The Iliad of Homer - Part Two

In my last post, I shared details of reading The Iliad, and of being pleasantly surprised with its accessibility. In this post I want to add a footnote about an unusually compelling theme that was referenced in the afterword of my Rouse translation. This theme proves that the Iliad is much more than a book about war-hungry men! (If you don't know the story at all, this post contains a major spoiler about the ending. But if you are familiar with the basic details of the story, these details will only enhance your reading of it.)

Adam Nicolson writes, For Homer, suffering is hinged to an unresolvable conflict between two inescapable elements of human nature: the ties that bind (family, friendship, community) and the blades that cut through those bindings (such as war). The war is shown against the backdrop of the people, homes and families of Troy. It is violence against domestic order.

To Homer, the city, the realm of family and connection, makes a stand against the chaos. In Troy, woven cloth becomes the medium for his story. When Helen first appears, she is in the hall of her house, weaving. In Book 3, she is working woven images into a tapestry showing the battles that have been fought over her. Helen, as she remembers the source of grief, becomes like Homer, the weaver of the tale.

[Outside the gates of Troy] where the battlefield is a careless and pitiless place, the allure and goodness of the besieged city become ever more precious. Achilles is determined to destroy the Trojans. They flee from his wrath back into the city – all except Hector, their champion, who must remain out on the plain with his adversary.

This is not just the meeting of Achilles and Hector; it is the deathly confrontation of two ways of understanding the world. The city is goodness and connection; the battlefield is horror and death. With Hector’s death, the city’s fabric is irreparably torn.

I have to confess that I missed that theme entirely! But like any classic, there will always be layers of meaning that surface with each subsequent reading.

I will close with just one quote comparing the two versions that I read. (Pope gets a bad rap for his translation, but I enjoyed his energetic eloquence.)

Few and short had his days been when Ajax laid him low, and he never paid to his parents the debt of a grateful son. (W.H.D. Rouse)

Lamented youth! In life’s first bloom he fell, sent by great Ajax to the shades of hell. (Alexander Pope)

P.S. Regarding translations, the majority of readers on the Lit Life Facebook page recommend Lattimore. Coincidentally, last week's Literary Life Podcast was about how to get started reading the ancient classics.

Blessings,

The Iliad by Homer - Part One

I was challenged by Don Beck in his Substack to tackle some of the classics I’ve been putting off for years. So, I took a deep breath and plunged into the Iliad. Fortunately, I’d listened to Elizabeth Vandivers’ “Great Courses” lectures last year and had a pretty good idea of its major themes. Still, it took perseverance to read the (sometimes) stiff language and to try and remember who was who.

I found it helpful to make a list of the central characters in the book so that I could disregard the dozens of other names mentioned. It was good to be able to recognize the main Trojans (Paris, Hector, Priam) and the main Greeks (Achilles, Meneleus, Agamemnon, and Petroclus). Unfortunately, many of them had more than one name! Even the gods changed names! (I had to abandon the audiobook and read a hard copy to keep everybody straight.) With that confusion cleared up, the story became much more engaging.   

The Iliad describes the final weeks of a ten-year battle between the Greeks and the Trojans over the beautiful Helen who had been taken from Meneleus, the Spartan king, by Paris, a Trojan prince.

I read W.H.D. Rouse’s (1938) prose translation. He created a very readable version, but I sometimes missed more robust language. Occasionally, I would take a peek at Alexender Pope’s more poetic version to meet that need. Rouse, in his attempt to put the poem in plain, modern English, sometimes surprised me with his rough language. Frequently he exchanged the more poetical “alas” for “damn it.” The schoolboys (for whom this translation was intended) must have chortled at the various swear words sprinkled throughout. 

But “plain, modern English” does not mean dumbed down. This was 1938, after all, when many people still had fairy tales and the King James Bible running around in their heads. That would have made this sentence from Book One seem strangely familiar: The king sent a dire pestilence on the camp and the people perished. Some phrases were downright brilliant such as when Agamemnon’s invincible hands were bedabbled in gore.

