Ha.

I was going to title my post, "This has officially become ridiculous," but then I saw that Fiona had scheduled a post with the title "This is ridiculous" for the same day, so I guess that's out. No matter.

Let me tell you what is truly ridiculous: I have, on my person, four different translations of the Purgatorio.

I know. This is out of control. But you see, as I mentioned last week, I'm having trouble with Merwin's translation. There are no summaries/arguments at the beginning of the chapter, and the notes are few and terse. I just feel like I'm missing so much.

So I took a lunch break and went to the used bookstore by my office. Now I have the Ciardi translation, because I know for sure I can follow it; the Mandelbaum, because as we all know by now, I like Mandelbaum; and, randomly enough, the Musa, because it's a Penguin edition with excellent notes. (That guy on Amazon seems to like him, too.)

I should not be spending so much money on used books, especially the Purgatorio. No one even likes the Purgatorio! But there's no point reading it, I don't think, if I can't make heads nor tails of it. And we'll be done with translations soon enough.

(The bookstore also had the Palma Inferno, and I took a moment to read some of it, and it was just beautiful. Oh well.)

I'm looking forward to getting a look at these translations and letting you know how it goes. I've made painfully slow progress with Merwin, so I'm hoping I'll be able to read faster now, too.

mea culpa

I think I owe John Ciardi an apology. I was all like, "Oh, terza rima, that's original. Focus on the POETRY, John Ciardi." And then I'd get all mad when he'd do that thing where he'd annotate a line by saying, "Yeah, um, this isn't actually in the Italian, but I needed to make a rhyme here, so let's pretend that Dante said this, ok?"

But looking at other translations, it seems like Ciardi didn't change the literal meaning very much, and I... I miss the rhyme. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy structure in poetry. Really, I'm a little ashamed of myself. I memorized "Kubla Khan" when I was twelve because I loved the way it sounded. I am rather fond of Tennyson. Why did I think that I wouldn't want my Dante to be structured?

Let's look at a couple of examples. Here's the canto ending I mentioned liking in Ciardi a while back:

But now the Poet already led the way
to the slope above, saying to me: "Come now:
the sun has touched the very peak of day

above the sea, and night already stands
with one black foot upon Morocco's sands." (IV.136-41)

And here's that same set of lines in W.S. Merwin's translation*:

And already the poet had begun
to climb ahead of me, and he said, "Come now.
See: the meridian is touched by the sun,

and on the shore night has set foot on Morocco." (IV.136-41)

(I believe Esolen's translation of these lines is fairly similar to Merwin's. Perhaps Fiona can give that version in a post or in a comment, just for comparison. What? You don't find translations fascinating? Well, I do.)

Anyway. Don't get me wrong. I like the Merwin translation. There's a certain delicacy, an awareness of diction, that is maybe missing in Ciardi. But there's something about the structure of Ciardi's phrasing, particulary in these canto endings, that Merwin's less formal verse lacks. And I miss it.

One more example. Here's the Pia episode that I quoted last week, in Ciardi:

A third spoke when that second soul had done:
"When you have found your way back to the world,
and found your rest from this long road you run,

oh speak my name again with living breath
to living memory. Pia am I.
Siena gave me birth; Maremma, death.

As he well knows who took me as his wife
with jeweled ring before he took my life." (V. 136-143)

And here are the same lines in Merwin:

"Oh when you are back in the world again
and are rested after the long journey,"
the third spirit followed upon the second,

"pray you, remember me who am La Pia.
Siena made me, Maremma unmade me;
he knows it who, with his ring taking me,

first had me for his wife with his gem." (V.130-136)

Which translation presents Pia in a more poignant, more memorable way?

On the plus side, Merwin has the original poem on the facing pages. I don't know Italian, but I have a decent command of Spanish, so I can piece out a little. Just for fun, here's Pia in Dante's original:

"Deh, quando tu sarai tornato al mondo
e riposato de la lunga via,"
seguitò 'l terzo spirito al secondo,

"ricorditi di me, che son la Pia;
Siena me fé, disfecemi Maremma:
salsi colui che 'nnanellata pria

disposando m'avea con la sua gemma."

----------------------------------------------

*Merwin, W.S., transl. Purgatorio, by Dante Alighieri. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.

Who shall be true to us/ When Daylight Saving Time broke the entire world?

I apologize for my title, which manages to combine the worst elements of not literary and not witty. I blame Daylight Saving Time and its shameless attempts to destroy everything that is good and true in the world, like sleeping in on Sundays.

