translating the abyss: on robert fitzgerald's "odyssey"
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Translating the Abyss: On Robert Fitzgerald's "Odyssey"Author(s): Robert BaggSource: Arion, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring, 1969), pp. 51-65Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20163181 .
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TRANSLATING THE ABYSS: ON ROBERT FITZGERALD'S ODYSSEY
Robert Bagg
1 1ENRY JAMES ONCE SAD), PERHAPS
marveHng at the Gordian technology of his own novels, that
to be an American was a complex fate. James meant many
things by that, but surely one was that Americans had a
simultaneous hunger for their own future and for Europe's past. That fateful hunger seems to have matured at last in
the present generation of American translators, who by pro fession live in both worlds and have turned translation into an art form in the ascendency, exuberant to the point of
hubris. Even the man whose work I wish to explore and
praise, Robert Fitzgerald, sometimes surprises me by the
size of his claims, though he asserts them with quiet force.
Fitzgerald smiles at hubris by his rendering of these lines at
the start of his Odyssey:
Of these adventures, Muse, daughter of Zeus, tell us in our time, lift the great song again.1
and he barely touches it with the last lines of his long, absorb
ing postscript:
The faithful woman and the versatile brave man, the
wakeful intelligence open to inspiration or grace?these are still exemplary for our kind, as they always were and
always will be. Nor do I suppose that the pleasure of
hearing a story in words has quite gone out. The Odyssey at aH events was made for your pleasure in Homer's
words and in mine.2
The hint here that the translator has become, must become,
1 The Odyssey, tr. Robert Fitzgerald (New York 1963), p.l. 2 Ibid, p.506.
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52 TRANSLATING THE ABYSS
his poet?even if that means Homer?an idea which at first
sounds obvious or grotesque, now seems to me distinctly true, and I will try to explain why.
Even in a time of much good translation, Fitzgerald's
Odyssey has attracted intense appreciation and scrutiny, as
though he had done more than merely follow superbly the
best modern practice, and revealed something lasting, dis
covered some secret about the nature of translation. To judge whether this may be so, it is necessary to look at the reasons
why contemporary translation has acquired such self
confidence.
We hear plenty of praise for works like Lattimore's Trojan Women, his Pindar, and even his relentless Iliad, Arrow
smith's Euripides and Petronius, Lowell's Imitations, Logue's Patrokleia, and occasionaUy a decorous insult or two. What
we do not hear often is the once traditional lament of the
disconsolate translator: that his job is hopeless and that any
appearance of success is a fraud. What left translators in
previous generations morose, particularly when faced with a
great Greek or Latin original, was an experience in a de
parted culture, a palimpsest of conventions, religious beHefs,
sleights of thought and speech which had no remote equiva lents in the modern language all too naively eager to welcome a resurrected masterpiece. This sense of what we have lost
has been exactly summarized by Nietzsche:
We no longer wholly understand how ancient man ex
perienced the most familiar and ordinary events?the
day for instance, and his waking up. Because the an
cients believed in dreams, waking existence had a differ
ent lustre . . . our "death" is an utterly different death.
All events had a different sheen because a god shone in
them; the same was true of aU decisions and glimpses into the distant future, because ancient man had oracles
and hidden signs and prophecy. "Truth" was thought of
differently, when the lunatic could be considered its
mouthpiece?something that makes us shudder or laugh.
Injustice had a different emotional effect since people feared not merely social punishment and disgrace but
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Robert Bagg 53
divine retribution as well.3
Caught in the frustrations of such truths, Victorian translators
felt as the linguist Werner Winter does even now, like stone
workers assigned the job of copying exactly a marble athlete,
possessing talent and tools enough, but unfortunately not
allowed to use marble.4 The result has been translation com
mitted by men convinced they could not succeed, and who often seized what they thought was the life line of literal
accuracy, that straw whose seizure proved they were drown
ing. But their despair was serious and we should ask why the translator's predicament no longer seems so desperate.
