"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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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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Stephen Mitchell's Iliad and the college classroom

I enjoyed Maclean.ca's interview with Stephen Mitchell, author of a new and apparently very striking translation of the Iliad. The line he translates using "son of a bitch" has come up frequently in coverage of the volume's release. His explanation in this interview resonated with me:

via Wikimedia Commons

Q: In your translation Achilles responds, “Don’t talk to me of agreements, you son of a bitch,” whereas Fagles’s Achilles says, “Hector, stop! You unforgiveable, you . . . don’t talk to me of pacts.”

A: Here’s my attitude: the English has to be alive. It has to be something that someone could believably say, so it has to be part of a living language. And it has to have the kind of emotional power behind it that I feel when reading the Greek. Here is Achilles expressing his heartbreak and contempt and intense hatred at the enemy who has killed his beloved friend—if it doesn’t have the emotional power behind it, it means nothing. There are only a few expressions in English these days that convey that kind of intense contempt—“son of a bitch” is about as good as it gets.

This is something I'm always very aware of in the classroom. Conveying the emotional power and the liveliness of the classics has an urgency for me that it does not for my older and more secure colleagues. Oftentimes trying to convey this is a great pleasure. Other times, I feel that my lack of traditional professorial gravitas (gender, stuffiness, elbow patches) mean that I have to keep the excitement high all the time, and it's exhausting. A professor who doesn't look like the stereotypical thinker of deep thoughts must therefore be 'cool' and a buddy, right?

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Labor Day

Gustave Moreau,
Hesiod and the Muse

... There was not one kind of Strife alone, but all over the earth there are two. As for the one, a man would praise her when he came to understand her; but the other is blameworthy: and they are wholly different in nature. For one fosters evil war and battle....But the other is the elder daughter of dark Night, and the son of Cronos who sits above and dwells in the aether, set her in the roots of the earth: and she is far kinder to men. She stirs up even the shiftless to toil; for a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbour, a rich man who hastens to plough and plant and put his house in good order; and neighbour vies with his neighbour as he hurries after wealth. This Strife is wholesome for men.

-Hesiod, Works and Days, tr. Evelyn-White

 

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Greece in the News: Savina Yannatou performs Sappho's poems

via Wikimedia Commons

On June 8th in New York Greek singer Savina Yannatou performed lyric poems by Sappho. Like many early Greek poets, Sappho is a semi-mythical figure, but she probably lived in the late seventh and early sixth centuries BC. Her poems make allusions to a group of younger women whom she advises and instructs, but the exact nature of their relationship is unclear. Ann Carson's translation of her fragments is beautiful and accessible and has a reasonably informative introduction.

In case you were unable to make it to Le Poisson Rouge last night, you can listen to Yannatou performing Sappho's lyrics here. A translation of the poems she sings in the video can be found here (start at poem 48). Pin It

My Blogging Namesake: Korinna of Tanagra

Korinna, whose name means "girl," is the best known Greek woman poet after Sappho. She lived in either the 6th or 3nd century BC. There is an old story that she tutored the 6th century poet Pindar, who wrote poems to celebrate victorious athletes. When she afterwards defeated him in a poetic competition, he called her a "sow." But this story may have been invented, since her poetry uses spellings for Greek words that were current in the 3rd century. Her works, which do not survive apart from fragments on papyrus, dealt with local legends and the gods of her native mountains and rivers.

Korinna fragment 655.1-6 (translated by Jane McIntosh Snyder)
Terpsichore (goddess of dancing and singing) [summoned me] to sing
beautiful tales of old
to the Tanagraean girls in their white robes.
And the city rejoiced greatly
in my clear, plaintive voice. Pin It