cahn asked me: What Classics works (to be read in English translation) would you recommend to hook someone who doesn't know anything about it? (Aside from the Illiad/Odyssey/Aeneid -- but would also be open to interesting translations of those!) (And especially for someone who preferred the Aeneid to the Illiad and Odyssey?)

With the caveat that different things work for different people, and also my knowledge of good English translation is limited because I read most of those works in German (and/or had to translate them in school, like Cicero's speeches against Catilina and Sallust's work about the conspiracy), here are some recs I would go with. Note that they aren't literal translations but poetic ones, much like the Faust translation by Howart Brenton I recced to cahn where he had someone do the literal prose translation for him first so he could be sure about the literal meaning and then put it into verse. They're also by terrific poets, which means when you read these works in English, you get something of the visceral excitement and beauty of the originals, not a sense of dutiful bland dictionary (or worse, bowlderized) rendition.

1.) Ted Hughes: Tales from Ovid (i.e. a selection from Ovid's Metamorphoses). Praise, quotes and explanations why I think that's an awesome book to read here.

2.) Ted Hughes: Alkestis by Euripides. The last thing he ever published, shortly before his death, with a theme of personal relevance. Hughes and Euripides were as good a match as Hughes & Ovid. More praise and quotes here.

3.) Roz Kaveney: Catullus. Lots of well deserved praise and buying link here.

Now as I said elsewhere, I've been hearing good things about Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, so it's definitely on my to read list, but I haven't gotten the chance to yet. And with Cicero's letters and speeches, Suetonius, Plutarch, Herodotus etc. I don't know any English translations, since, see above, I read them in German (or in Cicero's case translated some of the speeches in school and read the rest in German).

The other days

Connie Palmen: Du sagst es. (Original title "Jij zegt het", thank you, ratcreature). This is a new novel about the marriage between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, written in first person from Hughes' pov, and right there you have a basic problem. Not that it's a fictional take on people who lived and died within many readers' living memory (Hughes as late as 1998); there have been others, and fiction at least doesn't declare itself to be THE TRUTH, but the author's imaginative speculation on same; it's more honest than many a non-fiction in this regard. No, it's that both Plath and Hughes were fantastic writers who wrote about their relationship, and sorry, but that's a very high standard to aim for if you're going for first person.

(First person is tricky in general to believe for me as a reader and to do as a writer. I've done it occasionally, but rarely, and as a reader first person more often breaks the suspension of disbelief for me than not. Especially if the narrator is supposed to be someone whose voice has been preserved in written or audio form.)

Connie Palmen doesn't really manage, but that's not the only problem I have with her book. Another, related: there's a lot of prose paraphrasing of Hughes' Birthday Letters poems, which means something real Ted Hughes expressed in a few concise sentences is expressed by fictional Hughes rambling on for several pages. This isn't helping with the comparisons to the detriment of the novel. Then there's the question as to which type of readers this book is aiming for: can't be people either unfamiliar with the Plath and Hughes saga, or just casually aware of both poets' existence, because the novel rarely bothers with explanations and settings; for example, it starts at their first meeting at the St. Bodolph's Review party in Cambridge but doesn't bother explaining what Hughes was doing there, what Plath was doing there, and expects the readers to know all this already. Otoh, if the book is for readers who know their Lucas Myers (American poet, friend of Hughes) from their Richard Sassoon (on-off boyfriend of Plath's pre Ted), then it feels a bit like the kind of fanfiction that solely describes with a bit more dialogue or inner monologue scenes in broadcast episodes which fans are already familiar with with, you know what I mean? I've read Plath's breathless account of her first meeting with Hughes in her journal, written a day or two after the fact. I've read Hughes' elegic take on it, written decades later in his poem "St. Bodolph's" in "Birthday Letters". Palmen trying to match either writer's command of language by paraphrasing them, and not adding something uniquely hers, just feels - well, second rate, sorry to say.

Then there's the way no one but Plath, and maybe her mother Aurelia, is really fleshed out as a character. His siblings, Olwyn and Gerald, were enormously important to Hughes (see next review), but while that's said in a tell not show way by Palmen's narrator, she doesn't bother with the show not tell, actual scenes (other than Olwyn vs Sylvia arguments) that would show us who they are. Again, I can understand some of the why - both died only this year, which means when this novel was written they were still alive, and one feels more inhibited because of this. But it's still for me a narrative failure.

(Also irritating: Palmen's Hughes repeatedly describing Plath's eyes as "black", when real Hughes described Plath's brown eyes in some of the most memorable passages of Birthday Letters. What is up with that? Maybe a Dutch-German translation error, and the original novel means something like "dark gaze"?)

