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

Same as it ever was

From Dennis Dutton, "Hardwired to seek beauty":

Throughout history and across cultures, the arts of homo sapiens have demonstrated universal features. These aesthetic inclinations and patterns have evolved as part of our hardwired psychological nature, ingrained in the human species over the 80,000 generations lived out by our ancestors in the 1.6 million years of the Pleistocene.

The existence of a universal aesthetic psychology has been suggested, not only experimentally, but by the fact that the arts travel outside their local contexts so easily: Beethoven is loved in Japan, Aboriginal art in Paris, Korean ceramics in Brazil, and Hollywood movies all over the globe.

Our aesthetic psychology has remained unchanged since the building of cities and the advent of writing some 10,000 years ago, which explains why The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, remain good reading today.

Read the rest by clicking here. Link via Arts & Letters Daily.

A Glenn Gould story

My AM 740 experience (see here) has left me wondering about Glenn Gould and Toronto radio. Did he listen perhaps to "Pet" Clark on CHWO? I've found nothing to suggest that he did, but I did find an interesting Gould story while looking:

One woman that knew him believes the mystery is impenetrable even 15 years after his death. Marilyn Kecskes has been the superintendent of 110 St. Clair Ave. West since 1973. She first met Gould on the elevator when he was wearing gloves and covering his face with a handkerchief for fear of catching her germs. Kecskes said she had never met anyone like him: a maverick and eccentric who was also a raging hypochondriac. She knew he was special, too, because his mailbox was the only one that had been tampered with. Someone had once tried to force it open in hope of getting a bit of his mail.

Kecskes took the elevator to the top floor of this still stylish Art Deco building. Gould, she said, was messy ("orange juice and milk cartons everywhere"), and intensely private (he fired his cleaning lady of about five years "because she liked to gossip about him"). Kecskes added that he covered his bedroom window with a bookcase, that he was a terrible driver who frequently drove his big Lincoln Continental into one of the concrete pillars in the downstairs parking lot and that he disliked intrusions. "Once he called me on the telephone," she said with a smile, "'There's someone knocking on my door. Could you see what they want?' Imagine!"

When the elevator stopped, Kecskes opened the heavy doors next to what was once Gould's apartment and mounted the stairs to the roof. She pointed to what used to be his window. "I used to sit up here, after I had done my cleaning, and I would listen to him play all night long," confessed Kecskes, blushing at the memory. "He never knew I was up here, or else he would have been angry with me, I suppose, but I had the moon and the stars and his music and there was nothing more beautiful."

From Deirdre Kelly, "The Gould Rush" (The Globe and Mail, September 20, 1997).

I found this article quoted in "A Glenn Gould Tour of Toronto and Area," compiled by Michael Davidson. The Globe and Mail online archives go back only to 2002, so it's especially fortunate that Michael Davidson has given this story (which I've seen nowhere else) a life online.

» "A Glenn Gould Tour of Toronto and Area"

The dowdy world on radio

Driving across the great prairie last night, my wife Elaine and I were searching for something suitable on the radio. The usual classical FM station was playing something by musicians from the "Cold-hearted Club," as Elaine put it, and the usual oldies station did not quite fit the moment. So we tried the radio's scan function. We started with AM, where we picked up station after station filled with talk of a sort that held no interest for us. Often one word was enough to send us scanning again - diadems, eternity, blood. We listened for a short time to a talk show about Kentucky auctioneers, but as much as I like the odd and arcane, that was too much even for me.

Then we found it - AM 740, playing "big band" music, lively, harmonically sophisticated, and free of references to damnation. We had found "the dowdy world" on our radio. The music was a treat, but the commercials were even better. First, a spot for "Bruno's Fine Foods," featuring Scottish smoked salmon and 5-lb. lasagna trays. Then a spot for a cd called A Little Breath of Scotland. Where was this station coming from?

Finally, we heard the ID: AM 740, CHWO, Toronto. Three hours south of Chicago, we'd picked up George Jonescu's Sunday night big-band program.

I talked to George briefly by cellphone: he was playing two versions of "Stealin' Apples," by Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, and was polling the audience on which it preferred. Elaine and I thought Goodman was better, no contest. George's listeners agreed: in a (small) landslide, Goodman won, 45 to 14. The toll-free number - "good anywhere in North America" - should have been my first clue that picking up this station wasn't quite as extraordinary as I'd thought. The second should have been George's lack of surprise that we'd picked up his show. As I learned this morning, CHWO is a 50,000-watt clear-channel station.