 A cursory reading of the story leaves you with the impression that this is a tale of men greedy for war and its spoils. But Homer had much more to say than that. The background is war, but the themes are of mortality and what makes life worth living. The ideas of honor and glory are central, but Vandiver makes it very clear that the Greek understanding of glory ("kleos") isn't just accolades for winning a battle.

In the introduction, Rouse writes, [To the Greeks,] life is lived and death is died according to a certain code of values: to be fully human (at least for a man) is to be a hero, to kill or be killed for honor and glory. Various characters grapple with this social code, especially Achilles and Hector.

I have more that I want to say about that, but it will have to wait for another post. This epic poem is definitely worth the effort. 

P.S. Vandiver's enthusiasm for her subject matter is quite contagious. Happily, her lectures are free as digital downloads from most libraries via Hoopla. 

Blessings,

Prophetic Words from John Buchan

John Buchan (1875-1940) was a politician and author who is most widely remembered for his Richard Hannay series of novels. In his autobiography, Memory Hold-the-Door, he takes a dim view of the future.

Writing in 1940, in the midst of WWII, he seems to be looking toward future generations and how they will be affected by modernism. He writes, My fear is not barbarism, which is civilization submerged or not yet born, but de-civilization, which is civilization gone rotten. (p. 146)

The world has become a huge, dapper, smooth-running mechanism. Is that the perfecting of civilization? Does it not rather mean de-civilization, a loss of the supreme value of life? In such a world everyone would have leisure. But everyone would be restless, for there would be no spiritual discipline in life.... Everybody would be comfortable, but since there could be no great demand for intellectual exertion, everybody would be slightly idiotic. Their shallow minds would be easily bored, and therefore unstable. Their life would be largely a quest for amusement. The vulgar existence led today by certain groups would become the normal existence of large sections of society. (p. 147)

Men would go everywhere and live nowhere; know everything and understand nothing. In the perpetual hurry of life there would be no chance of quiet for the soul. In the tumult of a jazz existence, what hope would there be for the still small voices of the prophets and philosophers and poets? (p. 148)

He certainly seems to be describing the 21st century!

Blessings, 

Final Thoughts on Kindle Unlimited

I've dipped into Kindle Unlimited whenever I could get a good deal, and have had mixed feelings as you can tell from this post, and this post.

Since I'd learned the trick of making a KU curated list, I had much better luck this time going straight to the books that were worthwhile. As I've stated before, I pay almost nothing for the KU subscription, but end up reading voraciously to "get my money's worth." Obviously, I didn't give some of these books their due, and ended up buying two of them to re-read and savor more fully. From most enjoyable to least, here are the titles that I read in December, January and February:

Cinderella - stunningly illustrated by K.Y. Craft

Ask of the Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for a Whole and Holy Life by Grace Hamman

Portrait of a Murder: A Christmas Crime Story by Anne Meredith (vintage detective fiction)

Unfinished Portrait by Mary Westmacott (aka Agatha Christie)

Baking for Two by Tracy Kabiku (and 7 other cookbooks)

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

Heroes of the City of Man - Peter Leithart (guide to the Greek classics)

The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein

Behind Barbed Wire and High Fences by Helen Angeny (WWII POW memoir)

Rochester's Wife - D. E. Stevenson (disappointing fiction from one of my favorite light authors)

I checked out two retellings of  classic books that were AI generated (I didn't know it at the time), and they were as awful as you would expect.

I paid 99 cents for three months, but ended up spending $15 on books that I wanted to keep. So it came out to about $5 a month (the normal price is $12). I could have done worse. 

Blessings,

Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs

According to Alan Jacobs, as our society becomes more and more immersed in digital realities, we are losing our personal density. He wrote this book to encourage his audience to learn to think more deeply by reading more widely.

He begins by explaining why our thinking has become so thin. Because of the deluge of information pouring into our minds via screens, we must, of necessity, practice a form of informational triage. We simply cannot read everything so we choose those subjects which are immediately interesting, and topics which are generally written from the point of view of those with whom we agree.

