of Germany is neither an apostle of pacifism, nor of socialism, nor even of liberalism, and that he is not an absolutely irreducible defender of national, political, and social liberties. If Jaurès continues, and above all if his political interest pushes him to it ever so little, he will end by discovering first truths.

There is also Hervé, socialist united with Jaurès, who, we were told, wanted to go to Poland, to fly to the rescue of the Poles, and to form a whole Polish legion with the collaborators of the Mouvement Socialiste. Only he did not leave. A man who chatters instead of acting is, by very definition, a parliamentary. This Hervé is not only a traitor. He is a politician, and even a politician of the parliamentary species.

Jaurès and his united comrade Hervé will perhaps end by discovering, above all if their political interests push them to it ever so little, they will perhaps end by perceiving that it is not in Poland that we shall have to defend the Polish liberties, and all the liberties of all the world, but quite simply and quite tranquilly, if I may say so, on the banks of the Meuse. They will end by discovering what we have known with an altogether immediate grasp, because we are not politicians: that more than ever France is the asylum and the champion of all the liberty of the world, and that all the liberty of the world will be played upon the banks of the Meuse, in the defiles of the Argonne, as in the heroic times, unless it be on the banks of the Sambre, as in the time of a real revolution, — and may the events grant that it be Valmy or Jemmapes, — or at some corner of the forest of Soignes, — and may the events grant, if it must be a Waterloo, that it be at least a Waterloo turned about.

Jaurès and Hervé would today oppose us in vain that Bebel has spoken justifying their attitude. The mere fact that Bebel has spoken with a year of delay, a year later than he ought, in circumstances, in a general situation and under the menace of events where a minute had its price, the mere fact that Bebel was able for an entire year noticeably to keep silent shows well enough how spontaneous, interior, significant, effective is this intervention of Bebel. Secondly this protestation of Bebel is only one speech more, a parliamentary speech more, and has no value but the value, if one may say so, of a parliamentary political speech; in every country; in Germany less than anywhere else; it would not stop the invasion of the threatening catastrophe any more, even were it able to stop it as much, than a speech of Jaurès in France would stop truly grave events. Finally, in the very text of the words on which Jaurès leaned in the session of interpellations of Friday 8th, I find again this good old duplicity of Bebel, this German eloquence which flourished in the international congresses.

“Listen to a last warning,” Bebel is said to have said, quoted by Jaurès at the French tribune. — I take this text from le Matin of the next morning, Saturday 9; but it is a text marked so clearly that there cannot be considerable variants. — “Listen to a last warning. Up to now the German worker has defended the German fatherland, but, if you continue to make it a fatherland of servitude, he will ask himself if it is worth the trouble for him to defend this fatherland.”

Such is not, such is in no way the question: the question is altogether other. We do not ask that Bebel fabricate, imitate, and import into Germany a German Hervéism that should balance the French Hervéism. It is not from the opposition, from the balancing of these two Hervéisms that we expect an equilibrium that should make the salvation of all our liberties, and of all the common liberties of all the world.

Hervéism is essentially sabotage, a sabotage, a particular case of sabotage applied to international relations, functions, and operations. Hervé says, in substance: Because France did not give instantly to the workers a mystic regime of economic, political, and social beatitude (of which regime the workers would have obtained for fifty years all that is humanly graspable if they had not put themselves in tow of the politicians and if they themselves had not made themselves deeply politicians), to punish her, M. Hervé says in substance, for the punishment, as whining children say, we shall wait until this whole people is under the blow of the most atrocious and the heaviest military invasion, and then we shall set ourselves to shooting them in the heap, by way of proving how much we are pacifists. — We do not ask in any way that Bebel extend to the German socialists this ingenious reasoning. We ask on the contrary, we hope that if by impossibility a French Caesarean government of military reaction were preparing, as openly, executing a military invasion of the Rhine provinces to crush the national, political, and social liberties of the Germans, we hope that the German socialists would rise as one man against those of our Frenchmen who would make themselves the accomplices of this crime. And these Frenchmen would not be us. For against this crime we should be the first to give not only the precept, but the example not only of desertion, but of insurrection and of revolt. And this insurrection here would be none other than the traditional French revolutionary insurrection. But such is not, such is in no way the case today. We do not ask Bebel not to defend his country in a gratuitous imaginary hypothesis opposed to the hypothesis that presents itself as real today. We ask him not to attack, not to contribute to attacking ours in the real hypothesis that presents itself today. We do not ask him not to oppose a crime that would be committed by French armies. We ask on the contrary that he oppose himself to it; with all his strength and by every means. But for this once and in reality we ask him that not only he not participate in the crime that his emperor not only meditates, but prepares against us, but that he oppose himself to it with all his strength and by every means. As we oppose ourselves to it, as we shall oppose ourselves to it.

