Book Commentary: December 2003 Archives

Here's an interesting literary review. I read a very well done review in it at lunch today, by Scott Hightower, of Richard Howard's new book of poems, Talking Cures. Well, it's actually a reverie of Hightower's relationship to Howard (he was a student at one time) and the poetic voice Howard represents. In fact, the poem quoted in the review comes from an older book!

He closes with a very reassuring observation:

"Our poets make our poetry . . . One by one the poets give voice to our realm, our humanity, and fill our slandscape with our collective exploration: the observing, generating self engaged in speaking ourselves through time. Talking cures."

I very much like this sense of history, the historical conversation or polylogue that poets and poetry represent for any society, nation, culture. Hightower's strikes me as the appropriately Romantic tone for our bloody new century: individual and inclusive (undeniably so), measured and ambitious.

Now, if he can only let himself release literature from its chains, as in:

" . . . Howard consistently delivers the proportion and perspective an educated reader can expect from 'literature.'"

No shame, I think, in using that word again, since all educated readers will agree that it means so much more (other?) than the white male canon from which all educated readers have been liberated.

Just finished re-reading The Iliad, Robert Fagles' translation, Bernard Knox' introduction. I first read it nearly thirty years ago, in a cold room in northeastern Indiana at Christmas break (I was a student at IU). That was E.V. Rieu's prose translation, which I still own in paperback (faded, brittle). At several places in the Fagles translation (which is verse), I stopped to compare texts with Rieu. I am often curious why translations don't vary more widely than they appear to, I mean, purely from the perspective of word choice. It's true, how many ways can one render "wine dark sea" into English, and why would you want to anyway? Still, launching into a line-by-line translation of twenty-four books averaging 700-800 lines each ought to offer the translator something more rewarding than a nuanced modernization of some previous rendering. Take Seamus Heaney's recent translation of Beowulf, which at certain crucial points translates a line or a phrase or a word in some subtly anti-English way, so that he identifies his own Irish history somewhat with the fate of Grendel. That seems to me worth the labor of translating a text that has been visited many times by one's predecessors! But I am sure I have not caught the nuances of change in voice and rhythm between a prose translation of The Iliad done two generations ago and one done post-Vietnam, post-fall-of-Iran, and read post-9/11.

I had not recalled how magnificently bloody is The Iliad, and blood is one thing Fagles seems to have concentrated on rendering in technicolor. Reading its carnage in end-stopped lines, "loving" detail and muscular images leaves me a little bit drained, say, the way I felt upon first seeing "The Wild Bunch" or "Scarface." It all happens in slow motion and I am not permitted to look away. It's a testament to the power of Homer's craft that a movie version would be nearly impossible to create, with any appropriate level of horror at least. (As a reference point, a cable channel a few years ago aired a filmed version of The Odyssey, starring Armand Asante. It was cartoonish. It sucked.) One needs the verbal image to register this much destruction upon individuals at war. Only the Normandy invasion scenes of "Saving Private Ryan" can approach what Fagles did in bringing carnage straight to the gut. I have experienced new dreams since finishing that poem!

I look forward to moving on to The Odyssey, another text I've not read in thirty years. Again, it was the Rieu translation then, and will be the Fagles translation soon.