Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

The governor nodded. So let’s see what comes next, he thought.

The following pages described how this broadcast had amazed Bill Norton. This was where the two fools first expressed their fear of arriving "too late,"

Small wonder that someone like me, a mere post-doc from Ireland who came to New York with my friend Max Ross in the (far from certain!) hope of adding something new to the old debate about Homer, was dumbfounded. The last available laboratory, I kept saying over to myself The last surviving foundry. I was rather disoriented and kept mulling the words over as if my intellect refused to take in their meaning. On the radio, the voice droned on, but I wasn’t listening anymore. "The last available laboratory in the world,” I said aloud at last, as if that would shake my brain out of its daze. Very soon that foundry would disappear. It was already threatened. It had to be made use of before it was too late. Before it fell into ruin, before it was buried under the sands of time, before it was forgotten .

I was startled to realize that I was pacing up and down the room. I would have preferred to think of the whole business in a state of calm, but that was out of the question. Good God, we must hurry! I thought. We must get over there as quick as we can. Discover that ancient laboratory. That thousand-year-old foundry of verse. Study it close up, as through a microscope; listen, as if we had stethoscopes, to the way in which Homeric matter, the Homeric marrow, is produced, and with that under our belts, it would be no trouble at all to unravel the mystery of Homer himself.

But shh! I warned myself. Not a word to anyone. Except Max Ross …

“The only area …” I kept on saying to myself The only area still able to give birth to epic poetry. The rest of the planet had passed through menopause. The only fecund region was there. The only place that was still hot. The only place that could still he made pregnant with the very latest epic. If we waited any more, it would be too late for anything. Sand and forgetting would cover it all over, all of it even the puzzle itself…

“We’d already caught on to that,”the governor said to himself as he scrabbled for a cigarette with a hand that shook from excitement. “Yes, we’d already caught on, you old crook!” he said aloud.

He needed a few minutes to be able to concentrate on reading again. As was to be expected, one of the pigeons had let on to the other, and both of them were now overcome by their “discovery."

We were both high on thoughts of all that was going to happen. It would shake the world! They would beg us to accept a chair at MIT! Definitive papers at the World Congress of Mediterranean Archaeology! And in our old Irish hometown people would shake their heads in disbelief Bill Norton and Max Ross? You must have got the names wrong. It must be some other pair…

We laughed and laughed. And then we started imagining all the consequences again. Sing, O muse, of Harvard’s anger! And of the International Center for Homeric Research! "And of my stupid mother-in-law, Diana Stratford,” Max added .…

But we had done enough laughing. We had to leave at once for those distant parts, had to get there, to the area, to the expiring laboratory. Issue a press release right away? No, quite the opposite: keep it all very, very secret Pretend the idea had never occurred to us. All that remained was to get started, there and then. Without telling anyone what we were up to .

We went over our good resolutions again and again, and then Max looked hard at me and said quietly, after a pause; “It is a good idea, undoubtedly, but in any event, you can’t do anything without proper preparation.”

Those were the first cold drops to fall on the heat of our enthusiasm .

“We’d already caught on to that one as well.” the governor mumbled as he stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray…"OK, let’s see where the fox goes to ground… .”

He was convinced that the plot was right there but a little more effort was needed to coax it out into the light.

… Who was Homer? A blind poet, as millions of educated folk imagine, or a redactor, or even, as Stewart claims, an editor in chief? The ancient poems of the Iliad and the Odyssey edited and published by Sir J. R Homer, of the Grecian Academy — ha ha ha!

Meanwhile our minds were racing toward the Balkan peninsula. According to Stewart, there were rhapsodes still living there. Certainly the very last of the rhapsodes, the last Homeric singers. We would listen to their ballads and record them. That much was clear. But we wouldn’t just record different singers; we would compare them each to each. That was also common sense: confronting different rhapsodes and comparing the different versions. But would that be enough? We entered the two types of work into our notebooks, and as we did so we realized that the adventure that lay ahead would be much more complex than we had thought at first .

The governor reread the paragraphs he had just deciphered: proper preparation … comparing the different versions … adventure that lay ahead …

OK, let’s see where you go to get your instructions he thought. Your university — or some office of the Greek intelligence service?

Once again he was disappointed. The glimmer of light that had begun to clarify his suspicions was replaced by a thick fog of boring prose.

We finally laid our hands on a recent and very complete edition of Albanian epic poetry. With the names of the itinerant singers whose ballads were reproduced. We could publish a collection of the songs of other rhapsodes. That way epic poetry would have a thousand faces. Like the reincarnation of a single being by metempsychosis .

We are less interested in Albanian epics themselves than in their production process, to use a modern term. We are seeking to reach by induction a truth of universal applicability: the means by which epic poetry is generated, and as a consequence, the answer to the enigma of Homer

The comparative method is the main key to our work. Not just comparisons between the different rhapsodes. The most important comparison will be the different interpretations of the same song by the same rhapsode. In other words, his way of singing such and such a poem one day compared to the way he sings it some later day. A month later, say, or three months later.

Apparently the issue is not just a question of memorization. It is also related to a fundamental aspect of oral poetry — the mechanisms of forgetting, which in its turn is not really just a matter of forgetfulness but a much more complicated business. There could be involuntary loss of memory, but at the same time, conscious memory loss is involved. An alleged slip of memory justifyng a new interpretation of the song…

The rhapsode is the main wheel in the machinery of the epic. He is publisher, bookseller, and librarian in one, and also rather more than that: he is a posthumous co-author and, in this capacity, has the right to amend his text. It’s perfectly legal, no one disputes his right, and no one criticizes him, except perhaps his own conscience .

It now seems obvious that the question which formerly seemed fundamental for explaining the Homeric phenomenon — to wit, how many lines could a rhapsode commit to memory (some say six thousand, others eight thousand, or even as many as twelve thousand) — needs to be replaced with a different question; How many lines may a rhapsode wish to forget? Or rather: Can a rhapsode exist without a capacity to forget?

We must stress, in this connection, that we still know very little about the world of the rhapsodes. What sort of people are they? How is their gift acquired? When is their art recognized publicly? On what does their reputation rest? What causes them to return to ordinary life? How are the contests between them held? What are the different styles, or schools, or rivalries between them within this s trange universe of recitation? How are the mediocre performers filtered or weeded out? How are criteria of value established?