Αιάζω τον Αντίνοο
Μεταφέρω και τις ξενόγλωσσες βιβλιογραφικές
πληροφορίες που βρήκα στο διαδίκτυο για τον Αντίνοο, ώστε ο όποιος αναγνώστης
να έχει συγκεντρωμένα τα στοιχεία.
Επίσης, αντιγράφω και το ποίημα «Θρήνος για τον
Αντίνοο», που έχει γράψει ο ποιητής Ράινερ Μαρία Ρίλκε. (Πράγα, Τσεχίας
4/12/1875-Μοντρέ Ελβετίας 29/12/19260). Το ποίημα το ερανίστηκα από το βιβλίο RAINER MARIA RILKE, Ποιήματα-Εκλογή από το έργο του,
εκδόσεις Κάδμος-Αθήνα 1957 και Ηριδανός-Αθήνα χ.χ. σε μετάφραση του ποιητή Άρη
Δικταίου.
Το ποίημα ανήκει στην συγγραφική περίοδο του ποιητή
«ΤΩΝ ΝΕΩΝ ΠΟΙΗΜΑΤΩΝ ‘ΜΕΡΟΣ ΔΕΥΤΕΡΟ’, τα οποία είναι αφιερωμένα στον φίλο του
γλύπτη Αύγουστο Ροντέν. “A
mon
grand
ami
Auguste
Rodin”.
Ο κύκλος αυτός των ποιημάτων του σημαντικού δημιουργού περιλαμβάνει και τους
εξής ακόμα τίτλους:
ΑΡΧΑΙΚΟΣ ΚΟΡΜΟΣ ΑΠΟΛΛΩΝΑ
-ΚΡΗΤΙΚΗ
ΑΡΤΕΜΙΣ
-ΕΝΔΥΜΙΩΝ
-ΛΗΔΑ
-ΘΡΗΝΟΣ ΓΙΑ ΤΟΝ ΑΝΤΙΝΟΟ
-Ο ΘΑΝΑΤΟΣ ΤΗΣ ΑΓΑΠΗΜΕΝΗΣ
-Ο
ΑΛΧΗΜΙΣΤΗΣ
-ΜΙΑ ΣΙΒΥΛΛΑ
-ΙΕΡΕΜΙΑΣ
-ΠΕΙΡΑΣΜΟΣ
-ΔΕΥΤΕΡΑ ΠΑΡΟΥΣΙΑ
-Ο
ΣΤΥΛΙΤΗΣ
-ΑΔΑΜ
-ΕΥΑ
-Ο ΑΝΑΣΤΑΣ
-ΑΓΙΟΣ ΓΕΩΡΓΙΟΣ
-ΜΑΡΙΑ Η ΑΙΓΥΠΤΙΑ
-ΑΠΟ ΤΗΝ ΖΩΗ ΕΝΟΣ
ΑΓΙΟΥ
-ΟΙ ΖΗΤΙΑΝΟΙ
-Η ΠΑΙΔΙΚΗ ΗΛΙΚΙΑ ΤΟΥ ΔΟΝ ΧΟΥΑΝ
-Η ΕΚΛΟΓΗ ΤΟΥ ΔΟΝ ΧΟΥΑΝ
-ΕΝΑΣ
ΔΟΓΗΣ
-ΟΙ ΦΟΙΝΙΚΟΠΤΕΡΟΙ
-ΚΥΡΙΑ ΣΕ ΜΠΑΛΚΟΝΙ
-ΚΥΡΙΑ ΜΠΡΟΣΤΑ ΣΤΟΝ ΚΑΘΡΕΦΤΗ
-Ο ΞΕΝΟΣ
-ΝΑΝΟΥΡΙΣΜΑ
-Η
ΕΡΩΤΕΥΜΕΝΗ
-ΠΡΟΣΩΠΟΓΡΑΦΙΑ
-ΓΙΑ ΜΙΑ ΜΑΡΑΜΕΝΗ ΚΟΠΕΛΛΑ
-ΜΕΛΕΤΗ ΠΙΑΝΟΥ
-ΟΙ ΑΔΕΛΦΕΣ
-ΤΟ
ΠΑΙΔΙ
-ΤΟ ΓΕΡΟΝΤΟΠΑΛΗΚΑΡΟ.
Τα Νέα Ποιήματα γράφτηκαν μετά τα «ΝΕΑ ΠΟΙΗΜΑΤΑ» (Neue Gedichte) 1905-1908, και πριν ο
ποιητής συνθέσει την σειρά των ποιημάτων του (δεκατρία τον αριθμό) «Ο ΒΙΟΣ ΤΗΣ
ΘΕΟΤΟΚΟΥ» (Das
Marien
Leben)
στα 1912. Την ίδια χρονική περίοδο και για μια περίπου δεκαετία ο Ρίλκε θα
δουλέψει τις δέκα εξαιρετικές του ελεγείες, «ΟΙ ΕΛΕΓΕΙΕΣ ΤΟΥ ΝΤΟΥΪΝΟ» (Duineser Elegien).
Το ποίημα «Η
ΕΡΩΤΕΥΜΕΝΗ» ο ποιητής και μεταφραστής το αφιερώνει στην Μαρία Περάνθη.
Τα
αρχαιόθεμα ποιήματα του Ράινερ Μαρία Ρίλκε είναι πάρα πολλά, και ορισμένες
φορές συνθέτει δύο ποιήματα για το ίδιο πρόσωπο ή διαπραγματεύεται από δύο
πλευρές το ίδιο θέμα. Αυτό πράττει και στα καθαρά θρησκευτικά του ποιήματα αλλά
και σε άλλα όπως ο «ΒΟΥΔΑΣ».
Στον Θρήνο για τον Αντίνοο ο ποιητής μιλά με την
φωνή του ελληνολάτρη ρωμαίου αυτοκράτορα Αδριανού, και αναφέρεται στην αγάπη
του ώριμου άντρα για τον νεαρό έφηβο της Βιθυνίας. Άλλωστε, αυτό «τον παραχάιδεψα,
άλλωστε.» δηλώνει την τρυφερότητα και την αγάπη που ένιωθε ο αυτοκράτορας για
τον Αντίνοο. Και αυτό το γνωρίζουμε από την ιστορία και τις πηγές που αναφέρουν
ότι είχε αποφασίσει ο αυτοκράτορας Αδριανός να βάλει τέλος στην ζωή του μετά τον
πνιγμό του νέου. Γιατί «Ποιος ν’ αγαπήσει μπόρεσε;» περισσότερο από εκείνον.
Αλλά ως ένας από τους «γαληνευτές Θεούς» πλέον θα μας συντροφεύει στην
αιωνιότητα. Η Ομορφιά που τόσο ύμνησε ο θείος Πλάτων στα έργα του, αλλά και η
μεταγενέστερη χριστιανική υμνογραφία «Ω Γλυκύ μου Έαρ» ήταν ίσως μέσα στην
ιστορία της μεσογειακής λεκάνης το κεντρικό βλέμμα των ανθρώπων. Ο μεσόγειος
έλληνας κυρίως αρχαίος άνθρωπος, ατένιζε τον κόσμο μέσα από την ομορφιά
προσώπων, χώρων, αρχιτεκτονημάτων, ιερών ναών, αγαλμάτων. Δηλαδή, εισήγαγε την
αισθητική μέσα στην καθημερινή της ζωής του χρήση, μέσα στην κοινωνία, έγινε
θεσμός της Πόλης. Ο Αντίνοος, αυτό το άσημο μέχρι πριν την συνάντησή του με τον
ρωμαίο αυτοκράτορα παληκαρόπουλο, ήταν ένα τυχαίο, όπως και τόσα άλλα βοσκόπουλα της ρωμαϊκής
αυτοκρατορίας. Το βλέμμα και ο έρωτας του Αδριανού τον ύψωσε σε διαχρονικό
σύμβολο της τέχνης και του πολιτισμού. Και ο δόλιος πνιγμός του από πρόσωπα του
στενού περιβάλλοντος του αυτοκράτορα όπως αφήνουν να εννοηθεί οι πηγές, δηλαδή
τον έσπρωξαν στον ποταμό Νείλο και πνίγηκε, πάνω στον ανθό της ηλικίας του, του
έδωσε την Θεϊκή αθανασία. Του πρόσφερε την ιστορική δυνατότητα να γίνει
ομοτράπεζος των Θεών μέσα στην αιωνιότητα. Να δοθεί το όνομά του σε αστερισμό
του γαλαξία. Να σμιλευτούν εκατοντάδες αγάλματα που εξυμνούν την γυμνική
ομορφιά του. Αυτός που τον αγαπούν οι Θεοί αποθνήσκει νέος, «ον γαρ οι Θεοί
φιλούσι αποθνήσκει νέος» πίστευαν οι αρχαίοι, και δεν είχαν άδικο. Αυτή η κάπως
ιδιοτελή τους αγάπη, αυτό το «φιλούσι» είναι που γέννησε την Τέχνη. Οικοδόμησε
την αιωνιότητα της ιστορίας της. Μόνο που, αυτό το «φιλούσι» έχει και το τίμημά
του, και αυτό, το πληρώνουν πάντα με την ζωή τους οι θνητοί.
