Rachel Cusk was invited by London’s Almeida Theatre to write a new version of Euripides’s Medea. The new play is both thoroughly modern and bears the Rachel Cusk was invited by London’s Almeida Theatre to write a new version of Euripides’s Medea. The new play is both thoroughly modern and bears the stamp of personality of this talented novelist and memoirist. That she fiercely loves her children, two boys, is apparent. She followed Euripides’s formula, creating a storyline which places the blame differently.
If you remember the story, Medea kills her sons when her unfaithful husband marries the young & well-tended daughter of Creon. Considering how difficult it would be for anyone to contemplate such an act, and considering Cusk was severely castigated by readers for her memoir about motherhood, A Life’s Work, Cusk manages to make her work, like Euripides's work, many things at the same time: strong, agonized, righteous, and tragic.
Commentaries on the original Greek play had different interpretations of Medea herself. One made her out to be a young lover who changed her view of her husband when she’d had children. The things that she liked about her husband when he was a young man annoy her when she’s older. When she learned he was unfaithful and was looking for something new, she poisoned his new wife and killed the husband and sons out of pique and revenge.
A more nuanced interpretation, suggests Medea pursued her ambitious middle-aged husband Jason hotly, helping him to secure the fleece of the Golden Ram and thus develop a reputation as one of the most daring heroes of Hellas. But Medea was an foreigner and when she returned to Jason's home with him, her combative and fiery alien nature grated on the conservative natives . She grew tiresome for Jason and he sought another, younger, wealthier alliance that would increase his standing. Then Medea sought revenge.
Cusk’s Medea has less backstory, though from the voices of the chorus (a group of mothers meeting while their kids playdate, and who cross paths picking up their children at the school gates), we learn that Medea is not liked. She’s smart, but no one really likes her writing, if they read it at all. She’s opinionated, which doesn’t work if one wants a marriage to run smoothly ("she asked for it"). She’s a “snooty cow” because she doesn’t always recognize the women in different settings, her mind on other things. Cusk slips in a Holocaust joke: “She gone very Belsen,” referring to how Medea has stopped eating. “It’s called the divorce diet.”
Meanwhile, Medea turns to the audience and makes her case:
“A bad thing has happened to me You’re scared that if I name it, it might happen to you, too. …Sleep, woman, sleep. You won’t even feel it when he creeps to your side and slits your throat. What’s that you say? What about love? Yes, you’re loving souls aren’t you? You love the whole world, You love your little hearts out. It’s all right, you can hate me. Go ahead, feel free. It’s so much easier than hating yourselves.
Medea has other voices speaking with her, ones more intimate: the Tutor and the Nurse and the Cleaner. The Cleaner is clear-eyed and clear-spoken and shares what she learned from her mother: the best revenge is to be happy. Pretend if you don’t feel it. Women are good at pretending.
The eventual playing out of the story is unique yet retains the pain of the original. We hear Creon slyly telling Medea “You know, you look completely different when you smile” while she is in the midst of her life’s most curdling trial. “There’s the sourness again. The problem with you is you don’t know how to love…an unloving woman is a freak.”
The audience undoubtedly feels stress levels rising as the characters have interleaved speaking parts—talking over one another. If you’ve ever been witness to a disagreement, this is one…after another…after another. Any uncomfortableness we feel when Jason and Medea are speaking is relieved by Nurse, Tutor, and Cleaner pointing to the absurdities of male expectations. But the best joke goes to Aegeus, who will become Medea’s second husband.
Aegeus, speaking to a Medea distraught about the money Jason expects from the marriage says he understands Jason is about to get his needs “assuaged” by a wealthy heiress. This word comes as a surprise in the midst of conversation and surely would elicit a burst of laughter in any theatre. The word joke may only work in English, but its excessive formality and sound-similarity to “massage” is a perfect bomb.
Cusk’s originality in portraying the oldest stories of all—love and infidelity—continues to entrance. I am even more impressed now with her fictional trilogy Outline than I was before I read whatever I could of her work. This author is special. In a book talk at Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., Cusk says a criterion to use when creating is that a work should be “useful.” Exactly. That’s why her work, her honesty, her humor, her willingness ‘to go there’ is so exciting. What she does keeps us alive....more
In the early days of Goodreads, I initially chose a user name for myself that was long-lived, historical, distinctive, and not often chosen by others.In the early days of Goodreads, I initially chose a user name for myself that was long-lived, historical, distinctive, and not often chosen by others. I chose the name Clytemnestra. I didn’t really know anything about her; I vaguely remembered there was some violence attached to her name. When a couple of people mentioned that user name when they contacted me, I thought, you know, that I should really find out more about Clytemnestra before I couple her name with my own.
Years later, I have this lovely, dense paperback written by Robert Graves, poet, historian, novelist, memoirist. In it, Graves explains that the story of Clytemnestra—her death at least—is not fixed exactly, and is still disputed. Suffice it to say that she was killed, somehow, by her son Orestes, some say for good reason. However, I am more inclined than ever to couple her name with mine and may again one day, after learning what I have about her life in this book.
Unless I am missing something, it appears Clytemnestra was married to Tantalus, King of Pisa, when Agamemnon killed him in battle and forcibly married Clytemnestra as war spoils. Clytemnestra was Helen of Troy’s sister, and therefore, we deduce, not as lovely as the famed Helen but perhaps not so far behind in terms of beauty and skill. Clytemnestra’s brothers, The Dioscuri, came to rescue her from Agamemnon in Mycenae, but Clytemnestra’s father Tyndareus forgave Agamemnon and allowed him to keep Clytemnestra.
Clytemnestra bore Agamemnon one son, Orestes, and three daughters: Electra, Iphigeneia, and Chrysothemis. Iphigeneia may have been Clytemnestra’s niece, daughter of Helen and Theseus, whom she adopted. When Agamemnon set sail with Menelaus for Troy to bring Helen back after she left with Paris, winds whipped up by Artemis prevented them from getting to Troy, and so Agamemnon decided unilaterally to sacrifice—as in kill—Iphigeneia to appease Artemis.
Clytemnestra, who already hated Agamemnon for killing her first husband and forcing her into marriage against her will, was beside herself for Agamemnon’s killing an innocent teen she looked upon as her daughter. In the ten years Agamemnon was away, Clytemnestra had a sexual relationship with a man who also had a reason to hate Agamemnon, Aegisthus. When she learned from a provocateur wishing to inflame her feelings of vengeance that Agamemnon planned to bring back the King of Troy’s daughter Cassandra and the children she bore to Agamemnon, Clytemnestra’s thoughts turned bloody.
Up to this time, Clytemnestra is entirely blameless. She slept with a man not her husband, but her current husband had killed her first husband, forced her into marriage, and was spreading his seed far and wide. It is said she would have been happy had Agamemnon never returned, but he did, and she beheaded him in the bath after pretending to welcome him home. Clytemnestra was unafraid of divine retribution, thinking her own acts retribution in themselves.
So what of the children from the union of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon? Orestes was raised by his grandparents Tyndareus and Leda. He was ten years of age and not at his mother’s place when Agamemnon returned from Troy. When he learned Agamemnon had been killed and his body disrespected in burial, Orestes felt he had to avenge the death. Aegisthus, Clytemnestra’s lover, lived for seven years in Agamemnon’s place, but was subservient to the true ruler of Mycenae, Clytemnestra, who finally came into her own as a ruler and leader.