What has restored his gusto and prestige? Greece with her
gods and her tricky syntax has sailed no nearer the American
mainland. All the difficulties remain. The crucial change of
attitude, apparent from the modern translator's defense of his work and the work itself, is this: we have redefined the essential poem, not as a structure of words which beckon like so many sirens to their English mates to join them and so
perish, but rather we define the poem as a reaHty in large part preverbal and preconscious, a reality the modern sensi
bility grasps by the deepest reading he can manage of his text. (It's clear that psychoanalysis, Jungian models of the
mind, and much recent literary analysis have encouraged the translator in this. )
This new location of the true poem as prior even to its own words frees a translator from a false reaHsm, but it also obH
gates him. Here is how Jean Paris puts this obligation:
The translator must retrace the initial intuition, the root of the work; he must devote his whole intelHgence and
sensitivity to the research of what may have been, for the poet, a mere iHumination, a gift from the gods. Then,
having worked out the core of the poem, having rebuilt the spiritual process according to its numerous elements,
3 From Die Fr?hliche Wissenschaft, 152. Translated by William Arrowsmith in Arion 2 ( Winter 1963 ) 13-14.
4 William Arrowsmith and Roger Shattuck, eds., The Craft and Context of Translation (New York 1964) p.93.
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54 TRANSLATING THE ABYSS
he has, finally, to go to more trouble than the artist him
self; he must pass from this construction to the concrete, written expression, and with no freedom whatsoever,
try desperately to adjust every word, every line, every
single cadence to the transcendental model.5
In these terms, the poet leads a sinfully untroubled life com
pared to his translator, who must be simultaneously a tran
scendentaHst and a desperate stenographer.
I now wish to produce an occasion on which a translator
manages to discover and re-enact the mysterious root of a
poem. All my convictions about translation can be iUustrated
by Robert Fitzgerald as he remakes the Odyssey. First a
short passage from Book 11: Odysseus in Hades. He is about
to speak to the dead spirit of his mother, Antikleia, after once
forcing her away from his supply of speech-stimulating blood while he heard out the prophet Tiresias. I precede Fitzgerald's work with a fairly literal version by one of his current (1967) rivals, Albert Cook. Antikleia finishes:
But longing for you and your counsels, noble Odysseus, And your kindliness, reft my honey-sweet spirit away." So she spoke. And pondering in my mind, I wished
To take hold of the soul of my mother who had died.
Three times I tried and my spirit bade me to grasp her.
And three times like a shadow or a dream she flew
Out of my hands. Sharp grief grew ever greater in my heart.
So I spoke out to her and uttered winged words :
"Mother, why do you not wait as I strive to grasp you, So that even in the place of Hades we might throw our dear
hands
Round each other and take pleasure in cold lamentation? Or is this some phantom that noble Persephone Sends me, so that I may grieve and lament still more?"
[11.202-14]
What this scene possesses, and which Cook's version does not fully give us, is the Greek sense of the impassable differ ence between the Hving and the dead, made even more keen
by the animal thirst of the Hving to touch, to feel the non
5 Ibid. p.86.
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Robert Bagg 55
existent presence, the very flesh of the one dead. To ac
complish this basic intent Homer's language gave him several
advantages. He had Hades, a place where such pains of long
ing could be acted out. Since the dead mother Antikleia was
not merely a memory or a dream as she would be to us, but a speaking character, a ghost, we may watch her approach
forlornly close to the comforting flesh that we and Odysseus
long for. Besides a place where everybody believed the dead
collected, Homer could count on the ghost to exist for his
time with a shifty, semi-palpability. More useful yet, Odys seus' heart, his "phr?n," was not the sentimental abstract
locus of emotion, as for us, but an organ like the skin or the
genitals from which one received physical sensation. To
succeed, then, with this elusive passage, to get it across, Fitz
gerald must increase Odysseus' sense of his own physicaHty,
translating the misleadingly abstract Greek into things which
have a sensuous life for a modern man. For instance, he adds a slight suggestion of protoplasm to Antikleia's ghost, in the
lines I now quote:
only my loneHness for you, Odysseus, for your kind heart and counsel, gentle Odysseus, took my own life away."
