Found in Translation: Epic, Song, and the Discovery of the Mediterranean

Found in Translation 219 Copyright © 2012 Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta. FOUND IN TRANSLATION: EPIC, SONG, AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE MEDITERRANEAN PHILIP V. BOHLMAN University of Chicago It might well be argued that no narrative musical genre envoices the Mediterranean so persistently as the epic. The foundational texts of Greco-Roman classicism (Homer) and Judaism (Torah) provide vehicles for the translation of myth into history. The emergence of modern nations arises no less from epics that translate the transitions from the Antique to the Modern, among the most notable the Iberian El Cid and the Serbian Kosovo Cycle. As literary-musical form the epic represents a Mediterranean that can forever be old and new, indeed, contesting the spaces between the old and new. Translations of the oldest Mediterranean epics (e.g., R. Crumb’s illustrated The Book of Genesis [2009] or Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey [2010]) make compelling cases for the very translatability of the postmodern. The translation of epic also unfolds as a path of return to the Mediterranean. Sung again and again, in versions and variants that embrace the oral and the written, that evoke landscapes charting Mediterranean geography and mentalité, epics depend on music. Epic singers seek the musical, and when they find it, they also discover the Mediterranean once again, giving it new and changing meanings. It will be my goal in this paper to reflect on the paths of translation that determine and are determined by the presence of the Mediterranean in epic song. I shall draw upon my research on religion and music in Europe, and I shall turn to several seminal texts by the great modern translator of epic, Johann Gottfried Herder. In particular, I wish to discuss the ways in which music and song together effect a process of confluence in potentially related instances of in-betweenness: between narrative and song; between tradition and modernity; and among the geographic littorals of the Mediterranean itself. In the Beginning – The Birth of Heroes Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 2012 ISSN: 1016-3476 Vol. 21, No. 2: 219–234 220 Philip V. Bohlman English translation 1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and the darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. 3 And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the Darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day. Genesis 1 Epic arises from the Mediterranean, as song shaped by the sea, as history breaching the shores striving to contain it. The journeys of the heroes who give their names to Mediterranean epics—Moses, Ulysses, the Cid—navigate and negotiate the stretch of the sea that gives the Mediterranean its name, the sea that lies between the lands. The sea asserts itself, metaphorically and literally, as musical geography suspended between the human struggle against unimaginable odds and the imagination of salvation beyond, the passage from the secular world of the flesh to the sacred world of the spirit. Mediterranean epic contains the spirit of great faiths, particularly the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which are at once joined and separated by epic song. The epic of Moses chronicles a common ancestry—be-reshit, ‘in the beginning’, as the epigraphaboveannounces—whereasthoseoftheCidattheonsetofthereconquista in southwestern Europe and the battles on the plains of Kosovo in the fourteenth century CE recount tales of irreconcilability. The stuff of myth, epics tell the stories of humans no less than gods, with songs born of the flesh of mortals who enter the world of the living and who die, locating life itself in the space between the two worlds of epic in the Mediterranean. I have long marvelled at the ways in which the epic as a genre has acquired the attributes of a simulacrum virtually inseparable from the Mediterranean. Epic, so indebted to the oral traditions of myth, nonetheless provides the template for creation and...