Here are some fractions and orts of news, a Monday medley of I'm Too Exhausted to Write a Real Post.

1. As Fiona mentioned, we had to return our previous copies of the Commedia, and I now have Merwin for the Purgatorio and Esolen for the Paradiso. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to try multiple new translators. So far this is turning out to have been dumb, and I miss Ciardi more than I would ever have expected. For one thing, he put little "arguments" at the beginning of each chapter, such as you'll find in Paradise Lost. This is brilliant because Dante can be hard to follow, and it's useful to know what to expect. No such luck with Merwin. He also doesn't explain anything. I know I complained about Ciardi's long, often tedious notes, but Merwin has hardly any notes at all, and there's so much now that I don't understand. I'm even missing Ciardi's rhyme scheme more than I would have expected -- more on the differences between translations later.

2. From IHE today:

Gaps in disciplinary pay are not new to higher education... some humanities disciplines remain stuck with salaries much lower than counterparts across the quad. The median salary for a full professor of English, for example ($79,854, across sectors), is less than the median for an assistant professor of business ($84,025). Instructors in English or in philosophy have median salaries below $40,000 at public institutions, while instructors in law and legal studies earn over $60,000 at public institutions.

What's this you say? English professors are among the very lowest paid? I'm shocked! SHOCKED I tell you!

3. I've mentioned the executive director of the MLA, Rosemary Feal, at least once before. Tomorrow I am going to be attending a meeting with her, as well as with the MLA's president and vice president. With luck I will learn some useful and interesting things. I'd better, since the meeting is scheduled for 8am, so I'll be interrupting my normally rigid 8am plans (hit the snooze button, hit the snooze button again, curse, turn the alarm off, walk blindly into my bedroom door, stub my toe, curse again, trip on the carpet...).

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****It has come to my attention that the block quote formatting comes out SUPER weird in Google Reader. Yet another reason to click on our actual blog every single day! That, and to comment on our new format, and maybe offer us your html expertise because we're not very good at this game.

Drop Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goal Posts of Life

One thing that I think we've both made clear we find difficult to stomach is Virgil's consignment to Limbo. But it's even more infuriating, this damnation by default, when you consider the Harrowing of Hell.

The Harrowing of Hell is a part of Christian Doctrine wherein Jesus went to hell and hung out for a bit and preached the gospel or something after he died. But not, apparently, to convert any sinners. According to Virgil via Dante (in Canto IV), he went down to get some very specific individuals.

"I was a novice in this state,
When I saw hither come a Mighty One,
With sign of victory incoronate.
Hence he drew forth the shade of the First Parent,
And that of his son Abel, and of Noah,
Of Moses the lawgiver, and the obedient
Abraham, patriarch, and David, king,
Israel with his father and his children,
And Rachel, for whose sake he did so much,
And others many, and he made them blessed;
And thou must know, that earlier than these
Never were any human spirits saved."*

So Jesus goes down into Hell to grab some Hebrew forefathers. It's not even clear that Virgil knows exactly what happened here and how roundly he was cheated. Seriously, what makes Noah and Adam more holy than any other righteous person who lives before the birth of Christ? OH RELIGIOUS DOCTRINE, YOU PAIN ME.

It's a good thing I don't subscribe to any of this or I think it would keep me up nights.

But seriously, could he just not carry all the good people up so he just picked the ones who were important in the Bible? SOCRATES WOULD BE A VALUABLE ADDITION TO HEAVEN TOO.

*This is from some random internet translation since I no longer have an actual translation of the Inferno. Stupid library, always wanting their books back. Sorry, baby, I didn't mean that, you know I love you. In other news, we have both switched translations: I grabbed the Anthony Esolen translations of Purgatorio and Paradiso, and Serena has the W.S. Merwin Purgatorio and the Esolen Paradiso. More on that anon.

in which Cerberus is icky, times three

I have to say, I envy Fiona her Hollander translation (although the name Hollander now reminds me of Roy Den Hollander -- I'm sorry, Robert and Jean Hollander, it's not your fault). I have the John Ciardi translation (mine is the 1977 Norton edition), and I can't say it's doing a whole lot for me. I would have preferred the Palma or the Mandelbaum -- I've mentioned that I enjoyed Mandelbaum's Aeneid -- but we're very limited in which editions we can obtain, since we really can't afford to buy all the books that we're reading, and -- this is sure to shock you -- the DC public library doesn't have a fantastic selection. (At least we still have a number of libraries. I'm looking at you, Philadelphia.)

