ProSe

My Top "Great Reads" In 2011--The ProSe Awards

2012-01-09T13:27:00.000-08:00

I spent the weekend going through all of my bookshelves, culling out books for donation to the public library, and doing some major shelf organization/reorganization. As I lovingly handled and flipped through many of my books I reflected upon just how many good books that I'd been privileged to read during 2011. I thought it might be fun share a list of my top, or favorite, reads of 2011. Also, as I do read about as much poetry as prose these days, I thought that I'd issue my ProSe "Great Reads" awards in two categories: Poetry and Fiction. So, without any further ado, here are my lists of my top "Great Reads" in Poetry and Fiction for 2011.

Top-Ten Great Reads in Poetry

The Iliad, Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald (1974)
The Iliad, Homer, translated by Stephen Mitchell (2011)
The Iliad, Homer, translated by Stanley Lombardo (1997)
The Oresteia, Aeschylus, translated by Ted Hughes (2004)
Sophocles' Antigone: A New Translation, translated by Diane J. Rayor (2011)
The Complete Plays of Sophocles, translated by Robert Bagg & James Scully (2011)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo, by Anonymous, translated by J.R.R. Tolkien (1975)
War Music, Christopher Logue (2003)
All Day Permanent Red, Christopher Logue (2004)
Memorial, Alice Oswald (2011)

Top-Ten Great Reads in Fiction

Middlemarch, George Eliot (1871)
The Crippled God, Steven Erikson (2011)
The Children of Hurin, J.R.R. Tolkien (2007)
Towers of Midnight, Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson (2010)
The Woodlanders, Thomas Hardy (1887)
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien (1977)
The Songs of the Kings, Barry Unsworth (2002)
The Heroes, Joe Abercrombie (2011)
Return of the Crimson Guard, Ian C. Esslemont (2010)
The Passage, Justin Cronin (2011)

Well, there they are, my top-ten "Great Reads" in Poetry and Fiction for 2011. I honestly very much enjoyed reading each and everyone of these books, plays, or poetry collections. Have a look and I truly hope that you may find something of interest to you in one or both of these two lists.

***

Happy New Year with New Books!

2012-01-02T15:59:00.000-08:00

I hope all of you had a wonderful, safe, and happy holiday season! Here it is January 2, 2012, and I am ever so glad to finally be back in our home in sunny southern California. Susan and I left here on the 21st of December and over the next ten days spent time in El Paso, Texas; Green Valley, Arizona; and Phoenix, Arizona whilst visiting family and friends. Susan flew to El Paso while I drove hauling all of the packages and luggage. I actually had to sit in Lordsburg, New Mexico for several hours on Christmas Eve and wait for the New Mexico Department of Transportation to clear Interstate 10 of snow and ice. It actually snowed on me from Wilcox, Arizona all the way to El Paso, Texas, and made for a very nice Christmas mood for all of us that evening when I finally did arrive in El Paso! Anyway, 'tis great to be home, car and luggage unpacked, laundry done, and closets cleaned out and reorganized. But what to do with all of the wonderful new books that I received? Hmmm, what a great problem to have, eh? ;-)

Okay, I'm going to take a stab at compiling a list of the books that I received, and I am going to list them by categories--

Fantasy Fiction

The Book of Lost Tales, Part II, J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien (single volume 50th Anniversary edition)
The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss
The Wise Man's Fear, Patrick Rothfuss
The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch
Red Seas Under Red Skies, Scott Lynch
The Dragonbone Chair, Tad Williams
Stone of Farewell, Tad Williams
To Green Angel Tower, Tad Williams
Lord of Snow and Shadows, Sarah Ash
The Prisoner of the Iron Tower, Srah Ash
Children of the Serpent Gate, Sarah Ash

Fiction
Achilles, Elizabeth Cook
Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier
Morality Play, Barry Unsworth

Drama/Theater
King Lear, Shakespeare
The Tempest, Shakespeare
Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare
Phedre, Jean Racine, translated by Ted Hughes

Poetry
The Riverside Chaucer, Geoffrey Chaucer
Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth, Wolkstein and Kramer
Flower Fairies of the Spring, Cicely Mary Barker
Flower Fairies of the Summer, Cicely Mary Barker
Flower Fairies of the Autumn, Cicely Mary Barker
Flower Fairies of the Wayside, Cicely Mary Barker
The Alliterative Morte Arthure, The Owl and the Nightingale, translated by John Gardner
Beowulf, translated by Frederick Rebsamen
The Beowulf Poet, edited by Donald K. Fry
Beowulf: A Dual Language Edition, translated by Howell D. Chickering, Jr.
Beowulf, translated by Burton Raffel
Idylls of the King, Alfred Lord Tennyson
Helen in Egypt, H.D.
The Inferno, Dante Alighieri, translated by Stanley Lombardo
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by William Vantuono
A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver

As you can see, I scored big-time! I am really looking forward to diving into this huge stack of new reading. My biggest issue right now is to find the shelf space for all of my new treasures! I love having a problem like that!

Time to go watch some college football! Happy New Year!

***

Christopher Logue (1926-2011) R.I.P.

2011-12-13T13:47:00.000-08:00

I was saddened to recently learn that the British poet, Christopher Logue, died on December 2, 2011. On December 10th, The New York Times ran a terrific obituary for Mr. Logue, and I've included a link to it here. My first encounter with Logue's poetry occurred during my literary exploration of the various translations of Homer's The Iliad. In fact, since 1959, Christopher Logue has been working on his interpretation or adaptation of significant portions of The Iliad, using his spare, but image-rich poetry to retell this great classic.

If you're looking to acquire all of Mr. Logue's 'Iliad' poetry, here is what you'll need to find--

War Music--An Account of Books 1-4 & 16-19 of Homer's 'Iliad' (1997);
All Day Permanent Red--The First Battle Scenes of Homer's 'Iliad' (2003); and
Cold Calls--War Music Continued (2005)

These three volumes of poetry are shelved with my seven different translations of The Iliad, and with Alice Oswald's Memorial (written about here) and David Malouf's beautiful novel Ransom. They most certainly do all belong together on the shelf.

If you're interested in learning more about Christopher Logue, his poetry, and his 'Iliad' project, you might be interested in reading my review and assessment of All Day Permanent Red--The First Battle Scenes of Homer's 'Iliad' Rewritten here. While a mere fifty pages in length, this thin volume holds some amazingly powerful poetry. It proceeds relentlessly at near breakneck speed, and leaves the reader panting and gasping for air about an hour later as the last page is turned.

Somehow I think recounting Logue's portrayal of the Myrmidon's bearing the dead body of their comrade-in-arms, Patroclus, is appropriate--

"Starred sky. Calm sky.
Only the water's luminosity
Marks the land's end.

A light is moving down the beach.
It wavers. Comes towards the fleet.
The hulls like upturned glasses made of jet.

Is it a god?

No details

Yet.

Now we can hear a drum.

And now we see it:
Six warriors with flaming wands,
Eight veteran bearers, and one prince,
Patroclus, dead, crossed axes on his chest,
Upon a bier.
Gold on the wrists that bear the prince aloft.
Tears on the cheeks of those who lead with wands.
Multiple injuries adorn the corpse.
And we, the army, genuflect in line."

(War Music, pages 196-197)

Requiescat in pace, Mr. Logue, your voice will be missed.

***

Adventures in My 'Mother Tongue': Middle English--Part 2

2011-11-29T19:49:00.000-08:00

For the past few weeks I have been having an absolute ball teaching myself to read and comprehend the literature written in Middle English. Middle English (ME) is the form of English that was commonly used, both spoken and written, in Britain from about the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066 until about 1500 A.D. ME, like present day English, is an amalgamation, or blending, of Anglo-Saxon (i.e., Old English), Old Norse, Old French, and many Latin 'loan words'. As with most languages, ME is a language comprised of dialects, and five major dialects have generally been identified. Probably the best known writer during this time was Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400), and his works are written in the southern dialect, and specifically that dialect classified as "East Midland", and it was this dialect that became somewhat standardized over time and used throughout Britain. In contrast, the Arthurian epic alliterative poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, that I have been slowly translating was written in the northern, or "West Midland" dialect, and shows a much closer relationship to its Anglo-Saxon and Welsh roots in Old English.

The ME alphabet is largely the same as that used by present day English, with the notable exception of a couple of additional characters that were in use through much of the ME period. The first character is the "yogh", and is depicted with the Ȝ, and can indicate the sound of the letter 'y' or the consonant grouping 'gh' like in 'knight'. In the ME alphabet the Ȝ or ȝ is found between 'g' and 'h'. The other character commonly used in ME is "thorn" and is indicated by the character Þ and þ, and represents the consonant grouping 'th' like that in 'that', 'this', 'other', or 'the'. The letter þ is located immediately after the letter 't' in the ME alphabet. Believe it or not, with time it becomes pretty easy to read the original ME and make the translation mentally. Apparently, there is a bit of a movement afoot to try and bring back the Ȝ for use in present day English as it has a much more explicit usage for that particular sound and consonant grouping. There's also still a bit of the ME character "thorn" or þ sneaking about even today. When you see a sign like "Ye Olde Book Shoppe" above your favorite bookstore, that "Ye" is actually "þe" (i.e., "the"). The early scribes hand-wrote the "thorn" symbol much of the time such that it looked like a "y". Grammatically it makes much more sense that the sign would read "The Olde Book Shoppe" too. There's a nifty bit of trivia for you!

The spelling and pronunciation of ME is fascinating too. It really is largely phonetic, and spelling seems to have been somewhat variable among dialects and usage. Bear in mind that for much of the time that ME was prevalent that it really had much more in common, from a pronunciation perspective, with continental languages like French, Italian, and even the liturgical Latin. However, during the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries there occurred what is known as the "Great Vowel Shift" in English. It was largely this change in the spoken values of the long vowels that marked the transition from Middle English to Modern English. Generally, the long vowel sounds in ME were as follows:

/a:/ as in modern 'father'
/ε:/ as in French 'bête' ('open e', roughly as in modern 'there')
/e:/ as in French 'thé' ('close e', roughly as in modern 'say')
/i:/ as in modern 'see'
/Ɔ:/ roughly as in modern 'broad' ('open o')
/o:/ as in French 'eau' ('close o', roughly as in modern 'go')
/u:/ as in modern 'do'

So, you can really see that things have changed a lot from the days of Chaucer or the anonymous Gawain-poet and the English that they spoke, read and wrote to that which we read, write and speak today. Once you become used to the sounds of the Middle English vowels, particularly the long vowels, in use prior to the Great Vowel Shift, you're well on your way to at least grasping the basic gist of ME.

It is has been quite fascinating to see so many words that we commonly use in present day English are there in ME. They are maybe just a little 'camouflaged', but the meaning can generally be ferreted out. I have found that it really, really helps to read these passages aloud, especially on those sections where I am kind of stuck. By simply reading it aloud, you can sometimes 'hear' the meaning of the word. I know, it sounds crazy, but it does work. Having a good glossary doesn't hurt either.

Here are two lines from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that may help illustrate some of what I am referring to with respect to the phonetic nature of Middle English--

"He sperred þe sted with þe spurez and sprong on his way,
So stif þat þe stone-fyr stroke out þerafter."
(Lines 670-671)

The literal translation--

"He spurred the steed with the spurs and sprang on his way,
So vigorously that the stone-fire [sparks] struck out thereafter."

At first glance the two lines appear to be fairly wonky and unintelligible. But if you kind of puzzle on them for a few moments and then slowly sound them out things start becoming more clear. Interestingly enough, even in translation the alliterative poetic scheme of the lines are largely maintained (i.e., the 'sp' sound of the first line, and the 'st' sound of the second line). I am nearly 600 lines into the poem and my vocabulary and understanding of ME grammar has markedly improved. I find that I am not referring to the glossary nearly as much as I did early on in the project.

So, you ask, precisely why am I translating Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight? First, I am using the exercise of translating the poem from the Middle English text as a learning tool to actually teach myself Middle English (the autodidact that I am). Second, I have read five different translations of the poem, and they are all quite different, and some are clearly better than others, and I'm very interested in better understanding why there is this great disparity in translations of the poem. Finally, I not only want to be able to read Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde in the original Middle English, as well as all of the works of the Gawaine-poet, but I'd also like to use my knowledge of Middle English as a spring-board to learning to read and understand Beowulf in the original Anglo-Saxon, i.e., kind of keep working my way back in time and language.

I plan to do some more postings associated with my 'Sir Gawaine' and Middle English experiences over the next few weeks. I would like to do a post that critically compares and contrasts the major translations of this important Arthurian epic, and what I liked and disliked. I also hope to share some of my own literal translation of the poem from the Middle English text and subsequent interpretation into something that is meaningful and relevant, yet respectful of the original intent of the anonymous Gawaine-poet in the late 14th century. At my present rate of translation, it looks like it will take a couple of months to complete the literal word-for-word translation. The harder task, I think, will be the line-by-line reinterpretation of the poem, and I anticipate that this phase of the project will take many months. The project has been a blast so far, and I am thoroughly enjoying working on it a little bit each and every day.

In summary, if you think you might be interested in learning more about Middle English--and I hope that some of you will be--I'd like to provide a brief reading list that might make it more fun for you. You might consider looking into the following books and reference materials--

Middle English:

A Book of Middle English, Third Edition, by J.A. Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre, 2005.

An Introduction to Middle English, Simon Horobin and Jeremy J. Smith, 2003.

Geoffrey Chaucer:

The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, edited by Jill Mann, 2005.

Troilus and Criseyde, by Geoffrey Chaucer, edited by Andrea Denny-Brown, 2005.

A Chaucer Glossary, by Norman Davis, Douglas Gray, Patricia Ingham, and Anne Wallace-Hadrill, 1991.

Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight:

Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight, Middle English text, edited by J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon, 1925; second edition edited by Norman Davis, 1967.

Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight, translated by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1975.

Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight; Patience; Pearl, translated by Marie Borroff, 2001.

Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight, translated by W.S. Merwin, 2002.

***

A Bit of Prose on Prosody--Part 1: The Structure of Poetry--Meter & Line

2011-11-20T19:29:00.000-08:00

'News Flash!'--I like poetry. That certainly won't come as much of a surprise to any even casual readers of ProSe. In fact, I tend to view poetry as the highest literary art form. While I can honestly say that I always 'liked' poetry, even as a grade-schooler, it wasn't until I really started reading and studying poetry that I truly began to love poetry. I currently have something around 100 volumes of poetry, including a few anthologies, sitting on my bookshelves. I tend to read as much poetry each week as I do other literary forms. While it isn't particularly popular in the realm of the book-blogosphere, I like to post poems that I like or describe poets and their works that I have recently discovered.

As some readers are aware, I recently started a regular weekly project featuring the poetry of Emily Dickinson (see my postings associated with The Dickinson Project), and in those postings I describe and discuss not only her beautiful poems, but also try and focus on Dickinson's interesting poetic techniques, as well as the craft of poetry itself. I am also getting set to start another regular weekly project focusing on the 154 sonnets written by William Shakespeare. I am very excited about both of these projects, as they involve two poets that are especially near and dear to my own heart.

It struck me though, that it might be useful to spend a little bit of time and talk about the "science and art of poetry"--also known as Prosody.

"prosody 1. the science or art of versification, including the study of metrical structure, stanza forms, etc. 2. a particular system or style of versification and metrical structure."

(Webster's New World Dictionary, Third College Edition, 1988)

So, the remainder of this post is going to 'wax prosodic' and discuss some of the primary elements associated with prosody. It is my hope that by having a better understanding of some of the terms and definitions associated with the different types of poetry, the structure of a poem, as well as the craft of poetry itself will help some readers gain a new appreciation for this beautiful literary art form.

Simply put, I would define a poem as an arrangement of words in a rhythmic fashion that expresses one's thoughts, feelings or ideas, and often incorporates the use of meter, metaphor, and may involve the use of alliteration, rhyming or other schemes. I'm quite sure that there are other (and probably better) definitions of what a poem is out there, but this will suffice for my purposes.

I think that the logical place to start is with the structure of a poem. A poem is generally comprised of lines of words arranged in such a fashion to take advantage of latent rhythms associated with the syllables and stresses in those words. This gets us to meter. Meter can be thought of as the quantitative measure of the rhythmic quality of the line of poetry being looked at, and is really just the organized succession of syllables at quasi-regular intervals in the line. The unit of measure is known as the metrical foot. The foot is typically associated with the accented syllable, and the number of feet in a line then yields the meter used in that line. For example, five feet in a line of poetry is known as pentameter, and is a very common form in English poetry. Homer's ancient Greek sets up well for hexameter, i.e., six beats-per-line, and this was what Homer used for The Iliad. Not that I would know first-hand, but apparently it is fairly difficult to translate the poem from the original Greek and present it in hexameter in English. Anyway, it is theoretically possible that one could have poems written in monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, and so forth. The old Norse and Icelandic 'saga' poetry (e.g., Poetic Edda) is a pretty good example of poetry that was largely written in tetrameter, i.e., four-beats-per-line, and it is generally often alliterative too (more on that later). Generally though, the poetry that an English-speaking reader will commonly encounter today will include the following metrical types: no meter (i.e., free verse), tetrameter, pentameter, and hexameter.

I also want to spend a moment or two on the different types of metrical feet that one can encounter being used in poetry. It gets a little complicated here, but bear with me and I'll do my best to make sense of it all. Apparently, there are twenty-eight different types of metrical feet that have been utilized in poems written over the ages. Fortunately, in the English-language poetry that is typically written and read there are five types of poetic feet, and include the iamb, anapest, trochee, dactyl, and spondee.

An iambic metrical foot is the most common foot, and consists of two syllables, a short or unaccented syllable followed by a long or accented syllable. For an example, I am going to use the first line from John Keats' Ode to a Nightingale--

"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains"

The bolded words, or letters, indicate the stressed syllables. As we have five unstressed/stressed pairs in this line of poetry, we are looking at a classic example of "iambic pentameter". See, its not so hard.

An anapestic metrical foot is made up of two unstressed or short syllables followed by one long or accented syllable. Here's an example you'll quite likely recognize--

"Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house"

Again, the bolded words or syllables indicate the end of the anapestic foot; and as we have four anapests, this is a line of "anapestic tetrameter".

The trochee, or trochaic, metrical foot is simply the long or accented syllable followed by the short or unaccented syllable. The Dies Irae of the Latin requiem mass is a great example of the use of trochees--

"Dies irae, dies illa"

So, what we have here is an example of "trochaic tetrameter".

The dactyl, or dactylic metrical foot, is comprised of three syllables, the first of which is the long or accented syllable, followed by the two short or unaccented syllables. A commonly used example of the use of a dactylic metrical foot is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, Evangeline--

"This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hem locks"

The first five metrical feet in the line are dactylic, with the last dactyl followed by a "spondee", which is our final 'foot' to be defined.

A spondee is a metrical foot with two long or equally accented syllables, e.g., "bread box" or "shoe shine". Given the nature of a spondee, it really makes no sense to actually construct a poem made up entirely of spondees. Typically, spondees are used in an anapestic metered poem, and can emphasize or enhance the meaning of words in a line. Here's a one-line example of the use of spondees from Tennyson's In Memoriam: A.H.H.--

"When the blood creeps and the nerves prick"

Well, this is probably enough for now. I hope that this very brief description of poetic meter and the more commonly used metrical feet was interesting, and may be useful as you read the next poem that you encounter.

I do hope you'll stay tuned, as I plan to cover "stanzaic" and "verse" forms and some other interesting poetic schemes and techniques in my next posting.

For those of you getting an early start on the Thanksgiving holiday, please travel safely and have a wonderful holiday. I hope you are able to get some good reading in, and throw that volume of Keats or Tennyson in the book-bag too.

***

Review: "Memorial" by Alice Oswald

2011-11-16T21:54:00.000-08:00

Here we are just a few days removed from "Remembrance Day" (UK) and "Veteran's Day" (US), and somehow it seems highly appropriate that I have just finished reading a new book-length poem entitled, Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad, by the British poet, Alice Oswald. Oswald's poem deeply affected me in a fashion similar to that that has occurred upon each of my visits to the Vietnam Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Now, let me see if I can explain why.

First of all, let me make myself clear, that while war, it seems, is a necessary evil and has been with us since the dawn of Humanity, this post is not about the morality, or immorality, of war. What I want to briefly focus on is the human cost, and how that cost is recorded and remembered, i.e., memorialized. Many countries have special days that commemorate their war dead, battles won, or wars fought. Most countries have physical monuments or memorials too, from the small monuments in village squares or parks, to those grand and elaborate national monuments typically found in capital cities. There's another type of memorial that some of us encounter through the course of our lives, and that is through the literature we read. For example, many of us have read Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, or Willa Cather's One of Ours, or Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, just to name a few; and they all, to one degree or another, describe the horrors and futility of war, and memorialize, if you will, its impacts upon the combatants. Over the ages, poetry has also been effectively utilized in a similar fashion, and one of the very first poems to deal directly with war and its costs is The Iliad by Homer. This is the subject of Alice Oswald's poem, Memorial.

The poem starts with eight pages of a list of names--214 names--all in uppercase. This is a listing of each death described by Homer in The Iliad and presented in the chronological order in which it appears in the poem. It is staggering to slowly come to the realization that Homer has described 214 individual combat deaths through the course of nearly 16,000 lines of poetry. To see that long list of names, on page after page after page, could not but help instantly transport me to the National Mall to stand in front of the Vietnam Memorial looking at the chronological ordering of the 58,272 names (all in uppercase too) of those who lost their lives during the Vietnam War from 1959 through 1975. Oswald's listing of these names, one after the other, is an incredibly powerful and visceral mechanism for instantly engaging her reader. There's none of the bickering between Achilles and Agamemnon here, the speech-making of Odysseus, or even the divine intervention of the gods. Nope, Oswald instantly starts the reader off with the stark and undeniable cost of that messy little war on the Trojan Plain--in human lives.

PROTESILAUS
ECHEPOLUS
ELEPHENOR
SIMOISIUS
LEUKOS
DEMOCOON
DIORES
PIROUS
PHEGEUS
IDAEUS...

And on and on it goes. After the list, Ms. Oswald moves straight into her poem, and what she has done is eloquently embrace and adapt Homer's vignettes of information that he provides in the poem about many of the men that are killed. A poignant example of the grace and sensitivity that Oswald brings to telling the story of these dead men is in the first one--

The first to die was PROTESILAUS
A focused man who hurried to darkness
With forty black ships leaving the land behind
Men sailed with him from those flower-lit cliffs
Where the grass gives growth to everything
Pyrasus Iton Pteleus Antron
He died in mid-air jumping to be first ashore
There was his house half-built
His wife rushed out clawing her face
Podarcus his altogether less impressive brother
Took over command but that was long ago
He's been in the black earth now for thousands of years

Whew! In twelve concise lines we see a man with a life in a pastoral land that was his, he had a house (half-built), and a wife, and then he sailed off to war with his men and his brother. And then he is dead. Sounds eerily like the story of the men that sailed off and then participated in the Normandy Invasion on D-Day, and now lie in the earth near the Omaha Beachhead.

Oswald's Memorial respectfully, even reverently, yet relentlessly brings the reader front-and-center with each of the deaths in Homer's epic, through the slaughter that Diomedes wreaks upon the Trojans in Book 5; the death of Zeus' beloved son, Sarpedon, at the hands of Patroclus in Book 16, quickly followed by Patroclus' own death; and culminating with the last death, that of the Trojan great, Hector, killed by Achilles in Book 22. In between these more 'famous' deaths are all of the others, one after the other, after the other. Also, in an effort to provide a momentary respite or interlude from the carnage of killing and death, Oswald has masterfully utilized her own version of Homer's similes. These similes, always presented twice consecutively, give the reader a well-needed moment for pause and internal reflection. At times, Oswald's lines of poetry are humorous, and then others are unbearably sad. This is, I think, a poem about life at the moment of death--a celebration of the life, and a memorial to the death. Oswald herself says that the poem is like something "from the Greek tradition of lament poetry", and that her poem presents The Iliad as "a kind of oral cemetery...an antiphonal account of man in his world." Maybe it is fitting that I close this review with the death of Hector "Breaker of Horses"--

And HECTOR died like everyone else
He was in charge of the Trojans
But a spear found out the little patch of white
Between his collarbone and his throat
Just exactly where a man's soul sits
Waiting for the mouth to open
He always knew it would happen
He who was so boastful and anxious
And used to nip home deafened by weapons
To stand in full armour in the doorway
Like a man rushing in leaving his motorbike running
All women loved him
His wife was Andromache
One day he looked at her quietly
He said I know what will happen
And an image stared at him of himself dead
And her in Argos weaving for some foreign woman
He blinked and went back to his work
Hector loved Andromache
But in the end he let her face slide from his mind
He came back to her sightless
Strengthless expressionless
Asking only to be washed and burned
And his bones wrapped in soft cloths
And returned to the ground

Just as Homer lovingly describes the intimacy of the feelings between the Trojan husband and wife (Book 6), Oswald's modern verse reinterprets those hopes, desires, and fears within Hector's death scene in a few starkly spare lines in such a fashion that one almost feels as though you are standing there witnessing his last living moments. It is powerful stuff! This is experiential poetry in the truest sense, as Oswald forces the reader to confront one of the primary elements of The Iliad--Men killing, and Men dying.