When Orestes had grown to manhood and consulted the Delphic Oracle, he learned Apollo’s answer, authorized by Zeus, that he must avenge the death of his father lest he become an outcast from society and stricken with leprosy. At the same time, the Furies would not look kindly on matricide, so Orestes must defend himself against the Furies with a special bow of horn, which Apollo gave to Orestes. Some twenty years later, he returned to his mother’s house. Clytemnestra did not recognize her son. After Orestes had killed Aegisthus, whom he had tricked into letting down his guard, Clytemnestra saw he was her son. Some versions say he beheaded her at her own home, some say he gave her over to a court of law and they convicted her to death. (Why do I mistrust this version?) Another version says that Electra entices Clytemnestra to visit her home with news that she bore a child to her peasant husband. Clytemnestra, eager to see a grandson, was killed by Orestes who was hiding in Electra's house. This one actually breaks my heart.
Electra, Clytemnestra’s first daughter, had been betrothed to Castor of Sparta, but Aegisthus was afraid she might bear a son to avenge his grandfather and wanted to kill her. Clytemnestra forbade this, but allowed Aegisthus to force Electra to marry a Mycenaean peasant who was then afraid to consummate the marriage. (It is said he feared Orestes' wrath.) Electra was thus powerless, kept in poverty, and threatened with imprisonment and banishment if she called Clytemnestra and Aegisthus ‘murderous adulterers.’
Her sister, Chrysothemis, unmentioned in this telling and despised by Electra for her subservience and disservice to her father’s memory, is a fascinating child of myth. In some viewpoints since this myth came into being, Chrysothemis was the pious and noble daughter according to the matrilineal law still golden in some parts of Greece at this time. (Who knew?) Ignorant as I am, I must have picked up in various places the notion that Clytemnestra was perfectly within her rights to kill the philandering, murdering husband who left her. Call it matrilineal if you must, but at some point you must call a spade a spade.
This is what the notes by Graves have to say:
1. This is a crucial myth with numerous variants. Olympianism had been formed as a religion of compromise between the pre-Hellenic matriarchal principle and the Hellenic patriarchal principle; the divine family consisting, at first of six gods and six goddesses. An uneasy balance of power was kept until Athene was reborn from Zeus’s head, and Dionysus, reborn from his thigh, took Hestia’s seat at the divine Council; thereafter male preponderance in any divine debate was assured—a situation reflected on earth—and the goddesses’ ancient prerogatives could now be successfully challenged.
2. Matrilinear inheritance was one of the axioms taken over from the pre-Hellenic religion. Since every king must necessarily be a foreigner, who ruled by virtue of his marriage to an heiress, royal princes learned to regard their mother as the main support of the kingdom, and matricide as an unthinkable crime. They were brought up on myths of the earlier religion, according to which the sacred king had always been betrayed by his goddess-wife, killed by his tanist, and avenged by his son; they knew the son never punished his adulterous mother, who had acted with the full authority of the goddess whom she served.
Is this relevant to the world we live in today? It could very well be relevant. I’d had no idea about matrilineal law in ancient Greece, and somewhere along the way this got superseded with a patrilineal system, a kind of law I like far less well. Matrilineal law has always made sense to me, not just because I am a woman.
Crucial myth, indeed. Graves tells us the Furies had always acted for the mother only: Aeschylus is “forcing language” when he speaks of The Furies avenging paternal blood. Moreover, the White Goddess Leprea inflicts or cures leprosy, not Apollo or Zeus. “In the sequel,” Graves tell us, not all the Furies accept Apollo’s Delphic ruling and Euripedes “appeases his female audience by allowing the Dioscuri to suggest Apollo’s injunctions had been most wise.”
I will read Euripedes’ plays. I may have, in ignorance, chosen the perfect avatar in Clytemnestra, situated as she in between a society who reveres and respects matrilineal rule and and the struggle with a patrilineal line. Clytemnestra was not especially kind to the children she bore with Agamemnon, and this is regrettable. I would have preferred she love her children regardless of where they were sourced, but since she is not the one who gets to tell the story, we’ll never know the truth of it. She intervened to prevent overt harm to her children several times; we must take this at least at face value....more
The first line in Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey, the first by a woman scholar, is “Tell me about a complicated man.” In an article by The first line in Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey, the first by a woman scholar, is “Tell me about a complicated man.” In an article by Wyatt Mason in the NYT late last year, Wilson tells us
“I could’ve said, ‘Tell me about a straying husband.’ And that’s a viable translation. That’s one of the things [the original language] says…[But] I want to be super responsible about my relationship to the Greek text. I want to be saying, after multiple different revisions: This is the best I can get toward the truth.”
Oh, the mind reels. This new translation by Emily Wilson reads swiftly, smoothly, and feels contemporary. This exciting new translation will surprise you, and send you to compare certain passages with earlier translations. In her Introduction, Wilson raises that issue of translation herself: How is it possible to have so many different translations, all of which could be considered “correct”?
Wilson reminds us what a ripping good yarn this story is, and removes any barriers to understanding. We can come to it with our current sensibility and find in it all kinds of foretelling and parallels with life today, and perhaps we even see the genesis of our own core morality, a morality that feels inexplicably learned. Perhaps the passed-down sense of right and wrong, of fairness and justice we read of here was learned through these early stories and lessons from the gods. Or are we interpreting the story to fit our sensibility?
These delicious questions operate in deep consciousness while we pleasure in learning more about that liar Odysseus, described again and again as wily, scheming, cunning, “his lies were like truth.” He learned how to bend the truth at his grandfather’s knee, and the gods exploited that talent when they helped him out. The skill served him well, allowing him to confuse and evade captors throughout his ordeal, as well as keep his wife and father in the dark about his identity upon his return until he could reveal the truth at a time of maximum impact.
There does inevitably come a time when people react cautiously to what is told them, even to the evidence their own eyes. The gods can cloud one’s understanding, it is well known, and truth is suspected in every encounter. These words Penelope speaks:
"Please forgive me, do not keep bearing a grudge because when I first saw you, I would not welcome you immediately. I felt a constant dread that some bad man would fool me with his lies. There are so many dishonest, clever men..."
Particularly easy to relate to today are descriptions of Penelope’s ungrateful suitors like Ctesippius, who "encouraged by extraordinary wealth, had come to court Odysseus’ wife." Also speaking insight for us today are the phrases "Weapons themselves can tempt a man to fight" and "Arms themselves can prompt a man to use them."
There is a conflicted view of women in this story: "Sex sways all women’s minds, even the best of them," though Penelope is a paragon of virtue, managing to avoid temptation through her own duplicitousness. She hardly seems a victim at all in this reading, merely an unwilling captor. She is strong, smart, loyal, generous, and brave, all the qualities any man would want for his wife.
We understand the slave girls that Odysseus felt he had to “test” for loyalty were at the disposal of the ungrateful suitors who, after they ate and drank at Penelope's expense, often met the house girls after hours. Some of the girls appeared to go willingly, laughing and teasing as they went, and were outspoken about their support of the men they’d taken up with. Others, we get the impression from the text, felt they had no choice.