Leigh recommended the Palma. I'm dying to read it. Meanwhile, here's a sample of what Fiona is reading compared to what I am reading. Let's look at Canto VI of the Inferno, describing Circle Three, the Gluttons.

Here's Hollander, which Fiona has:

With my returning senses that had failed
before the piteous state of those two in-laws,
which had confounded me with grief,

new torments and new souls in torment
I see about me, wherever I may move,
or turn, or set my gaze.

I am in the third circle, of eternal,
hateful rain, cold and leaden,
changeless in its monotony.

Heavy hailstones, filthy water, and snow
pour down through gloomy air.
The ground it falls on reeks.

Cerberus, fierce and monstrous beast,
barks from three gullets like a dog
over the people underneath that muck.

His eyes are red, his beard a greasy black,
his belly swollen. With his taloned hands
he claws the spirits, flays and quarters them.

The rain makes them howl like dogs.
The unholy wretches often turn their bodies,
making of one side a shield for the other.

When Cerberus--that great worm--noticed us,
he opened up his jaws and showed his fangs.
There was no part of him he held in check.

But then my leader opened up his hands,
picked up some earth, and with full fists
tossed soil into the ravenous gullets.

Here, just for the sake of comparison, are the same lines from Mandelbaum (via Google Books, which doesn't have a preview of Palma, sadly):

Upon my mind's reviving--it had closed
on hearing the lament of those two kindred,
since sorrow had confounded me completely--

I see new sufferings, new sufferers
surrounding me on every side, wherever
I move about or turn or set my eyes.

I am in the third circle, filled with cold,
unending, heavy, and accurséd rain;
its measure and its kind are never changed.

Gross hailstones, water gray with filth, and snow
come streaking down across the shadowed air;
the earth, as it receives that shower, stinks.

Over the souls of those submerged beneath
that mess, is an outlandish, vicious beast,
his three throats barking, doglike: Cerberus.

His eyes are bloodred; greasy, black, his beard;
his belly bulges, and his hands are claws;
his talons tear and flay and rend the shades.

That downpour makes the sinners howl like dogs;
they use one of their sides to screen--
those miserable wretches turn and turn.

When Cerberus, the great worm, noticed us,
he opened wide his mouths, showed us his fangs;
there was no part of him that did not twitch.

My guide opened his hands to their full span,
plucked up some earth, and with his fists filled full
he hurled it straight into those famished jaws.

And then here's what I'm reading, the Ciardi translation:

My senses had reeled from me out of pity
for the sorrow of those kinsmen and lost lovers.
Now they return, and waking gradually,

I see new torments and new souls in pain
about me everywhere. Wherever I turn
away from grief I turn to grief again.

I am in the Third Circle of the torments.
Here to all time with neither pause nor change
the frozen rain of Hellen descends in torrents.

Huge hailstones, dirty water, and black snow
pour from the dismal air to putrefy
the putrid slush that waits for them below.

Here monstrous Cerberus, the ravening beast,
howls through his triple throats like a mad dog
over the spirits sunk in that foul paste.

His eyes are red, his beard is greased with phlegm,
his belly is swollen, and his hands are claws
to rip the wretches and flay and mangle them.

And they, too, howl like dogs in the freezing storm,
turning and turning from it as if they thought
one naked side could keep the other warm.

When Cerberus discovered us in that swill
his dragon-jaws yawed wide, his lips drew back
in a grin of fangs. No limb of him was still.

My Guide bent down and seized in either fist
a clod of the stinking dirt that festered there
and flung them down the gullet of the beast.

Look. I appreciate why translators want to maintain something of the rhythm or the rhyme of the original. But when one -- as Ciardi does -- tries so hard to keep exactly to the rhyme (of something, let's remember, written in a different language), I think that the sacrifice in terms of diction, descriptive power, and original meaning is just too great. Not that I know which of these translations sticks most closely to Dante's Tuscan. But I think in terms of the power of its language, the impact upon the reader, Ciardi's translation is at too great a disadvantage. It comes across as flatter, less immediate than the other two. I don't know. I'd rather read good poetry than rhyming poetry, particularly when it's a translation.

(I'm all for stylistic rigor in the right place. The right place is Coleridge.)

If translations are really your thing, here's a cool thing on Amazon where some random guy gives a succinct description of a number of different translations.

"L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle."

