New from Homer

Here from The Economist is a review of a new edition of a venerable translation of the Iliad (Richmond Lattimore), two new translations (Stephen Mitchell, Anthony Verity), and a free adaptation (Alice Oswald): Winged Words. About Lattimore, the reviewer and I will have to disagree: the “certain grace” that he or she finds in Lattimore’s Iliad is missing from my copy. About Mitchell and Verity, I’m inclined to agree: the lines quoted offer little to recommend these translations. Oswald’s project sounds like an obvious imitation of Christopher Logue’s ongoing War Music: I’m surprised that the reviewer doesn’t mention Logue’s reimagining of Homer’s poem.

Mitchell’s bland admission to the Wall Street Journal — “I’ve never been able to read ‘The Iliad,’ actually, until I sat down to do this. . . . I could never get past book one in any translation. I found the language very dull” — raises an odd but relevant question: why might one sit down to translate a work one has never read, either in the original or in translation? Mitchell’s characterization of translations as “dull” makes me think that he must not have sampled Stanley Lombardo’s Iliad. It’s curious then that Mitchell’s colloquialisms — “Don’t talk to me of agreements, you son of a bitch“ — sound very much like the work of a poor man’s Stanley Lombardo.

For me, there’s one great Iliad in modern translation, and it‘s Lombardo’s. It’s the translation that made me understand Homer’s poem. I am interested though in browsing these new translations in a bookstore. (No samples at Amazon.)

Some related posts
Gilgamesh in translation (Stephen Mitchell and N.K. Sandars)
Whose Homer? (the Big Four: Lattimore, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Fagles, Lombardo)
Translators at work and play (another line by the Big Four)
Three Virgils (Fitzgerald, Lombardo, Fagles)
Translations, mules, briars (Guy Davenport on Lattimore)

[“I could never get past book one in any translation”: why would Mitchell have been limited to reading the poem in translation anyway? Because he had no Homeric Greek? Did he thus invest time in learning a language to be able translate a poem he had never read? Very puzzling. Browse around and you’ll find that other readers have wondered whether Mitchell can read Homer’s Greek.]

Selling the Iliad

On the back cover of the new University of Chicago Press edition of Richmond Lattimore’s 1951 translation of Homer’s Iliad, there’s an appraisal from Robert Fitzgerald:

The feat is so decisive that it is reasonable to foresee a century or so in which nobody will try again to put the Iliad in English verse.

Yes, Fitzgerald wrote that sentence, in “Heroic Poems in English,” a review of Lattimore’s translation published in the Autumn 1952 issue of the Kenyon Review. Sometime after writing that sentence, Fitzgerald translated the Iliad (1974). His Odyssey (1961) though is far better known.

I’ll admit: if I were tasked with selling the Iliad, I’d like to quote great reviews too. But quoting a nearly sixty-year-old undated sentence on the likely longevity of a translation, a sentence whose writer went on to make his own translation of the poem, seems, well, odd.

Related posts (Homer in translation)
“Kchaou!”
Translations, mules, briars
Translators at work and play
Whose Homer?

[I’m unable to find a date for this edition’s other jacket quotation, from Peter Green, writing in The New Republic: “Perhaps closer to Homer in every way than any other version made in English.” Which versions did Green have in mind?]

Whose Homer?

(for Stefan Hagemann)

I'm teaching the Iliad again, in Stanley Lombardo's 1997 translation, and we just hit a line that always sticks in students' minds, Hector's rebuke of his brother Paris in Book 3. As the opposing forces mass for battle, Paris steps out and offers to fight the Greeks' best man to the death. Menelaus steps up -- he's not the best Greek, but he is Helen's husband after all. Paris, suddenly pale, runs back to the Trojan lines. Hector then speaks with impatience and contempt:

"Paris, you desperate, womanizing pretty boy!"

I just recommended Lombardo's Iliad to my friend Stefan Hagemann, so I'll make a case for my choice by looking at how the other members of the Big Four -- Richmond Lattimore (1951), Robert Fitzgerald (1974), and Robert Fagles (1990) -- handle this one line. Here's Lattimore:

"Evil Paris, beautiful, woman-crazy, cajoling."

Yes, Lattimore is close to the Greek (Lombardo too, as you can see here). The problem with Lattimore's line, to my mind, is that it's nearly impossible to imagine someone saying it in English. It's very difficult to hear cajoling, for instance, as a term of rebuke. And what's urgently missing is the word you, the inevitable pronoun of rebuke in English ("Why you little . . . .").

