Welcome to the podcast “An Ancient Language for a Modern Soul. Poemi Conviviali by Giovanni Pascoli”. I’m here today with Professor Francesca Sensini, who is Assistant Professor in Italian Studies at the University Cote d’Azur, in Nice, France. She is the author of several books on Pascoli, one particularly on Poemi Conviviali called: From Classical Antiquity to Symbolist Poetry, a several articles on the figure of Achilles in Pascoli’s poetry. Today we will talk about The Lyre of Achilles, a poem narrating Achilles’s last night before he dies in the Trojan War.The translation you hear is the one published by me and James Ackhurst for Italica Press in 2022. The poem is read by Joanna Strafford, the music is by Giovanni Tardini played at the Celtic harp by Arianna Mornico.

ELENA : Welcome, Francesca, and thank you for being here.

FRANCESCA: My pleasure

The Lyre of Achilles focuses on one of the many “sequels” of the Iliad. Here, Pascoli imagines Achilles’ last night before his death. The death of Achilles is narrated in a variety of ancient sources, and has many different versions, but the one thing that these sources have in common is that Achilles died in Troy. Possibly, he died of an arrow wound in his famously vulnerable spot, his heel, the only place in his body that his mother, the goddess Thetis had not dipped in the river Styx to give him immortality. So, the Iliad is centred on Achilles’ wrath, many sources report the circumstances of his death or after his death, but Pascoli focuses on the night before Achilles’ death. Which is meaningful because Achilles knew his fate: he knew he would live a short and glorious life, and he knew the day of his death. Pascoli masterfully re-creates the suspended atmosphere of that night. Let’s hear it.

Achilles is the subject of many retellings. His figure stands out as the quintessential heroic warrior but also one prone to impulse and incontrollable wrath, as opposed to the more rational and humane Hector. Francesca, you have written extensively on the figure of Achilles in Pascoli’s poetry. What can you tell us of Achilles in Pascoli’s narrative.

FRANCESCA

Allow me to take a step back. I want to briefly consider Pascoli’s idea of poetry, as it is important to understand his depiction of Achilles. For Pascoli, poetry can be understood as the process of rejuvenation ... of an old person. Within this metaphor, the old person is the modern subject, it is us: we have accumulated centuries of history, which are heavy our soul. We are no longer young as a species, we are experienced and disenchanted.

ELENA:

Sorry, Francesca, I seem to hear in what you say an echo of Gianbattista Vico’s theory of the ages of mankind. According to Vico, an Italian philosopher of the seventeenth-eighteenth century, the second phase in the development of humans is what he calls the era of fanciullezza , childhood, where people lived according to fantasia, which is what we can call “magical thinking” or “mythical thinking”. In the next phase, rational thinking in the form of science, for instance, replaces “magical thinking”.

FRANCESCA

Yes. The modern subject – the old person- has a lot of experience and has learned to think rationally, to believe in facts and not in visions and intuitions, to distinguish reality from dreams, reason from fantasy. They are rational but unhappy because the world no longer amazes them as it once did, because their relationship with things has lost its vitality and meaning. They experience disenchantment, they have lost that child-like and primitive-like sense of wonder before the world and its mysteries.

Thus, this old person / the modern subject embarks on a search for that primeval condition within themselves. They look for the inner child/primeval being—in all its possible incarnations and simulacra—in the history of the world and its literature, especially ancient poetry and above all epics. Because according to Pascoli epic poetry reflects the primeval phase of the evolution of human creativity.

ELENA

Indeed, true poetry is the rediscovery of the primordial psyche, of the child that each of us once was as well as the human being during the phase of mythical thinking

FRANCESCA

Only through this process of rejuvenation, achieved by reading and studying the myths and poetry of the past – but studying with a loving attitude- can we rescue our his pre-rational mind, embodied in the the eternal child, “il fanciullino”:

Achilles is the Homeric incarnation of the ancient human, who was naturally a poet, an Adam naming the world he discovers with awe. Achilles is part of the childlike humanity that populates the Homeric texts and perfectly embodies the primitive subject because he combines action and contemplation. He is both the warrior and the poet.

Let me explain. Just like children, in his behaviour he displays both menis and philotes, anger and love. He screams, kills, cries; but he also sings, speaks to the waves of the sea, consoles the father of the enemy he has killed, loves his best friend Patroclus, his concubine Briseis, with deep tenderness, and is destined to die young because he is not meant to grow old. He must die innocent.

ELENA. Thank you. On the night before his death, Achilles receives a visit: an old man, an old bard, who comes to ask him for his lyre, the lyre Achilles had taken from a city he had sacked. Achilles was singing on that very lyre: he was singing “the glory of heroes dead and gone, and his own”, for he is a poet, like Homer himself. Reluctantly, Achilles returns the lyre to the old bard. Let’s listen to some stanzas.

FRANCESCA

The way the old bard is represented clearly conjures up the part of the Iliad where Priam comes to Achilles’ tents imploring for the body of Hector, his son slain by Achilles. Hector’s body had been left unburied for days – leaving his soul to wander restless in Hades – but eventually Achilles quenches his wrath, and returns the body to Priam.

The handing over of the lyre, the instrument of the young bard Achilles to the old bard, in Pascoli's poem, signifies the renunciation of the violent tales of epic poetry in favor of the search for a new subject, a more human song, purified of the violence and menis - anger- of the inner child.

ELENA

That is very interesting, Francesca. As we see, it is the old poet who is now tasked with singing Achilles’ glory. And by doing so, the bard promises to hide Achilles’s distemper – the melancholy as well as his wrath – which is his furious desire for glory. The old bard encourages Achilles to accept his fate, which is the same of any human being, and maybe understand eventally the power of love over anger and hatred.

Poetry immortalises human deeds, consigning them to eternity, and I think the last line of the old man’s speech is very telling: “We’ll say you listened to voices from the infinite sea and sky, as you drove onward, with the great shout of a charioteer, towards death your deathless steed.”

I’d like to finish our conversation today by thanking Francesca for being our guest today.

FRANCESCA

You are welcome.

ELENA

I will let you enjoy the poem in its entirety. Thank you very much for listening