Race is not mentioned but once in this book, very matter-of-factly, though the darker man is a servant to the lighter one:
"…[Odysseus] had a valet with him, I do remember, named Eurybates, a man a little older than himself, who had black skin, round shoulders, woolly hair, and was [Odysseus's] favorite our of all his crew because his mind matched his."
Odysseus’s tribulations are terrible, but appear to be brought on by his own stubborn and petulant nature, like his taunting of the blinded Cyclops from his own escaping ship. Cyclops was Poseidon’s son so Odysseus's behavior was especially unwise, particularly since his own men were yelling at him to stop. Later, that betrayal of the men’s best interests for his own childish purpose will come back to haunt Odysseus when the men suspect him of thinking only of himself--greediness--and unleash terrible winds by accident, blowing them tragically off course in rugged seas.
We watch, fascinated, as the gods seriously mess Odysseus about, and then come to his aid. We really get the sense of the gods playing, as in Athena’s willingness to give Odysseus strength and arms when fighting the suitors in his house, but being unwilling to actually step in to help with the fighting. Instead, she watched from the rafters. It’s hard not to be just a little resentful.
Wilson’s translation reads very fast and very clearly. There always seemed to be some ramp-up time reading Greek myths in the past, but now the adventures appear perfectly accessible. Granted, there are some names you’ll have to figure out, but that’s part of being “constructively lost,” as Pynchon says.
A book-by-book reading of this new translation will begin March 1st on the Goodreads website, hosted by Kris Rabberman, Wilson’s colleague at the University of Pennsylvania. To prepare for the first online discussion later this week, Kris has suggested participants read the Introduction. If interested readers are still not entirely convinced they want this literary experience now, some excerpts have been reprinted in The Paris Review....more
Ali Smith wrote this book fast, and I think that is how she intends us to read it, at least at first. We slow down when her images and meanings start Ali Smith wrote this book fast, and I think that is how she intends us to read it, at least at first. We slow down when her images and meanings start to coalesce on the page and we suspect there is much more to this than the twitter-like, depthless sentences that don’t seem like they are adding up to anything. Afterwards, an image emerges. What is more suited to tweeting than a Canada warbler?
The story, as such, is that a young man breaks up with his girlfriend Charlotte right before a Christmas he’d wanted to bring her to his mum’s house to introduce her to his mother. He finds a substitute girl, who happens to be waiting at a bus stop, rather than go through the humiliation of saying he no longer had a girlfriend. He pays her—Lux she is called, though he’d never asked—to stay the three days of the holiday.
Art grew in the course of this book into a grander vision of himself. He writes about nature, the churn of seasons, in a blog he calls Art in Nature. Though he rarely writes anything political, he is thinking about making his work a little more political, like the “natural unity in seeming disunity” of snow and wind, “the give and take of water molecules,” and “the communal nature of the snowflake.” He, Art, is not dead at all, though he is being crushed by his ex-girlfriend Charlotte on Twitter.
Charlotte is pretty clear-eyed:
The people in this country are in furious rages at each other after the last vote, she said, and the government we’ve got has done nothing to assuage it and instead is using people’s rage for its own political expediency. Which is a grand old fascist trick if ever I saw one…the people in power were self-servers who’d no idea about and felt no responsibility towards history…like plastic carrier bags…damaging to the environment for years and years after they’ve outgrown their use. Damage for generations.
Plastic carrier bags? This is where Smith shines, making her argument so clear and relatable and yet so absurd. She’s funny. She’s right and wrong at the same time, like most of us. Like Art. Smith draws environmental degradation, suggesting chemical drift in the air can settle like snow, like ash, like slow poison on our lives. She compares the influx of refugees fleeing for their lives in the Mediterranean to exhausted holidaymakers using their friends’ recommendations on the ‘best places to stay.’
Many images float around this book, inviting us to make connections: Iris-eye, art-Art, stone with a hole in it-eye, stone with the weight and curvature of a breast-Mother Nature…once we begin, we start looking for these parallels everywhere. Lux— she had some kind of luxurious brain, a luxurious education studying what she wanted (like Shakespeare, violin, human nature), and the luxury of floating through the world unencumbered and unafraid.
Lux is an out-of-body experience, an angel who appears and disappears; a Canada warbler. Lux is grace. Lux brings the two sisters together and reminds them of their shared history, of love, of the importance of struggling to create bonds. Lux tries to convince Art to stay after the three-day Christmas holiday to talk, late at night, to his mother. At first he refuses, but when Lux says she will help, he looks forward to it.
Soph, Art’s mother, is not crazy but prescient, depressed, and old. The word Sophia in ancient Greek and early Christian times meant wisdom, and clever, able, intelligent. Iris, the sister from whom Soph was estranged, is not a religious do-gooder but is targeting critical needs to save what’s best of the human race. She is named for Iris, the Wind-Footed Messenger of the Gods. Her presence signifies hope.
Smith is also concerned with truth, and at some point Lux points to the notion that the truth of a thing may be confused with what we believe to be true. Is there objective truth? This question has been argued since time immemorial. It is back with a vengeance, and must be adjudicated daily, moment-by-moment within each of us.
Art in Nature continues to exhibit itself throughout the novel: a female British MP is barked at by the grandson of Winston Churchill, who is also an MP. He says it was meant as a friendly greeting, she accepts the non-apology. Smith interprets this incident as snow melting on one side of furrowed ground in slanted winter sun. It turns out the stuff Art writes in his blog material is invented. Lies, one could say, but close enough to real to sound remembered. This novel has a lot to do with art and politics and what the difference is between them.
Iris writes
& th diff dear Neph is more betwn artist and politician—endlss enemies coz they both knw THE HUMAN will alwys srface in art no mtter its politics, & THE HUMAN wll hv t be absent or repressed in mst politics no mtter its art x Ire
Ali Smith—and this is only the second novel of hers I have read—seems a skilled interpreter of our lives. She is involved in the struggle, and has enough understanding to recognize #MeToo began with the Access Hollywood tape; the rest, on both sides of the Atlantic and around the globe, is fallout. She doesn’t want us to lose hope, but recognizes the route to betterment is long and arduous, which is why she occasionally blows a Canada warbler off course in the middle of winter to thrill us with what is possible....more
I was unprepared for this comedic play which seems impossibly modern and slapstick. I was looking for a copy of The Frogs, attributed to Aristophanes I was unprepared for this comedic play which seems impossibly modern and slapstick. I was looking for a copy of The Frogs, attributed to Aristophanes and performed 405 B.C. This particular edition was translated by Richard Lattimore, who translated a popular version of the Iliad, though it seems dated now. This play, on the other hand, virtually jumps off the page with vitality & energy.
Lattimore has translated this humor broadly; he says in his introduction to this play that he hates to explain the humor to us because that always makes it unfunny, but I would guess it is beyond the vast majority of folks to understand he is satirizing Aeschylus and Euripides...I suppose it works as general comedy, but it would certainly be better for those who have studied Classics.
