In plain language for a general audience, Emily Wilson explains the motivation and intent behind her new Odyssey translation. Recorded at the Bucknell Forum in October 2018.
So much more than an economical life
“Economics” as a discipline may ring dry and so,well… economical; that which remains once the human is removed from capital – a once succulent fruit; peeled, shredded, cut to the core. And the practitioners? The stars of any day seem often to be forgot, the theoretical paths taken rarely crossing and the enmity great. I actually do read some here and there, that is, somewhat economically – for instance, Krugman (because he is cranky and often says what I like) and other pieces of NY Times reporting and opinion, and Duflo & Banerjee. The Economist, I rather loathe – but it sometimes comes my way and I attempt to take what I can from stuff written by god knows who (they don’t tell you!), and in a language decipherable to but a few. Fairly regularly I browse the “Wirtschaft” pages of German media; the Suddeutsche Zeitung and sometimes the Frankfurter Allgemeine which is big on business (thankfully, not only) in a big way.
This is all to say, whilst I am not an absolute duffer, economics, and especially the business side, is not my thing. But John Maynard Keynes I do know, and I know him by way of the company he kept, and a piece by Jonathan Kirshner in The New York Times last December reminding of the publication one hundred years before of Keynes’ seminal work written in the aftermath of the Versailles peace conference, brings this back to mind.
…The book, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” turned out to be a phenomenon. It swiftly went through six printings, was translated into a dozen languages, sold over 100,000 copies, and brought world fame to its 36-year-old author, John Maynard Keynes…
…“Economic Consequences” is majestically written — Keynes was close to the iconoclastic Bloomsbury cohort of artists and writers, and his incisive, candid portrayals of the peacemakers (Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson) reflected the no-holds-barred influence of Lytton Strachey’s recently celebrated “Eminent Victorians.” The book was also wildly controversial for its assessments of the capacity of Germany to pay the reparations demanded by the victorious Allied powers…
Opinion, The New York Times, Dec. 7 2019
by Lady Ottoline Morrell, vintage snapshot print, 1915 NPG Ax140438
© National Portrait Gallery, London
Without having (yet) read the book, it seems clear Keynes prophesied that which would later be agreed by many in hindsight; the aggravating role the Treaty would play in creating an economic and social environment that would lead, and alone in the interests of satisfying extreme French reparation demands, to very bad places. And they did; a brief period of recovery was followed by political uncertainties, the market crash, a worldwide depression with all the accompanying societal and personal catastrophes, and which would ultimately facilitate the rise of tyranny and fascism in Germany and elsewhere.
I have just been writing a little about Lytton Strachey in my meanderings through Virginia Woolf’s daily life, as recorded by herself, and as it happens I am in the midst of a time (July, 1919) in which Eminent Victorians (various copies available at the Internet Archive) is being lauded as a resounding success, so Kirshner’s observation in respect to this book attracts my attention. Whether this attraction will run to reading either or both only time will tell, but in terms of the preoccupations of this extraordinary group of friends, where the lines are often blurred between (auto)biography and literature, and memoir-writing practiced with fervor as the true repository of truth, that, beyond the situational, theoretical and factual world of politics and finance, Keynes application of colorful brush strokes to his portraits of the movers and shakers of the time would hardly surprise. More determinedly then I now say: yes, two works, both a century old, that should be read.
The Mirror & the Light – a taster …
…to titillate or torment or both, The Guardian today has published an extract from the opening chapter of Hilary Mantel’s conclusion to her Thomas Cromwell Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, that is to be published in the UK on March 5 – beginning just as Bring up the Bodies ended with the spectacular execution of Anne Boleyn; in all its grotesqueness and nobility.
A reading by Ben Miles from the audio book is there to! And here is a video clip from the opening scene of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2014 production of Wolf Hall, with Miles as Cromwell.
White washing the past
In the last week or so, two disparate associations have made me consider just how much European culture (that is, the western Christian version) has invested in commanding the narrative of (their) inherent superiority, and how even today there are some who would seek to reverse or suppress an appreciation and wider representation of cultural diversity. To perpetuate their lineal myopic narrative they return now, as was so during the Enlightenment, to the Mediterranean and Aegean of the classical antiquity.
