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θεός νύ τις ἦ βροτός ἐσσι;
I like Robin Williamson's "Fool's Song (Columbine)," but I really wish he had included the verses Hope Mirrlees wrote for Lud-in-the-Mist (1926).
"There are windfalls of dreams, there's a wolf in the stars,
And Life is a nymph who will never be thine,
With lily, germander, and sops in wine.
With sweet-brier,
And bon-fire,
And strawberry-wire,
And columbine."
My poem "Leukothea's Odyssey 6" has been accepted by Goblin Fruit.
"There are windfalls of dreams, there's a wolf in the stars,
And Life is a nymph who will never be thine,
With lily, germander, and sops in wine.
With sweet-brier,
And bon-fire,
And strawberry-wire,
And columbine."
My poem "Leukothea's Odyssey 6" has been accepted by Goblin Fruit.
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Congratulations on the placement of the new poem.
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Thank you very, very much. I do not know that you need to feel awed by anything I write, but I am very glad that it resonates with you.
I must with some shyness confess to being woefully underread not only in classical poetry but virtually in poetry's entire arc.
I can certainly recommend you some classical poets, although I have a difficult time recommending translations. (If you read two or three at once, you can get a better sense of the work as a whole rather than each translator's particular filter, but that presupposes that you can get, say, three comparable translations of Lucan that don't suck. Your chances improve with things like the Odyssey.) Once past late antiquity, I'm very touch and go until the nineteenth century, and we're still only talking Western poetry. I like Ikkyu.
I've read some Hebrew poetry and Shakespeare and bits of Poe and Crane and Eliot and Auden and Hacker and Kinnell -- and not much else save oddments of English greats, and none of it enough for deep intimacy.
Even so, who or what do you like best? Or what interests you most, which may be a different question?
And yet phrases like (but of course no two are alike) "threshings of godhead" and lines like (and otherwise) "the smart of pennyroyal on his tongue like a word / he had forgotten to say" are deeply thrilling and light up the palace of possiblity in new ways, flicker through scrims of gem and leaf.
That is beautiful criticism to receive. Thank you. I mean that.
Have you written of the poem's background or constellations of allusion?
I think it's a straightforward midrash for the Homeric Hymn to Demeter: I was struck by the story of Demophoon, first just for the image of the child torn misguidedly out of a gift of godhood—Metaneira sees her son burning in the fire where the disguised Demeter has been placing him night after night to burn off his mortality, anointing him with ambrosia by day; not totally without reason, she leaps to the conclusion that the old wandering woman she engaged as a nurse is murdering her child—and then for all the echoes that go with it. Demeter is a mother who has lost her child, not quite to death, because Persephone is a goddess still and immortal: then again, Hades is the eponym of death, his house the underworld, and so to be taken by him in person, wedded to him, is perhaps truer and more awful than simply ceasing to be; the point is, Demeter knows grief and bereavement, and with a mother's sympathy and a god's overcompensation she is trying somehow to make them up to her mortal benefactor, making her child unassailable where Demeter's own was so terribly not. The trouble is that Metaneira does love her son. When she finds him in a fireplace, she's going to freak. And thinking that she is saving his life, she pulls him back into death instead. τιμὴ δ᾽ ἄφθιτος αἰὲν ἐπέσσεται, Demeter finally tells her, imperishable honor will be on him always, but it feels like a consolation prize, something salvaged from the ruin.
ἀγρόμεναι δέ μιν ἀμφὶς ἐλούεον ἀσπαίροντα
ἀμφαγαπαζόμεναι: τοῦ δ᾽ οὐ μειλίσσετο θυμός:
χειρότεραι γὰρ δή μιν ἔχον τροφοὶ ἠδὲ τιθῆναι.
And gathered around him, [his sisters] washed him as he struggled
and cradled him lovingly: but his heart would not be comforted,
because worse nurses and nurturers held him now.
So I wondered not if, but how much he would remember of what he had lost.
Anyway I shall return.
I look forward.
Congratulations on the placement of the new poem.
Thank you! I keep saying that, but it is heartfelt!
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I would welcome that. I have Fagles' translations of Homer and The Aeneid and the 1993 edition of The Norton Book of Classical Literature, edited by Bernard Knox. Am I right to consider Fagles a good first translation of those works? Are there other translations you consider essential? Who are your favorite classical poets and translations?
