An opportunity to write a few words on the magnificent Mary Beard will I not turn down!
As a field of study, “Classics” was an elite pursuit even before elite was a dirty word, and certainly doesn’t have it easy in the highly competitive environment of a contemporary higher education system that focuses more on career paths and professional development than on the humanistic (and less obvious) attributes and skill-sets attached to the study of ancient “systems” and “dead” languages. How I bemoan that I had not in my youth the imagination to contemplate such a dead end journey! Alas!
In this respect, as reported in The Guardian, Mary Beard’s (upcoming) retirement gift to Cambridge University, is a thoughtful and timely contribution. Acknowledging herself its relative modesty, Professor Beard does still hope that her gesture will, beyond the specific scholarships that will be offered, encourage broader interest and ethnic and socioeconomic diversity in the subject.
The way to go, Mare! – I do say. To wit, I dare say I hear the reply: Hold your horses, my dear – I’m old not dead, and ain’t goin’ nowhere! Or however that may be said in aforesaid language long said to be dead.
An op-ed piece …oh! excuse me – a “guest essay”… in today’s NYT alerted me to the demise of the classics department at the renowned Howard University. Two senior academics from the university defend the decision to scrap the department against criticism from without and within; the crux of their argument falling along financial grounds but also with the assurance of Howard’s continued commitment to the humanistic tradition through other departments – English, philosophy and history – and interdisciplinary paths. And, pointedly, that a H.B.C.U. does not have the luxury of NOT having to constantly review their academic programs and their viability (read: Endowment!) This, a jab in direction of what they believe to be unreflected criticism from elite sectors and the “ivory tower”.
Founders Library, Howard University.
As Howard is the only H.B.C.U. to have a classics department, its pending loss is more than unfortunate; my flitting around (digitally speaking) in the last year or so led me to believe there to be a growing interest and presence amongst minorities and women. I recall thinking that the success of some of the books being published and movies being made, suggested a renewed attraction amongst young people to mythologies and the ancient world and the stories they had to tell, and how they may be interpreted for the contemporary world. (I guess, if not zealous college recruitment, then the spectre of student loan repayments might in the end convince that computer science or bio-tech subjects are more prudent options!) On the other hand, after four years of Trump and more than a year of Covid, it is clear that the humanities have suffered the most in attracting funding, and at Howard it may be classics that loses out but elsewhere I dare say some other program.
Related, I think, are the rising tensions and the potential for conflict in classics institutes and in academic scholarship; a lot of which has to do with politics (hijacking by the right), gender (feminist or non-gendered renderings) and race.
On the latter, this is a particularly enlightening piece by Rachel Poser in The New York Times Magazine earlier this year; ostensibly about the young Princeton academic, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, and his experience as a Black student and scholar in classics. (In this respect, his opinion on the Howard decision and the future of university classics departments in general would not be uninteresting.) But Poser’s piece, beyond the personal Padilla narrative, explores the place of classics at the foundation of Western Civilisation, and what that means for the institutionalisation of ideas of race and the supremacy of Western thought in universities. Padilla says that means inherent racism and a myopic world view. I hope that is not true. Regrettably, Howard could have had an interesting role to play in a process of renewal – in making the Classics fit not just for this century but also the next.
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Euripides’ “The Bacchae” in the March 18th 2021 episode of “In Our Time”.
Listened to this week, and with (Dionysian!) pleasure: Melvyn Bragg’s BBC Radio 4 program “In Our Time”, and his conversation about Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae with Emily Wilson, Edith Hall and Rosie Wyles.
Mention of Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History from 1992, led to some moments of reflection. A few years ago after reading The Gold Finch, and remembering the hype surrounding the publication of Tartt’s first book (I guess it became a bestseller), I read The Secret History, and whilst I would have recommended it as a good enough read, I recall my expectations for literary fiction were not really fulfilled. (By the way, similarly so, my opinion of The Gold Finch.) A likeable enough but vacillating narrator and his capricious bunch of classics cohorts at an elite college, certainly sucked one into their vortex of deceits, large and small, but I had the feeling at the end of having been chewed up and spat out – unsatisfied, left cold. That the story’s murder and mayhem was created in the pursuit of Dionysian pleasure and dabbling in bacchanalian ritual, I had all but forgotten; rather, what stayed with me was the disturbing ease in which the accoutrements of privilege could be weaponised by an amoral didactic, catapulting young lives into the abyss (in the novel: both in a real sense and an allegorical).
But back to Bragg’s program…On the website there is further information – both concerning the subject matter and the guests. The text can be found here at Perseus; not as easy reading as the above discussion is to listen to, but the theatre of life rarely is – the truth being in the performance, and the borders of pleasure and tragedy fluid.
To set the stage, so to say, and to understand the context of Ancient Greek performance, I recommend Edith Hall’s Gresham Lectures of 2018, of which the following video is part.
Reading and discussion of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (translation by Oliver Taplin)
Above, as an example, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, which I note uses the Oliver Taplin translation that Emily Wilson spoke of here. And, Mr. Taplin is in fact a guest (approx. 22:00), and has some interesting things to say about translation and performance – in general and in respect to the Oresteia in particular.
A reading of the Odyssey is of course never over; for me, after a concentrated yearlong effort, it is at the moment in abeyance, but surely to be returned to. For many others, their journey may just be beginning, and this recent project from Harvard’s Centre for Hellenic Studies could be an interesting starting point.