I bit my lip, rising perplexed, with longing to embrace her, and tried three times, putting my arms around her, but she went sifting through my hands, impalpable as shadows are, and wavering Hke a dream. Now this embittered aH the pain I bore, and I cried in the darkness :
"O my mother, wiU you not stay, be stiU, here in my arms,
may we not, in this place of Death, as well, hold one another, touch with love, and taste
salt tears' relief, the twinge of welling tears?
Or is this aU hallucination, sent
Against me by the iron Queen, Persephone... [11.202-14]
Homer gave his translator no lip to bite down upon, but has
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56 TRANSLATING THE ABYSS
given him a situation which demands that somehow flesh be
gripped. Lip-biting, of course, belongs to our time's idiom of
gestures, though it belonged also to the Greeks. For instance, in TJie Bakkai, at line 621 the furious Pentheus gives his lips to his teeth. But Fitzgerald seizes the gesture because it
suggests, this nervous grinding of flesh, something of what
pondering in one's "phr?n" meant to a Greek. Out of all the
other clean strokes of translation in the passage I mention
two: the participle "sifting" gives Antikleia's ghost the
weight she needs to graze Odysseus' palms, and the "taste of
tears and twinge of welling grief" replace, or, actually,
physically reactivate the ritual weeping hidden in the
Greek phrase "take pleasure in cold lamentation" Kpvepolo T
TapTr?)fxtu6a y?oio.
The method Fitzgerald uses here, and with consistent
success through the whole epic, is to sail always near the
literal surface of the Greek poem, leaving it to submerge himself toward the preconscious depths only when the
reality he glimpsed beneath was irresistible and indispen sable.
That was a brief passage, and translating a great epic is
more arduous than winning a number of tactical skirmishes.
There remains a strategic problem any translator has in gain
ing the respect of the modern intelligence, and that is our
skeptical appreciation of any hero who delights in his own
ruthlessness. Such an epic accumulation of physical action
may not make much headway in an age when Proust, Henry
James, and WaUace Stevens are serious reading. A translator
might, and with some validity, handle this decadent age of
ours by saying to us : Homer is action, and much more and
it's sublime?I won't flinch from telling it like it was. That
stern task would be a disastrous drain on the audience's
resilience, I think. For this reason: his audience will need
to supply a great deal of mental energy to correct its prevail
ing skeptical response to heroism, to repress its unease with
formulaic repetition and strange opacities of feeling. There's
no doubt that such an exercise is good for us and sometimes
exhilarating. Another way, though, exists, which we have
been watching Fitzgerald open up, and it seems to offer more
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Robert Bagg 57
than a purifying of sensibility.
Our age has solved the hero problem by inventing anti
heroes: Herzog, Genet himself, the Glass brothers, Buddy and Seymour, and now Alex Portnoy. How shall we deliver
honest respect to a hero who does not, never had the slight est need to, recognize his own potential absurdity? Fitzgerald
acknowledges the problem with his usual reckless subtlety. He allows his Odysseus and his Homer to speak sometimes
with mild irony about immense happenings, military, divine, emotional. After all, Odysseus is a man who knows all minds
and is never at a loss, even in our screwed-up century. He
will learn how to behave in our presence. So we find Fitzgerald playing
a delicate lightheartedness
through scenes a Victorian would have pondered glumly in
his phr?n. The last few points can be translated into example
by one of the poem's fine climaxes, the moment Odysseus
strings his great bow while disguised as the beggar:
But the man skilled in all ways of contending satisfied by the great bow's look and heft, like a musician, like a harper, when
with quiet hand upon his instrument
he draws between his thumb and forefinger a sweet new string upon a peg: so effortlessly
Odysseus in one motion strung the bow.
Then slid his right hand down the cord and plucked it, so the taut gut vibrating hummed and sang a swallow's note.
