August 13 2023: Here embedded was a tweet (from 2022) announcing Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s The Iliad for 2023; now defunct. No matter; the translation is on its way – on our bookshelves in the next weeks as I write. Nor, by the way, can I any longer get to the May 30 thread which inspired me to the musings below. Rather than deleting my post, I offer Wilson’s thread from about the same time on the nuances required – and the compromises that sometimes have to be made – in Homeric translation.
A classic translator's dilemma, which presumably applies for any language pair: what to do about the fact that languages individuate the world differently. One language makes a distinction where another makes none.
Should one dare to flitter into the Twitter-sphere (which I do these days but sparingly!), Wilson’s May 30 2022 thread cleverly teases out how very much Homer’s epic tale evidences the absurd constancy of the human condition – for better or worse, in good times and bad – through the span of our existence. Fear not – Dr. Wilson is not on the brink! Of myself I am not so sure…
Don’t tell me about dead heroes, dead languages, dead civilizations, enlightenments and awakenings, beginnings and ends of history … ! On whim and with change of garb and scenery we play what we deem our original role; every night an opening night, an acting out of our own perceived exceptionalism.
The truth written in memory is another: Like the river from its source, we flow onward, snugly fitted in the bed made for us; accumulating and losing sediment along the way, wasting nothing more than we want, but remaining essentially the same. We are our ancestors’ heirs; a mere appropriation over time of ourselves, intent on satisfying ourselves for life’s moments; at once brief and eternal.
During the height of the Covid crisis (hopefully to never venture higher), there was “out there”, where opinions fester and, yes, take on a life of their own, an ongoing debate concerning the value to be placed upon any life; considered in terms of years already lived and the potential for those yet to come. Stated in short: Must society and its institutions protect the older amongst us (seniors or retirees, say) or rather focus on the more productive, those in the middle of life (workers, parents, students) or, indeed, the very youngest with the most years yet before them (infants, school children)? It could hardly surprise, that neither a morally nor a functionally sustainable solution could be agreed upon, rather, as the pandemic wore on, what could be witnessed was only a hardening of the positions and an intensification of already existing tensions between generations – and interest groups (e.g. employers, unions, health services, schools) in their service.
Mostly, I must say, I found these debates exceedingly irritating; often simplistic, and very often the empiric data on which arguments were built being cherry-picked for purpose and presented as evidential – and by all parties. It seemed to me, in the midst of this global crisis that dominated every aspect of many people’s lives, that solidarity should be encouraged and not fault lines created across nations, class and generations. Especially, the latter surprised me. I hadn’t realized the fragility of our modern societal (and familial) structures, in which one is viewed essentially only in relation to the discretely – and discreetly! – numbered stages of one’s life.
Now, an inflammatory issue reemerges (as if it ever went away!) that is in some respects analogous; arising from a quite different circumstance but none the less still concerned with – in fact, springing from – the very murky, ill-defined logic that results from trying to neatly organize all the stages of a human life. I am speaking, of course, of the abortion debate in the US; heating up again following the Supreme Court leak that more than suggests an impending overturn of Roe v. Wade and the Court’s intention of sending abortion rights to the mercy and inconsistencies of state jurisdiction, and being fought with the usual ritualistic fervor.
As in those arguments surrounding measures to curb the pandemic, again, in respect to abortion rights, one is confronted with a situation that seemingly demands a value (of life) judgement. And to an even more radical degree. A complex matter, but one deserving of consideration.
One consideration may follow a scenario like this:
If a foetus is a life, when is it a life? And what value may be placed upon that life? Say, for instance, we take a 10-year-old child; one who may be expected to live for eighty more years; who may earn x amount in that period by some productive means (whereby the productivity is highly subjective and variable) and thereby contribute to society; who may themselves have x children; x grand-children. Is that child’s life more valuable than that of their parents with half of their life (therefore their productivity – in the widest sense, including giving life to this child) behind them, and even more so than that of their retired perhaps ailing grand-parents? Following this logic, does not a 10 week old foetus then have even greater potential, therefore greater worth? And in the preceding embryonic stage, more so again? Generally speaking, and particularly in terms of the latter stages of the argument, I would suggest that most reasonable people would find absurdity in the hypothesis.
(I recall a thought experiment being posed along the lines of: Say, a maternity clinic is on fire and there is the opportunity to save either a mother or a baby from the ward or a collection of IVF embryo cultures in a laboratory awaiting transfer. I cannot believe anyone’s inclination would be to first think about the embryos; our instinct seems to inform us as to what human life is – and it is not to be found in a Petri dish. And such was the unanimous result of the experiment.)