Για την αντιγραφή και τα γενικά σχόλια
Γιώργος Χ. Μπαλούρδος
Πειραιάς, 22/9/2018
Τελευταία μπανάκια του καλοκαιριού
•
ΘΡΗΝΟΣ ΓΙΑ ΤΟΝ ΑΝΤΙΝΟΟ
Κανείς σας δεν εννόησε της Βιθυνίας τον έφηβο (ώστε
το ποτάμι να πιάσετε κι’ απ’ αυτό να υψωθήτε…).
Τον παραχάιδεψα, άλλωστε. Κι’ ωστόσο: μόνο θλίψη
που τον γιομίσαμε πολλή και τον πικράναμε για πάντα.
Ποιος ν’ αγαπήσει μπόρεσε; Ποιός μπορεί;-Κανείς
ακόμα,
Κ’ έτσι άπειρο προξένησε πόνο-. Τώρα, είναι, στον
Νείλον,
ένας απ’ τους γαληνευτές Θεούς και δεν γνωρίζω κάν
ποιος είναι απ’ όλους και δε μπορώ να τον ζυγώσω.
Κ’ εσείς, παράφρονες, τον πετούσατε ως τ’ αστέρια ακόμα,
για τούτο σας φωνάζω και σας πιέζω: τον εννοείτε
τάχα;
Γιατί δεν είναι ένας νεκρός μονάχα. Πρόθυμα θα το
ήταν.
Κ’ ίσως να μη του συνέβαινε τίποτα αν αυτό ‘ταν
μόνο.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Pessoa’s
Antinous J. D. Reed* Keywords Antinous, English poetry, Decadent poetry,
Modernism, Fernando Pessoa. Abstract Pessoa’s Antinous follows a tradition of
poems on mythological dying-god figures mourned by their divine lovers,
transferring the tropes of that tradition to the Roman emperor Hadrian and his
lover, who had been appropriated by fin-de-siècle literary homoeroticism.
Palavras-chave Antinous, Poesia inglesa, Decadentismo, Modernismo, Fernando
Pessoa. Resumo O Antinous (Antínoo) de Fernando Pessoa segue uma tradição de
poemas sobre deuses mitológicos moribundos sendo lamentados por seus amantes
divinos. Pessoa transfere os artifícios dessa tradição para duas personagens, o
imperados romano Adriano e seu amante, o qual tinha sido apropriado pelo
homoerotismo literário do fim do século XIX. * Professor of Classics and
Comparative Literature, Brown University. Reed Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural:
10 (O./Fall 2016) 107 I. For the student of Classical reception, Pessoa’s
Antinous (1918), with its picture of the Roman emperor Hadrian’s grief for his
dead boyfriend, caps a roster of nineteenth-century English poems inspired by
“dying god” figures, Greek mythological characters like Adonis, beloved by a
powerful deity, lost objects of beauty.1 Examples are Shelley’s “Adonais,” his
elegy on Keats under the guise of an Adonis-figure; Keats’Pessoa’s Antinous J.
D. Reed* Keywords Antinous, English poetry, Decadent poetry, Modernism,
Fernando Pessoa. Abstract Pessoa’s Antinous follows a tradition of poems on
mythological dying-god figures mourned by their divine lovers, transferring the
tropes of that tradition to the Roman emperor Hadrian and his lover, who had
been appropriated by fin-de-siècle literary homoeroticism. Palavras-chave
Antinous, Poesia inglesa, Decadentismo, Modernismo, Fernando Pessoa. Resumo O
Antinous (Antínoo) de Fernando Pessoa segue uma tradição de poemas sobre deuses
mitológicos moribundos sendo lamentados por seus amantes divinos. Pessoa
transfere os artifícios dessa tradição para duas personagens, o imperados
romano Adriano e seu amante, o qual tinha sido apropriado pelo homoerotismo
literário do fim do século XIX. * Professor of Classics and Comparative
Literature, Brown University. Reed Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural: 10 (O./Fall
2016) 107 I. For the student of Classical reception, Pessoa’s Antinous (1918),
with its picture of the Roman emperor Hadrian’s grief for his dead boyfriend,
caps a roster of nineteenth-century English poems inspired by “dying god”
figures, Greek mythological characters like Adonis, beloved by a powerful
deity, lost objects of beauty.1 Examples are Shelley’s “Adonais,” his elegy on
Keats under the guise of an Adonis-figure; Keats’s own “Endymion,” particularly
the Adonis section; Swinburne’s take on the Tannhäuser legend, “Laus Veneris,”
with its heated eroticism and hopeless roster of the vampiric Venus’ cast-off
lovers. The “Epitaph on Adonis” of the ancient Greek poet Bion of Smyrna (late
second century B.C.E.) lies in the background, as it does for those poems, too;
more generally felt is the tradition of the “pastoral lament” from Theocritus’
“Idyll 1” through the anonymous “Epitaph for Bion” (a principal influence on
Shelley) to Milton’s “Lycidas.” The echoes I hear—both surface echoes and those
in the underlying poetics—are perhaps products of my own filters (which, to be
sure, screen out as much as they screen in), but I hope to show that that
literary background is an apt one. Antinous became a subject for homoerotic
English literature in this period, as Waters documents for the later nineteenth
century, focusing on one particular use of his image2 : The decadent Antinous,
like the Mona Lisa, whom Pater eulogized in his influential Studies in the
History of the Renaissance (1873), was revered as an enigma; writers avoided
dispelling his mystery [...] with historical reconstruction. His silences, his
subjection to the fantasies in which the emperor chose to involve him, were
inscribed into the decadent sadomasochistic plot, redefined as tokens of power
rather than of subjection. (WATERS, 1995: 217) Like mythological “dying gods,”
Antinous is beloved, beautiful, and lost. He is a paradigmatic dead lover, a
supreme paragon of the quiescent figure in which David Halperin is inclined to
see a kind of extreme of the very qualities that incite desire: There’s no
lover like a dead lover […]. What men value in sleeping, dying, or dead lovers
is their turning aside from the subjects who desire them [...]. In turning away
from us, the dead lover enacts the ruses of erotic desire itself, mimicking the
characteristic unfindability 1 I wish to thank Patricio Ferrari for the
opportunity to speak and write on this poem. I use the text and line numbers as
printed in the critical edition (PESSOA, 1993: 41-50). On Pessoa’s English
literary output in general see FERRARI and PIZARRO, 2015. 2 On Antinous as a
subject of “Uranian” and allied literature in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, see also KOPELSON (1994:26-8), MADER (2005: 387-388). Reed
Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural: 10 (O./Fall 2016) 108 of the erotic object,
its simultaneous immanence in and transcendance of its material medium, its
tendency to recede from the lover in his every attempt to possess it.