In the hushed hall it smote the suitors
and all their faces changed. [21.404-13]
That was done in a minor key. Terror rises, as Archilochus
said, from the unforeseen. Several things, working together,
impress me about this moment. First, the quiet of Fitz
gerald's rendering it: he has chosen to translate the stunned
silence that must have surrounded the suitors as they watched
the beggar set the bowstring with formidable ease. The
calmly climatic line?
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58 TRANSLATING THE ABYSS
so effortlessly
Odysseus in one motion strung the bow
?reveals the speed and sweep of the action itself; the sepa ration of adverb and verb prolongs our sense of completion until the last second. Fitzgerald's eye was on the exact
rhythmic movement Odysseus was enacting as much as on the
Greek syntax. That his imagining ear was also alert is audible
for us in another remarkable line :
so the taut gut vibrating hummed and sang
into which Fitzgerald gets the pluck, "the taut gut," the swell
ing blur of the "vibrating" cord, and the swift modulation of
sound that forms "hummed and sang." Finally, the uncanny effect of using music as the omen to the suitors of their coming
slaughter. Most of this is Homer's, but Fitzgerald makes declarative
something the Greek only impHes. The swaUowlike musical
note smites the suitors, in English, whereas in Greek the
note was released on the air and the suitors changed color
because they were trapped in the same room with it. In
Cook's version
It sang sweetly beneath like a swaUow in its sound.
Great distress came upon the suitors, and the skin of all
Turned color.
[21.411-13]
To a less sensitive modern ear, an omen may not carry its
proper wallop, but how can you ignore one so expHcit you are smote by it?
That we are meant to see revenge as a kind of music sug
gests to Fitzgerald an even bolder resource some dozen lines
later, after Odysseus wings his shaft through the twelve ax
sockets. "Telemachos," he says,
the stranger
you welcomed in your hall has not disgraced you.
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Robert Bagg 59
I did not miss, neither did I take aU day
stringing the bow. My hand and eye are sound, not so contemptible
as the young men say. The hour has come to cook their lordships' mutton?
supper by daylight. Other amusements later, with song and harping that adorn a feast.
[21.424-30]
Now this bravado is invisible to the naked eye in the Greek, which consists of the formulae Homer always used when a
person predicts a banquet followed by entertainment. How
ever, we know as he speaks that Odysseus clearly intends to
disrupt the banquet by mowing down the suitors as he sends
into the air music more brutal than a swallow's note. That
will be the only singing and harping of the day. Would
people in an ancient audience have sensed something
ominously complacent in Odysseus' words about the ban
quet never to be finished? A smart Greek, yes. This play of
mind through figures and images existed for Greeks as much
as it does now, for us.
The kind of music that Fitzgerald does mute almost com
pletely is that of Homer's tremendous hexameters. That
choice seems more than shrewd. To try to make convincing
English hexameters is about as crazy as to translate inflec
tions, since it is only the Greek language's inflected facility which makes it maUeable enough for hexameters to lay down
their decorum of strong sounds. Instead, Fitzgerald chooses
to contribute his own personal tone. It is another kind of
music, which the Greek poem is without. Because Fitz
gerald's tone suggests a man not to be taken in, a hard man
who has seen it aU, yet one who values what is skillful and
graceful, we associate this tone with Odysseus himself, who
in his original incarnation possessed heroic enlargements of
of those virtues which, Fitzgerald shows us quietly, still
survive.
But I believe there is an importance to Fitzgerald's mode
of translation beyond its sheer attractiveness. He has an in
tuitive sense of the translator's responsibiHty which I think
deserves to be stated as a theory. Parts of it I already have,
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60 TRANSLATING THE ABYSS
though what I now say is the heart of it.
