Some lesser works of Sōseki and Tanizaki - deep in the earth directly beneath Lady Kikyō’s toilet

Dolce Bellezza is running her 17th Japanese Literature Challenge.  Amazing, well done, etc.

I read some short works for it, which I will pile up here: three short works by Natsume Sōseki, collected in a Tuttle volume that looks like it is titled Ten Nights of Dream Hearing Things The Heredity of Taste and a pair of Junichirō Tanizaki novellas paired up in The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi and Arrowroot.  Sōseki and Tanizaki are exactly who I read last year, and quite possibly who I read for many years more.

The translators, in the introduction, emphasize that the Sōseki pieces are “lesser” although “not unimportant,” but I enjoyed them more than the one other work of Sōseki’s I’ve read, the short novel Kokoro (1914), by reputation a great work, I presume more for its culturally significant subject than its art.  But perhaps these stories are like études, technical exercises no matter how catchy the melody.

“Ten Nights of Dream” (1908), for example, is a series of ten dreams, each a few pages long, perfect newspaper fodder.  Some pieces are pure surrealism, accumulations of symbols, while others are little parables.  A man dreams that he is watching a famous 13th century sculptor at work.  He is told that the sculptor does not create the image of a god, but rather finds the god within the wood, the Michelangelo conceit.  When the narrator tries to carve a god, he botches it again and again, concluding that there are no longer gods in the wood.  See, a little parable.

The dreamer spends the last dream knocking pigs into a bottomless pit – “still the pigs, more pigs and more, kept grunting up toward him” – before falling in the pit himself (63).  I have a strong taste for this type of thing.  But any imaginative write can knock out fake dreams, I know.

Similarly, “Hearing Things” (1905) is about an anxious man who becomes hopped up on ghost stories and begins thinking ghosts are everywhere:

“It’s all imagination,” he immediately went on, continuing his conversation with Gen-san.  “You think to yourself that they’re frightening, so the ghosts get uppity and then, of course, they start wanting to come out” (110). 

That’s the narrator’s barber, deflating him so that the story can end happily.  The story is more about the literary representation of the uncanny than about anything actually uncanny.  So again, an amusing exercise.

“The Heredity of Taste” (1906) is the most interesting, a series of Tristram Shandy-like digressions that end up telling the story of a soldier killed in the Russo-Japanese war, which is treated tragically under the narrator’s comic tone.  And the lack of jingoism was interesting.

It was a wonderful time when Kō-san waved the flag, but I’ve been told that where he lies at the bottom of that ditch he’s just as dead and just as cold as any other soldier.  (145)

Aiko Itō and Graeme Wilson translated the Sōsekis.

I have enjoyed – again this is just taste – Tanizaki’s historical fiction, his stories about samurai and warlords, more than his contemporary stories, and Arrowroot (1930) and The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi (1935) were not exceptions.  Lord Musashi is about a samurai with a sadistic sexual kink, a common Tanizaki preoccupation, this time involving severed heads, and more specifically severed noses.  I suppose the historical setting is absolutely necessary, since such a story set in contemporary Manchuria would be too disgusting to read.  Tanizaki pretends to have found unlikely original sources describing Lors Musashi’s sex life while also explaining obscurities of the actual historical events.

In other words, Terukatsu now found himself deep in the earth directly beneath Lady Kikyō’s toilet.  (74)

It is that kind of story, with the usual Japanese political and military events caused by motives stranger than the norm.  On the same page is a reference to another story about “the beautiful Heian court lady who tantalized a suitor with a copy of her feces fashioned out of cloves” which Tanizaki finally wrote up fifteen years later in Captain Shigemoto’s Mother (1949), which I read last January.

Arrowroot is a gentler thing, an example of the distinctive Japanese genre of the literary travel story that dates back at least to the 9th century Tale of Ise, where characters visit beautiful or historic sites in large part because of the poems or plays or stories about them.  In this case, Tanizaki wants to explore a canyon which perhaps sheltered an exiled warlord but more importantly along the way is able to see a  drum make of fox skins that is featured in a famous Nōh play.  The narrator is perfectly aware that the drum he sees is not the real thing, and the warlord cannot possibly have lived in the canyon.  The “real” association is false, but the literary side, the story, remains true.  The story is still the story.

The translator, Anthony Chambers, in a note about magical Japanese foxes, writes that “[f]oxes are so partial to tempura and fried tofu that they can be summoned by setting out these delicacies” (201).  Me too, me too.  Just try it.

Meredith, thanks as always for the push to read these Japanese books.

Metamorphoses Cantos IV and V - gore, Pyramus and Thisbe, and a rap battle

Bacchus continues his reign of terror in Canto IV of Metamorphoses by turning three sisters who refuse to believe in his divinity into what “we in English language Backes or Reermice call the same” (Golding, 99) “[Or, as we say, bats.]” (Martin, 140).  How sad that we lost the word “reermice.”  But what is new here is that the three sisters, before their transformation, tell stories that also feature transformation, one after the other, the most famous of which is Pyramus and Thisbe.

The Pyramus and Thisbe story is not a mythological story but a tragic romance of the ludicrous sort, as Shakespeare saw perfect for travesty.  Charles Martin shifts his rhetoric to emphasize the ridiculous side of the story (warning: gore ahead):

  “It was as when a water pipe is ruptured

where the lead has rotted, and it springs a leak:

a column of water goes hissing through the hole

and parts the air with its pulsating thrusts;

splashed with his gore, the tree’s pale fruit grows dark;

blood soaks its roots and surges up to dye

the hanging berries purple with its color.” (Martin, 128)

This just-so story about why mulberries turn purple is the bit of Ovid Willa Cather borrowed for O Pioneers! (1913).  Shakespeare for some reason omits theses special effects (“With the help of a surgeon he might yet recover and prove an ass”).  Somehow Arthur Golding’s translation does not sound so silly.  But Martin has A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream behind him; silly is the only way to go.

The Canto ends with another romance, this time purely mythological, the Perseus story, full of metamorphoses, not just everyone turning to stone from Perseus’s super-weapon, but the creation of coral, another just-so story tossed in.  The Perseus saga shifts, in Canto V, to another parody of Homer and other epics, an insane scene of mass slaughter as gory as a Hollywood action movie, and part of the joke is that the scene goes on forever, ten blood-soaked pages in Martin.  One poor schmuck dies when his sword rebounds into his own throat.  Like an action movie, it is not just the number of kills, but the variety.

Every fifth book of Metamorphoses ends with a performance, in this case two, a song contest.  Martin shifts meters, letting one side rap and giving the other a loosey-goosey irregular five-beat line that somehow feels closer to Golding’s long lines but without the rhyme.  That’s how Ovid delivers the story of Proserpina (another just-so, why there is winter).  The rap is not in today’s style, but more like that of “Guns and Ships” from Hamilton, or maybe “Lazy Sunday.”  The rappers, challenging the Muses themselves, lose the battle and are turned into, what else, birds, magpies according to Golding,

Now also being turnde to Birdes they are as eloquent

As ere they were, as chattring still, as much to babling bent. (Golding, 135)

Ten cantos left.

