After a week of screaming headlines and an inundation of appalling, indeed frightening newspaper articles, gruesome photographs, and television reports, we still have no coherent sense of the disasters playing out in the Middle East, and no confident sense of likely developments in a setting of such volatility and unknown unknowns. Just at the moment the focus is on the horrendous death and destruction being visited by Israeli air power as the ground forces of the IDF stand by near the barrier fence for an expected massive land invasion of Gaza.
The barbarous acts committed by Hamas against young children, including babes in arms, have incited a special revulsion in many, and what I regard as a perplexing silence or even semi-justification among others. There is every possibility that open warfare could expand to Israel’s northern border (with Lebanon). There are many other dangerous complexities.
A few years ago I published a book on a topic that is likely to seem to most people arcane rather than simply specialized.* The subject was a brilliant religious poem by the Portuguese poet Luis de Camões, who died in 1580. The poem is a commentary in 365 lines of polished verse on the nine verses of the psalm Super flumina Babylonis (“By the Waters of Babylon”), number 137 in most English bibles. The psalm is in the voice of a Hebrew captive, part of a group being transported by their captors from their sacked capital to Babylon. At some point along the river the captors ask (or order) the Jewish captives to perform one of their traditional songs. But the speaker declares this impossible. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy. I provide the full text of the psalm in a modern English version (New International) at the bottom of the post.
Portuguese literary scholars have often called this poem “Zion and Babylon,” the two cities (Zion being another name for Jerusalem) constituting a binary opposition with obvious moral dimensions—and some not so obvious ones. It has been very highly praised. The Spanish poet Lope de Vega (d.1635) called it “the pearl of all poetry.” As the psalm is itself a beautiful song about music, it is hardly surprising that is has captured the interest of dozens of musicians from Palestrina to Bob Marley. I well remember when I first saw the poem. It was on a long flight from California to New York. I had been reading Camões’s famous imperial epic (the Lusiads) in the splendid verse translation of Leonard Bacon (Hispanic Society of America, 1950). In order to give his readers a demonstration of the poet’s prowess in forms other than the epic, Bacon appended at the back of his book “A Note on ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’” along with his own translation of the poem. Reading it had an electrifying effect on me. In the popular expression, I was blown away. I spent several hours of the flight studying the English text.
Expanding nine verses of biblical Latin into 365 lines of Portuguese redondilha gave Camões a pretty free hand. So different are the techniques of medieval exegetes from modern practice that following its thought is not always easy for us. They prefer the allegorical, hidden meanings of Scripture to the apparent literal meaning of the text. Any modern reader of Super flumina has to be startled if not repelled by the psalm’s final two verses celebrating infanticide. Bacon wrote thus: “The poem is, of course, an expansion of the 137th Psalm, every verse of which, with one exception, is quoted in it. That Camões left out the conclusion of the psalm has an interest. One is apt to believe that his mind and heart were revolted by the barbaric savagery of the 6th Century before Christ, but in any case such a piece of sadism would not have harmonized with the Poet’s visionary ecstasy.” Actually, the poet spends eight ten-line stanzas “translating” these lines! But as he regards them as allegorical—betokening the obligation of all believers to root out and destroy all the moral imperfections within their own souls by smashing them against “the Stone that was Christ,”—he pays scant attention to the literal sense certainly intended by the psalm’s unknown author. I say “unknown author.” Some Renaissance exegetes insisted that King David was the author. They knew David died centuries before the Babylonian Captivity, but claimed that he had written this song as prophecy. And prophecy of a sorry sort it is.
Today we look on, appalled, at the Slaughter of the Innocents in the kibbutz villages of southern Israel and in the bombed-out buildings of Gaza City. Twenty-five hundred years without much moral progress to show. How long, o Lord, how long?
*Luís de Camões as Scriptural Exegete (Tamesis/Boydell and Brewer: Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester NY, 2017)
Psalm 137 [Super flumina Babylonis]
1 By the rivers of
Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
2 There on the poplars
we hung our harps,
3 for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
4 How can we sing the
songs of the Lord
while in a foreign land?
5 If I forget you, Jerusalem,
may my right hand forget its skill.
6 May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you,
if I do not consider Jerusalem
my highest joy.
7 Remember, Lord, what the Edomites did
on the day Jerusalem fell.
“Tear it down,” they cried,
“tear it down to its foundations!”
8 Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is the one who repays you
according to what you have done to us.
9 Happy is the one who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.
