lyrics
AP:119-152 Be consistent if you are original
Either follow tradition, or invent consistently.
If you happen to portray Achilles, honoured,
Pen him as energetic, irascible, ruthless,
Fierce, above the law, never downing weapons.
Make Medea wild, untameable, Ino tearful,
Ixion treacherous, Io wandering, Orestes sad.
If you’re staging something untried, and dare
To attempt fresh characters, keep them as first
Introduced, from start to end self-consistent.
It’s hard to make the universal specific:
It’s better to weave a play from the poem of Troy,
Than be first to offer something unknown, unsung.
You’ll win private rights to public themes, if you
Don’t keep slowly circling the broad beaten track,
Or, pedantic translator, render them word for word,
Or following an idea, leap like the goat into the well
From which shame, or the work’s logic, denies escape.
And don’t start like the old writer of epic cycles:
‘Of Priam’s fate I’ll sing, and the greatest of Wars.’
What could he produce to match his opening promise?
Mountains will labour: what’s born? A ridiculous mouse!
How much better the man who doesn’t struggle, ineptly:
‘Tell me, Muse, of that man, who after the fall of Troy
Had sight of the manners and cities of many peoples.’
He intends not smoke from flame, but light from smoke,
So as then to reveal striking and marvellous things,
Antiphates, Charybdis and Scylla, the Cyclops.
He doesn’t start Diomede’s return from Troy with his
Uncle Meleager’s death, or the War with two eggs:
He always hastens the outcome, and snatches the reader
Into the midst of the action, as if all were known,
Leaves what he despairs of improving by handling,
Yet so deceptive, in blending fact with fiction,
The middle agrees with the start, the end with the middle.
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