I give it four stars only because I'm not sure I got it completely...and I wouldn't want to give Aristophanes less than that....more
What is so startling about the Iliad is its immediacy, its emotion. Real, recognizable feelings and behaviors are so evident that the fact they happenWhat is so startling about the Iliad is its immediacy, its emotion. Real, recognizable feelings and behaviors are so evident that the fact they happened in a time before Christ just falls away. We find ourselves rooting for these men and women even as we see the plotting of the gods and they obvious way they place a thumb on the scales of justice.
Once one has gone even a little way into the Iliad, one’s curiosity blooms: how can this story have survived? what is its history? are there more stories? how did people learn this story? One wants to talk with someone else about the book, someone knowledgeable, a teacher perhaps. Alexander obliges, but she is interesting not just for first-time readers. She has her own translation of the Iliad, and has a vast understanding of the other works from this time, as well as the culture.
The stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey may never really leave one after an encounter with them. There are darn few pieces of literature in history that have that kind of impact. It is endlessly interesting to read new translations and go through the whole thing again every couple of years, listening to debates about who does it best. This has gone on since they were first delivered orally. Alexander’s book indulges that curiosity, leading a discussion of points we raced past in the midst of discovery.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this in conjunction with this latest reading: this time I listened to Stephen Mitchell’s version, read Peter Green’s, and consulted all the earlier versions. I really loved the new translations but think I may prefer Fagles above the others. It is just so easy to get stuck into poetically, and the edition, I have to admit, is so luxurious and pleasing with its deckled edges and parchment-colored paper (as opposed to white). It is easier to turn the pages, which is something which frankly never occurred to me before. It is lightweight. In a book of this size, that is something.
If you notice that the spelling of character’s names in my various reviews of this book are all over the place, just understand that practically every translation of this book has a different set of spelling concerns. Today one can guess which edition others are reading by the way they spell characters’ names. I happen to love this diversity. It adds to the awe-struck understanding that this work has been translated endless times by endless people and makes one wonder: how has it changed over time after being touched so much?
The sumptuous funeral accorded Patroklos accords with heroic burials in different cultures from different ages, allowing for the input from cultures who enjoyed the Iliad after its initial introduction. The detail of the burial is consistent with the pattern of archeological evidence. Alexander shares a discovery in 1980 on the Greek island of Euboia of an Iron Age burial site the owner wanted for a vacation home. It was the site of a heroic burial dating approximately to 1000 B.C. which contained the bones of a 30 to 45-year-old male wrapped in a fine linen robe buried alongside a woman adorned in gold. This is close to Homeric times and provides evidence that heroic burials as described in the Iliad happened at least from the Iron Age.
Alexander is able to bring many of the questions we have together in one place while referencing scholars who have tried to answer. She acknowledges the Iliad has been called the “poetry of combat” but she says it is not merely “impersonal slugging matches” but personalized heroic deaths, giving life to men at the moment of their death. It makes me weep to think of it.
And yet, Alexander points out that the Iliad insistently humanizes the enemy, despite recording endless pathetic deaths: three times as many Trojans die as do Achaeans. We have sympathy for the Trojans. This is the way the book is written.
Alexander writes beautifully here:
“Priam and Achilles meet in the very twilight of their lives. Their extinction is certain and there will be no reward for behaving well, and yet, in the face of implacable fate and an indifferent universe, they mutually assert the highest ideals of their humanity.”
And this, dear friends, is how we know man is not merely a greedy sod out to “win” what they cannot ever truly win, for time erases glory made of gold. I really enjoyed this very worthwhile accompaniment to the great Iliad. Thank you, Caroline Alexander and Viking Press for this truly interesting and inspiring work of scholarship....more
Christopher Logue was a poet. Irreverent and utterly original, he was asked to “contribute to a new version” of Homer’s Iliad. Despite protestations tChristopher Logue was a poet. Irreverent and utterly original, he was asked to “contribute to a new version” of Homer’s Iliad. Despite protestations that he knew no Greek, he looked over the earliest attempts to translate the work and came up with something…irreverent and utterly original.
Logue offers “an account” of Homer’s Iliad, just as a later poet, Alice Oswald in Memorial, would offer an interpretation…not a translation. Lovers of the Iliad, those who know well the story and joyfully encounter each new translation, will just as eagerly sink into the off-beat nature of this poet’s unique and modern take.
We know Achilles hated Agamemnön, but Achilles’ shouted challenges to the older man in the voice of earlier translators did not have the modernistic sensibility of Logue’s:
‘Mouth! King mouth!’ Then stopped. Then from the middle of the common sand said: “Heroes, behold your King— Slow as an arrow fired feathers first To puff another’s worth, But watchful as a cockroach of his own.”
Ah, I love that. May I say I can think of another leader who fits the ‘watchful cockroach’ image, who sports a hair mantle not unlike that of the cockroach's carapace. Damn hard to eradicate him, too.
The sport of the gods is evident throughout, despite the bloody gore of a war among equals.
“But they just smile. They are the gods. They have all the time in the world. And Lord Apollo orchestrates their dance. And Leto smiles to see her son, the son of God, Playing his lyre among them, stepping high, Hearing his Nine sing how the gods have everlasting joy, Feasting together, sleeping together, Kind, color, calendar no bar, time out of mind, And how we humans suffer at their hands, Childish believers, fooled by science and art, Bound for Oblivion—
And Aphrodite, Queen of Love, “her breasts alert and laden with desire…” addresses Helen:
“Do stop this nonsense, Helen, dear… ...Try not to play the thankless bitch: ‘Such a mistake to leave my land, my kiddywink…’ What stuff. Millions would give that lot For half the looks that I have given you… ...Be proud. You have brought harm. Tremendous boys Of every age have slaughtered one another Just for you! … Bear this in mind: Without my love, somewhere between the Greek and Trojan lines A cloud of stones would turn your face to froth. So, when they lift the curtains, and he looks—you hesitate. And then you say: Take me, and I shall please you.” Pause. What do you say? ‘Take me, and I shall please you.’ “Good. Now in you go.”
Christopher Logue died in 2011, so his account of Books 1-4 and 16-19, this fragment that ends with the death of Petroclus, is what we have left. His similes remain: "Spears like nettles stirred by the wind," “Dust like red mist,” Pain like chalk on slate,” Arrows that drift like bees,” “Tearing its belly like a silk balloon…” And so it goes on.
One is never finished with the Iliad when one has read it. It lingers, and while it does, Christopher Logue’s version gives some joy.
I was surprised I didn't like this as well as the others, simply because it was more elegant in style and therefore marginally harder to read for meanI was surprised I didn't like this as well as the others, simply because it was more elegant in style and therefore marginally harder to read for meaning. Antigone didn't come across on a quick read with the raw spirit I perceived in the other plays. What I did love about this translation: the lessons taught to Creon by Tiresius and even by his own son Haemon were so elegant and expansive:
"It's no disgrace for a man, even a wise man, to learn many things and not to be too rigid. You've seen trees by a raging winter torrent, how many sway with the flood and salvage every twig, but not the stubborn--they're ripped out, roots and all. Bend or break."
The Chinese have a similar saying. It's good advice to anyone, though one recognizes there is a difference between stubbornness and enlightened principle, which should not be comprised with easy solutions.
I loved Haemon telling his father: "What a splendid king you'd make of a desert island--you and yourself alone." Later, Tiresius tries again to warm Creon, "Take these things to heart, my son, I warn you...Stubbornness brands you for stupidity--pride is a crime. No, yield to the dead! Never stab a fighter when he's down. Where's the glory, killing the dead twice over?"