I have a shelf that contains seven different translations of Homer's The Iliad, as well as the three thin volumes of Christopher Logue's brilliant poetic reinterpretation (discussed here), and David Malouf's gorgeous little novel Ransom (reviewed here). Alice Oswald's beautifully moving poem, Memorial, will be joining that company, as a monument to those 214 men who died on the Scamander Plain nearly 4,000 years ago. Somehow, I think Homer would see this as quite fitting.

Memorial
By Alice Oswald
Faber and Faber Limited, 2011.
84 pages.

***

The Dickinson Project--Poem No. 657

2011-11-15T22:49:00.000-08:00

I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors--

Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of eye--
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--

Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise--

This is an interesting little poem that has always appealed to me. The first couplet gives away the subject of the poem--Poetry--which, in Dickinson's opinion, is a fairer House than Prose. Personally, I agree with her. I think most people would think that a writer has more latitude and flexibility in plotting and being descriptive with prose, so Dickinson plays on that perception with her description of her 'House' with all of its windows and doors. In other words, Dickinson, through her poetry, chooses to let us in in through the poem's 'windows' into her soul; or, she can effectively block us with a 'door' of her own construction (or, even by living as a recluse?). Conversely, a 'door' is also an entrance, isn't it? It is another way that Emily lets us into her 'House'. Although it may take some work, our access depends upon our interpretation of Emily's poem, line-by-line, and word-by-word. It is, after all, her 'House'.

In the second stanza she describes the overall architecture of her 'House'. It isn't made of brick or clapboard. No, Emily uses Cedar, a very long-lasting aromatic smelling wood. The Gambrels, or roof, of her house is the ever-expansive and infinite Sky. I think she's hoping that her poetry may live a long life, and that the 'Possibilities' of her poetry are as infinite and expansive as the sky above.

The last stanza, to me, speaks to her having moved in, and made herself at home in her 'House'. She is the Poet, and any Visitors that she receives are those entirely receptive to poetry, i.e., they are the fairest, in her opinion. Finally, I love the image created with the concluding couplet, that of Emily's use of her Hands/to gather Paradise to her through the crafting of her lines of poetry. Each time I finish reading this poem I'm left with a sense of 'admiration'. Admiration for what she's created in these 12 short lines, and also the recognition of how much she admires the craft of poetry.

This poem, No. 657 in Thomas Johnson's 1955 edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, is thought to have been written by Emily sometime around 1862. This is also poem No. 466 in Ralph W. Franklin's Reading Edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1999). From this point forward, I will reference both the Johnson and Franklin numbers for the poems, as many readers have one, or both, collections of her poetry.

Finally, I want to briefly mention the photograph that I've attached to this posting. This is a photograph I took of Willa Cather's house in the tiny prairie town of Red Cloud, Nebraska. I thought it appropriate to use a photograph of the house of a famous American writer of prose to illustrate and accompany one of the works of one of America's greatest poets. My oldest daughter, Amber, and I enjoyed an incredibly fascinating day touring all of the Cather sites in and around Red Cloud, and visiting Willa's house was one of the high-points. Oh, and do 'click' on the photograph and avail yourself of the larger view.

***

Thoughts on My 2012 Reading List...

2011-11-14T15:23:00.000-08:00

It seems that the book-blogosphere is all abuzz right now with everyone writing about their upcoming reading challenges for 2012. This is truly a wonderful thing, as I am seeing a lot of folks making commitments to read some really great stuff. I think that challenges can be a very intelligent way of providing a reader with the incentive and motivation to tackle a book, or books, that one might normally shy away from, for whatever reason. I also think that these challenges are a great example of the role book-blogging plays in the on-line world of social media. For example, I love paying attention to the books that many of my fellow bloggers are reading and reviewing. Frankly, it has been through my experiences with my own blog, and all of the blogs that I follow, that I have not only greatly expanded my own reading horizons, but made some wonderful new friends. So, toward the end of 'expanding my reading horizons', I have been giving a lot of thought to what is going to be included on my "2012 To-Be-Read" list. Please bear in mind that this list is in a state of flux, and that there will likely be some additions or subtractions, but here's what I've come up with so far--

Ancient Greek and Roman Literature
The Iliad, Homer, translated by Anthony Verity, 2011.
The Iliad, Homer, translated by Richmond Lattimore, revised and reissued, 2011.
Parmenides and Empedocles: The Fragments in Verse Translation, translated by Stanley Lombardo, 1982.
Metamorphoses, Ovid, translated by Stanley Lombardo, 2010.
Tales from Ovid, translated by Ted Hughes, 1999.
The Oresteia, Aeschylus, translated by Peter Meineck, 1998.
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson, 2003.
Sappho: Poems and Fragments, translated by Stanley Lombardo, 2002.
Four Plays by Aeschylus that I have yet to read (i.e., The Persians, Seven Against Thebes, The Suppliants, Prometheus Bound).
Some, or all, of the comic plays of Aristophanes.
Six Plays by Euripides that I have yet to read (i.e., Andromache, Bacchae, Hippolytus, Ion, Iphigeneia in Tauris, and Medea).

Medieval Literature
Le Morte d'Arthur, Sir Thomas Mallory (the Winchester Manuscript).
The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer (Middle English edition, Penguin Classics).
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Anonymous, translated by W. S. Merwin, 2004.
The Death of King Arthur: A New Verse Translation, translated by Simon Armitage, 2011 (the Alliterative Morte d'Arthur).
The Inferno, Dante Alighieri, translated by Stanley Lombardo, 2009.
Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio, translated by J.G. Nichols, 2009.
The Mabinogion, Anonymous, translated by Sioned Davies, 2008.
The Kalevala, Anonymous, translated by Keith Bosley, 2009.

William Shakespeare
Hamlet
King Lear
Macbeth
Troilus and Cressida
Henry IV, Part I
Henry IV, Part II
Henry V
Richard III
Coriolanus
As You Like It
Merchant of Venice
Midsummer Night's Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
Tempest
Winter's Tale
The Sonnets and Poems

American Literature
The Life of Emily Dickinson, Richard B. Sewall, 1976.
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman.
Moby-Dick, or, The Whale, Herman Melville.
The Reef, Edith Wharton.
The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer.

British & European Literature
Idylls of the King, Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Jamaica Inn, Daphne du Maurier.
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2002.
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo, translated by Julie Rose, 2008.
The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, 2000.

So, there it is, my initial thoughts on my proposed reading list for 2012. I have already signed up for two reading challenges that I think will help me stay focused and on-track with my readings goals. The first is the Back to the Classics Challenge--2012 hosted by Sarah at Sarah Reads Too Much. You can go here to read more about this challenge and my selections. The second challenge I'm taking up during 2012 is hosted by Jean at Howling Frog Books and is the Greek Classics Challenge--2012, and you can read more about this challenge here. Finally, given all of the Shakespeare that I am planning to read, I am going to formally join Risa at Breadcrumb Reads and her Reading Shakespeare--A Play a Month In 2012 challenge.

Along with my own continuing projects of featuring the poetry of Emily Dickinson and the sonnets of William Shakespeare, I am really excited about the reading I have ahead of me in 2012. How about you?

***

Greek Classics Challenge 2012

2011-11-13T16:24:00.000-08:00

I've found a challenge for 2012 that is right in my 'wheelhouse'! Jean at Howling Frog Books (what a great name for a blog!) has created the Greek Classics Challenge 2012. The goal is to challenge yourself to read some of the great plays, poetry, and literature of the ancient Greeks. If you're interested, I encourage you to go and visit her website here and you can sign up too.

My goal during 2012 is to read at least one work per month, and that would put me at the "Thucydides Level". As it stands, I have several plays by both Aeschylus and Euripides yet to read, and a new translation of Aeschylus' The Oresteia, by Peter Meineck, that I plan to read (my sixth or seventh different Oresteia, I believe). I'm going to use the challenge to explore the comic plays of Aristophanes, and the poetry of Sappho, Empedocles, and Parmenides, as they're all new to me at this point in time.

I also have two translations of The Iliad on the TBR shelf that I want to read in 2012. One is a brand new translation by Anthony Verity (Oxford University Press, 2011) that was published in late-October. The other Iliad I have is a reread of the newly released revision of Richmond Lattimore's 1951 translation. This has a new Introduction, wonderful maps, a superb glossary, and is a beautifully hard-bound edition from the University of Chicago Press. I am very much looking forward to reading both of these translations.

I hope to see some of you joining us in this challenge too. I, for one, can't wait for the discussions to begin!

Adventures in My 'Mother Tongue': Middle English

2011-11-12T20:51:00.000-08:00

Okay, a question for you. How many of you, in the course of your reading, enjoy encountering new words, or are curious about the origin of specific words and how they are used? As many of you may be aware, I am continually fascinated by language, and especially the English language--my 'Mother Tongue'. Toward this end, I decided to do a posting that looks at an earlier form of English known as Middle English that was generally in use from about the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066 to about the end of the 1400s. I am currently reading the alliterative poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, that was written by an anonymous poet in the late 14th century, and is just over 2,500 lines written in Middle English. Actually, I am reading three different translations in a side-by-side fashion. The first is by J.R.R. Tolkien, and was completed in the early 1950s according to his son. The second translation is by Marie Borroff, and was published in 1967. Finally, I am reading Simon Armitage's recent translation completed in 2007 (cover attached at right). Each of the translated poems preserves the structural organization and alliteration of the original, and yet they are all somewhat different from one another; which is certainly to be expected when dealing with different translators and differing poetic perspectives.

What has really been the fascinating aspect of my reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight though has been my careful reading and analysis of the original Middle English text. I have been slowly, but steadily, poring over it and endeavoring to literally translate it word-by-word. The Armitage translation presents the original Middle English text on the left-hand page, and his translation on the right-hand page. Seamus Heaney did this type of presentation with his magnificent translation of Beowulf from the original Anglo-Saxon (Old English) text. Anyway, by using the three translations that I have, a big fat Webster's dictionary, and several on-line resources, I have gotten through about sixteen pages of the Middle English text. I'm having a blast too! This is like a seriously cool puzzle, and is hugely challenging. I am already getting a decent handle on vocabulary and I'm beginning to figure out the grammatical rules of the road for this beautifully archaic version of English. I'm not going to belabor the point, but just go ahead and share a bit of the poem and corresponding translation. So, here is the third stanza from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight--

This kyng lay at Camylot upon Krystmasse
With mony luflych lorde, ledes of the best,
Rekenly of the Rounde Table alle tho rich brether,
With rych revel oryght and rechles merthes.
Ther tournayed tulkes by tymes ful mony,
Justed ful jolile thise gentyle knightes,
Sythen kayred to the court, caroles to make.
For ther the fest was ilyche ful fiften dayes,
With alle the mete and the mirthe that men couthe avyse:
Such glaum ande gle glorious to here,
Dere dyn upon day, daunsyng on nyghtes;
Al was hap upon heghe in halles and chambres
With lordes and ladies, as levest him thoght.
With all the wele of the worlde thay woned ther samen,
The most kyd knyghtes under Krystes selven,
And the lovelokkest ladies that ever lif haden,
And he the comlokest kyng that the court haldes.
For al was this fayre folk in her first age
on sille,
The hapnest under heven,
Kyng hyghest mon of wylle;
Hit were now gret nye to neven
So hardy a here on hille.

Okay, now the Modern English translation by Marie Borroff (1967)--

This king lay at Camelot at Christmastide;
Many good knights and gay his guests were there,
Arrayed of the Round Table rightful brothers,
With feasting and fellowship and carefree mirth.
There true men contended in tournaments many,
Joined there in jousting these gentle knights,
Then came to the court for carol-dancing,
For the feast was in force full fifteen days,
With all the meat and the mirth that men could devise,
Such gaity and glee, glorious to hear,
Brave din by day, dancing by night.
High were their hearts in halls and chambers,
These lords and these ladies, for life was sweet.
In peerless pleasures passed they their days,
The most noble knights known under Christ,
And the loveliest ladies that lived on earth ever,
And he the comeliest king, that that court holds,
For all this fair folk in their first age
were still.
Happiest of mortal kind,
King noblest famed of will;
You would now go far to find
So hardy a host on hill.

I chose Ms. Borroff's translation because it really is, in my opinion, the most literal. You can get a pretty good sense of the Middle English with a line-by-line comparison with her modern translation. Tolkien's translation is quite literal too, but is perhaps a bit more poetic and lyrical. Armitage's translation, while preserving organizational structure and alliterative style, does deviate rather significantly from a literal representation of the poem. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that at all, I'm simply pointing out the differences in the translations that I am studying. I have translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Burton Raffal and W.S. Merwin coming in the mail too. So, you can see that I am truly trying to experience the poem from many different poetic perspectives. Right now, though, I am just concentrating on trying to gain a better understanding and appreciation of the original Middle English text. After I've 'conquered' Sir Gawain and the Green Knight I plan on tackling Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, and forego reading a modern translation. Wish me luck!

I hope you have enjoyed this brief visit to an earlier time in the history of our wonderful language--English!

Veteran's Day--"And There Was a Great Calm" by Thomas Hardy

2011-11-11T10:59:00.000-08:00

'And There Was a Great Calm'
(On the Signing of the Armistice, November 11, 1918)

I
There had been years of Passion--scorching, cold,
And much Despair, and Anger heaving high,
Care whitely watching, Sorrows manifold,
Among the young, among the weak and old,
And the pensive Spirit of Pity whispered, "Why?"

II
Men had not paused to answer. Foes distraught
Pierced the thinned peoples in a brute-like blindness,
Philosophies that sages long had taught,
And Selflessness, were as an unknown thought,
And "Hell!" and "Shell!" were yapped at Lovingkindness.

III
The feeble folk at home had grown full-used
To "dug-outs," "snipers," "Huns," from the war-adept
In the mornings heard, and at evetides perused;
To day--dreamt men in millions, when they mused--
To nightmare-men in millions when they slept.

IV
Waking to wish existence timeless, null,
Sirius they watched above where armies fell;
He seemed to check his flapping when, in the lull
Of night a boom came thencewise, like the dull
Plunge of a stone dropped into some deep well.

V
So, when old hopes that earth was bettering slowly
Were dead and damned, there sounded "War is done!"
One morrow. Said the bereft, and meek, and lowly,
"Will men some day be given to grace? yea, wholly,
And in good sooth, as our dreams used to run?"

VI
Breathless they paused. Out there men raised their glance
To where had stood those poplars lank and lopped,
As they had raised it through the four years' dance
Of Death in the now familiar flats of France;
And murmured, "Strange, this! How? All firing stopped?"

VII
Aye; all was hushed. The about-to-fire fired not,
The aimed-at moved away in trance-lipped song.
One checkless regiment slung a clinching shot
And turned. The Spirit of Irony smirked out, "What?
Spoil peradventures woven of Rage and Wrong?"

VIII
Thenceforth no flying fires inflamed the gray,
No hurtlings shook the dewdrop from the thorn,
No moan perplexed the mute bird on the spray;
Worn horses mused: "We are not whipped to-day";
No weft-winged engines blurred the moon's thin horn.

IX
Calm fell. From Heaven distilled a clemency;
There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;
Some could, some could not, shake off misery:
The Sinister Spirit sneered: "It had to be!"
And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, "Why?"

(First published in Late Lyrics, by Thomas Hardy, 1922)

***

Veteran's Day--11/11/11

2011-11-10T20:44:00.000-08:00

On July 28, 2014, it will have been exactly one-hundred years since the beginning of the First World War. This great war--"The War to End All Wars"--ended on the 'eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month' of 1918, and of the 70 million combatants involved in the four years of conflict, more than 9 million were killed! My grandfather, a young U.S. Army officer, served with General Pershing's army in France in 1918, and I can remember him telling me stories about watching aerial dogfights between German and Allied airplanes. He didn't talk much about any of the on-the-ground fighting that he experienced though. I served in the United States Coast Guard from 1973 through 1977, and my oldest stepson is currently a Sergeant First-Class in the United States Army, and has done tours of duty in both Iraq and Afghanistan. On this Veteran's Day, I ask you to remember the millions who've served their country, and especially those who've paid the ultimate price. In turn, I salute and honor your family members and friends who have served, or are now serving our country in our nation's armed forces.

Great Britain paid a particularly high price during the First World War. Virtually an entire generation of young Englishmen were killed, maimed, or were psychologically damaged during the four years of that horrific great war. Many young British writers and poets were among those who enlisted and served their country, and many did not return. For example, Hector Hugh Munro, better known as the author, 'Saki', an acknowledged master of the short story genre, was killed in action on November 13, 1916, during the Battle of the Somme. Another young British officer, Charles Sorley, was killed in action at the Battle of Loos, in France, on October 13, 1915. Found among Sorley's personal possessions following his death was the following poem that he had written--

When you see millions of the mouthless dead'
When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, 'They are dead.' Then add thereto,
'Yet many a better one has died before.'
Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.

Poignant to the point of being almost painful and hauntingly beautiful, this sonnet seems to me to be written in Homeric style. Toward this end, have another look at the poem's Line 10--'Yet many a better one has died before.' This is a direct allusion to a line in Book 21 of Homer's The Iliad when Priam's son, Lycaon, begs Achilles for mercy on the battlefield, and Achilles replies, Even Patroclus died, a far, far better man than you (Translation by Robert Fagles, Book 21, Line 120).

Charles Sorley may have been brutally killed on the battlefield, but his words live on in his eloquent poem, and his poem makes us recall all of those killed on the field of battle over the ages--even back as far 4,000 years to Homer's descriptions of the combat deaths of Patroclus and the young Trojan Prince, Lycaon.

***

A Poem for the Day: "In the Forest" by Anna Akhmatova

2011-11-10T13:44:00.000-08:00

In the Forest

Four diamonds--four eyes,
Two of the owl's and two of mine.
Oh, frightful, frightful the end of the tale
About how my bridegroom died.

I lie in the grass, it is damp and luxuriant,
My words unconnected sounds,
And above peers such an important,
Attentively listening owl.

The fir trees hem us in,
Over the sky--a black square.
You know, you know, they killed him,
My oldest brother killed him--

Not in a bloody duel,
And not in battle, not in a siege,
But on a deserted forest pathway
When my bridegroom was coming to me.

(1911)

***

Another poet that I'm choosing to feature on A Poem for the Day is the Russian Modernist, Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966). I have always loved her poetry and have a 'chunkster' volume of her poetry, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer (Zephyr Press, 2000). I love poets that tell a story with their poetry, and Akhmatova is good for that with In the Forest.

On its surface, In the Forest is a dark, forbidding, and tragic little poem, and just a little bit creepy too. It leaves the reader with an unsettled feeling and wanting to know more. I simply have to think that this poem is the result of an old Russian or Ukrainian folk-tale that Anna heard, or knew of. It just has the feel of something out of Grimm's Fairy Tales. There may even be a political or artistic undercurrent running through the poem too, I just don't know at this point. This was written in the last years of the Czar's rule, which was a period of growing political unrest in Russia.

In 1910, Anna Akhmatova, in conjunction with the poets, Osip Mandelstam and Sergey Gorodetsky, formed the Guild of Poets (also known as the Acmeist movement; from the Greek word 'acme' = the 'best age of man'), a loose confederation of poets that met and discussed their art-form in "The Stray Dog Cafe" in St. Petersburg. These poets were interested in promoting the actual craft of poetry rather than the inspiration or mystery behind the poem, and in using "concrete" themes rather than the nebulous or "ephemeral world" of the Symbolists.

I plan to post and discuss more of Anna Akhmatova's poetry, as well as more information about her life, and how the Russian Revolution in 1917 and subsequent life in Soviet Russia influenced her poetry over the course of the rest of her life. For example, in 1921, her former husband, Nikolay Gumilev, was executed for ostensibly being part of an anti-Bolshevik conspiracy. Anna, and her son, Lev, were persecuted by Soviet authorities until well into the 1950s when the Soviet literary establishment finally began to recognize her importance as a poet. Anyway, more to come over the next few weeks about this fascinating woman and wonderful poet.

Finally, the beautiful portrait of Anna Akhmatova that I have attached to this posting was painted in 1914 by Nathan Altman (1889-1970), a Russian avant-garde artist. Altman, like Akhmatova, was born in what is now the Ukraine, and attended the Art College in Odessa. In 1910, Altman moved to Paris and studied art with other Russian expatriate Russian artists (e.g., Marc Chagall, Vladimir Baranov-Rossine, Alexander Archipenko, et al.). One can certainly see the influences of Cubism in Altman's painting of Akhmatova.

***

The Dickinson Project--Poem No. 1463

2011-11-08T20:20:00.000-08:00

Hooded Visorbearer

Our next poem in The Dickinson Project is one of my favorites. It is a richly complex little gem that really works well on several levels. Not only does it evoke some beautiful visual imagery, but it is also a bit of a 'head scratcher' too with its enigmatic couplet ending the poem. This is an excellent example of Emily Dickinson's amazingly powerful control over her use of words. Here is Dickinson's poem, No. 1463--

A route of evanescence
With a revolving wheel--
A resonance of emerald,
A rush of cochineal--
And every blossom on the bush
Adjusts its tumbled head,--
The mail from Tunis, probably,
An easy morning’s ride--

In thirty-five words, Emily has 'painted' a picture of a hummingbird every bit as grand and magnificent as that of her artistic contemporary, Martin Johnson Heade (attached at upper right). I love her choice of words in the poems, as they give the reader the sense of rapid motion, bright color, a momentary microcosm of the natural beauty in her backyard, or even your own backyard. Another Dickinsonian trait is her use of alliteration. An "alliterate" poem is a poem that contains the repetition of an initial sound, usually of a consonant or cluster, in two or more words in a line or succeeding lines. In this poem there are three different sets of alliteration occurring. Obviously, the easy one to spot is using the letter "R" with Route, revolving, Resonance, Rush, and Ride. Then there's Blossom and Bush, and in the seventh line, we find the word tum-b-led. Finally, in the last two lines we have Mail and Morning's. This is one terrific alliterative poem!

I think the other nifty quality of this little poem is that her choice of words enable the reader to easily visualize and almost experience the hummingbird's whirring motion and frenetic darting from flower-to-flower with her use of the words, Evanescence, Revolving Wheel (the rapidly revolving wings), and then Rush. It is all so transitory, just like a hummingbird's presence. Also, note that Emily reinforces these qualities of the little hummingbird with her use of the indefinite article "A" to lead each off.

I have to say that the last two lines are still a bit of an enigma to me. I have puzzled over this couplet forever it seems, and I'm still really no closer to convincing myself of precisely what she is alluding to here. I have commonly heard that because the hummingbird is moving so fast on his "route", going from flower-to-flower, that he's like a postman, and that he's bringing the mail from a far, faraway place. But why "Tunis"? Again, I have heard it speculated that Emily is giving a nod to her favorite playwright, Shakespeare, and his play, The Tempest, as a place so faraway that 'Claribel' cannot receive a note from her father 'Alonso' (The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1). Well, I guess it sounds as good as the next theory. I'd love to know your ideas on this couplet.

Finally, I want to just spend a moment and give you a bit of background on the painter, Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), who painted "The Hooded Visorbearer" that I've attached above. Johnson Heade is generally considered a painter of the "Hudson River School", although there are those who think he didn't focus enough on painting landscapes like others in the school. Johnson Heade was obviously fascinated with hummingbirds as he created many, many paintings that included them, and took trips to Central and South America to paint exotic species of hummingbirds in their native habitats. He has a connection to Emily Dickinson too! Johnson Heade had a young and very beautiful protege, Mabel Loomis Todd, who studied art under his tutelage. During the summer of 1882, Mabel Loomis Todd and her husband, David Todd, went to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Mabel eventually entered into an adulterous affair with Emily's older brother, Austin Dickinson. Apparently, Johnson Heade even went up to Amherst later that summer to try and convince Mabel to end the affair, but to no avail. Following Emily's death in 1886, Mabel Loomis Todd helped Thomas Wentworth Higginson edit Emily Dickinson's poems for publication. If you're interested in more of this story, I highly recommend Christopher Benfrey's wonderful book, A Summer of Hummingbirds--Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, & Martin Johnson Heade (The Penguin Press, 2008).

***

Attending a Reading & Book-Signing with Stephen Mitchell and "The Iliad"

2011-11-06T15:31:00.000-08:00

My wife, Susan, and I spent a lovely day in downtown Pasadena yesterday. The weather was gorgeous with temperatures in the mid-60s. Much of the afternoon was spent in Christmas shopping for our grandchildren in the many shops and stores along Colorado Boulevard. As much fun as the shopping was (actually, it was kind of fun ;-), the high point of the day was attending a reading and book-signing at Vroman's Bookstore featuring Stephen Mitchell and his new translation of The Iliad. It started at 6:00 p.m. and concluded about 7:30 p.m. Counting Susan and I, there were probably 20 of us in attendance for the reading and discussion.