Ovid's Metamorphoses, Cantos II and III - or just III, it turns out - And Cole and Swift, and little Woolfe

A month ago I wrote about the first Canto of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  Now I will move through the Cantos two or three at a time, just leafing through the books, really, with luck getting at what Ovid is doing.  Cantos II and III today.

Ovid established his cosmology and created the world in Canto I.  Now he is ready to do what he loves best, turning innocent young women into plants.  Or water, or constellations.  And turning innocent and less innocent men into stags and snakes, and writing just-so stories.

The gods are highly human, impulsive and wicked, sometimes more like impersonal, uncaring forces, and other times more like all-powerful dictators.  The rulers, the philandering Jove and the wronged wife Juno, so jealous and petty that she loses any sympathy, are especially menacing, but really danger can come from any direction at any time.  Mere humans are also generally terrible if they have any power at all.  That’s the ethos of Metamorphoses.

Canto III is full of the revenge of Juno.  She is especially awful to Semele, the mother of Bacchus.  She plays the Snow White trick, visiting to her as “a crone / with whitened hair and wrinkle-furrowed skin” (Martin, III, 101) to goad her into making a request from Jove that will cause her death – “incinerated by Jove’s gift” (103).  It’s all Semele’s fault then, not Juno’s.

Little fetus Bacchus is of course unharmed, and, sewed up in his father’s thigh, becomes the second child after Athena to whom Jove gives birth.  The gods live in a strange world.  An entire series of Bacchus stories follow in later Cantos, some familiar from our reading of Euripides.  Ovid is adept at interweaving the mythic story cycles, turning them into little sagas, into history.

For example, earlier in Canto III Cadmus founds Thebes by defeating a dragon and sowing the teeth to grow warriors from the earth.  A series of Thebes stories, mostly tragic, follow.  Eventually (Canto IV) Cadmus and his wife will themselves will be transformed into dragons.  They live in a cave on the Dalmatian coast, occasionally terrorizing the locals until the 4th century when St. Hilarion makes them immolate themselves, presumably converting them to Christianity.  See Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1943), her giant book about Yugoslavia.  “Without doubt it was Cadmus, it was literature” (252).  She does not actually see the cave, though, but takes the word of St. Jerome.

Canto III – not sure why I am only pulling things from Canto III – features another of Ovid’s modes, explicit parody, in Actaeon’s catalogue of hounds, a Homeric pastiche, comic but grimly so, since the dogs are about to tear poor Actaeon to pieces:

Blab, Fleetewood, Patch whose flecked skin with sundrie spots was spred:

And Tawnie full of duskie haires that over all did grow,

And Tempest best of footmanshipe in holding out at length.

And Cole and Swift, and little Woolfe… (Golding, 68)

And “shaggie Rugge,” Jollyboy, the entire pack.  I wonder if Shakespeare was thinking of this passage when he named King Lear’s little lap dogs.

Actaeon’s metamorphosis and death is gory and detailed, as many of Ovid’s transformations will be, but I find Echo’s change to be the most horrible:

unsleeping grief wasted her sad body,

reducing her to dried out skin and bones,

then voice and bones only; her skeleton

turned, they say, into stone.  (Martin, 106)

More of that to come in Metamorphoses.  More of everything.

The Best Books of 2024

For the last year and a half I read short books, mostly, which was psychologically satisfying and anyway necessary to fit the available energy and concentration.  Now, though, back on my feet, I hope, I am ready to read long books again.

Long, and I mean it, like Rebecca West’s 1,150 page Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), a novelistic tour through Yugoslavia mixed with a fragmented Gibbon-like history of the region.  I am almost halfway through without losing much enthusiasm.

My chronological drift has taken me into the 1940s, and I plan to read a number of the major works of the decade.  Nothing else I am likely to read comes close to West’s monster, although The Second Sex tops 700 pages.  But in the last couple of years I passed over a number of likely books because they were too long, so now is the time to gather them up.  Is A Glastonbury Romance (1932) really almost 1,200 pages?  Was John Cowper Powys out of his mind?  Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925), under a thousand, seems almost reasonable, Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932) a breeze at 600, except I hope to read it in French, and Finnegans Wake (1939) practically a novella, except that it is written in the style of Finnegans Wake.

Yes, of course, this post is some kind of post-surgery overreaction.  Now I will read Finnegans Wake!  Now I will read The Tale of Genji!  And so on.  I am aware.  Although last summer, wondering what the first readers of Finnegans Wake saw, I read the first four or five installments published in 1924 and 1925 under the noncommittal title “Work in Progress” and found the idea of reading more plausible.

I greatly enjoyed my little immersion in Indian literature a couple of months ago, where I mixed classical epics and poetry with modern novels.  I want to do that again.  Several times even.

First: Persian literature.  Dick Davis has been publishing piece of Ferdawsi’s Shahnameh (1010) for decades.  His latest version (2016) is just under a thousand pages; I doubt that is half of the entire epic, likely the longest ever written by a single person.  Along with Ferdawsi I could read Attar’s The Conference of the Birds (1177) and the poetry of Rumi (12th c.) and Hafez (13th c.), all of which have been translated by Davis.  Maybe, looking at modern novels, I could try My Uncle Napoleon (1973) by Iraj Pezeshkzad, translated by, let’s see, Davis again.  Any Persian expedition is likely to become the Dick Davis show.  Well, it is a great lifetime achievement, and he is a fine poet in his own right, as I know from his 2009 collection Belonging: Poems.

Second: Arabic literature.  The One Thousand and One Nights, not necessarily such a long book depending on exactly which texts are included in the translation.  The 2021 Annotated Arabian Nights is a beauty.  I am not sure what else I might read.  A browse through the Library of Arabic Literature will find something.  Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley is from 1947, so that is an easy choice.  I wonder what his earlier novels about ancient Egypt are like?

Third: Japanese literature.  The Tale of Genji (11th c.) and The Pillow Book (1002) alongside Ivan Morris’s The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan (1964).  Then move to The Tale of Heike (14th c.) and some more recent works, more Sōseki and Tanizaki and Kawabata, maybe.

Fourth: Chinese literature.  One of the early novels, like Romance of the Three Kingdoms (14th c.), likely in some still enormous abridgement, followed by The Story of the Stone (1791-2).  Then, or alongside, some novels from the 1940s, Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City (1943) and Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged (1947).

For example.  Let’s say.  Maybe these are the best books of 2024 and 2025.  Or 2035.  No, look, one big book per month is twelve books.  Maybe I really get ten read, or eight.  That’s pretty good.  That’s not pure bluster.

If anybody would like to recommend a Persian, Arabic, etc. book, short or long, classical or contemporary, please do.  If anyone would like to read along with one of these beasts, please let me know. They all seem like terrible readalong books, since they are exactly the books where the pace should not be forced and the reader’s right to give up halfway – a tenth of the way – through is paramount.  Still, let me know.

Now I need to get writing about Ovid.  Speaking of whom, if anyone wants to continue reading Roman literature in my company, I am completely open to the idea.  Let’s say you have joined me with Plautus, Terence, Lucretius, Ovid, Seneca the playwright, and Seneca the Stoic.  We still have Virgil, lots of great lyric and satirical poets, Pharsalia, Satyricon, Cicero, a shelf of famous historians I have never read, and St. Augustine.  Lots of interesting things.  Julius Caesar, I’ve never read Caesar.  Let me know, let me know.