24 hour reading of the 24 books of “The Odyssey” – performed December 8-9 2020
In the LRB Conversations podcast series, Emily Wilson discusses her recent piece in the London Review of Books (8 October 2020) (restricted access) on three (relatively) new translations of Aeschylus’ The Oresteia. One would have to say, mixed reviews; Wilson of the opinion that all fail to adequately reflect newer scholarship in respect to the state of democracy and justice in fifth-century Athens, and how that is reflected in the language of tragedy and specifically that of Aeschylus. She concludes the Oliver Taplin translation to be much the better of the three (though his introduction disappoints), and she recommends also that of Sarah Ruden (in The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, 2017 Modern Library Classics).
Emphasised is the misunderstanding of the breadth of the feted Athenian model of state – a “democracy” that applied in fact only to a very limited constituency and only a handful removed from an oligarchy, and where a majority of the populous had absolutely nothing to say. In this regard, there are through the ages analogies aplenty – countries who adopt “Democratic” to their name and are quite obviously not is one example – but I specifically thought about the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States in which that insinuated by “men” and “people” abounded with obvious exceptions – gender, race – until the last half of the 20th century, and less obviously – through disenfranchisement – still.
My thoughts flying to the young America, are echoed in the turn of conversation to the performative aspects of Greek tragedy, whereupon it is suggested that “Hamilton”, with its use of music and dance (and I would say the “state” folklore it serves) is perhaps the best modern analogue to classical Greek drama. In retrospect, I often wonder whether Athenian statecraft and European puritanism may have always been an imperfect mix upon which to build the foundations of a new nation.
More than once, the difficulty factor of Aeschylus is stipulated to be at the higher end – though in the course of the trilogy it moderates. Should one be deterred or accept the gauntlet handed down?
An interesting afterword: Emily Wilson, referring to her translation of The Odyssey, reveals a little of her criteria for (re-) translation (one of the reasons behind her criticisms of the above): first comes the request (in her case from an editor at Norton, with whom she had previously worked), but then a careful deliberation as to whether it is warranted, and what new stuff, if any, there is to brought to the fore, and her decision being further informed by her experience as a teacher of college students in the US. And, particularly she was convinced of the need for a new translation that returned to the metrical and syntactical rhythm of the ancient text, after years of versions rendered in prose form. Further, she recognised the opportunity to present a work that moved away from a purely Odysseus centred telling and gave the story in many voices, as multi-faceted, if you like, as the hero himself.
And, an after, afterword: Emily Wilson mentions at the very end of the podcast, that her Iliad translation will include Book 10 which, unbeknownst to me (well, who would have thunk it!), has been a matter of controversy over the years; the essence of the argument being that this book was a later addition and to be, therefore, discarded by the purist. The Stephen Mitchell translation, that does just that and to which Wilson refers, was reviewed at The New Yorker in 2011 by Daniel Mendelsohn.
In a blog entry for the LRB in 2018, Emily Wilson gave a lesson in reportage gone awry – lost in translation or just plain misunderstood. Whichever, the claims circulating in the media at the time that a clay tablet discovered near Olympia, with lines from Book 14 of the Odyssey, was perhaps the oldest extract from the epic, were way off-base – for all the reasons she explains in her entry.
For my purposes, I mention this in passing only because of where I am at the moment in my epic reading, and Emily Wilson’s comments in respect to the nature of the inscription. Following is some of the passage on the tablet, and in her own translation:
His yard was high and visible for miles,
of fieldstones topped with twigs of thorny pear.
He built it in the absence of his master,
with no help from Laertes or the mistress.
Around the yard, he set a ring of stakes,
of wood with bark stripped off. Inside the yard,
he made twelve sties all next to one another,
...
Book 14 [lines 8-14] The Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson
Of course, we have here the beginning of Book 14, and Odysseus, in the beggar’s guise created for him by Athena, is approaching the humble yard of the swineherd, Eumaeus. It is this descriptive passage that leads Wilson to wonder at the purpose of the artefact – the subject matter is hardly the most profound; perhaps its origins were of a more mundane or utilitarian nature than cultural.
Not exactly a pig in a poke, but close. Just as it is wise to check your purchases, so it is to double check sources of information. Emily Wilson ends on a positive note anyway:
The bright side to this inaccurately reported story is that it reveals a hunger among the general public for news about the ancient world. […] Maybe this fake news story will inspire more people to investigate the ancient world for themselves, and also to realise that the stories told about the Odyssey are – like the poem’s wily, scheming, deceitful protagonist himself – not always to be taken at face value.
LRB Blog, 14 JULY 2018, “Making a Pigsty” by Emily Wilson
Emily’s Odyssey readings for the young (and young in spirit!)
While hopefully not neglecting working on her awaited Iliad translation, Emily Wilson has been using some of her time with a little playful emoting from The Odyssey – perhaps directed towards a younger audience than I, but a lot of fun anyway. The clip below is from Book 1, and short readings from each book are on her YouTube channel, and here is an overview on Emily’s website. Maybe I can get some pronunciation and elocution tips! I have been making my own recordings (as an incentive to read aloud!) but more often than not fall afoul when it comes to the pronunciation of people and places.
Emily Wilson reads a section from her translation of The Odyssey, Book 1.
And this news of a further lorbeer for Emily. May she not rest on her laurels.
