[Previous: lines 582-590]
Jesus and his disciples, in the temple at Jerusalem, examine a series of stone-carved artistic representations. First: the creation.
Hic superûm sator informem speculatus acervum,------------
aeternam noctemque, indigestumque profundum;
prima videbatur moliri exordia rerum
ipse micans radiis, ac multa luce coruscus.
Iamque videbatur fulva de nube creare [595]
stelligeri convexa poli terrasque, fretumque
et lucem simul undivagam; mox unde micantes
et solis radios, et cœli accenderet ignes.
Ipsi iam denso crepitare examine circum
auctoremque ducemque suum plausuque sonare [600]
aligeri fratres supera arce volatile vulgus,
lucis opus primae: necdum tamen aethera ab imis
flammiferum terris, terras discreverat undis,
sed tantùm confusa iacebant semina rerum.
Nec mora: vix cœli extuderat septemplicis orbem, [605]
ordine cui vario rutilos affigeret ignes,
et jam cuncta novam incipiebant sumere formam
paulatim, cœlumque sua compage teneri.
Cernere erat, sicca in medio iam mole relicta,
littoribus curvis circum maria humida fundi, [610]
illisosque vadis spumare ad sidera fluctus.
Nondum pontivagae curvabant ampla carinae
carbasa, nec liquido lentari in marmore remi;
lata sed innocui verrebant aequora Cauri.
Ecce autem, jam fagiferi capita ardua montes [615]
attollunt, infraque jacent humiles convalles,
continuò tellus summittens daedala germen
flore renidescit, et frondis explicat arbos.
Iam videas viridi vestiri gramine campos;
iam colles densis frondere cacumina silvis, [620]
ilicibusque, oleisque, et coniferis cyparissis.
Nec mora; cœruleo flammis duo lumina cœlo
incipiunt teneris primùm lucescere rebus;
et sibi, ceu mundi vigiles, statione vicissim
succedunt, certoque suum dant fœdere lumen. [625]
Nam lucis fons dimensum sol ambit Olympum
ipse die, terrasque novo splendore colorant;
nocte suas vultu pallenti servat in umbris
luna vices, fundens auratis cornibus ignem,
lucidaque exornant nocturnis aethera gemmis [630]
sidera, perpetuo circumlabentia motu.
Tum bifidis passim verrebant marmora caudis
squamigerûm mutae pecudes, pelagoque natabant,
at pictae volucres librare per aera pennis
corpora, et inter se curvis decernere rostris. [635]
Nec procul hinc errant latos armenta per agros,
lanigerique greges persultant pabula laeta.
Iam latebras videas meditari dira ferarum
semina, iam longos per humum reptare chelydros.
Desuper hortari clara de nube putares [640]
cœlicolûm regem, laetasque expromere voces:
“Crescite, propagate genus, mea semina, vestrum,
seclaque perpetuis generatim jungite seclis.”
Here the Maker looked down on the unformed mass------------
of eternal night and gulfs of confusion;
and considered how to bring about a beginning—
himself a shining light vibrating with radiance.
Now, from a wine-dark cloud, he created [595]
the starry vault, earth on its axis, ocean
with light glittering on its waves; and he made
the beaming sun, and fires in the night sky.
And here, fluttering in a dense crowd around
the Creator and Lord, singing His praise, were [600]
myriad winged brethren circling high heaven
celebrating first light: though the ether had not
separated its fire from earth, or earth from seas,
the seeds of things were still variously scattered.
In no time the vault of the sevenfold heaven [605]
was forged and the bright fires fitted to their spheres;
now everything new was beginning to take
its first form, and the skies were fixed into place.
Now dry land could be seen, appearing among
the watery spread, curved shorelines rising, [610]
great waves jarred back and spume hurled at the stars.
As yet no great ships raised wind-bulging sails
of cloth, nor yet did oars stir the marbled seas;
only the northwest wind passed this way, harmless.
Look! beech-dense heads of granite mountains raised [615]
themselves, and steep valleys appeared inbetween,
immediately clothed in soil to grow seedlings
bright flowers bloomed, and leaves unfurled on trees.
Now you could see plains clothed in bright green grass
and the hills were swaddled in dense forests of [620]
oak and olive and coniferous cyprus.