People at pleasure muddle these questions, I mean these demands, these interrogations so simple of reality, by altering them, by transforming them into logical, even mathematical cases. But what would the parliamentary politician charlatans become if they did not earn their poor living by muddling all questions. It is not a matter, today, of all these cases of supposed amphigorical conscience. It is a matter of a real event. For it no longer suffices to say that we are under the German military menace. We must say today that we are under the German military preparation. And even we must say that we are today under the firm German military promise.

That being so, when Bebel speaks of the defense of the German country, I shall not say that he plays the game of German imperial policy, because that would be pushing a little far the care for exactness, but he adopts the German imperial version of present events, but he enters into that version. Which is that it would be Germany herself who would be in danger of invasion. When he replies that the German people will end by asking itself if it must continue to defend the German country, he supposes, he feigns, he confirms that the question to which he is constrained to reply thus is indeed the question whether and how the Germans must defend the threatened German country. In a word he speaks of what is not in question, which is the beginning of politicians’ tactics in every country in the world. For there has only ever been one internationalism realized. And it is that of the political parliamentary verbalism and of the big political tricks restitched with parliamentary thread in all the political parliamentary countries of the world.

When Bebel responds that the German socialists will end by being led to ask themselves whether they shall continue to defend the German country, he does not respond to the question, he imagines, he feigns, he imitates an imaginary question opposed to the real question really put. What is really at stake is not the defense of the German country. It is, what is the contrary, the defense of the French country.

It is to abuse beyond the limits permitted to imagine an exact balancing where the bourgeois French government would symmetrically counter-weigh the German imperial government and consequently where the French Hervéist insurrection would make a necessary counter-weight to a German Hervéist insurrection. For this reasoning to be admissible, for this imagination not to be purely imaginary, the two parts of this imaginary equilibrium would have to be themselves equal on either side in all their sub-partial parts, in all their subdivisions, or that on either side the totals at least be equal or equivalent. Now we are on the contrary very far from an equality, and even from an equivalence. On the governmental side, or, in order not to make two sets of comparisons overlap, one horizontal and one vertical, in the governmental regions all the German military force is menace, promise, preparation, offensive, and offense; all the French military force on the contrary is menaced, defensive, and defense; let us only ask that it too be all preparatory. In the insurrectional regions, every French insurrection would be dangerous, — for the military defense, — because every French insurrection would be serious, because the French, or at least certain Frenchmen, would make the insurrection, or would make of insurrection as the French make everything or make of everything, seriously; only the French have successively taken seriously so many contradictory theories; and the German insurrection on the contrary would be a non-real operation, in the German style, purely imaginary, purely doctrinal, purely dogmatic, purely political and parliamentary, in no way serious, in no way dangerous to the military offense; a supplication itself and not a revolution. For the Germans too are not revolutionaries, the Germans too are supplicationaries, more heavily than anyone, and despite all the appearances they would give themselves, under all these appearances, supplication as we have defined it is the form that all claims take among them.

Thus these two inequalities, far from opposing each other and compensating each other, on the contrary add up and weigh each other down. On the German military side everything is offense; on the French military side everything is defense. On the French insurrectional side, there would be, among the entrained citizens, a few elements, a few serious men; on the German insurrectional side, nothing serious; it is a people of submissive and obedient ones, not to say more, a people of bent necks and of passive discipline. In no way a revolutionary people. The exact contrary of a revolutionary people.

