Where's my dinner?

3009 students: Here’s an article on the birth of the “TV dinner.” Trouble in Pleasantville!

The real ramen

In Japanese ramenyas (ramen shops) a bowl of ramen holds a house-made soup, springy noodles, the chef's own tare (a mix of soy sauce, sugar and rice wine to flavor the soup) and exactly six traditional toppings. The wait at top Tokyo ramenyas can be up to three hours.

For all college-age consumers of ramen noodles, an article on the real ramen, as prepared and eaten in Japan.

“There is no permanence”

Utnapishtim’s words to Gilgamesh echo in an article in the New York Times:

The nation's 115 million home computers are brimming over with personal treasures—millions of photographs, music of every genre, college papers, the great American novel and, of course, mountains of e-mail messages.

Yet no one has figured out how to preserve these electronic materials for the next decade, much less for the ages. Like junk e-mail, the problem of digital archiving, which seems straightforward, confounds even the experts.

Aeschylus in three translations

Richmond Lattimore, 1953:

I ask the gods some respite from the
    weariness
of this watchtime measured by years I lie
    awake
elbowed upon the Atreidae’s roof dogwise to
    mark
the grand processionals of all the stars of
    night
burdened with winter and again with heat for
    men,
dynasties in their shining blazoned on the air,
these stars, upon their wane and when the
    rest arise.

Lattimore is making stately lines of iambic hexameter (da DUM, times six). The lines sometimes have a clunky, rough beauty—“ elbowed upon the Atreidae’s roof dogwise,” “and again with heat for men”—but there’s often a lack of clarity. The accumulation of prepositional phrases (twelve in a single sentence) doesn’t help.

Robert Fagles, 1966:

Dear gods, set me free from all the pain,
the long watch I keep, one whole year awake . . .
propped on my arms, crouched on the roofs of
    Atreus
like a dog.
                 I know the stars by heart,
the armies of the night, and there in the lead
the ones that bring us snow or the crops of summer,
bring us all we have—
our great blazing kings of the sky,
I know them when they rise and when they fall . . .

Fagles is translating in a loose iambic pentameter (the final line is the clearest example of the meter). There’s greater clarity than in Lattimore’s translation, but also what seem to me to be gaffes. I can’t help hearing “Dear gods” as a little too campy and histrionic, and a little too much like the start of a letter. Fall is an odd word to describe stars moving through the sky (falling or shooting stars are another matter entirely). As in Fagles’ Homeric translations, characters tend to space out  . . . for no apparent reason (the two ellipses are in the original). Notice that Fagles brings an overt military overtone to the stargazing with his reference to “the armies of the night.”

Peter Meineck, 1998:

Gods! Free me from these labors!
I’ve spent a whole year up here, watching,
propped up on my elbows, on the roof
of this house of Atreus, like some dog.
How well I’ve come to know night’s congregation
    of stars,
the blazing monarchs of the sky, those that bring
    winter
and those that bring summer to us mortals.
I know just when they rise and when they set.

Meineck is translating into non-metrical lines, with line breaks following the syntax. Like Lattimore, he is close to the Greek, but with far greater clarity. Here it’s possible really to hear a weary watchman, a hired hand—a man treated “like some dog”—who plays no great part in the affairs of state. His rueful awareness of the house’s sorry history is evident even in his reference to “this house of Atreus.” (I can hear the sardonic quotation marks around house of Atreus.)

Even without knowing each translator’s background, it wouldn’t take much to guess that Meineck is the translator who’s most clearly thinking in terms of translation suitable for performance, would it?

David Shulman, r.i.p.

There’s an obituary for David Shulman in today’s New York Times. Shulman tracked down the origins of countless modern words and expressions, including Big Apple, The Great White Way, doozy, hoochie-coochie, and hot dog.

Tip: You can read the full article on the Times site by typing “mediajunkie” (without quotation marks) as both user name and password. The magic word “mediajunkie” will get you into many free news sites that require registration.

Harold Russell photos

Here’s a link to what must have been a wonderful event—a showing of The Best Years of Our Lives at a community college, with (it would seem) Harold Russell in attendance. The page has several photos, including a photo of HR in later life (looking much the same as he does in the movie) and what appear to be two stills from Diary of a Sergeant.

