Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

Je n’étais pas au brûlant de¤le

Je n’ai pas combattu dans la pluie chaude

Ni embourbé dans la saline jusqu’au genou,

Levant un glaive, mordu par les mouches, combattu.^17

This follows faithfully Eliot’s phrasing, imagery, and syntax, from attendant
la pluie (“waiting for rain”) to combattu dans la pluie chaude (“fought in
the warm rain”), and the ¤nal mordu par les mouches, combattu (“bitten by
®ies, fought”). It is dif¤cult to think of a more skillful way of rendering
Eliot’s poem in French, and yet one feels that in Leyris’s text most of “Geron-
tion’s” force has been lost. First, the heavy double stressing on “old man” “dry
month,” “hot gates,” “warm rain,” “knee deep,” “salt marsh.” And more im-
portant, the harsh stops, spirants, and fricatives of “heaving a cutlass” and
“bitten by ®ies, fought” are wholly lost in the gentle, harmonious sounds of
Levant un glaive (note the internal rhyme, open vowels, and soft l’s), mordu
par les mouches (alliteration of m’s, soft o and u), and combattu, which all
but rhymes with mordu. In French translation, then, Gerontion’s voice, so
agitated in the original, sounds almost steady.
It is in the context of Gerontion’s extreme agitation—an agitation contained
in sound and rhy thm of the passage rather than in the words themselves—
that we must consider the lines that follow:

My house is a decayed house,

And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,

Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,

Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.

The goat coughs at night in the ¤eld overhead;

Rock, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.

The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,

Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.

I an old man,

A dull head among windy spaces.

Those who defend this passage against the charges Julius and others have
made usually do so on the grounds that “Gerontion” is, after all, not Eliot’s
own meditation but the monologue of a diseased mind. “Gerontion’s mind,”
writes Jewel Spears Brooker, “is a metaphor for the mind of Europe, a collaps-
ing mind with which Eliot had little sympathy.... [The poem’s] characters—
whether Greek, Christian, or Jewish—exist in Gerontion’s demented mind,
and all, including himself are represented as withered and repulsive rem-

28 Chapter 2