Let me first say that I prefer my translations the old-fashioned way: original work on the left, translation on the facing page.* It's especially important with Dante. If you're not looking over every so often and reading the verse out loud in Italian (even if you have no idea what it means), well, there goes approximately 22% of your pleasure in reading Dante.

Really! Italian is like that. I also feel this way about Spanish poetry: it's just not the same unless you say it in the original language. And even if you don't speak Italian, Dante is ridiculously easy to sound out.

And why, class, does Fiona feel comfortable with it?

Well, it is supposedly unfair to claim (as many have) that Dante invented modern Italian. It's a very romantic notion. His real contribution was bringing his dialect (Florentine/Tuscan) of Italian into the literary tradition in such a major way that he rendered all the other dialects of Italy inferior. Italian exists in its modern form largely because Dante was so important. Without him, the Roman or Milanese dialects might have eventually won out when Italy decided "Hey, it's pretty stupid that we don't have a unified language isn't it?"

It's easy to forget what a literary rock star Dante was, even in his own time. Personally, he was kind of a hermit -- but this is not by any means a guy who had to wait till after his death to be recognized. Scholars began writing commentaries on the Commedia pretty much immediately, and they haven't stopped yet. People waited for the last installment, the Paradiso, like it was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

I've only just begun reading (he's in the middle of a dark wood and there's a leopard), but I'm excited. If I recall, this is a very political poem, so hopefully there will be lots of Guelph/Ghibelline conflict in the subtext and I'll tell you all about it.

*for the Inferno I am reading the Hollander translation. Once I get to Purgatorio, I'm not sure if I will try to continue with this (i.e. make another library trip) or if I'll switch to the Sayers translation. We'll see.

"Like a body wholly body"

Another factor in my shameful posting delinquency is the death of my laptop. I think it needs new parts, for which I am deeply reluctant to pay. I have this old desktop, but it is not only extremely uncomfortable to use, but also itself very dicey -- as a matter of fact, it just died as I was typing that. Way to prove my point, desktop. Anyway, my home computer situation is distinctly unreliable right now. And I am feeling whiny about that, as you can probably tell. Sorry.

Man. And that introductory essay -- which I finally finished -- was embarrassingly awful. I felt like I should read it because I don't have easy access to a lot of scholarship on the works that we're reading, and besides, the authors are two very respected classicists... but wow. Here's an example:

The Agamemnon coils, tightens; the light in the dark is strangled off at last. The Libation Bearers plunges out of darkness towards the light -- the disaster that plunges us into darkness once again. The Eumenides sweeps us through a phantasmagoria of light and dark, of darkness breeding light, until the night brings forth the torches of our triumph, like the torches of that Fury Clytaemnestra, "glorious from the womb of Mother Night." Night and day are mother and daughter, suffering and the illumination it can bring. For the energy of the Furies is as great with order as the energy of Dionysus. They are his wild maenads gathering moral force. They are the Mean Dynamic. ("The Serpent and the Eagle," 81)

Seriously, Robert Fagles? No, the entire essay is like this. Here's another choice quote: "Athena is both the Victor and the spirit of the loom; and as her citizens raised her robe to the wind, like a sail to buoy forth their ship of state, it may have symbolized the fabric of Athenian society, resilient and controlled, which they bestowed upon posterity" (91).

Yes. "Like a sail to buoy forth their ship of state." And I thought Seamus Heaney's introduction to Beowulf was bad. I had no idea. None. I'm not sure whether to blame W.B. Stanford or to chalk it up as another case of poets-can't-write-prose syndrome. (Wikipedia calls Fagles a poet, and his obituary in the NYT mentions that his B.A. and Ph.D were in English, but I'm not really sure whether he wrote much apart from his translations. Either way, they count as poetry, because they are beautiful and poetic and not super-literal anyway.)

Fiona said that the writing reminded her of graphic novels, and I can totally see that. The diction is very intense and very, I don't know, all-encompassing, like it's trying to say everything that can be said about the Oresteia, but compressed into 84 pages. Eighty-four interminable pages.

When I finished the essay and started Agamemnon, I realized that it's the same version we read in Hum 110. Going through the syllabus archive, I see that Reed first used the Lattimore and then the Lloyd-Jones before settling on the Fagles, perhaps because they don't use his Iliad or Aeneid. In any case, I wish we'd chosen a translation that I hadn't already read (you may have noticed that I enjoy comparing), but it doesn't much matter. I just wanted to re-read it because I felt like I didn't remember it particularly well.