Lastly: having read a lot of Hughes - poetry, drama, letters, some essays - I don't think he comes across as self-pitying in his published voice. IMO, and that doesn't mean he wasn't, just that his own texts, either due to command of language or editing, don't feel like he was. But Palmen's Hughes feels extremely sorry for himself, as if the author wants to make absolutely sure we do, too, and thus paradoxically prevents it.

Jonathan Bate: Ted Hughes.: Subtitled "The Unauthorized Life", because while the author originally had the cooperation of the Hughes estate and thus access to Hughes' unpublished journals, poem drafts etc., he inevitably (if you know something of the long saga of the Plath biographies and Olwyn Hughes) clashed with them, authorization was withdrawn, and thus the subtitle. This being said, Bate clearly has a lot of respect for the tough as nails Olwyn; when she died in January this year, he wrote her obituary, and if you read it, you'll see what I mean.

As biographies go, this is a good one. Bate takes Hughes seriously as a poet, which doesn't mean he praises all his work, but it means we get a lot of Hughes' development as a writer - this includes some quotes from early drafts, and to me at least, it's fascinating to see how various alternatives of a later classic phrase were considered before the final one happened - , a strong presence of his Yorkshire background and his love of nature, detailed accounts of his threatre work with Peter Brook etc. - instead of just accounts of his love affairs. Which are, of course, present as well. If there's anything to critisize, it's that brief relationships like the one with Emma Tennant get more in terms of quotes from the lady in question than second Mrs. Hughes, Carol, gets about her decades long marriage, but since this is also because Carol Hughes still won't go on the record for journalists or biographers, I see Bate's problem.

Anyway, Carol aside, Bate is great with bringing the supporting cast of his biography to life. Definitely the siblings, Gerald and Olwyn, and other long lasting relationships, part ally, part adversary Al Alvarez, but also people hardly noticed even by all the Plath biographers before, like Shirley, Hughes' pre-Sylvia girlfriend who was with him during that fateful first encounter, or Susan Alliston, whose affair and breakup with Hughes turned into a long term friendship and who died of cancer the same year Assia Wevill committed murder-suicide with their daughter and Hughes' mother died (supporting Bate's argument that 1969 beat out 1963, the year of Plath's death, as Worst Year Ever for Hughes). His narrative voice is generally non-judgmental, literary judgments aside (I'm with him on "Shakespeare and the Great Goddess" as Hughes at his prose worst, btw, and also that the Ovid translations work as something of a poetical rebirth), and he comes across as trying to be fair to everyone in the big dramas of Hughes' life: case in point, the last but one of the stormy Olwyn versus Sylvia encounters, where they both thought the other was rude, Bate points out Olwyn smoked non-stop despite Sylvia asking her not to and yours truly entirely sympathizes with Sylvia until Bate also points out that Sylvia's other complaint, that Olwyn stayed so long on this particular visit, overlooks that Olwyn lived in Paris at this time and hadn't seen Ted in more than a year, so had a lot of catching up to do.

Bate declares right at the start he wants to write a complete life, not just another take on the Plath and Hughes relationship, and points the reader to Diane Middlebrook's "Her Husband" for one of the most recent and thorough, but inevitably, though her suicide happens on page 216 of 556, Sylvia Plath is the strongest non-Hughes presence in the book. There's a good argument to be made that dead Sylvia had a stronger grip on Hughes - both as a poet and as a woman - than any of the other living women he became subsequently entangled with, and certainly more than poor doomed Assia. (Another plausible argument can be made that if Sylvia had lived, so would Assia have; both Assia and Ted Hughes despite their affair were anything but sure they wanted to have a permanent relationship before Sylvia died, they both still had other relationships - Assia with her husband David plus a brief fling with, of all the people, Al Alvarez, Ted with the aforementioned Susan, and if Sylvia had lived, the Ted/Assia affair probably would have burned itself out quickly, and they'd have moved on, whether or not they would have re-committed to their respective spouses. But being known as The Other Woman after Sylvia Plath had killed herself trapped Assia in a competition she could no longer win, and in a relationship she and Hughes thought they HAD to make work now which went on to ensure it didn't.)

Bate shows that the poems addressed to Plath collected in Birthday Letters were indeed written (and redrafted a lot) during decades, not a last outburst before Hughes' death (the decades long process had been mentioned at the time Birthday Letters was published, but was met with scepticism), and again, the early drafts are interesting to me both in terms of how a poem is written and as an endlessly attempted dialogue with a woman who is gone. (Ditto for Hughes' comments on her poetry and prose, be it in private letters or, rarely, in public.) His version of Euripides' Alcestis, the last complete Hughes work to be published within his life time, wasn't something comissioned or otherwise inspired by an outside source, he chose to write about a woman dying and then returning to her husband as he felt himself dying, and since I thought there were repeated Sylvia echoes in ALCESTIS, I was gratified that so does Bate. (He found a Wuthering Heights allusion Hughes has smuggled into Alcestis which I missed, though, and which has no equivalent in the original Greek text. In Hughes' Alcestis, Admetos after Alcestis death imagines his own death:

"I think of cool soil
A mask over my face,
A weight of stillness over my body,
A darkness
In which she lies next to me - her lips
Maybe only an inch from my lips,
Forever."