(HALPERIN, 2006: 8 and 17) Pessoa’s Antinous even before death—before the poem
begins—was always turned away, enticingly remote even within the grasp of his
royal lover, as at lines 79-81 (the lines that serve as the cue to Hadrian’s
necrophiliac kissing and fondling of the corpse): “‘Beautiful was my love, yet
melancholy. | He had that art, that makes love captive wholly, | Of being
slowly sad among lust’s rages.’” (PESSOA, 1993: 43). The conventional response
to such figures was most famously enacted by the poet Tennyson, stopping in
front of a bust of Antinous in the British Museum alongside the young Edmund
Gosse, then a curator there, who quoted the poet in his memoir: “‘Ah, this is
the inscrutable Bithynian!’ There was a pause, and then he added, gazing into
the eyes of the bust: ‘If we knew what he knew, we should understand the
ancient world.’” (GOSSE, 1912: 134). It is telling that Tennyson expressed his
desire in terms of knowledge, and that he expressed its object in terms of the
sum of “the ancient world.” Antinous, as Tennyson says, was a young man from
Bithynia, a province of the linguistically and culturally Greek eastern half of
the Roman empire, whose relationship with the notably philhellene emperor
Hadrian could be made neatly to fit the paradigm of “Greek love” between an
older man and an ephebe (see DOVER, 1989). He was probably not yet 20 when he
died. On a state journey through the eastern empire with Hadrian and his
entourage, he fell into (or jumped into, or was pushed into) the Nile—we are no
closer to the precise facts than were the ancient sources at our disposal.3
Hadrian gave him divine honors and mystery rites, as well as a distinctive
position in imperial iconography. He is best known to us from his extensively
preserved cult portraiture, which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
found its way from the ancient Roman provinces to public and private
collections in the cities of the emerging European empires, and which documents
a striking adaptability to the various cultural discourses available—a
“multiple and mutable imagery” 4— despite the constancy of his unmistakable
visage. He appears as a Classical Athenian athletic victor in contrapposto; as
an Egyptian pharaoh with the accoutrements adopted by Ptolemaic and Roman
rulers of Egypt (the persona melds ancient Egyptian and Roman royal power
through a coalescence of Osiris— with whom persons drowned in the Nile were
traditionally associated—with the 3 On Antinous generally see LAMBERT (1986);
for more recent treatments, with references to earlier scholarship, see VOUT
(2007: 52-135), JONES (2010: 74-83), RENBERG (2010). On the English reception
of Antinous see also VOUT in INGELHEART (2015: 232-51). 4 Cf. Cadario’s title:
“molteplici e mutevoli immagini” (2012). On his portraiture generally see MEYER
(1991), VOUT (cit. n. 3), SAPELLI RAGNI (2012). Reed Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa
Plural: 10 (O./Fall 2016) 109 monarch Hadrian himself); as various gods both
Greek and Roman: Dionysus, Vertumnus, Attis, Apollo. The Greek Dionysus and
Egyptian Osiris were identified since the time of Herodotus (2.42.2); both had
to do with mystery rites—like those of Antinous—that promised a better life
after death. The tantalizing distance of the beloved, exacerbated by his death,
with the statues making him permanently a presence just out of reach, recalls
Tennyson’s response to the British Museum bust. Antinous’ combination of
assertive pecs and inward-turning visage makes him a model of the ephebe
preserved; the transience of youth and beauty are made transcendent, and
transcendent in many forms: an image of late antique divine syncretism,
bringing the different cultures of the empire together in accordance with
long-tested modes of assimilation. In antiquity, as in modernity, he is easily
analogized to mythological beloved, dying youths like Adonis, Hyacinthus, and
Narcissus. For example, a now fragmentary poem composed a century and a half
after his death says, O Narcissus, I revere your reflected beauty; I shed a
tear for Hyacinthus, who [suffered] the cruel discus; I pity your hunting of
the wild beast, [Adonis.] Yet the meadow of Antinous and his lovely [new flower
has no need to envy] the pool, the fatal discus, or [the hunt]. 5 In this
mythopoeia the flower was evidently created by the moon goddess from the blood
of a lion killed by Antinous during a royal hunt (which recalls the less
successful hunts of Adonis and Attis); the concern of the Moon over it recalls
her love for Endymion, everlastingly asleep. Central to Pessoa’s reception of
dying-god literature could be considered lines 32-33: “Antinous is dead, is
dead forever, | Is dead forever and all loves lament,” (1993: 41) with its
close echo of Bion of Smyrna’s Epitaph on Adonis: “I mourn Adonis: fair Adonis
is dead; | fair Adonis is dead, the Loves mourn in reply.”6 Pessoa continues by
assimilating the grieving emperor and the recurrently grieving love goddess
(34-37): “Venus herself, that was Adonis’ lover, | Seeing him, that newly
lived, now dead again, | Lends her old grief’s renewal to be blent | With
Hadrian’s pain” (1993: 42).7 Antinous was introduced (2-3) with “The boy lay
dead | On the low couch,” (1993: 41) recalling lines that articulate Bion’s
narrative: “fair Adonis lies [dead]” (7) and “gorgeous Adonis lies on
crimson-dyed sheets” (79)8 —the latter phrase referring to the couch 5 P.Oxy.
4352 fr. 5.ii.3-7, edited and commented on by J. R. Rea in The Oxyrhynchus
Papyri LXIII (1996: 1-17). LIVREA (1999) suggests an attribution to Soterichus
of Oasis. For the myth of Antinous’ flower see also PANCRATES in ATHENAEUS
15.677d-f. 6 αἰάζω
τὸν Ἄδωνιν, “ἀπώλετο καλὸς Ἄδωνις.” / “ὤλετο καλὸς Ἄδωνις,” ἐπαιάζουσιν Ἔρωτες. For text and commentary on Bion see REED (1997). 7
On the mythological analogies see SABINE (2007: 156-157 with n. 37). 8 κεῖται καλὸς Ἄδωνις and κέκλιται ἁβρὸς Ἄδωνις. Reed Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural: 10 (O./Fall
2016) 110 he and Aphrodite used to share (71-72), like the “memoried bed” on
which the naked Antinous lies in Pessoa’s poem (67). The reader may miss any
trace here of the “anthropological” reading of dying gods, the interpretation
developed in the nineteenth century by scholars like Creuzer, Mannhardt, and
Frazer (REED, 2000: 322 n. 16), culminating in Frazer’s Golden Bough and its
elaboration of a common myth of a “dying and rising god,” symbolizing the
fruitfulness of the crops and farmlands and the cycles of the seasons, “the spectacle
of the great changes which annually pass over the face of the earth” (FRAZER,
1914: 3), used to allegorical effect in the evocations of those myths by such
Modernist poets as Eliot in The Wasteland and Pound in Canto 47, with the
seasons a metaphor for the ups and downs of human culture. Perhaps there is a
hint of this meaning in the rain that begins Pessoa’s poem, which (lines 7- 8)
“fell like a sick affright | Of Nature at her work in killing him” (1993: 41):
the pathetic fallacy (a trope endemic to pastoral lament and its descendants)
recalls a conscious-stricken deity (though less like Venus over Adonis than
Apollo over Hyacinthus); there is a displacement of Hadrian’s own feelings.
Rather, as Waters suggests by her epithet “decadent,” in tone and treatment of
its subject Pessoa’s Antinous is Romantic or post-Romantic, Late Victorian,
Aesthetic, fin-de-siècle, though it is dated 1915, first self-published in
1918, and reworked for the 1921 edition: squarely within the formative years of
English Modernism.9 The poem eerily evokes the poetry of 1890s. Take the
Antinous stanzas from Oscar Wilde’s “The Sphinx,” cited by Sena (PESSOA, 1974:
65) as anticipating Pessoa’s tone of “ardência esteticista” (the speaker
addresses a tabletop Sphinx): Sing to me of that odorous Green eve when
crouching by the marge You heard from Adrian’s gilded barge The laughter of
Antinous, And lapped the stream, and fed your drouth, And watched with hot and
hungry stare The ivory body of that rare Young slave with his pomegranate
mouth. (WILDE, 1989: 542)10 The end of Pessoa’s poem, with its withdrawal of
viewpoint onto the spent king, the haloed moon, and an unidentified swooning
voice in the courtyard, leaves an impression of Wilde’s Salomé. Pessoa’s
opening— 9 See WEIR (1996) as Decadence as transitional between Romanticism and
Modernism. 10 First published in 1894. Reed Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural: 10
(O./Fall 2016) 111 The rain outside was cold in Hadrian’s soul. The boy lay
dead On the low couch, on whose denuded whole, To Hadrian’s eyes, whose sorrow
was a dread, The shadowy light of Death’s eclipse was shed. (PESSOA, 1993: 41)
—is more restrained than the address to Venus in Harold Acton’s 1890s-style
adaptation of Bion’s Epitaph on Adonis: “O Cypris violet-stoled, O wrapped in
purple woof | Arise and beat your azure-veinèd breasts! | Small jewelled
nipples, bleed!” (ACTON, 1925: 9). But the ensuing suggestive, but
unmistakable, recollections of reciprocal homoerotic frenzy are in the Decadent
spirit, and (mutatis mutandis) we’re always hearing the same lush
blend—characteristic of English imitators of Symbolisme, the poets of The
Yellow Book published by John Lane (with whom, twenty years after that literary
phenomenon, Pessoa was in touch about publishing Antinous11)—of the language of
Shelley’s Adonais—or, better, Keats himself—distilled through Swinburne and
fused, in Pessoa’s hands (and not without leaving a suspicion of parodistic
excess), with the Elizabethan extravagance and wordplay that features also in
his Epithalamium and sonnets (e.g., Antinous line 20: “O tongue which,
