ABSTRACT

Alice Oswald’s two books of Homeric verse, Memorial and Nobody, excavate the Iliad and the Odyssey, respectively, for sounds other than those man-glorifying songs of war and adventure made classical by literary tradition. They stress what Oswald calls the fluid, fleeting "livingness" of oral poetry that literary culture arguably deadens in its efforts to standardise and monumentalise Homer' s heroic narrative. To adjust the poetic balance between livingness and lastingness, Oswald distils Homer’s narrative to its evanescent and/or atmospheric elements and she foregrounds those diluvial clamours which repeatedly drown out the hero’s boasts and shouts, dampen his immortal aspirations and dissolve his bronze-clad psyche. This essay shows how Oswald’s recovery of Homer’s oral poetry in modern English verse concerns our approach to Anthropocene turbulence wherein we, her readers, might find ourselves adrift. It examines Oswald's strategy of stressing Homer’s aquatic fluency at the expense of his heroic-anthropocentric-narrative and in view of Anthropocene philosophy that calls for a shift from imperial, instrumental thinking about water as an exploitable global resource to empathic thinking with water as a companion, supra-human, species.

摘要

爱丽丝·奥斯瓦尔德的两本荷马史诗《纪念》和《无名之辈》 ，挖掘了《伊利亚特》和《奥德赛》，分别是那些因文学传统而成为经典的赞美战争和冒险的歌曲以外的声音。他们强调奥斯瓦尔德所说的口头诗歌流动的、转瞬即逝的“活力”，文学文化在标准化和纪念荷马的英雄叙事的努力中可以说是麻木了。为了调整生动和持久之间的诗意平衡，奥斯瓦尔德将荷马的叙事提炼成转瞬即逝和/或大气的元素，她将那些反复淹没英雄自夸和呼喊的洪流喧嚣放在首位，挫伤了他不朽的愿望并溶解了他的青铜色灵魂。这篇文章展示了奥斯瓦尔德在现代英语诗歌中恢复荷马的口头诗歌如何关系到我们应对人类世动荡的方法，在这种动荡中，我们，她的读者，可能会发现自己漂泊不定。它检查奥斯瓦尔德'关于水作为一种可开发的全球资源，将水作为一种伴侣、超人类、物种进行移情思考。