Every confrontation, every comparison between the whole of the French situation and the whole of the German situation therefore falls; far from one having to add and compare on the one hand the French military force and on the other hand the German military force as magnitudes of the same order, far from one having to add and compare on the one hand the French insurrectional attempt and on the other hand the German insurrectional attempt as magnitudes of the same order, on the contrary, in this real conflict of two antagonistic powers, and not of four, — for one cannot fight four-cornered, one cannot fight four at a time, that is to say each against all the three others, and from the old song:

They were four
Who wished to fight,

the grammarians would be wrong to read the text in that sense that one can fight four at a time, — in this conflict which has come it is the French insurrectional attempt which becomes an auxiliary and which must compare itself as a magnitude of the same order and add itself to the German military force, and it is the French military force which becomes the principal and which must compare itself as a magnitude of the same order and add itself to the supposed German insurrectional attempt.

Far from its being the case, as an excited man has said, that it is the French soldier who does the same thing as the German soldier, and far from its being the case that it is the French insurrectional deserter who does the same thing as the hypothetical German insurrectional deserter, on the contrary, in this real debate, in this double conflict, which cannot absolutely be a quadruple conflict, it is the French insurgent who does the same thing as the German soldier, and it is the French soldier who does the same thing as the supposed German insurgent.

In the history of the world, in such a conflict a soldier, a reservist, a French citizen who rejoins his unit does exactly the same thing as would do a German who revolted, with this diminution of effect that he is less effective, operating in an army enemy to the German army; and every French citizen who would make an insurrection would do the same thing as does a German who rejoins, with this infinite aggravation that he is infinitely more dangerous, because he is a traitor, technically, that is to say because he operates behind an army and in a city in which he had until this date enjoyed the rights of a citizen.]

[Parliamentarism of Jaurès and parliamentarism of Hervé. Parliamentarism of Bebel. Parliamentarism of the Russian refugees. When one sees Russian refugees living in Paris going to chatter in French meetings, how one recognizes that there are still fine days ahead for parliamentarism in every country, and that if it is permitted to hope that Russia will shortly escape the tsarist domination, likewise one does not see that it is permitted to hope that she is near to escaping the parliamentary dominations.]

[What a contrast between this noise of chattering of the meetings and that great silence we had for more than a week regarding everything real that was happening in that immense empire. What a contrast: Our ears are full of all the noise of those who do not act. And of all those immense peoples who act and who suffer, of all those immense peoples who work and who die, for a week and more we heard nothing. A mere strike of the Russian agents of the posts and telegraphs, and, I think, of the famous sub-agents, had sufficed to plunge us back into secular conditions of existence, and into conditions of knowledge that everyone believed definitively abolished. It is a dear idea of the modern world that the perfections obtained, notably in the order of means of communication, by the application of science to industry, and more generally by the application of industry to science have given results acquired, undisplaceable, irremissibly immovable. I believe on the contrary that great commotions would not have much to do to plunge us back into antique conditions of life, and that almost instantaneously they would plunge considerable parts of humanity, if not the whole of humanity, back into conditions of existence and of knowledge that one believed irrevocably surpassed. Eydtkuhnen is at our door, but immediately behind Eydtkuhnen there was such a barrier that beyond, that immediately at this barrier began a silence more silent than the silences of the Middle Ages and of antiquity, a silence total and perfectly realized, without infiltrations, without pilgrimages or odysseys. This silence lasted only a few days, but during the few days it lasted, we were as ignorant of what was happening in those countries as our fathers were in the time of the Golden Horde, and more ignorant than they were through the ministry of the crusades. And today even, when communications have been partially re-established, today when couriers of carriages and of railway trains have partially replaced the telegraph from Saint Petersburg to Eydtkuhnen, what we learn is that for the Russians themselves, for the official capital of Russia, whole provinces, considerable provinces, provinces greater than this France itself and than the other Germany, are for several months buried in a total silence. How right the psychologists are to tell us that we hear silence: we still have in our ears the memory and the sound of that silence. And we have heard it also as a warning.]