In no time two cerulean flames burned in the sky
casting their light for the first time upon things;
each, at vigil over the world, taking their turn
after the other, pouring out their allotted light. [625]
First the bright sun circles above high Olympus
each day, colouring the world with new splendour;
next, at night, its face passing above shadows
the moon takes her course, golden horns shining,
as lucid stars adorn the dark like gemstones [630]
turning in perpetual circumlocution.
Now, stirring the marbled waters with forked tails
scaly schools of silent fish swim through the seas,
and painted birds swing on wings through the air
bickering among themselves with curved beaks. [635]
Nearby, herds of cattle wander the wide fields,
and joyful flocks of sheep frolic in the pasture.
Now could be seen the lairs where ferocious beasts
nurse their young, and watersnakes creeping along.
High above, exhorting all from a shining cloud, [640]
the King of Heaven joyfully declared:
“Grow, my offspring, increase yourselves, to you
belong the ages, for your endless generations.”
The image at the head of the post is Gustave Doré's late nineteenth-century illustration of Genesis. Here's a more period-appropriate engraving: Raphael Sadeler's ‘Dieu le Père sépare la lumière et les ténèbres’ (1585). Click to embiggen. You know you want to.
This, then, is the first phase of Vida’s lengthy ekphrasis, describing sculptures, or perhaps bas reliefs, in the temple at Jerusalem (the whole passage is based on Vergil’s descriptions of the murals in Dido’s palace, Aeneid 1:453-93). We start with the creation of the universe, and the population of that new earth with birds, beasts and fishes. It’s a rather nice piece of writing, actually, this; Vida elevating, or (I hate to sound vague, but you know what I mean) poeticising his style, aiming for a heightened and more vivid immediacy. The details are familiar enough from Genesis of course, although Vida’s description of God as being, himself, light—before, that is, the great first fiat lux of creation as such—is interesting: line 594’s lux coruscus actually means coruscating with light, which is to say, vibrating, waving, trembling, shaking with brightness. There’s something quite striking in the sheer restlessness of this. The Homeric ‘wine-dark’, in line 595 is a slight stretch: Gardner translates nubes fulva as ‘dark cloud’ which is certainly fair enough, although fulvus actually means ‘deep yellow, reddish yellow, gold-colored, tawny’ (‘mostly poetic’, say L&S), so I don’t think my rendering is entirely off.
There’s always seemed to me something puzzling (I am, of course, very far from the first person to note this) about the way the opening of Genesis narrativizes—that is, situates in a temporal structure—an event that is, by definition, prior to time as such. The phrase ‘nec mora’, repeated in lines 605 and 622, means ‘without delay’, or ‘straightway’; by translating this as ‘in no time’ I suppose I am channelling this sense. Vida can sidestep this, to a degree, since he is not describing the actual creation of the universe, but is rather describing an artistic representation of that event, although even so he tends to fall back on infinitives like creare (line 595) instead of, say, using creāvit.
The Hebrew that the KJV so famously render as ‘in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep’ is, scholars assure us, better translated as ‘when God began to create heaven and earth’ or ‘when God was beginning to create’ or somesuch formulation. Robert Alter's highly praised The Five Books of Moses, A Translation with Commentary (2004) gives us ‘when God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said: “Let there be light.” And there was light.’ Of the nicely alliterative phrase welter and waste, Alter comments:
The Hebrew tohu wabohu occurs only here and in two later biblical texts that are clearly alluding to this one. The second word of the pair looks like a nonce term coined to rhyme with the first and to reinforce it, an effect I have tried to approximate in English by alliteration. Tohu by itself means ‘emptiness’ or ‘futility’, and in some contexts is associated with the trackless vacancy of the desert.Vida does quite well with this, although his main orientation is not the flat wideness of desert spaces so much as the vertiginous heirarchy of up and down. His tohu-bohu is deep rather than wide: line 592's nox aeterna ‘eternal night’ and indigestumque profundum, which means depths without order, unarranged, confused. Vida's God looks down upon, and indeed into, these depths; and his elevated position, emphasised by these flocks of winged angels circling the heights singing God's praises only reinforces this up-down axis. Vida's account of creation filling with fecundity is more panoptic in its framing that the Biblical original, and he caps it by, as it were, panning up one final time, to God high in the sky, on a convenient cloud, looking down again on what he has done. Vida's ordering of events even works, as it were, top down: first the cosmic spheres and the fitted into place, then the earth and its inhabitants and finally fish in the depths and wild animals lurking in the hollow spaces of the world. Vida, we might say, has a much more arboreal than he has a rhizomatic imagination.
[Next: lines 644-673]
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