Photo by John D. Fellers

Mitchell started off with three readings from his translation. His first reading was from Book 6 (Lines 394-502), and is the beautiful passage recounting the meeting between Hector and his wife, Andromache, and their little baby son, Astyanax. This intimate marital interlude covers the full range of human emotion, including: love, grief, fear, sorrow, and even hope for the future for their little son. Mitchell pointed out that what makes these 100 lines, or so, so extraordinarily amazing is that this poignant passage is about the enemy. Homer is very careful to make his reader conscious of the fact that the cost of this war is a heavy burden for both Greek and Trojan, and that the Trojans are human beings with lives and loves just like the Greeks and even the readers themselves.

The second reading was an interesting choice, and came from Book 18 (Lines 455-597). This section describes the god of Fire, Hephaestus, crafting the new shield for Achilles. These nearly 150 lines are what Mitchell interestingly refers to as the "world's first movie", as the crippled blacksmith god lovingly tells the whole saga of human life in minute detail in the bronze, gold, tin, and silver as he fashions the shield. To hear Mitchell read these lines aloud really brought home to me the poetic beauty of The Iliad, these lines, and especially the musicality of Mitchell's wonderful translation.

The final selection that Mitchell read was from Book 24 (Lines 458-522), and is arguably one of my favorite passages in the entire poem. This scene describes the meeting between the Trojan king, Priam, and Achilles. This occurs late at night when Priam comes to the Greek camp in an effort to ransom the corpse of his dead son, Hector. These sixty-four lines are truly some of the most emotionally powerful lines in the history of poetry and document the state of grace that both men are finally able to attain whilst surrounded by the savagery and brutality of a war of absolute destruction. I find myself shedding tears each and every time I read this section of the poem, and it was no different when listening to Stephen Mitchell reading it aloud to all us. Even though these lines are loaded with the pathos of profound grief and no hope for the future of either man, there is the salvific quality of the two men--enemies in this war--being able to find the humanity in one another and reaching that state of grace together. This is truly amazingly beautiful poetry.

Mitchell entertained questions and answers about his translation for half-an-hour, or so. Even 'your's truly' piped up with a couple of questions. I asked if he would tell us a bit more about the process he utilized in translating from the Greek text, and how he made decisions on not including sections of the text that were believed to have been added much, much later in the history of The Iliad. I also asked Mitchell about his choice of the 'five-beat' meter that he used in constructing his English translation. He talked about how other translations just didn't sound right to his ear, and that he wanted to see if he could come up with a meter and rhythm that could effectively tell Homer's story, but would still work poetically and musically in English. It was his experience, and I believe to our long-term literary benefit, that his pentameter lines satisfy on both counts.

I must confess that even though I already had a copy of Mitchell's The Iliad sitting on my bookshelf at home, I purchased another and had Stephen Mitchell inscribe the title page to me. It has become an instant treasure, and one that I hope to pass on someday to one of my children in the hope that they too will come to love this poem as much as I do. Also, I will probably try and find some deserving soul to pass on my other copy of Mitchell's beautiful translation. It seems to me that there's something fitting about sharing Homer with friends and family.

Of course, I couldn't walk out of one of the Los Angeles area's finest independent bookstores without buying some other books! I bought myself a beautiful edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets and Poems (the Folger Shakespeare Library edition, and annotated as well). I also bought an edition of Shakespeare's play, A Midsummer Night's Dream (the Royal Shakespeare Company edition published by The Modern Library). All in all, a perfectly lovely day and evening!

***

Review: "The Songs of the Kings" by Barry Unsworth

2011-11-06T13:10:00.000-08:00

I have just finished reading The Songs of the Kings by Booker Prize winner, Barry Unsworth. This is an eloquent and powerfully written novel that is quite thought-provoking on several levels. The novel was published in 2003, and I have to wonder if there was an external motivation behind Unsworth's writing of the novel than simply writing a good story? More on that in a moment though. First, I think it will be useful to provide a brief bit of background on a few important aspects of Greek mythology that bear on the plot of the novel.

Okay, so I need all of you to dredge up and recall some of the bits and pieces of Greek mythology that you've run across in the course of your life. First, the "Judgment of Paris", where Paris (son of Trojan king and queen, Priam and Hecuba) selects Aphrodite as "the most beautiful" among the three goddesses, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. In return, Aphrodite rewards Paris (the sycophant that he is) with the ability to 'seduce' and carry off Helen of Sparta, the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, and the brother of Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae. Second, as part of the agreement behind Helen choosing which suitor to marry, her father Tyndareus evoked a pledge from all of her suitors that they would rally and stand behind whoever her eventual husband was if there was ever any "future threat to the marriage". The suitors--pretty much all of the Greek chieftains--so pledged, and Helen then selected Menelaus to be her husband. Now, fast forward about ten-years, and along comes 'pretty-boy' Paris, and Helen elopes with him and off to Troy they go. It is safe to say that this action probably qualified as a "threat to the marriage" of Helen and Menelaus. Consequently, the Greeks rally their forces, under the command of Agamemnon, and set off to destroy Troy and 'rescue' Helen from the 'lecherous' clutches of Paris. The Greek fleet sails to its initial rendezvous point on the east coast of Greece, to a little fishing village known as Aulis. This is where Unsworth picks up the tale in The Songs of the Kings.

Unsworth's book is a story in five acts, and must be a nod to the structure typically utilized by the ancient Greek dramatists. The Greek fleet is trapped at Aulis by contrary winds and weather conditions, and the army, and its chieftains, are getting restless and losing their will to carry the fight to Troy. In Unsworth's novel, we read of a cabal of the senior Greek leaders, instigated and led by Odysseus (he brings new meaning to the term "Machiavellian"), that begins to develop a conspiracy that will compel Agamemnon and Menelaus to irrevocably commit to the War with Troy. Using intrigue, deception, selective interpretation and misinformation, the conspirators convince Agamemnon that Zeus requires the sacrifice of his eldest daughter, Iphigeneia; and that with her sacrifice, the weather conditions will change and the Greek fleet can set sail. At first, as one can well imagine, Agamemnon is horrified at the thought of having to offer up his child as a sacrifice to the gods. Odysseus and the other conspirators determinedly continue to brow-beat and cajole Agamemnon into doing the right thing for Greece and restoring its national honor.

The Greek leaders, in the novel, are really more like a gang of Wall Street CEOs, all trying to exert their own influence and power and looking to acquire more treasure, honor and glory. Morality and principles mean little to nothing to most of them. Unsworth's portrayal of Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus, and Achilles is unflattering at best. These are vain-glorious men who care little for anything or anybody if it doesn't benefit them in the long-run. Unsworth satirically plays off of many of the personality traits that can be gleaned from Homer's portrayal in The Iliad and The Odyssey, or of the later Greek playwrights like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. For example, there is Agamemnon, the thuggish control-freak; Menelaus, the weak-willed cuckold; or Odysseus, the clever and manipulative talker; or Achilles, the sulking glory-hound dilettante; or the two Ajaxes, Big and Little, both just brutish homicidal maniacs. The one character that sees through the conspiracy is Calchas, the foreign-born priest of Apollo. He knows that this is all a terrible fabric of lies, but feels powerless to stand up to the conspirators.

In the 'second act' of the book, the conspirators have finally succeeded in convincing Agamemnon that he is really left with no choice, and that he must sacrifice his daughter for the national good. He is told that in the long-run the poets will sing his praises for the courage he showed in reaching this difficult decision. Unsworth even creates the character of a blind bard, or "singer", who the conspirators use to disseminate their lies and misinformation in his songs and poems that recites at the soldiers fires at night. If a story is told a certain way long enough, it becomes true. The conspirators understand the use of the media and religion in getting 'the facts' out there for the masses. Now, the entire army knows that Agamemnon must sacrifice his daughter to propitiate the gods and create the favorable conditions necessary to prosecute the war.

Unsworth also takes the reader back to Mycenae in the novel's 'third act' and spends several chapters introducing and developing the characters of Iphigeneia and her maid-servant, Sisipyla. After getting to know Iphigeneia, the reader can't help but become more and more horrified at the impending doom that seems to face this likeable young woman. I need to mention too that Iphigeneia is also a priestess for the goddess Artemis (the twin sister of Apollo, and goddess of the hunt, wild animals, goddess of childbirth, and the protector of all young living things, animal and human). Iphigeneia has been trained in this role by her mother, Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's wife and the Mycenaean queen. The horror just continues to mount when a delegation from Agamemnon shows up in Mycenae with the news that Iphigeneia must travel to Aulis in order to be married to Achilles. Of course, Clytemnestra and Iphigeneia think this is wonderful news, as Achilles, the son of a goddess (Thetis) is also the champion of the entire Greek army. The reader knows though that this is all just a ruse to get Iphigeneia to Aulis. I felt utterly helpless as I read about this lovely young woman happily packing her wedding trousseau and preparing for the trip to see her father and to meet her betrothed.

You'll have to read the 'last act' of the novel to find out how it ends. There's an intriguing twist that had me holding my breath as I read the last 50 pages of the book. Iphigeneia and her maid, Sisipyla, have arrived in Aulis, and the tension among all of the characters was palpable and thick enough to cut with a bronze sacrificial knife (pun thoroughly intended). At this point in the book, that old adage "the train has left the station" really applies, as things said, and things done are virtually irrevocable at this stage in the plot. This knowledge, on the part of the reader just adds to the theater and drama of Unsworth's tale.

As I read this brilliant little novel there were a couple of observations that jumped out at me. First, this book could have been an almost line-by-line script for the Bush Administration's run up to the war with Iraq. The twisting and manipulation of facts by Odysseus and the other Greek chieftains in the novel eerily reminded me of the "weapons of mass destruction" issue and all of the speeches given by the President and members of his administration as the case for war with Iraq was constructed. Secondly, I think Unsworth is also telling the story of the dangers of religious and gender persecution here. Remember that Iphigeneia is a priestess for the goddess Artemis--an archetypal 'Mother Goddess'. The Greek army's chief priests all serve Zeus, the Father of the gods, and are vocal proponents of the patriarchal system that was becoming widespread across the Bronze Age Mediterranean region. These priests needed to eradicate the last vestiges of the worship of the Mother Goddess and the female deities. By labeling Iphigeneia as a "witch" and then publicly killing her as a priestess of Artemis powerfully symbolized asserting their strength and control.

After making these observations while reading Unsworth's novel, I wondered if I was simply over-reaching and reading more into this than Unsworth intended. I immediately read Euripides' last known play, Iphigeneia at Aulis (probably written about 404-402 B.C.E.). Upon finishing it, I have to say that it is my opinion that Unsworth has done a terrific job in his novel at portraying the pathos, drama, intrigue, and humanity depicted in Euripides' powerful play. Unsworth's novel makes us a party to the conspiracy, makes us feel the overwhelming guilt of a father who knows he is doing wrong, and makes us, in a somewhat voyeuristic fashion, a witness to a victim unwittingly proceeding down the path to her Fate and Destiny. This is a story about decision-making that spirals out of control and the far-reaching consequences that affected not only the primary protagonists, but the Mycenaean empire, Troy and the Trojans, and even reaches out and touches all of us in our own time--i.e., the Iraq War. Like Sophocles' great play, Antigone, Euripides' play and Unsworth's novel are hard-hitting examples of people placed in extraordinary and desperate circumstances requiring moral courage and the adoption and adherence to principled positions. The failure to find that courage or the failure to stand up in the face of tyranny or persecution can have devastating consequences. This, ultimately, is the message of Euripides in his play, Iphigeneia at Aulis, and in Barry Unsworth's beautiful novel, The Songs of Kings.

The Songs of the Kings
By Barry Unsworth
Hardcover
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2003, 341 pages.
From my personal collection.

***

Recommended Additional Reading:

Iphigeneia at Aulis, by Euripides
The Greek Myths, by Robert Graves
The Oresteia, by Aeschylus
A Dream of Fair Women, Alfred Lord Tennyson (the 1842 version of the poem).

***

Back to the Classics Challenge--2012

2011-11-04T13:19:00.000-07:00

I was inspired by fellow book-blogging friend, Jillian, over at A Room of One's Own to participate in a year-long reading challenge during 2012. The challenge is the brainchild of Sarah at Sarah Reads Too Much, and is entitled "Back to the Classics Challenge--2012" and involves nine categories of reading to be accomplished between January 1, 2012 and December 31, 2012. I actually think the discipline required of me to participate in this challenge will cause me to finish reading a couple of novels that I have been putting off for aeons. Also, I have some other great works of literature that I want to read, and planned to read in 2012, so they just really mesh well with this challenge. If you're interested in participating in Sarah's challenge, I urge you to have a look at this posting.

Here are the nine categories--

Read any 19th Century classic work;
Read any 20th century classic work;
Reread a classic work of your choice;
Read a classic play;
Read a classic work of fiction that is a mystery/horror/crime;
Read a classic romance
Read a classic that has been translated from its original language into your language;
Read a classic work that is an award winner; and
Read a classic that is set in a country that, in all likelihood, you will not visit during your lifetime.

And here are my choices--

Moby Dick, or, The Whale, by Herman Melville (1851);
The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer (1948);
Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo (1862), Translated by Julie Rose (2008);
A Midsummer Night's Dream, by William Shakespeare (late-1590s);
Jamaica Inn, by Daphne du Maurier (1936);
The Reef, by Edith Wharton (1912);
The Inferno, by Dante Alighieri (circa 14th century), Translated by Stanley Lombardo (2009);
The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, Translated by William Weaver (1980), PEN Translation Award Winner; and
Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880), Translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky (2002), PEN Translation Award Winner.

I'm actually quite excited to get started on this list! I'm also glad that I am using this challenge to finally compel myself to read (actually, finish would be the operative term here) Moby Dick and The Brothers Karamazov. I am really looking forward to taking on Dante's Inferno, as I already had planned to tackle it in 2012. The coming year is also going to be the year in which I discover, or rediscover, many of Shakespeare's plays. Anyway, lots of good stuff to look forward to here! Have a great weekend, and Happy Reading!

***

Literary Blog Hop, November 3-6, 2011

2011-11-03T15:14:00.000-07:00

The "Literary Blog Hop" is a monthly feature of the ladies over at The Blue Bookcase. I think this is the only meme that I still try and regularly participate in. The questions are always thought-provoking and tend to contribute to my overall desire and efforts to becoming a better writer, reader, and blogger. I genuinely hope that Christina, Connie, and Ingrid continue to support this meme going forward. Anyway, this month's question is the following--

"To what extent do you analyze literature? Are you more analytical in your reading if you know that you're going to review the book? Is analysis useful in helping you understand and appreciate literature, or does it detract from your reading experience?"

This question does sort of fall right in my 'wheel-house', as I really have become an analytical reader over the years. For me, this has been a learned behavior too. First, I have to say that I have been a voracious reader from the very first moment I learned to read. Having said that though, it wasn't until much later that I ever really gave any thought to what or how I was reading. I was, I guess, more of a 'qualitative' reader, in that I either liked the book, or I didn't. It was probably in college where I first learned to approach my reading experience in a more analytical fashion, and this was probably more a function of having to actually identify the important stuff and understand it well enough to write a paper and/or pass a test. Even though I was a geology major, I took history and English classes too, and I learned how to become a more analytical reader and a critical thinker (and I think that analysis goes hand-in-glove with critical thinking).

With that bit of background out of the way, here are my answers to Christina's questions. I think I pretty much analyze and think about everything I choose to read these days. If a book has an Introduction, I read it. I read and consider footnotes and endnotes. I'm an inveterate scribbler, and am always underlining key sentences, or making marginalia notes. I tend to write brief notes about important topics, issues, plot points, character assessments, and so forth, on an end page at the back of the book. I use these notes and marginalia when assembling my review of the book (either here on my blog, or on my Goodreads page). I avidly look for literary connections and relationships in what I am reading, which has allowed me as an individual reader to begin weaving, if you will, a tapestry of the literature I've read from the ancient classics to the great authors and poets of our modern times. I'm now able to read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and 'hear' the gentle strains of Homer and The Odyssey singing to me. This simply would not have been possible fifteen or twenty years ago. Each book would have stood on its own, and I probably never could have made the connection.

The ability to analyze what I'm reading, and discern overall authorial intent, has absolutely increased and intensified my overall reading experience and enjoyment. When I do find an author I like, I tend to immerse myself in their works and read as much of their oeuvre as is practicably possible. I have done this with Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, the ancient Greek classicists, A.S. Byatt, Stephen Erikson, Cormac McCarthy, Robert Jordan, J.R.R. Tolkien, and so many other wonderful authors. Now I know why these are considered the authors of great literature, and generally I can tell you why in each instance.

As a final example of the empowerment that a reader can get from literary analysis and critical thinking, I'll use my experience with A.S. Byatt's beautiful novel, Possession (one of my all-time favorite novels!). The first time I read the novel, I skipped reading the epigraphs leading off the chapters in their entirety, and in most cases skimmed or ignored all of the poetry embodied within the text. In other words, I casually discarded 25-30% of the entire book! Amazingly enough, I still really liked the book! I picked it up again a few years later, and started over. I dug into it with a passion, and ended up 'deciphering' and understanding the mythology that Byatt was putting forth, and how it related to the novel's plots and characters, and her views associated with academic research and literary criticism. Because of this extra effort on my part, Byatt has become one of my favorite modern authors. More importantly, I gained an undying love for much of the poetry of the Victorian Era, particularly that of Christina Rossetti, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning--and it was Byatt that led me there! Again, all of this simply could not have been possible a few years ago, as I wasn't reading analytically, and I certainly wasn't engaging in any critical thinking. Now, I go into a new book with my eyes wide open and my brain switched on, and what a difference it makes!

***

The Dickinson Project--Introduction & Poem No. 12

2011-11-02T21:43:00.000-07:00

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. With the exception of a short stint at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in South Hadley, she spent her entire life in Amherst, most of it in her family home. Frankly, she brings new meaning to the term "prolific poet". Emily Dickinson wrote just under 1,800 poems, of which less than twelve were actually published during her lifetime (it is unclear if there were 7 or 10 poems published).

Shortly after Emily's death on May 15, 1886, at the age of 55, her younger sister, Lavinia found bundles of her poems, neatly sewn together in fascicles. Can you imagine opening a trunk or a drawer and finding what arguably must be regarded as one of the greatest American literary treasure troves ever discovered? Anyway over the next few weeks and months I plan to bring much, much more of Emily Dickinson's personal life to the forefront in this writing project. Truth be known, I am awaiting the arrival of Richard B. Sewall's seminal biography, The Life of Emily Dickinson (1998).

I think the other point I'd like to make before I post the first poem tonight, is that Dickinson was not only quite unique in her time, but is still considered so. This is a woman who used words sparingly but powerfully. She didn't title any of her poems. She was extraordinarily unconventional in her use of capitalization and punctuation (e.g., her use of dashes is important in establishing rhythm and meter as the poem is read or recited). Dickinson also was unique in her use of slant rhyme (aka half rhyme) in her poetry. "Slant rhyme" is defined in Webster's New World Dictionary as, "rhyme in which there is close but not exact correspondence of sounds (e.g., lid, lad; wait, made)". Why don't we just go ahead and put up one of Emily's poem, and we'll use it to explore some of this stuff--

12

The morns are meeker than they were--
The nuts are getting brown--
The berry's cheek is plumper--
The Rose is out of town.

The Maple wears a gayer scarf--
The field a scarlet gown--
Lest I should be old fashioned
I'll put a trinket on.

(circa 1858)

There it is, short and ever so sweet. What a wonderful portrait of the fall season in just these precious few words. I just love the couplet "The berry's cheek is plumper--/The Rose is out of town." It is just brilliant! It feels like a happy little portrait of fall too, and leaves me with the impression that Emily loved seeing the changing seasons across the local landscape from her Amherst vantage points.

Okay, lets look at some of the technical aspects of this little poem. First, there is what most of us recognize as some normal rhyming in the first stanza (i.e., Lines 1 and 3, and Lines 2 and 4). Things get a little 'hinky' in the second stanza though, don't they? Lines 2 and 4 are a great example of Emily's use of a slant rhyme (i.e., gown and on). I also have to wonder if the last two lines aren't Emily having a little fun at her own expense. She was known as a severely plain little woman who typically wore a white dress, and maybe she thought that she ought to add something to compete with that "gayer scarf" and "scarlet gown" of the autumn foliage.

Before you bail on me, just take a moment and read the poem aloud. Use Emily's dashes at the end of her line to put that fractional pause in too. Those dashes are ever so important and perfectly guide the poem's flow and rhythm. See what I mean?

Okay, I think this enough for now. Rest assured that we will not only continue to explore the aesthetic and technical aspects of Emily's poetry, but we'll look at potential literary and artistic influences upon her work. We're going to explore her relationships with family and friends over the course of her life too. Oh, and I wanted to mention that over on the right side you can find a box for "The Dickinson Project", and in this box I will be keeping a listing of the references and resources that I will be using here. Finally, I'm really excited to be starting this project, and because of it I know that I'm only going to fall even more in love with Emily Elizabeth Dickinson and her poetry. I hope you do too!

***

Review: "The Firebrand" by Marion Zimmer Bradley

2011-11-02T12:12:00.000-07:00

I finished reading Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Firebrand early this morning, and found it to be an excellent book, and one that I look forward to rereading again at some point in time. This novel, at just over 600 pages, tells the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of Kassandra the Prophetess, one of the daughters of Priam and Hecuba, the king and queen of Troy. Zimmer Bradley does a terrific job of incorporating the commonly accepted mythological elements of all of the major characters in the novel, including several of the gods and goddesses, e.g., Apollo, Zeus, Athena, Aphrodite, Hera, Poseidon, and even the great Earth Mother herself. I have to say that I was quite intrigued with Zimmer Bradley's character development of the great Achaean warrior, Akilles, and the portrayal of his rage, which is the subject of Homer's epic poem, The Iliad. Zimmer Bradley may be closer to the truth of the matter with Akilles than that generally thought, but I'll leave the reader to form their own opinions.

While the novel is clearly intended to be read for its fantasy entertainment value, there is also the intriguing thread of cultural anthropology woven throughout that causes the reader to at least consider the differences between the matriarchal societies of some earlier Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures and the inexorable establishment of the more widespread patriarchal system in the Bronze and Iron Ages. For example, she explores this in a social context through the roles of Priam, Hecuba, and even the Amazon leader, Penthesilea; as well as through the role that religion and religious beliefs played with the Trojans, Achaeans, and other tribes and peoples encountered in the novel. It might be easy to just attribute this to Zimmer Bradley's brand of literary feminism, but I personally choose to think that she is really trying to remind us of the Myth of the Goddess, and that the balance of female and male in our own psyche is important even now. Zimmer Bradley's portrayal of Kassandra in telling this story is compelling and thought-provoking. Frankly, I enjoyed this novel even more than her wildly popular The Mists of Avalon. This was a well-written story and a real page-turner from start-to-finish. I have given this novel 4/5 stars.

***

The Firebrand
By Marion Zimmer Bradley
Hardcover
Simon & Schuster, 1987, 608 pages.
ISBN--0671641778
[This book is from my personal collection]

New In November!

2011-11-01T12:10:00.000-07:00

I wish all of you the best as we enter the month of November (Sheesh, where has 2011 gone?). Anyway, on this first day of a new month I'm kind of excited, for myself and for my literary blog, ProSe, to announce that I'm going to be starting two projects that I hope will be of interest to some of you. I have been thinking about both of these projects for a while, and have finally decided to roll them out.

Amherst College Archives

The first project I am introducing is going to be a weekly posting entitled the Dickinson Project, where I plan to feature a selected poem from among the nearly 1,800 poems that Emily Dickinson wrote, and then offer some thoughts and commentary associated with that poem. I also want to place Emily Dickinson and her poetry in the context of her time, and bring in some of the other arts and literature of her contemporaries. Emily Dickinson's poetry has always been very important to me, and I hope to be able to successfully share my love and enthusiasm for her poetry with all of you through this weekly feature.

The second writing project is also poetry-related, and will feature a weekly posting of one of Shakespeare's sonnets. I am going to start with Sonnet No. 1 and then, week-by-week, move through all 154 of them. Again, I hope to provide some interesting thoughts and/or commentary and related information in these postings. I am really looking forward to this project too, as I have yet to read each and every one of Shakespeare's sonnets. In fact, I'll wager that I've probably only read 25-30% of them, so this is going to be a wonderful new learning experience for me too.

I am hoping that both of these weekly features become somewhat of a signature item for ProSe over the next three or four years. Personally, I think it will be a great way for me to intellectually challenge myself and learn more about both of these literary giants, and be able to do something with my blog other than simply reviewing the books I happen to be reading. I am under no pretensions that I am doing anything remotely original with either of these projects, as I am quite sure that there are plenty of bloggers out there who've posted about Dickinson's poetry and Shakespeare's sonnets. That's okay! I really am doing this solely for my own gratification, and I am hoping that some of the rest of you may get some enjoyment from it too.