Your comment about reading two or three good translations of a given poet struck a nerve. In the mid-90s, when I was first immersing myself in Beethoven's late string quartets (works I count amongst the most sublime utterances in the history of the human race), I was able to afford multiple recordings of each of them, and so had the odd and illuminating experience of becoming more intimately familiar with the compositions than I was with any single recording of them. The best performances inter-illuminate one another, revealing qualities in the music that are not contained in any performance, qualities that stand revealed only in one's imagination, a strange sort of parallactic juxtaposition. Obviously not the same phenomenon, and yet similar in some ways, or so I would imagine.
I also have (moving on to the middle ages) Robert M. Durling's translations of Inferno and Purgatorio, from Oxford. Not, I suspect, the most well known recent translations, but I was intrigued by the editions in the store and decided to take a risk on them. I don't believe his translation of Paradiso has been published yet.
Beyond that I have a few used Norton anthologies of English poetry, mostly unread, like the classical works mentioned above.
It's daunting, and it seems I must read Homer before Virgil, and Homer and the Bible and no doubt any number of other things before Dante, etc. I do appear to have committed myself to devoting a fair amount of my "free" reading time for 2010 to a close reading of most of the Bible, a document I have decidedly mixed feelings about, central-document-of-western-civilization syndrome and all that. If I can fold some Shakespeare in there it would be a good thing. Actually I'd rather fold Homer into it, but don't want to bring the whole effort crashing down, which is so easy to do.
I have a huge volume of Eugenio Montale, who I stumbled upon; I really like some of it. All that Mediterranean light. Mean to read more. Remember liking some of Neruda's 100 love sonnets. Mystical sensuality; Kinnell gets it just right sometimes, something he shares with Montale and Neruda. But so much poetry is opaque to me.
Who are your favorite female poets? I feel underread in women writers generally. I do have a "complete" Dickinson, but have barely begun.
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I may be in the minority; I don't actually like Fagles that much. His translations of the Homeric epics feel overworked to me: he makes the language exciting, but in the process somehow misses the point that there is deep strangeness and echo in it already. I tend to recommend a combination of Richmond Lattimore and Robert Fitzgerald for the Iliad and the Odyssey, since the former is very faithful to the Greek (to the point where it defamiliarizes the English, although not as extremely as I think might be tried) and the latter is highly charged as poetry (in ways that play with register rather than holding it all to the same pitch, which I think is another problem I have with Fagles). I haven't read his Iliad, but I do like Stanley Lombardo's Odyssey; he properly renders κάμμορος as "tricky bastard." (It's something Athene calls Odysseus a lot.) And while it is not so much a translation of the Iliad as a series of versions, Christopher Logue's War Music, taken as a project with the later volumes All Day Permanent Red and Cold Calls, is essential. The Aeneid is trickier; in this case, I'm lukewarm about Fitzgerald (he oversteps my tolerance for infidelity to the text), Fagles I have the usual arguments with, and I actively recommend against Allen Mandelbaum (who comes across as though he's trapped somewhere in the nineteenth century). There is fortunately, very recently, Sarah Ruden; her language is unadorned and elides more than it expands, which is not necessarily accurate to the hexameters behind it, but she may be the first translator of the Aeneid I've encountered where I like both their English and their sense of the Latin. I should check out Stanley Lombardo. I wouldn't mind if Seamus Heaney ever produced a version, but so far I think he's confined himself to individual passages, like 6.98—148 (the Sibyl and the Golden Bough) in Seeing Things (1993).
(You may be interested in Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies' Homer Multitext Project, which lets you look at three manuscripts of the Iliad from the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. It's fun.)
Who are your favorite classical poets and translations?
Yikes. I may not be able to answer the second question in all cases, but I can at least get to the first. I think I'm conventional: I love the Greek lyric poets, especially Sappho, Alkaios, Anakreon, Archilochos, and Mimnermos (and I have a soft spot for Hipponax fr. 120 W: λάβετέ μεο ταἰμάτια, κόψω Βουπάλωι τὸν ὀφθαλμόν—"Hold my coat, I'm going to punch Boupalos in the eye"); I love the Homeric hymns; the Iliad and the Odyssey should go without saying, but especially the latter; I can take or leave some of the Alexandrians, but Kallimachos is fantastic and Lykophron's Alexandra is like Finnegan's Wake twenty-two centuries too soon. I like some of Pindar. I like Theokritos' Idyll 11. If you're including drama, Euripides writes gods that are not human; they are terrifying, which they should be.
