TWL, Lines 312-321: Translating the Water Section

  312 Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
  313 Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
  314 And the profit and loss.
  315 A current under sea
  316 Picked his bones in whispers.  As he rose and fell
  317 He passed the stages of his age and youth
  318 Entering the whirlpool.
  319                                           Gentile or Jew
  320 O you who turn the wheel and look windward,
  321 Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

  312. THE PHOENICIAN, it seems, has been dead since his opening appearance (see line 47); and from the start he was also given an enigmatic identity. See note 39, and see lines 47-52, when Madame Sosostris successively introduced the already drowned and pearly-eyed Phoenician Sailor and the one-eyed merchant.  Eliot later suggested, at note 219, that the merchant would melt into the sailor.  Eliot also associated the Phoenician with the hyacinth girl (see note 125) and with the originally pearly eyed Prince Ferdinand (see note 218, referring  to Shakespeare, The Tempest (note 0.1) 1.2.376-402)).  See also note 12 for the Phoenician origins of Queen Dido. Phoenicia literally means “land of purple” in Greek, so named for its purple dye trade.  See note 380.

  314. FORGETTING: A sailor who has drowned is like a merchant who is undone by the mechanics of profit and loss; he has not  only lost the mastery of his environment, he has succumbed to it.

  318. THE WHIRLPOOL: The dead body, rising and falling with the waves, begins to decompose, or “melt,” into the pool of the undercurrents.  Compare the cauldrons of St. Augustine and MacBeth (notes 307 and 308).  The stages of age and youth are behind him now, as are the identities of gender and religion.

  GENTILE OR JEW: The speaker now turns ambivalently to the Gentile or Jew, i.e., one without distinction whether one is in the faith or out of it; compare line 365 (“I do not know whether a man or a woman”). See also Romans 3: 9-10 (note 0.5):

  “What then? are we better than they? No, in no wise: for we have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin; As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one.”
 
  320. TURNING THE WHEEL: The whirlpool imagery of line 318 continues.  Recall the Wheel card drawn by Madame Sosostris (line 51), but now “you,” the reader, are said to be turning it and looking windward as you go; see note 311.5.

  321. PHLEBAS alludes to Plato’s Philebas, one who held pleasure over intellect, in contrast to Socrates, who put knowledge first.  See Plato, Philebus (360 BCE), tr. Harold N. Fowler (1925), 48e:
 
  “Socrates: ‘And there are still more who think they are taller and handsomer than they are...’”

  DANS LE RESTAURANT: The entire water section loosely restates the third stanza of Dans le Restaurant (1920), a poem Eliot had originally written in French. Here is my translation, prompted by Eliot’s partial restatement and adding my own take of the “Dans” variations:

 “Phlebas the Phoenician, fifteen days dead,
  Forgot the cry of gulls and the swell of Cornwall
  And the profits and losses and the cargo of tin:
  A current under sea took him far away,
  Past the stages of his former life.
  You have to consider, it was a painful exit;
  All the same, he was a man who once was
  handsome and tall.”