Thanks for indulging the silliest-sounding thing I have ever written here.

The best books of 2023, in a sense - "Aren't you tired of reading?"

Last January seems even more distant than usual at this time of year.  It will likely not surprise anyone that 2023 now comes with a strong feeling of Before and After.  So I will indulge in the “facetious and silly” exercise of identifying the best books I read in 2023.  Sorting through the actual books of the year is also a good hobby, but not mine.

I mean “best” in the sense that the books are the most imaginative, artful, innovative, beautiful up to a point, linguistically rich or at least interesting, and still generative of other significant works of art.  Obviously one can value other things.  My list of favorites of the year would be similar but somewhat different, including more silly stuff.

Plato’s dialogues (4th cent. BCE), of which I read almost all, were easily the best book or books I read last year, and I mean best as literature, as invention and story-telling and linguistic play and all of that.  As the extended development of one particular character, approaching the novelistic.

A few other books – Lucretius’s The Way Things Are (1st BCE) and Lucian’s Satires and Dialogues (2nd CE) – would make this list on their own, but I am tempted to add everything we read as part of the march through Greek and Greekish philosophy.  The pre-Socratics, Diogenes, and Seneca were all richer because they were part of the project, because they conversed with Plato.  No, reading does not always have to be a course of study, it does not always have to have a syllabus.  Sometimes, though.  Many thanks to everyone who read along with any of this.  It was a real help to me.

The great highlights of my little post-surgery course in Indian literature, in Sanskrit, Tamil, Kannada, and English, were the obvious:

The Mahabharata (2nd BCE – 2nd CE / 1973) in the William Buck retelling

The Bhagavad-Gita (added to the above at some point) in Barbara Stoler Miller’s translation

The Ramayana (2nd BCE – 2nd CE / 1972) in the R. K. Narayan retelling

All just thrilling stuff.  Narayan is explicit that he compresses anything he does not find so thrilling the later classical poetry and modern novels and Peter Adamson and Jonardon Ganeri’s Classical Indian Philosophy (2020) became more interesting with the ancient epics behind them.  Vivek Narayan’s 600-page counter-epic After (2022) would not exist without them, since the thing it is “after” is the Ramayana.

The best novels and the like:

Little Novels of Sicily (1883), Giovanni Verga, the D. H. Lawrence translation

The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886), Leo Tolstoy

Ulysses (1922), James Joyce – in its own category, almost , although what tedium in passages, including in some of the most brilliant, like the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter that parodies the bulk of English literature.  When I last read this book I could identify, I don’t know, the Dickens chunk, while now I could see almost everyone.  It is some kind of progress, I guess, in the study of literature, to be able to identify a Carlyle or Pater parody.

Invitation to a Beheading (1936), Vladimir Nabokov, plus the most extraordinary of the last half of his Collected Stories, “Signs and Symbols” and “The Vane Sisters” and so on.

The Grapes of Wrath (1939), John Steinbeck – a novel written in many modes, which should have endeared it to postmodernists, except that two of the modes, the sentimental and didactic, are low prestige.  Or used to be.  Pynchon and DeLillo readers should revisit the novel.  It is more of a systems novel, an omnibook, I remembered.  I enjoyed several other more minor Steinbeck books last year, but none were like this one.

Ficciones (1944), Jorge Luis Borges - fundamental

The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944), Katherine Anne Porter, especially the cluster of Miranda stories, “The Old Order.”

Delta Wedding (1946), Eudora Welty – the richness, the fluidity, the insights.

En attendant Godot (1952), Samuel Beckett – somewhat different in French than English.

The Leopard (1958), Giuseppe di Lampedusa

Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979), Italo Calvino - the title quotation is from the last page of the latter.

Every one of these I had read before, although mostly long, long ago.

Some books of poems:

L'Art d'être grand-père (1877), Victor Hugo – The Art of Being a Grandfather, the great thunderer as an old softy.

La jeune parque (1917) and Charmes (1922), Paul Valéry

Poesias Heteronominos (1914-34), Fernando Pessoa – a collection of the various Pessoan personas.  I wanted to read Pessoa in Portuguese and I did, even if I doubt I could do it again right now,  Maybe Alberto Caeiro, the shepherd poet.

A Marvelous World (1921-52), Benjamin Peret – Surrealism as a principle of life.

Autumn Journal (1939), Louis MacNeice

Transport to Summer (1947), Wallace Stevens

Poems of Paul Celan (1947-76), tr. Michale Hamburger – as if I understood these.

In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus (2007), X. J. Kennedy

This Afterlife: Selected Poems (2022), A. E. Stallings

Seren of the Wildwood (2023), Marly Youmans – a genuinely mysterious fairy tale poem, too mysterious for me to say anything about it.  If Youmans, a longtime Friend of the Blog, were more of an abstraction, as most authors are to me, I would say she is in a “major phase.”

Next up: the best books of 2024.

Books I read in December 2023 - No one’s worse than you, she says

Lots of short fantasy fiction this month, perhaps everything in the first section except the May Sarton novel and Eugene O’Neill play, balanced by a complementary pair of Holocaust memoirs.

NOVELS, STORIES & A PLAY

Ocean of Story, Vol. 1 (11th cent.),  Somadeva, tr. C. H. Tawney, ed. N. M. Penzer (“Penzer is a maniac”)

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927 / 1941),  H. P. Lovecraft – the beginning of Lovecraft’s comic masterpiece.  Yes, also cosmic, sure, why not, but mostly hilarious.

The English Teacher (1945),  R. K. Narayan

1984 (1949),  George Orwell – decades ago I had not understood this novel as a response to the Blitz.  To totalitarianism, obviously, but Orwell also wonders if London will ever really be rebuilt, if rationing will ever end.  It was a good question.

The Palm-wine Drinkard (1952),  Amos Tutuola – another lively folktale pastiche novel, like the Brazilian one, Macunaima, I read last month.

A Shower of Summer Days (1952),  May Sarton – Sarton has caught my attention as a Maine writer, but that was her old age.  For some reason here, earlier, she wrote a quite good Irish country house novel which is also, as my wife pointed out, a comic remake of Elective Affinities.

Long Day's Journey into Night (1956),  Eugene O'Neill – so much poetry quoted in this play.  When I last read it, let’s say thirty-five years ago, what did I know about Swinburne or Dowson or Baudelaire.  Or anyone.  I had heard of Shakespeare.

Elric of Meliboné (1972),  Michael Moorcock – funny, but not as funny as Lovecraft.  Last read at least forty years ago.  A friend collected the Lovecrafts and Moorcocks, while I assembled Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books.  An education in the classics.

The Living End (1979),  Stanley Elkin

Wakefulness (2007),  Jon Fosse

Olav's Dreams (2012),  Jon Fosse

Weariness (2014),  Jon Fosse – aka, the three novellas bundled together, Trilogy, or as it says at the top of every odd-numbered page, Triology.  The Dalkey Archive blurb claims a “rich web of historical, cultural, and theological allusions” which was utterly invisible to me.  I especially enjoyed the oblique murder story, or more correctly the obliqueness of the murder story.