To be remembered: Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872-1970). Born 15o years ago today; renowned mathematician and logician, a founder of analytic philosophy, a prolific (and accessible) writer and commentator of the 20th century, a Nobel Prize for Literature laureate, an influential public intellectual and a voice for peace – and as such one with particular resonance at this time.
Because birthdays, one’s own or that of another, always seem to inspire reflection on the passing years, Russell’s short essay contemplating (and so titled) “How to Grow Old” (from his 1956 collection Portraits from Memory and Other Essays at the Internet Archive) is a fitting read. It’s simple and entertaining and it’s message is timeless, and begins by restating its purpose as actually being concerned with how not to grow old. In a nutshell: genetic disposition is one thing, health issues another, but the greatest dangers lay in nostalgia and regret, and clinging to the past and to a world of youth that is no longer yours. Rather, one should look to the future and pursue a broad range of interests, the more impersonal the better. His essay nears its end with the difficult contemplation of death that faces us all, and described with the metaphorical river of life.
[…]Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.[…]
from the essay “How to Grow Old” by Bertrand Russell.
Sometimes referred to as Mr. Russell, with sly, good-humored respect one may presume, but for Virginia Woolf (and for our photographer above, Ottoline Morrell), more often than not, he was just plain Bertie – another of the brilliant, mercurial, imperfect figures that entered her sphere through family and acquaintance. So, as Woolf may well have proclaimed should she have encountered him on any 18th May: Happy Birthday, Bertie!
Catching up on some London Review of Books reading – with which I always seem to be in arrears, and which is not always my fault because continental Europe delivery from the island is somewhat tardy – I would very much commend Tom Stevenson’s excellent reportage (LRBVol. 44 No. 7 · 7 April 2022) of the first weeks of the Ukraine war. Framed by his journey out of Poland, first to Lviv then Kyiv, and described with an observant eye for the landscape and the human elements of the catastrophe that has befallen this land, Stevenson doesn’t shy from the complexities of geo-politics and some of the more technical aspects pertaining to defense and military – strategy, equipment, etc.
With words familiar to me for reasons different but somehow the same – see this recent post – the title of Stevenson’s piece, “Things fall from the sky”, resonated, and came to be explained by this passage in which Stevenson describes his crossing into the eastern side of Kyiv:
[…] A two-chair barber shop in a corrugated metal shed at the side of the road had opened its doors under a sign that read: ‘Express haircuts: fast and quality. 60 hryvnia.’ Marina, the woman working there, was turning away the local babushkas: she only wanted to serve volunteers. She spoke Russian with a heavy Ukrainian accent. The barbershop had reopened one week into the invasion, she said, and it would stay open ‘until things start falling from the sky’. In fact, things were already falling from the sky. […]fragments of a Russian missile – shot down by Ukrainian air defences – had landed on a housing complex next to a nursery school. The crater at the foot of one of the tower blocks was about four metres across. […]
In my blog post that I refer to above, I was pondering – my thinking very much influenced by how it was that so very many clever people over a considerable amount of time failed to recognize Russia’s intentions – the Bruegel depiction of Icarus’ fall from the sky; an extraordinary event seemingly unattended by all and sundry, and here we have Stevenson’s Marina, representative of many of the inhabitants of Kyiv, trying as best she might to get on with her life but ever alert, waiting …
Tom Stevenson’s piece is dated 25th March. Since he wrote, the war has intensified, atrocities against civilians have been uncovered – in Bucha for instance. And, as I write now, both Mariupol and Kharkiv are devastated, as are any number of villages in the eastern and southern regions. Kyiv still stands and with it a nation and a legitimate government, and its allies – with ever more financial and military support (the latest package from the US: a mind-boggling $33 billion). The prospects of an end to warfare, even of a return to diplomacy, have evaporated I fear. But to whom does one talk? To Putin? I think not. I would welcome Stevenson’s reasoned voice again, even when anything said may quickly be overtaken by events.
…’tis indeed this year, 100 years after the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land that famously so begins. And for some much more so than for others. Embedded below a wonderful recitation by Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins (for BBC Radio 4 presumably).