There is no time to think about anything else. This preoccupation with the present, with no regard for history or past ideas, leads to a “lightweight” existence that is easily toppled by life’s hard knocks. Jacobs believes that reading old books (and grappling with their ideas) can give us a stability that is not easily shaken by each current event or recent mode of thinking.

Jacobs encourages us to read older books with a generosity toward the author, which means that instead of writing them off for being racist, sexist, white or male, etc., we need to be gracious toward them and give them more of your attention than you may at certain moments feel that they deserve – because you hope that something good will come of it. At the very least you hope for an expansion of your own understanding.

He writes, I believe that any significant increase in personal density is largely achieved through encounters with un-likeness. When we read something that startles us (or with which we disagree) we are naturally tempted to close the book. But if we disregard all past authors for differences we have with them, our pool of candidates for our attention will get smaller and smaller.  Eventually we get a nicely manageable collection of ideas, all of which are more or less the same. But this limited understanding of the world leaves us impoverished.

G.K. Chesterton’s argued that when we ignore the history and ideas of the past, we do so at our own peril. If the modern man is indeed the heir of all the ages, he is often the kind of heir who tells the family solicitor to sell the whole damned estate, lock, stock, and barrel, and give him a little ready money to throw away at the races or the nightclubs. (from his essay: On Man – Heir of All Ages)

I learned a lot from this book, but while reading, I had to practice what Jacobs preached. Although I sometimes disliked his disdainful tone, I kept going because his main emphases are ideas that are very important to me. If only he had been as generous to those with whom he disagrees (who are still living) as he is with writers of the past. 

Blessings,

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

In a recent post I talked about the “100 Books with Dante” method of tackling daunting classics by reading short chunks each day with a knowledgeable tutor to guide you through. There is nothing wrong with using training wheels to get through a classic for the first time.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of those stories that I knew I should read, but didn’t think I could because of the 14th Century Middle English. I noticed that Grace Hamman had covered the book on her podcast, “Old Books with Grace," and decided to read along with her, which was a great way to work my way through the book. I found a simplified (but not dumbed-down) kindle version by Marie Borroff (1923-2019, Lit professor from Yale) for 55 cents. I listened first to Grace’s half-hour introduction to each chapter, and then read the chapter. Hamman’s rich commentary and Borroff’s lovely translation made it a delight.   

The story takes place at Christmastime in the court of King Arthur. While he and his men are feasting, a huge green knight appears and challenges them to a "Christmas game" of chopping off each other's heads. If Arthur is unsuccessful, he must come to the green knight “in a year and a day” to have his own head cut off. King Arthur’s nephew, Sir Gawain, begs to take the king’s place in the match. The rest of the poem recounts his adventures.

I enjoyed this book so much that I bought the Simon Armitage version on Audible (the version Hamman used on her podcast) and look forward to re-visiting it in the future. 

Has anyone else tried to read this? Any thoughts?

Blessings,

Latest Audible Haul

I thought I had all the Audible titles I could possibly want, but once again, they drew me in with the promise of "3 months for 99 cents". I had been wanting to get my hands on Jan Karon's latest Mitford novel, My Beloved, so I jumped at the chance of getting it for 33 cents. ($15 at Amazon). My second credit was spent on a Great Course offering from one of my favorite lecturers (Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition - 84 lectures by Elizabeth Vandiver!). My third book was Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth. So far so good. 

When I discovered that almost all of Wendell Berry's books were on sale for 2 to 3 dollars, I bought eight of them, including his most recent novel (and possibly his last), "Marce Catlett." ($14 on Amazon)

I almost squeezed by without shelling out more money, but then I saw a few more Great Courses for sale done by Vandiver. Ha! 

You know how Sam's Club sells cheap rotisserie chicken at the back of the store so that you'll spend a lot more than you planned before you leave? Audible is no different. They offered me three almost free books and then deluged me for months with other books that were on sale. I'm not sorry for anything I bought, but am glad the temptation to give into book fever has finally ended. (Because somehow I resisted their offer of three more months for half price!)

Do you use Audible? Have you found any particularly good recordings of favorite books? 

Blessings,