And the Chorus at the end, telling us
"Wisdom is by far the greatest part of joy, and reverence toward the gods must be safeguarded. The mighty words of the proud are paid in full with mighty blows of fate, and at long last those blows will teach us wisdom."
We'll learn it easy or learn it hard, but wisdom comes. At what price?
This edition tells us slightly more about why Creon hates Polynices but not why Polynices did what he did. Polynices returned to Thebes "consumed with one desire--to burn them roof to roots..." while his brother Eteocles is "crowned with a hero's honors."
This play is so brilliant, it is difficult to imagine someone could ruin it. This translation by Robert Fagles is masterly in the old style, and the Introduction and Notes are authored by Bernard Knox.
Did not read the other plays at this time. ...more
I am not well-schooled in tragedies--the Greek tragedies, that is--but when I learned that one of the books I intended to read for the Man Booker awarI am not well-schooled in tragedies--the Greek tragedies, that is--but when I learned that one of the books I intended to read for the Man Booker award this year was based on the story of Antigone, I thought now was a good time to have a look.
This is the first I have encountered of the play, I loved it. It is filled with terrific emotion and common responses to tragedy, as well as wisdom unbound. The personalities are strong and salty...and act on their promises.
Those of you who know the story will still be thrilled by the Chorus at the end saying "Grand words of proud men are punished with great blows, and this, in old age, teaches wisdom." And "Wisdom is by far the foremost part of happiness..."
Oedipus's two sons kill one another, as decreed by fate, and his two daughters are forbidden by King Creon to bury the body of one of the sons because Creon thought him a traitor. Antigone decides she will bury him anyway because this is the custom of the city and is a courtesy to the gods. Terrible events ensue.
We never learn here why the two sons are unequally loved. Perhaps that backstory is given in another play.
This edition is printed left side with the Greek, right side with English. It has a detailed introduction in which the story and all the characters mentioned are described in their relationship to the main actors in this story. That was helpful. At the end are extensive notes and discussion about word choices and inferred meanings. I thought this was impressive....more
Angela Merkel is a terrific politician. Even those who don't agree with her policies admit to her skill in making space for her own ideas. But we coulAngela Merkel is a terrific politician. Even those who don't agree with her policies admit to her skill in making space for her own ideas. But we could say that about Donald Trump, too. What makes Merkel an extraordinary, groundbreaking leader is what is in her personality that is opposite to Donald Trump. Merkel isn't in it for the glamour, fame, or money. Ten years ago, she claimed she had no intention of staying on as Chancellor beyond two terms. She is currently running for her fourth term at the end of this year. Why?
Merkel’s desire to stay on as Chancellor of Germany has something to do with legacy and with current danger. Anyone can see the threats in the national and international environment. When one spends many years leading an electorate and shaping a worldview that strengthens one’s country vis-a-vis outside threats to stability, one wants to leave it in safe hands. Qvortrup doesn’t tell us, at the end, whether or not Merkel, unlike Hillary, has groomed a successor who can take over her role should she decamp. Merkel is still young enough to see Germany through another term but then a successor should emerge.
Germany in the late 2oth and early 21st Century was as tumultuous as any other nation, resembling the child's game of Chutes & Ladders. Political parties fought for ascendency at the time of the fall of the wall, and Merkel, through luck and instinct, rose within a year to a place in national politics. People liked her. She was unthreatening to higher ups and she was willing to do anything in an organization. She used every opportunity; even handing out leaflets gave her access to voters. She honed her instinct for what was needed, learned what voters wanted and would accept, and was courageous in accepting opportunity and responsibility. Later some would question her: Merkiavelli?
Merkel was, and is still, resolutely forward-looking, unlike the kind of national figures in Russia, where Putin wants a return to Tsarist times and America, where Trumps seeks a return to early 20th Century oligarchies. When former Chancellor Helmut Kohl lamented that ‘She is destroying my Europe,’ Merkel responded, “Your Europe, dear Helmut, no longer exists.’ Finally, someone who gets it.
What I find most intriguing about Merkel is her political expediency. Qvortrup makes the point that in politics one doesn’t make ‘friends’ like one does in other fields, but Angela made friends easily compared with her colleagues. She was a little frumpy, but clever, kind, generous, unthreatening, and…a brilliant political statistician. During her tenure as Chancellor, she had several cabinet-level ministers, party leaders, and government heads resign in disgrace. She shuffled the deck, calculated odds, sacrificed some appointments, and very shrewdly chose replacements who could strengthen her party's ascendency. She could work with anyone, her listening demeanor polite and cordial. Qvortrup is particularly good on the details here. Merkel’s office was never implicated in any of the scandals, and she never defended those who came under attack. It is said she urged more transparency. Her careful composure under pressure will become a trademark.
Merkel could not afford the distraction of making a scene over news that broke late in 2013 that the United States was monitoring her private telephone. Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014. She needed American support to counter the Russian encroachment into European sphere. Qvortrup says Merkel “always considered Obama a lightweight,” which runs counter to impressions the American press has broadcast that the two got along famously. She apparently idolized Reagan, I wonder whether for his politics or for his famous charm and political skill at changing the frame of any discussion. Qvortrup also says Merkel was not enthusiastic but not overly alarmed at having to deal with Putin, who was a known quantity to her. This again is counter to previous analyses I have seen. Merkel is able to confound watchers in this way.
Handling the sanctions regime against Russia at the time of the Ukraine invasion and the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 took nerves of steel. Putin was desperate and threatening, but all Europe was suffering under the sanctions, particularly France. Qvortrup goes through this and the Greek financial crisis in detail. Merkel manages, in the summer of 2015, to get Greece to agree to allow the EU to control the money earned from privatization of Greek assets, barring 12.5% for the Greeks to decide how to use. The solution required throwing her Finance Minister and his advice under the bus. Qvortrup compares the period to a Greek tragedy with an unanticipated solution, or deux ex machina. This magic trick, pulling the rabbit out of the hat as it were, will need to be unpacked in greater detail in future examinations of this period.
I watched most of Merkel’s first two terms with half-an-eye, but when the Syrian war crescendoed into a full-blown refugee crisis, I turned my gaze full-on Europe. Merkel’s strength of character and leadership skills took my breath away. She'd found an issue more important than her own career and she did not back down. This woman, this frumpy pant-suited attention-sink, did more to embody Christian values than any other European leader while serving the needs of her country and leading Europe by forging an alliance among nations.
“Germany under Merkel became a social liberal state based on ecumenical values.”
Merkel was not an ideologue, but pragmatic. Having lived under communism, she took what was best from it and left the rest. Brexit must have been a terrible disappointment to her idea of a united Europe, and the election of a right-wing nationalist in America threatens Germany’s economic stability and security. Merkel’s expected retirement no longer seems a foregone conclusion. The current threats will require unique responses. Mütter Merkel’s calm and compromise may require a change of pattern. Do Germans think she can do it? Can anyone do it if she cannot?