Firstly, the bizarre Presidential decree, entitled – believe it or not – “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again”, that instructs planners and architects to resist the dictates of a zeitgeist determined to be obsessed with diversity and inclusiveness (and presumably any innovative design tendencies of the 20th century), and instead adhere to a traditional architectural form, that is, one inspired by the classical lines favoured in the founding years of the new republic and perfected in the moral wastelands of the antebellum South.
As The New York Times says in an editorial:
…The proposed executive order reflects a broader inclination in some parts of American society to substitute an imagined past for the complexities and possibilities of the present. It embodies a belief that diversity is a problem and uniformity is a virtue. It is advocating for an un-American approach to architecture.
The Editorial Board Feb. 4, 2020
Beyond the retrograde aesthetic that seems to be espoused, I can’t help but ponder that here we have another insidious attempt by the President and his cohorts to undermine a fragile social cohesion, and that along racial lines. One can well imagine how the power and grace of David Adijaye’s wonderful National Museum of African American History and Culture would send them off on a delusory tangent, whereby the Times’ architecture critic Michael Kimmelman writes this wonderful piece offering a more nuanced definition of “classical” – but then “nuance” is not a category applicable in some thought processes.
And a second association arose out of my reflections upon visiting an exhibition in Frankfurt a few days ago. At the Liebieghaus, and entitled “Gods in Color” , displayed were an impressive range of reproductions of antique sculpture reimagined in the colorful splendour of their time.
I was interested in many different aspects, including the historical narrative and cultural significance of the sculptures, the techniques and materials used in their creation and the contemporary techniques used to expose the polychromy. But, prompted by learning (short video clip below) that there had been evidence enough in the 18th century of antique polychromy, contrary to the essentially monochrome narrative inherited from the Middle Ages, and, further, that the preeminent art historian of the time, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (this a Wiki link, better is this from a 2017 exhibition in Weimar, unfortunately only in German), was erroneously seen as a proponent of the marble-white theory (until 2008!), I have been thinking a lot about the enduring public perception of the “whiteness” of antiquity – be it in sculpture, attire…and buildings.
And here I return to the very Trumpian view of the architectural imperative: the State embellishing (better said, white-washing) history and defining the present in the image of this falsely received and often discredited past.
The Odyssey (2): Books 1 – 2
The Journey Begins
Firstly, Homer, I have now concluded, is meant to be read aloud. Browsing and rereading passages is one thing, but to capture the rhythm and maintain concentration one must, absolutely must, emote! So that is precisely what I am doing in video chunks of a maximum of fifteen minutes – privately I should say. Being unsure sometimes of a correct pronunciation, I have found the comprehensive glossary with pronunciation key at the back of Wilson’s book [pp. 553-577] to be very helpful, and as a last resort a “how to pronounce…” request to Google has an answer every time. And, it is not cheating to refer to the Notes, including summary paragraph! [pp. 527-552]
To also be said, English translations of The Odyssey have named each of the twenty-four sections variously: “Song”, “Rhapsody”, “Scroll”, “Chapter” or, as Emily Wilson like other translators has chosen to do, simply “Book”. Further, she gives each of the books a title, which, if not unique, seems at the very least to be unusual, and I think a really nice touch – adding to the work’s order and accessibility.
Book 1: The Boy and the Goddess
pp. 105-119
This most famous of epic journeys does not begin with an actual journey, nor with the hero, the principal journeyer, rather in medias res at the point in which Athena intervenes, sanctioned by the will of Zeus, upon the woes of her favoured one, Odysseus, to facilitate his homecoming. Under the guise of Mentes and familial friendship, Athena infiltrates the chaotic Ithaca household of Odysseus’ wife Penelope and son Telemachus, overrun as it is by bawdy, avaricious suitors, and with all her wiles and powers of persuasion sets the path Telemachus will follow on a journey of his own – a journey in search of the absent father and in a wider sense a journey to manhood.
