Translations, mules, briars

Dwight Garner, writing in the New York Times:

The most plain, direct and noble translation of The Iliad into English, at least for that generation of college students who had it pressed into their lucky, sweaty palms, has long been Richmond Lattimore’s of 1951, though Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of 1974 and Robert Fagles’s of 1990 have their fierce adherents. Lattimore’s version, once read, doesn’t leave you: it is supple, unvarnished, morally complex and, in a word, thrilling.

It is unusual to find such words as plain, direct, and supple applied to Lattimore’s work. Here is Guy Davenport on Lattimore, in an essay I’d recommend to anyone who reads in translation. Davenport is writing about Lattimore’s Odyssey, but still, the shoe fits:

[H]e is writing in a neutralized English wholly devoid of dialect, a language concocted for the purpose of translating Homer. It uses the vocabulary of English but not its rhythm. It has its own idiom. One can say in this language such things as “slept in that place in an exhaustion of sleep” (for Homer’s “aching with fatigue and weary for lack of sleep”) and “the shining clothes are lying away uncared for” (for “your laundry is tossed in a heap waiting to be washed”).

Professor Lattimore adheres to the literal at times as stubbornly as a mule eating briars.

“Another Odyssey,” in The Geography of the Imagination (Jaffrey, NH: David R. Godine, 1997), 35.

My favorite translations of Homer: those of Robert Fitzgerald and Stanley Lombardo.

Related reading
All Homer posts (Pinboard)

Pocket notebook sighting

Policeman: What do you know about this?

Pharmacist: I never saw him before.

[Angels with Dirty Faces, dir. Michael Curtiz, 1938.]

More notebook sightings
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
Extras
Journal d’un curé de campagne
The House on 92nd Street
The Palm Beach Story
Pickpocket
Pickup on South Street
Red-Headed Woman
Rififi
The Sopranos

Thought for the day

The road to the health-food store is paved with good intentions.

Moleskine 2010 desktop calendar

The Moleskine 2010 desktop calendar is on sale at Amazon for $3.74 (list $19.95). I wonder whether anyone thought about marking down to $3.65.

(via Notebook Stories)

[6:51 PM: Boing Boing spotted this deal, and now it’s gone. The calendars are still available via Amazon from various sellers, for $19.99 and other prices. MoleskineUS is asking $20.95.]

F train

For the worst ride in New York City: take the F train.

“Why E-mail No Longer Rules”

Because of Facebook and Twitter:

Instead of sending a few e-mails a week to a handful of friends, you can send dozens of messages a day to hundreds of people who know you, or just barely do.

Yes, you can. But as I’ve written in a previous post, technology makes it possible to do things, not necessary to do them.

Lester Bowie interview

“I’ve been a researcher — I consider the stage as my laboratory”: trumpeter Lester Bowie (1941–1999), interviewed by Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air, explaining why he wore a lab coat when performing.

I am fortunate to have heard Lester Bowie on six occasions — five times with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and once with the New York Hot Trumpet Repertory Company, aka Hot Trumpets. Five trumpets, that was all: Bowie (the group’s founder), Olu Dara, Stanton Davis, Wynton Marsalis, and Malachi Thompson, up from New York to Boston’s Emmanuel Church for an hour of music, then back to the airport, circa 1981 or so. I remember the Dizzy Gillespie tune “Groovin’ High” and “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Yes, it really happened.

A related post
Some have gone and some remain

[Photograph of Lester Bowie circa 1989 by John Kelim, licensed under a Creative Commons license. Thanks, John, for sharing your work.]

Peace, music, and notebooks

Gimme an M. Gimme an O. Et cetera.

My daughter Rachel gave me a Woodstock Moleskine notebook.

Thank you, Rachel!

Love, Dad

[Image borrowed from Moleskine. It’s too rainy to take a nice photograph outside.]

Plaid really warmer

Good to remember as it gets colder:

From Here’s to Warmth! (Sheboygan: Plaid Manufacturers Council, 1954).

Barack Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize

Remember the spin in the wake of Rio’s Olympic victory? “WORLD REJECTS OBAMA,” yelled the Drudge Report. But Norway has gone rogue. From the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s press release:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.

Yes, this award seems to be as much about the forty-third president as about the forty-fourth. But if the world (or even one rogue nation) is seeing the United States in a different way now, that’s something to celebrate. Congratulations, President Obama.