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Pennies crash down from the sky
I did not sleep at all last night. This is much less entertaining than it sounds. I am hoping not to repeat the trick tonight.
I know the last time I read Watership Down (1972) was in seventh grade, two years before I started Latin, but I still have no excuse for realizing only this afternoon that it is completely the Aeneid if someone had listened to Kassandra. The book's first epigraph is even some stichomythia from Agamemnon: φόνον δόμοι πνέουσιν αἱματοσταγῆ (line 1309). Hey, Dawn, how're the wife and kids? Marblehead says hello.
I know the last time I read Watership Down (1972) was in seventh grade, two years before I started Latin, but I still have no excuse for realizing only this afternoon that it is completely the Aeneid if someone had listened to Kassandra. The book's first epigraph is even some stichomythia from Agamemnon: φόνον δόμοι πνέουσιν αἱματοσταγῆ (line 1309). Hey, Dawn, how're the wife and kids? Marblehead says hello.
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That's an awesome bit of information, that about Watership Down. I hadn't realized it either, but it makes sense. Adams is a devoted student of the classics.
My daughted hated Watership Down, which made me sad. I don't necessarily think it's the best thing since sliced bread, but it has mythic charm and derring-do, which should be an unbeatable combination.
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Are any of the rest of his books worth reading? Watership Down is the only one I know.
My daughted hated Watership Down, which made me sad. I don't necessarily think it's the best thing since sliced bread, but it has mythic charm and derring-do, which should be an unbeatable combination.
I am not at all sure it's a book for children, as they are usually defined. I do remember liking it; and re-reading, I'm enjoying the epic scope that I didn't fully appreciate the first time around. Maybe she'll change her mind.
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XD
The Young Lady is currently 16. She was, IIRC, 12 or 13 when she had to read Watership Down for school. And therein lies, I suspect, part of the problem. It's rather unfortunate that kids tend to hate the assigned literature at school - even when the schools have tried to make the subject more enticing by including contemporary works with literary merit.
At that age, she was reading LOTR with enthusiam (as I imagine many of us did as young adolescents). I think that making the jump to rabbits - no shiny swords, no cozy Hobbit-cooking and clothes, no lovely ethereal elves - plus the fact that it was a school assignment are what doomed any good opinions she might have had. And right now, of course, her reaction is "I already read that - why should I read it again when there's new Pratchett and Gaiman and so on coming out?" (She's also fond of P.C. Hodgell and Kingsbury's Courtship Rite.)
Adams' Shardik and Maia are both richly detailed fantasy novels with very little, if any, magic: there are some examples of scenes where god-powers many be involved, but it's not clear. The emphasis is on the characters and how they are affected by religious fervor, war, political scheming, and so on.
Maia comes chronologically before Shardik, and recounts the life of a good-hearted, beautiful country bumpkin of a girl who ends up as a courtesan in the leading city of the region - which is beautifully detailed. The sexual nature of Maia's situation is explored explicitly, both for good and ill. She becomes involved at city politics in a very high level, and her naive viewpoint is the lens through which we view revolution, a siege of the city, and other unpleasant realities of a change in regime, as well as some very grotty bits of human nature.
Shardik concerns another naive rural character, the slightly simple hunter Keldarek, who encounters an enormous bear and believes it to be the avatar of his people's god. Ambitious men in his tribe seize on this sign as impetus to start a war of conquest. After their own traditional religious leaders (a group of priestesses) show a lack of enthusiasm for this idea, they manipulate Keldarek into becoming their priest on the basis of his relationship with the bear, who travels with them as a living sign of their holy mandate. Once again, war and its grim aftereffects are important themes.
I enjoy these books, but a lots of pain and angst occurs and is vividly detailed during the course of the stories. Adams' style is grandiloquent and loquacious, as in Watership Down, and one either likes it or loathes it.
I have not read The Plague Dogs out of a sort of cowardice: I'm pretty sure it would upset me a great deal.
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Watership Down is an Aeneid retelling... if someone had listened to Kassandra. Oh I see... you mean, if they had gotten out early, not had the whole war.
Interesting!
But tell more?
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It's quite good. The rest of the CD is around here somewhere, but this seems to be the only song on my computer.
But tell more?
Well, for starters assume that Kassandra was a small male rabbit named Fiver . . . It's the escaping of the doomed community before its ruin, not in the midst of—Aeneas only gets out as Troy is already burning—and the search for somewhere to found a new home, with mythically close encounters along the way (Cowslip's warren is explicitly identified by Adams with the Lotos-Eaters of the Odyssey), sort of conflated with the generations-later founding of Rome;
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Your icon is best.