For Latin poets, my first loves were Catullus and Ovid; I do like Vergil, although I don't re-read him with the same frequency; I do want to re-read Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. With the Silver Age, I added Lucan, whose unfinished anti-epic the Pharsalia or Bellum Civile is black-humored and occasionally batshit; Seneca's tragedies are in a similar vein of ghosts and gore which eventually gave us The Revenger's Tragedy, Hamlet, and probably a lot of film noir. I did not imprint on Horace or Martial, but they are filed mentally as poets I should give another chance. I actually like Plautus and Terence. And if you want non-classical Latin, the Carmina Burana rock even without Carl Orff.
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This will not give you a rounded view of the literature, but it's a lot of what I'd take to a desert island. The problem with the second half of the question is that I don't usually read classical poets in translation. I have an answer in the case of Lucan—seek out Joyce Jane Wilson and Susanna Braund, avoid Robert Graves like the plague—and I can point you toward Peter Green for Ovid's Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, but that might be it off the top of my head. I think Anne Carson's Sappho is well-regarded. Ted Hughes did versions of Seneca. I will have to get back to you. I'm not sure promising to provide translations myself would be a good idea, unless you're really willing to wait.
I also have (moving on to the middle ages) Robert M. Durling's translations of Inferno and Purgatorio, from Oxford. Not, I suspect, the most well known recent translations, but I was intrigued by the editions in the store and decided to take a risk on them. I don't believe his translation of Paradiso has been published yet.
I haven't heard of him at all and I never fell in love with Mandelbaum, so I will look these up! Thank you.
It's daunting, and it seems I must read Homer before Virgil, and Homer and the Bible and no doubt any number of other things before Dante, etc.
When you've done all of that, however, take the time for Seamus Heaney's "Station Island." His pilgrim's Vergil is James Joyce.
I do appear to have committed myself to devoting a fair amount of my "free" reading time for 2010 to a close reading of most of the Bible, a document I have decidedly mixed feelings about, central-document-of-western-civilization syndrome and all that. If I can fold some Shakespeare in there it would be a good thing.
What translations are you using? I am not really qualified to speak on any of them, as I don't read Biblical Hebrew (until we get into the Gospels, which I have read in the original), but I can recommend the JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh; it was given me by a close friend who is a cantor and I trust his language skills.
Actually I'd rather fold Homer into it, but don't want to bring the whole effort crashing down, which is so easy to do.
It is possible to read the Iliad and the Odyssey without pages of notes. There is much to be gained from close study, but it might be useful for you to approach them first as narratives or pieces of myth, then within the framework of oral tradition and heroic epithets and composition-in-performance. I can recommend a few starter books if you're interested.
I have a huge volume of Eugenio Montale, who I stumbled upon; I really like some of it. All that Mediterranean light.
But so much poetry is opaque to me.
Why?
Who are your favorite female poets?
God. So much of my poetry is in boxes, I know I'm forgetting someone. Rika Lesser is one of my absolute favorites: I discovered her through her first collection Etruscan Things (1983), which gives voice to the artifacts and archaeology of that civilization, and have continued to like her through later books in her own voice and her translations of Göran Sonnevi. Another is H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), who is one of the very few people I've read in English who sounds as though she composed in classical Greek; she started with the Imagists and is probably best known for Trilogy (1944—1946), a three-book response to the Blitz; she was also in a silent film with Paul Robeson in 1930. In a more contemporary vein, Theodora Goss; Francesca Forrest; Greer Gilman.
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As for the Bible, I have the Oxford Jewish Study Bible, which uses the JPS Tanakh (a fine translation for sure), and Robert Alter's translations of Torah, Samuel, and Psalms. Alter is awesome! The translations are beautiful (and it seems highly idiomatic; his reputation as a scholar of Hebrew is sterling) and his essays and annotations are superb. I envy your ability to read the gospels in the original Greek. I have Willis Barnstone's translation of the gospels, which I like very much, though I prefer to read them with traditional forms of pronouns restored. I also have Richmond Lattimore's New Testament, and about 25 other English translations, 16 of them in just two Oxford volumes of parallel NT's. I have an ambition to write a new "translation" of Mark, my favorite of the canonical gospels. (I urgently recommend John Carroll's profoundly heretical -- and I mean that as the most soulful compliment -- midrash on Mark, The Existential Jesus.)