This, Bates speculates, is Hughescliff, imagining himself in the moorland graveyard at Heptonstall, and goes to quote the relevant Wuthering Heights passage:

"You were very wicked, Mr. Heathcliff!" I exclaimed, "were you not ashamed to disturb the dead?"
"I disturbed nobody, Nelly," he replied, and "I gave some ease to myself. I shall be a great deal more comfortable now, and you'll have a better chance of keeping me underground when I get there. Disturbed her? No! She has disturbed me, night and day, through eighteen years - incessantly - remorselessly - till yesternight, and yesternight I was tranquil. I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped and my cheek frozen against hers."

Wuthering Heights was of great significance to both Plath and Hughes (who grew up almost next door, well next village, in Yorkshire), and there are poems about it and Emily Bronte by both of them, but that parallel had still eluded me before.

After describing Hughes' death and giving a brief overview of the lives (and in one tragic case death) of his surviving family in the subsequent years, Bate returns once more to the tale of Ted and Sylvia, and after 500 pages of trying to keep up a matter-of-fact, occasionally ironic tone, at last throws caution into the wind and goes for the bloody passion, and does it better in half a page than Palmen does in an entire novel:

Sylvia Plath's death was the central fact of Ted Hughes's life. However he tried to get away from it, he could not; however the biographer broadens the picture, it is her image that returns. In the letters of his final months, even after the expiation that came with Birthday Letters, Plath remains the most vivid presence in his mental world. So, for example in a simple sentence of luminous poetic prose in a long letter to his German translators who had sought advice on the meaning of various phrases in such poems as 'The Bee God', Ted explains how the image ' Your page a dark swarm':

"brings together SP bending over the bees (pending over the beehive with its roof off), SP bending over her page (where the letters as she composed writhed and twisted, superimposed on each other, displacing each other), her page, as a seething mass and depth and compound of living ideas - carrying, somewhere in the heart of it, in the heart of the words, of the phrases, of the poetic whole struggling to form itself, the vital nuclei of her poetic operation - her 'self' and her 'Daddy' - and finally, her poem (in process of composition there on her page as she bends over it) as a warm of bees clinging under a blossoming bough."

"The lit blossom", he writes, "is also Sp's face." It is as if Sylvia instead of the thought-fox has entered the room and is bending over Ted as he writes. Her face is radiant. Her ghost has returned in recognition of the knowledge that he loved her until the day he died. Before him stands yesterday.

One poem for poetry month.

Prospero and Sycorax
Ted Hughes


She knows, like Ophelia,
The task has swallowed him.
She knows, like George's dragon,
Her screams have closed his helmet.


She knows, like Jocasta,
It is over.
He prefers
Blindness.


She knows, like Cordelia,
He is not himself now,
And what speaks through him must be discounted -
Though it will be the end of them both.


She knows, like God,
He has found
Something
Eastier to live with -


His death, and her death.

I've posted two poems from Ted Hughes' collection Birthday Letters (the last poetry volume he published, a year or so before his death) before, my favourites - "Life after Death" and "Daffodils". One of the reasons why I love them best is that the beauty of the language and the emotional impact is there whether or not you know anything about Hughes and/or Sylvia Plath. They work as their own entities, and any information you need to understand them is given in the poems themselves. That's not the case for some of the other poems, whom I love as well, but for slightly different reasons, and will quote from this time. These poems bring Plath to life in a way none of her biographers (imo, as always) have managed. Of course, it's Hughes' version of her, his perspective and his memories, and also his decades long struggle with those memories and the way his own life has become part of a public narrative, but all the same, there is an emotional richness with all its contradictions there, and a physical reality, that I didn't find in the various versions by third and presumably more objective parties. (Unless they were quoting from Plath's diaries and letters.) One of the red threads throughout Birthday Letters is the attempt to get back to Sylvia the living woman as opposed to Sylvia Plath the cult figure; it's a double engagement both with Sylvia's own versions of her life and herself (and she had several - the "I" of the letters is not the "I" of the journals is not the "I" of the poems) and with the public figure. One of the earliest BL poems addresses the moment of reading her journals again, a decade or so after her death.

( Your story. My story. )

Quote of the day: "If you could make the public understand that my father was not a jolly, jocose gentleman walking about the earth with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch you would greatly oblige me." Kate Perugini, nee Kate Dickens, to George Bernard Shaw about her father Charles.