Qvortrup is admiring of Merkel, as has been every other journalist who has written a biography that I have seen. He is not sycophantic: he tells us when Merkel was perceived as Machiavellian and other criticisms. But to date I still do not have a good sense of why her approval ratings fell, reportedly below 50% in 2015, and what the objections are in Germany to her leadership beyond fear over the influx of refugees. A situation like the refugee crisis needs the whole nation pulling together to make it work. Germany could be a model for those of us who will need to do the same. Migrants and refugees--I doubt I'm breaking news to most of you--is going to be a constant for all of us living in temperate zones in the future. Best we think ahead....more
In light of Elaine's review, I rewrote my initial snarky take on this novel and posted to my blog. To get full enjoyment from this novel, I urge you tIn light of Elaine's review, I rewrote my initial snarky take on this novel and posted to my blog. To get full enjoyment from this novel, I urge you to see what a reread will do for you.
Below is my original review. ---------------------
This short novel feels too long. An anthropologist, Sofia, quits working on her PhD ostensibly to care for her mother, who is unable to walk. No explanation can be found for the mother’s malady so mother and daughter travel to Spain in hopes a specialist there may be able to elicit a cure.
Long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, this novel comes after a long history of successful poetry, novels, and screenplays by Levy, so we are primed to find it praiseworthy. And it is, but she very nearly tips us into the deep, endlessly cycling the trauma of caring for someone apparently suffering a psychosomatic illness.
There is something we are meant to pay attention to: the notion that some people would never consider doing things that are not to their own advantage. The idea arises again and again in the course of the novel, first explicitly stated when the daughter visits her estranged and happily remarried father to ask for financial assistance or, at the very least, moral support for her efforts to care for his first wife. He refuses, and his new wife snorts with derision that he would consider doing any thing not to his advantage.
Women—wives, mothers, daughters, sisters--often do things not strictly in their best interests. They do it out of love, usually, or say they do. But when one is the head of one’s own household, one is responsible for oneself—to oneself—to manage, to persist, to succeed. [Truthfully, and this is completely unrelated to the book, I know a woman who takes care of herself before everyone else and she is one pain in the caborum.]
(view spoiler)[ Near the end of the novel Sofia tells her mother that she must start doing things that are to her advantage and take charge of her life. Her mother promises to try. Sofia wants her to because she wants to do the same. She wants to return to school and finish her PhD. I suppose it took years in England, a month in Spain, and a visit to the estranged ex-father in Greece to figure it all out, but it seemed like the long way ‘round to me. (hide spoiler)]
There is more in this novel: a kind of forbidden love with a luscious, unstable blond of German descent and a lustful affair with the tent supervisor for jelly-fish stings. There are fabulous white-white sheets (must get some of those), blue embroidery thread that spells out a misunderstood and potentially dangerous message, and a leather-booted horse trainer. There is a doctor of the psyche and his sexy Sunny daughter, to say nothing of a pregnant white cat and a chained dog who howls whether or not he is leashed. It all has the tone of a late-adolescent fling about it. Good for some…
There is nothing wrong with a little fun in the sun—I feel like I missed my beach getaway this year so may sound a little dour about the descriptions of daily swimming and tan lines. Maybe it all could have been said in a poem, or a screenplay that features a stage covered in dunes with a backdrop of bluest ocean and a sliver of sky. The claustrophobia of that setting would mirror how I felt revolving in the confusion of Sofia’s mind. When finally the doctor tells Sophia, “Your confusion is willful,” we echo his diagnosis and frustration.
There is a twist at the end which will thrill some readers. Being who I am, however, it didn’t surprise me. But that’s just my sour nature coming out. I have only read a couple Booker Long List nominees so far, but I guess this wouldn’t be at the top of my list. ...more
The night before Time magazine put Angela Merkel on their cover as "Woman of the Year" (2015), and as I was thinking to myself that we have precious fThe night before Time magazine put Angela Merkel on their cover as "Woman of the Year" (2015), and as I was thinking to myself that we have precious few leaders to emulate, I thought of Angela Merkel. I realized that I only had general impressions and knew next to nothing about her personally, the governance of modern Germany, her role in the EU, etc. What I could not help but notice was her three-time election to leadership in Germany and how every other country seemed to listen to her.
This is a juvenile title, but it gave me some basic facts that I did not know and it had pictures (!) of Merkel as a young woman. The commentary focused on major milestones in her political career, and I liked very much that the author would make a statement or claim about how Merkel succeeded or failed on a specific issue and then would give the opposing view. For instance, "some people criticized Merkel for..." That's exactly the kind of both sides I needed to help me understand how Merkel is perceived in Europe.
However, this short teen title is simply not detailed enough for my needs. Fortunately I have discovered a New Yorker (Dec 1, 2014) article I missed, so will catch up a little with that. We certainly need someone to be writing something: Angela Merkel: The Authorized Biography by Stefan Kornelius does not have very good reviews on Goodreads, for whatever reason, but may try that....more
Before Angela Merkel was named Person of the Year by Time magazine in 2015, Merkel had long been recognized as a leader among leaders, one whose opiniBefore Angela Merkel was named Person of the Year by Time magazine in 2015, Merkel had long been recognized as a leader among leaders, one whose opinion was not just sought, but absolutely couldn’t be ignored. Could she be the kind of leader we ought to emulate? It wasn’t just her manner of soothing her own electorate that Germany could, in fact, take hundreds of thousands of migrants, changing the face of their community and revitalizing it at the same time. It was the fact that she’d led the European Community through a difficult debt crisis and managed to get a contentious Europe to hew to her insistence upon debt ceilings as a percentage of GNP.
"We have to be a bit strict with each other at the moment so that in the end we are all successful together."
Merkel’s record as Chancellor in Germany has few book-length analyses, but this one, written by two Berlin-based journalists for Bloomberg News, is extremely useful for understanding the basis of her style and success as a leader, while pointing out areas other European leaders do not agree with Merkel’s direction and methods. If Merkel lived in the U.S., we’d already have several books out on her rise to the top leadership post. This book, published in 2013 after the EU was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2012, is specific to how Merkel steered the EU through the debt crisis amid much political maneuvering.
Several pieces in the The New Yorker on Merkel (e.g., George Packer's Dec 2014) add to our understanding, though seem to underestimate Angela Merkel. Packer, taking the line proposed by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, suggests that Merkel’s leadership through the euro crisis has been “less than inspiring” and the euro zone was saved only by the emergency intervention of the European Central Bank led by Italian economist Mario Draghi, who had been extensively lobbied by the Americans. The authors of this book, however, point out that Merkel approached the crisis with a different set of attitudes toward what caused the crisis and what was necessary to fix it.
Czuczka and Crawford give a tantalizing account of Merkel turning to the work of Polish-born mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, then teaching at Yale, to understand the workings of the financial markets. Mandelbrot wrote a piece in Scientific American (1999) entitled “A Multifractal Walk down Wall Street,” later expanded into The (Mis) Behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward (2004), co-authored with Richard L. Hudson, a former managing editor of Wall Street Journal’s European edition. “Chapters have subtitles including “How the operations of mere chance can be used to study a financial market” and “Orthodox financial theory is riddled with false assumptions and wrong results.”” One can imagine how this bolstered Merkel’s insistence upon commonsense regulation of banking and financial instruments.