To discover the route along which Fitzgerald reached his
understanding of the translator's responsibility, imagine what
the experience of a Greek audience at a recitation of epic must have been. EarHer I argued that it must have been
alert to images, dislocations, suggestions of motive; that is, excited and imaginative itself. More than this, the bemused
listener surely enjoyed juxtapositions, resonances, extremely delicate echoes from myth to myth and phrase to phrase. If
we can sense some of these at our staggering distance, their
minds must have been even more generously deluged with
this kind of satisfaction. All I wish to claim here is that
Homer's language contained the hum of implication just as
our own minds contain it and just as a knotty sentence of
Shakespeare's is restless with it. What Fitzgerald does is to
acknowledge this truth about the unspoken ways great poetry stirs and provokes both its poet and its reader, and he trans
lates Homer's mind as continuaUy thinking about what it is
saying. Yet, it is precisely this inclusion of his own mental reality?
the sin of Monet, Degas, and Renoir?which drives the Latti morean HteraHsts up a wall. Metaphorically, at least, as shall
be seen. Here, in mid-diatribe, is Albert Cook, whose recent version of the Odyssey succeeds in following the poem line
by line, enjambments included. Cook says :
The Hteralist provides the reader, or at least the student, with the comfortable assurance that for the vast desig native tapestry of the original a pink thread may some
times do duty for a red one, or a blurred one for a blurred
one, but never a blue one for a red one, and never a poly chrome burst for a single color of the original. The im
pressionist, on the other hand, for all the rationales he can muster, can never free himself of the charge leveled
by T. S. Eliot at Gilbert Murray (who translates rather
more Hterally than most of the impressionists now ac
tive ) : "So here are two striking phrases which we owe to
Mr. Murray; it is he who has sapped our soul and
shattered the cup of all life for Euripides. . . . Professor
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Robert Bagg 61
Murray has simply interposed between Euripides and
ourselves a barrier more impenetrable than the Greek
language."
Any rendering builds a wall. One can only hope to build
a translucent one. We always need masonry, but also
bricks that are translucent to begin with.6
He obviously thinks Liddell and Scott are the only suppliers of translucent bricks. Eliot's famous thrust against Murray is uncomfortably close to importing into criticism the tech
nique of the Big Lie; as frequent with Eliot's arresting phrases there is a lash of truth in a sea of wrongheaded malice. The
few images Murray slips in can be defended only if they
provide something indispensable, not merely a rime or a
sonority; but to claim that Murray's translations establish a
barrier more impenetrable than the Greek language is pre
posterous?we know a great deal of what is happening in a
Euripides play after reading Murray, and we know what
emotional tone a late Victorian minor poet thought existed in
his time's idiom akin to Euripides' dramas.
Cook, however, equates the presence of the translator's
sense of his own mind with the willful building of a blank
wall. Since I am convinced that only his own presence of
mind will give a translator's work a chance of literary success,
forgive me this reply in kind to Cook and Eliot:
What a Hteralist assumes the right to do is to introduce
an element into his EngHsh version as gratingly foreign to Greek as the most outrageous liberty taken by
an
impressionist, because the Hteralist imposes a numbness
of sensitivity that does not deHght in its words, does not
meet its audience's desire to range among the poem's
implications, and does not know in which generation it is
alive.
To try to imagine how the Greeks would look on our trans
lation of their poetry, and so understand the kind of blank
6 The Odyssey, tr. Albert Cook ( New York 1967 ) pp.x-xi.
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62 TRANSLATING THE ABYSS
ness of mind I find in the Hteralists' work, we will go quickly to the fortieth century and look at a translation with com
mentary, by a sensitive philologist, of some surviving curios
ities. ( Most philologists in this era have become the emenders
of ancient cinema. The greatest reputation belongs to the
daring Macrobe, of Entropy University, who, not content to
snip and rearrange ceUuloid, finally made sense of Antonioni's
Blow-Up by emending a visible tennis ball back into the ac
tion at the film's end.) But our philologist has discovered
this line and a half, all that remains of one of Hamlet's solilo
quies, preserved in mirror image on a ditto of a discarded
exam:
O! most wicked speed To post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets.
This is exquisite, our man assures us, to anyone who has spent the necessary fifteen years to master English. With icy au
thority he tells us, however, that his version gives, as ade
quately as the tools of modern learning wiU allow, precisely what the English says. It reads :
O sinning swiftness, trotting so righthandedly To sheets that once were incestuous lovers.