counter-tongued, made the blood bold!”) (see RODITTI, 1962: 381). The poem
impersonates poetry of the pre-war height of British imperialism and of its
Elizabethan inception. Tennyson’s searching gaze into the British Museum
Antinous’ eyes has its fictional response across the Channel in Jean Lorrain’s
Monsieur de Phocas (1901, after serialization in 1899), whose titular hero
finds a key instantiation (among many) of his obsession for a “chose bleue et
verte,” a “certaine transparence glauque” [“a blue and green something,” “a
certain glaucous translucency”], in the Louvre bust of Antinous: “Avec quelle
mollesse et quelle chaleur à la fois savante et profonde ses longs yeux de mort
se reposaient sur moi!” [“With what tenderness and what warmth both canny and
profound his far-reaching eyes of death rested upon me!”]. This is presumably
the Mondragone bust, whose eyeless sockets seem to the protagonist to require
filling with emeralds. Du Plessis diagnoses Phocas’s “eye-obsession” as the
sign of a labile, distinctly turn-of-the-century eroticism (2002: 71). The eyes
of Pessoa’s Antinous are “half-diffidently bold” [l. 14], “now [...] too closed
and now too looking” [l. 146]: he, too, is a teasingly elusive subject, a ready
surface for projection of response to oneself, whether dead or alive. Valuable
historical studies of our poem’s eroticism by Monteiro (2007) and Klobucka
(2013) note that Pessoa’s alterations between the 1918 and 1921 versions of the
poem tend to reduce the negative evaluation of (homo)sexuality: “all his 11 See
Fernando Pessoa: Correspondência 1905-1922, edited by Parreira da Silva
(PESSOA, 1999: 175). Reed Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural: 10 (O./Fall 2016)
112 vices’ art is now with Death,” for example, becomes “all his arts and toys
are now with Death” (line 51) (1993: 42); “Love wanders through the memories of
his vice” becomes “Love through the memories of his love doth roam” (line 165)
(1993: 45). In those three years Pessoa seems to retreat—perhaps not so much
from a negative stance toward homosexuality as from the late Romantic delight
in “sin,” which survives in such lines as 19 “O fingers skilled in things not
to be told!” (barely changed from 1918’s “[...] not to be named”)—that
abjection or recuperation summed up in Alfred Douglas’s “I am the love that
dare not speak its name,” a Decadent valorization of shame, disease,
malformation—that is, of difference under the various metaphors that difference
receives from society. II. The first line heralds Pessoa’s performance of late
Romantic affectations: “The rain outside was cold in Hadrian’s soul”—a
customization of Verlaine’s “il pleure dans mon coeur | comme il pleut sur la
ville,” [“It weeps in my heart | As it rains on the town,”] with its
correspondence between inner and outer worlds. 12 Why the emphasis on rain here
and elsewhere in the poem, which is necessarily set in Egypt? Every
conscientious Classicist knows from Herodotus (2.22.3) that rain is quite
foreign to Egypt, which for moisture depends rather on the Nile (Antinous’
killer). This is more London, Paris, or Berlin. The poem perverts a certain
idealization of the Mediterranean: Aldrich (1993) entertainingly documents how
the region, whose warmth and light were held conducive to sensuality and
freedom from social inhibitions as well as from heavy clothing, was central to
the homoerotic fantasies of northern Europeans for two centuries. John
Addington Symonds’s poem “The Lotos-Garland of Antinous” (in Many Moods, London,
1878, pp. 120-134) rather emphasizes the torrid setting of the Bithynian’s
demise, “With many a fringèd mile of sultry palm | Shimmering in noonday
sunlight”—Waters (1995: 208) rightly compares to that poem’s tableaux the work
of contemporary painters, like Alma Tadema, equally adept in recovering ancient
and inventing Oriental scenes in sybaritic detail. Similar is Hugh McCulloch,
Jr.’s “Antinous” (The Harvard Monthly 11, 1890, p. 72): “[...] this land, where
thirst and famine burn | Death’s incense”; or the vision described in the
anonymous pornographic novel Teleny: “I saw a barren land, the sun-lit sands of
Egypt, wet by the sluggish Nile; where Adrian stood wailing, forlorn,
disconsolate for he had lost for ever the lad he loved so well.” (1893).13 12
Editor’s note: Pessoa’s French poem “La pluie bat la fenêtre…,” [“The rain
beats against the window…”] dated 9 February 1914, echoes Verlaine’s famous
lines (see PESSOA, 2014: 97 & 331). 13 Quotation from INGLEHEART (2015:
149). On Teleny’s use of the Antinous story see INGLEHEART (2015: 149-51). Reed
Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural: 10 (O./Fall 2016) 113 Pessoa’s imagery
participates conceptually in a northward translatio imperii. The erotic object
Antinous as slave, as provincial, as Easterner coincides with European colonial
concerns at this moment—even, or even especially, in 1915 and the following
years. A node of Classicism and colonialism also concludes the stanza from
lines 85-95, where “a memory of lust revives and takes” [l. 86] Hadrian’s “senses
by the hand,” [l. 87] and: A creeping love-wise and invisible hand At every
body-entrance to his lust Whispers caresses which flit off yet just Remain
enough to bleed his last nerve’s strand, O sweet and cruel Parthian fugitives!
(PESSOA, 1993: 43) Again like Shelley’s Adonais—with its personified dreams,
loves, splendors, and echoes—personified whispered caresses, themselves barely
existent, act upon the mourner14; but in this case they delude and taunt him,
they are both sweet and cruel “Parthian fugitives,” like the cavalrymen of the
Parthian Empire who, Roman poets frequently remind us, are “fierce in flight,”
shooting arrows back at their adversaries even as they strategically retreat.15
The caresses imagined by Hadrian combine Cupid’s notorious arrow-shots with
those of the enemies of Rome. To some extent the trope is ornamental, but it is
easily connected with Hadrian’s own contendings with the Parthian Empire,
Rome’s great rival for control over the eastern coastlands of the Mediterranean
(objects of European Orientalist desire since the nineteenth century)—some
provinces of which Hadrian himself found it prudent to yield back to the
Parthian sphere, after their direct control by Rome in the previous reign. Love
and empire employ the same strategy against an “Other” who acts while in
retreat. The poem’s second half, in fact, is about the emperor’s therapeutic
strategies after both memory and necrophilia fail him, as it moves (in yet
another trope adopted from Bion) between narratorial exposition, including
injunctions to the mourner, and Hadrian’s own monologue, his unfolding
determination of how to commemorate Antinous and preserve their love, his
choice of how to let the dead boy go. At about the halfway mark (line 179) he
declares that he will make an everlasting statue; at line 204 he falters,
lamenting, “Yet oh that this were needed not” and that Antinous were still
alive in his multifarious sensuousness: a rose, a garland, a flame. But he
promptly resolves anew to find an enduring form for love, a turn the poem
attributes to “the gods” [line 225]. “All that thou art now is thyself 14 A
post-Decadent engagement with Shelley’s Adonais is also evident in the war
poetry of Pessoa’s contemporary, Wilfred Owen; see REED 2006. 15 See e.g.
VIRGIL, Georgics 3.31; HORACE, Odes 1.19.11, 2.13.17. Reed Pessoa's Antinous
Pessoa Plural: 10 (O./Fall 2016) 114 and I,” he says in line 306, apparently
struggling to adapt from Shelley a neoPlatonic sublimation (1993: 49): Our dual
presence has its unity In that perfection of body which my love, By loving it,
became, and did from life Raise into godness, calm above the strife Of times,
and changing passions far above. (PESSOA, 1993: 49) After all, he says at line
226, “Thy death has given me a higher lust— | A flesh-lust raging for
eternity.” (1993: 47). Hadrian’s vision is of the future, posterity’s memory of
the two of them together (cf. 28-29 “He weeps and knows that every future age |
Is looking on him out of the to-be”) (1993: 41). To achieve this everlasting
perfection in material, Hadrian focuses on the statues of Antinous that he
intends to set up; the ancient portraiture becomes the poem’s telos. “Yet thy
true deathless statue I shall build,” he meditated just above (289-293), Will
be no stone thing, but that same regret By which our love’s eternity is willed.
One side of that is thou, as gods see thee Now, and the other, here, thy
memory. (PESSOA, 1993: 48) “There is a kind of reverse Pygmalion myth in
operation here,” as noted by Waters (1995: 211) (cf. 218). “I shall to marble
carry this regret | That in my heart like a great star is set” [lines 315-316]
(PESSOA, 1993: 49)—in this image of Hadrian’s concretization of his feelings
one might hear the “great star” that “early drooped in the western sky in the
night” in Whitman’s elegy on Lincoln, emblematizing grief by metonymy, along
with lilacs and ever-returning spring—perhaps also the audacity of Tennyson’s
Ulysses: “to follow knowledge like a sinking star | unto the utmost bounds of
human thought.” Hadrian’s “regret” does not sink like a star and go away; it
sinks into his heart and potentially abides—and so reminds me, too, of Bion’s
Epitaph on Adonis, where the goddess hopes to suck Adonis’ spirit into her,
down to the liver, and keep his love there united with hers, in that Greek
poem’s maddest and most fervent refusal to sublimate (lines 45-50). In Pessoa’s
subtext is the new star, observed by Hadrian, that Antinous was said to have
become and that (like statues and flowers) made him eternal.16 16 Cassius Dio 69.11.4.