Merkel’s personal style of 80% listening and 20% speaking, as well as her slow (some call it “delaying”), step-by-step trial-and-error “scientific” approach to decision-making has meant she has been able to change her mind when necessary, and adopt a policy she had not previously supported, all without being personally attacked as flip-flopping. She has been able to carry her electorate along with “root” changes in government administration, tax policy, and economic and societal direction. In addition, her reliance on a few close-mouthed advisors, closed-door negotiations, and restrained personal style have not given opponents much of a target. Vituperative postings on YouTube that give voice to those who oppose her migrant policies appear to play to a minority as she enjoys record high approval ratings in Germany and in Europe generally, particularly among the eastern Bloc countries.
"The supreme illustration of Merkel’s ability to pull off a reversal without incurring political damage was her overnight decision to ditch a planned extension of the lifespan of German’s nuclear power stations…Merkel the scientist said she had been convinced by the weight of evidence provided by the worse nuclear disaster since Chernobyl."
Crawford and Czuczka point out innumerable instances when Merkel managed to emerge from a political scuffle victorious, from her defeat of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, to allowing David Cameron to wander off on his own while she consolidated her leadership of the EU, shifting the center of gravity from Franco-German to Germany after the addition to the EU of several eastern European countries.
The Eastern Europeans “are acutely aware that systems can collapse” and have experienced collapse in their lifetimes, which may be why they appreciate Merkel’s “commonsense” approach to rebuilding “from the root” systems that are failing. Merkel seems to be creating an entirely new coalition of formerly weak European states that may emerge as a bloc of enormous vitality in comparison to the formerly wealthy colonists of western Europe who still seem intent upon protecting their wealth rather than creating new wealth. (America take note!) Merkel is focused on staying relevant and prosperous in a future that includes the rise of China and India and other emerging economies which are experiencing growth rates that may sideline the centrality of Europe in decision making.
“I have a very clear vision of what Europe should undertake, and must undertake, so the people in Europe can continue to live in prosperity.”
Merkel has a small portrait of Catherine the Great on her office desk in the chancellery. Catherine “was courageous and accomplished many things under difficult circumstances,” Merkel said when asked. Catherine also ruled Russia alone for 34 years. Merkel has told close associates that she will not run again for chancellor and may even leave before her term is finished in 2017. “Mutti” Merkel has changed the face of politics in Europe during her term and enjoys unprecedented popularity despite the static of vociferous opponents. It is difficult to imagine any other person we know governing with the quiet authority Merkel radiates.
This book is a very useful, insightful, and readable introduction to Merkel’s thinking, style, and political deal-making in her early terms as German chancellor, and gives us some idea of what was happening in Europe during that time. It includes biographical snippets and telling photographs of key moments in Merkel’s accession to and consolidation of power. For Americans, it may be an indispensable guide to understanding how Merkel is perceived by member EU countries. American–centric reporting misses a great deal of her appeal. Two journalists immersed in Berlin politics, and whose home countries (U.K. and U.S.) do not support Merkel’s policies, come away admiring of what she has been able to accomplish. Is Merkel the great politician of our time? ...more
Morris, most everyone knows, is one of the premier travel writers of the 20th Century. She went everywhere, and wrote with such interest and eruditionMorris, most everyone knows, is one of the premier travel writers of the 20th Century. She went everywhere, and wrote with such interest and erudition about the places she visited that one reads her works simply because she writes better than anyone else. One publisher gave her the opportunity to write fiction, and Morris created an invented place, Hav, to which many folks immediately wanted to book a flight.
This novel is composed of two parts: in Last Letters from Hav Morris describes for us her first glimpse of the Protectorate of Hav, its residents, flora, fauna, religions, and origins. In Hav of the Myrmidons written twenty years later, Morris returns to a much-changed Protectorate. In the Epilogue to the combined novel called simply Hav published by nyrb, Morris tells us that the allegories of old Hav have been transmuted from a place of “overlapping ancient cultures but with familiar signposts based in history” to allegories of “civic prodigies…hitherto inconceivable and themselves all but fictional still.”
Hav is an international protectorate near the Black Sea and on the Mediterranean. Every major nation had its representatives there, ensconced in (formerly) grand buildings that carried a storied history. When Morris visited in the 1980’s, Hav was rundown and a tiny bit disreputable, but the glamour of earlier days still shone through.
Morris shares her first impressions upon her arrival at night (monotonous and cold, stark and forbidding) and those again modified by clear morning light (bright, colorful, polyglot). She stays several months, buys an automobile, and travels by ferry to outlying islands. She meets the important citizens and legal representatives of countries occupying national concessions in Hav and witnesses the major celebrations—the coming of the snow raspberries and the Roof Race. Her visits to The Iron Dog, and The House of the Chinese Master (“the most astonishing aesthetic experience Hav can offer”) are accompanied by marvelously detailed descriptions composed of wonder and awe.
The novel is just a travel memoir, a very good one with historical references and informative notes about where to find the best food, until Morris comes to her discussion of the British Concession and its history in the province. Morris seems to become much more pointed in her references when she describes the British consul, his wife, and English interests in establishing a base in Hav. Morris includes notes General C.J. Napier wrote to his wife about Hav: “A dreadful hole—worse than Sind!” and “Oh what a foretaste of hell this is.” The British always kept some distance from true involvement in the life of Hav (they “loathed the Protectorate”), created buildings that looked quite like those created in India for their comfort, and were reputed to house only spies in their offices.
We learn that celebrities and leaders from many countries visited Hav in its heyday. Morris’ description of Nijinsky’s visit is particularly poignant, but Hitler and Wagner (at different times, naturally), George Sand and Chopin, Kim Philby, and the shadowy Sir Edmund Backhouse, scholarly sinologist and baronet, were all said to have stayed there at some time or another.
An escarpment just to the north of Hav was home to a cave-dwelling tribe of troglodytes who never settled in the city proper but who form “a still living bridge between the city and its remotest origins.” Their language has a fragile connection with the Celtic, but is still incomprehensible to everyone outside their group. It is said when they first saw the peninsula upon which Hav now sits, surrounded by blue sea, they called the place “Summer,” or hav in the surviving Celtic language of the West.
The underlying political structure of Hav was a shambles of competing interests and insufficiently expansionist beliefs which added to the rich confusion of organic growth in the labyrinthine city. Hav was likewise a rich stew of religions, all in stages of isolation from their original tenets. One mysterious group called Cathars of Hav was composed of secret members of the community and whose ceremonies and meetings involve robes and chants in underground locations. The Cathars are said to trace their history to the Crusades and their beliefs to Manicheanism, or the dualistic cosmology between the forces of good and evil, darkness and light. This group alone gives Morris pause in her ramblings about the city, but she does not spend much capital thinking about them before she is advised by the British Consul to leave the city in haste.
Morris ends Last Letters from Hav on a note of uncertainty, with low-flying war planes streaking over the city. Morris sees warships on the near horizon as she pauses on an overlook near where she will abandon her vehicle and catch a train away from Hav.