So, what do you think? Would you like the opportunity to learn more about the poetry of Dickinson and Shakespeare on a weekly basis here on ProSe? I hope so, because here it comes!

Review: "The Iliad" by Homer, Translated by Stephen Mitchell

2011-10-30T20:29:00.000-07:00

Maybe Stephen Mitchell answers the question of "Why we should read the Iliad?" best in the 'Introduction' to his new translation of this epic poem--

We return to the Iliad because it is one of the monuments of our own magnificence. Its poetry lifts even the most devastating human events into the realm of the beautiful, and it shows us how vast and serene the mind can be even when it contemplates the horrors of war.

Frankly, I'm not sure that I've ever before encountered such an eloquent or concise description of the relevance and true value of this great literary work to Humankind.

Some might say, "Do we really need another translation of the Iliad?" I think the pertinent response to the question should be, "If the new translation advances our appreciation for Homer and deepens our understanding of the story he was attempting to tell and its impact on our lives today--then bring it on!" This is, in my opinion, precisely what Stephen Mitchell has done with his new translation of The Iliad.

Mitchell's translation is based upon a re-working of the original Greek text by the scholar, Martin L. West. West identified sections in the text that he classified as "probable interpolations by other rhapsodes" that were spliced into the poem over the decades and centuries after it was written down. A "rhapsode" is the term for the classical Greek professional performer of epic poetry, i.e., kind of like a bard of the middle ages, and they were apparently common in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E., and perhaps even earlier. West and other scholars believe that what happened was that as the poem was recounted, time and time again, modifications and adaptations were made, and that some of these were ultimately transcribed and included in the Greek text that has been handed down over the ages. That this likely occurred is not particularly surprising to me, given that the Homeric tradition really was an oral tradition. Stories told over time and by different story-tellers are quite likely to end up being somewhat different.

So, based upon West's work, Mitchell decided to omit these interpolated sections from his translation. This has resulted in a translation that excludes something like 1,200-1,300 lines from a poem of approximately 16,000 lines, or just under ten-percent! The most noticeable deletion is Book 10 ("The Doloneia") which recounts the night-time raid by Odysseus and Diomedes into the Trojan camp. The great majority of scholars confidently acknowledge that Book 10 was a later addition to the poem. About his translation, Mitchell says--

I am under no illusion that I have translated the original text of the Iliad, as written or dictated by the anonymous poet called Homer--just the most intelligent attempt we have at getting back to an original, and a text that I could use as the basis for the most intense possible poetic experience in English.

Personally, I think Mitchell has succeeded in creating a beautifully spare, but powerfully compelling poem that seems to sing to the reader as though it had been originally composed in English.

Mitchell has generally utilized an iambic five-beat line as his meter. In contrast with the earlier translations of Lattimore (six-beat), or Fagles (six- or seven-beat lines), Mitchell's poetry seems rhythmically cleaner and more lyrical. In many respects, I think that what Mitchell has achieved is somewhat akin to the translation of Stanley Lombardo that endeavors to restore the Iliad to its proper place in the oral tradition. In other words, Mitchell's translation, like Lombardo's, begs to be read aloud. I am not saying that Mitchell's translation is better than those of Fagles, Lattimore, or Fitzgerald. No, I am simply saying that it is noticeably different, and that I believe that this will aesthetically appeal to some readers. Toward this end, I am going to provide an example by comparing a passage from the translation by Robert Fagles (1990), and then the same passage from Mitchell's translation, and you can be the judge of which you prefer. The section I have selected is from the latter portion of Book 24, the last book of the Iliad, and describes the return to Troy of Priam as he accompanies the body of his slain son, Hector. First, the Fagles' translation--

"Once they reached the ford where the river runs clear,
the strong, whirling Xanthus sprung of immortal Zeus,
Hermes went his way to the steep heights of Olympus
as Dawn flung out her golden robe across the earth,
and the two men, weeping, groaning, drove the team
toward Troy and the mules brought on the body.
No one saw them at first, neither man nor woman,
none before Cassandra, golden as goddess Aphrodite.
She had climbed to Pergamus heights and from that point
she saw her beloved father swaying tall in the chariot,
flanked by the herald, whose cry could rouse the city.
And Cassandra saw him too...
drawn by the mules and stretched out on his bier.
She screamed and her scream rang out through all Troy:
"Come, look down, you men of Troy, you Trojan women!
Behold Hector now--if you ever once rejoiced
to see him striding home, home alive from battle!
He was the greatest joy of Troy and all our people!"

(Fagles, Book 24, Lines 813-830)

And now the same passage from Mitchell's translation--

"And when they came to the ford of the swirling Xanthus,
Hermes left them and went to Olympus, as dawn
was spreading its saffron glow over all the earth.
With groaning and lamentation they drove the horses
on toward Troy, and the mule cart carried the body.
No one saw them at first, neither man nor woman.
But Cassandra, who was as lovely as Aphrodite,
from the top of Pergamus caught sight of her father
coming to Troy in the chariot...then the herald...
and then she saw him, on a pallet inside the mule cart.
She let out a scream and shouted to the whole city,
'Come and see Hector, you men and women of Troy,
if you ever were glad to see him return from the war,
so great a joy he was to our city and people.'"

(Mitchell, Book 24, Lines 686-699)

Personally, I think Mitchell's crafting of those lines is the more poetic--at any rate, it is poetry that has been structurally organized that very much appeals to me on an emotional and intellectual level. For example, Fagles describes the coming dawn of the morning with--

Dawn flung out her golden robe across the earth

which, while a wonderful metaphor, is perhaps a bit formal and somewhat abstract. In contrast, Mitchell keeps it simple and natural with--

as dawn was spreading its saffron glow over all the earth.

Now that is a sunrise that I can see in my mind's eye--the 'saffron-colored' low angled light of the rising sun. This makes me think of beautiful sunrises that I've actually seen, and then I realize that this beautiful early morning light is actually illuminating and coloring a scene of profound sadness and grief--a father bringing his dead son home. That is the power of great poetry, in my humble opinion.

In conclusion, this was a powerful and very impressive interpretation, and one that I look forward to carefully reading again and doing more side-by-side comparisons with the other translations that I own and cherish. For me, I guess what it comes down to is that I'm not sure that there is any such thing as a bad translation of The Iliad, it is just that some are better than others. Stephen Mitchell's translation is one of the better ones. It gets a solid five stars from me, and I highly recommend reading it.

By the bye, I am going to attend a reading and book-signing featuring Stephen Mitchell being held at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, California on November 5th. I'm very excited to hear more about his experiences with The Iliad over the past few years. I may even have to buy another copy just to have one signed just for me! ;-)

Bonus Feature

If you're looking for some interesting and well-written fiction to follow your reading of Homer's The Iliad, I might suggest the following--

Helen of Troy by Margaret George (Viking, 2006) tells the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of Helen of Sparta who leaves her husband, Menelaus, and runs off with Paris to Troy. George does a wonderful job of placing her reader in the Bronze Age of the Greeks and Trojans, and an even better job of creating and exploring the personalities of the various characters involved in the war. An easy and fun read.

Perhaps an even better written and more interesting novel is Firebrand by Marion Zimmer Bradley (Simon and Schuster, 1987). This is a decidedly intriguing and feminist perspective of the Trojan Prophetess, Kassandra (Cassandra). Kassandra has always fascinated me, with her story in Greek mythology, and later treatment by the great dramatists, Aeschylus and Euripides. Bradley expertly continues telling her story masterfully in Firebrand.

***

Sunday Musings: Where Do You Do Your Best Reading & Writing?

2011-10-29T21:44:00.000-07:00


(c) David Allen Sibley, 2003

I love sitting at my desk and reading my books, catching up on your blog postings, or just doing a little writing myself. Sometimes though, something catches my eye and I find myself just relaxing and looking out the window and watching all of my little feathered or fur-covered friends cavorting about our backyard. I especially love the spring and fall seasons when migrating birds stop and investigate my yard with its trees, bushes, and flowers. For example, right now I have dozens of yellow-rumped warblers (Dendroica coronata) and western bluebirds (Sialia mexicana) moving through on their way south. They bathe in the little pools of water in the wells surrounding my trees; and they hop about looking for insects and seeds in the gardens and lawn. In a word--they are just beautiful, and I could watch them for hours. I've always been an avid birder, and keep a battered copy of David Sibley's Field Guide to Birds of Western North America (2003) within reach on my bookshelf.

I like my workspace a lot (see photo at left). It is very comfortable, and quite conducive to reading and thinking. I have about one-third of my books near my desk in a large wall-sized bookcase which is really convenient (photo at lower-left). For the rest of my books, I have to go into my wife's office where I have several large floor-to-ceiling bookcases (Thank you, IKEA!). On the shelves next to my desk I keep my favorite collections of poetry, literature and poetry anthologies, style manuals, atlases, dictionary, thesaurus, and writing notebooks. Even though I could carry my laptop around from room-to-room, I generally don't. I enjoy the discipline of sitting at my desk when I write and/or read; not to mention that it is also an ergonomically comfortable environment to work in.

I think my most favorite time to be at my desk is early on a Sunday morning. I love sitting at my desk with a nice steaming cup of coffee and watching the sun rising. There's something about those first golden beams of low-angled morning sunlight streaming through the window across my desk that just starts the day off ever so nicely! So, how about you--where do you like to read and write? Do you have a nice little area that is all your own?

Review: "Isis" by Douglas Clegg

2011-10-28T15:24:00.000-07:00

Fall is here! It is the season for raking leaves, digging out the warm winter jackets and wool hats, and getting your pumpkin ready for the visits of your neighborhood's little ghosties and goblins on Halloween. If you're looking for a spooky little literary 'treat' for yourself, look no further--I have a recommendation for you.

Two years ago, while wandering around my favorite bookstore, on a whim I picked up a hardcover edition of a novella by Douglas Clegg entitled, Isis. This little book of just 113 pages is heartbreakingly good, and is profusely illustrated with beautiful and very detailed pen-and-ink line drawings by Glenn Chadbourne. Honestly, I think the primary reason I purchased the book initially was because of the quality of the illustrations. It really piqued my interest as soon as I picked it up and flipped through it.

Isis is a gripping and truly macabre tale. In essence, Clegg has given the reader a superb retelling of the ancient Egyptian Osiris and Isis myth. Isis is set in Cornwall during the Victorian Period, and is a classic tragedy involving Love, Life, and Loss as experienced by a young woman, Iris Villiers, and her twin brothers, Harvey and Spencer. The young people and their mother are staying at the decaying old mansion--Belerion Hall--that has been in the Villiers family for many, many years. As befits a good scary story, there is an ancient and decrepit family burial ground next to the house that is known by the locals as "The Tombs", and the children are warned off of the place by the gardener, "Old Marsh". While a quick read, Clegg's writing in this book is really quite good and deserves to be savored slowly. Here's a little sample describing one of Iris's jaunts out across the Cornwall landscape--

"When the sun came out--for the summers at Belerion Hall were often long and pleasant--I saw the distant stone arches out along the tidal island that seemed to float atop turquoise waves. I could sit near the cliff's edge on a beautiful summer's day and imagine the white sand below the cliffs to be full of pirate treasure. My first governess told me of the seven stones in the old harbor to the west called "The Tin Men"; they had once been miners and had gone so deep into the earth that they were turned to rock itself. Now they sat in the sea, having swallowed enemy ships that had attacked the port centuries before. I loved the legends and tales, and in the village, where some of the folk spoke the old language, I began to learn a bit of it slowly and loved being able to say a word or two in Cornish."

Or, this wonderful description of Iris in her grandfather's library--

"On rainy days, I explored my grandfather's immense and musty library, with its volumes of strange and wonderful books. It had no windows at all, so I could forget the gray wintry world outside. Its ceiling looked like elegant chocolates from a London confectionery, and it had bookcases so high that I had to climb ladders to see it all. I crept over to the hearth rug with several books and lay there in front of the huge stone fireplace to begin my escape from Belerion Hall through the pages of novels and histories."

Clegg's writing (this tale, at least) reminds me a bit of some of George Eliot's earlier works, or that of Thomas Hardy, as there's always that hint of bleakness or forthcoming tragedy lurking in the background. Clegg also does a superb job of blending bits of Celtic or Druidic legend and myth in with his retelling of the Isis/Osiris story, and it all works really, really well. I'm not going to say any more about the plot of the book, but suffice it to say that it has a series of twists that you probably won't see coming and that will both surprise and horrify. This is probably not a tale for the very young either; it is dark, gritty, realistic, and terribly bittersweet, with some pretty significant moral lessons throughout. This hauntingly beautiful novella is one to read while safely ensconced in a warm living room in front of a crackling fire with a nice steaming mug of hot apple-cider. Have a Happy and Safe Halloween and do let me know how you liked Isis.

Isis
By Douglas Clegg
Vanguard Press, 2009
Hardcover edition, 113 pages.

***

A Poem for the Day: "Autumn" by Christina G. Rossetti

2011-10-23T15:08:00.000-07:00

Here is a poem by one of my favorite Victorian poets, Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894). Christina was the younger sister of the PreRaphaelite poet and painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (at left, is his pencil and chalk portrait of his sister). She was a prolific poet who, through the course of her life, wrote something over 1,000 poems, and is perhaps best known for her epic poem, Goblin Market (1859). Also, about two years ago I read Jan Marsh's seminal biography of Rossetti entitled Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography. While it was tough to find a copy (my used copy came from Britain), it was well worth the effort (and money!) as it shed so much light on this lesser known, but very important poet. If you're interested in learning more about Christina Rossetti and Marsh's wonderful biography, have a look at my book review in this earlier posting here.

The poem I'm posting is entitled Autumn and was written in April 1858. I have always loved this poem for its introspection, vivid imagery, and similes. For some reason, I have always kind of looked upon Rossetti's Autumn as being akin to Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott (originally written in 1832, but revised in 1842). Obviously, Rossetti must have been very much aware of Tennyson's poetry (he was, after all, Poet Laureate during much of her life). Anyway, without further ado, here is Christina Rossetti's poem--

***

AUTUMN

I dwell alone--I dwell alone, alone,
Whilst full my river flows down to the sea,
Gilded with flashing boats
That bring no friend to me:
O love-songs, gurgling from a hundred throats,
O love-pangs, let me be.

Fair fall the freighted boats which gold and stone
And spices bear to sea:
Slim, gleaming maidens swell their mellow notes,
Love-promising, entreating--
Ah! sweet, but fleeting--
Beneath the shivering, snow-white sails.
Hush! the wind flags and fails--
Hush! they will lie becalmed in sight of strand--
Sight of my strand, where I do dwell alone;
Their songs wake singing echoes in my land--
They cannot hear me moan.

One latest, solitary swallow flies
Across the sea, rough autumn-tempest tost,
Poor bird, shall it be lost?
Dropped down into this uncongenial sea,
With no kind eyes
To watch it while it dies,
Unguessed, uncared for, free:
Set free at last,
The short pang past,
In sleep, in death, in dreamless sleep locked fast.

Mine avenue is all a growth of oaks,
Some rent by thunder-strokes,
Some rustling leaves and acorns in the breeze:
Fair fall my fertile trees,
That rear their goodly heads, and live at ease.

A spider's web blocks all mine avenue;
He catches down and foolish painted flies,
That spider wary and wise.
Each morn it hangs a rainbow strung with dew
Betwixt boughs green with sap,
So fair, few creatures guess it is a trap:
I will not mar the web,
Tho' sad I am to see the small lives ebb.

It shakes--my trees shake--for a wind is roused
In cavern where it housed:
Each white and quivering sail,
Of boats among the water leaves
Hollows and strains in the full-throated gale:
Each maiden sings again--
Each languid maiden, whom the calm
Had lulled to sleep with rest and spice and balm,
Miles down my river to the sea
They float and wane,
Long miles away from me.

Perhaps they say: "She grieves,
Uplifted, like a beacon, on her tower."
Perhaps they say: "One hour
More, and we dance among the golden sheaves."
Perhaps they say: "One hour
More, and we stand,
Face to face, hand in hand;
Make haste, O slack gale, to the looked-for land!"

My trees are not in flower,
I have no bower,
And gusty creaks my tower,
And lonesome, very lonesome, is my strand.

(Composed, April 14, 1858)

***

The painting that I've attached to the right of the poem is by the famous American landscape painter, Thomas Moran (1837-1926), and is entitled A Scene on the Tohickon Creek: Autumn and was painted in 1868. Please, please do 'click' on the painting and enjoy the larger view of this exquisite work of art!

Moran is one of my favorite landscape painters, and is one of the artists from the mid-19th century American artistic movement known as the "Hudson River School". Other artists in this 'school' included, for example, Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and Martin Johnson Heade. The artists of the Hudson River School were influenced by Romanticism and the earlier artistic works of landscape painters like J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, as well as by the literary works of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Thomas Moran traveled out west with one of the early exploratory teams from the U.S. Geological Survey (the Hayden Survey, 1871) and made many beautiful sketches and paintings of the scenery that he encountered. It was largely because of his landscapes and sketches being exhibited back east that Yellowstone National Park was created. In fact, the U.S. Congress purchased several of his large canvasses that were then hung in the Capitol building for years (they are now in the Smithsonian Museum). Some of Moran's paintings can currently be found in the Department of the Interior building, the Smithsonian, and in the Oval Office of the White House.

I have always very much admired the compositions and lighting conditions depicted in the landscape paintings of Moran, Bierstadt, Church, and Cole, and continue to strive to duplicate the qualities of those elements in my own photography. Whether or not I have been successful is a determination I leave entirely to the judgment of the viewer. If you're interested in taking a look at my current portfolio of landscape photography, please have a look here.

***

Review: "The War That Killed Achilles" by Caroline Alexander

2011-10-22T09:23:00.000-07:00

Caroline Alexander says in her Preface to The War That Killed Achilles that "this book is about what the Iliad is about; this book is about what the Iliad says of war."

I loved this book! It is extraordinarily well-written, and to the point at 225 pages in length (plus another nearly 50 pages of end-notes). While scholarly, it reads very well. Alexander takes us through the Trojan War's cast of characters in chapters that cover topics like "Chain of Command", the "Terms of Engagement", "In God We Trust", "Man Down", "No Hostages", "The Death of Hektor", and the last chapter "Everlasting Glory". Alexander's book hones in on the seven or eight months that are covered in Homer's Iliad, and while it speaks to the historical context of Troy, Mycenaean Greece, and the Trojan War itself, I think the real message of her book is the psychology of the War and the psychology of the humans involved in it.

It is perhaps easy to come to the conclusion that the Iliad is really the story of the "rage" of Achilles. I don't know if it is that simple though, and I don't think Alexander does either. She spends a lot of the book discussing why Achilles is 'angry' with Agamemnon, and it is much more complicated than Agamemnon having forcibly taken Achilles' concubine, Briseis, from him. She postulates that Achilles had reached the conclusion that Agamemnon is an inept and incompetent military commander, and that this war between the Trojans and Achaeans was unjust, and that he--Achilles--really 'doesn't have an axe to grind' in this fight. All of this was very thought-provoking for me, and caused me to carefully reread the Iliad and rethink my feelings about Achilles' actions (or, inaction, as the case may be).

Alexander makes a strong case too, that both sides in this nasty little war were just plain worn out. The Greeks and the Trojans had been fighting for nearly ten years, with little in the way of tangible results other than seeing hundreds of their comrades killed or maimed. That can't be good for your overall mental health. The psychological toll of losing friends in combat must have been huge, and anger and guilt (i.e., 'survivor's guilt'), and post-traumatic stress disorder must have, by this time, affected all of the combatants. When Achilles' best-loved friend, Patroclus, is killed by Hektor, one can begin to understand how Achilles could have simply 'snapped' and just gone berserk with 'rage'. Particularly as one knows from Homer that Achilles, in essence, facilitated Patroclus' death at the hands of Hektor (i.e., Achilles let Patroclus borrow his armor and lead the Myrmidons into combat against the Trojans). Combat is violent, combat is horrific--whether it is in the Bronze Age on the Plain of Troy, or in 2011 in the Korangal River Valley in Afghanistan--and the human cost is always incalculably high.

Finally, Alexander finishes her book with a discussion about Achilles coming to terms with his own role in the Trojan War, and his acceptance of his own destiny and what Fate ultimately had in store for him, and the choices involved. Could Achilles have really packed up his 2,500 Myrmidon warriors and sailed back home in his 50 'black-hulled' ships to a peaceful and quiet obscurity? Could he have left without avenging the death of his beloved friend, Patroclus? Alexander is compelling as she lays out the case that Achilles was able to, as Homer alludes to in the poem, sort through the pros and cons of what faced him, and was able to 'make peace' with himself. Alexander, I think, believes that it was through Achilles reaching a resolution to these issues that freed him to fully embrace the warrior ethos of his time and meet his destiny and fate with honor and integrity--on the battlefield, or late at night in the parley with the Trojan king, Priam. Maybe the great Lycian warrior, Sarpedon, a Trojan ally said it best in describing the warrior's code when he tells his friend, Glaukos--

"Man, supposing you and I, escaping this battle,
would be able to live on forever, ageless, immortal,
so neither would I myself go on fighting in the foremost
nor would I urge you into fighting where men win glory.
But now, seeing that the spirits of death stand close about us
in their thousands, no man can turn aside nor escape them,
let us go on and win glory for ourselves, or yield it to others."

That's powerful stuff, and this is a very powerful book that Caroline Alexander has written. She's right too. This book is about "...what the Iliad is about; this book is about what the Iliad says of war." The War That Killed Achilles is a wonderful complement to a reading of Homer's The Iliad, and gets a solid 4/5 stars from me.

The War That Killed Achilles
By Caroline Alexander
Viking, 296 pp., 2009.

***

A Poem for the Day: "Autumn in King's Hintock Park" by Thomas Hardy

2011-10-21T21:11:00.000-07:00

Staying with my fall theme, I'm sharing a favorite poem of mine by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). This is from his collection of poems entitled, Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses first published in 1901. I know I've said this before, but I really want to recommend Hardy's poetry to you. He wrote nearly 1,000 poems, and there are very, very few that don't measure up. This particular poem very much reminds me of one of my favorite Hardy novels, The Woodlanders (1887). If you're at all interested in this novel, and I hope you will be, I encourage you to take a look at my review here. The painting that accompanies the poem is entitled, Avenue of Poplars in Autumn, and was painted by Vincent van Gogh in 1884 (just three years before Hardy published The Woodlanders).

Autumn in King's Hintock Park

Here by the baring bough
   Raking up leaves,
Often I ponder how
   Springtime deceives,--
I, an old woman now,
   Raking up leaves.

Here in the avenue
   Raking up leaves,
Lords' ladies pass in view,
   Until one heaves
Sighs at life's russet hue,
   Raking up leaves!

Just as my shape you see
   Raking up leaves,
I saw, when fresh and free,
   Those memory weaves
Into grey ghosts by me,
   Raking up leaves.

Yet, Dear, though one may sigh,
   Raking up leaves,
New leaves will dance on high--
   Earth never grieves!--
Will not, when missed am I
   Raking up leaves.

(From Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses, 1901)

***

"The Iliad" Redux--Which Translation?

2011-10-20T22:35:00.000-07:00

I know, I know, you're probably getting mighty tired of my postings on The Iliad by now. I'm almost done, I promise. I only have one major translation left to read, and I'm not getting to it until early next week while I'm on a three-day business trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Having said that though, I thought I'd spend some time putting together a posting that compares and contrasts the translations that I have read, and also provide some suggestions for some pleasurable side reading. This information may prove useful to readers who want to tackle Homer's epic poem, and are wondering which translation to read. It may also be interesting to those who've read The Iliad and are considering reading a different translation at some point in time. I am going to list the translations that I've read organized by date of translation and/or publication.

Richmond Lattimore (1951)--

This is, of the modern translations, probably the most classical, formal, and elegant rendition. Lattimore uses what he calls a "free six-beat line" in his verse translation of Homer's dactylic hexameter verse of the original Greek. Based upon all that I've read about these translations, Lattimore was ruthlessly faithful to the Greek spellings of places and names, and utilization of the formal epithets (e.g., "grey-eyed" for Athena, or "father of gods" for Zeus, etc.) when describing the cast-of-characters. It is colorful and incredibly descriptive stuff to read. If you love Homer, and specifically The Iliad, Lattimore's poetic interpretation is one that you should eventually read. It is the 'Elder Big Brother' of modern 20th century Iliads.

