Why is it always Sappho?

From the NYR blog:

Waiting at the busy intersection, it suddenly occurred to me that if the old Greek poetess, Sappho, could see what I’m seeing now, she would not only understand nothing, but she would be terrified out of her wits. If, on the other hand, she could read the poems that I had just been reading, she would nod with recognition, since, like her own, many of these new poems spoke directly of the sufferings and joys of one human being. Suspicious of every variety of official truth, they brazenly proclaimed their own, while troubled and unsure of what the person whose life they were describing amounts to. This voice, which Sappho would recognize, has continued to speak to us quietly in poems since the beginning of lyric poetry.

Her modern reputation (as the founder of lyric poetry) is actually a fine revenge for the way the ancient world viewed her, as a freak of nature:

"At the same time as [Alcaeus and Pittacus] flourished Sappho, a marvellous creature (thaumaston chrema): in all recorded history I know of no woman who even came close to rivalling her as a poet." (Strabo, Geography)

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"Eros is an enemy"

From Chapter 1 of Eros the Bittersweet:

"Desire, then, is neither inhabitant nor ally of the desirer. Foreign to her will, it forces itself irresistibly upon her from without. Eros is an enemy. Its bitterness must be the taste of enmity. That would be hate."

Cool.

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"The Unbearable Truth of War"

This review (of the one-man show An Iliad) won me over immediately by its references to Simone Weil:

While translations abound, dramatizations of the Iliad are fairly uncommon. Of course the poem has inspired countless plays—Aeschylus, for instance, called his tragedies “scraps from Homer’s banquet.” But these typically focus on a single episode, like the Greeks’ efforts to persuade Achilles to return to battle in Book 9. The entirety of Homer’s text runs to over 15,600 lines and would take about 24 hours to recite from beginning to end; it also has hundreds of characters—men, women, gods, demigods, a crying baby, and two immortal, talking horses, among others.

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List-making: it's not just for Mycenaeans anymore

Although I found its additive style a little annoying (ironically), I appreciated this article on the history of the list. If nothing else, it has inspired me to stop apologizing for Linear B ("Yes, there was written Greek in the Mycenaean period, but unfortunately it's only lists of supplies and livestock.")

According to Robert Belknap in his book The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing—a study of literary lists, particularly in the work of four American Renaissance authors—lists of sequential signs appeared as early as 3,200 B.C.E. Used as a means of accounting and record keeping, they signified an early form of communication that would evolve into written language. If this is true, then Eco is right: the list is the origin of culture.

List-making is also at the heart of traditional poetry, which often begins with genealogies. I frequently downplay the lists that occur in Homer and Hesiod in an effort to make those authors seem more accessible. I briefly mention the list's importance as a test of the bard's memory and as a way of including various parts of the audience (as with the Catalogue of Ships). But now maybe we will look deeper at how such poetry is in some sense an elaboration on a list (of gods or heroes).

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"In the depths of digital libraries lie dead Iliads."

The "Siege of the Iliad" over at the Chronicle is a fun, fast read. I appreciate its tight focus on the issue of translation style -- it's very easy (very easy) to become pedantic or get bogged down in scholarly minutiae when talking about Homer.

But the Iliad appealing mainly to fighters or manly men? Nah. It's actually striking how many prominent English language Homerists are women. And Simone Weil's "The Iliad or the Poem of Force" makes a cogent (and passionate) argument for viewing Homer's poem as anti-war.

I do wonder why more women haven't translated Homer. It may be a perception issue, where there's a concern that such a translation would be taken less seriously. It seems odd, when nearly every other Greek genre has been translated by both men and women, but gender stereotypes can be odd like that.

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"Hour-long lectures on the color of Dido's hair"

Lauren Davis's piece on the survival of our pop culture is lovely and imaginative. But there's a more important reason I liked it: it explains why my classical studies students prefer Homer to Vergil:

Today... the Aeneid is relegated to upper-level Latin classes, while middle schoolers and high schoolers get the Greeks' mythical side of the story with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. So why do Hector and Achilles get a starring role in English class (and, consequently, big box office movies) while Aeneas and Dido don't? A Latin teacher once explained to me that when she tried to teach Vergil's poem in English, she had very little to say. The Aeneid is one of the great works of Western literature, but appreciating it depends heavily on understanding the language in which it was written: Vergil's word choices, his syntax, even the number of times he uses certain words to describe Dido's hair. (I had a Latin teacher who could deliver hour-long lectures on the color of Dido's hair.)

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All of this has happened before ...

...and all of it will happen again.

From the New Statesman blog:

"Linguistic disobedience" might be achieved in many ways: by speaking out of turn, by disrupting syntax and "meaning", and by offering comparisons between disparate things. It might be a case of the poem acting as "witness", a recording of what's normally "unseen", ignored or denied. It can be subtle -- using allusion and slight shifts from convention -- and it can be volatile -- from agitprop to rants.

From Sappho 16 (tr. Anne Carson):

Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot
and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing
on the black earth. But I say it is
    what you love.

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'Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy'

via Wikimedia Commons

I've been reading In Search of the Trojan War by Michael Wood (full review coming soon). Wood has a detailed discussion of the the Troy myth's on medieval literature, noting that most medieval works about are based on something called The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy. The Iliad and Odyssey were virtually unknown; The Recuyell was the 'Homer' of this period. (It was also the first book printed in English, in 1475.)

I liked the sound of this work; as a dead languages nerd I was especially pleased that its very archaic English has not been updated. I did a little digging on it today (in between trying to get undergraduates interested in Latin personal pronouns -- ugh!). Here is a sample, from the reign of Saturn:

By the moyen of these thynges the renomee of kyng Saturn grewe. And the worlde was that tyme of gold, that is for to saye hyt was moche better and more haboundant in the dayes of mannes lyf and in plente of frutes of the erthe than in ony other tyme after. (Recuyell pp. 16-17)

How sweet would it be to offer an English class on the postclassical reception of the Trojan war? A girl can dream...

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