Praises, trophies, and an ode
To thrice-blest Basil, the Border Lord,
A man most noble and most brave,Whose strength was a gift to him from God.He overcame all Syria,Babylon and all Charziané,Armenia and Cappadocia,Amorium and Iconium,And that great famous castle too,Though mighty and well fortified,I mean Ancyra – all of Smyrna,And conquered lands beside the sea.Now I’ll disclose to you the deedsWhich he accomplished in this life:How he filled valiant fighting menAs well as all the beasts with awe,Having as help the grace of God,God’s Mother, the indomitable,The angels and archangels too,And the victorious great martyrs,Both the all-glorious Theodores,The army leader and recruit.
And noble George of many laborsThe miracle-working martyrs’ martyrSublime Demetrius, the patron
Of Basil, and the boast and prideOf him who vanquished all his foes,The Hagarenes and IshmaelitesAnd barbarous Scyths who rage like dogs. (pp. 3-4)
It is almost impossible to begin a discussion of Digenis Akritas without first laying out what it is and what is is not: It is not an “epic” of the style of Homer and Vergil, although the main character of Basil, the titular two-blood border lord, most certainly possesses epic heroic traits; it had a multi-generational gestation period, derived largely from ninth and tenth century events that were interwoven and mutated over generations of folk tales into the forms it reached when the tales of Basil began to be written down in the last centuries of the Roman/Byzantine Empire; it is a simple tale, or perhaps it’s better to argue that it is rooted more deeply in popular motifs than were the simile-ridden epics of the early Empire period. Digenis Akritas is perhaps best viewed as sui generis, combining the profound Orthodox beliefs of the people with tales of heroism on the borders of the Empire as it struggled to maintain a firm border in the Tarsus Mountains of Asia Minor against Arab raids for over two centuries after the capture of Jerusalem from the Romans.
Digenis Akritas, like most of its contemporaries, existed for centuries in various forms before being published in Western European vernaculars in the 18th and 19th centuries. In his Introduction, translator/editor Denison B. Hall discusses in depth the histories of six different Greek texts and one Slavonic text that each captured snippets of Basil’s (and his father, the Emir, before him). Hall chose to use the Grottaferrata version, discovered in a Greek rite monastery of Grottaferrata near Frascati, Italy in 1879, as the core of this English translation, as it contains the clearest tale of Basil and his father before him from beginning to end.
At first glance, Digenis Akritas is an odd poem. Unlike the classical epics that begin in media res or like modern stories that begin with the protagonist, this poem devotes the first three of the eight books of the Grottaferrata version to his father, the Emir, and how he came to bring his 12,000 strong soldiers over to the side of the Romans, as well as his conversion to Christianity and further adventures before and just after his son Basil was born. While this might at first glance seem to be grounds for a disjointed and uneven tale, a further examination reveals that the first parts are just as integral to the overall poem as those books devoted to our titular hero. Recall that Digenis Akritas is in origin a collection of folk tales about the borderlands of the 9th and 10th centuries and that with the spread of these tales, more and more elements were grafted onto the core historical events and personages. The end result is a poem in which the first three books foreshadow the events of Basil’s time on the eastern frontier, creating a sort of doubling effect that does not confuse the reader as much as provide a reinforcement of thematic elements throughout the entire poem.
The anonymous composer(s) of Digenis Akritas did not employ the dactylic hexameters of classical Greco-Roman epic poetry, but rather utilized a fifteen-syllable “political verse” that depended more on a pattern of unstressed-stressed-unstressed syllables to create a strong, flowing rhythm that did not depend upon rhyme. The English near-equivalent is ten-syllable verse, which Hull uses to create a fast-paced flow to the poem. The result is an energetic poem that swiftly flows from metaphor to action and back in a matter of a score of lines. In addition, the religious elements, namely the complementary nature of heroism and faith, are clear and concise. Digenis Akritas was intended both to entertain and to reinforce Christian morals and for the most part, it succeeds at blending these two seemingly disparate elements into a whole.
I alluded to the difficulties in categorizing Digenis Akritas above, but it is worth repeating that the value one may find in this poem lies in understanding what it is and what it isn’t. If you read it expecting motifs and strong similarities to Homer or Vergil, for example, you will be disappointed that it is something else. However, if read as what is possesses in its own right, an entertaining and concise series of tales welded together with few seams exposed, Digenis Akritas certainly is an excellent tale and perhaps is one of the better fictions to emerge from the medieval Roman/Byzantine period.
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