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 at the University Cote d’Azur de 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 Birds of Memnon”, a poem narrating the tragic friendship of Achilles and Memnon, the son of the goddess Aurora. 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, and the music is written and played by Marianne Gubri at the electric harp

ELENA:

Welcome, Francesca, and thank you for being here.

FRANCESCA

It’s my

ELENA

This poem is narrated by the goddess Aurora. Aurora mourns the death of her son Memnon, whom Achilles slayed in Troy. Memnon was the son of Aurora and Tithonus, a king of Ethiopia, which explains why Aurora mentions his “dark” features. He had brought an army to Troy, and he had managed to kill the Greek warrior Antilochus. The Greeks begged Achilles to fight him and avenge Antilochus. The two men, who are both sons of goddesses- clashed. Eventually, Achilles stabbed Memnon through the heart, causing his entire army to flee in terror.

However, the Ethiopians that stayed close to Memnon in order to bury their leader were turned into birds (hence the title Memnonides) by the gods. Those birds live in the marshes by his tomb engaging in ritual fights to celebrate the memory of their king Memnon. Memnon’s memory is also celebrated with a gigantic statue – a colossus- representing a seated man. According to Herodotus, every day at the rising of the sun the statue makes a noise, and the sound one could best liken to that of a harp or lyre when a string has been broken.

FRANCESCA

The Birds of Memnon begins exactly where The Lyre of Achilles ends. In fact, the two poems should be read together, as a diptych, a painting made of two parts. The Lyre of Achilles ends with Achilles waiting for dawn, the dawn of the day when he dies.

ELENA

In fact, The Birds of Memnon opens with a mention of the goddess Aurora: “And there was Aurora, touching the earth, the black earth, with her rosy fingers”.

FRANCESCA

The story of the Birds of Memnon takes place in the time between dawn and sunrise on Achilles’ last day. Aurora begins by reproaching Achilles for slaying her son Memnon and predicting his imminent death. Aurora indicates that Memnon and Achilles are “brothers”: Achilles was not her son, but the text implies that she loved him like her son, Memnon and the two boys grew up together as brothers. Here we have a biblical theme: two brothers who are the opposite of each other (Memnon is dark, Achilles is fair) but who love each other.

ELENA

And just like Abel and Cain, the two brothers end up fighting, and one of them kills the other.

FRANCESCA

This is not only an echo of Genesis, but also a recurrent theme in Pascoli’s poetry. I’m thinking in particular of the poem I due Fanciulli, The Two Boys in Primi Poemetti, where we see two brothers fight, and their mother reproaching them. The Two Boys ends with a condemnation of conflict and violence in the world, and a wish for peace and brotherhood among people. Since we are all bound to die, why kill and destroy, when we could all live in peace. The structure and main ideas of this poem are replicated in The Birds of Memnon, but in a mythological setting, with Aurora as the mother.

ELENA : Let’s listen to the first two stanzas

ELENA:

In our book we translated the original title Memnonidi as The Birds of Memnon because we wanted to highlight the central metaphor of the poem, which is the story of the warriors turned into birds. Francesca, how do you interpret the myth of the birds in this poem?

FRANCESCA

Here Pascoli elaborates on a passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book 13) where the myth of Memnon’s warriors turned to birds is narrated. Actually, we should be very precise with the type of birds, because Pascoli is usually extremely accurate with his depiction of flora and fauna. So those are not generic birds: in Italian, they are called “gralle” and in English they are waders or shorebirds, birds that live along shorelines or in damp areas like marshes. They have long legs precisely because they wade through a body of water.

Anyway, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the warriors-turned-birds fight every year in funeral games. Funeral games were athletic competitions held in honour of a recently deceased person. But in Metamorphoses the fights are real, and warriors wound and kill each other, sort of like gladiators. Not in Pascoli’s poems: here the birds engage in ritual fights but without hurting each other, like in the Olympic games. Let’s listen to stanza 4

FRANCESCA

The funeral games where the birds fight without hurting each other symbolise Pascoli’s stance against violence and conflict. They indicate the way forward for mankind, which should eventually evolve towards developing peaceful ways to inhabit the earth.

ELENA

This is actually a crucial aspect of Pascoli’s worldview. Just like any other educated person in the late nineteenth century, Pascoli was imbued with evolutionary theories ultimately deriving from Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man. Mankind was seen as being in constant evolution, in an upward trajectory towards progress, further and further away from the original brute.

FRANCESCA

But Pascoli is critical of this view: mankind should evolve not only in terms of technological advancement but also in terms of ethics. What is the point of developing advanced technology if we use it kill and oppress each other. We should learn how to live without inflicting pain to each other.

ELENA

And I think, this idea is very relevant today, with new technologies that threaten to annihilate or replace us.

FRANCESCA

Yes. This poem really puts into play the senselessness at the heart of epic tales—violence, glory as in fierceness in battle, the ability to overcome the enemy in war– while at the same time celebrating their unchanging beauty as stories—as we saw in the poem The Lyre of Achilles, or Solon, in which poetry is the means by which those deeds are immortalised. But poetry sublimates everything in the distance that it creates. Pain loses its edge and becomes poetic melancholy, and likewise, the gruesomeness of war turns to epic glory.In her prophecy Aurora reminds Achilles that he, too, is destined to die, like every man, and that he will also become a shadow and regret life. The expression "immortalmente affaticato", “weary now until forever” beautifully describes the shadow of Achilles, eternally subjected to the toil of rethinking the life he misses and, it seems, lived without understanding its true values: love, brotherly love, which can heal, at least in part, the inherent suffering of the human condition. Heroes do not escape this law.

ELENA:

Yes. Let’s listen to the last two stanzas, where Aurora foreshadows Achilles’s condition in the afterlife. It is worth noticing that here Pascoli draws inspiration from the passage in the Odyssey where Ulysses descends to the Underworld and meets the shadow of Achilles, that is Odyssey, Book 11. Here Achilles regrets having chosen a short but glorious life over a long one, even as a nobody.

FRANCESCA:

As we said before, The Lyre of Achilles and the Birds of Memnon form a poetic diptych: from a literary perspective, the element of the lyre introduces a meditation on the "ancient fables" and their mix of fascination and violence. On the other hand, the story of Achilles, his development as a character —represents the need for a new direction for humanity gather at the threshold of the new century.

ELENA

Thank you very much Francesca for this conversation. And thank you all for listening. You can now listen to the entire poem. Enjoy!