@lionofchaeronea / lionofchaeronea.tumblr.com
I just bought another translation of Beowulf. Burton Raffel's for Signet Classics, to be specific -- I already own Seamus Heaney's and Kevin Crossley-Holland's versions. I know some people find Beowulf dull, but it speaks to me as few other works of literature do. And, silly though it may sound, it gives me courage.
At the moment, I'm reading the Penguin Classics edition of the so-called Apocryphal Gospels, edited by Simon Gathercole. Specifically, I'm on the Gospel of Marcion, an influential second-century thinker who saw the vengeful God of the Old Testament and the merciful God of the New as separate deities, implacably opposed to one another. Marcion produced his own, heavily edited version of Luke's Gospel, stripping out all references to Jesus' Davidic genealogy and human relatives, as well as any mentions of divine judgment. My training is as a classicist, not as a scholar of early Christianity, so much of this is terra incognita for me. But hey, if one is never willing to learn new things, one will never grow as a person, am I right?
I'm proud to say that I've finished the 885-page Collected Poems of Federico García Lorca (and learned a fair bit of Spanish in the process). Now, on to Pablo Neruda!
Reading Tayeb Salih's 1966 novel Season of Migration to the North, an intricate, gripping parable of European colonialism's effects on the people of Sudan. Rarely has so compact a work (only 139 pages in this edition) contained such multitudes.
Current nonfiction reading is The Final Pagan Generation: Rome's Unexpected Path to Christianity by Edward J. Watts. It's a sort of collective biography of the last Romans to be born before Constantine's pro-Christian measures, focusing on four individuals: Libanius, Themistius, Ausonius of Bordeaux, and Vettius Agorius Praetextatus. With considerable skill and imagination, Watts reconstructs the environment that would have shaped these men's thinking, arguing (persuasively, I think) that the imaginative constraints placed on them by their schooling and their society made it nigh impossible for them to imagine a Roman Empire without paganism. Watts sometimes strains a bit in his attempts to connect his material to the present day -- this is the first, and thus far only, time I've seen Ausonius compared to Eminem -- but that really doesn't detract from what is, overall, an excellent book.
Current reading is Derek Walcott's Omeros, a stunning book-length poem in which Walcott translates the Trojan War myth cycle to the contemporary Caribbean and his home island of St. Lucia. I've read many, many "reimaginings" of the classics, in nearly every conceivable period and geographic setting, and this may be the finest of them all.
Reading Anne Carson's An Oresteia -- an amalgamation of three Greek tragedies (Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Electra, and Euripides' Orestes) that treat the myth cycle of the House of Atreus from radically different perspectives. I was a little skeptical beforehand as to how well the undertaking would work, but it turns out it's marvelous. Carson's translations carry an exceptional charge that crackles even on the page, to say nothing of performance.
I'm reading His Master's Voice, a novel by the great Polish SF writer Stanisław Lem about a government project to make radio contact with extraterrestrials. If there weren't still a pointless divide between science fiction and "real literature" in the minds of critics, Lem would have won the Nobel Prize. His work blows most lit fic out of the water in its complexity, perspicacity, and philosophical heft.
Current fiction reading is Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man by U.A. Ananthamurthy, translated from Kannada by A.K. Ramanujan. A brief but exceptionally powerful novel, it's the story of a brahminic community disrupted by the death of a rebel member, and of Praneshacharya, the wise man of the community, who finds himself in an impossible bind as he tries to figure out whether the rebel brahmin deserves funeral rites and who should perform them. Ananthamurthy is extraordinarily good at creating memorable characters with just a few verbal strokes, and he chooses just the right sensory details to evoke the tight-knit, almost claustrophobic nature of the community. Not only is this a fine read, but it's made me keenly aware of how little I really know, and how much I need to learn, about Hinduism.
Current nonfiction reading is The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, by the great French historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot (1922-2010). It's an exceptionally fine book, rich in provocative insights. Hadot argues that the Meditations, far from being the random collection of jottings they may seem at first glance, are a coherent philosophical program of self-improvement, built around the three core dogmas of Stoicism as articulated by Epictetus in his Discourses. He carefully articulates these three dogmas, relating to desire (orexis), impulse (hormē), and assent (synkatathesis), and connects them to Stoic teachings on physics, ethics, and logic, respectively. I've read the Meditations multiple times, but I'll read them now with fresh eyes after having absorbed Hadot's insights.
