This has been a high-tech week for devices to deal with the vicissitudes of motor neuron disease, or ALS. We can get medications and devices to deal with many of its manifestations but some of the annoying symptoms, like excessive secretion of mucus, are troublesome and hard to relieve. But enough already! Let's talk and think about something else entirely. Some months ago David asked me to identify 'essential' books and say why they are essential. Many others more knowledgeable and with more relevant expertise than I have made lists of this kind and written learned discourses to justify them. All I can do is offer haphazard selections. Today I'll try to say something about literary works in languages other than English that perforce I must read in translation -- in a few cases with books I've really loved, admired, enjoyed, I've read more than one translation. That has been my way with Homer.In the early 1950s I back-packed around Europe twice, each time with a few Penguin classics that I still have, battered and travel-stained but too full of happy memories ever to let go. I took Homer's Iliad on one journey, the Odyssey on the other. They are both prose translations. Despite John Keats's poetic praise, I never got far with Chapman's translation but I enjoyed Robert Fitzgerald's rolling verses almost as much as those Penguin classics in prose, and it's those I've returned to several times. In the 1950s I also read the great Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripedes in the Penguin classic translations, and these are somewhere on the shelves scattered throughout our apartment. A project I promised myself that I'd do eleven years ago when we moved into this apartment is to arrange my remaining books in some sort of rational order; it remains undone, and now I rationalize that it's fun to go searching as I have in the past few minutes to verify that indeed these precious tattered volumes are still here; searching can disclose other books I'd forgotten that I have, and vow to reread them some time. For whatever reason, I never got as deeply immersed in translations of the great Roman writers as I have always been in the Classical Greeks. Of course I've read bits of Ovid, Apuleus's Golden Ass in the rollicking bawdy translation by Robert Graves (someone purloined my copy years ago and I've never replaced it as I would if any of my precious Greek classics went missing; I suppose that's a measure of my attachment to Roman classics). But I've never attempted most other Roman writers, except Julius Caesar's Conquest of Gaul which is hardly a work of great literature. What does distinguish great literature? The greatest of all tragedies, Sophocles' Oedipus trilogy, especially Oedipus Rex, contains the essential elements. A young man gets into an argument with a stranger, fights and kills him at a place where three roads meet near Thebes. (This place where three roads meet was pointed out to me by Peter Collett at the time student reading Classics at Oriel College Oxford, a life-long friend I met on that back-packing holiday). The young man goes on into Thebes, meets and soon marries the widow of the man he killed, has children with her. Then it is revealed that he is the firstborn son of the woman he has married, sent away into exile when he was born because a sooth-sayer looked at him, at the swollen feet that gave him his name, foretold he would kill his own father and bring disaster upon the family. Oedipus realized that he has killed his own father and married his own mother. Overwhelmed by the horror of what he has done, Oedipus puts out his own eyes. It is an ancient myth perhaps originally founded in fact, there is a sense of relentless inevitability about the way actions lead to reactions and events unfold; and all is told in a drama that, in modern translation anyway, and as seen on stage and even on TV, takes hold of you and never lets go until you reach the end, drained by intense emotion yet fulfilled, satisfied, the better for the experience. Homer's Iliad has similar effects, prolonged though less intense, dealing with the series of tragic events that follow an episode in the ten-year siege of Troy, the wrath of Achilles when his leader Agamemnon deprives him of his favorite slave girl.
I had thought in this post that I could say something useful about the great Russian writers, and even the German, French, and others I've had to read in translation because my language skills are so limited. But limited also is time to escape reality into my blog. Cervantes, Thomas Mann, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Proust and a dozen or more others will have wait until another time.
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