One more thing about the introduction -- well, I could say a lot more, but it's almost midnight and I still have real work left to do. The authors use a ton of quotes throughout. For some they cite sources; for others they just use quotation marks and, I don't know, assume the reader gets it? So of course half the time I don't. But. "The Furies will generate life; Athena will lead that life to social victory. Together they express a 'blessed rage for order' " (85).

This refers to a very famous, very excellent Wallace Stevens poem that you may know already; if you don't, you should read it because it is amazing. It's probably on our booklist, but you can go ahead and read it now.

More soon.

There is chaos under my blog, and the situation is excellent.

Fiona and I have discussed the fact that our target audience here is basically... my mother. Except I think her computer is broken. And possibly Fiona's little brother because I understand he spends a lot of time online. My boss assures me that he reads it too--very comforting--but really, the idea behind the Literary Iditarod essentially guarantees that no one will read it. Most people, I would guess, have not read the books we're reading, or maybe read them for a high school class that they'd rather forget. The few who have read most of these books are likely already to know a lot more about them than we do, and therefore to find our observations trivial and boring.

Mostly I feel ok about no one reading our blog. I did feel a little bit worse when I read this review of The Wordy Shipmates. In fairness, at times that book was--okay--annoying, but the review was harsher than I felt was really warranted. "With all these middlebrow historians making scholarly work perfectly accessible," Virginia Heffernan writes, "do we really need still more accessibility — pierced-brow history, maybe, with TV and pop-music references?"

Ouch.

Another burn: "Vowell, who constantly emphasizes how nerdy (meaning impressive) she finds her own interest in the Puritans, introduces figures like John Winthrop and Roger Williams as if no one’s ever heard of them."

All right, I'm just going to own this one right here and now: I didn't know who they were before I read The Wordy Shipmates. Admittedly, I dropped out of high school after a year, and got two years of what should've been my high school education at decidedly mediocre Irish schools, so my knowledge of American history is... well... there's not a lot of it--but I'm not the most ignorant person there ever was, and I didn't know the first thing about Winthrop and Williams. It seems unlikely, moreover, that I would've been inspired to pick up a book about them if Fiona hadn't spoken so highly of Sarah Vowell. Just because something has been made accessible doesn't mean it's appealing.

Anyway. I digress. Heffernan's point is that, if you really want to learn about the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Vowell is maybe not your best bet. And of course if you really want to learn about Western lit classics, we are not your best bet. Which is fine, since that's not so much the point of the Literary Iditarod. But part of the point of the Iditarod is to make silly comments about great works, which is sort of the Sarah Vowell model. I can see why Heffernan is irritated about that--there's a lot more to say about the Massachussetts Bay Colony (/Homer), and you shouldn't have to have basic history (/literature) fed to you with a spoon. But isn't there room for both highbrow scholarship and lightweight books (/blogs)? I think it can be helpful to have a wide range of viewpoints and contexts; we can't all be David McCullough (/...Clifford Geertz?).

The Iditarod is also largely extraneous to one of its other ostensible raisons d'être: preparing me for the lit GRE. Most of the advice I see about it says buy the Princeton Review guide, maybe buy a Norton anthology or two, and cram. And that's more than reasonable--having seen some sample questions in my study book, well... I need not have skimmed a word of Hawthorne (and I haven't, yet) to be able to name Hester Prynne, and all the epic poetry I can read will never tell me that it was Maya Angelou who worked as a streetcar conductor and also as a prostitute (nor will it tell you that my mom used to date her son, Guy Johnson; I hope that's on the test).

I feel like I should do the reading, though, or at least as much of it as I can. And I enjoy it. So maybe there's no real reason for you to read our blog or for us to write it (especially Fiona--she doesn't even want to go to grad school!).

But if you are reading our blog and you have read Homer, I'd love to hear your thoughts about the Odyssey versus the Iliad. I'm finding the Odyssey so much more readable, to the point where I've flipped ahead a few times at tense points to see when things will be resolved. It's gripping! I want to know how things go down!* I'm sure some of that has to do with Lattimore vs. Fagles, but is some just a difference in the books themselves? David says that "a lot more happens in the Odyssey," but he's only read the condensed version, too, so I'm not sure I can trust his opinion. Is the Odyssey intrinsically more interesting? Is Fagles just way, way easier (I mean, he definitely is)? Knox writes,

