The poem begins with a statement of fact: that the observer cannot know what the missing head of the Greek statue looked like. Here are three translated versions of the first sentence:
“We cannot know his legendary head / with eyes like ripening fruit.” (Stephen Mitchell)
“Never will we know his fabulous head / where the eyes’ apples slowly ripened.” (C. F. MacIntyre)
“We never knew his stupendous head / in which the eye-apples ripened.” (Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann)
The remainder of the sonnet contemplates the statue’s torso, and various translations differ even more as the poem proceeds.
“But / His torso still glows like a candelabrum / In which his gaze only turned low, / Holds and gleams.” (M. D. Herter Norton)
“And yet his torso / is still suffused with brilliance from inside, / like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, / gleams in all its power.” (Stephen Mitchell)
“—yet something here keeps you in view, / as if his look had sunk inside / and still blazed on.” (Don Paterson)
Is the torso a candelabrum, a lamp, or neither? Does the torso gleam or blaze? Is the light turned low or sunk inside? Was the absent head legendary, fabulous, or stupendous? Were the eyes ripening fruit or eye-apples? Should the tense be present, past, or future? I think it is impossible to attempt a close reading of a poem in a language one doesn’t know. But what is plain is that the defaced sculpture has agency. And the poem is about the effect the imperfect classical statue has on the beholder, who must change his or her life as a result of a direct human response to it.
IN PARIS, there are endless encounters with the principles associated with Apollonian beauty—order, rationality, harmony, restraint—reminding us of the remarkable civilization of Greece, rather than something darker, lacking discipline, unbridled, violent. Does this make Paris more human, more truthful, more fragile, more tragic? Surely, these two forces—the Apollonian and the Dionysian—must be reconciled for us to be content in our lives.
Today I pondered this when I happened upon a two-room gallery of prints by Renaissance and baroque masters. Many of the images were exquisite, anatomical sketches of the male body, which perhaps explains the gallery’s location at a medical school. Roaming through the long corridors of the college afterward, I found a little museum of anatomy, a vast, dusty hall lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves displaying fragments of the human skeleton. After the serene old masters, it was a sobering, grotesque spectacle. Here, instead, was a godless, unsentimental coroner’s laboratory. In one corner was shelf after shelf of jars containing fetuses floating in sickly-sweet-smelling formaldehyde. The human skin was bleached white, and the open eyes shone a perfect sapphire blue. Afterward, out on the street, I felt chastened, and Paris seemed to tilt beneath me, the bright sun penetrating my dark glasses.
Part XV
LAST NIGHT, after another attack in Paris, I dreamed the dream called France. Mother was in the post office exchanging money, and signed all her traveler’s checks in the wrong place. What pretty handwriting, I thought, as she exclaimed, “Sainte Vierge!,” using an expression I had not heard since childhood. The postal clerk looked over her glasses and replied glibly, “Madam, in this matter the Blessed Virgin cannot assist you.”
Then Mother and I were discussing Uncle Marius’s name, which came from Gaius Marius, born in 157 BC, the son of a laborer who was elected Roman consul five times. He was the first citizen to break into the exclusive governing class of aristocracy. His wife was Julia, sister of Julius Caesar. He was beloved for having delivered Provence from the barbarians in a great battle at Aquae Sextiae, modern-day Aix-en-Provence. He was a brave soldier and skilled with his troops. The carnage from this battle was so great that, when heavy rain fell the following winter, the earth soaked up the putrefying bodies and bore a prodigious crop. When I was a young man visiting Uncle Marius, we would sit at his dining-room table drinking milky white pastis. He raised pale blue and yellow canaries and would let them out of their cages to fly around our heads. He was unemployed and fixed radios, which he sold at the marché every weekend. I loved him.
Then Mother and I were at the Paris Opera House, craning our necks to admire the ceiling mural painted by Marc Chagall. “This noble France, this poet of the Nations,” Mother said, looking up, quoting Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Nothing one has seen before prepares one for Chagall’s unmistakable rainbow of colors (“Color, not technique, conveys a painter’s character and message,” he insisted). I don’t remember what I saw in that ceiling of unidentifiable figures and creatures—roosters, goats, fish, donkeys—sometimes with human bodies, but they seemed to float somewhere between heaven and earth. Sometimes chased by flowers. Sometimes like angels hovering, with sweeping white flame-like wings. Is it possible that Chagall was not really a surrealist but a supernaturalist?
Then Mother and I were at a restaurant overlooking the dark violet Seine. There were barges knocking against each other in the current. Overhead, the gnarled limbs of plane trees cast shadows on us. It was Mother’s birthday, so we ordered kir royals, which I splashed a little on the immaculate white table linens. In honor of Marseille, Mother’s birthplace, I ordered bouillabaisse, which arrived in two dishes, a bowl of murky bouillon and a side plate heaped with filleted scorpion fish, dories, monkfish, eel, capon, and spider crabs. I smeared a garlic paste on little toasts and
