Soul Journeys

 Reading James Hamilton-Paterson's Gerontius naturally got me interested in Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, a work I barely knew, so I've bought a CD (featuring the wonderful Janet Baker as the Angel) and embarked on listening to it. Although I'm very much more a Vaughan Williams man than an Elgarian, I'm impressed and enjoying it. Perhaps it was because of The Dream – a setting of Newman's poem charting the journey of a dying man's soul from this life to the next – that the phrase 'animula vagula blandula' came into my head. It's the first line of a short poem in which the dying Roman emperor Hadrian bids farewell to his soul. I have a vague memory that, years ago, one of the back-page competitions in the Spectator or New Statesman challenged entrants to translate it (I don't suppose that would happen these days). I can't remember whether I entered, but 'Animula vagula blanda' is a translation challenge to which many have risen: more than a hundred translations have been published in book form, and many more can be found on the internet. 
  Here is the text, with a straight translation: 

Animula vagula blandula

Hospes comesque corporis

Quae nunc abibis in loca

Pallidula rigida nudula

Nec ut soles dabis iocos

Little wandering, charming soul,

Guest and companion of my body,

What places will you go to now?

Pale, stiff, naked little thing,

Never again to share a joke.

Among the more eminent of the poets who have translated it are Alexander Pope, who strikes an inappropriately grand note – 

Ah! Fleeting Spirit! wand’ring Fire,
That long hast warm’d my tender Breast,
Must thou no more this Frame inspire?
No more a pleasing, chearful Guest?

Whither, ah whither art thou flying!
To what dark, undiscover’d Shore?
Thou seem’st all trembling, shiv’ring, dying,
And Wit and Humour are no more!

and Henry Vaughan, who comes much closer to the tone of the original  –

My soul, my pleasant soul and witty,
The guest and consort of my body,
Into what place now all alone
Naked and sad wilt thou be gone?
No mirth, no wit, as heretofore,
Nor Jests wilt thou afford me more.

while Charles Tennyson Turner (Alfred's elder brother) makes a neat job of it – 

Little wild and winsome sprite,
The body’s guest and close ally;
To what new regions wilt thou fly?
A pale and cold and naked blight,
With all thy wonted jokes gone by.

and Christina Rossetti's version is stark and bleak – 

Soul, rudderless, unbraced
The body’s friend and guest,
Whither away today,
Unsuppl’d, pale, discas’d
Dumb to thy wonted jest.

Hadrian, of course, was writing in a pre-Christian world, and his relationship with his soul is very different from that of the dying Gerontius, who is fully identified with his soul. Hadrian is bidding farewell to something that has been almost a part of himself but was always separate, and now it is off, alone and unhoused, to inhospitable regions unknown. His soul has been like a charming, mischievous child (all those diminutives) who has lived with him for a while, and is now setting out on his own to who knows where. It's been fun having him around, and Hadrian hopes he'll be all right out there. Gerontius, on the other hand, is not the temporary residence of a visiting spirit: he is his soul and his soul is him, and they journey together into a spiritual realm of which they know at least the outlines. Christian souls are not the lost, anxious, wandering spirits depicted in Homer, and the heaven that awaits at least some of them is conceived in very much more exalted terms than the asphodel meadows or the Elysian fields. I'm hoping Gerontius makes it...