Morris uses the word “maze” to describe Hav more than once, leading us to think she meant, among other things, to suggest “a-maze…ing” Hav. In 2005 Morris was invited to revisit Hav. Her later map of the city looks completely different from the earlier one, with many of the wonderful places she described razed. Now the Myrmidon Tower dominates the landscape: “a virtuoso display of unashamed, unrestricted, technologically unexampled vulgarity” upon which is emblazoned the state emblem of the Republic, the letter ‘M’ flashing in sequential colors of red, yellow, green and blue and overlaid against an Achillean helmet outlined in gold. When Morris ascends the Tower, she discovers the nearby newly constructed Lazaretto! Resort (“the name is written with an exclamation mark because we believe you will find it a truly exclamatory experience”) is, in fact, built like a maze when viewed from above. The suites are named for places once a part of the old Hav before the Intervention in 1985.
As luck would have it, the first people Morris interacts with in the New Hav are a “very English middle-aged couple” whose advice “don’t experiment too much with the local stuff” seems designed to remind Morris however things have changed, much has stayed the same. But then: “The thing is one feels so safe here. The security’s really marvelous, it’s all so clean and friendly, and well, everything we’re used to really.” And that turns out to be the most frightening and curious thing.
The troglydytes who originally named Hav are no longer living in whitewashed caves on the escarpment but have been moved to barracks near the airport where the menfolk work on airport construction. While many Morris spoke with seemed pleased with the central heating and the comfortable living, one man pointed out that they were experiments of “ethnic engineering,” given a few certainties in exchange for their unique though hardscrabble culture.
Morris must leave after only six days this time, while she was forced to leave after six months on her first visit. Things have changed quite a lot and the menace is palpable. People are afraid to speak openly for a very tight grip by the Cathars of Hav hear all and see all.
This science fiction reminds us what a woman of the world Ms. Morris is, for she has caught the national character of each resident group in Hav quite clearly. But it is her certainty that events and locales have really lost their historical basis and point of origin is one that stays with us long after we put her book down. The world is renewing itself, and has become strange to even one so practiced in the art of travel.
”The great ‘M’! ‘M’ for what? ‘M’ really for Myrmidon, or ‘M’ for Mammon? For Mohammed the Prophet? For Mani the Manichaean? ‘M’ for McDonald’s, or Monsanto, or Microsoft? ‘M’ for Melchik? ‘M’ for Minoan? ‘M’ for Maze?...’M’ for Me?”
Again from the Epilogue, Morris says “A whole world…has come into being since I wrote Last Letters from Hav. New states have emerged, and new kinds of cities suddenly erupted.” The world is a new thing in this century, and history doesn’t always provide a signpost. Morris, the great traveler, is perplexed and uneasy. ...more
This marvelous collection of the extant fragments of verse attributed to Sappho is a glorious spur to the imagination. Sappho was a lyricist, a poet, This marvelous collection of the extant fragments of verse attributed to Sappho is a glorious spur to the imagination. Sappho was a lyricist, a poet, a musician. It is unknown whether or not she was literate in reading and writing, but her work was collected in writing, and reprinted, but little has survived the centuries. Only one full poem, the ode to Aphrodite, survives whole at twenty-eight lines.
Sappho was known and lauded throughout the ancient world for the beauty of her poems accompanied by the lyre. She wrote nuptial songs mainly, it seems, for the tenor of the fragments suggest the happy circumstance of a marriage. The Encyclopedia Britannica suggests that Sappho taught young women the arts of courtesanship, seduction, marriage which may (I speculate here) be one reason why she was so universally adored and admired.
Can we all agree that to be a brilliant courtesan requires great intelligence: a deep understanding and acceptance of human nature and desire, and enormous self-control and discipline? Add to this her apparently unparalleled skill as a poet—alas! We do not have enough of her work surviving to adequately judge, but the fragments set us to dreaming and are an undeniable spur to writers and lyricists alike. We will have to trust her contemporaries and sup upon lines like
Eros shook my mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees
and
you burn me
Anne Carson has chosen to reprint fragments attributed to Sappho, sometimes single words, separated by brackets to indicate lost fragments. The blank spaces are fruitful places for meditation on what was once there. Sometimes the few words jump from the page
] ] ] ] robe and colored with saffron purple robe cloaks crowns beautiful ] purple rugs ] ]
and
]Dawn with gold sandals
If many of the song or poem fragments were composed for weddings, just that concept brings a host of associations and an understanding of Sappho’s history. There is more to learn about her as an individual (she had three brothers, was married with a child, was exiled to Sicily in her twenties it is thought) but not much more. It is thought she lived from 610 B.C. to 570 B.C. A collection of her work was published during the Middle Ages in nine volumes but has not survived. Our imagination will have to suffice.
That the work of an individual has so inflamed the public imagination for such a long time is cause enough for wonder. One fragment shows an awareness of her fame
someone will remember us I say even in another time
Sappho was a “honeyvoiced…mythweaver,”
]nectar poured from gold ]with hands Persuasion
The surviving fragments are a kind of spur to the creative mind. When writers or lyricists find themselves stuck, they could do much worse than flip through this book for its inspiration. To my mind Sappho addresses writer's block:
for it is not right in a house of the Muses that there be a lament this would not become us
Apologies to Anne Carson and publisher AA Knopf for not being able to reproduce the high quality typesetting and lovely spacing in this book. If this review is at all intriguing to you, try to lay your hands on a printed copy from 2002. The formatting is as informative as the print. Also, I put pictures in my blogpost....more
There are many translations of Cavafy's poems. Cavafy is thought by other poets to be among the poetry greats of all time. He writes often of love, buThere are many translations of Cavafy's poems. Cavafy is thought by other poets to be among the poetry greats of all time. He writes often of love, but he also writes of man's psychological wiliness and attempts to fool himself. His work is very simple, filled with visual, emotional, and erotic cues. He wrote stirringly of man's political nature as it is formed from his personal imperfection. Barnstone, in her Foreword to this volume [translates and] quotes "In a Large Greek Colony, 200 B.C.E." The poem, written in 1928, is a "gentle and sane" criticism of progressivism, and can, with little revision, describe the men and women of our good Senate who, with great heat and words, perform surgery on our lives. The civility of his resistance is memorable. I wish we all had such wisdom in our criticisms. The last two stanzas of the poem read:
"And when, with good luck, they finish their work, having ordered and pared everything down to the last detail, they leave, taking away their rightful wages, as well. We'll see what remains, after so much expert surgery.
Perhaps the time had not yet come. Let's not rush; haste is a dangerous thing. Premature measures bring regret. Certainly and unfortunately, there is much disorder in the Colony But is there anything human without imperfection? And anyway, look, we're moving ahead."
Barnstone says of this:
"The last two stanzas [of this poem] are delicious and the penultimate line is the signature supreme...It may be his homosexuality--the fact that it was such an omnipresent subject for him--placed him inevitably on the radical edge and even created in him a huge tolerance, and understanding of loneliness, isolation, and suffering, a pity for the despised, for the outcast, and a sympathy for the outsider, Jew, Pagan, Christian, which made it impossible for him to demonize the other, what the politically stupid, thoughtless, or narrow of our time required...Also he was manifestly good, and sane and whole, and most of all, kind."
Read the whole poem. It tells us something.
My favorite poem in this collection is called Desires:
"Like beautiful bodies of the dead that haven't aged and were locked in a mausoleum with tears, with roses at their heads and jasmine at their feet, that is what desires look like when they pass without having fulfilled, without even a single night of passion, or a shining morning." (1904)
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