He provides some notes to bolster his version.
dexterity. Usually "cleverness," but sometimes, as here, the opposite of "sinisterly," i.e. "righthandedness," since it is obviously a hand that must take hold of the
sheet. Compare Greek eu.
incestuous sheets. A misplaced epithet, or, the part for
the whole.
The excessive sibilance of the line may have projected some form of negative emotion.
Later on in the book I'm quoting from, Shakespeare's Frag ments (no complete plays survive), there appears what we
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Robert Bagg 63
recognize as Macbeths immensely quiet response to his wife's
crazed suicide: "She should have died hereafter." This our
Hteralist commentator renders: "The necessity was that she die later, not now."
The solemn judgment I want to extricate from this absurd
digression is that our involvement with the great poetry of our own language is intimate and aHve, and the survival of our sense of splendor is so fragile that a
displacement of words can darken it to the grotesque. It is a delusion to op erate as if the Greeks' involvement was any less animated. If he is to translate this animation, a modern translator does
well to provide a similar stimulus to the mind's activity, either from what he can deduce from his knowledge of the text and the cultural life running through it, or he must
simply guess what probably was happening. It's clearly re
assuring if a translator has great deep learning, and tact
tempered by recklessness.
Unfortunately, the prime loyalty of most people who are
deep and subtle scholars of it is to Greek. Naturally?since they learned it because English was somehow lacking to their
spirits. The result of this loyalty is a kind of translator's death wish. All his invested delight and love drive the scholar to
leave intact the pre-eminence of his original. What a scandal if a modern version could do just as weU as the original! So instead of using all he knows about the text and its place in the culture, and all the felicities of English to receive grace
fully the ancient poem, the scholar punishes EngHsh for its in
adequacies and numbness; he inflicts the greatness of Greek on our speech, like a
distorting lash of nostalgia from a tyrant great in his own time.
Fitzgerald has learning and sense enough to see, like Keats, that English ought to be kept up. His mode of translation will not censor or repress our consciousness of how we feel in
present life, or luxuriate in phony contemporaneity. The
suggestion that the modern mind and the ancient mind can be assimilated he never makes. Rather, his practice suggests, the good translation wiU preserve and dramatize the
estrangement of our mind from theirs. What is translated in
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64 TRANSLATING THE ABYSS
a characteristic passage of Fitzgerald is the great abyss itself
between what we think and they felt. A HteraHst who refuses
to aUow this abyss into his poem denies us all the emotion its
implacable existence evokes for us. To locate my sense of
Fitzgerald maintaining, moment by moment, the strange
symmetry between our time and Homer's poem which shapes the abyss, we can look at the great scene of fulfillment and
final homecoming in Book 23. Penelope is speaking:
"But here and now, what sign could be so clear
as this of our own bed?
No other man has ever laid eyes on it?
only my own slave, Aktoris, that my father
sent with me as a gift?she kept our door.
You make my stiff heart know that I am yours."
Now from his breast into his eyes the ache
of longing mounted, and he wept at last, his dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms,
longed for as the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a
swimmer
spent in rough water where his ship went down
under Poseidon's blows, gale winds and tons of sea.
Few men can keep alive through a big surf
to crawl, clotted with brine, on kindly beaches
in joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind:
and so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband,
her white arms round him pressed as though forever.
[23.225-40]
We can grasp the moment after separation when two people return to each other's arms, for Fitzgerald's words give us our
own and Homer's emotion fully in tune, but what of that
tremendous simile?their embrace is Hke a spent swimmer
received by the glad land?
For Odysseus it is more than a simile, it once happened to him, as he swam in out of storms to Nausicaa's Phaeacia,
and it is the only image that could compress his entire life.
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Robert Bagg 65
At the moment we experience Odysseus and Penelope weep
ing at last in each other's arms, we find entering that feeling the unimaginable sensation of washing ashore to the glad land, out of range of a god's hatred, and rolling in upon that, our
completed knowledge of the long painful way home
across seas, flowing through the embrace and carrying us
backward in thought.
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