"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.

flotsam; jetsam

1. Hee. Scott M. sent me this parody, A. E. Housman's Fragment of a Greek Tragedy. Being sent things related to the Iditarod pleases me very much. My mom sent me a bunch of musty old classics from her bookshelves, and Fiona's dad sent me an advice manual about becoming a professor (thanks, Tom!).

2. This review really makes me want to reread The Histories, which we are not reading for the Iditarod, but which is utterly delightful. I recall that he described and endorsed the system of one town wherein the most beautiful girls were auctioned off as wives to the highest bidder; the proceeds from this were then used to pay other men to take the plainer girls as wives. I love this idea. It is so practical, and everyone wins. Beauty becomes a communal asset! I defy anyone to come up with a better way to get all the young folks married off.

things that will slowly drive me insane

Just for those of you who haven't read it (and, I don't know, have an aversion to the Wikipedia), here's a very quick recap of the plot of the Oresteia.

1. Agamemnon: Agamemnon comes home from the Trojan war, after being away for ten years. His wife, Clytaemnestra, has been resentful of the fact that he sacrificed one of their daughters, Iphigeneia, at the outset of his journey, apparently because Artemis would not provide the necessary winds without a sacrifice. Also, she -- Clytaemnestra -- has been getting it on with Agamemnon's cousin, Aegisthus, for some time. So when Agamemnon gets home, she coerces him into walking on some fancy tapestries, or something, because I guess this qualifies as hubris and will put him out of favor with the gods? Then she kills him while he's in the tub (not classy). Then she kills Cassandra, whom he'd brought back with him as a slave.

2. The Libation Bearers: Some uncertain number of years later, Orestes, -- the son of Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra -- who has long been elsewhere, returns to Argos and reunites with his sister, Electra, whom he finds mourning at their father's grave. They agree that their father was awesome and their mother sucks, and they hatch a plan to kill her. Orestes heads to the palace in disguise and proceeds to kill Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra.

3. The Eumenides: The Furies, who traditionally punish those who kill their mothers,* are after Orestes. Apollo tells them to cut it out, because the murder was justified and he told Orestes it was ok. The Furies are pissed about this, and Athena comes in to mediate. She ends up holding a little trial for Orestes; the jury is tied, so Athena breaks the tie in Orestes' favor. The Furies are pretty much shitting bricks until Athena, in essence, convinces them to use their power for good rather than evil. And they all lived happily ever after, the end.

Ok. So that's all very well and good, and you probably didn't need all that background, but there it is just in case. HERE IS THE PART THAT IS BREAKING MY BRAIN.

During the whole Apollo-Orestes-Furies disagreement, Orestes summons Athena to come help out. And in she comes:

Enter ATHENA, armed for combat with her aegis and her spear.

ATHENA
From another world I heard a call for help.
I was on the Scamander's banks, just claiming Troy.
The Achean warlords chose the hero's share
of what their spear had won -- they decreed that land,
root and branch all mine, for all time to be,
for Theseus' sons a rare, matchless gift.

Home from the wars I come, my pace unflagging,
wingless, flown on the whirring, breasting cape
that yokes my racing spirit in her prime. (The Eumenides 408-16)

Really, Athena? You just came from the Trojan war, just now? Because I am pretty sure it ended YEARS ago. Like, before Agamemnon came home. I mean, I don't think he bailed before the job was done, or anything. Are you a very, very slow traveler? Is there a hole in the space-time continuum?

Athena, I never ask you where you really were when you come home at four am and claim you were "just out with friends." I respect your privacy, Athena. So why would you lie to me? It hurts me when you lie.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
*I love the exchange during which they explain this duty to Apollo:

APOLLO
Authority -- you? Sound out your splendid power.

LEADER
Matricides: we drive them from their houses. (The Eumenides 207-8)

How's that for a company slogan? Matricides: we drive them from their houses!

mush!

Guys, I have to say, the Iditarod is a much slower process than I had anticipated. We started in early December, and I should easily finish the Oresteia on the Metro up to the gym tonight (Fiona has already started the Inferno), but that's, what, three books in almost two months? And other than Small World, I really haven't read anything else.

Meanwhile, I have all these new books that I want to read. And these. And some others. Seriously, it's out of control. The free book situation is killing me. Worse yet, my uncle has a new book and I have no excuse not to read it since my dad sent me a copy. And a few of my friends have writing projects that I have sworn to read that are rotting on my hard drive.

As a child I read constantly, often several books at a time. I was the kid who'd get in trouble for reading during class, who'd be so engrossed in a novel that I'd fail to hear the bell at the end of recess, who'd miss the point of every social occasion and make a beeline for the host's bookshelf. Adults would tell me, "Oh, I used to read too, when I was younger, but now I just don't have time." And I would think, how is that possible? Who doesn't have time to read?

