War and Remembrance Multiple Choice Quiz | Poetry

Answer: Astyanax

Hector went to his wife to bid her farewell, for the skirmishes intensified. At this scene Andromache tried to convince Hector to leave the battlefield, lest she would be widowed. But Hector replied:
"No man, against my fate, sends me to Hades. / And as for fate, I'm sure no man escapes it, / Neither a good nor bad man, once he's born."
Hector's son Astyanax was frightened by the glinting helmet. So Hector took off his helmet to comfort his son.
By the way, Hector called his son Scamandrios. But the rest of the Trojans called him Astyanax.
Orestes is the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and is mentioned in the tragedies by Aeschylus.
Telemachos was the son of Odysseus and Penelope and turns up in Homer's "Odyssey" .
And Iulus (also known as Ascanius) was the son of Aeneas and Creusa. We find him and his father in Virgil's "Aeneid".

Answer: Aeneid

The Greek Homer (probably 8th Century BC) had left two magnificent epic poems: the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey". The Roman poet Virgil (70 BC - 19 BC) undertook the venture to create a Roman penchant: the "Aeneid", in which Aeneas (a fugitive from Troy) sails to Italy and founds a dynasty which will lead to Romulus and Remus.
"TImeO DanaOS, et DOna feRENtes" (I've capitalised the stressed syllables) is a reference to the end of the Trojan War. Odysseus came up with a notorious scheme. The Greeks constructed a large statue of a wooden horse, supposedly a gift to the Gods. But in fact a squadron of brave Greeks were hidden inside the statue. When the rest of the Greeks sailed off (a feint), the Trojans rolled the statue inside Trojan walls. The Trojan high priest Laocoon warned against this act with the aforesaid words: "Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes".
The other options are theatre plays by the three best known ancient Greek tragedy writers. "Agamemnon" was written by Aeschylus (ca 525 BC - ca 456 BC), "Alcestis" by Euripides (about 480 BC- about 406 BC) and "Antigone" by Sophocles (497 BC - 406 BC).

Answer: Song of Roland

"The Song of Roland" is an anonymous text in medieval French. It has been translated into many languages, and Project Gutenberg stores the English translation.
The story is that Charlemagne is fighting the Moors in Spain. Charlemagne's rear guard takes position at the pass of Roncevaux. There the Moors attack the rear guard, vastly outnumbering the Christian forces. Roland, the commander of the rear guard, uses his sword Durendal to kill as many Moors he can and only blows the horn Elephant at the last moment. Charlemagne's main force returns to Roncevaux, only to find the rear guard completely slaughtered.
Here is a quote from an English translation of this text (chapter 85):
"'Comrade Rollanz, sound the olifant, I pray; / If Charles hear, the host he'll turn again; / Will succour us our King and baronage.' / Answers Rollanz: 'Never, by God, I say, / For my misdeed shall kinsmen hear the blame,/ Nor France the Douce fall into evil fame! / Rather stout blows with Durendal I'll lay, / With my good sword that by my side doth sway; / Till bloodied o'er you shall behold the blade. / Felon pagans are gathered to their shame; / I pledge you now, to death they're doomed to-day.'"

Song of Solomon is a love song in the Bible.
Song of Bernadette is an historic novel by Franz Werfel (1890-1945).
Song of Hiawatha is an epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882).

Answer: Trojan War

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) was a famous English poet. His work "The Canterbury Tales" is a collection of stories told by pilgrims on the route to Canterbury, and has a structure that reminds us of the "Decamerone" by Boccaccio (1313-1375). "The Canterbury Tales" was completed around 1380, while "Troilus and Chryseide" dates from about the same decade.
Here are the first verses of "Troilus and Chryseide":
"The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen, / That was the king Priamus sone of Troye, / In lovinge, how his aventures fellen / Fro wo to wele, and after out of Ioye, / My purpos is, er that I parte fro ye."

I'll try to give a more modern version, with the stressed syllables in capitals: "The DOUble SORrow of TROIlus to TELL here, / who WAS King PRIamus' SON, of TROY, / In LOving, HOW his adVENtures LEAD him / From WOE to WELL, and AFter ALL of JOY - eh / My PURpose IS to SHARE with YOU this." Don't shoot the pianist: the modern text was my own effort.

In fact "Troilus and Chryseide" is set around the Trojan War, but the main subject is a love story - the war serves only as a background.

You've read earlier in this section that Chaucer died in 1400. The Eighty Years' War (1568-1648), the Crimean War (1853-1856) and the American Civil War (1861-1865) were events yet to come.

Answer: Gerusalemme Liberata

All the options were written by Tasso (1544-1595).
Tasso grew up in Salerno near Naples and was sent to a Jesuit college. He started his career with the epic poem "Rinaldo" in 1562.
"Gerusalemme Liberata" ("Jerusalem Liberated") is Tasso's prime opus. It was published in 1574 and deals with the events from the First Crusade. In ancient Roman tradition, Tasso starts this epic poem with a few lines sketching the content (and reminding very much of the first lines of Virgil's "Aeneid").
The text I chose were the very first two verses of the first chapter of "Gerusalemme Liberata". I haven't found a translation into English, so I've translated it myself as follows: "I sing the pious deeds and the captain / who freed Christ's magnificent tomb".
"Dialoghi" ("Dialogues") is a miscellaneous work by Tasso.
"Rime" ("Rhymes") explores the musicality of poetry: rhyme and rhythm.
"Discorsi del poema eroico" ("A Treatise on the Heroic Poem") is a linguistic guideline to epic poetry.