The star recurs in poetry on Antinous. A sonnet by Ernest Raynaud ends with an
image of Hadrian making Antinous “un astre au ciel bleu,” [“a star in the blue
sky”] conceiving that he saw “tes yeux s’ouvrir dans les étoiles!” [“your eyes
opening in the stars!”]. Reginald Shepherd, eternizing in a way not alien to
Pessoa’s Hadrian, imagines Antinous as “a star to wish upon two thousand years
from you” [...] “the star I can’t make out [...]”(SHEPHERD, 1996: 75- 76). Reed
Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural: 10 (O./Fall 2016) 115 Hadrian’s turn to
consolation and even hope—the correlative to Shelley’s Adonais 361 “He lives,
he wakes—‘tis Death is dead, not he”17—comes at line 236: “Love, love, my love!
Thou art already a god,” (PESSOA, 1993: 47) and fully embraces Platonic
sublimation: “a sight, to me allowed | [...] | A vision of the real things
beyond | Our life-imprisoned life, our sense-bound sense” [lines 238-243]
(1993: 47). He seems to have found his way back from Decadent materialism to an
earlier style of English Romanticism, to a “subtler sense” [line 251]—but the
materiality of the statue complicates things, and a Romantic claim of the
imagination over physical reality makes some concession to that reality [lines
277- 280]: Therefore when now thy memory I bid Become a god where gods are, I
but move To death’s high column’s top the shape it took And set it there for
vision of all love. (PESSOA, 1993: 48) And so in the rest of his monologue
Hadrian attempts a synthetic conception of the “true deathless statue” as “no
stone thing, but that same regret | By which our love’s eternity is willed”
[lines 289-291] (1993: 48); marble will embody for all future ages, in
posterity’s responses to it, the dialectic of love and loss that now
constitutes Antinous to him. The poem’s late Romantic tensions between material
and immaterial forms of preservation—degrees of presence—are subtended by those
between the one and the many. Antinous’ posthumous portraiture, as we saw, was
polymorphous, teeming with many divine and human shapes and costumes; so too
Pessoa’s Antinous in life, variously costumed to mimic the various Greco-Roman
gods worshiped in marble or chryselephantine [lines 155-160]: Now was he Venus,
white out of the seas; And now was he Apollo, young and golden; Now as Jove
sate he in mock judgement over The presence at his feet of his slaved lover;
Now was he an acted rite, by one beholden, In ever-repositioned mysteries.
(PESSOA, 1993: 45) But “now he is something anyone can be,” the poem says with
fin-de-siècle disdain, in a “stark negation of the thing it is” [lines
161-162]. Hadrian oddly (given the archaeological record) speaks about one
statue, and even makes it 17 Cf. MILTON, Lycidas 165 “Weep no more, woful
Shepherds weep no more.” The trope ultimately descends, through a long line of
early modern pastoral laments, from the double lament in VIRGIL, Eclogue 5.
Reed Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural: 10 (O./Fall 2016) 116 represent Antinous’
divine status “calm above the strife | of times, and changing passions” [ll.
310-11, quoted above]. The emperor attempts a Shelleyan, Platonic misreading18
of Antinous’ many personae—a strategy for controlling his own love and grief?
It has its correlative in the (military) reduction of many peoples to one, and
indeed Hadrian sometimes seems to be projecting his own imperial rule far into
the future in the form of this statue he desiderates, willing a negation of the
Roman empire’s diffraction into its European and Ottoman heirs as he wills a
reduction of Antinous’ polymorphousness into unity (or into a duality that
includes both of them). In antiquity finding the essence behind the many faces,
the reality behind the many masks (in this case beauty and the love beauty
engenders), is a late imperial theological mode, finally satisfied (it would
seem) by monotheism; in literature I think of Isis in Apuleius’ Golden Ass,
Book 11, who appears to Lucius in her Egyptian form—or rather universal form—to
tell him who she really is despite the many names that she’s been given and that
she authoritatively recites to him. The “Orphic” hymns of (perhaps) Hadrian’s
own period are largely exuberant catalogues of different names and epithets of
their divine addressees, finding a cumulative truth though multiplicity.
Frazer, too, in his anthropology of dying and rising gods (which takes its cues
from the syncretistic thought of late antiquity and has its matrix in the
expansive explorations of the British empire) certainly wants to find the
underlying essence behind many appearances. But again, Pessoa’s poem offers no
Frazerian certainties. The poem’s surrounding rain, “cold in Hadrian’s soul,”
recurring at critical points in the narrative (lines 1, 7, 24, 48, 65, 171, and
342), stirring his mind in memory and desire, supposedly setting off some
action on his part (including the idea for the statue at line 171), makes
ambiguous his relation to the exterior world and ironizes this version of
Romantic transcendence in a way that approaches Decadence as much as it does
Modernism. Sabine, diagnosing the poem’s “ecstatic dissolution of subjectivity
achieved through sensuously promiscuous interaction with external phenomena”
(2007: 150), connects its intersubjectivity and tensions between singleness and
multiplicity to Pessoa’s own protean persona. He is discussing in particular
the encyclopedic string of recollected or attempted sensual acts at the bier in
the poem’s first half, a kaleidoscope of lust implicitly assimilating physical
to intellectual possession. In its comprehensiveness it may vaguely recall
scientific efforts like Krafft-Ebing’s famous Psychopathia Sexualis, but in
literature it is juster to compare the exhaustive inventory of pleasures
available throughout 18 Cf. SHELLEY, “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John
Keats”: “The One remains, the many change and pass; | [...] | Life, like a dome
of many-colour’d glass, | Stains the white radiance of Eternity, | Until Death
tramples it to fragments.” (LII, lines 460-464). Pessoa’s Hadrian promises that
“This picture of our love [...] | […] will loom white out the past” (lines
199-200) (PESSOA, 1993: 46). Reed Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural: 10 (O./Fall
2016) 117 Venus’ domain in Aubrey Beardsley’s unfinished account of the
Tannhäuser legend, Under the Hill, 19 whose all-encompassing variety is
Decadent in the style of Huysman’s A Rebours or Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas.
Hadrian would seem to reverse the dialectic that is Havelock Ellis’ structural
definition of Decadence: “a further development of a classic style, a further
specialisation, the homogeneous ... having become heterogeneous” (1915: 175):
an antithetical recourse to the monistic white light of the Classical—or at
least the Platonic—is not out of character for what we know of the historical
emperor’s tastes. But Antinous does not finally resolve the question of the one
and the many, which is real and which is image. The prosopopoeia here, the play
with the faces on the surface of things and probing of their independent
existence, also continues in this poem—published under Pessoa’s own name—a long
tradition that Hadrian himself would have recognized. 19 First published in a
bowdlerized version in The Savoy in January and April 1896; privately published
in 1907 by Leonard Smithers as The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser (London). Reed
Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural: 10 (O./Fall 2016) 118 Figs. 1 & 2. Statue
of Antinous, reign of Hadrian (117-138 CE). Delphi Archaeological Museum.
Photos by Carlos Pittella (18 December 2014). Bibliography ACTON, Harold
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of Michigan Press, pp. 8-21. INGLEHEART, Jennifer (2015). “Putting the Roman
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Murray. Oxford: Oxford University Press. WEIR, David (1996). Decadence and the
Making of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press.s own
“Endymion,” particularly the Adonis section; Swinburne’s take on the Tannhäuser
legend, “Laus Veneris,” with its heated eroticism and hopeless roster of the
vampiric Venus’ cast-off lovers. The “Epitaph on Adonis” of the ancient Greek
poet Bion of Smyrna (late second century B.C.E.) lies in the background, as it
does for those poems, too; more generally felt is the tradition of the
“pastoral lament” from Theocritus’ “Idyll 1” through the anonymous “Epitaph for
Bion” (a principal influence on Shelley) to Milton’s “Lycidas.” The echoes I
hear—both surface echoes and those in the underlying poetics—are perhaps
products of my own filters (which, to be sure, screen out as much as they
screen in), but I hope to show that that literary background is an apt one.
Antinous became a subject for homoerotic English literature in this period, as
Waters documents for the later nineteenth century, focusing on one particular
use of his image2 : The decadent Antinous, like the Mona Lisa, whom Pater
eulogized in his influential Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873),
was revered as an enigma; writers avoided dispelling his mystery [...] with
historical reconstruction. His silences, his subjection to the fantasies in
which the emperor chose to involve him, were inscribed into the decadent
sadomasochistic plot, redefined as tokens of power rather than of subjection.