You’re awful, the Girl says

You’re the worst guy in the whole of Bjørgvin, she says

No one’s worse than you, she says

No everything is awful, she says (p. 100)

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (2017),  Mariana Enriquez – highbrow horror from Chile.  It is always interesting to see what is going on in the literature of the South American south, even if the recently resurgent genre is not really for me.  It can’t scare me (see Lovecraft above) but it can still disgust me.

POETRY

Ovid's Heroines (25-16 BCE / 1991),  Ovid / Daryl Hine

Ovid's Elegies (16 BCE / 1599 CE),  Ovid / Christopher Marlowe

The Owl and the Nightingale (12-13 cent.),  anonymous, tr. Simon Armitage

Collected Poems 1921-1951 (1952),  Edwin Muir

I hope to write about the Ovid books soon.  They are not at the level of Metamorphoses, but what is.

MEMOIR

Smoke over Birkenau (1986),  Liana Millu

Still Alive (1992/2001),  Ruth Kluger – please see Dorian Stuber’s blog for notes on both of these books.

 

IN FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE

La condition humaine (1933),  André Malraux

Bacchus (1951),  Jean Cocteau

Rhinocéros (1959),  Eugène Ionesco

Still plugging away at Bom Dia!, my Portuguese textbook.

Ovid's Metamorphoses, Canto I, "Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge"

Some notes on Canto I of Ovid’s Metamorphosis (8 CE).  Just some of the things I am looking for or enjoying while reading Ovid’s epic of “forms changed / into new bodies.”  (tr. Charles Martin, 2004, p. 15).  Or, per Arthur Golding (1567, p. 3 of the Paul Dry paperback) “Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge.”

I’ve been reading Charles Martin first, then Arthur Golding, who is difficult due to archaic words and twisty syntax but also his long fourteen syllable rhyming couplets, which perhaps contribute to the twistiness.  Golding is occasionally magnificent.  Martin, in modern blank verse, is much clearer.  As I write about Ovid, I’ll hop from one to the other.

Canto I begins, after Ovid’s brief statement of purpose, with the creation of the world, an imitation of Hesiod, a metamorphosis on the grandest scale, not the usual mode of the poem.  “No kinde of thing had proper shape” (AG, 3), a violation of Ovidian principles.  The way Ovid describes Chaos – “a huge rude heape” and so on (3) – will look familiar to anyone who read the pre-Socratic philosophers with me long, long ago.  Chaos resembles the featureless, motionless sphere of Parmenides and Zeno, while its transformation by a surprisingly vague and unnamed God seems borrowed from Empedocles and perhaps Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things.  Later, after the great flood, Ovid describes the generation and evolution of animals in a way that also sounds something like the weird eyeball monsters ofEmpedocles.  As in Heraclitus, in Ovid “everything flows.”

Next up is the Golden Age, where Martin has the pre-agricultural people living off of

                                          fruit from the arbutus tree,

wild strawberries on mountainsides, small cherries,

and acorns fallen from Jove’s spreading oak.  (19)

Martin is staying close to Ovid’s text.  Golding has

Did live by Raspis, heppes and hawes, by cornelles, plummes and cherries,

By sloes and apples, nuttes and peares, and lothsome bramble berries,

And by the acorns dropt on ground, from Joves brode tree in fielde.  (6)

Raspberries, rosehips, cornelian cherries.  This is a great example of Golding’s tendency to expand, but also, charmingly how on occasion he becomes very English, blending Ovid’s Roman landscape with his own green and pleasant land.

Let’s see.  Here’s the monstrous Lycaon turning into a wolf, the first of so many human to animal metamorphoses.  Ovid loves the details of the transformation, a good part of his tendency to expand the old story, adding “foam… at the corners of his mouth” (24) and so on.  Note that the Lycaon story is narrated by a character, by Jove.  Ovid uses every narrative device he knows, direct narration, speech, songs, stories within stories (although not to the depths of A Thousand and One Nights), anything.  The transformation of poor Syrinx into reeds is told within the story of how poor Io turned into a cow.  We met her on stage long, long ago in Prometheus Bound. 

The transitions, the metamorphoses of one story into another, are central to Ovid’s art.  He is not writing a catalogue but rather a single continuous story built from many seamlessly linked stories.  Well, the move from Io to Phaethon, where Phaethon is friends with Io’s son, seems thin to me.  But some of Ovid’s transitions are themselves beautiful, marvels of storytelling.  Related is how he ends cantos in the idle of a story, the interruption just another way for the narrative to flow.  The story has just begun, so I have to come back to it.

I feel I have skipped a thousand interesting things, just in the first Canto.

With the holiday near, I will likely not write anything for a couple of weeks at least.  I have read all the way through Canto II, so there is no need to worry about catching up.  Daryl Hine’s Ovid’s Heroines and Christopher Marlowe’s youthful Ovid’s Elegies also kept me entertained; I should write note about each of them in January.  Ovid is my kind of fun.

Have a good holiday.

Let's read Ovid's Metamorphoses! And perhaps more.

Who would like to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE) with me?  We have had some discussion of this good idea, and I feel I am up to it now.  Up to writing about it.

Metamorphoses is a compendium of Greek myths that feature transformation, which turns out to be hundreds of pages worth of stories.  Ovid’s poem is not a catalog of any kind, but rather an original weaving of the myths into a new form.  Ovid enacts the title of the poem.  A translation should flow.

The translations.  The appeal of the 1567 Arthur Golding translation is it is the Ovid that Shakespeare read.  I believe Jonathan Bate’s Shakespeare and Ovid (1994) is the place to go for the details.

The George Sandys translation (1621-6), in heroic couplets, is superb but sadly Shakespeare did not read it, so it loses the celebrity boost.  It is likely – a bit of trivia – the first English book written in the Americas (Sandys was for a time treasurer of the Virginia Company).

A 1717 version by many hands, including Dryden, Pope and other great poets of the time, as well as some of the duds, sounds interesting and was the default Ovid translation for a century but in my experience the translations of this period, like Pope’s Homer, wander pretty far from the original, and I would at least like to pretend I am reading Ovid.

Skipping way ahead, I have no opinion about the many modern translations.  Twenty years ago I read some samples of Charles Martin’s flexible 2004 version which I liked a lot, so I’m going to read that one.  But I am sure several of the other options are good.

I would advise against the many 19th and early 20th century Ovid translations written as trots for Latin students.  There are likely better and worse, but they seem like dull stuff.  Ovid should be translated by a poet.

What should the schedule be?  Metamorphoses has fifteen chapters that typically fill thirty to forty pages.  Normally I would read one a day with some breaks, but three weeks seems too fast.  Let’s say I read a couple cantos a week.  Perhaps I will read Martin and Golding, which will slow me down.  Eight weeks, with some slippage – December, January, maybe into February.  Or is that too long?  Please advise.

I’ll try to write something once a week. 

I also hope to fit in more – much of the rest of – Ovid, who I suppose is my favorite Roman poet. 

The Heroides are a collection of monologues or letters sent by Greek heroines (and Sappho) to their lovers.  They were written by a young, even teenage, Ovid, circa 20 BCE.  They, too, were a significant influence on Shakespeare, on his great heroines, and on the European novel generally.  Daryl Hine’s Ovid’s Heroines (1991) is the obvious recommendation.