Porché will forgive me: I have not been able to resist the childish desire to put some Greek in this cahier. I wanted to indulge myself by correcting some Greek proofs. I am well aware that without this stroke of force this would doubtless never be given to me. I wanted to copy out some Greek for the printers. The poet of à chaque jour will understand better than anyone this sentiment which in the difficulties of action of a certain age, in the labors of maturity, pushes us to revive artificially certain of the old days, some of the days past, particularly dear, particularly elect, pushing us to recommence the exercises, some, certain exercises of our first apprenticeships. In vain. I perceived, on trying, that my barbarian hand had become heavy again. My very reading had become heavy again. And looking at the two sheets pulled from this cahier I perceive, too late, that on page 49 I let pass Δίος accented on the ί, instead of Διός, as if it were not a heresy not to accent on the final syllable a genitive or a dative of a monosyllabic nominative. At any rate let us console ourselves with the fact that the dictionary gives Δίος in Aeolic. Singular phenomenon, the sense had remained much more intact in my memory, much more entire and much more fresh, as if it were anterior to the text and in us still more profound. The cultural instruction we received in certain schools is quickly lost in the coarsenesses of modern life. I copied with a left hand. Quite simply, too tranquilly, too innocently I copied in my old school edition, in my old Tournier of the families. It must be very ill bred, today, to copy a Greek text in an edition of Tournier. They must have invented, since, much more learned editions. The time is no more, the time will never come again when we used to make for our good masters, in themes, those admirable molded manuscriptions of Greek. This Greek of our themes was not always good Greek. And sometimes even it was not Greek at all. That at least is what our masters said, and afterwards what they wrote in the form of notes sometimes severe. They were evidently right. And even had they not been right, they would have been right all the same. For the ancient Greeks did not return to settle the matter between us. But the writings were already beautiful and molded like the typographies of our later editions. And these admirable writings somewhat raised our averages. For our masters were men. And these molded writings somewhat rested the eyes of the one who corrected them. They unfurrowed the worried and creased brows; they somewhat rested the poor devoted eyes, professionally tired. Sovereign against migraine. Antineuralgic manuscriptions. And they were pleasing to see. And their tired eyes, tiring less, inclined their souls to indulgence. And the Greek, with reason, seemed to them better. And perhaps, in reality, it was better.

Porché will forgive me. I could not resist the temptation. How, as a writer, resist the temptation of putting oneself back to the rough and salubrious, and salutary school of translation. As a French writer, how resist the temptation of putting oneself back to that admirable ancestral Greek. I could not resist the childish desire, — let us say the filial desire, — to translate the most beautiful raising, — or lowering, — of curtain that there has ever been since there has been a theater in the world and that in the world there are spectators. How necessary it must be that misery, and more particularly misfortune, defined as the non-success of the event, be essential to humanity, for in the full modern age an echo of antique lamentation and of Greek supplication to resound thus faithful after an interval of more than twenty-two centuries elapsed, or if one goes in the contrary direction, for contemporary lamentation and for this supplication of January 22 new style to have received more than twenty-two centuries ago its very formula, its rite, I shall say its rhythm, and its essential scheme. And what must have been the genius of this Sophocles, to have so exactly given, more than twenty-two centuries ago, the formula of antique supplication on the threshold of his tragedy, and so purely, that this formula, after an interval of more than twenty-two centuries to come, should become the very formula and should constitute the essential rite of a supplication whose event is contemporary to us. What a frightening and almost mysterious resounding at a distance. What frightening human identities. Under so many appearances of transformations. One is requested to receive my Greek version of today as a pious exercise and itself also as a — modest — remembrance of an old pupil. I shall place it under the invocation of the memory we have kept of one of the men to whom we owe the most, under the invocation of our regretted master, of one, among all, of our regretted masters, of the one whom all of us together used to call familiarly and affectionately Father Edet. Pater Aedeas, as the new boys used to say, who wanted to play the wits. Whatever our comrade Larby may have one day pretended, he is one of the men to whom the men of my generation owe the most. He was all heart and all goodness. His big growling paternal voice foamed with goodness. His voice steeped in tenderness a little heavy and deep, his voice stuffed with good gruff thrusts taught that exactness which is inseparable from justice. To all those, little pupils, who had the honor and the good fortune to receive his lessons, at Lakanal, at Henri IV, at the Sorbonne, he taught that intellectual probity which infallibly entails moral probity. He was the one who preferred a good misinterpretation to a doubtful false-sense. That is, a fine misinterpretation, bold, frank as the collar, well drawn, well coupled. But well delimited also. Rather than one of those doubtful off to one side in-betweens, bisectors which spare equally the good sense and the bad. Which are a perpetual betrayal of the text, and which always disclose in their author a double and shifty and sly character of false dodging. He was not one to content himself with an approximation. Without arrogance and without any system, — like so many others, systematic, who would make you a system just to be, simply, an honest man, — he tirelessly taught probity, slowness, exactness, attention, precaution, the gripping of the text, and not to confuse the unreal with the potential, and not to entangle together all the paragraphs of the Riemann and Goelzer. I still had the sound of his voice in my memory when pursuing today my Greek version I was led to translate at last that Oedipus would be a bad man, not to do all that the god manifests. Who does not recall still and who does not hear how he pronounced un mauvais, lengthening and weighing the au into ô: a môvais. A môvais was indistinctly and as sincerely Oedipus who disobeyed the gods as the one who put Romanibus in a Latin theme. Romanibus was the abomination of desolation. Monsieur Gibout, you have again put me Romanibus.