I love Robert Fitzgerald's Odyssey, but like many readers, I find him less at home in the Iliad. Here's Fitzgerald's Hector:

                                               "You bad-luck charm!
Paris, the great lover, a gallant sight!"

Fitzgerald leaves out any overt reference to Paris' beauty (in the Greek, he is "best in form," or "best in figure"), a curious omission, as Homer has just noted Paris' glamorous leopard-skin (he is the only warrior in the poem to wear one). As for "You bad-luck charm!" -- that phrase introduces a tone of high camp that I find bewildering in this context.

Robert Fagles has picked up all the establishment honors, but his translations of Homer (and Aeschylus) seem to me to strain too hard for a faux-lofty, Yeatsian rhetoric. Rarely do they, for me, ring true. Here's Fagles' Hector:

"Paris, appalling Paris! Our prince of beauty --
mad for women, you lure them all to ruin!"

What I first notice here is the sheer verbiage: what Homer does in five words, Lattimore and Lombardo in six, Fitzgerald in eleven, Fagles does in sixteen. Fagles' Hector speaks with stagey repetition (he seems to have a British accent, methinks) and (like Fitzgerald's Hector) with two! -- two! -- exclamation points. Another problem: Fagles' translation seems a little misleading for new readers of the poem, for Paris has lured neither Helen nor any other woman. (There is no "them all.") The Iliad presents Helen as the victim of a sexual kidnapping of sorts, a woman filled with contempt for her keeper. It's not at all clear that she's been "ruined": though she's filled with shame and self-hatred, the poem never passes judgment on her, treating her rather with compassion and generosity.

Facing multiple translations in a bookstore, it can be difficult to know what choice to make. Picking some scattered lines for comparison can sometimes illuminate the differences among translations to a remarkable degree. Looking at this line in four translations reminds me of why I choose Lombardo's Iliad when I teach.

Related posts

"Kcahou!"
Paris, pretty-boy
Translators at work and play
Aeschylus in three translations

Interview with Stanley Lombardo

Homer in four translations

In The New York Times, Emily Wilson, who has now translated both the Iliad and the Odyssey, writes about four translations of a speech by Hector from Iliad 6.

When I taught Homer and other ancient writers in translation, I was very fond of bringing in multiple versions of a passage. Reading across translations and exploring the source text via the Perseus Digital Library is a great way to get closer to the poetry. When I was preparing to interview the classicist Stanley Lombardo in 2003, I sat in the library with the Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Fagles, and Lombardo translations of the Iliad and Odyssey and the Loeb texts of the poems, scanning every line in each translation for items of possible interest. As the poet said, you can observe a lot by just watching.

*

One point in Wilson’s commentary that complicates things greatly:

Wilson writes that Hector “is a deeply loving father and husband who makes the choice to leave his family to almost-certain enslavement and death” by fighting on the Trojan plain. “His death,” she writes, “will entail his wife’s rape and enslavement, their baby’s violent death and the sack of their city.”

I have to disagree. These events won’t come about because of Hector’s death in battle. They’ll come about because Troy is doomed. As Hector says earlier in his meeting with his wife Andromache in this episode:

Deep in my heart, I know too well
There will come a day when holy Ilion [Troy] will
    perish,
And Priam and the people under Priam’s ash spear.

Hector imagines the pain he will feel — he’ll be alive — as his wife is taken by the Greeks, and as he goes on to say, he hopes to be dead, “the earth heaped up above me,” before it happens.

Related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard) : Aeschylus in three translations : Homer in four translations : More Homer : Sappho in two translations : Virgil in three tranlations : More Virgil

[Lines from the Iliad are in Stanley Lombardo’s translation (1997).]

Aristeia

The aristeia (from aristos, best) is a recurring element in Homer's Iliad. It's a warrior's moment of greatest glory in battle, the poem focusing on him alone as he kills victim after victim after victim.

The longest and bloodiest aristeia in the poem is that of Achilles, who seeks to make the Trojans pay for killing his beloved comrade Patroclus. What sets Achilles' aristeia apart from all others in the Iliad is that it is, at heart, a suicide mission: Achilles knows that if he kills the Trojan warrior Hector (who dealt the final blow to Patroclus), his own death will soon follow. He doesn't mind. When his horse Xanthus — magical, immortal, and gifted with prophetic speech — warns Achilles of his fate, he replies, "I don't need you to prophesy my death, / Xanthus. I know in my bones I will die here."