Current nonfiction reading is Pagans and Christians by Robin Lane Fox, first published in 1986. Overall, it's a fine book--exceptionally learned and written in a smooth, elegant prose with flashes of dry British humor. That said, RLF has a tendency to dismiss out of hand arguments that he finds objectionable, even when (to my mind) those arguments have something to recommend them. There are also moments of odd oversight--for example, he cites the Homeric epics as evidence that even in the Archaic period "anyone could be visited by the gods," ignoring the significant class bias that Homer's deities show. (No divine epiphanies for Thersites!) These are small blemishes, though. I'm learning a great deal, and that, for me, is the mark of any scholarly work's success.
Current reading is The Radiance of the King by Camara Laye. First published in French in 1954, it's a fascinating novel that deconstructs African colonialism (Laye was from what is now Guinea) through complex layers of allegory, symbolism, and magical realism. There are points of contact with other great 20th century novels--Kafka's The Trial, most notably--but at the same time, it's something uniquely African and uniquely itself. Definitely worth a read.
(Incidentally: Laye was all of 26 when he published this novel. ...And now I'm going to go huddle in the corner and weep over what I've failed to accomplish in my life.)
Current nonfiction reading is Neoplatonism by Pauliina Remes, part of Acumen's very fine Ancient Philosophies series. I freely admit that I find Neoplatonism difficult, at least compared to, say, Stoicism or Epicureanism, but Remes does a superb job of laying out the key issues the Neoplatonists faced--the ontological hierarchy, intellection vs. sensory perception, will and selfhood, etc. She also pays keen attention to the historical development of the school and demonstrates the evolving nature of Neoplatonist thought, as scholars such as Proclus and Damascius responded both to Plato himself and to the gauntlet laid down by Plotinus and Porphyry. And all this within a span of just over 200 pages (!) As a jumping-off point for further study of the topic, you'd be hard-pressed to do better.
Reading the Complete Poems of Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) at the moment. You know, over the past few years I've become something of an expert on 17th century English poetry, which is a nice addition to my cabinet full of Knowledge That Has Precisely Zero Applications in Everyday Life.
Current reading is Harlem Shadows, the landmark 1922 poetry collection by the Jamaican-American author Claude McKay (1890-1948). To breathe new life into traditional forms like the sonnet, at a time when Modernism and free verse were overwhelmingly dominant, is impressive. To write of intense emotions--alienation, grief, rage--in a beautiful way is no less impressive. To do both at once is astonishing, and that is what McKay did. His work is an undying cri de coeur against racial injustice in both his native and his adopted countries, and it stands as one of the crowning achievements of the Harlem Renaissance.
Current nonfiction reading is The Family in Greek History by Cynthia B. Patterson (Harvard University Press, 1998). Ever since the nineteenth century, a prevailing paradigm in Greek social history has portrayed the oikos (family or household) and the polis (city-state) as having been in tension, with competing claims to authority that could sometimes erupt into open conflict, as e.g. in Sophocles' Antigone (where Antigone's loyalty to her brother opposes Creon's state decrees). Patterson, an expert on Greek law, argues forcefully and cogently that this paradigm is flawed, a product of mistaken assumptions about ancient social evolution. She prefers, following Aristotle in the Politics, to see the oikos as a fundamental building block of the polis, recognized as such by ancient legislators who codified "proper" family relationships into law. I'm honestly not sure whether I'm qualified to judge every facet of Patterson's argument--her knowledge of Greek law runs rings around my own--but I've been very impressed by her analysis of the family in the Homeric and Hesiodic poems. She's a fine close reader, and unlike some scholars, she pays attention to what the texts actually say rather than what she would like them to say. If nothing else, she's encouraged me to rethink many of my assumptions about ancient family structure and gender roles, which is a valuable service in and of itself.
Finally reading Emily Wilson's translation of the Iliad (I'm a little ashamed that I let it sit unread on my bookshelf for so long). So far, it's very fine indeed. Wilson uses a supple iambic pentameter that's probably as close as you can come in English to the effect of Homer's fluid hexameters, and she nicely threads the needle where diction is concerned, maintaining a tone that's neither artificially elevated nor slangy. I also highly recommend her introduction, which touches upon the key themes of the poem with great efficiency and perspicacity, and her translator's note, which is a valuable window into her thought processes. I think it's safe to say that her translation will have staying power--certainly, if I were teaching classical civ at the moment, it's the one I would choose for students new to Homer.