The AM 740 website is a wonderful thing:

With access to the largest active music library in Toronto radio, AM 740 features a wide range of specialty programming, from big bands and 50s crooners, to the early rock’n’rollers, folk singers, country cross-over artists, and many of today’s top artists specializing in 'retro-sounds'.

AM 740 is much more than a well-stocked juke-box though. With newscasts every half-hour weekday mornings, and hourly through the day, information flows consistently with news, sports, traffic, weather and plenty of time-checks too. Hourly 'Prime Time Moments' focus on travel, gardening, finances and car-care. AM 740 on-air personalities are friendly, cheerful companions who help you through your day.

Tune us in anytime, just about anywhere, for the All Time Favourites – AM 740!

AM 740 certainly helped brighten our drive through the darkness last night.

» AM 740

» AM 740 schedule   A sample: "Bob Sprott features a spotlight on Les Brown, covering the lengthy period between 1936 and 2001."

» AM 740 photo gallery   I especially enjoyed the photos from the re-opening of Woolcott's Shoes, "Comfort Shoe Specialists Since 1937."

» Bruno's Fine Foods   "Yes . . . there really is a Bruno."

» Denis Snowdon's page   Snowdon is the AM 740 on-air personality who compiled A Little Breath of Scotland.

MLK

15 January 1929 - 4 April 1968

» The Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project
» Frequently requested documents and audioclips Texts and audio clips (Acrobat, Quicktime, and Realmedia) of "Letter from Birmingham Jail," "I Have a Dream," King's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Beyond Vietnam," and "I've Been to the Mountaintop."

A good place to study, in two languages

[Advice for students.]

Here's a suggestion for the start of the semester: Find a good place to study and make it your own. The more time you spend in that place, the more it will become associated with the work of learning.

A good place to study isn't necessarily one that's comfortable. In his book Creative Reading, the poet Ron Padgett offers a funny account of his teenaged attempt to create a "nirvana" for reading — pillows, background music, a Do Not Disturb sign, cold drinks, and cookies. The only problem was that he ended up falling asleep.

Good places to work are as various as individual students. If you like quiet, find a lesser-used area of the library. The bound periodicals or the A and Z stacks (if your library uses Library of Congress Classification) might be likely places to start. If silence is deafening, look for a livelier setting. If your dorm room would be a perfect place except for the noise in the hallway, try an ambient sound from iSerenity to mask the distractions.

When I'm not working at home, my favorite spot to work is a table on the third floor of my university library. I've been working at this table for so long that I've come to think of it as my own. There's room to spread out books and papers (much more room than in a professorial carrel), and the public computers are far enough away that checking my e-mail isn't a great temptation. The nearby books, mostly on urban renewal, are not a browser's paradise. There is little to do at this table but drink bottled water and work.

When I'm walking to this table, I sometimes think about all the work I've already done there. That history itself makes this table a place where I'm likely to get stuff done. While the semester is young and full of new possibilities, find a place that helps you get stuff done too.

[Renzai, a Japanese student, asked to translate this piece. You can now read "A good place to study" in Japanese via the link below. Renzai has also provided a link to an image file of the translated text (for browsers that cannot display Japanese characters). Thanks, Renzai!]

勉強しやすい場所 [A good place to study]

Headline

Politics can get ugly, even at the college level:



Yecch.

The word of the day

The made-up word of the day is humormeter:

hu · morm · e · ter (hyoo MORM ih ter) n. The little-understood brain mechanism governing the human response to humor.

Sample sentence:

My daughter is laughing at every one of my jokes. Her humormeter must be broken.

Homework

[In his book Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry, Kenneth Koch describes the development of what he calls his "poetry base" -- simply, his "knowledge of the language of poetry." I just asked my students to write about the development of their poetry "bases." Here's my homework.]

I was attuned to songs from very early on, thanks to my father's dedication in exposing me to jazz. When I was three or four I was listening to Joe Turner and Anita O'Day, but it was their voices, not their words, that made an impression on me (the same with Erroll Garner's voice at the end of Concert by the Sea). My first remembered awareness of poetry involves rhymes from the pre-kindergarten and kindergarten eras. My mother used to sing to me:

Michael's a good boy
He is the best boy
He can run and jump and play
He can ride a bike.