What follows is unrelenting in its horror. Spattered with blood and tissue, fire shooting from his head, Achilles is both animal and god. He has lost his humanity, killing and mutilating as he moves toward his own death. He fights not alongside his fellow Achaeans, but in a private war. The only community he can now acknowledge is a community of the dead, the one that holds Patroclus and which he soon will join.

I think that what we're seeing in a campus rampage is a version of Achilles' aristeia, the work of a person dissociated from his own humanity and from reality. Simone Weil called the Iliad the poem of force, force being that which turns a human being into a thing. In the fragile version of pastoral that is the open American campus, it seems terrifyingly easy for one who would wield that force to be able to do so.

[Iliad translation by Stanley Lombardo, 1997.]

Christopher Logue (1926–2011)

The British poet Christopher Logue has died. He is best known for reimagining Homer’s Iliad in a long work that he called “a poem in English dependent on the Iliad” or simply “my Homer poem.” Or as others have called it, “Logue’s Homer,” a decades-long project that began in 1958 with a section of Iliad 21 commissioned by the BBC. Logue noted in his autobiography Prince Charming (1999) that when the opportunity to work on the Iliad came his way, his copy of E.V. Rieu’s prose translation of the poem was in a box of books he had planned to sell.

You can read Logue’s Homer in three volumes: War Music (1997, collecting Kings, The Husbands, and War Music), All Day Permanent Red (2003), and Cold Calls (2005), whose jacket flap calls it “the penultimate installment.” (Will there be another?)

Logue’s Homer seems to me the last great work of literary modernism, collapsing past(s) and present with grim wit and startling originality. Three brief examples:

“Hail and farewell, dear Ek.”
(The Husbands, Paris speaking to Hector)

Blurred bronze. Blood? Blood like a car-wash:
    “But it keeps the dust down.”
(All Day Permanent Red)

They find him with guitar,
Singing of Gilgamesh.
(Cold Calls, the embassy to Achilles)

[“Hail and farewell”: “ave atque vale,” from Catullus 101, the poet addressing his dead brother.]

"Uber-responsible" types

Lifehacker, the home of "tips and downloads for getting things done," had a remarkably ill-advised post over the weekend, Get Drunk Faster. Oy. Some spirited (no pun intended) comments followed, one of which challenged readers to "name one …1… literal or fictional uber-responsible type that the opposite sex ultimately digs."

That's easy. In Homer's Iliad, there's the Trojan warrior Hector. His wife Andromache loves him, and Helen (the most beautiful woman in the world) seems attracted to him. In Iliad 6, when Hector and Helen speak, she wonders,

"But since the gods have ordained these evils,
Why couldn't I be the wife of a better man,
One sensitive at least to repeated reproaches?"

Like Hector? Helen then rebukes her keeper Paris by name and invites her "'Dear brother-in-law'" to sit with her. Hector's reply leaves little doubt about the undercurrent of feeling in this scene:

"Don't ask me to sit, Helen, even though
You love me. You will never persuade me.
My heart is out there with our fighting men."

Hector then tells Helen that he's off to see his wife and child. His wife and child. Get it? He's a family man, whom we see as a son, brother, husband, and father. Yet his responsibility to the people of Troy trumps even his devotion to family: when, in one of the most moving passages in the poem, Andromache pleads with Hector to consider his own safety in fighting the Greeks, he cannot honor her plea. The city is his responsibility, and he is his responsibility: his name means holder in Homer's Greek.

Aeneas, the hero of Virgil's Aeneid, one of the few survivors of the fall of Troy, is another "uber-responsible" figure with strong sexual appeal. Aeneas is devoted above all to what Virgil calls pietas, his duty — to the gods, his family, his people. Aeneas' departure from Troy gives us an emblem of that devotion: as Aeneas leads the band of survivors, he carries his father Anchises on his back. Aeneas is responsible too for his own son Ascanius: thus Troy's past and its people's future are both his responsibility. Dido, queen of Carthage, is smitten as Aeneas tells the story of Troy's destruction. She is, literally, love-sick, "a wound / Or inward fire eating her away," and she kills herself when Aeneas abandons her (not long after consummating the relationship) to find a home for his people.

Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) at the end of Casablanca (1942) is a distant inheritor of Aeneas' sense of pietas: "But I've got a job to do too. Where I'm going, you can't follow. What I've got to do, you can't be any part of." Rick walks off into "a beautiful friendship" (not sexual of course) with Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), who has said that "well, if I were a woman and I weren't around, I should be in love with Rick." Thus the "uber-responsible type" might appeal not only to the opposite sex but to "all the sexes," as Ira Gershwin put it. Everybody comes to Rick's.¹

[Iliad translation by Stanley Lombardo (1997). Aeneid translation by Robert Fitzgerald (1983). Casablanca screenplay by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch.]

