Overheard

Tonight, in a restaurant:

"It's not a 'show' show."

"Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

Sign

Seen last night, by the cash register in a restaurant:

NO PERSONNEL CHECKS

Proust's pharmacy

[W]e can find everything in our memory: it is a kind of pharmacy or chemical laboratory, where one's hand may fall at any moment on a sedative drug or a dangerous poison.

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003), 361

Proust posts, via Pinboard

Proust's reality

Reality is the cleverest of our enemies. It directs its attacks at those points in our heart where we were not expecting them, and where we had prepared no defense.

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003), 360

Proust posts, via Pinboard

Three Virgils

Here's a passage from the Aeneid in three translations. The Trojan hero Aeneas is recounting the fall of Troy to Dido, queen of Carthage. In this passage, Aeneas offers an extended (epic) simile to characterize the Greek warrior Pyrrhus (Achilles' son, also known as Neoptolemus). Pyrrhus is soon seen breaking down doors, hunting down the Trojan warrior Politës, and killing the Trojan king Priam at his own altar. (Virgil spares his reader the details of Priam's beheading.) In this simile, Pyrrhus is a figure of sinister phallic force:

Just at the outer doors of the vestibule
Sprang Pyrrhus, all in bronze and glittering,
As a serpent, hidden swollen underground
By a cold winter, writhes into the light,
On vile grass fed, his old skin cast away,
Renewed and glossy, rolling slippery coils,
With lifted underbelly rearing sunward
And triple-tongue aflicker.

Robert Fitzgerald, 1983

*

Framed by the portal to the entrance court
Pyrrhus stood in his glory, haloed in bronze,

    As a snake raised on poison basks in the
        light
    After a cold winter has kept him
        underground,
    Venomous and swollen. Now, having
        sloughed
    His old skin, glistening with youth, he puffs
        out
    His breast and slides his lubricious coils
    Toward the sun, flicking his three-forked
        tongue.

Stanley Lombardo, 2005

*

There at the very edge of the front gates
springs Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, prancing in
    arms,
aflash in his shimmering brazen sheath like a
    snake
buried the whole winter long under frozen turf,
swollen to bursting, fed full on poisonous
    weeds
and now it springs into light, sloughing its old
    skin
to glisten sleek in its newfound youth, its back
    slithering,
coiling, its proud chest rearing high to the sun,
its triple tongue flickering through its fangs.

Robert Fagles, 2006

A few details that strike me: Fitzgerald's "sprang" instantly makes Pyrrhus a figure of frightening energy. "Writhes into the light" has an eerie beauty but seems at odds with the sudden movement of "sprang." Lombardo's Pyrrhus is more a warrior who's ready for his close-up, basking in the spotlight and puffing up with pride. "Venomous and swollen" stands out as choice phrasing. (Here, as in his translations of Homer, Lombardo sets off epic similes with italics.) Fagles' translation is striking in its over-the-top alliteration but sometimes bewildering in its diction. "Prancing in arms" seems unintentionally funny (is Pyrrhus camping it up?), and "sheath," which might suggest a sheath dress or, alas, a condom (British slang), seems like a very oddly chosen word.

Reader, which version(s) do you prefer?

Related posts
Aeschylus in three translations
Robert Fagles' Aeneid
Whose Homer?

Variations of Virgil (New York Sun, article with two excerpts from the Fagles translation)

Rhadamanthine

It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day:

rhadamanthine \rad-uh-MAN-thun\ adjective
often capitalized : rigorously strict or just

Example sentence:
The judge took the maliciousness of the crime into account and decided upon a rhadamanthine punishment.

Did you know?
In Greek mythology, there were three judges of the underworld: Minos, Aeacus, and Rhadamanthus. Minos, a son of Zeus and Europa, had been the king of Crete before becoming supreme judge in the underworld after his death. Aeacus, another son of Zeus, was king of Aegina before joining the underworld triumvirate. Rhadamanthus, brother of Minos and king of the Cyclades Islands, was especially known for being inflexible when administering his judgment -- hence, the meaning of "rhadamanthine" as "rigorously strict or just."

"Radios, it is"

"An' after he studies at night, why -- it'll be nice, an' he tore a page outa Western Love Stories, an' he's gonna send off for a course, 'cause it don't cost nothin' to send off. Says right on that clipping. I seen it. An', why -- they even get you a job when you take that course -- radios, it is, nice clean work, and a future."

That's Rose of Sharon speaking of her hopes for the future with her husband Connie, in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

Above, part of an ad from Popular Mechanics (June 1938).

From the same issue of Popular Mechanics: Alkalize with Alka-Seltzer, "MONEY MAKING FORMULAS," A mystery EXchange name.

Steinbeck on migrant camps

For my students reading The Grapes of Wrath -- an excerpt from John Steinbeck's 1936 account of migrant camps in California:

Here is a house built by a family who have tried to maintain a neatness. The house is about 10 feet by 10 feet, and it is built completely of corrugated paper. The roof is peaked, the walls are tacked to a wooden frame. The dirt floor is swept clean, and along the irrigation ditch or in the muddy river the wife of the family scrubs clothes without soap and tries to rinse out the mud in muddy water.

The spirit of this family is not quite broken, for the children, three of them, still have clothes, and the family possesses three old quilts and a soggy, lumpy mattress. But the money so needed for food cannot be used for soap nor for clothes.

With the first rain the carefully built house will slop down into a brown, pulpy mush; in a few months the clothes will fray off the children's bodies, while the lack of nourishing food will subject the whole family to pneumonia when the first cold comes. Five years ago this family had 50 acres of land and $1,000 in the bank. The wife belonged to a sewing circle and the man was a member of the Grange. They raised chickens, pigs, pigeons and vegetables and fruit for their own use; and their land produced the tall corn of the middle west. Now they have nothing.

Death in the Dust (Guardian Unlimited)

Robert Fagles' Aeneid

Robert Fagles' translation of Virgil's Aeneid will be out in a couple of days. From a New York Times article:

"I usually try not to ride the horse of relevance very hard," Mr. Fagles said recently at his home near Princeton University, from which he recently retired, after teaching comparative literature for more than 40 years. "My feeling is that if something is timeless, then it will also be timely." But he went on to say that The Aeneid did speak to the contemporary situation. It's a poem about empire, he explained, and was commissioned by the emperor Augustus to celebrate the spread of Roman civilization.

"To begin with, it's a cautionary tale," Mr. Fagles said. "About the terrible ills that attend empire -- its war-making capacity, the loss of blood and treasure both. But it's all done in the name of the rule of law, which you'd have a hard time ascribing to what we're doing in the Middle East today.

"It's also a tale of exhortation. It says that if you depart from the civilized, then you become a murderer. The price of empire is very steep, but Virgil shows how it is to be earned, if it’s to be earned at all. The poem can be read as an exhortation for us to behave ourselves, which is a horse of relevance that ought to be ridden."

Translating Virgil's Epic Poem of Empire (New York Times, free registration required)

And here's a link to a related post, with one passage from the Aeneid, as translated by Robert Fitzgerald, Stanley Lombardo, and Robert Fagles:

Three Virgils

Reader, which translation do you prefer?

Boo!

[Construction paper, ink, colored pencil, twine, by James Leddy]