Short Talk on Homer and John Ashbery

In the twenty-fourth book of Homer’s Odyssey the souls of the suitors all go down to Hades. Hermes leads them, gibbering like bats, past various underworld landmarks, the white rock of Leukas, etc., and on their way they pass the δῆμον ὀνείρων, which Homer leaves undescribed and unexplained. Δῆμον means “people, population or country.” Όνείρων means “dream.” A demographic of dreams. My friend Stanley Lombardo, translator, translates it “the dream deme.” But so how would this work? Is it a big file catalogue with all the dreams waiting in alphabetical order to go appear inside some head at night? Or standing around easy with drinks and anecdotes? Or so bored with signifying they’re lying on the ground in heaps? Do they have a gift shop? Does it sell books by Adorno? Are there factions and animosities and a row of chairs like an audition? A smell of sweat? Exhaustion and tears? Or is it blissful, beyond meaning, barefoot, organized by gentle bells? Do they have to practice all the time to keep in dream shape or is it like having perfect pitch? Are there dream trees to shade them and small dream boys who climb up and sit quiet while others search for them gradually losing heart? Do their dream streets fill with mobs drifting fast and slow at once over the sidewalk, each sealed into a private membrane as clear and dense and general as death? If there are dogs in the dreams do they need to be walked? If Freud is there (“I know I am overdue!”) is he aloof or enjoying himself? Down the road from the summer cottage of my friend Stanley Lombardo is a farm where emus and llamas graze. On the fence a sign informs us that “llamas hum to their young.” Do not worry, the sign implies, humming is O.K. Does the demographic of dreams emit a worrying sound? Emus are in appearance plucky and plunging creatures, mostly torso. Llamas are stately, with an air of deep comedy, and larger than they seem. “You hit one of those you can say goodbye to your car,” commented Stanley Lombardo, translator. He also told me that llamas never stop moving their ears even when sleeping. Whether they stop moving them when sleeping inside a dream is a question to be considered in a forthcoming Short Talk on Stanley Lombardo, where I hope to compare Stanley Lombardo with John Ashbery as a personality disposed to careless joy in almost any situation. About a year ago I attended an interview in which John Ashbery was present via Skype due to being almost ninety years old and tired. The interviewers were a little afraid of him. There were two interviewers. They groped for a way to engage a conversation. One mentioned a book she claimed John Ashbery had written, entitled “Light.” Ashbery denied this. She insisted. She had the book at home on her bookshelf. Ultimately they decided it must have been an issue of ARTnews magazine on this theme. “So, John, can you say something about that?” asked the other interviewer, to which Ashbery after a very long pause replied, “Light. What would we do without it?”

Short Essay on Anne Carson’s Short Talk

I believe this short talk is a good illustration of the [In]visible for three main reasons, the same reasons I loved hearing it in the first place. While I’ve read many books by Anne Carson, including her first collection, Short Talks (a number of times), I only discovered her « Short Talk on Homer and John Ashbery » in November 2021, when she read it online at the Ottawa VERSeFest. During the event, the text was invisible to us, the audience members, and I certainly missed some words and nuances at the time. But there were three elements that, in my opinion, were related to [in]visibility, and which lingered in my mind:

1.  Stanley Lombardo, translator

Being a very passionate translator, I can’t help but cheer when my peers are placed in the spotlight. When Carson underlines the fact that her friend Stanley Lombardo is a translator—and she does so twice in the text—I feel like she is paying tribute to an important profession, one which is often overlooked. It may be an occupational bias on my part, but, a few weeks after hearing it, I did not remember the exact title of the short talk; I did, however, remember “Stanley Lombardo, translator.”

2.  Dream deme

Dreams sipping drinks, dream dogs demanding (or not) to be walked, dream trees offering shade… Everything that happens in the dream deme is fascinating to me: I can almost see it all before my eyes. But can I? Dreams, like images in the poem, appear somewhere in the brain. They are not truly visible. And yet, a few weeks after the readings, I still felt as though I had witnessed these things. As for the name of the place, the “deme” itself, I chose to leave it in English in my translation and add a French equivalent in parentheses, because, of course, Stanley Lombardo did not translate from Greek to French. This intervention makes visible the fact that my version is another translation. At the end, when Carson recounts the interview with John Ashbery, I used a different process—I did not feel it was useful to specify that “light” means “lumière”, but was glad I had an opportunity to use that word a little later, so the quote from Ashbery would make sense in French.

3.  Llamas humming
A hum is not visible, yet it is very powerful. The first translation I ever published was of a beautiful poem called “The Hum” by Rachael Boast. I discovered Anne Carson’s works thanks to Boast, through her invitation to the Griffin Poetry Prize readings in 2014. And now, within the context of my PhD, as I study the intricacies of networks in the literary milieu, I find myself delighted to reflect on the more or less visible relationships that exist between authors and translators. Almost as delighted as when I found out, via Wikipedia, that it is indeed true that llamas hum to their young.