¹ Everybody Comes to Rick's: the title of the Murray Burnett–Joan Alison play that was the basis for Casablanca; also a line in the film, spoken by Louis to Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt).

Related posts
On the Iliad and Aeneid

Lombardo's Homer wins

Stanley Lombardo's unabridged recording of his translation of the Iliad has received the 2007 Benjamin Franklin Award from the Independent Book Publishers Association for best adult nonfiction audiobook.

Nonfiction? Well, the Greeks did think of the Iliad as (to borrow Ezra Pound's definition of the epic) "a poem containing history."

Benjamin Franklin Awards, 2007
Stanley Lombardo recordings (Parmenides Audio)
Stanley Lombardo interview (Jacket)
"Wonderland of voices," review of Lombardo's Iliad and Odyssey recordings (Jacket)

Hillary Clinton and kleos

I'm teaching the Iliad and the Odyssey in a four-week summer session for undergraduates: two hours of teaching in the morning, five days a week, and preparing for the next class at night. So I have Homer on the brain, and I find myself thinking about the Democratic presidential race in terms of κλέος. Kleos, "what is heard," or, less literally, "fame," "glory," is one of the great moving forces in Homer's Iliad. When, for instance, the Trojan warrior Hector challenges any Achaean to fight him, he promises if victorious to return his opponent's corpse for funeral rites,

"So someone in generations yet to come
Will say as he sails by on the darkening sea,
'That is the tomb of a man long dead,
Killed in his prime by glorious Hector.'
Someone will say that, and my fame [kleos] will not die."

[Iliad 7, translated by Stanley Lombardo.]

To seek kleos is to seek a cultural afterlife in memory and speech.

Kleos in Homer is always a good thing, but as the Greek-English Lexicon points out, kleos can also refer to any reputation, good or bad. So what kleos might Hillary Clinton's actions in the Democratic race attain for her? What will the future say? That she gave her all in an effort to push back the barriers against women's full participation in political life? That when she saw the math against her, she worked to support her party's inevitable nominee and further the cause of racial reconciliation? Or that she damaged her party's chances by taking every chance to characterize her opponent's success as illegitimate? The future is listening, now.

Related posts
All Homer posts (Pinboard)

Homer then and now

The Nation has an extensive report on the experiences of American veterans of the war in Iraq. An excerpt:

We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photographs, that some soldiers had so lost their moral compass that they'd mocked or desecrated Iraqi corpses. One photo, among dozens turned over to The Nation during the investigation, shows an American soldier acting as if he is about to eat the spilled brains of a dead Iraqi man with his brown plastic Army-issue spoon. . . .

The scene, Sergeant [Camilo] Mejía said, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers and cousins.

A reader of Homer's Iliad will find nothing surprising in such accounts. Achilles' character is undone in the course of the Iliad; the warrior who once displayed the greatest concern for his comrades and the greatest compassion toward the enemy descends into self-absorbed brutality. Here is Achilles speaking to the Trojan warrior Hector, before killing him and dragging his body behind a chariot:

               "I wish my stomach would let me
Cut off your flesh in strips and eat it raw
For what you've done to me. There is no one
And no way to keep the dogs off your head."

(Iliad 22, translated by Stanley Lombardo)

Standing on Troy's wall, Hector's father and mother witness Achilles' treatment of their son's body, groaning and screaming as they watch.

And here we are, twenty-seven centuries later, in the same story.

The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness (The Nation, via Boing Boing)

Victor Davis Hanson on Ajax, Achilles, and Trump

The New Yorker has an interview with Victor Davis Hanson, classicist, military historian, and Donald Trump supporter. The interview covers touches on many subjects in a short space: “anchor babies,” the travel ban, the statue-loving demonstrators in Charlottesville, Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and when it’s appropriate to mock a woman as unattractive: “There are certain women that may be homely,” Hanson declares. It’s like watching an interview from The Colbert Report.