Robert Fitzgerald (1974)--

Fitzgerald's translation reads easier, in my opinion, than Lattimore's. This is a qualitative statement on my part, and is probably more a function of the kind of reader that I am these days. Fitzgerald also doesn't include all of the repetition that the original Greek text has, as this is really a relict of The Iliad's oral tradition. Fitzgerald chose blank verse as the meter for his translation, and it really does seem to correspond better to the dactylic hexameter of the Greek than using English hexameter or rhymed verse. While Fitzgerald's blank verse reads very, very well, it still manages to sound traditional and is not flamboyant at all--it is simply good poetry. I have to say that 'at the end of the day' I really enjoyed the Fitzgerald translation.

Robert Fagles (1990)--

The translation of The Iliad by Robert Fagles was the first one that I read cover-to-cover, and it really was a life-altering experience, and the beginning of my love-affair with Homer and all-things 'Iliadic'. Fagles believed in the performance-driven aspects of The Iliad, and he did his very best to emphasize this element with his translation. Fagles did a terrific job at translating the Greek into his lines of verse that maintain a lyrical and rhythmic five or six beats per line while maintaining a very sensible and readable text. As I read his translation I found myself completely caught up in the beauty of the mythology, and fully able to experience the pathos, drama, and tragedy of this great story. I have to say that by the time I was finished with this translation, my overall reading experience was something approaching the sublime. I guess I'll probably always be partial to Fagles' translation as 'it was my first'. Finally, I should note that the Introduction to the Fagles translation was written by Bernard Knox and is simply magnificent in its own right and a 'must-read' for any reader of Homer and The Iliad.

Stanley Lombardo (1997)--

Lombardo's translation was fun to read! Apparently, Lombardo is very interested in restoring the oral tradition associated with people experiencing Homer and The Iliad and The Odyssey. His translations very much lend themselves to being read aloud and hearing (and even feeling) the lyricism and rhythms of the words and verse. In fact, it is my understanding that Lombardo does performances of various books of The Iliad on the stage for audiences (would I ever love to attend one of these!). Frankly, Lombardo's translation begs to be read aloud and shared with others. Trust me, it works in a similar fashion for the reader reading it alone too--it is a performance on every page!

I also really liked how Lombardo inset and italicized the similes in the poem (and there's gobs of 'em). It makes it so much easier for the reader to relate each simile to section of the poem it applies to. It was really quite clever (and makes it ever so much easier when reading aloud). Lombardo is a firm believer that The Iliad is a living poem (after all, it has been translated into English approximately 150 times since the 17th century!), and that "living poetry means living speech". I completely agree. For new readers, or readers who might be unsure of whether they'd like The Iliad, this might be a great translation to start with. If you're an Iliad junkie, like me, you ought to read it too. Lombardo's translation is powerful and relevant.

Stephen Mitchell (2011)--

Stay tuned! I do plan to provide a review of Mitchell's new translation (October 2011) some time in the next couple of weeks. I have it sitting on the TBR shelf right now, and I plan on starting it early next week while on my business trip. Apparently, Mitchell has utilized a relatively recent reworking of the Greek text by the scholar, Martin West. If you're interested in this new translation by Stephen Mitchell, you can read about it in an earlier posting of mine here. I'm pretty excited to read this and compare and contrast it with the other versions I've read. It should be really interesting.

Bonus Material--

If you read The Iliad, any of the translations referenced above, or others, I also strongly recommend that you consider picking up the following books. I think they'll add significantly to your overall experience with Homer and his epic poem.

The Odyssey--Obviously, if you've read The Iliad, you probably ought to go ahead and read The Odyssey. All of the translators referenced above have translations of The Odyssey, with exception of Stephen Mitchell, and he's working on his rendition even as I write.

Ransom--This little book by Australian writer, David Malouf, is seriously one of the most gorgeous works of fiction I've ever encountered. It focuses and expands upon events occurring in the last three or four books of The Iliad. It is hauntingly beautiful and powerful prose that borders on poetic for much of the time. If you're interested in Malouf's novel, you can check out my review here.

War Music, All Day Permanent Red, and Cold Calls--These little books of poetry by British poet, Christopher Logue, are his retelling of significant portions of The Iliad and are not to be missed. Once you've read The Iliad, dip into War Music and prepare to be 'gobsmacked' up side the head! If you're interested in Logue's poetry, have a look at my posting here.

The War That Killed Achilles--This non-fiction book by Caroline Alexander (2009) is superb, and places Homer's epic poem in historical context. It is just over 200 pages, and is extremely well written. I am so glad that I read this as it really shed a lot of light on the events associated with the Trojan War, as well as the psychology of the major players.

A Brief Iliadic Glossary--

Some interesting words and definitions that I've encountered during my reads:

androktasia = combat death description (these abound within The Iliad)

aristeia = display of martial prowess (e.g., Book 5 is the aristeia of Diomedes)

eris = refers to 'strife between heroes' (mortal or immortal)

teichoskopia = viewing from the walls (refers to Helen and Priam up on the walls of Troy looking down on the Greek commanders)

***

A Poem for the Day: "To Autumn" by John Keats

2011-10-17T21:39:00.000-07:00

To Autumn

    SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

    (September 19, 1819)

    ***

This is thought to be the most anthologized poem in the English language, and I can certainly see why. It is a beautiful portrait of the fall season. John Keats (1795-1821) wrote this poem in Winchester in mid-September 1819, and in a letter to his friend, J.H. Reynolds, on September 21st, he said--

"How beautiful the season is now--How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather--Dian skies--I never lik'd stubble fields so much as now--Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm--in the same way that some pictures look warm--this struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it..."

(Letters of John Keats. A Selection, ed. Robert Gittings, 1970)

A lot of folks have interpreted this poem as an allegory of artistic creation, a meditation on death, or even some form of political statement; and maybe it is all of those things, I really don't know. I just know that it is an absolutely beautiful poem that is pretty much perfectly constructed. It is an example, in my humble opinion, of Keats' consummate skill in achieving poetic perfection in writing odes. These three stanzas, each with eleven lines (versus the 'normal' ten lines), written in iambic pentameter, with a pair of rhyming couplets in each stanza just above the last line. This is just classic from start to finish. Read it a couple of times slowly. Even better, read it aloud to yourself and fully experience the lyricism and rhythms. You'll get it, and all of the sudden you'll determine that you want to read more of Keats' poetry. You won't be disappointed, I promise.

The photograph I've attached to this posting is one I took a couple of years ago on a late-fall afternoon outside of Lincoln, Nebraska. This photograph of the recently harvested Nebraska corn-field reminds me of the light of "..the soft-dying day..." touching "...the stubble-plains with rosy hue..." that Keats described so eloquently in this poem. If you like, please do 'click' on the photograph for a larger view. Enjoy the photograph and the poem!

Inquiring Minds Want to Know--Your Current Top-Ten Greatest Works of Literature?

2011-10-13T13:47:00.000-07:00

A couple of times a year I make a list in my journal. I ask myself the following question--

"If I had to list my top-ten greatest works of literature of all time right now, what would they be?"

Obviously, this list morphs and changes over time as I continue to discover and read books that are new to me. Interestingly enough though, there are a couple of stalwart hangers-on that have continued to occupy spots on my list. So, what's on my list at this particular moment? Well, here 'tis--

The Iliad, by Homer
The Oresteia, by Aeschylus
Beowulf, by Anonymous
Complete Poems, John Keats
Villette, by Charlotte Bronte
Middlemarch, by George Eliot
Complete Poems, Emily Dickinson
The Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy
Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier

Okay, there's my list. I'll even share a little 'blurb' about each book telling you why it made my list, and why I hope you'll pick it up and give it a go sometime yourself.

The Iliad--More than three-thousand years old, these sixteen-thousand lines of poetry lyrically tell the greatest story ever told; and, at the same time, it is also quite possibly the greatest anti-war testament to be found in the canon of the world's greatest literature. Spell-binding and compelling from start-to-finish, this epic poem by the itinerant bard, Homer, is a 'must-read' for any serious reader. I highly recommend the translations of Robert Fagles (1990), Robert Fitzgerald (1974), and Richmond Lattimore (1951). I am reading a translation by Stanley Lombardo (1997) that completely lends itself to the oral tradition of Homer, as Lombardo has created an interpretation that is meant to be recited aloud and listened to. I have Stephen Mitchell's brand-new translation sitting on the shelf waiting for me too. Stay tuned!

The Oresteia--This trilogy of tragic plays by Aeschylus was first performed over 2,500 years ago in an outdoor amphitheater near Athens. While it is something bordering on near-miraculous that it has survived nearly three millenia--the only surviving trilogy from antiquity--what is of even more import is what these plays say and what they document and may have set in motion for all of civilization. These plays recount the grim and dark tragedy of the ancient Greek House of Atreus, and the shift from the "Code of Blood Vendetta, or Vengeance" to the "Rule of Law," introducing the new concept of a trial by jury and pronouncement of judgment and justice. This is nothing short of monumental, and simply must be experienced. I highly recommend the translations of The Oresteia by Robert Fagles (1977), Ted Hughes (1999), and Alan Shapiro and Peter Burian (2003), and while I've not yet read it, I hear that the translation by Peter Meineck (1997) is superb as well.

Beowulf--This was incredible! Beowulf is an epic poem of nearly 3,200 lines that was first written down in old Anglo-Saxon--the 'Mother-Tongue' of English--about 1,300 years ago. I have only read the Irish poet, Seamus Heaney's, translation (2000) and it is spare, sparse, and gritty, and is presented side-by-side with Anglo-Saxon original. The plot of this elegiac poem was absolutely epic. The horror of Grendel and his Dam was palpable; and the heroism of Beowulf and his spear-fellows timeless. Finally, the ability to carefully study Heaney's translation, alliteration, and interpretation of the poem and then to be able to compare it to the old Anglo-Saxon bordered on surrealistic.

Complete Poems of John Keats--In my opinion, Keats was the "Bright Star" among all of the poets of the Ages. I weep when I think of what the world lost when John Keats died of tuberculosis at the age of 26 on February 23, 1821, in Rome. This poetic giant left humanity with a treasure of the likes of Hyperion, The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci, Ode to Psyche, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Lamia, Endymion, and The Fall of Hyperion, and a significant number of other breathtakingly beautiful poems . It somehow comforts me to imagine Keats, even now, scribbling away in poetic fervor, in the "western halls of gold" with Apollo, his voice joined with that of the nine Muses, and "We listen here on earth:/The dying tones that fill the air,/And charm the ear of evening fair." Read Keats, and prepare to be left breathless, but, oh, ever so alive!

Villette--My short letter to Miss Charlotte Bronte upon finishing my first reading of her profoundly powerful last novel, Villette:

'This novel, this Villette, like an arrow fletched fair, flew true, oh so true, and pierced your beating heart; and from that mortal wound poured the secrets of your soul, your inner-most being; laid bare for all to see. The incalculable loss of your older sisters, then Branwell, your dearest Emily, and finally quiet little Anne. This towering testament to loneliness, to sorrow, swept me, your Reader, relentlessly through the unimagined torrent of your human emotions—your grief, your fears, your reserved passion, your quiet grace, steadfast loyalty, and your resolute strength and faith.

I felt guilty as I read, Miss Charlotte, looking over my shoulder at every pause; afraid that you should somehow find me picking the lock of your secret diary; spellbound as I turned the pages, one after the other, reading your most intimate, personal, and painful thoughts and the passionate feelings that poured forth onto the page. Intensely captivated by the dialog between your Passion and your Reason, the conversations between your Imagination and your Matter; but I read on. Until it simply became too much; I averted my eyes, and I wept.'

With each re-read, I find that this novel still affects me on a personal and an emotional level like no other work of fiction I've encountered to date. Read Villette.

Middlemarch--At first blush, one has this sense of simply being immersed in a rather quiet and pastoral story, but there's really very much more going on here as one turns the pages.It is a story of rural England during the period of great reforms in politics, religion, agriculture, manufacturing, medicine, and even transportation. Mostly though, it is the story of human beings, and what it means to be human.

This is a stately, sedate, sophisticated, and complexly elegant novel. It really does demand the reader's full dedication and attention as it is read too, much like I found when I read her last novel Daniel Deronda. Boy, was it ever worth the extra effort though. When I finished reading this novel, for the first time earlier this fall, I realized that I had arrived at a point in my reading and comprehension that I finally understood what Virginia Woolf meant as she described Middlemarch as "...one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."

Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson--My description of Dickinson and her work that I used in an earlier blog post (here) is still pretty much spot-on. Emily Dickinson, the 'Belle of Amherst,' may have been quiet and even painfully shy, but there was a nuclear reactor's worth of power contained within this woman's genius that was able, through her brilliant use of a few simple joined and arranged words, to create a body of work of nearly 1,800 poems that perfectly pulsate and throb with the essence of Life. As a companion to Dickinson's The Complete Poems, I highly recommend Helen Vendler's Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (2010), in which she showcases Dickinson's "...startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention." All I can say is that Dickinson's poetry has resonated and stayed with me my entire life!

The Return of the Native--As many of you know, I love the novels and poetry of Thomas Hardy, and one of my very favorite Hardy novels is The Return of the Native. The novel contains more than a superficial nod to the great choric scenes of the Greek tragedies, as well as the gatherings of commoners like many of Shakespeare's dramas. The novel's primary characters are locked together in a tale of passion, drama, pathos, and tragedy where, in typical Hardyan fashion, only Fate, Chance, and Irony exert any control whatsoever. Like a moth is drawn to a flame, the reader is inexorably drawn into the tale, and recognizes with growing horror that full release can only be attained through reaching and experiencing the novel's shocking climax. The lyrical descriptions of the environment, the role of the humans in it, and the interactions between the characters quite reminds me of the great modern American novelist, Cormac McCarthy (the next author on my list!). The Return of the Native is Hardy's Naturalism at its finest; and becomes an almost poetic homage to the interaction of the human species with one another as well as with the Earth Mother herself.

Blood Meridian--This ain't an easy book to read. This is an uber-violent novel that paints a picture of the west like something done by Hieronymus Bosch. I think Harold Bloom got it exactly right when he said,

"The violence is the book. The Judge [Holden] is the book, and the Judge is, short of Moby-Dick, the most monstrous apparition in all of American literature. The Judge is violence incarnate. The Judge stands for incessant warfare for its own sake."

All I can tell you is that I have read this novel several times, and each time I find myself somewhat ensorcelled, and in an almost evil or grimly terrifying sort of way, as I turn the pages. It may be the bildungsroman of 'The Kid' and his adventures, but there is absolutely nothing nostalgic or romantic about the American West that McCarthy paints in this novel. Somehow though, I think this novel is incredibly important, and only Cormac McCarthy could have written it.

Cold Mountain--With this novel I have come full circle with my list and return to Homer, if you will. I completely agree with the widely held opinion that Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is the American Odyssey. This is an extraordinarily beautifully written novel that tells the story of Inman, a Confederate soldier, who is physically and psychologically worn out from the horrific combat of the American Civil War, and undertakes a trek back to his home in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina. Frazier's ability to connect the reader with Inman, the people he encounters, and the environment through which he travels is amazing, and it is accomplished through some of the most poetic and lyrical prose I've read in a long, long time. Simply put, this is just a gorgeous novel to read, and it fully deserved the National Book Award for Fiction that it received in 1997.

Well, there it is. My current list of my top-ten favorite works of literature, and why I chose them. Have you read any, or all, of these books? If so, what did you think of them? Also, the bibliophile (and 'list-maker') in me is very interested in your top-ten list. I'd love for you to leave me a comment with the list of your top-ten favorite great books.

My 100th Posting!

2011-10-09T15:02:00.000-07:00

This is my 100th posting to ProSe! It seems hard to believe, at least to me, but I've been adding to this blog since August 2009. I thought it might be worthwhile to spend a moment or two and look retrospectively at what I've done and ask myself several questions--

First, am I still being faithful to my original intent in creating this on-line 'writer's and reader's notebook'?

Yeah, I generally think I am. I started ProSe because I wanted a place to journal about and discuss the great literature that I was reading. If anything, I think that through my own use of this blog, and my interactions with other book-bloggers and readers, I have actually become a better writer, reader, and much more adept at critical thinking. So, in retrospect, whilst the blog has matured, so have I as a reader and a thinker. Those are very good things.

Secondly, what could (should) I do to improve the overall quality of ProSe, and my own personal on-line blogging experience?

At first blush, the obvious answer is to participate more consistently week-in, and week out. When I look at my record of posts, it is a record of fits-and-starts. I'll be really active for a few weeks, even a few months, and then I'll kind of go on an extended 'vacation' for two or three months. I think I need to become a more disciplined writer and actually make the extra effort to maintain my on-line 'writer's journal,' i.e., this blog. Hey, I don't ever stop reading great books for weeks or months on end, so why stop writing about them? As I said above, maintaining ProSe has made me a more complete writer and reader.

I think another area in which I can improve is to make more of an effort to link subjects, topics, and discussions that I feature on ProSe with similar topics and discussions that I encounter among all of the rest of you. It never ceases but to fascinate me when I encounter postings from other bloggers that are reading, or have just read, the same books that I am reading or just finished. It is so cool to be able to read your experiences while still mulling over my own. So, I think making more of an effort to bring your pertinent thoughts and observations into the discussion and connecting them with my own can only continue to make me a better reader and critical thinker. Also, I would be remiss in not pointing out that it has been through my interactions with all of my fellow book-bloggers that I have been regularly turned on to some really terrific books over the past couple of years. Thank you, my friends!

Thirdly, and this is a rhetorical question, why is it that postings about poetry are almost universally ignored?

Now, I am sure that this a gross over-generalization, but it seems to me that 99.99% of all the postings associated with literature that I am encountering on-line are about fiction and non-fiction books, and virtually nothing is being posted about poetry. As most of you are aware, poetry is probably my favorite literary art-form, followed by fiction. Part of my rationale for creating ProSe was to give me a forum to post and discuss some of my favorite poets and their works. I am always somewhat amused though at just how little attention these poetry postings of mine receive. I think there are only two conclusions that I can draw from this: (1) I am a terrible presenter and that my scribblings about poets and poetry are about as boring as watching paint dry; or (2) poetry is just not something that most readers are interested in these days. Let me qualify that last observation by saying that I am most certainly not casting any aspersions, nor am I being judgmental. It is what it is. Rest assured, I plan to continue postings here that involve and feature poets and poetry, as it is a very near and dear art form to me.

Finally, I would like to invite all of you to grade ProSe and my performance as a blogger. Are there particular things you'd like to see me change, or include?

Well, there it is--my 100th posting. Personally, I'm proud of myself, and I'm proud of what ProSe has become over the past 26 months that I have been blogging. This is the dawn of a new phase for me as an on-line writer, as a reader, and for ProSe, and I am hopeful that my next 100 postings will continue to show the growth in my writing, reading and critical thinking. I also want all of you to know just how inspiring you have been, and continue to be, to me. I have made some wonderful new friends, and found many, many of you that share many of the same interests that I do. As I move forward into the future I am very much enjoying the ride, and hope that some of you will continue to join me. Cheers!

P.S. The photograph I've included with this posting is one I took at dawn on the shores of beautiful Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park in northwestern Montana. I spent a lovely morning there with my wife and oldest daughter a few years back, and looking at it always brings back such great memories. Please feel free to 'click' on it for a much larger view.

A Poem for the Day: Fragments from Antiquity

2011-10-08T15:10:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd share some of the bits of this and that that I've encountered in the course of my reading recently. I maintain a writer's journal, of sorts, where I jot down nifty things that I encounter in the books that I'm reading, and looking at it this morning I thought that posting some of these might be of interest, and even inspiring, to some of you. All of the 'fragments' included here come from the various plays of the ancient Greek classicists that I've been studying of late.

First, I want to share some lines from Aeschylus' Agamemnon (first performed in 458 B.C.), the first play in the the great trilogy we know as The Oresteia. The following lines have stuck with me for much of my life, and I always search them out in each new translation of The Oresteia that I encounter. These were the words spoken by Robert F. Kennedy upon hearing of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968--

"For it was Zeus who set
men on the path to wisdom
when he decreed the fixed
law that suffering
alone shall be their teacher.
Even in sleep pain drips
down through the heart as fear,
all night, as memory.
We learn unwillingly.
From the high bench of the gods
by violence, it seems, grace comes."

[Agamemnon, Lines 200-210, translation by Burian and Shapiro, 2003]

And here are the same lines translated and interpreted by the late-British Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, from his brilliant The Oresteia: A New Translation (1999)--

"I call God Zeus
And Zeus, or the greater one
Who wears Zeus like a mask for man to imagine,
Has given man this law:
The truth
Has to be melted out of our stubborn lives
By suffering
Nothing speaks the truth,
Nothing tells us how things really are,
Nothing forces us to know
What we do not want to know
Except pain.
And this is how the gods declare their love.
Truth comes with pain."

[Agamemnon, Ted Hughes, 1999]

No pun intended, but I do believe that there's a lot of truth in these words, unfortunately. I love the classical elegance of the Burian/Shapiro translation, but marvel at the power and visceral directness of the Hughes translation. They both speak to me on a very emotional level. Which do you prefer?

Now, staying with the theme of The Oresteia and the House of Atreus, I would like to share a few lines from Anne Carson's amazing translation of Sophocles' powerful play, Elektra (written between 440-420 B.C.?). These nine lines are the response of the Chorus to Elektra's palpable and heartfelt grief and anger over the murder of her father, Agamemnon, by her mother, Clytemnestra--

"Not from Hades' black and universal lake
can you lift him.
Not by groaning, not by prayers.
Yet you run yourself out
in a grief with no cure,
no time limit, no measure.
It is a knot no one can untie.
Why are you so in love with
things unbearable?"

[Elektra, Lines 186-193, translated by Anne Carson, 2009]

While it may seem almost unfathomable to others (like the Chorus here), I think we all have either felt grief that is so all-encompassing and consuming, or know of those close to us who've experienced it, and the only cure is simply the passage of time and compassion from our fellow humans. Carson's words caution us against being completely and utterly consumed by grief.

Okay, it is time to pick up the tone, and move out of the 'shade' over to the 'sunny side of the street.' I want to share some beautiful lines of poetry from Euripides' moving play, Ion (probably written between 412-410 B.C.). Ion, simply put, is the story about a mother and her son (and so much more, but that's for another posting...Note to Self). This first bit is timeless, and something we can all relate to--

"Let the oracle be straight and clear
We've waited so long
For the great gift--Children

Lush endless happiness
Belongs to those who see
Shining in their children
Golden generations yet to come"

[Ion, Lines 456-462, translated by Di Piero and Burian, 1996]

Or this next simple, but ever so effective, little 'ode to joy' from Kreousa as she is reunited with her long-lost son, Ion--

"To heaven's bright unfolding,
my joy sings,
shouts high and far.
Joy I never imagined--
Where does it come from?"

[Ion, Lines 1398-1402, translated by Di Piero and Burian, 1996]

Isn't that just beautiful? It is spare, minimalist, and almost reminds me of something done in Haiku--but we all know, from reading those few words, that Kreousa is full of joy!

And I want to close with the last lines from Euripides' Ion, because I think it circles around and addresses what Aeschylus was talking about in our first fragments above, but with a more upbeat take-home message--

"Goodbye, Apollo, Son of Leto and Zeus.
Now we have learned to give the gods their due
and to take heart when we're driven by disaster.
In the end, the good get what's good.
The bad, by nature, get what's bad."

[Ion, Lines 1588-1592, translated by Di Piero and Burian, 1996]

I think what I love the most about reading these plays is the joy of discovering all of this amazing poetry! Sometimes I wish that I could read these lines in the original Greek, but for now I must rely upon the expertise and talents of the translators to do their best in preserving and interpreting the author's original intent as well as the aesthetics of the work as a whole. For these reasons, perhaps the job of translator is even more difficult than that of author, I don't know. I do know though that, for me, a new translation is much like a box of chocolates--you never quite know what you have until you've opened it and read it. Some you just like better than others, and others just miss the mark entirely. I now spend a lot of time researching various translations of works that I am interested in acquiring. Using all of the book reviews of my fellow book-bloggers, and the reviews and discussions I access via my on-line book groups (i.e., Goodreads and Shelfari) has really allowed me to hone in on the right editions to purchase and read. In fact, I think it is fair to say that most of what I'm reading these days (and for the past few years) is a direct result of my daily interactions with all of you, and for that I'll always be eternally grateful!

Literary Blog Hop, October 6-9, 2011

2011-10-06T12:40:00.000-07:00

The "Literary Blog Hop" is a monthly feature of the ladies over at The Blue Bookcase. This month's question comes from The Reading Life and is--

"If you could invite any three literary figures from different eras to Sunday dinner who would they be?"

What a great question! The first thing that immediately came to mind was that this reminded me of that wonderful quotation from Virginia Woolf--

"Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?"

Well, okay, since Keats and Austen already have invitations to Ms. Woolf's party, I can't very well invite them to mine. Who would I invite? Hmm, decisions...

My Guest List--

Homer. Yes, the Homer of The Iliad and The Odyssey fame. That itinerant blind bard of ancient Greece that left the world some of the greatest stories ever told as the epic poetry that has been translated into so many languages and read and marveled over for nearly three millenia. I'd love to learn more about his story-telling and the bardic oral tradition that ultimately resulted in these tales becoming such a significant part of the Human literary legacy.

