Flashback 2007: What's old is new: Homer translator takes a whack at Virgil's 'The Aeneid'

The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro, London, 1654 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     The Sun-Times once had a book editor, and an excellent one: Henry Kisor, who not only reviewed books, but wrote them, also excellent. One of my favorite titles of all time is attached to his memoir about growing up with deafness: "What's that Pig Outdoors?" Henry's retired to the Upper Peninsula, but writes in from time to time, and it's always a pleasure to hear from him.

     If a melancholy one. We once had a book editor, heck, we once had an assistant book editor, and an entire book section. All long gone.

     Occasionally, I'd draw a plum assignment — or heck, knowing me, maybe I volunteered, I don't recall — such as reviewing a new translation of "Aeneid." To show you how sincere this review was, I later read it a second time, out loud to my older son. Tomorrow I'll post the sidebar, a review of Virgil's "Georgics," his book about farming and so much more.

Fiction
The Aeneid
By Virgil
Translated by Robert Fagles
Viking, 486 pages, $40

     It takes guts to recast a classic. The rewards are great -- a guaranteed audience, a familiar tale. The perils are also great.
     Sometimes the experiment works: Gregory Maguire's Wicked was a commercial success and ended up on Broadway. Sometimes it doesn't: The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall's slave's-eye view of Gone With the Wind, is interesting only for its legal woes.
     Homer's The Iliad, an epic of Achilles and the Trojan War, and The Odyssey, about the homeward agonies of Ulysses, would seem beyond adaptation. Honed by centuries of re-telling, speckled with familiar tropes — the long black ships, the wine dark sea — revisiting it would seem an act of hubris. A challenge nevertheless taken up by Roman poet Publius Virgilius Maro, whose new book, The Aeneid, takes the story of the fall of Troy and tells it from the perspective of a vanquished Trojan, Aeneas, adding moments that Homer left out — the sack of the city, the creation of a giant wooden horse — turning the epic into a tale of the creation of Italy.
     OK, The Aeneid is not a new book —Virgil penned it in the decade before his death in 19 B.C. But its benefits and problems are the same as those of any other adaptation.
     The first question is why anyone who doesn't fear getting his knuckles rapped by nuns would even contemplate reading The Aeneid.
     The answer is because it is newly translated by Princeton scholar Robert Fagles, whose translation of The Iliad (1990) and The Odyssey (1996) were surprise bestsellers. Readers who savored those works are eager to see what he does with Virgil.
     How well does Fagles do? Look at the death of Priam, the aged king of Troy who, as the city falls, throws himself at his son's killer and is slain. Here's how John Dryden, the 17th century poet, describes the scene:

Now die!' With that he dragg'd the trembling sire,
Slidd'ring thro' clotter'd blood and holy mire,
(The mingled paste his murder'd son had made,)
Haul'd from beneath the violated shade,
And on the sacred pile the royal victim laid.
His right hand held his bloody falchion bare,
His left he twisted in his hoary hair;
Then, with a speeding thrust, his heart he found:
The lukewarm blood came rushing thro' the wound,
And sanguine streams distain'd the sacred ground.
Thus Priam fell ...

     Fagles puffs away the dust:

Now — die!'
That said, he drags the old man
straight to the altar, quaking, slithering on through
slicks of his son's blood, his right hand sweeping forth his sword —
a flash of steel — he buries it hilt-deep in the king's flank
Such was the fate of Priam...