And of course, Hanson talks about his forthcoming book, The Case for Trump, in which he likens Donald Trump, in passing, to the Greek heroes Achilles and Ajax. As he does in the interview:

“You have a neurotic hero [Ajax] who cannot get over the fact that he was by all standards the successor to Achilles and deserves Achilles’s armor, and yet he was outsmarted by this wily, lesser Odysseus, who rigged the contest and got the armor. All he does is say, ‘This wasn’t fair. I’m better. Doesn’t anybody know this?’ It’s true, but you want to say to Ajax, ‘Shut up and just take it.’ Achilles has elements of a tragic hero. He says, at the beginning of the Iliad, ‘I do all the work. I kill all the Trojans. But when it comes to assigning booty, you always give it to mediocrities — deep-state, administrative nothings.’ So he stalks off. And the gods tell him, ‘If you come back in, you will win fame, but you are going to end up dead.’ So he makes a tragic, heroic decision that he is going to do that.

“I think Trump really did think that there were certain problems and he had particular skills that he could solve. Maybe in a naïve fashion. But I think he understood, for all the emoluments-clause hysteria, that he wasn’t going to make a lot of money from it or be liked for it.”

These comparisons are bonkers. Let’s not forget: Trump, unlike Ajax, won the big prize, with, it seems, considerable help from outside actors who worked to rig the outcome — Russians, not Greeks. The Ajax of Sophocles’s tragedy Ajax (the work Hanson is referencing) does more than say “This wasn’t fair”: having planned to kill Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Odysseus, he is deluded by Athena into slaughtering cattle instead. And he then realizes what he has done: “Now I stand here / Disgraced.” What distinguishes Sophocles’s Ajax is his profound shame, an emotion Donald Trump seems incapable of feeling.

As for Achilles: he returns to battle out of a deep sense of loyalty to his beloved Patroclus, willing to sacrifice himself to avenge his comrade. Loyalty, self-sacrifice: further elements of human experience that seem foreign to Trump, except insofar as he demands them of others.

If Trump resembles anyone in the Iliad, it’s Agamemnon, the leader who is at a loss in a true crisis and claims Achilles’s prize of war (the enslaved Briseis) to assert his own greater authority. It’s the preening, self-aggrandizing Agamemnon who complains of fake news, dismissing the prophet Calchas’s explanation of a plague: “Not a single favorable omen ever!”

And it must be said: Ajax, Achilles, and even Agamemnon fight valiantly. None of them claimed to have bone spurs. The best comparison there would be to Odysseus, who feigned madness to avoid conscription. But once at Troy, he too fought valiantly.

In 2017 I wrote a post about Trump, Agamemnon, Oedipus, and Creon: We three kings. Or, really, one king and two tyrants.

Other related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard)

[Amazon’s Look Inside feature lets me see that the references to Ajax and Achilles are as cursory in Hanson’s book as they are in this interview. I’ve quoted from Peter Meineck’s translation of Ajax, in Four Tragedies (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), and Stanley Lombardo’s translation of the Iliad (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).]

An Iliad

“In their one-man adaptation An Iliad, Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare (TV’s True Blood) return Homer’s epic poem to the voice of the lone poet as he recounts a story of human loss and folly that resonates across three millennia of war and bloodshed.” An Iliad runs at Chicago’s Court Theatre, November 10 to December 11.

[Thanks to Music Clip of the Day for the news.]

Homer's world

Book 18 of Homer's Iliad contains a remarkable description of the surface of Achilles' shield. Made by the god Hephaestus, the lame blacksmith, the shield offers an enigmatic picture of life in its totality: sun and moon, war and peace, city and country, the seasonal endeavors of agriculture and pastoralism and vintage, all encircled by the River Ocean. I like to think of the shield as the god's silent, somber celebration of all the possibilities of life beyond the Iliad: the city at war (i.e., life as it's lived in the Iliad) represents only a small part of the whole.

Above, a remarkable visualization not of Achilles' shield but of the geography of the Homeric world, creator unknown. (Click for a larger view.) If this picture were a real snowglobe, I'd buy it in a second. More via the links:

Homer’s Snowdome (Strange Maps)
Homer's view of the earth (henry-davis.com)
An explanation (henry-davis.com)

(Thanks, TRH!)

Homer's Rumsfeld

From a brief interview with Robert Fagles, whose translation of the Aeneid was published last week:

"I was asked by a reporter, 'Is there a Rumsfeld in the Iliad?' I said, 'I don't think so, but isn't one enough?'" Fagles said. "He laughed and didn't print it."