I have Peter Green’s thorough Penguin Classics book The Erotic Poems (dated after Heroides and before Metamorphoses), containing his great love elegies the Amores, as well as The Art of Love – how to seduce – and The Cure for Love – how to break up, as well as a fragment about how to apply makeup.  180 pages of Ovid in a 450 page book.  I said Green was thorough.  And I remember the translations as good, but I plan to revisit Amores in Christopher Marlowe’s remarkable translation.  Marlowe was also likely a teenager when he did Ovid’s elegies.  Teenagers and their love poems.

I have not read Ovid’s calendar poem, Fasti, or the poems in exile, Tristia and the Letters from Pontus.  Christoph Ransmayr’s enjoyable fantasy novel The Last World (1988) explores this part of Ovid’s life.  We’ll see if I get this far.   Why wouldn’t I, Ovid is my favorite Roman poet.  Except maybe for Horace.

Please advise about anything I mentioned, or missed.  Good translations, a better schedule, supplemental books, favorite essays on Ovid, tips for learning Latin fast, anything.  It is all appreciated.

Books I read in November 2023

Recovery from surgery leads to a long list of books. (Everything is going well, by the way, thanks).  My idea of a “comfort read” is a book on a subject about which I do not know much – start me over at the beginning – thus my enthusiastic Indian literature project, which is ongoing, more slowly.

I need to write up an invitation to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and perhaps more Ovid.  Any minute now I will write that.  Please join me on Metamorphoses.

 

INDIAN LITERATURE OF VARIOUS TYPES

Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology (1-3 CE) &

Speaking of Shiva (10-12 CE),  both tr. R. K. Amanujan – the pleasure is in the variations in the formula; the latter is especially strange.

Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man (1965),  U. R. Ananthamurthy – an esoteric dispute about the burial of a corrupt holy man leads to a number of outstanding novelistic ironies.

Malgudi Days (1982),  R. K. Narayan – stories from the 1930s through the 1970s about Narayan’s famous town.  More Narayan, easy to enjoy, in my future.

Classical Indian Philosophy (2020),  Peter Adamson & Jonardon Ganeri – written at my level, the crucial thing, although I beg you not to test me.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (2020),  Arvind Krishna Mehrotra – an Indian beatnik gets more interesting.

After (2022),  Vivek Naryanan – “after” the Ramayana, an ambitious 600 page poetic response to the great epic, like Christopher Logue’s War Music, say, if not as focused or as strong.

Four of these books are from NYRB Classics or NYRB Poets.  Good for them.

 

FICTION

Macunaíma (1928),  Mário de  Andrade – a surrealist picaresque looted from German anthropologists’ collections of Amazonian folklore, mixed with Afro-Brazilian traditions and modern Sao Paulo, the most purely Brazilian book I will ever hope to read, and also the most foreignizing translation I have ever read, even more than Leg Over Leg.  So many birds, insects, plants, and whatever else - so many non-English words - all explained in the notes.

The Man without Qualities  (1938),  Robert Musil – the 200 pages Musil almost published in 1938, making it the last coherent narrative piece of his monster.  The Burton Pike translation has 400 pages more of notes and fragments, containing some of Musil’s best writing, he says, but I will never know.  I think the action is in the satirical 800-page 1930 first volume, but some smart people prefer the more mystical unraveling of late Musil.

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940),  Ernest Hemingway – this book was so famous, the epitome of the serious novel.  Now?  I wonder.  It is a mix of enjoyable kitsch, godawful kitsch (the love affair, the “Spanish”), and quite good action scenes.

H. M. Pulham, Esquire (1941),  John P. Marquand – another big best-seller, easy to read, with lots of Boston and Maine detail, and a good narrator of the perfectly reliable but utterly clueless type.

The Bridge over the Drina (1945),  Ivo Andrić – centuries of history flowing around a bridge that I could still visit today, often reading more like history than fiction.

Delta Wedding (1946),  Eudora Welty – rich, gorgeous, subtle.

The Common Chord (1947),  Frank O'Connor – doing his thing, writing about his people.

The Daughter of Time (1951),  Josephine Tey – the recovery classic, detection directly from the hospital bed, which is not where I read it.  Soon after, though.  Today the detective would have been sent home after a few days, destroying the conceit.

Collected Stories (1908-53),  Colette – I have been reading through Colette’s short writings for years, in French, but I finally gave up on finding the last few books, so I switched to English for about 60 pages.  The early work on the Cherí character is worth reading.  If you have a taste for Colette, it’s all worth reading, easily.

Andrienne Kennedy in One Act (1954-80),  Adrienne Kennedy – a new Library of America collection of a writer about whom I knew nothing inspired me to learn something.  A series of one-act avant-gardisms concludes with two stark adaptations of Euripides; how enjoyable.

Mort (1987),  Terry Pratchett – about a tenth as many good lines as Douglas Adams, but that many good lines justifies the project, the life.  Plus he's good with endings.

The Adventures of China Iron (2017),  Gabriela Cabezón Cámara – the gaucho epic as pan-sexual Utopia.

This Is How You Lose the Time War (2019),  Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone – perhaps the worst blurbage I have ever seen. The short novel about time traveling enemies who fall in love is neither “seditious” nor “dangerous” nor does it “ha[ve] it all.”  If I were not giving the book away (as a gift, not because it is bad) I would tear off the covers.

 

POETRY

Body Rags (1968) &

Selected Poems (1946-80),  Galway Kinnell

Glass, Irony and God (1995),  Anne Carson

Things on Which I've Stumbled (2008),  Peter Cole

Zeno's Eternity (2023),  Mark Jarman

 

CRITICISM

The Burning Oracle (1939),  G. Wilson Knight

Ear Training (2023),  William H. Pritchard – perhaps my favorite living critic, with a new collection of pieces going back to the 1970s, and not too many pieces that I had already read in The Hudson Review.

 

MEMOIR

The Diary of a Young Girl (1947),  Anne Frank – I thought this was the most famous book I had never read, but that is not true anymore, is it?  Harry Potter is likely more famous.  I hate to think what else.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Les inconnus dans la maison (1940),  Georges Simenon – The Strangers in the House, a character study of an lonely alcoholic lawyer.  A stranger is murdered in his house.  And the lawyer is also a stranger in his own house!

Caligula (1944) &

Les Justes (1949),  Albert Camus – laughable as a portrait of 1905 Russian anarchists but likely an exact portrait of people Camus met in the French resistance.

L'Équarrissage pour tous (1950),  Boris Vian – in which Vian fails to “read the room,” as we might say now, setting his anti-war satire in Normandy on D-Day, just where and when the French are at their most anti-anti-war.  But it all works out.  Less outrageous than Catch-22, really.

Tête de Méduse (1951),  Boris Vian

A real sign of recovery, I have resumed my Portuguese study, starting over with an outstanding textbook written by and for high school teachers in southeastern Massachusetts.

Books I Read in October 2023

The five-day hospital stay breaking the month in half is likely invisible to anyone but me, but that is why the fiction list is so mystery-heavy, and for that matter so long.  Many of these books, the post-surgery group, are not just short but light, well-suited for the invalid's tired hand.  The invalid is feeling much better, by the way, in fact not much of an invalid, so perhaps I am ready for a heavier book.