     Fagles loses a strong image — the killer's hand, twisting in the old man's hair — but the passage is a third shorter, and falls more harmoniously on modern ears.
     Despite Fagles' best efforts, Aeneas is not the most appealing hero. Virgil was considered a proto-Christian — that's why Dante chose him as his guide in his Inferno, and there is something very Ned Flanders about Aeneas — he's a heroic goof, not nearly as complex as Achilles, and lacking the ingenuity of Odysseus, not to mention the good plot line.
     Which is the second problem. Rather than returning home after 10 years, Aeneas is leaving it forever, off to found Italy. He does so with such brio that you expect The Aeneid to be underwritten by the Italian Tourist Board, which in a sense it was; Virgil was commissioned to write it by the Roman emperor. It was as if George Bush hired Maya Angelou to rewrite Moby Dick with an eye toward promoting New England tourism.
     So why read The Aeneid? There is no question that reading it is work, if only to keep skipping back to the nearly 1,000-name glossary to find out who Penthesilia is or where Crustumerium might be located. The ancient Romans were haunted by the fear they were merely pale imitators of the Greeks, and to compare Virgil to Homer, you see why.
     The bottom line is, if you're unfamiliar with Fagles' work, yet want to dive into the classics for their poetry, their power, their eternal themes and deathless imagery, then you'd do better starting at his The Iliad and The Odyssey. They're superior works. If you've already read Homer, then you're probably ready for The Aeneid.
     Yes, there are long eat-your-peas stretches to trudge through — you'll never want to read about another unblemished white ox being slaughtered again. But there also are moments of drama and heartbreak — Queen Dido bewailing her doomed love — plus a queasy familiarity as you read about a previous costly, ill-conceived war.
     You'll be reading a book that enthralled the great minds of our culture. The Aeneid inspired Dante to write his masterpiece.
     "It is from you alone that I have taken/The lofty style for which men honor me," Dante gushes when he meets Virgil in The Inferno.
     Shakespeare, too, was a fan of the book, and that is not true of every best seller thumping down upon the tables at Borders this month.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 7, 2007

"I saw it on television"

 

      I'm on vacation all this week, since coming back from New York on Monday. It's been nice. In fact, I don't remember enjoying just being at home quite so much. Doing whatever I feel like doing.
     I've pretty much stepped away from social media — that alone made the week pleasant. Surprisingly so. I didn't realize what a pain in the ass it was, just how much Twitter is the death of a thousand cuts, and what a time sink Facebook can be. I'm going to try to dial back my presence there permanently. Let the groundlings have at each other without me.
     I did dip my toe back into Twitter Thursday, and noticed the above, which I had reposted. It's the sort of dry wit that can redeems social media, sorta. Not a criticism of The Economist, I rush to add. I like to tell people that reading The Economist is like having an extra brain. But a reminder that when one writes something, there is always, or often, an aspect that is not considered. In this case, the hard right have previously guided Germany, into the greatest catastrophe and bloodletting of the 20th century.
     Odd that they would flirt with it again. Then again, there's a lot of oddness going around. It's odd that nearly half of all Americans would stand solidly behind the clown we saw on rampant display at the presidential debate Tuesday night. "They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats. They're eating the pets." What an imbecile. And then, when challenged, for him to say, "I saw it on television." What a moron. I have a hard time understanding how even one person can vote for this guy. Then again, as I've said before, once you get in the habit of ignoring reality, the exact nature of the reality being ignored hardly matter. 

     Speaking of ignoring stuff, I think I'll wrap up here. No law says these posts have to go on and on. One may be brief.

Met Notes #1: "Reframing history."

Visible Storage at the Met

     We visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City on Monday and popped into what it calls "Visible Storage" in its Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art. A jumble of paintings and sculptures, empty frames and stacked china, silver, tables and chairs, hundreds of linear feet of treasures jammed together with almost no note or explanation.  It's like the best flea market of all time, except nothing's for sale.  

     Once, years ago, I was pleasantly startled to turn a corner in Visible Storage and come face-to-face with John Singer Sargent's "Madame X" hanging from a slotted metal wall as if the famed painting were just another art print in somebody's closet.

     "Madame X" was back in her usual place in a public gallery Monday — the sitter was an American creole socialite from New Orleans, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau; Sargent concealed her name so as to avoid scandal over both her suggestive pose and her skimpy dress (originally, one strap had slipped down, but Sargent later quailed and repainted it in place.

          The Sun-Times reported Wednesday that The Art Institute received a $75 million gift to expand how it presents its modern art. That's welcome news, as museums struggle to stay relevant and show off their collections in creative ways. 

     Of course, you don't need to construct a new building to shake up how artwork is presented. Museums lately have been vigorously trying to expand the contours of Western art. A current fashion is juxtaposition — placing contemporary works by underrepresented artists alongside greats of the Western canon. For instance, the Met decided to hang Elizabeth Colomba's 1997 "Armelle" immediately to the left of Sargent's masterpiece.