Poor new boys, who wanted to play the wits. It is still he who taught them what an edition is, what editors are. Freshly arrived at Lakanal, poor little boys of the French departmental provinces, the most advanced among us arrived barely distinguishing a bookseller, who sells books, from an editor, who brings them forth, who fabricates them. They said naively and currently the Hachette edition or the Colin edition. When they still paid attention to these differences and knew these first editions themselves: happy still those who had such concerns. And they thought they had said everything when they had distinguished one French edition from another French edition. And it was barely that the most loose dared go as far as to speak of Teubner and Tauchnitz. And when they had pronounced one or the other of these two names, they recoiled in fright before their own audacity. And they thought they had passed the honestly permitted limits of human science, because they had pronounced one of these two German names. Then this Father Édet would gently intervene, — for Aedeas is itself a frightful barbarism, — and he taught us paternally, without irony, without pride in his old knowledge, as one teaches the conscripts in the barracks some too elementary truths, paternally he taught us that an editor is not a merchant who fabricates a book or who has it fabricated, but is a learned man who establishes a text; paternally he taught us all the gentle paternal contempt one ought to have for those merchants who get rich or who are supposed to get rich or who pretend to get rich by selling Greek, and all the immense respect one ought to have, on the contrary, all the admiration for the professors and the learned who establish texts; first he made us discreetly understand that the German editors were still much stronger than the French editors; first he made it so that after very little time we pronounced like father and mother and with a knowing air these innocent phrases: We read in Witzschel; or: I find in Stallbaum; or finally: Weise gives. Gives was above all eloquent, gives said a long deal. Weise gives παλαιός, but Untermensch gives only πάλιν. And it was a whole affair. In less than a month we had learned to smile fraternally, like elder brothers, when a new new boy, ignorant of the necessary distinctions, impromptu began again to speak to us of the Hachette edition.

He was of those ancient university men and of those university men of old who had such an idea of exactness that indissolubly and without doing it on purpose and even sometimes having the appearance of the contrary, they indissolubly taught the whole of justice. Distinctive note: they were not municipal counselors nor even deputy mayors of the towns where they operated. — I do not say this for Litalien, who merits entire esteem. I say it for many others.

As this race no longer is, — we have seen the last specimens of it, and our young men have hardly glimpsed any, — so this time is no more, and doubtless never will be again. That would be nothing, and I would easily console myself for it. Man would easily console himself for growing old, and passing, and disappearing, since such is his nature, and since such is his destiny if he had at least this consolation that the generations pass and that humanity remains.

We unfortunately no longer have even this consolation; and even we have the contrary certainty that humanity does not remain. The generations pass, and humanity passes no less. Greek humanity is dying today before our eyes. What the invasions or the penetrations of no barbarians had been able to obtain, what the persecutions of no barbarian Christians had been able to obtain, nor the riots dimly concerted and slyly gross and murderous of the foul gross monks of the Thebaid, what time itself, that tireless demolisher, had not obtained, the passing triumph of a few politicians’ demagogies is on the way to effecting before our eyes.

Today: this evening, at half past eight, as the posters say, as the theater criers cry out: this evening, at half past eight, on the theater of the modern world, irrevocably supreme performance, in reality, of the drama of Hypatia. The foul gross monks come out of the Thebaid like a nocturnal herd of lean dogs had murdered only the body. What no barbarians nor Time, accomplice of all demolitions, had obtained, a contemptible company of modern politicians has played before our eyes, and has won the game. What no barbarians nor barbaric Time had obtained, a quite small company of modern politicians, without effort, without debate, without battle, has just effected before our eyes. Once more it has been given to a little troop of little malefactors to obtain, to execute, to effect what immense troops of great malefactors had not obtained.