I hope to get a little - or big - Ovid project going soon.  Metamorphoses and the early Heroides, but them why not the rest.  It would be pleasant to have company, so I will put up an invitation sometime soon.

INDIAN EPICS & THEIR RETELLINGS

Mahabharata (2 BCE-2 CE), the 1973 William Buck adaptation

The Bhagavad-Gita (1 BCE), tr. Barbara Stoler-Miller         

The Ramayana (3 BCE-3 CE, maybe), the 1972  R. K. Narayan adaptation

Marvelous books I read 25 years ago, once again great pleasures.  I will pursue this Indian literature line for a while. 

GREEK PHILOSOPHY

Selected Essays and Dialogues (1 CE), Plutarch - another book from 25 years ago.  I find Plutarch to be a genial voice, not unlike his great descendant Montaigne.

 

FICTION

The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886) &

Collected Shorter Fiction, Vol. 2 (1885-1906),  Leo Tolstoy, the 400 pages or so I had never read, plus the above.  Lots of Christian fairy tales, plus “The Forged Coupon,” a clever chain of sin.

The Big Money (1936), John Dos Passos - I love the USA Trilogy in theory, particularly its collage-like construction, but find it dull in practice. Or I find the more ordinary novellish parts - characters, story - dull, perhaps because so much of it is written like a medieval chronicle ("and then... and then... and then...").  I do love the potted biographies of the famous - Henry Ford, Frederick Jackson Taylor, William Randolph Hearst - turned into prose poems.  Would an entire book of just those would become tiresome?

Rebecca (1938), Daphne Du Maurier

The Third Man (1950), Graham Greene - no zither, no kitten, but solid.

The Investigation (1959), Stanislaw Lem

The Wanderer (1964), Fritz Leiber - an odd although Hugo-winning science fiction novel from one of my longtime favorite fantasy writers.  It is an early "planetary disaster" novel, with characters all over (and off) the glove reacting to the catastrophe in different ways.  I was surprised how goofy the book was in places.  Leiber had perhaps been reading Vonnegut and Pynchon.

Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jean Rhys

At the Bottom of the River (1983), Jamaica Kincaid

The Black Book (1993), Ian Rankin

A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East (2003), Laszlo Krasznahorkai

The Forgery (2013), Ave Barrera

 

POETRY

A Journey of the Mind: Collected Poems of Helen Pinkerton (1945-2016), Helen Pinkerton

Mast Year (2020), Katherine Hagopian Berry

Old Orchard Beach Cycle (2022), Robert Gibbons – these last two are Maine poems by Maine poets.  We hit a bad patch in Maine last week.  It felt healthy to read some Maine poems.

 

IN FRENCH

L'Art d'être grand-père (1877), Victor Hugo

La Cantatrice chauve (1950) &

La leçon (1951) &

Les chaises (1954), Eugène Ionesco

La Répétition ou l'Amour puni (1950), Jean Anouilh

En attendant Godot (1952), Samuel Beckett

A jolly little “French theater in the 1950s” run along with the great late-period Hugo poetry collection. 

My cancer - "It can’t be true! It can’t, but it is."

 

Liver cancer.  That was a surprise.  I knew something was wrong, but I was not expecting that.

Since the diagnosis last summer, since it was known for a fact that I had something serious, things have moved fast.  It has been like boarding a train.  Once in motion there is no way off.  I guess I have seen plenty of movies where people get off of moving trains, often with bad results.  I am going to stay on and do what my doctors tell me.

Monday is my liver surgery, a major change of direction.  When I wake up, my tumor will be in the hands of the researcher who expressed almost too much interest in getting a look at it.  He can have it.  The subsequent year of immunotherapy treatment is to keep the tumor from returning.

I have great doubts about sharing personal information of any kind, much less medical information, with the internet, but my cancer is no secret in my real life, and I wanted to explain why the schedule of my Greek philosophy reading – no, not the reading, the writing – fell apart.  How fortunate to be reading Greek philosophy – Cynics, Stoics, and others – at just this time.  The perfect companions.  But my energy was not so good, and a lot of what was left went to health care appointments.  So, so many appointments.  My writing suffered, and will likely do so for some time.

My doctors, by the way, have been superb, as have the nurses, technicians, and everyone else.  The insurance company has behaved itself.  No medical horror stories, or even irritation stories, not yet.  My greatest suffering, at this point, has been the 900 calorie per day liver-softening diet that I am currently enduring, although not for long.  Have pity on this poor glutton.

Ivan Ilych, in “The Death of Ivan Ilych” (1886), worries about the cause of his illness.  The illness, which involves, the appendix, or maybe the kidney, sure sounds like cancer.  I wish he had had my doctors.  He once heavily bumped his side while hanging a curtain:

‘It really is so!  I lost my life over that curtain as I might have done when storming a fort.  Is that possible?  How terrible and how stupid.  It can’t be true!  It can’t, but it is.’  (Ch. VI, tr. revised Maudes)

Of course, however comforting it would be to know, poor Ilych has no idea.  I had a brief discussion with the surgeon about the cause of my cancer, ending in a shrug and a laugh.  Who knows?

Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece is the only work on illness I have deliberately sought out.  I owe a debt, though, to Nanni Moretti’s 1993 anthology film Caro Diario, specifically to the extraordinary third part where he recreates his frustrating, circular experiences with the Italian medical system (which does save him in the end – he is now 70, with a new movie out).  It’s because of Moretti’s film, backed by some family history, that led me to push hard on my doctors to look for cancer.  “Be your own advocate” is the phrase people use.  Yes, do it.

I will be out of touch – out of everything – on Monday, and I have never been a recovering patient before so I have no idea when I might respond to any well wishes, kind thoughts, crackpot advice, or angry scoldings.  Many thanks, then, in advance for any of that.

Now back to the problem that makes me fret the  most: which books to bring to the hospital?

 

But the Moon rescues others as they swim from below - a glance at the essays and dialogues of Plutarch

The great ragged Greek philosophy readalong ends with Plutarch, famous for his extraordinary Parallel Lives but also the innovative author of a large mass of essays and dialogues which picked up the title Moralia (late 1st C.) along the way.  Plutarch was hardly an original philosophical thinker, but he invented the familiar essay, and most readers of Montaigne will find Plutarch to be a genial companion.  Of course Montaigne quotes Plutarch (and Seneca, and Lucretius) frequently.

Plutarch has retroactively become a “Middle Platonist,” one of a number of 1st century Greek writers creating a Plato revival, preparing for the eventual triumph of the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, who would be the next logical person to read if I kept going.  I suggested the Oxford World’s Classics Selected Essays and Dialogues (tr. Donald Russell) as a good place to see Plutarch in his more philosophical modes, but now I see that my premise was false.  Plutarch was always in a philosophical mode.  He lived in a social world suffused with philosophy, much like the community surrounding Socrates, except Plutarch’s mental world also includes Stoicism, Epicureanism (the enemy), and other movements we have encountered.  And although he himself is a priest at Delphi, as Greek a profession as I can imagine, his world also includes Rome, as he will demonstrate in his Parallel Lives where Roman history turns out to be a version of Greek history.

