Summary
Of the 84 surviving fragments of Stesichoros’ Geryoneis, Carson translates 16 in “Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros.” These are fragments she described in “Red Meat: What Difference Did Stesichoros Make?” as “some of its principal fragments.” They span the time before Herakles’ arrival on Geryon’s island until the time after Geryon’s death.
The first fragment, “Geryon,” repeats the word "red" seven times as it establishes the insistently red parameters of Geryon’s daily life: the red landscape, red cattle, redness day after day. We are told he is a monster, but we are not told what that means. We learn he has a dog.
The second fragment, “Meanwhile He Came,” is three short lines written with an ominous terseness, where an unnamed “Him” (Herakles) approaches. From “salt knobs” we glean he is crossing the sea’s rocky shore.
The third fragment, “Geryon’s Parents,” assumes an abruptly modern context in which Geryon is a young boy, insisting upon wearing a mask at the supper table—either costume or disguise. His parents try to send him upstairs to bed, where an “incubus” awaits him. Frightened, Geryon tells them that he wants to stay downstairs and read.
The fourth fragment, “Geryon’s Death Begins,” takes place in Geryon’s mind, which is reeling from the murder of his herd of cattle at Herakles’ hands. He mourns their deaths, and anticipates his own—"All these darlings said Geryon And now me.”
The fifth fragment, “Geryon’s Reversible Destiny,” contains an ambiguous snippet of conversation between Geryon and his mother. His mother is reassuring him that he doesn’t have to make up his mind right away. But behind her, Geryon sees the “coil of the hot plate starting to glow,” an image that suggests that something is beginning; he doesn’t have time to waste.
The sixth fragment, “Meanwhile in Heaven,” takes place in a glass-bottomed boat in heaven in which the gods Zeus and Athena look down at the earth, and Athena points out Geryon, presumably condemning him to death.
The seventh fragment, “Geryon’s Weekend,” mixes ancient and modern with an anecdote of Geryon and a centaur leaving a bar and going back to the centaur’s place. Geryon feels a frisson of erotic anticipation as he drinks wine with the centaur.
The eighth fragment, “Geryon’s Father,” conveys Geryon’s father’s deep appreciation for words. After days of mulling silently, his father would reveal the invented word he had been working on: “Nightbollsnorted.”
The ninth fragment, “Geryon’s War Record,” reveals Geryon’s sensitive nature and inability to fight. His “war record” is that he lay on the ground, covering his ears. But he can’t escape the sound of horses being burned alive. He isn’t a soldier, and he doesn’t sympathize with them. He is a “monster,” but what that means in this context is that he is an animal, who sympathizes with the plight of the horses being forced into battle.
The tenth fragment, “Schooling,” begins with an ominous claim that in the days of Geryon’s childhood, police were weak and family was strong, insinuating that Geryon had no way of escaping familial abuse. Then we see the scene of his first day of school, where his mother straightens his wings and sends him out the door.
The eleventh fragment, “Right,” describes a snippet of conversation between Geryon and his little dog. They’re sitting on the bluffs, and Geryon muses to the dog that there may be many little boys who think themselves monsters, but Geryon is the one who’s right. The dog looks at him with love.
The twelfth fragment, “Wings,” describes Geryon taking flight. He sinks “up” into the morning, and sees his tiny dog running around far below on the beach like a “freed shadow.”
The thirteenth fragment, “Herakles’ Killing Club,” takes place at the moment of the dog’s death. He doesn’t see the club, but feels it hit him. The fragment offers a single line of lamentation which conveys the gravitas of this small death: “All/Events carry but one.”
The fourteenth fragment, “Herakles’ Arrow,” takes place at the moment of Geryon’s death. The arrow splits Geryon’s skull in half, and as he leans over before crumpling to the ground, he is compared to a poppy bent in a “whip of Nude breeze.”
The fifteenth fragment, “Total Things Known about Geryon,” dramatizes the fragmentary nature of the legend of Geryon as told from Stesichoros’ unique perspective. The list of things we know of Geryon is short: he loved lightning, he lived on an island, his mother was a river nymph, his father gold. He had six hands, six feet, red wings, and magical cattle. Herakles killed him and his dog for the cattle.
The sixteenth and final fragment, “Geryon’s End,” provides a somber afterword to Geryon’s fleeting life: “The red world And corresponding red breezes/Went on Geryon did not.”