Emily Dickinson. The 'Belle of Amherst' may have been quiet and even painfully shy, but there was a nuclear reactor's worth of power contained within this woman's genius that was able to, through the use of a few simple joined words, create a body of nearly 1,800 poems that perfectly pulsate and throb with Life and showcase, as Helen Vendler puts it, Dickinson's "...startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention." This little woman's poetry has resonated and stayed with me my entire life!

Anne Carson. My third dinner guest would just have to be the Canadian poet and translator, Anne Carson. While I have only read Carson's translations of Aeschylus (Agamemnon), Sophocles (Elektra), and Euripides (Orestes) imaginatively conflated into her An Oresteia (Faber & Faber, 2010). Her interpretation is modern, lyrical, and quite powerful. To me, Carson's Agamemnon is bleak, dark, and sinister; and one can't help but be astounded with the power and rage exhibited by Klytaimestra and the penetratingly prophetic and haunting voice of Kassandra. I want very much to read Carson's translations and thoughts on the fragments of poetry by the ancient Greek female poet, Sappho, as well as Carson's own volume of poetry entitled, Glass, Irony and God (1995). I love her voice, it just speaks to me. From my own contemporary perspective, Carson is up there in the exalted 'thin air' with the likes of A.S. Byatt and Margaret Atwood.

Although not specifically asked for, my fourth dinner guest would be my oldest daughter who is finishing up her Ph.D. in English at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, Nebraska. She is a brilliant, independent-minded woman with great ideas and a tremendous future ahead of her. Now, I think I'll just serve the meal, pour the wine and sit back and enjoy the conversations. Check back with me in a few hours.

Review: "The Greek Myths--Complete Edition" by Robert Graves

2011-10-03T13:22:00.000-07:00

If you plan to read Homer's The Iliad or The Odyssey, or any of the great plays of the Greek classicists, I have a suggestion for a book that will prove to be indispensable to you on your journey through these great works of literature. Robert Graves (1895-1985), the British poet, translator and novelist, produced some 140 works. He is probably best known for his novel, I Claudius, and his historical study of poetic inspiration, The White Goddess. In the late-1950s, he also completed a two-volume compilation and analysis of Greek mythology. In this posting, I am reviewing the 1992 Penguin soft-cover edition entitled, The Greek Myths--Complete Edition. It is encyclopedic in content, organization and structure, as well as size as it is nearly 800 pages in length. It is my humble opinion that this really may be the very best desk reference on Greek mythology that is available. I did quite a lot of research, on-line and in the bookstores, before I made the decision to buy a copy of Graves' book, and I really couldn't be more satisfied.

Graves starts off, rightly so, with the early Pelasgian creation myths that tell the stories of the creation of the Universe, the Titans, Titanesses, and the first man, Pelasgus. Graves compares the early Pelasgian creation myths with the later Homeric, Orphic, and Olympian creation myths, and from there the reader is 'off to the races.' Graves takes each myth--from the Creation through Odysseus' homecoming at the end of The Odyssey--and provides a synopsis of all of the variations, includes a comprehensive set of bibliographic citations associated with the source(s) for each myth and its variations, and then follows that up with detailed set of explanatory notes and comments. Frankly, it is just this organizational structure that makes this book priceless, in my opinion. Now, does the book lend itself to sitting down and reading it straight through, cover-to-cover? No, not particularly. I did, but then I wanted to read each myth--all 171 of them--as some of them I wasn't familiar with at all. Having done that though, I can honestly say that I am completely convinced that Graves' organizational scheme in this reference book is nothing short of brilliant. I am also completely comfortable navigating my way around the book, starting from either the table of contents or index, reading the actual myth(s), the source citations, and then exploring Graves' notes and comments. In summation, I'd say that Graves has taken a scholarly approach in his presentation of the myths, documenting sources, and with his explanatory notes and commentary. Having said that though, I also maintain that this is still an enjoyable and eminently readable book, and one that you could pick up and open to any page and start reading and just lose yourself for an hour or two.

There's another fascinating aspect of this work that I want to highlight. While Graves, in this volume, has collected and compiled the myths and stories of the ancient Greeks, he is obviously very interested in the genesis and spread of these myths through time and across cultural boundaries. Consequently, Graves spends a lot of time and commentary on an etymological analysis of words (no matter how arcane or archaic) in establishing relationships between, for example, some of the creation myths emanating from Sumer (e.g., the Epic of Gilgamesh), or the variations of similar myths found in Celtic regions of western Europe. This makes sense to me too; as peoples, with their customs, beliefs and ideas, were surely moving about and interacting with one another. Now, whether one buys into all of the notions put forth by Graves in his commentaries, I'll leave that up to each reader to make up his or her mind, but I think he's on to something here--like I said, it just seems to make sense.

I think that the myths of ancient Greece are important, and will continue to be. They are some of the foundational building blocks of much of the great literature, art, and music that we all love and appreciate today; and, as such, they are an important part of our cultural and spiritual heritage as human beings. They continue to provide artistic and philosophical inspiration to us in our lives, from the likes of John Keats' great poems Endymion and Lamia, or the Daphnis et Chloe ballet musical score by Maurice Ravel, to modern graphical renditions of Agamemnon's murder at the hands of his wife Clytemnestra while in his bath, such as that by 'baudelaire999' at left. Graves' The Greek Myths--Complete Edition will help you make sense of these daily encounters with Greek mythology, and I hope will leave you looking for more. I highly recommend having a copy of Graves' book on your bookshelf, right next to your dictionary, thesaurus, style guides, and poetry anthologies. Its a keeper! As the inveterate bibliophile that I am, I am now on the lookout for a hardbound copy of this wonderful book in two volumes, as it was originally published.

A Poem for the Day: An Excerpt from Euripides' "Ion"

2011-10-03T09:07:00.000-07:00

As you rise early some morning while it is still dark out, go outside and sit quietly in your favorite spot and as the dawn comes you might have a moment like this--

"Dawn's gleaming horses raise
the blazing sun above the earth
up through air steeped in fire
where light on light routs
the faint lingering stars
into the sacred dark.

The peaks of Parnassos, untrodden,
flare, smolder, and take for us
this day's charge of sun.
Smoke of desert myrrh
rises to the rooftop,
shrine of bright Apollo.

Inside, the priestess sits,
at the sacred tripod,
crying to the Greeks
songs Apollo murmurs in her."

Ion (Lines 71-86), by Euripides, translated by W.S. Di Piero, 1996, included in The Complete Euripides: Volume III--Hippolytos and Other Plays, Oxford University Press, 2010.

***

Isn't this just lovely? This bit of poetry is Lines 71-86 from Euripides' play Ion that was written between 412 and 410 B.C. The lines are spoken by Ion, a temple servant in the Temple of Apollo in Athens. Ion turns out to be the son of Apollo and the Athenian queen, Kreousa. She abandoned the infant child after his birth, and he was spirited off by Apollo and placed in the temple. There's much more to the story, as one can imagine, but I just wanted to share these beautiful lines about the dawning of a new day.

Post Script--

The photograph I've attached is one I took a couple of years ago just before dawn at Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park. The polygonal structures in the foreground are a closeup of the thick crust of salt that covers this basin which is some 282 feet below sea-level. Truly a weirdly beautiful landscape. Please feel free to click on the photograph for a larger view.

Theater Review: "Trojan Women (After Euripides)"

2011-10-02T12:16:00.000-07:00

In a posting on September 25th, I mentioned that my wife, Susan, and I were going to be attending a performance of Euripides' Trojan Women by the SITI Company at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California, on October 1, 2011. It is my opinion that there may not be a better outdoor venue for the staging and production of classic theater anywhere in the United States.

In 1954, J. Paul Getty opened the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Malibu site. Once the new Getty Museum was opened in 1997 in the Sepulveda Pass, the Getty Villa in Malibu was then completely renovated and ultimately reopened to the public in 2006. It now houses the Getty's antiquities collections of arts associated with the cultures of ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria. The Villa itself is modeled after the Villa dei Papiri, a Roman country house in Herculaneum that was buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. I have to say that if you're in the Los Angeles area, I strongly recommend that you visit the main Getty Museum, the Getty Villa in Malibu, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). These really are three of the best museums in the country, in my opinion.

On the property of the Getty Villa is the Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater. It is an outdoor amphitheater just like those found among the ruins of the cities and towns of ancient Greece. Each fall (typically September and early-October), the Getty Villa stages performances of classic theater in this amphitheater. For example, recent classical performances have included productions of Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Elektra, Euripides' Hippolytos, and Aristophanes' Peace. For its fall performance in 2012, the Getty is scheduled to put on Euripides' rarely performed play, Helen.

In preparation for seeing the play, I did take the opportunity to read a recent translation and discuss it with Susan. I chose to read the translation by Alan Shapiro that is included in The Complete Euripides: Volume I--Trojan Women and Other Plays (Oxford University Press, 2010). This is a powerful, hard-hitting and relentless tragedy that essentially forces the reader to acknowledge the absolute devastation of war and its utter futility.

In a nutshell, the plot of Trojan Women is as follows--

The Trojan War is over, the Trojans have been defeated and the Greeks are victorious. All that remains for the Greeks is to load up the booty of war, raze the city to the ground, and sail for home. Part of the 'booty' to be divvied up are the Trojan royal women, including the Trojan Queen Hecuba, and her daughters, Cassandra and Polyxena; Hector's wife, Andromache; and Paris' concubine, Helen (formerly the wife of Menelaus, one of the Greek chieftains). The play covers the few hours of time as these women come to realize the full extent of the devastation that has been visited upon them and their beloved Troy, and as they learn what is to become of them as they 'farmed' out to the various Greek commanders. Hecuba starts the play with a long lamentation, almost an ode to grief as she recounts the death of King Priam, the death of all of her sons, and the sack of Troy--and it just gets worse and more tragic from here.

We find out that Hecuba's daughter, Cassandra, the virgin prophetess/priestess of Apollo, has been awarded as a concubine to Menelaus' brother, King Agamemnon of Argos; and that Andromache is to be given to Neoptolemus, Achilles' son; Hecuba's daughter, Polyxena has just been sacrificed on Achilles' tomb; and that Hecuba herself is to be given as a slave to serve Odysseus. We also learn that Helen--"the face that launched a thousand ships"--is to be returned to Sparta to meet her fate at the hands of her husband, Menelaus. The final insult comes near the end of the play when the young son of Hector and Andromache is taken and hurled from the walls of Troy by the Greeks--thus extinguishing the royal line of Priam and Troy. Hecuba now knows that even Hope itself is gone as she laments, "O child, O city--what's left to suffer? How much further/Can we fall into complete destruction?"

Last night was also the last performance of Trojan Women (After Euripides), and it was completely sold out. Susan and I headed down to the Getty Villa late in the afternoon. The weather was absolutely ideal too, with an evening temperature in the mid-70s. Our plan was to arrive early enough to have a nice dinner on the veranda overlooking the amphitheater and take in the ambiance, and then be able to select good seats for the performance. An added bonus was that while we were eating we were able to watch the actors and actresses come out onto the stage at the base of the amphitheater and practice their movements and warm up their voices.

The SITI Company's performance was directed by Anne Bogart, and used an adaptation of Euripides' play written by Jocelyn Clark. The ensemble's acting during the performance was simply magnificent! I especially wish to acknowledge the performance of Ellen Lauren in the role of Queen Hecuba. Hecuba is on the stage during the entire performance, and she delivered her lines with passion, emotion, drama and pathos. The pitch of her voice rose and fell with the tortured movements of her body as she delivered her lines and I was swept into the vortex of her lamentations, her overwhelming grief, and her palpable anger at the Greeks and her antipathy for Helen, whom she blamed for all that had befallen Troy and her family. Lauren's performance was just stunning--from start to finish!

The characters and roles of Cassandra, Andromache, and Helen were generally solidly performed; although I thought the character of Cassandra, played by Akiko Aizawa, was perhaps a little 'watered down', from that of Euripides' original. Cassandra's foretelling of what befalls the House of Atreus--as well as herself and Agamemnon--is so significant and emotionally powerful, and is the source of several other superb tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, as well as Euripides. Cassandra's prophetic lines in Euripides' play injects that note of utter horror at what is out there looming on the horizon for Agamemnon, his wife Clytemnestra, and their children Orestes and Elektra (and I highly recommend a reading of Aeschylus' The Oresteia for this horrifying story). I just didn't pick up on that as much in Clarke's adaptation as perhaps I would have liked. What worked really well in the performance though was the 'debate'--almost an indictment and trial, if you will--between Hecuba, Menelaus, and Helen. While Helen tried to foist the blame for all that has happened onto Aphrodite (the Goddess of Love), Paris, or even Hecuba herself, no one buys it. The only question that is not answered by this adaptation, or even in Euripides' original, is what does finally happen to Helen (and that is left for other plays).

There were a several very apparent and intriguing deviations from Euripides' original that Clarke introduced in his adaptation. The first was the use of Poseidon as a moving stage prop, if you will, during the entire performance. In the original play, Poseidon provides an introduction and tells the audience about his founding of Troy, helping to build the city, and his rage that the other gods and goddesses have all conspired against him to bring the city down. That was done here as well, but then Poseidon kind of lurks in the background, with an arm stretched out toward whichever woman happened to be speaking at the time. It almost seemed to make Poseidon appear impotent and incapable of doing anything--and maybe that it is precisely what Clarke was striving for here. Another deviation was that instead of Andromache giving up her son, Astyanax, to Talthybius (the Greek envoy, or Herald) to be hurled to his death from the walls, she smothers the infant to her breast and gives the little corpse to the Greeks to 'save' him from being killed at the hands of the Greeks. Hmm, I need to think on this for a while, maybe it worked, but maybe it didn't. Finally, Clarke's adaptation also included a role for Odysseus, who makes an entrance toward the end of the play, and makes pronouncements on behalf of the Greek commanders and kind of tidily wraps everything up. All in all, I think that this worked well, and reinforced the kind of casual and impersonal way that the Greeks approached the sack of Troy and enslavement of the women.

Both, Susan, and I unhesitatingly gave this performance 4 out of 5 stars. The acting was very, very good. Jocelyn Clarke's adaptation was bold and audacious, and I think mates up well with Euripides' original. The costuming was magnificent too; with the women in simple white gowns or robes, the Greek herald Talthybius is a black uniform like that of a SWAT policeman, and Menelaus and Odysseus in crisp, neatly tailored suits. The staging of the play on the portico of the Getty Villa and on the slate stage of the amphitheater was just exquisite and just added ever so much to our overall experience. While this play was written by Euripides in 415 B.C., and may have been written as a protest against Athenian militarism and hegemony during the Peloponnesian War, it still comes across as one of the great anti-war statements of all time. If you have the chance to see any production of Euripides' Trojan Women, I highly recommend that you avail yourself of the opportunity.

***

A Poem for the Day: An Excerpt from "All Day Permanent Red" by Christopher Logue

2011-09-29T21:21:00.000-07:00

Whoo-Whee! I have something new and definitely very, very different to share with all of my readers. As all of you know, I am still working my way through many of the classics of ancient Greece. The more I have read, the more I have discovered and realized that these ancient poems and plays are truly the foundation and building blocks of much of the great works of literature that we all read today.

These are some of the oldest recorded works in what we call the western canon, and the connections, themes, and ideas from these early works are clearly evident in subsequent literary works from antiquity all the way to the present. Authors and poets, over the centuries, have reached back to these classics as they tell their own tales. It never fails but to amaze me when I find these connections in whatever novel or poem I happen to be reading, or as I'm reading one of the Greek tragedies, I realize that I've seen the plot spun out as a poem by Keats, or a satirical novella by Margaret Atwood.

Well, what I have for you now is a bit of an epic modern poem that bridges the span of nearly 2,500 years back to Homer's The Iliad. Since 1959, a British poet, Christopher Logue has been slowly but steadily working on his own interpretation of The Iliad. He has carefully studied most, if not all, of the English-language translations, and has crafted his version, and published it in bits and pieces over the past nearly fifty years. Of the 24 books in The Iliad, I think he has retold about a dozen so far. I don't know if he plans to retell each and every book, but I believe he does intend upon publishing a combined, or unified, interpretation of his vision of The Iliad for our time.

I have three of Logue's books of poetry retelling portions of The Iliad, including the following:

War Music--An Account of Books 1-4 and 16-19 of Homer's Iliad (University of Chicago Press, 1997);
All Day Permanent Red--The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003); and
Cold Calls--War Music Continued (Faber & Faber, 2005).

All I can tell you is that this is some of the most visceral and shockingly intense poetry that I've read in a long, long time. It is poetry that is elegant, beautiful, biting, emotionally gut-wrenching, painful, humorous, lyrical, cinematic, and extraordinarily powerful. It screams to be read aloud, and it screams to be shared with everybody. On my train home from work tonight, I had an uncontrollable urge to stand up in the car and just begin reading out loud--I didn't, but maybe I should have.

I'm going to dip into Logue's second book, All Day Permanent Red--The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad for the bit of his work I'm sharing here. The material covered by Logue in this volume is that generally contained in Books 4 and 5 of The Iliad. What a great title too--"All Day Permanent Red"--to describe the vicious and desperate hand-to-hand combat between the Achaean and Trojan warriors; but Logue apparently took the title for this slim volume from an old Revlon lipstick advertisement! It reminds me very much of the statement a veteran of the American Civil War made as he recalled the combat at the Battle of Antietam (September 17, 1862), "...that for a moment in his mind's eye the landscape around him turned red."

Without further ado, here is an excerpt from this brilliant poem--

All Day Permanent Red--The First Battle Scenes from Homer's Iliad

"Headlock. Body slam. Hands that do not reach back. Low dust.
Stormed by Chylabborak, driven in by Abassee
The light above his circle hatched with spears
Odysseus to Sheepgrove:

'Get lord Idomeneo from the ridge.'

Then prays:

'Brainchild Athena, Holy Girl,
As one you made
As calm and cool as water in a well.
I know that you have cares enough
Other than those of me and mine.
Yet, Daughter of God, without your help
We cannot last.'

Setting down her topaz saucer heaped with nectarine jelly
Emptying her blood-red mouth set in her ice-white face
Teenaged Athena jumped up and shrieked:
'Kill! Kill for me!
Better to die than to live without killing!'

Who says prayer does no good?

Seeing Athena's cry raise fight and fire in lord Odysseus,
Hera, Heaven's creamy Queen, told Diomed
(Still near the strip, content amid the crackle of snapped spears):

'Odysseus needs you. Go.'

Beneath a rise
300 paces downslope from
Chylabborak and Abassee
A party of 500 wandering Greeks
See Hector parked and praying:

'Lord of Light...'

While Lutie fills a bucket from the well
Where the Skean road that runs from Troy
Straight up the slope to the ridge
Crosses the track.

'...I shall be busy until dark.
If I forget you, do not you, me.'

Out from the wanderers the Teucer boys
Iolo, 16, from a wife, and Parthenos
Bred from a she Teucer inherited
Come crouch-down hurrying convinced that this
Their chance for fame Prince Hector dead etc. has come.
Parthenos set to plant his spear by Hector's spine,
Iolo, well...

Boy Lutie is astonished by their impudence
But not enough to not, in one,
Put down the bucket thrash his whip, its crack
Recalling Hector to his fate, its tip--as Parthenos
Jumped for the chariot's tailgate
And Hector's mittened hand snaffled his wispy beard--
Circling Iolo's wrist.

Parthenos kisses Hector's wrist.
His eyes are full of words.

'Take a deep breath before you speak, Greek boy.'

He does.

'Please, Prince of the Gate, take us alive.
We did not want to come to Troy.
We could not disobey our father's words.
His mother was your aunt Hesione.
He has a wall of swords--'
'With silver hilts,' Iolo says--
'And gold--a chest of gold.
Please. Please. Please. Please.'

The wanderers edge in.

Hector steps down.
The Teucer boys may not have been the brightest on the slope
But they are bright enough to know death when they see it.
'Keep your lives,' he said. 'A gift from Troy.'
And as they ran, made
'Go' to Lutie with his head,
Studied the wanderers,
Lifted the bucket, doused himself
And charged.

See an East African lion
Nose tip to tail tuft ten, eleven feet
Slouching towards you
Swaying its head from side to side
Doubling its pace, its gold-black mane
That stretches down its belly to its groin
Catching the sunlight as it hits
Twice its own length a beat, then leaps
Great forepaws high great claws disclosed
The scarlet insides of its mouth
Parting a roar as loud as sail-sized flames
And lands, slam-scattering the herd.

'That is how Hector came on us.'

Despite the few who ran
Out from the rest to get at him and died
Or ducked and dodged his restless spear
And came away covered with blood and died,
Like shoppers trapped by a calamity
The rest pressed back onto the rest.
And he, partly to please his comet's tail,
Took sideways jumps--one foot up to the other in the air--
Chattering his spear along their front.

The ridge.

Sheepgrove (as asked).

Idomeneo does not wait.

Dustlight. Far off
A woman with an infant on her back
Is picking fruit."

(Pages 16-21)

***

Holy Cow! Can you believe this stuff? Every time I read these lines I am simply gobsmacked, and I need to reach down and pick my jaw up off of the floor. Logue forces you to recall your mythology--Zeus' "brainchild," Athena--the petulant, teenaged, ice-white faced Athena. This is great stuff! The description of Hector charging into battle was awesome and flat-out terrifying--the simile simply could not be better--equating Hector to a ferocious male African lion! And the perspective of young Lutie, Hector's nephew and chariot driver, sort of overlays the entire scene. The ending of this section of the poem is such a juxtaposition too, an almost jarring contrast from the shocking combat to this pastoral moment of a woman off in the distance up on the side-slope of the hill with her child on her back quietly picking fruit. In other words, even in the midst of all of this drama and pathos, life goes on. Trust me, all three of these books of poetry are like this. Your eyes are wide, wide open as you read each page, your brain is a sponge just taking in Logue's metaphors, his use of simile and allegory, and his just plain masterful use of language in turning phrase after phrase.

I also think it is important for me to add that I want you to know that I don't think that this is Homer modernized. No, this is a version--an interpretation--of Homer squarely landed in the oral tradition from whence it came, and somehow I think that Homer, and all of those who've translated The Iliad over centuries, would thoroughly approve of what Christopher Logue has done (and is continuing to do) and embrace his work wholeheartedly.

I plan to share more from Christopher Logue's volumes of interpretations of the books of The Iliad in the coming days, and I also plan to compare and contrast his poetry with my upcoming evaluation of Stephen Mitchell's new translation of The Iliad that is being released on October 12, 2011 (see my posting here). Stay tuned!

A Poem for the Day: "The Last Chrysanthemum" by Thomas Hardy

2011-09-25T17:02:00.000-07:00

Here we are just a couple of days after the Fall Equinox, and it feels like it is time to share another favorite poem of mine. I recently ran across a wonderful review of one of Thomas Hardy's volumes of poetry, Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), over on the Ordinary Reader's blog, and it inspired me to look through my own collections of Hardy poetry again. I came across The Last Chrysanthemum, and it just felt like a great poem to share in celebration of the beginning of the fall season. I hope you enjoy it too.

The Last Chrysanthemum

Why should this flower delay so long
         To show its tremulous plumes?
Now is the time of plaintive robin-song,
         When flowers are in their tombs.

Through the slow summer, when the sun
         Called to each frond and whorl
That all he could for flowers was being done,
         Why did it not uncurl?

It must have felt that fervid call
         Although it took no heed,
Waking but now, when leaves like corpses fall,
         And saps all retrocede.

Too late its beauty, lonely thing,
         The season's shine is spent,
Nothing remains for it but shivering
         In tempests turbulent.

Had it a reason for delay,
         Dreaming in witlessness
That for a bloom so delicately gay
         Winter would stay its stress?

- I talk as if the thing were born
         With sense to work its mind;
Yet it is but one mask of many worn
         By the Great Face behind.

***

Performance: "Trojan Women (After Euripides)" at the Getty Villa, October 1, 2011

2011-09-25T12:13:00.000-07:00

I love living in the LA area! There's just so much cool stuff going on!

I just purchased tickets for my wife and I to attend a performance of Trojan Women (After Euripides), a world premiere production at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California, in the evening on October 1, 2011. This performance, by the SITI Company, is being done outside in the Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater at the Getty Villa, which is an outdoor performance space based upon the ancient prototypes still evident among the Greek-influenced ruins in the eastern Mediterranean region. Recent classical performances at the Getty Villa have included productions of Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Elektra, Euripides' Hippolytos, and Aristophanes' Peace. In September 2012, a performance of Euripides' rarely performed play, Helen, is scheduled to be put on.

Here's a 'blurb' about the play from the Getty's website--

"SITI Company, one of the country's leading theater ensembles, performs the world premiere of a new Getty-commissioned production, directed by Anne Bogart and adapted by Jocelyn Clarke. In the ruins of their burning city, the royal women of Troy—still mourning the slaughter of their husbands and sons—await enslavement and exile. Among the greatest of all antiwar dramas, the play is a timeless meditation on the moments of individual choice that separate death and life, despair and hope, future and past."