Essays like “Bashfulness” and “Talkativeness” are the Montaigne-like essays.  The argument of, say, “Talkativeness” is really a long string of examples of the dangers of the vice, pulled from a masterful knowledge of Greek and Roman history.  “These remarks are not meant as a denunciation of talkativeness, but as therapy” (218).  Virtue, but of the practical sort.

More impressive and difficult are Plutarch’s dialogues, modelled on Plato but with innovations.  “Socrates’ Daimonion” is a highlight.  Socrates openly said that he was sometimes warned against specific actions by a daimon, a friendly spirit outside of himself.  He was never advised to do anything but only warned against things.  In Plutarch’s dialogue a number of Thebans and others, including an old friend of Socrates, debate what he might of meant, complicating the concept of daimon, climaxing in the remarkable “Myth of Timarchus,” a wild vision of the afterlife where the soul and intellect are distinct, the latter actually being the outside daimon.  The stars are daimones being pulled to the moon.

But the Moon rescues others as they swim up from below. These are they for whom the end of Becoming has come.  The foul and unpurified, however, she will not receive.  She [the moon!} flashes and roars at them most horribly and will not let them near her.  They lament their fate and are borne away down there once again, to another birth, as you can see.  (108)

That’s up there with Plato’s late, weird visionary myths.  The discussion of the daimon is intermixed with the story of a political conspiracy to overthrow the tyrant of Thebes.  The philosophical discussion is part of what is really a piece of historical fiction (the conspiracy is 400 years in the past).  This is what I mean when I say the dialogues can be difficult – this is a dang complex text.

I tracked down an old translation of “On the ‘E’ at Delphi,” a cryptic title.  Alongside the famous “Know Thyself” inscription, Delphi had the an uppercase epsilon (the same as our E) inscribed on the temple of Apollo.  What does it mean?  Plutarch puts himself in this dialogue but does not give himself the last word.  Many theories are explored.  Fans of Thomas Browne’s magnificent The Garden of Cyrus (1658) will enjoy the long discussion of the meaning of the number five; others may well be baffled.

Don’t miss the other Delphic essays, “Oracles in Decline” and “Why Are Delphic Oracles No Longer Given in Verse?” or the short, heartbreaking “A Consolation to His Wife,” on the death of his infant daughter.  Don’t miss, if you like this book, the additional essays in the Penguin Classics collection.  Don’t miss Parallel Lives, at least the best parts – the life of Anthony! – whatever you do.

So that’s the Greek philosophy readalong.  I meant to write more and for that matter think more, but life interfered in a way that was almost ironic.  Still, a success as far as it went.  Many thanks to the people who helped me out by joining in, on the internet or in real life.

Just a bit more about real life tomorrow.

Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and their Stoic self-help books - I shall not be afraid when my last hour comes

The curious thing about Stoicism is its long-lasting survival in the self-help genre, curious at least until I read Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic (1st C.) several years ago and discovered that it was a self-help book, one of the founding self-help books.  The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (170-180), which I read recently, has a different format, more of a commonplace book, but is similarly aimed at self-improvement.

I did not get much out of Meditations, but that is because I read it, one page followed by another until I finished.  Written in fragments, it is more of a book to keep handy and consult, perhaps randomly.  What wisdom will pop out?

Remember that what is hidden within you controls the strings; that is activity, that is life, that, if one may say so, is the man.  Never occupy your imagination besides with the body which encloses you like a vessel and these organs which are moulded around you.  They are like an axe, only differing as being attached to the body.  (Book X, 38, tr. A. S. L. Farquharson, Oxford World’s Classics)

Tough words, since I have been spending a lot of the last few months imagining one particular internal organ – I will write about my illness soon and be less cryptic – but the Stoics are generally bracing.  Cold baths, simple food, contempt for money and success, a “tough it out” attitude towards pain and adversity, and indifference about death, those are the Stoics.  One can imagine, for any illness, for example, times when a “tough it out” pep talk is useful.

Still, it is an odd book to simply read, except for the first chapter which is where the emperor lists what he learned from people in his past: “modesty and manliness” from his father, “piety and bountifulness” from his mother, and on like that through a dozen people.  A smart exercise I can imagine encountering in a contemporary self-help book, if I ever read such things. 

I did glance at a couple of Ryan Holiday’s books, since he makes a lot of explicit use of the ancient Stoics, and was pleased to find that he does not emphasize money and success – so much of the audience for these books is the business crowd, desperate to increase annual sales by 10% – but rather how to be happy.  A real Stoic tells me how to be virtuous, not necessarily the same thing, but I was impressed that Holiday is not trying to make his readers wealthy.

Seneca is more my guy.  He is the great Stoic hypocrite, since for the five years before Emperor Nero came of age he was effectively the domestic ruler of Rome (a general handled foreign policy) and became one of the richest men in the world.  Then again when he gave it all up without complaint when Nero took power.  The letters, including the selection I read in the Penguin Classics edition (tr. Robin Campbell), were written after his fall from power.  They are likely pseudo-letters, written for if not exactly publication than at least dissemination among interested readers.

I had better jump to Letter LIV, about ill health, and look for wisdom.

Even as I fought for breath, though, I never ceased to find comfort in cheerful and courageous reflections.  ‘What’s this?’ I said.  ‘So death is having all these tries at me, is he?  Let him, then!  I had a try at him a long while ago myself.’  ‘When was this?’ you’ll say.  Before I was born.  Death is just not being.  What that is like I already know.

The short sentences and conversational tone make Seneca pleasant reading, as if a friend has written me.  Perhaps they are artifacts of the translator; I don’t know.  “You can feel assured on my score of this: I shall not be afraid when my last hour comes – I’m already prepared, not planning as much as a day ahead” – now that is Seneca, that is Stoicism.

A pleasure of Seneca’s letters is that they are full of ordinary Roman life.  Letter LVI is about how to deal with noise:

But if on top of this some ball player comes along and starts shouting out the score, that’s the end!  Then add someone starting up a brawl, and someone else caught thieving, and the man who likes the sound of his voice in the bath, and the people who leap in the pool with a tremendous splash.  Apart from those whose voices are, if nothing else, natural, think of the hair remover, continually giving vent to his shrill and penetrating cry in order to advertise his presence, never silent unless it be while he is plucking someone’s armpits and making the client yell for him!  Then think of the various cries of the man selling drinks, and the one selling sausages and the other selling pastries, and all the ones hawking for the catering shops, publicizing his wares with a distinctive cry of his own. (109-10)

I’m sitting at a window in ancient Rome.  Love it.

Lucretius brings to light in Latin verse the dark discoveries of the Greeks

During the Hellenistic period, Epicureanism and Stoicism replaced Plato and Aristotle as the dominant philosophical movements (Plato would make a big comeback; Aristotle would have to wait for the great Arabic philosophers).  Both movements were popular in the Roman Republic as well as in Greece.  Thus although Epicurus had, until recently, survived only in three letters preserved by Diogenes Laertius, his ideas were preserved in one of the four (let’s say) great Latin epics, De Rerum Natura (1st century BCE) by the mysterious Lucretius, translated as The Way Things Are by Rolfe Humphries.