(WATERS, 1995: 217) Like mythological “dying gods,” Antinous is beloved,
beautiful, and lost. He is a paradigmatic dead lover, a supreme paragon of the
quiescent figure in which David Halperin is inclined to see a kind of extreme
of the very qualities that incite desire: There’s no lover like a dead lover
[…]. What men value in sleeping, dying, or dead lovers is their turning aside
from the subjects who desire them [...]. In turning away from us, the dead
lover enacts the ruses of erotic desire itself, mimicking the characteristic
unfindability 1 I wish to thank Patricio Ferrari for the opportunity to speak
and write on this poem. I use the text and line numbers as printed in the
critical edition (PESSOA, 1993: 41-50). On Pessoa’s English literary output in
general see FERRARI and PIZARRO, 2015. 2 On Antinous as a subject of “Uranian”
and allied literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see
also KOPELSON (1994:26-8), MADER (2005: 387-388). Reed Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa
Plural: 10 (O./Fall 2016) 108 of the erotic object, its simultaneous immanence
in and transcendance of its material medium, its tendency to recede from the
lover in his every attempt to possess it. (HALPERIN, 2006: 8 and 17) Pessoa’s
Antinous even before death—before the poem begins—was always turned away,
enticingly remote even within the grasp of his royal lover, as at lines 79-81
(the lines that serve as the cue to Hadrian’s necrophiliac kissing and fondling
of the corpse): “‘Beautiful was my love, yet melancholy. | He had that art,
that makes love captive wholly, | Of being slowly sad among lust’s rages.’”
(PESSOA, 1993: 43). The conventional response to such figures was most famously
enacted by the poet Tennyson, stopping in front of a bust of Antinous in the
British Museum alongside the young Edmund Gosse, then a curator there, who
quoted the poet in his memoir: “‘Ah, this is the inscrutable Bithynian!’ There
was a pause, and then he added, gazing into the eyes of the bust: ‘If we knew
what he knew, we should understand the ancient world.’” (GOSSE, 1912: 134). It
is telling that Tennyson expressed his desire in terms of knowledge, and that
he expressed its object in terms of the sum of “the ancient world.” Antinous,
as Tennyson says, was a young man from Bithynia, a province of the
linguistically and culturally Greek eastern half of the Roman empire, whose
relationship with the notably philhellene emperor Hadrian could be made neatly
to fit the paradigm of “Greek love” between an older man and an ephebe (see
DOVER, 1989). He was probably not yet 20 when he died. On a state journey
through the eastern empire with Hadrian and his entourage, he fell into (or
jumped into, or was pushed into) the Nile—we are no closer to the precise facts
than were the ancient sources at our disposal.3 Hadrian gave him divine honors
and mystery rites, as well as a distinctive position in imperial iconography.
He is best known to us from his extensively preserved cult portraiture, which
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries found its way from the ancient Roman
provinces to public and private collections in the cities of the emerging
European empires, and which documents a striking adaptability to the various
cultural discourses available—a “multiple and mutable imagery” 4— despite the
constancy of his unmistakable visage. He appears as a Classical Athenian
athletic victor in contrapposto; as an Egyptian pharaoh with the accoutrements
adopted by Ptolemaic and Roman rulers of Egypt (the persona melds ancient
Egyptian and Roman royal power through a coalescence of Osiris— with whom
persons drowned in the Nile were traditionally associated—with the 3 On
Antinous generally see LAMBERT (1986); for more recent treatments, with
references to earlier scholarship, see VOUT (2007: 52-135), JONES (2010:
74-83), RENBERG (2010). On the English reception of Antinous see also VOUT in
INGELHEART (2015: 232-51). 4 Cf. Cadario’s title: “molteplici e mutevoli immagini”
(2012). On his portraiture generally see MEYER (1991), VOUT (cit. n. 3),
SAPELLI RAGNI (2012). Reed Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural: 10 (O./Fall 2016)
109 monarch Hadrian himself); as various gods both Greek and Roman: Dionysus,
Vertumnus, Attis, Apollo. The Greek Dionysus and Egyptian Osiris were
identified since the time of Herodotus (2.42.2); both had to do with mystery
rites—like those of Antinous—that promised a better life after death. The
tantalizing distance of the beloved, exacerbated by his death, with the statues
making him permanently a presence just out of reach, recalls Tennyson’s
response to the British Museum bust. Antinous’ combination of assertive pecs
and inward-turning visage makes him a model of the ephebe preserved; the transience
of youth and beauty are made transcendent, and transcendent in many forms: an
image of late antique divine syncretism, bringing the different cultures of the
empire together in accordance with long-tested modes of assimilation. In
antiquity, as in modernity, he is easily analogized to mythological beloved,
dying youths like Adonis, Hyacinthus, and Narcissus. For example, a now
fragmentary poem composed a century and a half after his death says, O
Narcissus, I revere your reflected beauty; I shed a tear for Hyacinthus, who
[suffered] the cruel discus; I pity your hunting of the wild beast, [Adonis.]
Yet the meadow of Antinous and his lovely [new flower has no need to envy] the
pool, the fatal discus, or [the hunt]. 5 In this mythopoeia the flower was evidently
created by the moon goddess from the blood of a lion killed by Antinous during
a royal hunt (which recalls the less successful hunts of Adonis and Attis); the
concern of the Moon over it recalls her love for Endymion, everlastingly
asleep. Central to Pessoa’s reception of dying-god literature could be
considered lines 32-33: “Antinous is dead, is dead forever, | Is dead forever
and all loves lament,” (1993: 41) with its close echo of Bion of Smyrna’s
Epitaph on Adonis: “I mourn Adonis: fair Adonis is dead; | fair Adonis is dead,
the Loves mourn in reply.”6 Pessoa continues by assimilating the grieving
emperor and the recurrently grieving love goddess (34-37): “Venus herself, that
was Adonis’ lover, | Seeing him, that newly lived, now dead again, | Lends her
old grief’s renewal to be blent | With Hadrian’s pain” (1993: 42).7 Antinous
was introduced (2-3) with “The boy lay dead | On the low couch,” (1993: 41)
recalling lines that articulate Bion’s narrative: “fair Adonis lies [dead]” (7)
and “gorgeous Adonis lies on crimson-dyed sheets” (79)8 —the latter phrase
referring to the couch 5 P.Oxy. 4352 fr. 5.ii.3-7, edited and commented on by
J. R. Rea in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri LXIII (1996: 1-17). LIVREA (1999) suggests
an attribution to Soterichus of Oasis. For the myth of Antinous’ flower see
also PANCRATES in ATHENAEUS 15.677d-f. 6 αἰάζω τὸν Ἄδωνιν, “ἀπώλετο καλὸς Ἄδωνις.” / “ὤλετο καλὸς Ἄδωνις,” ἐπαιάζουσιν Ἔρωτες. For text and commentary on Bion see REED (1997). 7
On the mythological analogies see SABINE (2007: 156-157 with n. 37). 8 κεῖται καλὸς Ἄδωνις and κέκλιται ἁβρὸς Ἄδωνις. Reed Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural: 10 (O./Fall
2016) 110 he and Aphrodite used to share (71-72), like the “memoried bed” on
which the naked Antinous lies in Pessoa’s poem (67). The reader may miss any
trace here of the “anthropological” reading of dying gods, the interpretation
developed in the nineteenth century by scholars like Creuzer, Mannhardt, and
Frazer (REED, 2000: 322 n. 16), culminating in Frazer’s Golden Bough and its
elaboration of a common myth of a “dying and rising god,” symbolizing the
fruitfulness of the crops and farmlands and the cycles of the seasons, “the
spectacle of the great changes which annually pass over the face of the earth”
(FRAZER, 1914: 3), used to allegorical effect in the evocations of those myths
by such Modernist poets as Eliot in The Wasteland and Pound in Canto 47, with
the seasons a metaphor for the ups and downs of human culture. Perhaps there is
a hint of this meaning in the rain that begins Pessoa’s poem, which (lines 7-
8) “fell like a sick affright | Of Nature at her work in killing him” (1993:
41): the pathetic fallacy (a trope endemic to pastoral lament and its
descendants) recalls a conscious-stricken deity (though less like Venus over
Adonis than Apollo over Hyacinthus); there is a displacement of Hadrian’s own
feelings. Rather, as Waters suggests by her epithet “decadent,” in tone and
treatment of its subject Pessoa’s Antinous is Romantic or post-Romantic, Late
Victorian, Aesthetic, fin-de-siècle, though it is dated 1915, first
self-published in 1918, and reworked for the 1921 edition: squarely within the
formative years of English Modernism.9 The poem eerily evokes the poetry of
1890s. Take the Antinous stanzas from Oscar Wilde’s “The Sphinx,” cited by Sena
(PESSOA, 1974: 65) as anticipating Pessoa’s tone of “ardência esteticista” (the
speaker addresses a tabletop Sphinx): Sing to me of that odorous Green eve when
crouching by the marge You heard from Adrian’s gilded barge The laughter of
Antinous, And lapped the stream, and fed your drouth, And watched with hot and
hungry stare The ivory body of that rare Young slave with his pomegranate mouth.