I am very excited to be seeing this play, an adaptation done by the playwright, Jocelyn Clarke, and seeing it done out-of-doors by the SITI Company's ensemble. We plan to arrive at the Getty Villa early enough to enjoy a nice dinner on the veranda overlooking the theater, and maybe even a glass or two of wine. I am also going to read a recent translation of Euripides' The Trojan Women aloud to my wife over the next few days, so that we both have the gist of the plot in our minds as we attend the performance. I also promise to post a review of the performance when I get back. Stay tuned!

The Challenge--What Translation to Choose and Read?

2011-09-23T15:18:00.000-07:00

These days I'm reading a lot of great literature that was not originally written in English, and as I really don't speak or read any other language other than English, choosing a good translation would seem to be a very important step if I'm to fully experience these novels, plays, or poems. Until a few years ago, I never really gave much thought to what translator or translation that I was reading. I just purchased a copy of the book and started reading. For the past few years I've maintained my on-line library on both Goodreads and Shelfari, and I've begun encountering a lot of information about literary translators and various translations of the books that I've read, I'm reading, or want to read. Intuitively, at least to me, it would seem to make sense that a translation that is well-done and presented in a such a fashion as to make the author's work relevant can only improve the overall experience we readers can then have with the author and his/her book. Consequently, I thought that it might be fun, and maybe even useful, to share with all of you my thoughts and observations about the various translations of some of the foreign language works I've read. I'd also like to hear from you about translators and translations that you've encountered and liked or disliked. So, let's get started--

I'm going to start in Russia with Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and War and Peace, and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. I first read Anna Karenina some 25+ years ago, about the time Masterpiece Theater was running a multi-part adaptation on television. I was house-sitting for friends in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I just got completely lost in the novel over several weeks. The translation that I read was by Constance Garnett (1861-1946), and I loved the book. I followed that up several years later with my first reading of Tolstoy's War and Peace, also a Garnett translation. In 2005, I ran across an article in The New Yorker that opened up my eyes to the value of a solid translation and the enormous amount of work involved in translating a great work of literature. This article was entitled "The Translation Wars" and tells the story of how the husband and wife team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have tackled the translation of many of the great Russian novels into English (if you're interested, I've provided a link to the article here). I've since read the Pevear/Volokhonsky translations of Anna Karenina and War and Peace, and have their translation of The Brothers Karamazov sitting on my to-be-read shelf. I very highly recommend their translations of Tolstoy. Are Pevear/Volokhonsky translations better than the Garnett translations? Far be it from me to adequately critique or judge one versus the other, but I do know that having read both translations, I can say that I personally prefer the Pevear/Volokhonsky translations--they just felt a little 'earthier' and more Russian.

Okay, let's move on to Beowulf. I had tried reading this epic, book-length, poem several times over the course of my life and failed miserably, usually only getting a few pages into it before chucking it. Whilst visiting my younger brother a few years ago, I encountered a battered copy of Seamus Heaney's translation (2001) of this poem on his bookshelf. My brother raved about it. I bought a copy, and the rest is as they say, "History!" This started my love affair with all things Heaney. Beowulf was incredible! First of all, the story was told in the spare, sparse, and gritty language of Heaney's bilingual translation of the Anglo-Saxon original that is something like 1,000 years old. Second, the plot of this elegiac poem was absolutely epic. The horror of Grendel and his Dam was palpable; and the heroism of Beowulf and his spear-fellows timeless. Finally, the ability to carefully study Heaney's translation, alliteration, and interpretation and then compare it to the Anglo-Saxon was almost surrealistic. It was an amazing experience to have the ability to look at and study the root language of modern English. As a side-note, when you finished reading the Heaney translation, go out and find yourself a copy of the late John Gardner's slim volume entitled, Grendel (1971). This existential little book tells the tale from the 'monster's' point of view, and is profoundly thought-provoking on many levels.

Now, let's go further back in time and look at the translations of the itinerant bard and poet, Homer, and two of the great literary works of humankind--The Iliad and The Odyssey. Apparently, these two Homeric epics may have been first transcribed in Greek in the 8th Century BCE. Prior to that I have to believe that traveling bards and storytellers around the Mediterranean region would have adapted and told elements of these tales in the villages and towns they visited (i.e., an oral form of translation). From the perspective of translation and adaptation into English it even gets crazier. Go on-line, or to your public library, and you'll see that these epic poems have been translated by just about anyone with a passing classical education. If you look at the Wikipedia entry for "English Translations of Homer" there are, from the 16th century on, nearly 120 different translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Some of the more prominent translations include those done by George Chapman (1611-15), Alexander Pope (1715), Richmond Lattimore (1951, and 1965), Robert Fitzgerald (1961, and 1974), and Robert Fagles (1990, and 1996) .

I have read the translations by both Lattimore and Fagles, and have the Fitzgerald translation coming to me even as I write this. I would have to say that my favorite, so far, is the Fagles translation. It was just magical and the poem seemed alive with richness in a contemporary framework that I could readily understand. Fagles' translation is quite lyrical and loosely maintains a meter of five- and six-beats per line throughout. I encourage you to read it aloud, it just rolls off of the tongue, and becomes even more enchanting. I also enjoyed the older translation by Richmond Lattimore. It is elegant and feels more classical. Again, I am certainly not qualified to judge the quality of one translation versus another, but I am able to judge my responses to each, and I would say that I related better to Fagles' translation. Finally, I have recently become aware of a brand new translation that is being released in early October 2011, by Stephen Mitchell. For more on the new Mitchell translation of The Iliad see my blog posting of September 21st. I guarantee that I will certainly review Mitchell's translation of The Iliad as soon as I am done reading it. [And doesn't it just have the coolest dust-cover artwork?]

I have quite a robust collection of ancient Greek tragedies. I think have at least one copy of all of the plays by the Greek classicists. I have several translations of my favorites. For example, I have four different translations of Aeschylus' trilogy The Oresteia (Thomson, Lattimore, Fagles, and Ted Hughes), with the Fagles and Hughes translations being my favorites. The Fagles translation is probably the most faithful to the original Greek (and the Introduction by W.B. Stanford is worth the 'price-of-admission' alone), but the Hughes translation and/or adaptation is even more poetic and emotionally powerful.

Another ancient Greek playwright that I adore is Sophocles, and I have several wonderful translations of his plays. For the three Theban plays (i.e., Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone) it is hard to beat the relatively recent translations by Robert Fagles. Although, I have to say that the translations of Antigone by Seamus Heaney (The Burial at Thebes, 2005) and Diane Rayor (Antigone, 2011) are beyond sublime. I also just finished reading a new translation of all seven of Sophocles' plays by Robert Bagg and James Scully, and their Antigone was hard-hitting as well. I very much enjoyed their translations of Aias (Ajax) and Women of Trakhis too. I have posted a more in-depth review of the Bagg/Scully translation collaboration here if you're interested.

Finally, I am in the midst of re-reading Victor Hugo's monumental novel, Les Miserables for the first time in some 20 years or so. I read the Fahnestock/MacAfee translation (1987) shortly after it came out and loved it. During the big Les Mis craze, I saw several musical adaptations on the stage and a television movie or two as well. I received a lovely gift certificate for Barnes and Noble for my birthday (or Christmas?) and decided to splurge and buy myself the hardcover Modern Library edition of Julie Rose's new translation of Les Miserables. I am only about one-quarter of the way through this massive tome, but I am loving and savoring every word. I had forgotten how much I love this story, and how Hugo lays bare the soul of his characters, and I think Julie Rose has very capably preserved this aspect. Again, I promise to post a comprehensive review of her translation when I am finished.

Well, have I definitively answered the question, "Which translation is the best?" Heck no! I am not even going down that road, as I'm sure that each of us has our own opinions and 'tried-and-true' favorites. All I've tried to do with this posting is convey the notion that for many of these great works that we read that, in some cases, the translation selected and read can mean the difference between a memorable experience, or one that ends up being just 'ho-hum.' Please, please take my recommendations with a grain of salt and recognize that these translations are ones that I personally enjoyed and appreciated. I'm sure that you may have your favorite translations, and for equally valid reasons at that. I'd love to hear from you about the translators and translations of books and poetry that you've encountered and that have made a positive impression on you.

***

News Flash: A New "Iliad" is Coming Soon!

2011-09-21T14:51:00.000-07:00

"Hello! My name is Chris, and I am addicted to Homer."

I have made it my business over the past couple of years to find and read copies of all of the major translations of Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey. While I very much love the elegant and classy translations by Richmond Lattimore (The Iliad, 1951; The Odyssey, 1965), I'd have to say that my current favorites are those by the late Robert Fagles (The Iliad, 1990; The Odyssey, 1996). In my opinion, the Fagles translations are eminently readable and enthralling, and it is my understanding that he did a truly masterful job of adapting the original meaning of the Greek into the idiom of Modern English. Well, at any rate, it sure works for me!

Anyway, I've just recently become aware of a new translation of Homer's The Iliad by Stephen Mitchell that is being released on October 11, 2011, published by Free Press. From the reviews I've managed to find and read, Mitchell is well qualified and up to the task of giving the world this new translation of The Iliad. In fact, a publication release I found on-line may provide a bit of the back-story of why Mitchell felt compelled to tackle his own translation of this epic poem--

"Mitchell’s Iliad is the first translation based on the work of the preeminent Homeric scholar Martin L. West, whose edition of the original Greek identifies many passages that were added after the Iliad was first written down, to the detriment of the music and the story. Omitting these hundreds of interpolated lines restores a dramatically sharper, leaner text. In addition, Mitchell’s illuminating introduction opens the epic still further to our understanding and appreciation."

Well, I for one, can't wait to get my grubby little paws on a brand-spanking-new hardcover edition of this book and dive in and form my own opinion. I'm also seriously contemplating picking up my well-read copy of Fagles' translation and giving it a reread over the next couple of weeks, just so I'll have something to compare and contrast.

Finally, I've just found out that Stephen Mitchell is coming to the independent bookseller, Vroman's Bookstore, in Pasadena on Saturday, November 5th at 4:00 p.m., for a book-signing and discussion of his new translation of The Iliad. Yup, you guessed it, I'll be there. Wouldn't miss it for the world!

Review: "The Complete Plays of Sophocles--A New Translation" translated by Robert Bagg & James Scully

2011-09-21T13:01:00.000-07:00

I finished this newly published (2011) volume of translations of the seven existing plays by Sophocles recently. I unhesitatingly recommend this new work of the translators, Robert Bagg and James Scully, as they really did an outstanding job of presenting these powerful dramas with extraordinary lyricism and emotional impact. For your information, I am providing a list of the plays in the collection and the primary translator--

Aias (James Scully)
Women of Trakhis (Robert Bagg)
Philoktetes (James Scully)
Elektra (Robert Bagg)
Oedipus the King (Robert Bagg)
Oedipus at Kolonos (Robert Bagg)
Antigone (Robert Bagg)

Interestingly enough, this was the first time that I had read Aias (Ajax) or the Women of Trakhis and I really, really enjoyed both of them. While I was familiar with the story of Ajax from The Iliad, I have to say that Sophocles and James Scully really made me realize the physical and psychological toll that warfare and combat has upon a soldier. One has to believe that what is described in Aias can only be classified as a classic case of "post-traumatic stress disorder" (PTSD). We see the toll that this 'madness' takes upon the family and friends of Ajax, and it is truly heartbreaking. In the Introduction to the volume, Bagg and Scully indicate that excerpts from both Aias and Philoktetes have been performed for members of the American armed services and their families in the context of addressing and dealing with PTSD. I say, 'Bravo!'

Finally, I have to say that I consider myself somewhat a connoisseur associated with Sophocles' Antigone, and the translated version in this collection is simply superb. The dialog is spare, clipped, and drips with pathos--we emotionally respond not only to what Kreon and Antigone say in the play, but the overall intent of Sophocles in writing the play. As Antigone prepares to meet her fate she laments,

"Hades, who chills each one of us to sleep,
will guide me down to Acheron's shore.
I'll go hearing no wedding hymn
to carry me to my bridal chamber, or songs
girls sing when flowers crown a bride's hair;
I'm going to marry the River of Pain." (890-895)

That'll wrench your heart-strings. In this collection, Bagg and Scully have given us a new version of Sophocles that is dramatic, poetic, and lyrical, and incredibly relevant for our time. The language incorporated in these translations is not in the slightest degree flowery or excessive. In my opinion, not one word is wasted, the emotion is right there--in your face--and it just feels right. Read these plays and see what you think.

Novak Djokovic vs. Roger Federer, U.S. Open Semifinal, September 10, 2011

2011-09-11T19:30:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to all of you tennis fans out there--

The U.S. Open Mens Semifinal between Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer, the world's number 1 ranked player (Novak) versus the number 3 ranked player (Roger) was unbelievably amazing from start to finish and is destined to be an instant classic. The winner of the match would go on to face the winner of the Rafael Nadal/Andy Murray match in the final of the U.S. Open on Monday, September 12, 2011, and it totally lived up to its billing and all of the hype!

Djokovic was down two sets to love in a potential five-set match, and he looked like he was going to lose to the crafty veteran, Federer, in straight sets. Shortly after the beginning of the third set the mood of the match changed, and it was evident that Djokovic had sunk his teeth into the match and was not going to go away without a fight--and fight he did!

Djokovic went on to reel off the next two sets, and the two men then started the fifth, and final, set to decide the outcome of the match and who would move on to the final on Monday. Back and forth the two men went, both serving pretty well and hitting the most amazing returns and ground strokes. This was championship tennis at its very, very best.

Federer even had two match points to finish off Djokovic and advance to the final, but it was not to be. Djokovic cracked a laser-like return to negate one match point (this shot stunned Federer and the nearly 24,000 people in Arthur Ashe Stadium). Federer then served a nearly 110 mph serve right into Djokovic's body that somehow the young Serbian managed to block back across the net for a winner. This erased the remaining match point for Fed, and it was all Djokovic from this point on. A stunning turn of events. In retrospect, this exhibition of tennis excellence from Djokovic shouldn't have surprised me so much. He has had an absolutely awesome year, with a win/loss record of 63-2--and has won two majors (The Australian Open and Wimbledon)!

While Rafael Nadal dispatched the Scot, Andy Murray, relatively easily in four sets in the other mens semi-final, I have to think that Djokovic will win his third major this year by winning the U.S. Open Final on Monday night. It should be a helluva final--another great battle between Rafa and the Djoker. Me, I'd like to see Djokovic win this and just put a heck of an exclamation point on the great year he has had so far.

If you really love tennis go to You-Tube, or the U.S. Open's website (usopen.org/) and look for the video of the match between Federer and Djokovic. Awesome stuff!

Review: "Middlemarch--A Study of Provincial Life" By George Eliot

2011-09-11T18:53:00.000-07:00

I have just finished reading Middlemarch, and this pretty much completes my reading of George Eliot's major works. Middlemarch truly is quite the sublime novel from start to finish. At first blush one has this sense of simply being immersed in a rather quiet and pastoral story, but there's really very much more going on here as one turns the pages.It is a story of rural England during the period of great reforms in politics, religion, agriculture, manufacturing, medicine, and even transportation. Mostly though, it is the story of human beings, and what it means to be human.

Eliot gives us a wonderful cast of characters in Middlemarch, and they cut across all class lines from the landed gentry, tradesmen and women, and the simple country rustics that work the land and work in the manor houses. While perhaps Dickensian in cast, the peoples that populate the novel are not laden with the satire or comedy of a Dickens or Thackeray novel. No, these are all people that we can relate to even in this modern age. These are your neighbors, some rich, some poor; these are your physicians; your pastors; your shopkeepers, and so forth. The people of Middlemarch are your family, friends, and acquaintances and become even more so as the novel moves along.

As much as I truly enjoyed the plots in Eliot's Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner, I'd have to say that Eliot "kicked it up a notch" in Middlemarch. This is a stately, sedate, sophisticated, and complexly elegant novel. It really does demand the reader's full dedication and attention as it is read too, much like I found when I read her last novel Daniel Deronda. Boy, is it worth the extra effort, and one can't help but find oneself savoring the pacing and structure of the novel as Eliot lays out the tale.

Eliot herself compares one of her primary characters, Dorothea Brooke, to St. Theresa de Avila. She is a genuinely decent human being who very much cares for the welfare of all of those around her, including even the man she marries early in the novel--Edward Casaubon. Interestingly, at least to me, that through the novel there was an almost tidal 'ebb and flow' of how the reader viewed many of the characters. The one exception was Dorothea, as she always stayed above the fray and maintains her 'saintliness'. I suppose that some could say that maybe Dorothea's saintliness was laid on a bit thick, but I think the character of Dorothea and her actions are important in helping to bring home the novel's overall message and moral impact. I think that this was also true in different degrees with some of the other characters, such as Tertius Lydgate, Rev. Farebrother, Caleb Garth, his wife, and their daughter Mary Garth. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the novel though is Eliot's ability to make her readers empathize and even sympathize with the characters that are not so likeable, e.g., Bulstrode or Casaubon.

Finally, I have to again say that somehow I really think that George Eliot had to have been some sort of inspiration for, or influence upon, the later works of Thomas Hardy. I really do see a somewhat similar approach to realism and naturalism in the works of these two important authors. While Eliot's novels don't showcase the impact of Fate or Chance perhaps as prominently as Hardy, they both inject a big dose of reality in the day-to-day lives of their characters. Bad things do happen to good and bad people alike, just like Life. The beauty of Middlemarch is that it depicts the indomitable Human spirit at its finest (and, dare I say, at its worst at times too). Those who wish to do good can; and for those who don't, well they get caught out.

Great book! I highly recommend reading this novel. I have to be honest and fess up that I tried to read this book off and on for 20+ years, and it just never took with me. I was finally able to sink my teeth (and brain) into it and just let myself become immersed in the peoples and landscape of Middlemarch, and what a profoundly satisfying and enriching experience it has been. In all reality, I think that I am at a point in my reading and comprehension these days that I was finally ready for what Virginia Woolf described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." I do look forward to re-reading it again at some point and thinking about the messages and lessons of this rich novel that George Eliot has crafted and left us.

For me, now it is on to a new translation of Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (translation by Ms. Julie Rose, 2008). I'm also reading a new translation of the plays of the 5th century B.C. ancient Greek playwright, Sophocles. This 2011 translation and adaptation has been done by Robert Bagg and James Scully. Too much good stuff!

Reviews: Thomas Hardy: The Neglected Novels--Part II

2011-08-26T20:31:00.000-07:00

I mentioned a week or so ago that I was in the process of reading the remaining four novels written by Thomas Hardy that I'd not gotten to before. Hardy wrote fourteen novels over the period from 1871 through 1897. Actually, his very first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady was completed in 1868, but was never published. Hardy's first published novel was Desperate Remedies in 1871. His last novel was The Well-Beloved and was published in 1897. Of Hardy's fourteen published novels, I had read all but the following: Desperate Remedies, The Hand of Ethelberta, A Laodicean, and The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved & The Well-Beloved. So, I ordered the the Penguin Classics editions of these four 'neglected', or 'minor', Hardy novels and started reading.

While, after finishing all four books, I can say that it is my opinion that none of these novels quite rise to the level of Hardy's best work, i.e., Far From the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Woodlanders, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, or Jude the Obscure. Oh, they are each quite good, well written, and have engaging plots. Interestingly, at least to me, they are quite different from one another too.

Desperate Remedies was really a rollicking good read--a real pot-boiler of a mystery and romance. Of all of Hardy's novels this is the one that perhaps most closely emulates some of the literary creations of Charles Dickens or Wilkie Collins. This has it all--scheming and intrigue, blackmail, illegitimacy, adultery, murder and more. Sure it was maybe a bit rough around the edges, but that is to be expected as this was Hardy's first published novel and he was really just learning his craft. Personally, I thought the character development was terrific in the novel, with characters that I very much liked and some that I utterly despised. Desperate Remedies was a fun novel to read and one that I look forward to picking up again in a few years for a re-read. If you're looking for something that's kind of edgy and mysterious, yet with a good dose of romance and set in the heart of the Victorian Era, I highly recommend Desperate Remedies.

The next book that I read was Thomas Hardy's fifth published novel, The Hand of Ethelberta. This was very, very good! What I loved about this novel was that Hardy's protagonist is a savvy and very street-smart young woman, Ethelberta, from a very poor family of ten children. Without giving much of the plot away, suffice it to say that this young woman sets out to make something of herself (and also indirectly benefit the members of her family). She is an accomplished poet, and publishes a volume of poetry that is well received by the critics (Remember, Hardy always considered himself, first and foremost, a poet). She also is put in the position of ultimately having to find herself a wealthy husband if she is going to be able to provide for her parents and siblings. Most of the novel is taken up with telling the story of Ethelberta's trials and tribulations in honorably finding a decent man and marriage. All in all, I found this to be quite funny at times, and a pretty rich satire on Victorian society and the roles men and women were expected to adhere to among the upper class. Like in many of Hardy's novels, the common folk, or 'rustics', figure prominently; so, one really does get a pretty good feel for the 'upstairs' and the 'downstairs' folks during the time-period of the novel. Again, good character development makes this a fun book to read. I found myself anxiously turning the page to find out what would happen next to our heroine and the other characters. Apparently, Hardy even drew upon his wife's diaries in plotting this novel, along with material he found in the popular romances of the day, weekly magazines, and even ladies fashion journals. The book does provide a wonderful window into upper-crust Victorian society.

Finally, I just finished the third book of Hardy's 'minor' novels yesterday. A Laodicean is my favorite of the three I've just read. It is a sophisticated novel with a superb plot. Again, there's mystery, some really nasty and nefarious scheming on the part of the bad guys, and a wonderful romantic triangle involving a very wealthy and beautiful young woman and her two very poor suitors. This novel revolves around architecture and the restoration of an old ruined castle. Knowing what I know of Hardy's life, one can really see many autobiographical elements in the telling of this tale. Hardy, as a young architect, spent much of his initial career in restoring old Norman and Gothic churches across Dorset, a task he seemed to thoroughly enjoy. I found it intriguing too, that this novel, like Desperate Remedies, involve a very poor man falling in love with and courting a woman much wealthier and from the upper class. A Laodicean is also, in my opinion, a moral treatise on the conflict between maintenance of the old way of life in rural southwest England (i.e., Hardy's 'Wessex') and the new modern age that is fast changing the landscape and people's lives (e.g., the railroad, the telegraph, new religions, etc.). This examination of the impacts of modernity upon the people and cultures of southwest England is a theme that Hardy will return to time and time again in his subsequent novels and much of his poetry. I highly recommend reading A Laodicean, and further recommend that you follow up by reading his very next novel, Two on a Tower. Hardy always considered these two novels to be a diptych--and read together.

So, if you're looking for something new to read; something maybe a bit off of the beaten path and not typically read by the masses, I urge you to seek out these three rather neglected novels of Thomas Hardy (and please do throw Hardy's Two on a Tower onto the pile too). Pull up a chair next to the window or on your porch or veranda, pour yourself a cup of nice tea, and allow yourself to enter the world of Hardy's Wessex and Victorian England. You won't be sorry, I promise. If you read one or more of 'em, do drop me a note and let me know what you thought of the book(s).

Thomas Hardy: The Neglected Novels--Part I

2011-08-16T13:46:00.000-07:00

I love serendipity! Actually, I really love the word too. It just rolls off of the tongue, and it even sounds 'serendipitous.' Well, I had kind of a serendipitous morning today, and I'm still grooving on it. I was up nice and early and made the coffee, settled in on the couch to finish the tenth, and final, volume--"The Crippled God"--in Steven Erikson's magnificent "Tale of the Malazan Book of the Fallen" series of fantasy novels. After drying my eyes and reshelving the book, I watered the plants and then got ready to head off to work.

I was waiting on the train platform, and noticed the station marquee was broadcasting a message. My train to Los Angeles was going to be 45 minutes to an hour delayed because of mechanical issues. I thought about it for a moment, and said, "What the heck?" I headed back to the house and a nice unscheduled day off. I immediately changed into my running togs and took off for a nice hour-long five-mile run. By ten o'clock I was back, freshly showered, and sitting down here posting on my blog, and feeling like a million bucks! That's serendipity--at least to me!

***

Okay, now that I've bored you with my 'off-the-top-of-my-head' thoughts, I want to let you know what's going on with my reading these days. As many of you know, I am a huge fan of the works of Thomas Hardy. Hardy is one of the great novelists of the Victorian period, and is one of the great poets of the early modern era. While many of his novels and short stories are widely read and hugely popular, Hardy always considered himself, first and foremost, to be a poet--and I would agree wholeheartedly. I spent much of the last year and half reading most of Hardy's fourteen published novels, his short stories, all of his poetry, and several excellent biographies. Thomas Hardy is, without a doubt, one of my favorite authors and poets. If you are interested, you can go back through the archives of this blog and find my many postings, thoughts and observations about all of the Hardy novels and poetical works that I devoured over the past eighteen months or so.