One ancient critic, the author of the treatise On the Sublime, thought that the Odyssey was the product of Homer's old age, of "a mind in decline; it was a work that could be compared to the setting sun--the size remained, without the force." ...What prompted his comment "without the force" is clearly his preference for the sustained heroic level of the Iliad over what he terms the Odyssey's presentation of "the fabulous and incredible" as well as the realistic description of life in the farms and palace of Odysseus' domain, which, he says, "forms a kind of comedy of manners." (23)

Maybe I just like the comedy of manners stuff... the Iliad's gory battle scenes got a little repetitive for me. (Although when it comes to gore, the Odyssey maybe tops its predecessor; I was going to quote from the scene where Odysseus gouges out Polyphemus' eye, but then I realized that I don't even want to read it again, let alone commit it to print. Eye-gouging is always bad, no matter whose they are... Oedipus', Gloucester's, Polyphemus'... it's always gross and I always feel sick. Why you gotta gouge out so many eyes, Great Authors?) One of the things that keeps the Odyssey interesting is the huge variety of settings, characters, and events.

So did you like the Iliad better or the Odyssey? Why? And which are your favorite translations?

I wanted to make a more Odyssey-centric post, but I guess I got sidetracked. So further Odyssey to come.

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*Even though Homer basically tells you everything at the outset:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.
But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove--
the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sungod wiped from sight the day of their return. [...]
But one man alone...
his heart set on his wife and his return--
Calypso, the bewitching nymph, the lustrous goddess, held him back,
deep in her arching caverns, craving him for a husband.
But then, when the wheeling seasons brought the year around,
that year spun out by the gods when he should reach his home,
Ithaca--though not even there would he be free of trials,
even among his loved ones--then every god took pity,
all except Poseidon. He raged on, seething against
the great Odysseus till he reached his native land. (ll. 1.1-10, 15-24)

Geez, Homer, way to give away like the entire plot. It's cool. I didn't want any suspense anyway. But really, not even a "spoiler alert" or anything?

he blinded me with library science!

Here we have Homer's Odyssey as translated by the celebrated Robert Fagles, who died this past March. He was the Arthur Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Princeton University, where he had taught since 1960. (Wow.)

This is the 1996 Penguin Classics edition, with an introduction and notes by Bernard Knox--another well-known classicist, who taught at Yale for many years--who also did the intro for Fagles' Iliad and three Theban plays. I chose the Fagles on purpose--but let me backtrack for a moment.

It is something of a detour (heh) to read the Odyssey after Beowulf. We have a couple of reasons for this slight change of plans. After learning that the GRE would have more than just the English-language classics on it, we decided to add some Greeks to our list, things that either I hadn't read for Hum110 or have since grown fuzzy on (I have got to reread the Oresteia--I can never remember what happens in which part). The Odyssey, in fairness, I probably don't need to read; I have read and studied the Iliad, after all, and I'm very familiar with the story; we even read the condensed version in high school.

But then... we read the condensed version in high school. They gave Homer the Reader's Digest treatment. It just doesn't seem right! I don't want to live my life with the secret shame of never having read the real thing. In any case, I really wanted to read a Fagles translation, because as I mentioned before, we read the Lattimore for Hum110, and a lot of the geekier classics-heads were pretty irked that we read him instead of Fagles. (But Lattimore was PBK, which is a fun thing.) So I wanted to know what I was missing.

I haven't gotten very far in yet, so I'm not sure how I feel. I know I don't feel very good, though, about something Knox mentions in the introduction. He says that Fagles' Iliad ends with, "And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses" (24.944). If I recall correctly (I think I do), Lattimore's ends with, "Such was the funeral of Hector, breaker of horses." Fiona says that she believes Greek to be a very active language, and maybe Fagles' translation is more accurate. Which is altogether possible; Lattimore, of course, does his best to approximate the poem's original meter (Oliver Taplin, in this 1990 review of Fagles' Iliad, says that Lattimore chose a "long, free six-beat line"), but he has also gotten a lot of praise for sticking closely to the text's original meaning. Fagles--says Taplin--uses between three and seven beats per line, but usually six. A more relaxed meter might allow him to translate more directly, but really I'm just speculating.