That reporter may have been hoping that Fagles would liken the Greek leader Agamemnon to Donald Rumsfeld. The similarities are not difficult to work out: when the Iliad begins, the Greek forces are in an ever-worsening situation, dying of a plague sent by the god Apollo. Is Agamemnon doing anything to change that? No. Moreover, he himself has caused the problems the Greeks are facing, by refusing to honor the priest Chryses' plea for the return of his daughter Chryseis, now Agamemnon's war prize. When the Greek prophet Calchas explains what is happening and what must be done to appease Apollo -- return Chryseis and make sacrifices, Agamemnon is furious. Here's a particularly Rumsfeldian bit of arrogance and cranky complaint about the media (or the medium):

                                                    "You damn
    soothsayer!
You've never given me a good omen yet.
You take some kind of perverse pleasure in
    prophesying
Doom, don't you? Not a single favorable omen ever!
Nothing good ever happens!"

(Iliad 1, translated by Stanley Lombardo)

A reader interested in exploring broad parallels between Homer's world of war and our own should investigate Jonathan Shay's Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming.

Fagles brings Aeneas into modern world (dailyprincetonian.com)

Exploring Combat and the Psyche, Beginning with Homer (article on Jonathan Shay, New York Times)

Petraeus

I find it fascinating that all questions of American strategy in Iraq are said to depend upon the observations of one man: Petraeus.

The omission of General is no sign of disrespect. It's meant to call attention to the seer-like status that seems to be associated with the name Petraeus. I'm reminded of Calchas, the seer whom the Achaean forces consult at the beginning of the Iliad:

Calchas, son of Thestor, bird-reader supreme,
Who knew what is, what will be, and what has been.

Petraeus even sounds plausibly mythic (though General Petraeus' parents are Dutch-American, not Greek or Roman): Petraeus is the name of a centaur in Hesiod's Shield of Heracles and Ovid's Metamorphoses.

[Iliad translation by Stanley Lombardo.]

Mediterranean fatalism

Over five nights in late July and early August, I made my way through the twenty-one episodes of the sixth (final) season of The Sopranos on DVD. No spoilers, if you haven't watched: I'll say only that there's much time spent in hospitals, "facilities," "centers," and funeral homes. It's a season of sickness and violence and death.

As a semi-Italian Brooklyn native and former New Jerseyan, I take great pleasure in the show's dialogue, which sounds, from my experience, remarkably true to life. (The exceptions: when Tony Soprano is made to say things like "I'm miffled" and "Rick Sanatorium," à la Archie Bunker.) One bit of dialogue that I noticed returning with some frequency in this season:

"What are you gonna do?"

That's Mediterranean fatalism itself, in five words.

"What are you gonna do?" is a rhetorical question that suits a variety of circumstances: Somebody's wife ran off? Somebody has cancer? Somebody has Alzheimer's? Somebody died? What are you gonna do?

In the world of The Sopranos, this rhetorical question marks the temporary surrender of illusion. Tony and company would like to believe that they're in control, of their lives and the lives of others. But sometimes there's nothing they can do, because life is difficult and unpredictably painful.

The Greek warrior Achilles expresses this sense of life's mystery and suffering in his words to the Trojan king Priam in Iliad 24. Achilles explains that Zeus keeps two jars, one filled with "good things," the other "a jar of woe." Some human beings get things from both jars. Some get only woe. And it's not fair:

"Yes, the gods have woven pain into mortal lives,
While they are free from care."

What are you gonna do?

[Iliad translation by Stanley Lombardo.]

Another Sopranos post
Angelo Bucco's notebook

Achilles in Afghanistan

In a PBS NewsHour discussion last night of the recent atrocities in Afghanistan, Jeffrey Johns, a former U.S. Air Force psychiatrist, mentioned Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam (1994):

[T]here’s a phenomenon known as berserk or going berserk that has been reported throughout time in almost all wars. Homer wrote about an episode about in which Achilles went on a rampage and committed several atrocities following the death of his friend. So while this is a rare phenomenon, it has been reported. Jonathan Shay writes about his patients experiencing something similar in Vietnam.

What Dr. Johns didn’t explain is that Achilles in Vietnam focuses on a pattern of experience that culminates in berserking, a pattern Shay finds in the Iliad and in the accounts of Vietnam veterans. The pattern begins with a betrayal of “what’s right,” an act that violates the codes by which a community lives and fights. In the aftermath of that violation, the soldier’s “social and moral horizon” shrinks: his loyalty now lies not with the community or the cause but with a small number of trusted comrades. The “death of a special comrade” leads to feelings of “guilt and wrongful substitution”: I wasn’t there for him; it should have been me. And what follows is the berserk state, in which a soldier loses all restraint, becoming at once animal and god.