I am well aware how very hard it is

To bring to light by means of Latin verse

The dark discoveries of the Greeks.  I know

New terms must be invented, since our tongue

Is poor, and this material is new.  (Book I, p. 23)

The ash-engulfed library at Herculaneum contained a substantial collection of Epicurean texts, including at least one major lost work by Epicurus, but I do not know if that text is in condition for amateur readers to read.  I doubt I would enjoy it more than I enjoy Lucretius.

If I had kept to my schedule I would perhaps have walked through each of the six books of Lucretius, from his dismissal of the gods, absent from human affairs if they exist at all, through the surprisingly modern sounding atomic theory, the origin of the world and everything else, ending with a dramatic account of a plague in Athens that ends so abruptly one wonders if the book is unfinished.

                    Sudden need

And poverty persuaded men to use

Horrible makeshifts; howling, they would place

Their dead on pyres prepared for other men,

Apply the torches, maim and bleed and brawl

To keep the corpses from abandonment.  (Book VI, 236)

A grim end at least fitting the materialism of the book’s philosophy.  You’re on your own, folks.  The last book contains numerous science-like causes of natural phenomena, for example nine separate theories about how lightning works.  An actual scientist would care which theory is true, but all that matters to Lucretius is that the cause is not Zeus or Jove or any other god.  A more common translation of the title is The Nature of Things.  Nature is natural.

The most fascinating piece of pseudo-science is apparently an innovation by Lucretius.  Bothered by the determinism of the standard atomic theory, he adds an element of randomness or indeterminism, his famous “swerve.”  Atoms, and the things made of them, like humans, move along their deterministic paths until they don’t.  Thus free will is possible, or at least something indistinguishable from free will.  I take the physics as mostly poetic, but it sounds so modern, as if Lucretius intuited quantum theory.

De Rerum Natura barely survived to the Renaissance, but once rediscovered it became a favorite.  Stephen Greenblatt somehow wrote a popular book about the early modern love of the Swerve.  Lucretius was a favorite of Montaigne.  I will say the same about Seneca and Plutarch in my next few posts.  We are in Montaigne’s library.

Such a complex book, and this is what I have to say.  Good enough.  Some of us are in talks about an Ovid readalong later this year, taking on another of the great Latin epics, my favorite of the bunch.

Books I Read in September 2023

Despite all evidence I hope to wrap up the Greek philosophy project within the next couple of weeks.  A medical deadline approaches.  That will help.

As usual, I read good books.

 

PHILOSOPHY & SELF-HELP

Letters from a Stoic (c. 60), Seneca - good timing for some Stoicism.

 

FICTION & A PLAY

Collected Stories (from roughly 1930 into the 1960s, the second half of the book), Vladimir Nabokov

They Came Like Swallows (1937), William Maxwell

Joseph the Provider (1943), Thomas Mann, concluding a 1,500 page monster.  Evidence of graphomania.

Death of a Salesman (1948), Arthur Miller

The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969 (1978), Jorge Luis Borges, arranged and rearranged.  The genial New Yorker memoir that concludes the book is a great pleasure.

 

POETRY

The Poems of J. V. Cunningham (1942-82)

Selected Poems (1944-73), Jean Garrigue

A Wall of Two (1947 / 2007), Henia & Ilona Karmel & frankly Fanny Howe too.  Please see Dorian Stuber’s 2021 review of this book and these poems, many of them literally written in the camps.  The story of how the poems, and the poets, survived is itself worth knowing.

The Kid (1947) &

Skylight One (1949), Conrad Aiken

Pisan Cantos (1948), Ezra Pound.  High level Modernist kitsch, I fear, including both Aiken and Pound.

 

CRITICISM

The Situation and the Story (2001), Vivian Gornick, generous insights into essays and memoirs, more relevant to our moment than to hers, even.

 

WHAT IS THIS?

Selected Writings (1913-48), Antonin Artaud, the 700 page Sontag selection, time well spent with an alien sensibility.

 

IN FRENCH

Journal, 1933-1939, André Gide

Notre-dame des fleurs (1944), Jean Genet, real French prison literature (although I read the less obscene 1951 revision) that with its rich French vocabulary that included but went well beyond slang was on the edge of my reading level.  It was so hard.  Between Genet and Artaud, it was French Weirdo Month for me.  That should be a regular event.

Lucian's satires - Frankly he's a blamed nuisance

The great 2nd century satirist Lucian was a great shock to me at one point, twenty-five years ago when I got serious about classical literature.  I had never heard of him, partly because of the odd historical artifact where what he writes is called “Menippean satire” even though nothing by the Cynic satirist Menippus has survived.  Menippus himself largely survives as a character in Lucian’s stories.  Confusing.

Thomas More’s Utopia, Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub and my childhood favorite Gulliver’s Travels are all direct, conscious descendants of Lucian.  Most of fantasy and science fiction literature is at least distantly Lucianic.  When I read Arisosto’s Orlando Furioso and watched a character fly to the moon, I knew where I was in literary history.

Not that I recommend reading Lucian to learn about literary history.  The outrageous, inventive “A True Story”; the sharp “Dialogues of the Dead”; the various angry attacks on philosophers Lucian thinks are con artists, as in “The Death of Peregrinus” – these all stand on their own.  He’s still pretty funny.

Lucian was not himself a Cynic, but I thought he would be instructive because his heroes are so often Cynics.  Menippus, across a number of pieces, travels to heaven and hell, reacting as a Cynic might.  Menippus often features in the “Dialogues of the Dead” as the voice of uncommon sense, although sometimes Diogenes fills the role, as here where the dead Diogenes is sending messages back to the living, to Menippus, for example:

DIOGENES: Tell him that Diogenes says, “Menippus, if you’ve had enough of poking fun at things up there, come on down here; there’s much more to laugh at…  Especially when you see how the millionaires and the pashas and the dictators have been cut down to size and look just like everyone else – you can only tell them apart by their whimpering and the way they’re so spineless and miserable at the memory of all they left behind.” (194)

As for the rest of the philosophers:

DIOGENES: You can tell them I said they could go to the devil. (195)

The Cynics enjoy Hades because they had nothing to lose in the first place but can still wander around mocking everyone’s pretenses.

CROESUS: We keep remembering what we left behind, Midas here his gold and Sardanapalus his life of luxury and I my treasure, and we moan and groan.  Whenever we do, he [Menippus] laughs at us and sneers and calls us slaves and scum.  And sometimes he interrupts our moaning with songs.  Frankly he’s a blamed nuisance.  (212)

Wealth and pleasure are not just of no value in Lucian’s dialogues, but are actually (future) punishments. 

I haven’t touched on “Philosophies for Sale” or the fierce assaults on phony philosophers.  I will just say that it has been useful to have read some of these people.  As with any satirist, Lucian is funnier when I know what the heck he is talking about.

The Selected Satires of Lucian translated by Lionel Casson was my go-to Lucian (and the source of the page numbers), not that there is anything wrong with Paul Turner’s Satirical Sketches.  I also poked around in the old Loeb volumes, in particular reading the rest of the journeys of Menippus and finishing up the “Dialogues of the Dead,” all well worth reading.