"Armelle" by Elizabeth Colomba

     "The parallel between Armelle and Madame X is caustic and ironic," Colomba notes on an explanatory card. "Both are creoles: X descends from a colonialist family; Armelle from one that would have been in bondage. Bestowing the same pose on my model, I challenge stereotypes, reframing history to apply a different narrative for the character."
    The standard circle-the-wagons response would be to howl that a portrait from an artist born in 1976 has been allowed to invade a gallery of Sargent portraits. The same see-no-evil approach that has Red States purging their libraries of books that offer clear-eyed views of the nation's racist history. That's fear. And timidity. The presence of Colomba's work made me linger over Madame X longer than I would otherwise, certainly when it is hung without comment in Visible Storage.   

     Not far from the Sargent hall was a painting that demonstrates this trend even more eloquently: "Belizaire and the Frey Children." Painted in the 1830s, this portrait is of "an enslaved Black subject depicted with the family of his enslavers," the aforementioned Belizaire seen at the upper right, in a beige frock coat, arms crossed, rather dubiously regarding his charges.   

      Sometime around the year 1900 the descendents of the children had their caretaker painted out, in the fine tradition of erasing Black people from historical memory. But in 2022, careful conservation returned the figure, and transformed what was otherwise a muddy and unexceptional family portrait of three long-dead children into a touchstone of one of today's most pressing social issues, at least in Red states. In Blue states, we just call it history and don't get bent out of shape studying it, perhaps because we don't sympathize with the Confederate losers in the bottom of our cold dead hearts.

     You probably wouldn't notice it on the scale reproduced here, and nothing in the materials suggested this point. But I looked at Belizaire's eyes, and the eyes of the Frey children, and noticed a certain similarity. Slave-owning men did have a habit of contributing to their own stock of chattel, and Belizaire might have been depicted among the Frey children because he was one of the Frey children. A half sibling anyway. You can see why those attracted to white supremacy would want this to continue being swept under the rug, as their forefathers routinely did. And why that urge must be assiduously squelched. Me, I like a little history served up with my artwork. Otherwise, museums are just big halls lined with pretty pictures.

    

  

Sept. 11, 2024

 

     The New York City subway and the commuter Path line both stop at Cortland Street, and the weird white Oculus mall/hub. So it was natural to meet at the 9/11 Memorial Sunday morning to begin our day. We didn't think ahead of what it would be like to wait there.

     The power of the place hits you instantly. What happened there, 23 years ago today.
     The rendezvous, my wife and I from our hotel near Madison Park, and our daughter-in-law from her home in Jersey City, the sort of small happy life event forever stolen from the people who died that day, and from their friends and loved ones. Stolen forever.
    My wife and I got there early, and did what you are supposed to do — pause, fall silent, reflect, remember that day. Gazing at the names, the cascading water, the new One World Trade Center looming above. 
     I'd been to the memorial before, several times, and found the design completely apt — if you haven't visited, you should. The memorial consists of a pair of square pits that outline the original footprint of the fallen twin towers, bordered with the names of those who perished in the attacks, cut into smooth brass. The letters cut just wide enough to insert a flower stem. 
     Inside, water cascades down the walls, and disappears into a smaller pit whose bottom is too deep to see. Beyond our ability to perceive, like the carnage itself. The memorial itself is huge; standing by one square, you can't see the other. Its size, like the Vietnam Memorial, suited to the enormity it is intended to commemorate.
     If you want to read something about 9/11, I wrote a more indepth reflection three years ago, at the height of COVID. Honestly, I don't have anything to add today. Fly the flag, try to dial back the hate that is the root of such disasters. Other than that, who can contemplate the unimaginable for long? I took off my cap and bowed my head. Our daughter-in-law arrived, and we proceeded to a much happier place, the South Street Seaport, alive with life and food and commerce.  The two sites only a few minute walk apart, one frozen in the unalterable and tragic past, forever fixed on the echoing void caused by the bloodiest day on American soil since the Civil War. All those names, all those precious lives were snuffed out by bitter hatreds. The other, particularly Jean-Georges Tin Building, is sort of an anti-9/11 Memorial. Not that it is against it, but that it represents a completely contradictory set of emotions. Coffee and muffins, commerce and seafaring. We drank our coffee and ate our sandwiches and looked out at another perfect September day, another clear blue sky, just like the one torn asunder on Sept. 11, 2001. 

One World Trade Center towers above the memorial site. At 1776 feet, it is the tallest building in the Western Hempisphere, and was designed by Chicago's Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The building marks its 10th anniversary next month. 