There’s no exact correspondence between what happened in Afghanistan and what happens in the Iliad. But details in a New York Times article about Robert Bales take on particular significance for anyone who’s read Shay’s work:

A year ago, according to a blog written by his wife, he was denied a promotion to sergeant first class, a rank that would have brought not just added responsibility and respect but also money at a time when his finances seemed stretched.

*

That next phase, the Baleses hoped, would take them to Germany, Italy or Hawaii. But the Army did not move Sergeant Bales from Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Nor did it allow him to become a recruiter, though he was in training for the job. Instead, he was told he would go with the Third Brigade to Afghanistan in December.

*

About a week ago, Mr. Browne [John Henry Browne, Bales’s lawyer] said, Sergeant Bales saw a friend lose a leg to a buried mine. Soon after, according to Mr. Browne, he sent his wife a short message: “Hard day for the good guys.”

*

About a day later, Army officials said, Sergeant Bales walked out of the outpost and headed toward the nearby village.

The subtitle of Achilles in Vietnam — Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character — makes a point that some readers want to resist: that good character provides no sure defense against the experiences of war, that good character can be destroyed by circumstance. Achilles, who embodies best character (caring for the whole community, sparing the lives of prisoners, respecting the enemy dead), is destroyed as a result of what Shay calls “catastrophic moral luck”: a betrayal by his commander and the loss of the beloved comrade who wears Achilles’ armor and fights in his place.

Robert Bales seems to have exhibited at least good character in the military. From an NPR report:

Early indications are that Bales was a good soldier. He signed up soon after Sept. 11, 2001. In the decade since, he served three times in Iraq, earning medals for good conduct and meritorious service.

In 2007, Bales took part in the battle of Najaf, an intense engagement later written up in a Fort Lewis newspaper called the Northwest Guardian. In the article, Bales is quoted saying he was proud of his unit, because “we discriminated between the bad guys and the noncombatants.”

One officer who was there says Bales distinguished himself; he told the Seattle Times Friday night that when he learned the name of the alleged shooter in Afghanistan, “I nearly fell off my chair and had a good cry.”

The names of the dead in Afghanistan, missing from New York Times, NPR, the PBS NewsHour, and the Seattle Times:

Mohamed Dawood, son of Abdullah
Khudaydad, son of Mohamed Juma
Nazar Mohamed
Payendo
Robeena
Shatarina, daughter of Sultan Mohamed
Zahra, daughter of Abdul Hamid
Nazia, daughter of Dost Mohamed
Masooma, daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Farida, daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Palwasha, daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Nabia, daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Esmatullah, daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Faizullah, son of Mohamed Wazir
Essa, Mohamed son of Mohamed Hussain
Akhtar, Mohamed son of Murrad Ali

And the wounded:

Haji Mohamed Naim, son of Haji Sakhawat
Mohamed Sediq, son of Mohamed Naim
Parween
Rafiullah
Zardana
Zulheja

Related reading
No one asked their names (Al Jazeera, found via TPM)
U.S. Soldier May Have Gone “Berserk” (Huffington Post, with a brief comment from Jonathan Shay)

Fitzgerald, Lombardo, Mitchell

In the September 23 New Yorker : an excerpt from Stephen Mitchell’s forthcoming Odyssey, a passage from book 17 with the title “The Death of Argos.” The passage is a celebrated moment from the poem, as Odysseus’s long-suffering hunting dog hears His Master’s Voice and dies an easy death.

A translation of a poem as vast as the Odyssey rises or falls not in its treatment of great, memorable lines — such as those that describe Argos, lying neglected and bug-ridden on a pile of dung — but in its treatment of what might be called ordinary lines, those that go by in a way that invites no special attention from a reader. Someone walks into town; someone offers a greeting; someone serves a meal: the translator must attend to it all. Three lines from Mitchell got me making comparisons to my favorite translations of the Odyssey, those of Robert Fitzgerald (1961) and Stanley Lombardo (2000).

The scene: Odysseus, returned to Ithaca and disguised as an itinerant beggar, has been staying out in the country with the swineherd Eumaeus. Eumaeus is one of the most appealing characters in the poem; Homer even addresses him directly as a mark of affection. Eumaeus is something of an avatar of Odysseus himself: the swineherd is the son of a king and queen, a displaced person who lost his noble home in childhood. He was raised by Laertes and Anticleia alongside Odysseus’s sister and and has lived as a slave in Ithaca for many years. In book 16, Eumaeus welcomes Telemachus (who has returned from searching for news of Odysseus) in what looks like a father-son reunion (Telemachus even calls Eumaeus atta, father). Eumaeus is pious, loyal, righteously indignant, and stealthy (in 16 he speaks quietly to Penelope about her son’s return). And like Odysseus, Eumaeus is a figure of great versatility: though he seems never to have fought before, he will soon join Odysseus, Telemachus, and the cowherd Philoetius in a Special Forces unit to deal out doom to the suitors.