Answer: Richard III

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is so famous he needs no introduction. He wrote some forty-odd theatre plays, whereby the tragedies, comedies and histories take up each about a dozen works.
"Richard III" is set at the end of the War of the Roses. Richard was the last king of the House of York, and would fight at Bosworth Field (1485) against Henry Tudor. During the battle Richard's mount was killed, after which he (according to Shakespeare) uttered the famous verse "A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!".
In Shakespeare's play as well as in real history, Richard III is killed on the battlefield. Henry Tudor would then in real history be crowned King of England.
"Hamlet" , "Othello" and "Romeo and Juliet" are famous tragedies by Shakespeare, but not English history plays.

Answer: Joan of Arc

Voltaire is the nom de plume of François Marie d'Arouet (1694-1778). He left us at least fifty theatre plays, several novels (including the well known "Candide"), articles for the French "Encyclopédie", and so on. His epic poems are "Henriade" (set in the time of King Henri IV of France), and "La pucelle d'Orléans" ("The Maiden of Orleans"). It is this latter poem to which I refer in this question.
Here are the first verses of this poem:
«Vous m'ordonnez de célébrer des saints: / Ma voix est faible, et même un peu profane. / Il faut pourtant vous chanter cette Jeanne / Qui fit, dit-on, des prodiges divins. // Elle affermit, de ses pucelles mains, / Des fleurs de lys la tige gallicane, / Sauva son roi de la rage anglicane, / Et le fit oindre au maître-autel de Reims.»

"To celebrate the Saints I'll ne'er aspire ! / Profaner subjects suit my feeble lays / To sing great Joan of Arc I'll tune the lyre / who did, they tell us, wonders in her days. // She stopped the progress of invading bands / and long the rage of Britain disappointed / the lily flourished in her virgin hands / 'twas she that saw her king at Reims anointed."
Joan of Arc (1412-1431) was a peasant girl who took up arms against the English during the Hundred Years' War.
Clara Barton (1821-1912) gained fame in the American Civil War. Edith Cavell (1865-1915) was a nurse executed during World War I. And Sophie Scholl (1921-1943) was one of the leaders of a resistance group during World War II. All these women were born long after Voltaire's death.

Answer: Lord Byron

All of these were famous British poets in the first half of the Nineteenth Century.
"The Siege of Corinth" starts with the following lines:
"In the year since Jesus died for men, / Eighteen hundred years and ten, / We were a gallant company, / Riding o'er land, and sailing o'er sea / Oh! but we went merrily!"
Lord Byron (1788-1824) was the poet who described this episode from the Greek War of Independence (1821-1832). He died at Messalonghi, the site of a notorious defeat of the Greek revolutionaries by the Ottoman Empire.
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) gained immortal fame with his poem "Charge of the Light Brigade", inspired by the Battle at Balaclava during the Crimean War.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) is well known as the author of the poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner".
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) wrote several lyrical ballads.

Answer: Heinrich Heine

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) is one of the great German poets form the Sturm und Drang period. His best known work is the "Buch der Lieder" ("Songbook"), which inspired Franz Schubert.
Here is the start of the aforesaid chapter 11:
"Das ist der Teutoburger Wald, / Den Tacitus beschrieben, / Das ist der klassische Morast, / Wo Varus steckengeblieben. // Hier schlug ihn der Cheruskerfürst, / Der Hermann, der edle Recke; / Die deutsche Nationalität, / Die siegte in diesem Drecke. // Wenn Hermann nicht die Schlacht gewann, / Mit seinen blonden Horden, / So gäb es deutsche Freiheit nicht mehr,/Wir wären römisch geworden!"

"This is the Teutoburger Forest, / Described by Tacitus, / This is the classic marsh, / Which stopped Varus. // He was slain by Cherusk King, / Hermann, the noble warrior, / The German nation / Won this manure. // If Herman wouldn't win / With his fair-haired army / German liberty'd not prevail, / we'd be Roman tributary."
I took the liberty to translate this text myself, having found no adequate English version.
By the way: "Maerchen" and "Märchen" are the same word, but to avoid strange renderings in flash quiz style, I chose the less common orthography "Maerchen" in the question.
Shmuel Hanagid (993-1056) was a Jewish poet living in Spain.
Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241) was an Icelandic historian and poet, who left us the "Prose Edda".
Wislawa Szymborska (born 1923) is a Polish poet. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.

Answer: "Bezette Stad" ("Occupied City")

"Bezette Stad" is the poem we're looking for. It is not characterised by rhyme or rhythm as we're used to find in poetry, but it is what we know as "typographical poetry". The manner in which some words are typed enhances the emotional content. For example, the word "dancing" would be typed with dancing letters in a circle.
I've translated the following quote (of course without the typical typography):
"Boom. Kettledrum stroke. There everything lies flat. Oh oh. Again rush violins violoncellos basses copper triangle drums kettledrums rush run rush run rush run STOP! Drama in full battle whores snakes fling themselves on honest men the factory wavers the honour wavers lies down all ideas fall HALT!"
Paul Van Ostayen (1896-1928) wrote many of his poems in a Dadaistic style. The typographical trouvailles were named "Calligrams" after the eponymous poem by Guillaume Apolinnaire (1880-1918).
"Music Hall" is another poem by Van Ostaijen. "Manual of Lyrics" is not a poem, but a textbook by Van Ostaijen.
"Kerkhofblommen" is a book by Guido Gezelle (1830-1899) which contains the alliterating poem I'll quote hereafter:
"Traagzaam trekt de witte wagen / door de stille strate toen / en 't is wenen en 't is klagen / dat ze bin' de wijte doen."
I'll venture a non-literal translation: "Tardily tracts the blank bier / through the silent street / and grieving and weeping / the masses meet."