In any case. Fagles is very famous, and I've read Lattimore, so it's Fagles' Odyssey we're reading. I really loved Knox's introduction, and I want to share three exciting things that I learned from it:

1. The Odyssey, of course, is in dactylic hexameter, as are the Iliad and the Aeneid. Hexameter means six metrical units, obviously; Knox informs me that a dactyl is "a long plus two shorts" and spondees are "two longs." (Boring, but it's good to know about meter.) But! What I didn't know is that, "The syllables are literally long and short; the meter is based on pronunciation time, not, as in our language, on stress" (12). I guess that's something I should have known by now; I'm sure we must have discussed it in class. But as an English major--and one who focused on Shakespeare!--I never so much as entertained the notion of a metrical style based on something other than stresses. Exciting times, guys.

2. This is... this is kind of the best thing ever. In a discussion of whether Homer would have composed his works as oral poetry or in writing, Knox says,

We do not know when papyrus, the paper of the ancient world, was first available in Greece, though we do know that it came at first not from its almost exclusive source, Egypt--which was not opened to Greek merchants until the sixth century B.C.--but from the Phoenician port the Greeks called Byblos (the Greek word for book was biblion--our "Bible"). 21

Guys. That is awesome. Dictionary.com tells the same story, but I would never have known if Knox hadn't told me. It also explains what libros are doing in the biblioteca. Oh, Bernard Knox, you blinded me with library science.

3. One more. Just one. On the subject of pirates, Knox mentions that "the young Julius Caesar was captured by pirates near the small island of Pharmacusa off the Ionian coast and held for ransom" (29). Caesar? Pirates? Ransom? Someone make a musical out of this! Or at least a bad Johnny Depp vehicle.

I'm Captain Evil (and I'm General Disarray!)

Aaah! I had intended for this to be a longer and more thought-out entry, but I got caught up doing Actual Work and now it is already midnight. I should really give it up and go to bed, but I just finished this Tolkien paper, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" (of which Wikipedia has a brief but accurate summary) and I wanted to mention a few things it brought to mind. Curse you, Norton Critical Editions, you and your large samplings of interesting and relevant critical material. Whatever. I'll sleep through the musical we're seeing tomorrow. (The plot summary of which reminds me of two different novels I read recently, and oh god, I'm already going off on tangents.)

Anyway. Tolkien. (I'll leave the LOTR angle to Fiona, since it's not my department.)

He discusses Beowulf in the context of its inevitable companions, the Aeneid and the Odyssey (apparently Beowulf used to be known as "the Beowulf"!); he considers the former a more appropriate counterpart, although he demurs on the question of whether Beowulf's author had read Virgil (I don't know if this question has been resolved since 1936, and if so, what the answer is; I'll investigate further):

There is, of course, a likeness in places between these greater and smaller things, the Aeneid and Beowulf, if they are read in conjunction. But the smaller points in which imitation or reminiscence might be perceived are inconclusive, while the real likeness is deeper and due to certain qualities in the authors independent of the question whether the Anglo-Saxon had read Virgil or not.... We have the great pagan on the threshold of the change of the world; and the great (if lesser) Christian just over the threshold of the great change in his time and place.... (p. 120).

In a footnote, Tolkien adds

In fact the real resemblance of the Aeneid and Beowulf lies in the constant presence of a sense of many-storied antiquity, together with its natural accompaniment, stern and noble melancholy. In this they are really akin and together differ from Homer's flatter, if more glittering, surface. (p. 120)

Ooh, burn. Seriously though, I did think of the Aeneid much more frequently than the Iliad (I haven't read the Odyssey yet, ok) while I was reading Beowulf, but I wasn't sure how much of that was because I read the Mandelbaum translation of the Aeneid and the Lattimore translation of the Iliad (mah hexameter, let me show u it). Lattimore's Iliad is very formal, whereas Mandelbaum's Aeneid and Heaney's Beowulf, neither of which attempts rigorously to adhere to the meter of its original, share -- perhaps partly as a result -- an immediacy and intensity that Lattimore's Iliad lacks. Since I have no Greek nor Latin nor Old English, I can't be sure which of all these qualities result from the poems as written and which are a consequence of their various translations. Tolkien's jab at "Homer's flatter, if more glittering, surface" would hint that at least some of this difference is inherent to the originals, but I just don't know.

One aspect of Beowulf that did remind me of Homer was the epithets, but oh, SO MUCH BETTER. If you thought "Hector, breaker of horses" was a pretty sweet moniker, how about Grendel, "captain of evil" (l. 749)? And while we're on the topic of exciting nomenclature, let's not forget the line where Beowulf describes his sword as a "sharp-honed, wave-sheened wonderblade" (l. 1490). (Hey, baby... wanna see my wonderblade?)