I also love the way the book is used in 'The Stand,' too.
I have not read The Stand. How does the epic get handed on?
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Hee!
I liked it b/c Stu thinks (being a rural Texan) rabbits are pretty stupid, and he thinks the idea of the book is dumb, but then he starts reading it and is blown away and actually talks about it to people! (he's v closed-mouthed) It's v well-done.
That's awesome.
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Yay.
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...
And, YES. That's obvious now that you mention it.
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Thank you. At least I am sufficiently overextended at this point to have some chance, I think.
And, YES. That's obvious now that you mention it.
I'm waiting to find out there's years of scholarship on this.
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Have you had a chance to read Margaret Atwood's THE PENELOPIAD yet? I'd be interested in your reaction.
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Either that, or everything's better with a classical education . . .
Have you had a chance to read Margaret Atwood's THE PENELOPIAD yet?
I have not. I own a copy, courtesy of
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Of course, I don't have to tell YOU there's a rich haul of possibility in exploring the women of the Classical world ... Margaret's Penelope is (in many respects) a typical Atwood heroine (shy but sarcastic, withdrawn but sensual). The writer's elaborations on the heroine's tale (drawn principally from Rieu's ODYSSEY and Graves' GREEK MYTHS) are clever and the observations about Odysseus she places in Penelope's mouth ("his clothes were rustic; he had the manners of a small-town big-shot, and had already expressed several complicated ideas that others considered peculiar") are unceasingly clever.
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Any road, I'm sorry that you didn't sleep and I hope that tonight's a better night.
I've never read Watership Down. I suppose I should correct that at some point. I did read Maia, which, along with US$ 1.96, will get me a grande tea in Starbucks.
I think you've got an excuse, personally. It's sometimes hard to sort things out, with having them sideways to each other like that.
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You are correct. I don't know whose translation Adams quotes:
CHORUS: Why do you cry out thus, unless at some vision of horror?
CASSANDRA: The house reeks of death and dripping blood.
CHORUS: How so? 'Tis but the odor of the altar sacrifice.
CASSANDRA: The stench is like a breath from the tomb.
Just in case we were in doubt as to whether the disregarded Fiver should remind us of any mythical seers . . .
I did read Maia, which, along with US$ 1.96, will get me a grande tea in Starbucks.
I've never even heard of Maia. How was it?
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Ah. Glad to know.
I don't know whose translation Adams quotes:
Hmm... might it be his own, if he's got enough Ancient Greek? I might well do likewise, in a similar position to his.
I've never even heard of Maia. How was it?
Not bad. It was a fantasy set in an Iron Ageish empire with... oh, perhaps we might say vaguely Sumerian-esque elements, except not really? The sex might've been a bit excessibe, but wasn't too gratuitous; the titular heroine was a girl sold into slavery by her mother, the latter being jealous over her relationship with her stepfather. She turned out to have some sort of capital-D Destiny. There was a wicked bisexual queen, but the titular heroine and her best friend, a nobleman's daughter kidnapped from some Africa-like place in the far South, were also quite happily bisexual so presumably we weren't meant to take that in the wrong way. He used "baste" or possibly "bast" as a substitute for a popular four-letter verb.
It's been quite a few years. I mostly read it because somebody I dearly loved was reading it when we both were in high school, and then bought a paperback a few years later when I saw it used in a shop because it made me think of her. I've still got that paperback, somewhere. I should find it and read it over again, I suppose.
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Now I really want to reread Watership Down. Which I've been meaning to do for ages, anyway.
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Now that the penny has finally dropped on my head, I should really do some kind of actual critical analysis of the text . . .
Now I really want to reread Watership Down. Which I've been meaning to do for ages, anyway.
Let me know what you think!
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Of which it certainly has elements. I am still re-reading, but I recall that they initially raid a farm for does; in the case of Efrafa, it just happens to be their luck that Hyzenthlay and others already want to leave.
but if they had all left Troy and had those adventures Hekabe and Andromache would have been there.
Yes. If Kassandra had been listened to; and been her brother.
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Awww. Shucks.
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Keep fingers, toes, and spontaneous webbed appendages crossed for us, please.
Also, please have a torrid affair with Greer Gilman. I don't often make such assertions, but there was smokin' autumnal tree porn!