(WILDE, 1989: 542)10 The end of Pessoa’s poem, with its withdrawal of viewpoint
onto the spent king, the haloed moon, and an unidentified swooning voice in the
courtyard, leaves an impression of Wilde’s Salomé. Pessoa’s opening— 9 See WEIR
(1996) as Decadence as transitional between Romanticism and Modernism. 10 First
published in 1894. Reed Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural: 10 (O./Fall 2016) 111
The rain outside was cold in Hadrian’s soul. The boy lay dead On the low couch,
on whose denuded whole, To Hadrian’s eyes, whose sorrow was a dread, The
shadowy light of Death’s eclipse was shed. (PESSOA, 1993: 41) —is more
restrained than the address to Venus in Harold Acton’s 1890s-style adaptation
of Bion’s Epitaph on Adonis: “O Cypris violet-stoled, O wrapped in purple woof
| Arise and beat your azure-veinèd breasts! | Small jewelled nipples, bleed!”
(ACTON, 1925: 9). But the ensuing suggestive, but unmistakable, recollections
of reciprocal homoerotic frenzy are in the Decadent spirit, and (mutatis
mutandis) we’re always hearing the same lush blend—characteristic of English
imitators of Symbolisme, the poets of The Yellow Book published by John Lane
(with whom, twenty years after that literary phenomenon, Pessoa was in touch
about publishing Antinous11)—of the language of Shelley’s Adonais—or, better,
Keats himself—distilled through Swinburne and fused, in Pessoa’s hands (and not
without leaving a suspicion of parodistic excess), with the Elizabethan
extravagance and wordplay that features also in his Epithalamium and sonnets
(e.g., Antinous line 20: “O tongue which, counter-tongued, made the blood
bold!”) (see RODITTI, 1962: 381). The poem impersonates poetry of the pre-war
height of British imperialism and of its Elizabethan inception. Tennyson’s
searching gaze into the British Museum Antinous’ eyes has its fictional
response across the Channel in Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas (1901, after
serialization in 1899), whose titular hero finds a key instantiation (among
many) of his obsession for a “chose bleue et verte,” a “certaine transparence
glauque” [“a blue and green something,” “a certain glaucous translucency”], in
the Louvre bust of Antinous: “Avec quelle mollesse et quelle chaleur à la fois
savante et profonde ses longs yeux de mort se reposaient sur moi!” [“With what
tenderness and what warmth both canny and profound his far-reaching eyes of
death rested upon me!”]. This is presumably the Mondragone bust, whose eyeless
sockets seem to the protagonist to require filling with emeralds. Du Plessis
diagnoses Phocas’s “eye-obsession” as the sign of a labile, distinctly
turn-of-the-century eroticism (2002: 71). The eyes of Pessoa’s Antinous are
“half-diffidently bold” [l. 14], “now [...] too closed and now too looking” [l.
146]: he, too, is a teasingly elusive subject, a ready surface for projection
of response to oneself, whether dead or alive. Valuable historical studies of
our poem’s eroticism by Monteiro (2007) and Klobucka (2013) note that Pessoa’s
alterations between the 1918 and 1921 versions of the poem tend to reduce the
negative evaluation of (homo)sexuality: “all his 11 See Fernando Pessoa:
Correspondência 1905-1922, edited by Parreira da Silva (PESSOA, 1999: 175).
Reed Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural: 10 (O./Fall 2016) 112 vices’ art is now
with Death,” for example, becomes “all his arts and toys are now with Death”
(line 51) (1993: 42); “Love wanders through the memories of his vice” becomes
“Love through the memories of his love doth roam” (line 165) (1993: 45). In
those three years Pessoa seems to retreat—perhaps not so much from a negative
stance toward homosexuality as from the late Romantic delight in “sin,” which
survives in such lines as 19 “O fingers skilled in things not to be told!”
(barely changed from 1918’s “[...] not to be named”)—that abjection or
recuperation summed up in Alfred Douglas’s “I am the love that dare not speak
its name,” a Decadent valorization of shame, disease, malformation—that is, of
difference under the various metaphors that difference receives from society.
II. The first line heralds Pessoa’s performance of late Romantic affectations:
“The rain outside was cold in Hadrian’s soul”—a customization of Verlaine’s “il
pleure dans mon coeur | comme il pleut sur la ville,” [“It weeps in my heart |
As it rains on the town,”] with its correspondence between inner and outer
worlds. 12 Why the emphasis on rain here and elsewhere in the poem, which is
necessarily set in Egypt? Every conscientious Classicist knows from Herodotus
(2.22.3) that rain is quite foreign to Egypt, which for moisture depends rather
on the Nile (Antinous’ killer). This is more London, Paris, or Berlin. The poem
perverts a certain idealization of the Mediterranean: Aldrich (1993)
entertainingly documents how the region, whose warmth and light were held
conducive to sensuality and freedom from social inhibitions as well as from
heavy clothing, was central to the homoerotic fantasies of northern Europeans
for two centuries. John Addington Symonds’s poem “The Lotos-Garland of
Antinous” (in Many Moods, London, 1878, pp. 120-134) rather emphasizes the
torrid setting of the Bithynian’s demise, “With many a fringèd mile of sultry
palm | Shimmering in noonday sunlight”—Waters (1995: 208) rightly compares to
that poem’s tableaux the work of contemporary painters, like Alma Tadema,
equally adept in recovering ancient and inventing Oriental scenes in sybaritic
detail. Similar is Hugh McCulloch, Jr.’s “Antinous” (The Harvard Monthly 11,
1890, p. 72): “[...] this land, where thirst and famine burn | Death’s
incense”; or the vision described in the anonymous pornographic novel Teleny:
“I saw a barren land, the sun-lit sands of Egypt, wet by the sluggish Nile;
where Adrian stood wailing, forlorn, disconsolate for he had lost for ever the
lad he loved so well.” (1893).13 12 Editor’s note: Pessoa’s French poem “La
pluie bat la fenêtre…,” [“The rain beats against the window…”] dated 9 February
1914, echoes Verlaine’s famous lines (see PESSOA, 2014: 97 & 331). 13
Quotation from INGLEHEART (2015: 149). On Teleny’s use of the Antinous story
see INGLEHEART (2015: 149-51). Reed Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural: 10
(O./Fall 2016) 113 Pessoa’s imagery participates conceptually in a northward
translatio imperii. The erotic object Antinous as slave, as provincial, as
Easterner coincides with European colonial concerns at this moment—even, or
even especially, in 1915 and the following years. A node of Classicism and
colonialism also concludes the stanza from lines 85-95, where “a memory of lust
revives and takes” [l. 86] Hadrian’s “senses by the hand,” [l. 87] and: A
creeping love-wise and invisible hand At every body-entrance to his lust
Whispers caresses which flit off yet just Remain enough to bleed his last
nerve’s strand, O sweet and cruel Parthian fugitives! (PESSOA, 1993: 43) Again
like Shelley’s Adonais—with its personified dreams, loves, splendors, and
echoes—personified whispered caresses, themselves barely existent, act upon the
mourner14; but in this case they delude and taunt him, they are both sweet and
cruel “Parthian fugitives,” like the cavalrymen of the Parthian Empire who,
Roman poets frequently remind us, are “fierce in flight,” shooting arrows back
at their adversaries even as they strategically retreat.15 The caresses
imagined by Hadrian combine Cupid’s notorious arrow-shots with those of the
enemies of Rome. To some extent the trope is ornamental, but it is easily
connected with Hadrian’s own contendings with the Parthian Empire, Rome’s great
rival for control over the eastern coastlands of the Mediterranean (objects of
European Orientalist desire since the nineteenth century)—some provinces of
which Hadrian himself found it prudent to yield back to the Parthian sphere,
after their direct control by Rome in the previous reign. Love and empire
employ the same strategy against an “Other” who acts while in retreat. The
poem’s second half, in fact, is about the emperor’s therapeutic strategies
after both memory and necrophilia fail him, as it moves (in yet another trope
adopted from Bion) between narratorial exposition, including injunctions to the
mourner, and Hadrian’s own monologue, his unfolding determination of how to
commemorate Antinous and preserve their love, his choice of how to let the dead
boy go. At about the halfway mark (line 179) he declares that he will make an
everlasting statue; at line 204 he falters, lamenting, “Yet oh that this were
needed not” and that Antinous were still alive in his multifarious
sensuousness: a rose, a garland, a flame. But he promptly resolves anew to find
an enduring form for love, a turn the poem attributes to “the gods” [line 225].