Book 2: A Dangerous Journey
pp. 120-134
But before his journey is to begin, Telemachus must bring his case to the Ithacans – and the suitors. One of the suitors, Antinous, reveals Penelope’s trick of the never finished burial sheet for Laertes – weaving by day and surreptitiously unweaving by night. Zeus sends down swooping eagles, but the prophecy foretold by one is not heeded. Telemachus shows his stuff and faces down the suitor’s taunts, but again it is only with the divine help of Athena that a ship and crew is procured – and the earthly loyalty of his old nurse Eurycleia in keeping his secret safe and gathering together the rations required. Under the guidance of Athena (guised as Mentor), and the winds and seas under her control, the curved ship sets sail.
Dorothea Lange’s America
Like many others I suppose, I have this Dorothea Lange photograph, mostly referred to as “Migrant Mother”, imprinted on some region of my brain. For me, it has come to represent the extreme rural poverty of the United States in the Great Depression years between the World Wars of the 20th century. When, then, I was writing about Marilynne Robinson’s “Lila” last year, it seemed like an appropriate visual representation of the itinerant life Lila led as a child and young woman.
And whenever I think about John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath I also have such images in my mind’s eye; going now to look, I see the cover print is in fact not from Lange rather includes one from Walker Evans of a farmer family – one not unlike the Joads perhaps.
It is interesting to note that both Lange and Evans worked for the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration during the 1930s. Whether their paths crossed I can’t say, but it is as a consequence of this government employment and many of their images therefore falling in the public domain, that we may thank for their continuing presence today.
Not living in NYC nor likely to get there anytime soon, this NY Times magazine piece on the current MoMA exhibition Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (through May 9 2020) is informative only indirectly, but does provoke anew thoughts on internal migration, and the underlying circumstance of economic hardship abetted by the unholy alliance between the machinations of big capital and the vagaries of climate and land, and its more sinister iteration when it is driven not only by economic needs but by racism and segregation – the great migratory movements of African-Americans out of the South, northward and westward, in search of jobs and dignity.
On the MoMA website are some wonderful resources that hopefully will remain available long after the exhibition finishes. And here is a trailer that gives some sense of an extraordinary woman who sought and found the human condition in every face, and whose photo-journalism has become art without losing the power of the very real moments she captured with her eye and camera.
Jack’s story
Expected, but still thrilled by the formal announcement of Marilynne Robinson’s new Gilead novel – the fourth. Finally (and is this the final word?), we are going to hear Jack’s side of things – at least the St. Louis story, for I recall Robinson stating last year that the new instalment would go to Gilead; though in some respects the place “Gilead” – real and mythical – and its effect on the characters, is always present.
stories that move & shape
Writing about Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire the other day, I remembered that it was on a list from the BBC of so-called “Novels That Shaped Our World” that turned up at the end of last year. Returning to look at this list again now, it seems to me that it is an interesting resource. They are all English language novels, that in itself minimising the selection, and the choices (from a group of literary sorts – writers, critics, etc.) are as idiosyncratic as one would expect, but certainly well worth perusing just the same. The books are organised thematically – for instance, identity, society, romance – and there are also lots of internal links to related media.
On reflection, I must also say that it was often not the absolute classic that meant so much to me at a particular time in life and that I remember still, so that perhaps explains some choices that I see as somewhat abstruse. There are a also a few selections that surprise and delight me.
For instance, Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, chosen by someone (whom?) and included in the “family” section. Should I be asked to name my favourite books, or those having had a profound effect on me, I would not have immediately thought of it. But now prompted, it occurs to me that long ago it having been sent to me from the opposite end of the world somewhere, reading Cloudstreet was a little like carrying all the grandeur and smallness, all the cruelties and generosities of a whole continent around in my pocket. I loved it. It positively reeked of Australia, and maybe it didn’t “shape my world” exactly but it certainly gave me good company when that was sorely needed. And what more can one ask from a good read?