In this early Spring 2022, my thoughts continue to be preoccupied with the once, and now again, “bloodlands” at the heart of Europe, and hope, pray even, that they will not be so for evermore. Reading the opening verses of Eliot’s immortal work anew, I am not wrapped in the memories of the Countess Marie and the Austro-German provinces, but think this time instead of other fertile lands in the here and now, one that produces food for the world, that would in any normal Spring be awakening from the long, cold winter and now instead perhaps just abandoned, a muddied quagmire left by monster tanks and trucks and man.
I. The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
“They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.
[...]
The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (1922)
The entire poem can be found all over the place of course. For instance, at the Poetry Foundation linked above and this annotated version at Bartleby. Audio files of Eliot’s own reading are here. And, this essay by Pericles Lewis (adapted from his Cambridge Introduction to Modernism) is informative.
Nations and nationality. Land and people. Well worth contemplating at any time, but more so in these anxious days as an unjust war continues on the European continent, as a sovereign country is invaded and by a more powerful aggressor declared to as such not exist; these tangled roots of conflict inextricably entwined in the historical paths of the new nation states that were formed in accordance with the treaties made at the end of World War I, only to be viciously torn asunder, to then re-form (and again …) in the post World War II years as the old colonial powers retreated further out of lands strewn wide and two distinctly different conceptions of freedom and governance faced off and redefined the geo-political order. During those years, conflicts burgeoned in all corners of the world, one such being that region in the north-west of the African continent called the Maghreb.
Excerpt for the opening of “In the Country of Others” by Leïla Slimani, pub. Penguin, 2021.
In the Country of Others is the first novel in a planned series from Leïla Slimani; set in Morocco and exploring the fraught relationship between the peoples of that country and the French colonial power, and framed between the years immediately following the Second World War and the splintered nationalistic allegiances and revolutionary fervor of the mid-1950s that were to lead to independence. I should say, though this novel is removed with the war that rages in the Ukraine as I write – geographically, culturally, historically, that conflict informs and casts a shadow over all my reading at the moment, Slimani’s book is a powerful literary rendering of just one of the many failures of reconciliation left over from the last century and in that sense is informative of the situation in the conglomerate of states that (re-) formed after the break up of the Soviet.
As in her previous works of fiction, Slimani develops her narrative from very real circumstances, but this time very close to home indeed, and in every way. Home, here, is not the Parisian suburbs and their contemporary, middle-class milieus but, rather, the post-war colonial Morocco and a family blended out of French and Moroccan, like that of Slimani’s, and, as they, enmeshed in a profound and sometimes violent struggle for personal and cultural identity.
Calling upon an array of analogy and metaphor, like that of the hybrid orange and lemon trees that bring forth the most bitter of fruit, and through some wonderfully realized descriptive passages and imagery – visual and sensual – of a landscape and its inhabitants, at once harsh and seductive, juxtaposed against a reality defined by extreme hardship and poverty and the indignities of subjection that bring forth not the best in man, Slimani tells her story of the Belhaj family; seeking to take root upon harsh ground that is sparse in the emotional nourishment needed to grow and flourish.
Slimani’s characters, and with them their very personal searches for freedom and meaning, converge in Meknès and on the Belhaj farm in the rugged hilly terrain beyond. Mathilde sought an escape from the rural Alsatian monotony and found one in the small, dark and beautiful man out of the Maghreb, and Amine saw in the young French woman – sturdy, blonde, vivacious – a just reward for services rendered to a land not his own. In the hills sufficiently remote from the stringent cultural norms of the medina, Amine will shed himself of the traumas of war and realize his father’s interrupted dream of a prosperous fruit farm and, at the same time, raise his family insulated from the gossip and politicking of the old town and the old ways. But, old ways are hard to shed and, for this uncommonly attractive pair, the passion that promised so much, is hard to sustain.
For Mouilala, Amine’s mother, her only freedom is to be found shrouded in rigid custom and widowhood, and the confines of house and terrace. Who are we to say freedom must know no boundaries. And for the lovely young sister Selma, it is in the pursuit of Western pleasures; not knowing that pleasure comes at a cost. For the angry, oft absent brother, Omar, held captive to an ideology and the tricolore, freedom will come only in its demise.
There is the baby, Selim (to be heard from later I expect), and then there is Aïcha. Oh, and what a girl she is! (I allow myself to imagine her as Slimani’s maman!) For the greater part of the novel she is about seven years old. We go to school with her on her first day; to a Catholic institution in the city, at the insistence of Mathilde. A disaster to be sure, but a heralding in of many colorful narrative strands to come. There is nobody like Aïcha; neither physically nor intellectually. She gives back as much as she gets from the pampered colonial daughters, and in Jesus she finds a friend. (And has the good sense to keep this to herself.) And in the nuns, allies; for it is – perhaps, surprisingly – clear to them that she is an exceptional little girl.