It seems unreasonable. I don't do that much with myself. I go to work, I exercise, I take a shower, have dinner, do my editing, and the next thing I know it's midnight or one am and I've got to get to bed. Fiona squeezes in reading time by staying up late late late, but I'm a much less energetic person than she is, and I really need my seven-to-eight -- if I get less than six hours of sleep, I'm essentially useless, I barely function (it's not at all clear how I got through college).

The only time I find to read is on the metro, which I take when I'm going to the rock gym, so a couple of times a week. And sometimes on weekends I have a spare hour or two.

This is shameful. I need to do better, but I don't know how.

"We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing..."

Not to denigrate one of the great dramatic works of human history, but the Oresteia (mostly the Eumenides) is an awful lot like a Thanksgiving pageant.

After all, it reminds everyone of our noble origins. The characters go through tribulations (banishment! starvation! religious persecution! curses on one's house!) and it leads them to forge some of the founding principles of their culture. In the end, everyone sings. Democracy is awesome, you guys. Also when the Pokanoket share their corn.

"Listen my children, and you shall hear
Of the trial of Orestes by a jury of peers
He killed his mother but that ain't no crime
And Apollo was in favor of it at the time
The main point is justice and mercy and such
You can't be concerned with revenge. There's too much
Of that nowadays, kids, but you must resist.
Cause that way democracy cannot exist."

It's a celebration of cultural values, displayed in a simple and ritualistic way. But the Oresteia doesn't have any children with papier-mache muskets (and for that we are truly thankful.)

Tiny addendum, somewhat relevant

Serena's talk about Oedipus made me think of a monologue which I love and often quote, and which I believe she and I have discussed though I would not swear to it. I have discussed this one with a LOT of people. It's from Richard Greenberg's Three Days of Rain, which should have won the Pulitzer in 1998 (damn you, Paula Vogel! Not really...):

PIP: No, I mean, it's just, like ... if some oracle told you were going to kill your father and marry your mother, wouldn't you just never kill anybody and stay single? ... And then, if you did inadvertently kill somebody, in the heat of the moment or something, and later started dating? Wouldn't you be smart enough to, like, avoid older women? I mean, to me the moral of that story is not your destiny awaits you. To me it's ... you know ... Do the Fucking Math.
WALKER: You must publish.

"Agamemnon is the king!"

Fiona always pronounces Aeschylus "ess-keh-lus" and I had always heard "ees-keh-lus." I looked it up to see which was preferred and I found a hilarious nightmare. If you have JSTOR access, check out this article; if you don't, carry on pronouncing it whichever way you always have, because it doesn't seem to matter either way (rather like "edd-i-pus" versus "eed-i-pus). Academics always gotta be fighting about something!

Anyway. Reading The Libation Bearers (the second of the three plays that make up the Oresteia) made me wonder about the Electra complex, which I had heard was the female version of the Oedeipus complex. This seemed sort of unfair to me, because in Aeschylus' version, at least -- I haven't read the Electra plays by Sophocles or Euripedes, although now I feel like I should, but not in these dreadful old versions that you can get for free online -- Electra doesn't do anything nearly as drastic as Oedipus (I don't think that she does in anyone's version of the story).

Appropriately, it seems like the Electra complex isn't as big a thing, anyway. According to Wikipedia,

The idea is based largely on the work of Sigmund Freud, who uses the Oedipus complex as a point of reference for its elaboration. The term, however, was introduced by Carl Jung in 1913. Freud himself explicitly rejected Jung's term, because it "seeks to emphasize the analogy between the attitude of the two sexes," and continued to use the [term] feminine Oedipus attitude in his own writings.

That's very good of Freud, since it doesn't seem reasonable to saddle poor Electra with all the baggage of Oedipus -- she doesn't appear to be in love with her father at all, though she does want her mother dead (come to think of it, I always thought Freud's terminology was a bit hard on Oedipus, too, since in the story he actually goes to great lengths to avoid killing his father and marrying his mother, rather than having some messed-up complex wherein he wants to do those things, although honestly if I were Oedipus and aware of that prophecy, which he was, I think I would've married a much-younger woman and avoided killing anyone at all, just to be on the safe side, but then there would be no play, I guess).

I will grant that Electra speaks of her father and her siblings with a degree of intensity that is rather off-putting, at least to my judgmental modern taste. When she and Orestes are reunited, she says,

You light to my eyes, four loves in one!
I have to call you father, it is fate;
and I turn to you the love I gave my mother --
I despise her, she deserves it, yes,
and the love I gave my sister, sacrificed
on the cruel sword, I turn to you.
You were my faith, my brother --
you alone restore my self-respect. (ll.240-247)

Hmm... yeah. Both she and Orestes are reeeeally into Agamemnon:

ORESTES
Dear father, father of dread,
what can I do or say to reach you now?
What breath can reach from here
to the bank where you lie moored at anchor? ...