“All that thou art now is thyself 14 A post-Decadent engagement with Shelley’s
Adonais is also evident in the war poetry of Pessoa’s contemporary, Wilfred
Owen; see REED 2006. 15 See e.g. VIRGIL, Georgics 3.31; HORACE, Odes 1.19.11,
2.13.17. Reed Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural: 10 (O./Fall 2016) 114 and I,” he
says in line 306, apparently struggling to adapt from Shelley a neoPlatonic
sublimation (1993: 49): Our dual presence has its unity In that perfection of body
which my love, By loving it, became, and did from life Raise into godness, calm
above the strife Of times, and changing passions far above. (PESSOA, 1993: 49)
After all, he says at line 226, “Thy death has given me a higher lust— | A
flesh-lust raging for eternity.” (1993: 47). Hadrian’s vision is of the future,
posterity’s memory of the two of them together (cf. 28-29 “He weeps and knows
that every future age | Is looking on him out of the to-be”) (1993: 41). To
achieve this everlasting perfection in material, Hadrian focuses on the statues
of Antinous that he intends to set up; the ancient portraiture becomes the
poem’s telos. “Yet thy true deathless statue I shall build,” he meditated just
above (289-293), Will be no stone thing, but that same regret By which our
love’s eternity is willed. One side of that is thou, as gods see thee Now, and
the other, here, thy memory. (PESSOA, 1993: 48) “There is a kind of reverse
Pygmalion myth in operation here,” as noted by Waters (1995: 211) (cf. 218). “I
shall to marble carry this regret | That in my heart like a great star is set”
[lines 315-316] (PESSOA, 1993: 49)—in this image of Hadrian’s concretization of
his feelings one might hear the “great star” that “early drooped in the western
sky in the night” in Whitman’s elegy on Lincoln, emblematizing grief by
metonymy, along with lilacs and ever-returning spring—perhaps also the audacity
of Tennyson’s Ulysses: “to follow knowledge like a sinking star | unto the
utmost bounds of human thought.” Hadrian’s “regret” does not sink like a star
and go away; it sinks into his heart and potentially abides—and so reminds me,
too, of Bion’s Epitaph on Adonis, where the goddess hopes to suck Adonis’
spirit into her, down to the liver, and keep his love there united with hers, in
that Greek poem’s maddest and most fervent refusal to sublimate (lines 45-50).
In Pessoa’s subtext is the new star, observed by Hadrian, that Antinous was
said to have become and that (like statues and flowers) made him eternal.16 16
Cassius Dio 69.11.4. The star recurs in poetry on Antinous. A sonnet by Ernest
Raynaud ends with an image of Hadrian making Antinous “un astre au ciel bleu,”
[“a star in the blue sky”] conceiving that he saw “tes yeux s’ouvrir dans les
étoiles!” [“your eyes opening in the stars!”]. Reginald Shepherd, eternizing in
a way not alien to Pessoa’s Hadrian, imagines Antinous as “a star to wish upon
two thousand years from you” [...] “the star I can’t make out [...]”(SHEPHERD,
1996: 75- 76). Reed Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural: 10 (O./Fall 2016) 115
Hadrian’s turn to consolation and even hope—the correlative to Shelley’s
Adonais 361 “He lives, he wakes—‘tis Death is dead, not he”17—comes at line
236: “Love, love, my love! Thou art already a god,” (PESSOA, 1993: 47) and
fully embraces Platonic sublimation: “a sight, to me allowed | [...] | A vision
of the real things beyond | Our life-imprisoned life, our sense-bound sense”
[lines 238-243] (1993: 47). He seems to have found his way back from Decadent
materialism to an earlier style of English Romanticism, to a “subtler sense”
[line 251]—but the materiality of the statue complicates things, and a Romantic
claim of the imagination over physical reality makes some concession to that
reality [lines 277- 280]: Therefore when now thy memory I bid Become a god
where gods are, I but move To death’s high column’s top the shape it took And
set it there for vision of all love. (PESSOA, 1993: 48) And so in the rest of
his monologue Hadrian attempts a synthetic conception of the “true deathless
statue” as “no stone thing, but that same regret | By which our love’s eternity
is willed” [lines 289-291] (1993: 48); marble will embody for all future ages,
in posterity’s responses to it, the dialectic of love and loss that now
constitutes Antinous to him. The poem’s late Romantic tensions between material
and immaterial forms of preservation—degrees of presence—are subtended by those
between the one and the many. Antinous’ posthumous portraiture, as we saw, was
polymorphous, teeming with many divine and human shapes and costumes; so too
Pessoa’s Antinous in life, variously costumed to mimic the various Greco-Roman
gods worshiped in marble or chryselephantine [lines 155-160]: Now was he Venus,
white out of the seas; And now was he Apollo, young and golden; Now as Jove
sate he in mock judgement over The presence at his feet of his slaved lover;
Now was he an acted rite, by one beholden, In ever-repositioned mysteries.
(PESSOA, 1993: 45) But “now he is something anyone can be,” the poem says with
fin-de-siècle disdain, in a “stark negation of the thing it is” [lines
161-162]. Hadrian oddly (given the archaeological record) speaks about one
statue, and even makes it 17 Cf. MILTON, Lycidas 165 “Weep no more, woful
Shepherds weep no more.” The trope ultimately descends, through a long line of
early modern pastoral laments, from the double lament in VIRGIL, Eclogue 5.
Reed Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural: 10 (O./Fall 2016) 116 represent Antinous’
divine status “calm above the strife | of times, and changing passions” [ll.
310-11, quoted above]. The emperor attempts a Shelleyan, Platonic misreading18
of Antinous’ many personae—a strategy for controlling his own love and grief?
It has its correlative in the (military) reduction of many peoples to one, and
indeed Hadrian sometimes seems to be projecting his own imperial rule far into
the future in the form of this statue he desiderates, willing a negation of the
Roman empire’s diffraction into its European and Ottoman heirs as he wills a
reduction of Antinous’ polymorphousness into unity (or into a duality that
includes both of them). In antiquity finding the essence behind the many faces,
the reality behind the many masks (in this case beauty and the love beauty
engenders), is a late imperial theological mode, finally satisfied (it would
seem) by monotheism; in literature I think of Isis in Apuleius’ Golden Ass,
Book 11, who appears to Lucius in her Egyptian form—or rather universal form—to
tell him who she really is despite the many names that she’s been given and
that she authoritatively recites to him. The “Orphic” hymns of (perhaps)
Hadrian’s own period are largely exuberant catalogues of different names and
epithets of their divine addressees, finding a cumulative truth though
multiplicity. Frazer, too, in his anthropology of dying and rising gods (which
takes its cues from the syncretistic thought of late antiquity and has its
matrix in the expansive explorations of the British empire) certainly wants to
find the underlying essence behind many appearances. But again, Pessoa’s poem
offers no Frazerian certainties. The poem’s surrounding rain, “cold in
Hadrian’s soul,” recurring at critical points in the narrative (lines 1, 7, 24,
48, 65, 171, and 342), stirring his mind in memory and desire, supposedly
setting off some action on his part (including the idea for the statue at line
171), makes ambiguous his relation to the exterior world and ironizes this
version of Romantic transcendence in a way that approaches Decadence as much as
it does Modernism. Sabine, diagnosing the poem’s “ecstatic dissolution of
subjectivity achieved through sensuously promiscuous interaction with external
phenomena” (2007: 150), connects its intersubjectivity and tensions between
singleness and multiplicity to Pessoa’s own protean persona. He is discussing
in particular the encyclopedic string of recollected or attempted sensual acts
at the bier in the poem’s first half, a kaleidoscope of lust implicitly
assimilating physical to intellectual possession. In its comprehensiveness it
may vaguely recall scientific efforts like Krafft-Ebing’s famous Psychopathia
Sexualis, but in literature it is juster to compare the exhaustive inventory of
pleasures available throughout 18 Cf. SHELLEY, “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death
of John Keats”: “The One remains, the many change and pass; | [...] | Life,
like a dome of many-colour’d glass, | Stains the white radiance of Eternity, |
Until Death tramples it to fragments.” (LII, lines 460-464). Pessoa’s Hadrian
promises that “This picture of our love [...] | […] will loom white out the
past” (lines 199-200) (PESSOA, 1993: 46). Reed Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural:
10 (O./Fall 2016) 117 Venus’ domain in Aubrey Beardsley’s unfinished account of
the Tannhäuser legend, Under the Hill, 19 whose all-encompassing variety is
Decadent in the style of Huysman’s A Rebours or Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas.
Hadrian would seem to reverse the dialectic that is Havelock Ellis’ structural
definition of Decadence: “a further development of a classic style, a further
specialisation, the homogeneous ... having become heterogeneous” (1915: 175):
an antithetical recourse to the monistic white light of the Classical—or at
least the Platonic—is not out of character for what we know of the historical
emperor’s tastes. But Antinous does not finally resolve the question of the one
and the many, which is real and which is image. The prosopopoeia here, the play
with the faces on the surface of things and probing of their independent
existence, also continues in this poem—published under Pessoa’s own name—a long
tradition that Hadrian himself would have recognized. 19 First published in a
bowdlerized version in The Savoy in January and April 1896; privately published
in 1907 by Leonard Smithers as The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser (London). Reed
Pessoa's Antinous Pessoa Plural: 10 (O./Fall 2016) 118 Figs. 1 & 2. Statue
of Antinous, reign of Hadrian (117-138 CE). Delphi Archaeological Museum.
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