I just wanted to bring to your attention a few of Thomas Hardy's novels that are less well known, three of which I have yet to read. Personally, I would include the following novels in a list of his lesser known books:

"Desperate Remedies" (1871),
"The Hand of Ethelberta" (1876),
"The Trumpet Major" (1880),
"A Laodicean" (1881),
"Two on a Tower" (1882), and
"The Well-Beloved" and "The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved" (1892)

Of the novels on this list, I've only read "The Trumpet Major" and "Two on a Tower" (which I loved, and is reviewed here). I recently went ahead and ordered copies of the remaining books (all of them are available in the Penguin Classics paperback editions), and I am very much looking forward to reading them over the next few weeks. In fact, I started, Thomas Hardy's first published novel, "Desperate Remedies" this morning.
So, if you're at all interested in these lesser known novels of Thomas Hardy, please stay tuned as I promise to post a review of each book as I finish it. I am very much looking forward to finishing off my reading of Hardy's entire literary oeuvre, and seeing how these remaining lesser known or 'neglected' novels stack up against my faves like, "The Return of the Native," "Far From the Madding Crowd," "Tess of the d'Urbervilles," "The Woodlanders," or "Jude the Obscure."

I'm Baaaaack! Woo-Hoo!

2011-08-14T20:55:00.000-07:00

Wow! It has been a while since I added an entry to my blog--about three months! Let me see if I can explain why. There really has been a lot going on, and pretty much all of it good too.

Susan and I went to Florida over the long Memorial Day weekend in late-May and visited our friends Mandi and Brian in Palm Harbor, near Tampa-St. Petersburg. We had a blast! Ate some great food, hung out at their beautiful pool, and just generally relaxed for several days. The weather was fabulous, and we had fun visiting the little coastal communities near Palm Harbor like Tarpon Springs and Dunedin. I also hauled my landscape photography gear with me and managed to get out a couple of times and photograph some of the beautiful landscapes in this part of Florida. First, I want to share the early morning view from Mandi and Brian's pool and patio area. How would you like this view with your morning coffee? Pretty spiffy, huh? I should mention that if you want to see a larger view of the attached images, please feel free to 'click' on it and open up the larger view.

I also visited the John C. Chestnut Regional Park late one afternoon and early evening. This park really highlights most, if not all, of the beautiful ecosystems found along much of the Gulf Coast of Florida. There is a terrific boardwalk nature trail that winds its way through an amazing saw-palmetto swampy area, and then the trail traverses along the shoreline of Lake Tarpon. I climbed one of the observation towers and captured a beautiful and tranquil sunset over Lake Tarpon. It really was a wonderful moment! I should mention that this part of Florida is loaded with alligators! It was pretty cool seeing these prehistoric reptiles, in all sizes, occupying just about any body of water, no matter how small. You surely have to be conscious of these creatures as you wander around next to the water's edge. I'm still not sure that I'd stick my toe in ANY body of water, other than a pool (and I'd check the pool twice too!), if I lived in Florida. Trust me, there's a lot of 'gators down there!

Susan's friend, Mandi, is an incredibly accomplished tennis player--really pretty much semi-professional caliber. We went with her to her club and watched her play a match with one of her friends. It was really quite inspiring and completely rekindled my life-long love affair with the game. And this brings me to the next chapter in my 2011 summer of rediscovery.

First, a little background is necessary. I am tall; in fact, I'm 6'3" in height. I used to be a pretty fit and trim fellow, but you know how it is as one ages. Over the years I just kind of let myself 'go to hell in a hand-basket.' I went from 170 lbs., and swimming a mile several days a week, to 235 lbs. and doing absolutely nothing except eat and drink. In the meantime, my wife Susan has been diligently trying to watch what she eats and spending several days a week working out. As I do the lion's share of the cooking, I found that I wasn't helping her one bit. In fact, I was surely unintentionally sabotaging all of her hard work.

Well, something just 'popped' inside me as I watched Mandi play her friend in that match of tennis in Florida. I really was tired of looking at the mid-fifties fat guy in the mirror with a double (triple?) chin day-in, and day-out. In the spirit of full-disclosure, I was also drinking waaay too much booze too. I found myself knocking back a bottle of red wine darned near every night along with all of the food I was eating. Something had to give. Well, my bad and unhealthy habits had to give way to a different lifestyle.

I have not had a drop of alcohol since early June 2011, and it feels fantastic! Now, I'm not saying that I won't drink again, but I'm going to (1) give myself some time to clean up my act first, and (2) then allow myself to enjoy cocktails with friends in a socially responsible and healthy fashion. The second big thing that I've done is undertake a significant physical fitness program, and I'm having a blast sharing this part of my new journey with my wife, Susan! I am playing tennis several times a week, running and walking on the off days, and jumping rope out on the patio. I took several weeks of tennis lessons from one of the local pros up here in Valencia and it has made all of the difference in my tennis skill level and my entire outlook on the game as a whole. I feel like I am in my mid-twenties again, and I have developed a ferocious topspin forehand and a pretty wicked two-handed backhand to boot!

Finally, I would say that the biggest thing I've done for myself is that I've become an inveterate user of an app on my Android HTC Inspire phone. I use "My Fitness Pal" to faithfully record my daily caloric intake, my daily exercise routines, record my weight, modify my fitness and weight loss goals, etc. I cannot tell you how wonderful and how important this program has been to the new me! I use the barcode scanner on my phone to scan food items that I eat, and it tells you all of the nutritional information, serving size, and so forth for everything that you're inclined to put in your mouth. My Fitness Pal has something like over a million food items in its database. It is amazing to have all of the nutritional information simply pop-up after I've scanned the barcode

I currently have a goal of 1,280 calories a day, and adhering to that goal would allow me to lose about 2 lbs. per week toward my goal of about 175 lbs. Obviously, exercise helps by allowing you to take in more calories per day. I encourage you to look into this wonderful program--both, as an app for your phone and for your PC--if you're at all interested in helping to get a better handle on the food that you're eating day-in and day-out. Sure it takes maybe 15-20 minutes per day to log your diary entries into the program, but its only 15-20 minutes out of your entire day! Just think, for the very first time you are really getting a true sense of exactly what, and how much, food you are taking in, which is then counter-balanced by the exercise that you do. It is really quite empowering.

So there you have it--an overview of my summer in just a few paragraphs! I am still reading some wonderful books, and will be adding some reviews and thoughts about those in the near future. I've also signed up for the next level of tennis lessons through the local parks and recreation department here in Santa Clarita. I also bought myself a great pair of really good running shoes. I feel like a million bucks, and I'm having a blast. Stay tuned!

Yosemite National Park & Landscape Photography--Part II

2011-05-08T16:33:00.000-07:00

I have now had a few days to browse through many of the photographs that I made during my recent trip to Yosemite National Park. I spent several days camping in Lower Pines campground in the eastern end of Yosemite Valley, and then taking the free shuttle bus to various locations throughout the Valley in an effort to find some interesting photographic opportunities. Because Yosemite National Park is so heavily photographed by photographers of all skill levels, I find that it is intellectually quite challenging to find some original and visually intriguing photographic compositions and subjects. Obviously, everybody likes to have the obligatory photographs of the various waterfalls, and the iconic views of the big-walls of granite like Half Dome and El Capitan; but as a landscape photographer, I am always on the prowl for images and compositions that are representative of my own artistic interpretation of this beautiful national park.

An example of an iconic view that I felt compelled to photograph is this view of Half Dome taken at Sentinel Bridge near the Yosemite Chapel (see photo above, at right). I happened to be nearby, late one afternoon, and even though there were no clouds in the sky whatsoever, I decided to at least take a few photographs from this well-photographed location. I decided to convert the image to black and white in an effort to highlight the leafing out of the alder and birch trees along the banks of the Merced River (the lighter colored trees at right in the photograph).

I also shot, in my view, perhaps a more interesting perspective of Half Dome from Lower Pines campground, where I was staying. I happened to be sitting at our campsite reading Thomas Hardy's, The Woodlanders late in the afternoon, and happened to glance through the pine trees and noticed that the light was getting very good (i.e., yellow-golden) on the face of Half Dome. I grabbed my camera gear and walked over to the edge of the Merced River and set up the camera and tripod and shot a few frames. Again, I loved the late-light contrasts and felt that this massive wall of granite was best portrayed in the black and white medium. I'd be interested in which image of Half Dome that you prefer--the first, more iconic view of Half Dome and the Merced River from Sentinel Bridge; or, this more close-up and detailed 'head-shot' of Half Dome. Please do make sure that you 'click' on each photograph for an enlarged view of the photo.

Over the past few years I have become quite interested in capturing images that I call "intimate landscapes". These are photographs taken of natural scenes that literally encompass just a square meter or two. In other words, the challenge is to find those smaller elements in the natural landscape that, when photographed, do a decent job of representing the larger landscape as a whole. To this end, I have found that reflections in water are a very credible way of creating some artistic photographic images. Too many photographers spend their time walking through the landscape looking up, or looking off into the distance. There's really nothing wrong with this approach, but you may be missing a whole host of wonderful images scattered all about you within just a few meters. For example, I hiked up to Mirror Lake, which offers spectacular views of Mount Watkins, Half Dome and Ahwiyah Point. Normally, most photographers focus on the larger scale photographs that include Mount Watkins, Mirror Lake, and Half Dome. I didn't even bother with that view at all, and spent my time wandering along the edge of the lake looking for reflections in the calm water of the mountains and trees around me. The color version, above left, is just such one of my attempts at capturing the reflection of Half Dome and Ahwiyah Point. During post-processing, I flipped the image vertically and horizontally. Personally, I think it kind of has the feeling of a painting from the French Impressionistic movement. Note that you can discern the 'sand waves' on the base of the lake at the bottom of trees in the image. What do you think? Is it an appealing photograph, or is it just too 'out there' for your tastes?

Whilst at Mirror Lake I found a huge boulder sitting near the edge of the lake that had a great reflection in the still lake water. I played with various compositions and exposures, and finally found one that appealed to me. This big granite boulder was streaked with a large wide stripe (maybe a quartz-rich pegmatite dike?) that was really quite fetching to the eye. Given the excellent tonal range exhibited in the image and the newly leafed-out vegetation in the background, I thought it might make an interesting black and white photograph. I quite like the end results here. To me, it kind of has a zen-like calming feel to it. What do you think?

I am also quite fascinated with forested scenes, and always endeavor to make photographs that portray the beauty and mystery of these woodlands. Early one morning as we were looking for suitable locations to photograph El Capitan from the bank of the Merced River near Cathedral Rock and Spires, I found a beautiful stand of very mature ponderosa pines and western red cedars. I carefully scouted about for a suitable location and set up my camera and tripod. I found a little dry gully that wound its way up through the trees and helps to naturally lead the eye into the scene. During post-processing, I created a black and white rendition (right) and then a color version (left). Frankly, I like them both, for different reasons. Again, I'd be very interested in which photograph you prefer, and why.

Finally, during my last afternoon in Yosemite Valley I was wandering around up by a massive cliff known as "The Royal Arches", and I came upon this huge ponderosa pine tree that must have been 150 feet tall and nearly five or six feet across at the base. A tree like this is probably in excess of 350 or 400 years old too! I love the bark of the 'yellow-bark' pines, and decided to see if I could make a photograph that captured the textures, patterns, and color of the bark of this beautiful old tree. I focused in on an interesting section of the trunk of the tree and made a few exposures. I tried it in black and white and then in color, but decided that the color rendition was really the very best representation. I love the patterns that nature provides, if only we take the time to look around for them.

So, there you have it--a few representative examples of how I approach the natural world around me with my camera and tripod. Have I been entirely successful? I don't know. I think some of these photographs are pretty well done, and do show off some of the attributes of Yosemite Valley as I intended. Others are maybe not quite so successful. Would I have wished for some stormy weather to lend more drama to the sky above? You bet! Interesting weather conditions with clouds are always a landscape photographer's best friend. Unfortunately, I just didn't really have any of those types of conditions; consequently, one does the best that one can with the tools at hand. And being in Yosemite National Park, at any time of year, and in any conditions, one can hardly go wrong. Thanks for looking at my images, and please do share your opinions with me. Cheers!

Yosemite National Park--Landscape Photography & Literature

2011-05-07T10:17:00.000-07:00

I'm back! I have been ever so crazy busy at work the past few months that all of the fun things in life seem to have been set aside--and blogging about books here at ProSe has really suffered mightily. Fortunately, I was able to get away for a nearly week-long camping trip with some friends during the first week in May. The primary purpose for our trip was to endeavor to make some decent landscape photographs. We stayed in Lower Pines Campground in Yosemite Valley in Yosemite National Park. The weather was splendid, and with all of the snowpack in the High Sierra (almost 200% of normal), the waterfalls in the Valley were just booming. Truly spectacular!

I took Thomas Hardy's novel, The Woodlanders along with me for a re-read. As I wandered about the park, from beautiful location to beautiful location, I would sit below a waterfall, or out in an open meadow, or under a tree, or even in my camp-chair next to the campfire, I'd pull out my Hardy and read. I have to say that this re-read of The Woodlanders was even more meaningful to me than when I first read it in 2010. Hardy;s description of the dense Wessex forests around Little Hintock and the lives of his rustics just seemed to come alive for me in the grandeur of one of America's most beautiful national parks.

Anyway, I just wanted to leave a short note that I am back to my blog, and that I am continuing to read some really terrific books these days. I am currently re-reading Hardy's The Return of the Native, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre for group discussions in a Goodreads.com group, and reading Charles Dickens's The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club for the first time for another group discussion. I also have R.D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone in my immediate queue to-be-read.

The photograph I've posted here is a photograph that I made in Cook's Meadow on the floor of the Yosemite Valley. The small pond is one of the ephemeral ponds that are created by the high-water conditions during the spring run-off. Do 'click' on the photograph for a larger view too. Stay tuned--more about my Yosemite photography trip and books I'm reading to come. Cheers!

***

Review: "The Bonehunters" By Steven Erikson

2011-02-05T21:10:00.000-08:00

Well, we've officially turned the corner in this series--there is a dim light ahead that is the end of the tunnel. The pieces are all on the chess-board now, and 'The Game' has begun. The Bonehunters is Steven Erikson's sixth book in his multi-layered epic high fantasy series, "The Malazan Book of the Fallen." I've actually moved far beyond just recommending this series for folks who love fantasy fiction. This is a complex tale that breathes life into Erikson's fictional world; a world comprised of a uniquely awesome mythology, philosophical examinations, geo-politics, archaeology, anthropology, military tactics, a truly fascinating magical scheme, and character development and world-building that is beyond amazing.

The first five novels in the series (i.e., Gardens of the Moon, Deadhouse Gates, Memories of Ice, House of Chains, and Midnight Tides) carefully, and quite originally, place the reader in the world of the Malazan Empire. It is an ambiguous and grey world, where sometimes right is wrong, or where wrong is actually right. Where what occurs, what you see and what you hear is not always precisely is as it ought to be interpreted. The Bonehunters only reinforces this notion.

A couple of 'rules' to keep in mind as you read these novels--The First Eriksonian Law--Pay very close attention to every word written; and the Second Eriksonian Law--Not everything can be interpreted correctly initially. I also cannot stress enough the reliance the reader must place on the maps, 'Dramatis Personae' and the 'Glossary' included in each novel. I would also encourage the reader to carefully read and think about each of the epigraphs that Erikson leads each chapter off with. There are always valuable little 'nuggets' that can be gleaned from these bits of prose or poetry. It is my experience that to fully experience all that Erikson offers, the reader must simply and unhesitatingly yield and immerse themselves in the Malazan world. And trust me, it ain't hard to do with this series!

The Bonehunters is largely the story of the Malazan 14th Army, under the command of Adjunct Tavore Paran, and its pursuit of the remnants of 'Sha'ik's' The Whirlwind' rebellion on the continent of 'Seven Cities.' The siege and battle at the city of Y'Ghatan is not only some of the most riveting military fiction you'll ever read, but the reception the Malazan 14th Army receives after the battle from the Malazan Empress Laseen in Malaz City is jaw-droppingly suspenseful. The geo-political events/conundrums and mysteries that Erikson introduces in this novel are really nothing short of amazing and mind-boggling. There are truly mysteries layered upon mysteries nested in this novel, and I can only look forward to the remaining novels to answer the new batch of questions that I now have.

Erikson, it now seems, has now developed and cleverly woven into the story-line all of the major and minor characters into this massive and clever plot. While there are very, very many characters, not only in this novel, but each of the previous books; we are now reaching the stage in the series that we can see that convergences are beginning to form. For this novel, the reader is treated to approximately 700 pages of character and plot development/build-up, and then the novel's pacing kicks into an afterburner and you simply can't put it down (I dare you!). Fortunately, I had a long (very long) day-trip flight from Burbank, California to Denver, Colorado (and return) for a meeting yesterday, and I was able to plow through the remaining 500 pages virtually non-stop! It bears repeating, but this series really is some of the most clever and smartest fiction that I've ever encountered.

All I can say is that if you are with the series this far; well, there is then absolutely nothing that I need tell you. Frankly, for anyone who has read the first five novels in this series, the only question I have is--How could you quit now? Yeah, I know, you can't. And I completely agree. I couldn't stop reading these books even if I wanted to--I must see how it ends, and so should you! The plot of The Bonehunters is an eye-opener, it answers a ton of questions, and it raises a million more. Oh, how Eriksonian is that?

By the bye, the first cover shown (at top) is the Tor hardcover edition, and the second cover shown is the mass-market paperback edition, and they're both big-time 'fat-books.' Happy Reading!

Reviews: "Midnight Tides" and "House of Chains" By Steven Erikson

2011-01-30T20:02:00.000-08:00

You're getting a 'two-fer' with this review. I am on a roll right now reading Steven Erikson's "The Malazan Book of the Fallen" series of epic high fantasy, and I am presenting my review of the fourth and fifth novels in his ten-volume series. What I am really trying to say is that you can't stop reading these books, and I am ever-so-thrilled that I still have five to go!

House of Chains is the fourth volume in Steven Erikson's monumental ten-volume series entitled, "The Malazan Book of the Fallen." This book follows the first three in continuing to flesh out the world and characters that Erikson has so brilliantly created.

The first quarter, or so, of the novel tells the back-story of a character that we briefly met in the second book in the series (Deadhouse Gates)--that of the 'Toblakai' or as we come to find out, the great Teblor warrior, Karsa Orlong. Again, it bears repeating that Erikson's professional training as an archaeologist and anthropologist has infused his characters and the fictional landscapes with a scent of authenticity that one rarely, if ever, encounters in fiction.

Following the fascinating recounting Karsa's story in the northern wilds of the continent of Genibackis, Erikson then focuses much of the remaining book on the Malazan 14th Army's efforts to defeat 'Sha'ik's Whirlwind' in the 'Holy Raraku Desert' on the continent of 'Seven Cities. This is some epic military fiction, told from the perspectives of the Army Commander herself down to the squad-level grunts themselves.

The last two-hundred pages, as is typical for Erikson, proceed at break-neck speed, the action and pacing just relentless. I am learning that Erikson is a big believer in 'convergence.' When s**t starts happening, more and bigger s**t starts happening; and the next thing you know there are just major events leaping off of every page. I truly defy any reader to set one these books down with anything under two-hundred pages remaining, it simply ain't possible.

Finally, one must always keep the 'First Eriksonian Law' firmly at the forefront as one reads--"Pay very close attention to every word read and event described." The 'Second Eriksonian Law' is equally applicable--"Every word read and event described has meaning that may not be initially understood." Those conversations, or actions of characters, or puzzling events that seem a little odd or inexplicable always seem to reappear as a 'light-bulb' moment later on when all then becomes clear (at least for that moment). The bottom-line is that Steven Erikson really is an enormously clever writer, and his authorial use of the craft of foreshadowing is some of the best I've run across. There just ain't anybody writing fiction like this guy! House of Chains is a very worthy addition to this magnificent series.

***

Okay, now having read the fifth volume in Steven Erikson's "The Malazan Book of the Fallen" series, Midnight Tides, I think Erikson has the set pieces all in place on the board now. In finishing this novel I have to say that it truly feels like we have now been exposed to the landscapes, and most of the characters; and it now seems that the plot lines are all starting to slowly begin spiraling toward some form of a mega-convergence in the remaining four novels. I, for one, can hardly contain myself and my excitement at what is to come!

Midnight Tides is set on the continent of Lether and tells the story of a major war that breaks out between the Tiste Edur (The Children of Shadows) and the Letherii peoples. This is the first novel to address these peoples and this continent, and none of the characters from the previous novels, with the exception of just a few of the Elder Gods, are even present. It doesn't matter a bit though. Within 50 pages, the reader is completely enthralled with the new lands and the characters. I would be completely remiss in not mentioning just a few of my new favorite characters; including Seren Pedac, Trull Senger, Brys Beddict, Shurq Elalle, Kettle, Iron Bars, and my absolutely most favorite characters in the series to date, Tehol Beddict and his 'man-servant' Bugg. Oh Lordy, you will just salivate with joy at each and every appearance (and there are plenty, trust me) of Tehol and Bugg. Seriously, some of the funniest stuff written!

The story of the 'world war' between the Tiste Edur peoples and the Letherii Empire is loaded with pathos and drama. Tears will be shed. Also, there are some very powerful explicit and implicit moral messages within this story that have application for all of us in our lives today, regardless of what country we live in. This story does tend make the reader stop and reconsider what patriotism means, and how it should be applied.

While at first blush it might be easy to question Mr. Erikson about the relevancy of this tale within the larger arc of "The Malazan Book of the Fallen", as we are on a completely new landmass with completely new characters--none of which has the slightest thing to do with the Malazan Empire. Having said this though, the careful reader will continually ferret out clues and new information associated with issues and events that have been encountered in previous novels in the series. In other words, I am suggesting that this is not only an incredibly well-written novel and engaging story in its own right, but is a very important portion of the larger 'Malazan' canvas that Erikson is carefully painting.

And did I tell you how much I love the characters of 'Tehol Beddict' and 'Bugg'? Just thinking about these two will bring a smile to my face for the rest of my life!

***

Review: "Memories of Ice" By Steven Erikson

2011-01-28T10:57:00.000-08:00

Memories of Ice is the third installment in Steven Erikson's brilliant fantasy series, "The Malazan Book of the Fallen." This may well be my favorite of the series so far (I know, I keep saying this as I read each successive book). This is a big, big story, and the cliche 'epic' really doesn't do the series, or each book individually, justice; but by the third volume, the reader is beginning to become much more comfortable in this amazing world that Erikson has created. Things are now really starting to make sense!

This novel brings the reader back to the continent of 'Genabackis' with the Malazan Army, specifically the 'Bridgeburners' and their charismatic commanders, 'Dujek One-Arm' and 'Whiskeyjack.' These great characters were first introduced in the series' first novel, Gardens of the Moon. There's some really dramatic and action-packed sequences associated with the siege and battle for the large city of Capustan. The Malazan Army and its allies are tasked with trying to retake the city from its conqueror, the horridly evil Pannion Seer and his minions. By the end of the book, I had shed some tears several times. Erikson really knows how to spin a tale, and at times his characters and plotting can really tug at the heart-strings. Also, in reading Memories of Ice, the reader gains an incredible amount of insight and information associated with several other significant plot-lines, characters, and history of some of the other species and races that populate the previous novels. In fact, sections of this novel reminded me of some of the fascinating accounts of hominid evolution and the ecological and archaeological evidence of Neandertal and early modern human life and interactions during the ice ages of 50,000 to 30,000 years ago. This really reflects Erikson's professional background as an archaeologist and his obvious love of anthropology and archaeology, and contributes mightily, and quite authentically, to the 'world-building' in this series.

While some things do become more clear for the reader with Memories of Ice, at the same time Mr. Erikson, in a very workman-like fashion, creates a whole host of new plot-lines, raises new questions, creates new mysteries, and develops fiendishly clever new issues that torture and torment the reader. Also, I have to say that each of these books just gets better and better; and is more complex and complicated, leaving the reader gasping and grasping for more. This is so uncharacteristic of most fantasy series where the strongest representative in the sequence is typically the first or second books, and the rest in a series tend to decline appreciably both in content and quality. Erikson's "The Malazan Book of the Fallen" series just seems to grow exponentially in quality. A very rare thing indeed!

Finally, if you've read the first two books in the series I probably don't have to tell you this, but read these books carefully. Pay attention to the information that Erikson gives you, think carefully about things said and done by the characters--everything means something! Erikson is famous for foreshadowing events and actions to come, but you have to figure it out. While some things may seem completely inexplicable to the reader now, rest easy and try not to panic for all will be eventually made clear with time. To reiterate, in my opinion Mr. Erikson may well be the most clever and creative author that I have ever encountered. Pay attention!