Analysis
Initially, we may assume that these 16 fragments are more or less accurate translations of fragments of Stesichoros’ Geryoneis. Some words immediately signal a modernizing translation—in the first fragment, Geryon’s snout pokes “out of the covers,” and a dream is compared to “jelly.” How ancient is jelly? we might wonder. Relatively quickly it becomes clear that some license has been taken with these translations. By Fragment 3, in which Geryon is eating supper downstairs, and is scolded for wearing a mask at the table, we have cause to wonder if these are translations of an ancient poem at all. Fragment 5 has a “hot plate.” Fragment 7 has a “bar” and a “sofa.” Fragment 10 has “police.” Yet we also see Zeus and Athena, Herakles and a river nymph. We might consider this translation to be apocryphal—a work of doubtful authenticity, though purported to be true. It is an amalgam of ancient and modern aesthetics, of faithful and inventive translation.
One way in which this collection of fragments gestures to an ancient stylistic tradition is in its lack of punctuation. Carson makes creative use of line breaks and enjambment but refrains from commas and periods. Ancient Greek texts were often written in the scriptio continua style, without spaces between words, upper/lower cases, or punctuation to separate sentences. This style may have been practical; writing materials were in short supply. Even after the invention of punctuation, scriptio continua was often used to save space. Carson’s use of upper case letters in the middle of lines, as with the word “At” in “Secret pup At the front end of another red day,” subtly breaks up the flow of the sentence without the overt use of periods or commas.
These fragments are overwhelmingly red. In addition to the 20 repetitions of the word “red,” there are the vividly red images of “hemorrhaging,” the “coil of the hot plate starting to glow,” “three/Measures of wine,” “roses being burned alive,” and his neck broken like a “poppy…in a whip of Nude breeze.” These images provide some clue as to what redness in this story means. There is energy, often violent energy, to this redness. There is also something inescapably seductive about this redness, which coexists uneasily with its morbidity. The magnetic danger of the volcanic imagery throughout this work—though remarkably absent from these fragments—should be brought up here, as we consider what an “autobiography” of “red” might entail, and consider the erupting volcano on the book cover. Fragment 1 informs us that “Geryon was a monster everything about him was red.” Later in Autobiography of Red, we are told that Geryon is like a volcano inside; that he has a monster’s magnetism, the seductiveness of danger. Yet we see nothing monstrous about his behavior. In these fragments he is above all innocent. His mother is the “Engineer of his softness,” who “neatened his little red wings” and sent him off school. He plays with and talks to his little red dog. He has a virginal quality in his nocturnal encounter with the centaur in Fragment VII. The monster which Herakles comes to slay is heroically innocent, and that is one of the most significant conjunctions between Carson’s and Stesichoros’ renderings of Geryon.
In the article "Sympathizing with the Monster: Making Sense of Colonization in Stesichorus' Geryoneis" (2009), classicist Christina Franzen discusses the comparison of slain Geryon to a dying poppy, which we see here in Fragment 14. Carson’s translation preserves Stesichoros’ poppy analogy when she describes how the arrow splitting Geryon’s skull “Made/The boy neck lean At an odd slow angle sideways as when a/Poppy shames itself in a whip of Nude breeze.” We see here a conjoining of erotic and violent imagery, which Franzen points out was always the dual character of Stesichoros’ poppy simile. Flowers are associated with virgins in ancient Greek literature, and their destruction with rape and death. "The fact that the Geryoneis simile's referent is masculine does not detract from its imagery of sex and fertility," Franzen writes. "These very aspects of the poppy simile suggest that the battle between Geryon and Herakles is a violent marriage or sexual encounter." Franzen's translation of this line in Fragment 14 is: "Geryon let down his neck to the side just like when a poppy, shaming its tender body, drops its petals all at once." She notes that Stesichoros’ poppy simile makes reference to the death of Gorgythian in Homer's Iliad, where his "head fell to the side just like a poppy in a garden," but Stesichoros’ simile differs in its undoubtedly erotic nature.
Franzen asserts that Stesichoros is playing with the metaphor of battle as intercourse in how he portrays Herakles and Geryon’s encounter, and Carson leans into this interpretation of Herakles and Geryon’s relationship. In Chapter 35 of Autobiography of Red, the poppy simile re-emerges in a sexual encounter between Herakles and Geryon: “He felt Herakles’ hand move on his thigh and Geryon’s head went back like a poppy in a breeze as Herakles’ mouth came down on his and blackness sank through him.” Though we should take into account that these fragments are a loose and creative translation of Stesichoros’ Geryoneis, it is worth noting that the violence and the sensuality of Herakles and Geryon’s encounter in Autobiography of Red is present also in Stesichoros’ Geryoneis, and has precedent as well in the eroticism of battle in Homeric epics.