Beowulf also contains my new favorite example of serious understatement. When Grendel is fighting Beowulf in Heorot, the hall where he (Grendel) has been murdering people every night for the past twelve years or so, Grendel begins to realize that he is losing: "The latching power/ in his fingers weakened; it was the worst trip/ the terror-monger had taken to Heorot" (ll. 763-65).

Yeah, the worst trip for sure. You know. The one where Beowulf rips off his arm, which injury shortly results in his agonizing death. Look, you guys, it was definitely way worse than those other trips where he just killed and ate a bunch of people and stuffed their remains into his dragon-skin pouch [Per Beowulf: "I had done no wrong, yet the raging demon/ wanted to cram me and many another/ into this bag" (ll. 2089-91)].

Oh dear. I have a lot else to say about Tolkien and Christianity and epithets and kennings (shield-clash! wave-vat! neck-ring! hate-honed! hall-roofing! bone-house!), but somehow I have been writing this post for well over an hour. More soon.

Seamus Heaney, Poets Laureate, and big words

I'm trying to figure out whether Seamus Heaney is officially Ireland's Poet Laureate or not, and the internet is giving me very conflicting stories. I see news items in which he is referred to as such, but the Wikipedia doesn't even say that Ireland has a poet laureate.

I remember my classmates at the Drogheda Grammar School complaining about him, and I thought that they said he was the poet laureate. But now I'm not sure, and I've been looking it up for so long that the words "poet" and "laureate" have lost all meaning to me. Maybe he is, like, de facto poet laureate; my friend Tash says, "We have a Poet Laureate? First I've heard. Still, if it's anyone, it'll be him...."

He's Irish and a poet and a Nobel laureate, so I guess that's close enough.

This is the poem about which I specifically remember hearing complaints; they had to study it for the Leaving Cert. His wife is rummaging in a drawer, and she reminds him of a skunk. Now I feel like I should study Seamus Heaney. It's so easy to get sidetracked.

Should you be reading Seamus Heaney's introduction to his translation of Beowulf -- to return to the topic ostensibly at hand -- you may come across a number of unfamiliar words. Perhaps being a poet does not incline one to write clearly in prose, or perhaps I'm thinking of being an academic. In any case, here are some words that I encountered with which I was unfamiliar or only sort of familiar (you know, when you've read a word enough times that it makes sense to you in context, but then you realize that you couldn't define it if you were asked); I will regard this as practice for the verbal section of the GRE. Mmm... Latin.

All definitions are via dictionary.com and/or the Wikipedia; I sure miss Reed's OED subscription.

in illo tempore: "at that time"

effulgence: "A brilliant radiance."

tumulus: "An artificial hillock, especially one raised over a grave, particularly over the graves of persons buried in ancient times; a barrow." Or, in geology, "a domelike swelling or mound formed in congealed lava."

foundedness: Well, actually, dictionary.com doesn't know what he means by this. Nor do I. We'll get there...

lambency: "An appearance of reflected light"; the adjective lambent is defined as "flickering lightly over or on a surface," or "effortlessly light or brilliant," or simply "having a gentle glow; luminous." David said he knew this one because there is a video game in which you can get "lambent armor." Apparently I've missed a lot by not playing video games.

chthonic: "Of or pertaining to the deities, spirits, and other beings dwelling under the earth." Also, "pertaining to the earth; earthy." This makes more sense to me in context; Heaney seems to use it to mean something like "inherent" when he says that "the dragon... could be read as a projection of Beowulf's own chthonic wisdom refined in the crucible of experience" (Translator's Introduction, xxxi).

There are probably more, but those are all the ones I can think of for now. This is the sentence that got me started on this topic to begin with (Heaney is speaking of the dragon): "Once he is wakened, there is something glorious in the way he manifests himself, a Fourth of July effulgence fireworking its path across the night sky; and yet, because of the centuries he has spent dormant in the tumulus, there is a foundedness as well as a lambency about him" (Translator's introduction, xxx).

Heaney's meaning is clarified somewhat by the following sentence, in which he describes the dragon as "at once a stratum of the earth and a streamer in the air, no painted dragon but a figure of real oneiric power..." (xxx). But really. This is what I mean about poets writing prose. He could have just said, "The dragon, having slept in the earth for a very long time, comes out all luminous and airborne (sparkly and flying!), which juxtaposition contributes to his impact and complexity in the reader's impression." Or even "DRAGON=AIR+FIRE+EARTH."

But no. Then I wouldn't get to brush up on my Latin roots.