I see myself today, for having lived too long,
Receive an affront and remain vanquished.
What combat, siege, ambush could never do,
What Aragon nor Granada could never do,
Nor all your enemies, nor all my enviers,
The count has done in your court almost before your eyes.

It is very frequent in history that very small companies of small good men succeed in doing what was refused to great companies of great good men. And of course it is still much more frequent that very small companies of small evil men succeed in doing what very great companies of criminals had not obtained. Great and strong humanities fought for centuries for and against Greek culture, that is to say for and against one of the essential cultures of humanity. An immense effort was given for the oppression, for the burial, for the annihilation of antique culture. A respectable effort of conservation, of continuation was made by a certain number of Christians. An admirable effort of restitution was made by the men of the Renaissance. And our great Frenchmen of the seventeenth century, and even those of the eighteenth, and even those of the nineteenth century had maintained the results of this renaissance. The great republicans, — I obviously do not speak of those of today, — the republicans of the first, of the second, and of the beginning of the third republic had very clearly seen how much it mattered to the maintenance of public spirit under a republican government that the humanities be first maintained.

It is a phenomenon very frequent in the history of humanity. For centuries great humanities fight for and against a great cause. And then everything passes. And then, one day, while humanity has its back turned, a little band of brigands arrives, despoilers of corpses, jackals and less than jackals, and one perceives the next day that the said great cause has been strangled in the night.

That is what has just happened to us in the modern world with Greek. By a mere alteration, by a mere supposed reform of the programs of French secondary instruction, by the passing triumph of a few modernist and scientist French maniacs, generally radicals, some of them professional socialists, a whole culture, a whole world, one of the four cultures that made the modern world, — it is true that it is not what they have done best, — disappears quite tranquilly and quite calmly before our eyes from the face of the world and from the life of humanity. Before our eyes, by our care disappears the memory of the most beautiful humanity. And in the second line, in the second degree, before our eyes, by our care perishes all the effort of the humanists and of the men of the Renaissance. All this admirable sixteenth century will have fermented and restituted in vain.

It is a loss that will doubtless be irreparable. For we know by the history of humanity that in matters of culture one knows well when one loses, and what one loses, but one does not know when one finds again, nor what one finds again. The triumph of demagogies is passing. But the ruins are eternal. One never finds again everything. In such matter it is much easier to lose than to find again.

We are told in vain that Greek has taken refuge in higher instruction, that it remains entire in a few chairs and in a few libraries. This is the greatest stupidity that has been said in modern times, when nevertheless one has not been deprived of saying stupidities. It is as if one said that the ancient Egyptians live and revive in the mummies of the sarcophagi of the basement rooms of the Louvre. As I hope to demonstrate in the thesis I have been preparing for several years on the situation made to history and to sociology in modern times, there is an abyss for a culture, for a history, for a past life in the history of humanity, for a humanity in short, between figuring in its linear rank in the memory and in the teaching of a few learned men and in a few catalogues of libraries, and incorporating itself on the contrary, by secondary studies, by humanities, in all the thinking and living body, in all the feeling body of a whole people, of the whole people, in all the body of the artists, of the philosophers, of the poets, of the writers, of the learned, of the men of action, of all the cultivated men, even of the critics and the historians, of all the men of taste, of all the men of sense, of all the men of uprightness and of fecundity, of all those men in a word who formed a cultivated people within the people, within a wider people. They are two existences which are not of the same order. The existence in the body of the producers of a whole people is an existence of life. The existence on the shelves, upon the shelves of a few libraries is an existence of death. Above all given what the modern libraries are. A poet who lay manuscript, ignored, ununderstood, unread unreadable in some lost monastery was not himself either a lost poet or a dead poet. Some pious monk, meriting our eternal gratitude, could care for him, preserve him, recopy him, transmit him to us at last. He was therefore not dead. He lived therefore for the future life of humanity. A poet, known, understood, classed, catalogued, who lies printed upon the shelves of this sterile Library of the École Normale and who is nowhere else, who is brooded in no heart, is a dead poet.