Thursday, October 5, 2017

Filelfo On Exile, The Case of Polyneices of Euripides: Contexts

Over the summer I've been gathering a number of the versions of a speech, and dialogue between a mother and son. There is no getting around it. The story this dialogue is pulled from is classic Greek tragedy. Euripides was not a fan of war or civil war and considered it a kind of curse for a nation or city, and did so in the strongest possible language. Just over 1850 years later, in the 1440's, an Italian included some of this dialogue in his own dialogue involving Italians talking about exile.

The setting for Francesco Filelfo's fictional dialogue On Exile  was a gathering of just a few gentlemen in Florence there discussing what to do in the future event of their own political exile. Crucially the very idea remains a future thought, a possibility, and not yet a reality for the conversants. This was not so for some of the other well-connected in those days. The setting for this fictional dialogue was during the time of the return of Cosimo de Medici to Florence in the 1430's, and just before many of the participants here were turned out.

This dialogue in four books itself was a new kind of fiction in literature. At once a gift (to a prospective patron), this book detailed the talk of an imaginary gathering ocurring a dozen years or more before the book's production. Full of wandering conversations presented in a loose, as-it-happens manner, it also, acts as a structured composition, all of which was also presented as reliable memory. More of the author's and this publication's contexts are here.

To show their weight, the conversants give examples from memory of books, past texts meant to support arguments of this or that position. And so, this dialogue presents both contrasting and comparing ideas pulled in from many places and times as the talk ranges across millenia.

In a substantial introduction himself, Filelfo provides the setting for his chosen recipient (the prospective patron) of this dialogue, and then, launches into a quick discussion between a father and a son, about the worries abounding in exile and things to remember when considering it. It is not long into this back-and-forth when the father here, Paolo Strozzi, seems to have assessed his son's worries and asks if he remembers the speech of Polyneices in Euripides. [i,57]
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Like I said, over the summer I've been gathering a number of the translations of this bit of dialogue between Polyneices and his mother Jocasta, produced in English in the modern era. They meet before the palace walls of Thebes. Polyneices has brought an army to take control what he thinks should be his city from the forces of his brother, Eteocles, with their father being kept 'buried behind bolted doors'. Jocasta, is the mother in this play of Euripides', called Phoenician Women, where Oedipus is their father. These sons now with armies set and ready for war are the sons of Oedipus, and his mother remains, Jocasta. Euripides has her explain at the very beginning of his play.
"Sun, flaring in your flames, what a harmful ray/ you hurled at Thebes that day when Kadmos quit/seaswept Phoenicia, and came to this country."
Kadmus married Harmonia, child of Kypris. and had a son Polydoros who fathered Labdakos, father of Laios. Laios married Jocasta, daughter, according to Euripides, of Menoikeus . Jocasta bore Laios a son that was later called 'Swell-foot', or Oedipus by the Greeks. The boy of course, was abandoned, and when found and raised, wondered who his real parents were. The day would come when Laios and Oedipus met on the road to Delphi at 'the split in the Phokis road', and the driver of King Laios' cart roared, "Out of the road, stranger! Make way for a king".

"... Then followed -- but why not steer straight/ to the point? Son killed father, took chariot and team... And somehow it happened that Oedipus/ my son understood the Sphinx song, and took/ the scepter of this country as reward, and took/ as bride her who bore him, the miserable man --/ and she who bore him did not know she was/ sleeping with her son. So to my child I gave birth/ to two children, two males, Eteocles/ and Polyneices the powerful,..." [lines 42-50. ]
The one brother left voluntarily to stay out of the other's way, and the other stayed in Thebes and, in time, brought all power to himself. Things grew so disparate and contrary that in time, Polyneices knew he had to return, and with an army. The scene is set and before battle is enjoined, the son approaches the gate to meet his mother to find a way to stop the coming carnage.

The story in Euripides moves right along with practiced rigor, tight, with damaging testimony and baleful warning. [The Greek text of Euripides is and follows here.] The dialogue of Filelfo overall, moves at a much more leisurely pace. But the presentation of this Euripidean dialogue within Filelfo's, is stark and comes like a hammer to the head. A modern English translation of Polyneices' initial speech to Jocasta will follow.
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After long discourses and an argument with the character of Poggio Bracciolini over the benefits of abstenance from drink, Palla Strozzi the chief speaker in book i, returns to mention Polyneices again. This time it is in order to call him a liar for saying he received nothing from his patronym when he could not have married King Adrastus' daughter without such a name. More on this again when time permits.
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Filelfo, FrancescoOn Exile,  Edited by Jeroen de Keyser and translated by W. Scott Blanchard, for The I Tatti Renaissance Library (ITRI); by The President and Fellows of Harvard College, USA 2013

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