Flashback 2009: 'Losing Mum and Pup' is frank and funny

The Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

    A long, busy weekend in New York City. Much fun, running around — lunch with a writer pal at the Century Association, a visit to the Treasures room at the New York Public Library, lunch at abcV, dinner at the Thai Diner, cheesecake at Caffe Reggio. Strolling Central Park AND the West Village AND the South Street Seaport and the reason we went here in the first place, a lovely wedding of a friend's son in Brooklyn.

     Monday morning we had a few hours free and headed to the Met, popping in on the Temple of Dendur. A small 2,000 shrine to the sons of a Nubian leader shouldn't be affected by a contemporary American humor writer. But I can never see the place and not think about Christopher Buckley. I don't believe I've ever shared that column here — let's fix that.

      Our parents leave us with a puzzle. If we're lucky, it's a simple, move-the-stack-of-discs-from-one-peg-to-another kind of puzzle we can solve with a little effort and then feel darn good about ourselves. Clever children.
     If we're not lucky, it's one of those jangly metal messes of bent nails and twisted loops, something we struggle over for the rest of our lives, flinging it aside in frustration only to pick it up again and again, determined to figure the thing out, somehow.
     And when our parents die, all hope of help is gone — no chance of anyone taking the jumble from our hands and saying, "Oh here, you do it like this . . . " A quandary millions of Baby Boomers are experiencing, and Christopher Buckley has done us a service by setting aside his usual job — crafting comic novels — to chronicle a grim period in 2007 and 2008 when his parents, conservative ringmaster William F. Buckley Jr. and New York socialite Patricia Taylor Buckley, both died.
     The book was published last week and its title — Losing Mum and Pup —hints at what Buckley has accomplished. I winced when I first heard it, chatting with him last September about his recent novel, Supreme Courtship. Rich people, writing frankly about their lives of privilege will, unless they are very careful, end up sounding like Thurston Howell III complaining about his daiquiri. The words "mum and pup" give off a tennis-anyone? tang of the snobbery that smoothed every polished river pebble syllable spoken by William F. Buckley. My affection for him being what it is — nonexistent — I worried that his son, one of the few contemporary novelists I really like, was about to veer off the path.
     My worry was misplaced. Christopher Buckley is so frank, so funny, that all class envy is defused. One forgives him his Swiss boarding school and yacht parties as he struggles to send off his difficult parents, who weren't always there when he needed them, but certainly are here now. After his mother's death, he keeps his ailing, channel-surfing father company. He writes:
     "I was supposed to leave mid-July on a long-planned trip to California. One night as we watched the first of three — or was it four? — movies, he said apprehensively, 'When are you leaving for California?'
     " 'I'm not, Pup, I'm going to stay here with you.'
     "He began to cry. I went over and patted him on the back. He recovered his composure and said somewhat matter-of-factly, 'Well, I'd do the same for you.' "
     "I smiled and thought, Oh no, you wouldn't. A year or two ago, I might have said it out loud, initiating one of our antler clashes. But watching him suffer had made my lingering resentments seem trivial and beside the point."
     Either that moment sends you bolting for the bookstore, or you've been bequeathed the puzzle page from Highlights and don't know it. Not being a fan of his father's, I wasn't offended, as some conservatives were, by Buckley's depictions of humiliating medical problems and agonizing hospital scenes. Certain details do stagger — his mother's memorial service is held at the Temple of Dendur, the Nubian temple rebuilt inside New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The bill for the event's audio/visual salute comes to $20,000, a detail Buckley delivers as farce:
     "The audiovisual subcontractor, a competent and agreeable man named Tony, presented his estimate. I whistled silently at the $7,000 price at the bottom of the e-mail, but I thought, Well, we're only going to do this once. A month later, my learning curve took a sharp turn upward when Tony presented his final bill and I realized that I hadn't read quite all the way to the bottom of his e-mail attachment. The $7,000 was for equipment. The labor cost came to an additional $13,000 on top of that. As I type this a year later, I'm able to chuckle — finally — at my ineptitude at e-mail attachment reading. I can hear Mum's ghost muttering, Twenty thousand dollars? For a few television screens and a microphone? Have you completely taken leave of your senses?"
     He hasn't. Buckley retains his wits and his wit — in several spots I laughed out loud, and found myself, for the first time, interested in William F. Buckley. I've never read anything by him; he was never exactly the hot author in my squishy liberal Democratic circle. But after I finished Losing Mum and Pup I felt compelled to trot off to the Northbrook Library and check out Right Reason.
     Our parents help us, then we help them. We begin as their dream, the poet said, then they become ours. Christopher Buckley has sketched his parents at their lowest, last moments and used the crisis to frame a portrait of their lives that is rich and alluring, heart-breaking and hysterical. It is filled with interesting tidbits — the Washington Monument is 555 feet high; Henry Kissinger cries easily — and practical advice: Don't smoke. If you're a veteran, make sure your family knows the location of your DD-214 certificate, proving your honorable service, if you want military honors at your funeral.
     And lastly, love pardons many sins. Buckley could have taken these same facts and written a version of Mommy Dearest if he didn't so obviously adore his parents, warts and all, a reminder that the love we give to our children is returned to us, if we are lucky, when we need it most.