ELECTRA
Then hear me now, my father,
it is my turn, my tears are welling now,
as child by child we come
to the tomb and raise the dirge, my father. (322-25; 336-39)

Can we talk about this? One line about Iphigeneia "sacrificed/ on the cruel sword," with nary a mention of who was doing the sacrificing, and then they're both worshiping their father like he's the second coming? (Anachronism, schmanachronism.)

It's not clear to me whether Clytaemnestra's hatred of Agamemnon is a product of his having killed Iphigeneia, her desire to replace him with Aegisthus, or both. Or maybe neither. But you'd think, at least, that Orestes and Electra would feel a shade more ambivalence about the dude who killed their sister so that his ships could sail. Is that so much better than what Clytaemnestra did?

Speaking of family ties, man, I had forgotten how disturbing the description of the sacrifice is. (I wonder if it's this bad in other translations?) It's hard to blame Agamemnon for how sexual these lines sound, since they're spoken by the chorus, but I want to blame someone:

"My father, father!" -- she might pray to the winds;
no innocence moves her judges mad for war.
Her father called his henchmen on,
on with a prayer,
"Hoist her over the altar
like a yearling, give it all your strength!
She's fainting -- lift her,
sweep her robes around her,
but slip this strap in her gentle curving lips...
here, gag her hard, a sound will curse the house" --

and the bridle chokes her voice... her saffron robes
pouring over the sand
her glance like arrows showering
wounding every murderer through with pity
clear as a picture, live,
she strains to call their names...
I remember often the days with father's guests
when over the feast her voice unbroken,
pure as the hymn her loving father
bearing third libations, sang to Saving Zeus --
transfixed with joy, Atreus' offspring
throbbing out their love. (Agamemnon 227-47)

Is there any way that this scene could not have been intended to sound profoundly sexual? It's hard to think Fagles would've added all that reeking innuendo just for kicks. I wonder what the intention is there; that is, what purpose is served by making Agamemnon sound like a child molester as well as a murderer. Leigh Walton? Anyone?

Although, speaking of scenes that sound closer to PG-13 than you'd think would be necessary, let's go back to Electra one more time. Here she is at Agamemnon's grave:

What kindness, what prayer can touch my father?
Shall I say I bring him love for love, a woman's
love for husband? My mother, love from her?
I've no taste for that, no words to say
as I run the honeyed oil on father's tomb. (The Libation Bearers 87-91)

Well, shit. Maybe Jung was onto something after all.

"The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too."

Man, you get into the Oresteia -- and yes, I've read it before, but still it is surprising -- and you understand why drama ever got off the ground. This is so raw. I don't quite know which bits are Fagles and which are Aeschylus, but this text is achingly gorgeous is a way you just don't see in modern drama. Or when you do it rings false.

I'd like a few words more, a kind of dirge,
it is my own. I pray to the sun,
the last light I'll see,
that when the avengers cut the assassins down
they will avenge me too, a slave who died,
an easy conquest.
Oh men, your destiny.
When all is well a shadow can overturn it.
When trouble comes a stroke of the wet sponge,
and the picture's blotted out. And that,
I think that breaks the heart. (Agamemnon, ll. 1345-1354)

Not to say that it's primitive.

I mean, it kind of is. But it has a level of dramatic sophistication that's also unexpected. The Greeks are the first we have, and as such we assume they only understood this visceral power of drama and the basic structures of things. But Aeschylus does nuance too! Look at the scene in which Electra discovers Orestes by following his footprints. That could be in Shakespeare. Or O'Neill, for that matter.

(O'Neill looooves Aeschylus. Witness Morning Becomes Electra, which actually is the Oresteia but set in the 19th century. Unfortunately, O'Neill didn't have Aeschylus' knack for saying a lot in a very short time. Witness O'Neill's NINE-ACT PLAY, "Strange Interlude." Which is all very well, but the Oresteia is a far better illustration of the different stages of womanhood when women are battered by fate and it is not NINE ACTS LONG. EUGENE.)

Speaking of that, I KNOW that if you've ever read the Oresteia you've been upset by this too, but REALLY we begin the tradition of democracy by proving that mothers aren't parents, but more like gardeners?

The woman you call the mother of the child
is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed,
the new-sown seed that grows and swells inside her.
The man is the source of life (Eumenides, ll. 666-669)

Thanks Aeschylus. Thanks a lot. I hope that resolved your mother issues right there.

"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.

penance

We are extremely sorry about our lack of blogulation this past week. The inauguration and related activities ate up all of our time, and although we actually did bring our copies of the Oresteia to read while we waited for the swearing-in to start, it was just impossible to get any reading done in that massive crowd, not to mention the freeeeezing cold, which is much worse when you have to stand totally still because there is no room to move.

As penance, Fiona has promised to tell some historical anecdotes about inaugurations; meanwhile, here are photos of us headed to an inaugural ball. After this we'll return to the Oresteia. Seriously. We are very sorry.