Rereading “The Odyssey”: Translations and the Film (Thornfield Hall)
Every decade there is a popular new translation. In the 1970s and ’80s, it would have been Richmond Lattimore’s, with its pared-down style, then considered closest to the Greek. And Robert Fagles’ gorgeous, lively translation, published in 1996, outdid Lattimore’s in beauty of language and poetic style. And now there is Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation, published last year, which was praised by Jorie Graham and Lee Child.
Of course seeing the film of The Odyssey – twice – has inspired me to reread the epic poem (Fagles’ translation). Before I make a few comments about Book 22, let me talk about the cast of the movie.
Short, to the point, and a post I agree with in the most part. I have not read The Odyssey since the movie came out, but i do not recall it leaving me tired.
I like how this documentary points out the difference between Hemingway as a man, a writer, and a myth.
Christina Anderson: “Man In Love” (The Yale Review), I have draft plays I need to get back to, but they worry me since I know so little about stage craft. Ms. Anderson annotates her play. I like the play. Her annotations give me ideas.
More Hemingway! I was disappointed by For Whom The Bells Toll when I read it again in my fifites. This podcast almost restored it for me.
The Sun’s Song, by contrast, has an all-male-identifying cast and consists of several acts and intervals. It alternates time periods and takes place across many different parts of the globe. It is the story of a father and a son, and it delves into questions of masculinity and intimacy; the wild earth and the wild in us; the politics of climate change; and the consequences of not dealing with your own hurt. I hope it will premiere in 2028, although it is still very much a work in progress. I am sharing an excerpt of the current draft below, along with annotations to provide insight into the play and my artistic decisions.
Does this mean he sees writing as a means of self-improvement? God, no! When he’s working on a scene, trying to capture a character or get the tone right, he’s not thinking in moral terms. “If you’re really engaged with that, it’s not a matter of morality, but a matter of getting at something true. So I prefer truth as a goal to morality, to self-improvement, to the betterment of one’s soul,” he says. “I don’t really care about bettering my soul. I care about getting it right,” he adds. And then, the reflexive edit: “Which is a pretty good ending line.”
A review of Library of America's Nineteenth Century short stories:
I know why I like Toni Morrison, another Midwesterner. She looks at America without blinking, without any sense of picking easy targets. Reading Tracing Shadows from Lapham’s Quarterly reinforces my bias.
That said, to pretend that just because an author was not racist, their character’s point of view or diction is not racial would be just as much of a folly. In American literary criticism up to that point, Morrison reflected, “the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference...Every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse.” In other words, when it comes to the way race works in literature, denial and finger-pointing are equally childish.
Morrison’s posture was instead to treat race and racism as worthy of interest, but unworthy of debate. Eschewing the representation game of bewailing the absence or distorted presence of race in American literature, she told us: Look again! No need to destroy the canon. No need to deify it, either. Why not just read it? This begins with something as simple as the act of noticing.
But I have spent too much time with Indiana's history of racism.
Morrison’s reading of Moby Dick spilled beyond “Unspeakable Things, Unspoken.” In a 1990 interview about her argument, the journalist Bill Moyers declared to her, of the bestselling books on the eve of the Civil War: “Your people never show up in the novels of that time.” Morrison gently contested this, saying, “Well, they do. They show up...It’s in Melville, it’s everywhere in Poe.” These are aesthetic figures rather than three-dimensional characters: “getting a truly complex human black person in a book in this country in the nineteenth century was unlikely. Melville came probably very close with…classic complexities, but not real flesh-and-blood people.”
She raised a pattern in Moby Dick as an example of this complex symbolism: “He gets into bed with him in the very first scene. Ishmael goes to bed with Queequeg. Each one of those white people in Moby Dick has a black brother. They’re paired together. Fedallah is the shadow of Ahab. Queequeg is the shadow of Ishmael. They all have them, and they work together in tandem.” She explained that, “even though the realistic representation is not there, the information, subtextual information…is all self-reflexive, it’s all about the fabrication of a white male American.” This is one meaning of her title, which also appears as an uncanny refrain in her 1987 novel Beloved: “Unspeakable things unspoken. Always we are defining ourselves by the other.”
No kidding. My research project has brought home to me that liberty exists only in opposition to tyranny, including slavery. That it has no definition other than as dialectic.
In her brief analysis of Huckleberry Finn in Playing in the Dark, she castigates the way critics of Twain’s 1884 novel had thus far tended to “focus on its celebration of savvy innocence, at the same time voicing polite embarrassment over the symptomatic racial attitude it enforces.” Morrison, by contrast, never dismisses or defends the racism in that novel in her writings on it. Instead, she considers its aesthetic and ideological function—and its narrative one: “Neither Huck nor Mark Twain can tolerate, in imaginative terms, Jim freed...freedom has no meaning to Huck or to the text without the specter of enslavement.”
Lolita has never rested easily with me, a brilliantly written novel about characters I do not like, but the following has me seeing more that might make me more sympathethetic.
There is now a documentary about Salman Rushdie being almost killed. I offer you two reviews.
‘The damage was much worse than I had imagined’: the shocking inside story of Salman Rushdie’s survival (The Guardian)
It is hard to say which time zone of the film is more viscerally shocking: the grisly footage of Rushdie being stitched and stapled back together in 2022, or the murderous hatred that roars out from news headlines in the months and years following the fatwa. In the US, the office of the Riverdale Press newspaper is firebombed after it runs an editorial about the book defending free expression; in Pakistan, six people are killed in riots; in Japan, a translator is stabbed to death; in Italy, another translator is stabbed in his home, while, in London, an effigy of a mutilated Rushdie is paraded through the streets by a furious crowd, some of whom declare on camera that nothing less than hanging will satisfy them
Knife review: Salman Rushdie doc is a potent reminder of art's power amid persecution (Robertebert.com)
This is a simple but strong document about the importance of art as a way to comment on the world, the artist’s resilience in the face of the controversies their work might inspire, and the determination not to let violence be the answer to everything. These may seem like obvious concepts, but as this film clearly shows, we need constant reminders.
For something a little lighter, two videos about Dorthy L. Sayers. I think there is a bit of an oversell of her as neglected but then I am one of her fans.
sch 9/20