    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 18, 2009

'Everybody Needs an Editor.' Always has been true, always will be.

     Communication is hard. It must be, because we're so bad at it. Many of us, anyway. Sometimes. Often. Not that we tend to be aware of it. We thunder away online, oblivious, pouring forth an endless stream of tweets and texts, manifestos and slideshow presentations that border on criminal dullness and inaccuracy.
     To reach an audience consistently, delivering an intended message, you need to work at it, constantly. I've been writing a newspaper column since I was 15, and though I've managed to achieve a certain facility, the process still requires concentration and effort. I still manage to fail spectacularly now and then, if I'm not careful and sometimes even when I am. It's hard to develop an edge and easy to lose one. Frequent sharpening is required to avoid dullness.

   To this end, a welcome whetstone for communicators is being published this Tuesday: "Everybody Needs an Editor: The Essential Guide to Clear and Concise Writing" (Simon Element $24.99) written by a pair of Chicago communications professionals, Melissa Harris and Jenn Bane, and edited by former Sun-Times colleague Mark Jacob. It's a boon for those who don't have a clutch of eagle-eyed newspaper editors picking over their prose.
     For those weaned on Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style," reading "Everybody Needs an Editor" will be an eye-opener (I almost called it "ENAE," but took to heart the advice on page 144: "Don't overuse acronyms"). It outlines how to write email subject lines and speeches, how to fire someone and how to resign. Filled with useful tips, both specific and general, the book warns against overuse of quotation marks, of shouting via ALL CAPS (they do have a habit, either good or bad I can't decide, of illustrating what not to do by doing it), and encourage vividness. I was surprised to see several tricks I thought were genius divinations of my own — such as to use photo captions to tuck in additional information you couldn't fit into the body of your story.
     "Everybody Needs an Editor" also offers a primer on the role of artificial intelligence.
"AI can improve your writing," they write (at least I assume they wrote it, as opposed to merely prompting a machine to do it, then buffing the result). "Think of it as a tool, like spell-check: It should be used in conjunction with human judgment and expertise."
     Soon writers will polish AI-generated copy more than they compose original work.
     "Increasingly, writers will not be putting the first draft down; 100% of their writing experience will largely be editing," said Harris in a Zoom interview. "We truly believe that editing [AI] ... making it better, is going to be the future."

To continue reading, click here.

The opposite of "great."

Head of Medusa, by Damien Hirst

    That the Russians have been pouring money into the pockets of popular Trump influencers comes as no surprise. It's not the smoking gun in Donald Trump's hand, yet. But if it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck... The man has no beliefs other than larceny, and his almost canine devotion to Vladimir Putin ... well, what explains it? You almost hope Trump's in the Russian's pocket; you'd hate to think he's doing this for free, panting at Putin's feet year after year just because he so admires dictators. Somehow that would be even worse. Though that could very well be the case. Nothing would surprise me anymore.
    Not true. It is astounding to see how easily the Republican Party follows along, swinging 180 degrees around to his way of thinking.  From huzzahing for Tail-gunner Joe McCarthy to cheering as the Russians savage Ukraine or, at the least, claiming the invasion of a European democracy and slaughter of its civilians is none of America's business. Heck, Russian tanks could roll down Pennsylvania Avenue and the Republican leadership of today would turn out in their slinkiest dresses, ready to service them. 
     These latest revelations will mean nothing at all, to his supporters. To those of us committed to saving American democracy, it is another reminder, as if one more is necessary, of  how high  the stakes are, and what we are fighting for.