As our scene begins, Odysseus and Eumaeus stand before Odysseus’s palace. Odysseus has commented on the palace at length, praising its design and construction, and noting from smell (roasting meat) and sound (a lyre) that men are inside feasting. Eumaeus compliments Odysseus on his perceptiveness and, for a brief moment, shapes the story by posing the question of who should enter the palace first. Eumaeus is in distinguished company: Athena, Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus all work on the story, giving another character a role to play or setting up the course of events.

Here is Fitzgerald’s Eumaeus:



Numbskull is a wonderful touch, and it’s not twentieth-century slang either: the Oxford English Dictionary dates the word to 1697. “This action” is military in its sound, fitting in light of what is to come.

Here is Lombardo’s Eumaeus:



The rhetorical question is a good touch: the beggar’s intelligence is no surprise to Eumaeus. In 14, Odysseus told a story so as to finagle a cloak from Eumaeus: Eumaeus figured out what Odysseus was up to and was happy to oblige him.

And here are the lines from Mitchell’s Eumaeus that got me making comparisons:



I cannot hear Eumaeus’s voice — or anyone’s voice — in these lines, which sound to me like the translationese of bad subtitles. I’m sticking with Fitzgerald and Lombardo.

Some related posts
Gilgamesh in translation (Stephen Mitchell and N.K. Sandars)
Whose Homer? (the Big Four: Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Fagles, Stanley Lombardo)
Translators at work and play (another line by the Big Four)
Three Virgils (Fitzgerald, Lombardo, Fagles)
Translations, mules, briars (Guy Davenport on Lattimore)
New from Homer (Mitchell’s Iliad)

[Does Mitchell know Homeric Greek? It seems a reasonable question. He has said that he never read the Iliad before translating it because he could never get through book 1 in a translation. Did Mitchell thus learn Homeric Greek to translate a poem he had never read? It’s all very puzzling. See the discussion beginning here.]

The Interrupters

[Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams, Eddie Bocanegra.]

The Interrupters (dir. Steve James, 2011) spans a year in the work of the men and women of CeaseFire, a Chicago-based organization that intervenes to de-escalate conflicts that threaten to turn violent. CeaseFire’s Violence Interrupters, all of whom bring a criminal history to their work, keep tabs on the doings in their Chicago neighborhoods, tracking the petty and not so petty disputes and grudges that so often precipitate violence.

The film focuses on the work of three Violence Interrupters — Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams, and Eddie Bocanegra. We see them speaking to the camera about their lives and speaking to others in an effort to avert violence by the power of persuasion: cajoling, challenging, empathizing, flattering, reasoning, shaming. The film is at once a cause for despair and a cause for hope. The fatalism of so many of the film’s young people, captured in the words “I am next,” written on a wall of the dead, seems straight from the Iliad: “I know I will not make old bones,” as Achilles says. Yet the Violence Interrupters themselves have learned to live beyond criminality and violence, and we see them, armed only with words, convincing others to do the same. Perhaps the most powerful scene: Williams accompanying Lil’ Mikey as he apologizes to the beauty-shop owner he robbed two years before.

The Interrupters is available on DVD. Or watch online at PBS’s Frontline.

During this past weekend, ten people were killed and thirty-nine more wounded in Chicago. One of the dead was a six-year-old girl.

[“I know I will not make old bones”: from Christopher Logue’s War Music, a reimagining of the Iliad (1997). Images from the film’s Facebook page and press materials.]

Brad Pitt and Homer's Odyssey

From Variety:

After turning Homer’s epic poem "The Iliad" into the 2004 film "Troy," Warner Bros. and Brad Pitt are teaming with George Miller to adapt the Greek poet’s other masterwork, "The Odyssey."

Their intention is to transfer the tale to a futuristic setting in outer space.

Warner Bros. has quietly set up "The Odyssey," and the early hope is that Pitt will star and Miller will direct, with Pitt’s Plan B producing. Pitt played Achilles in the Wolfgang Petersen-directed "Troy," a global blockbuster that David Benioff adapted from "The Iliad."

Both Homer poems dealt with the Trojan War; "The Odyssey" focused on the exploits of Odysseus, who hatched the idea to build the Trojan Horse. "The Odyssey" deals with his long journey home after he declines to become a god.

Well, sort of.