In kindergarten, I learned a little rhyme about an imaginary family:

There's mother and father
And baby that makes three
And sister and brother
There are five in our family.

I don’t remember reading any poetry in elementary school, but I remember writing a poem in fourth grade about winter. Where did that come from? It was published in the school paper and now sits in my house in a frame that my grandmother bought for it. I bought a book of Edgar Allan Poe's stories and poems when I was ten or eleven, and I remember how much I liked the title of the poem "To E----": mysterious! "Eldorado" was another poem that struck me: it seemed to belong to no time or place. These poems did not move me though to any further investigations of poetry. And high school was a waste land when it came to poetry; I can't remember reading a single poem (and I remember many specifics of my high-school reading). I know that I had a glib contempt for Deep Meaning, as my friends and I called it, though that didn't seem to stop me from scrutinizing Beatles lyrics for clues about Paul's death.

A freshman poetry course in college helped to make up for what never happened in high school; it at least made me realize that poetry was more than the precious, flowery thing I assumed it was. That recognition was largely a matter of discovering what was in the back of the anthology -- some contemporary poetry, including Gregory Corso's "Marriage," the first poem I can remember reading that really spoke in terms familiar from ordinary life. It was interesting to me that Corso was reported to have behaved very badly when he was on campus a year or two before for a reading. People were still talking about it. There was also a poem by Raymond Patterson about the death of Malcolm X, "At That Moment," which helped me understand -- and even get excited about -- the idea of metaphor. In this freshman course we could memorize poems, or passages, for extra credit, and I had (like everyone else) a blue book with my efforts -- five lines here, eight lines there (for some reason we had to write rather than recite).

It wasn’t until my junior year of college that things took off, in courses devoted to 17th-century literature and modern poetry (I thought it would be interesting to take them together). It was really a matter of the professors teaching these courses -- one an old eccentric (Paul Memmo), and the other a highly animated assistant prof (Jim Doyle). Each projected a reverence for the possibilities of language and imagination, and I, like a number of my comrades in English, wanted in a way to be Jim Doyle -- to read poetry with the same intensity of attention. These professors were inspiring models then and now.

So far virtually all my reading was British, in a deeply Anglophile English department. It wasn’t until I started work on a doctorate that I began to read modern American poetry -- Williams, Stevens, and others, but I didn’t really get it. Around the same time, I began reading Charles Bukowski, who for me (and so many other readers) was a gateway poet -- the one that got me interested in other much stronger and more addictive poets, those identified with the New American Poetry of Donald Allen's anthology. I bought Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara and never got beyond "The Day Lady Died." Around this time I began a subscription to the American Poetry Review and found myself loathing the contents and concluding that there wasn’t much of interest in contemporary American poetry.

It was only after finishing my doctorate that I realized that what I loathed was not contemporary American poetry but the version of it that had been made available to me. My eyes were opened via an anthology edited by Andrei Codrescu, Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970. I bought it on a whim and found myself completely taken with poetry that was beautiful, funny, odd, opaque, and without the prettiness and pretension of what I was reading in APR. Up Late was followed by two anthologies of language-poetry and then by countless books of recent and contemporary American poetry. I began to go backwards too -- finding my way to French poets who were crucial for some Americans (Apollinaire, Cendrars, Jacob, Reverdy) and becoming more and more caught up in reading Homer and Sappho (in multiple translations). So my poetry base at this point has many strata, the result of some good luck and some self-reliance, all haphazardly overlapping here and there.

And that's my story.

Things my children no longer say

- aminal
- bofay, pronounced bo-FAY (buffet)
- co-Coke, i.e., cold Coke
- the girl hamburger, i.e., Wendy's
- have for has
- he for his: as in "He have to take he nap."
- "I absolutely adore math."
- kid-Coke, i.e., caffeine-free Coca-Cola
- man-Coke, i.e., Coca-Cola
- she for her: as in "She have to take she nap."
- swimming pudd, i.e., pool
- 'What's a politic?": in reply to "What do you think about politics?"

*

August 2, 2019: There’s at least one that got away.

~ cold cream, i.e., ice cream.