Slimani allows all her characters’ viewpoints to come to the fore, but though it’s the voice of Mathilde that initially reverberates most, that sets the tone, that drives the narrative forward from the time of their arrival in Morocco in 1947, in the end it’s Aïcha’s way of seeing that lingers most. Once she lets us inside her precocious head, crowned with untamed locks, we see the people and the land, both near and dear, as a child would for sure – with love and anger, with envy and with confusion – but there is something more, an uncanny wisdom rooted in something more, something that makes her seem as old as the earth beneath her feet.
In the midst of a serious (and difficult in many respects) read of Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands (in German translation in my case), a just released Ezra Klein podcast popped up on my screen and lo and behold with the respected (and sometimes polarizing) Yale historian as guest. I usually listen to Ezra’s podcast via Apple or the NYT website, but the first is device dependent and the latter probably on subscription so here embedded is the Spotify version.
Ezra Klein in conversation with Timothy Snyder March 15 2022
Professionally, in the last weeks Ezra has found himself (and almost exclusively so) confronted with this heinous war of Vladimir Putin against the Ukrainian people. And, personally, he seems as moved to outrage as the most of us. It would be fair to say, foreign policy is not usually Ezra’s primary focus, but he is embracing it and probably learning along with his listeners. Also, I rather imagine, as a new second time father, Ezra is coming to terms not just with a present danger but one that will surely affect future generations.
This discussion with Snyder is only the most recent of a number of excellent podcasts released since the beginning of hostilities – including with other such qualified figures as Adam Tooze and Fiona Hill (who mentioned Bloodlands as a must read that offers some historical context to the current situation), and I expect there will be more to come.
Whether I will be able to find words to adequately describe the human and moral catastrophe with which one is faced in reading Bloodlands, I don’t know. What I do know is: Timothy Snyder would surely have not predicted, a dozen years after its publication, that – for all the wrong reasons – there would be a new readership for his book; people like me seeking some historical and cultural context for this war in the middle of Europe that is, at once, upon us and removed from us.
A subscription is probably required to access this interactive tour de force at The New York Times, but it is such a remarkably timely piece that I feel inclined to make mention of it here.
Elisa Gabbert does her own close reading and analysis for the Time’s “Close Reading” series of W.H. Auden’s 1938 poem “Musee des Beaux Arts“, an ekphrasis which is in turn, if not an analysis, the poet’s own particular appreciation of two narrative paintings from Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Firstly, The census at Bethlehem (1566) and then Landscape with The Fall of Icarus (1555). An appreciation of an appreciation if you will.
The census at Bethlehem (1566) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium.
Or, in respect to the Icarus painting, even a couple more iterations of appreciations. For Bruegel also looks elsewhere for inspiration; finding it in the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses – itself an inspired narrative work with mythological and historical elements. Bruegel arranges his scene as Ovid does (compare just a few lines and the painting below); but he has the spectacular event met with indifference rather than astonishment. As if a boy falls from the heavens every day. Or was Bruegel inserting a temporal dimension suggesting that, in any precise moment, a lapse in attentiveness, a diversion, may mean that something is missed? And that something could be a boy falling from the sky or something much more real – like the darkening clouds of war for instance. (Like everywhere else in Europe, the low countries were permanently engulfed in one conflict or other during Bruegel’s lifetime.)
Beneath their flight,
the fisherman while casting his long rod,
or the tired shepherd leaning on his crook,
or the rough plowman as he raised his eyes,
astonished might observe them on the wing,
and worship them as Gods.
- Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book VIII) Eng. trans. Brooks More, 1922.
As Gabbert points out, neither the painting nor Auden’s poem overtly signal approaching disaster let alone impending war, yet dangers are lurking in both. In the painting, Icarus has indeed fallen; his flaying legs barely noticed by a folk going about their business or just not caring, nor by the viewer eagerly progressing from one master work to the next, not seeing what Auden saw. After all, unprompted, human nature will have it that we see what we want to see – or we don’t see at all.
Looking eastward from Germany in these day, one can see the result of a political culture that was too concerned with economic interests and chose to look away for too long.