Harold Russell

From the New York Times obituary, by Richard Severo, February 1, 2002:

Harold Russell was born [in 1914] in North Sydney, Nova Scotia. His father was a telegraph office manager who died when Harold was 6. His death caused the family to move to Cambridge, Mass., where Mrs. Russell was a nurse and where Harold started working at odd jobs at the age of 10. After high school he worked in a food market.

Mr. Russell said he “made a rush to the recruiting office” after Pearl Harbor was bombed, not out of patriotism but because he thought of himself as a failure.

After basic training, he volunteered to become a paratrooper, and he learned that skill as well as demolition. The United States Army made him an instructor. On June 6, 1944, while some of the men he trained were involved in the D-Day landing, Mr. Russell was teaching demolition work at Camp Mackall in North Carolina and a defective fuse detonated TNT that he was holding. The next day what was left of his hands were amputated three inches above the wrists.

Walter Reed General Hospital offered him a choice of prosthetic devices: plastic hands or steel hooks. He chose the hooks, proved unusually adept at mastering them and eventually made a training film for soldiers who had lost both hands. The film, “Diary of a Sergeant,” showed Mr. Russell in daily activities.

Wyler saw the film after he had been asked by the producer Samuel Goldwyn to direct “The Best Years of Our Lives.” Wyler urged Goldwyn to hire Mr. Russell, and after some coaxing Mr. Russell, who was then attending business school at Boston University, agreed to appear in the film. The salary—$250 a week, with an additional $100 a week for living expenses—seemed generous, especially when compared with the $25 a week he had earned as a part-time worker at a Y.M.C.A.

The movie won eight Oscars and was a financial success. To show his gratitude, Goldwyn awarded Mr. Russell a bonus of $120 a week for a year, asking that he make promotional appearances.

Later, Mr. Russell was active in Amvets, a veterans’ organization, becoming the national chairman. In 1950 he became a founder of the World Veterans Foundation.

In 1954 “The Best Years of Our Lives” was rereleased and journalists asked why Mr. Russell had made no other movies. “I decided to quit while I was ahead of the game,” he told one reporter.

Mr. Russell received few other offers to act. He had several television roles, and in film he appeared in “Inside Moves” (1980), about handicapped people who congregated in a bar and helped each other, and in “Dogtown” (1997), in which he played a cigar store owner and war veteran in a small town.

In 1961 President John F. Kennedy appointed Mr. Russell as vice chairman of the President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped. In 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson made him the chairman, and Richard M. Nixon reappointed him.

Survivors include a daughter, Adele; a son, Gerald; four grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.

In his 1949 autobiography “Victory in My Hands,” Mr. Russell recounted his struggle to recover physically and psychologically from his wounds, and to use his prostheses. He became so adept at using his hooks, he liked to joke, that he could do anything but pick up a dinner check.

As a man who would go on to promote veterans’ causes, he wrote: “It is not what you have lost but what you have left that counts.”

[Note: I was lucky to borrow a copy of Victory in My Hands through interlibrary loan a few years ago. Imagine my surprise to find that the book was signed by Harold Russell, in the peacock-blue ink that filled so many fountain pens all those years ago.]

Ancient Greeks and the avant-garde

[A]n archaeologist might conclude that ancient Greece was a civilization of sensuous narcissists, antiwar activists and ardent feminists that had little patience for convention and little taste for bourgeois life. It was a culture, in other words, that closely resembled some avant-garde movements in the 20th-century United States.

Another Times article. (See tip below.)

All Greek

Greek: something hard to understand. Greek: a language intricate and rich in its powers of evocation, elegant in its archaic form, viscerally expressive in its modern one. Greek: an ancient culture that seems to have influenced everyone.

From an article in the New York Times, “Artistically Speaking, It’s All Greek to Me.”

Tip: You can read the full article on the Times site by typing “mediajunkie” (without quotation marks) as both user name and password. The magic word “mediajunkie” will get you into many free news sites that require registration.

Wheels of fire

When I told him that I was teaching Dante, my friend Rob Zseleczky mentioned that Wheels of Fire, a double-album by Cream, took its title from Dante’s description of Charon the ferryman.

Sure enough—it’s in the description of Charon in Inferno 3:

che ’ntorno alli occhi avea di fiamme rote
[who around his eyes had wheels of flame]

Cream, as anyone of a certain age will remember, was the original power-trio: Eric Clapton (guitar), Jack Bruce (bass), and Ginger Baker (drums). This poetic touch was apparently provided by sometime-lyricist Peter Brown.

Thanks, Rob!