Moving on to comics: Wil Wheaton blogs about favourite comic collections. His include Neil Gaiman's 1602 and Joss Whedon's run of Astonishing X-Men.

Fringe: Double Helix is an amazing look at Walter Bishop, vid-wise.

Back when an edition of Ted Hughes' Letters was published, I wrote a review. At the time, the BBC did a program with Richard Armitage reading excerpts of said letters, and he did a superb job. (Both because he's a good actor and because of their shared Yorkshire background, I thought the choice of him reading Ted Hughes was inspired.) What I only just found out is that you can download parts of the program at Armitage's website. The available excerpts include the letters he wrote to his sister Olwyn and to Sylvia Plath's mother Aurelia shortly after Sylvia killed herself. Someone put them on YouTube using footage of the film Sylvia. (I wasn't keen on said movie for various reasons, but okay.) But listen to Armitage's voice and the attempt by a young Hughes to phrase the unspeakable:

I stumbled across Germaine Greer dismissing Sylvia Plath's poetry as "a suicide note" and hence not real art, which annoyed me to no end. Both because it's not true, and because of the context in which she says it, which is an interview about the Plath/Hughes marriage, and she seems to do that irritating "if you like one, you must bash the other" thing. (I love both poets, for new readers of my ramblings.) I dislike this tendency in general, and here it's especially ridiculous because Ted Hughes himself hated this particular interpretation. He was quite eloquent (and consistent) on the subject, both before Sylvia became a world wide icon, when she was only recently dead, and decades later, when she was acknowledged as one of the great poets of her age. Here's an early letter, from 1963 trying to convince a critic (Donald Hall) he was wrong dismissing her poems as mere personal melodrama: Other people’s weaker poems look like anybody’s, or somebody else’s, but her least successful efforts were unique – like a completely original substance, even the very artificial ones. When you criticise her for using the impact of her sufferings in place of the impact of art, it seems to me you misread them. What you’re saying really, is that at last she managed to get through – she managed actually to say something of her own, in verse. What a feat! For a change, and at last, somebody’s written in blood. Whatever you say about them, you know they’re what every poet wishes he or she could do. (…) When poems hit so hard, surely you ought to find reasons for their impact, not argue yourself out of your bruises. If I cavil a bit, it’s because I hate to see cavilling, when something like those poems has occurred. And you seemed to cavil a bit, in that review.

By the 80s, of course, it wasn't necessary to defend her to the general literary community anymore - on the contrary - he was seen as the villain responsible for her death by a lot of them, and as an inferior poet (if they bothered to read his own work at all) - but to friends of his like Keith Sagar who went for the "one-note-breakdown/suicide note" interpretation as well. Hughes wrote in a private letter that wasn't published until after his death, argueing again against this interpretation:

Ariel – March-Nov. 62 – is the diary of her coming to grips with & inheriting this real self. It isn’t the record of a ‘breakdown’. Growing up brought her to it – having children etc., & confronting the events of 1962 (and mastering them completely). (After all, in 1960, she was only 18 months out of college – nearly all the Colossus poems were written while she was still a student or teacher & the rest within the first year after.)
You know Goethe’s remark about the labour & difficulty of actually laying claim to what we have inherited – and you know how few people attempt it, how few even know they need tom ake the effort, how some go through Primal Screams to find it etc. Well, Ariel is her record of her experience of it – of coming into possession of the self she’d been afraid of. You suggest you find much of it a language of disintegration. I see it as a footwork & dexterity – the honesty (nakedness) to meet the matter on its own terms, & the brave will to master it – which she did. Those poems enact a a weird fusion & identity with the material & simultaneously take control of it, & possession of it.
It’s a process of integration, start to finish. By Dec. 62 she was quite a changed person – greatly matured, and a big personality. In Dec/Jan she stopped writing (no poems really from early December to late January) & set up a new home, a new circle of friends, & a new life. (…) So you see I read those Ariel poems as a climb – not a fall. A climb to a precarious foothold, as it turned out. But she was knocked off again by pure unlucky combination of accidents. (…) I tell you all of this to quality your attitude to the notion of her as a young woman hurtling to disintegration shedding rags of poetry – leaping into Aetna & bursting into flames as she fell. Ariel poems are about successful integration – violently inheriting of a violent temperament. The first sign of disintegration – in a writer – is that the writing loses the unique stamp of his/her character, & loses its inner light.
Mustn’t underestimate her humour either.
The real question is – what would be the interpretation of those poems if she hadn’t died, if she’d gone on to write something marvellous in a different way. As those very last poems suggest she was about to do. They could only have been read as the scenes of a victorious battle for so called ‘self-integration’. The whole accent of subsequent commentary would have been different. The interpretation generally given is a pure fantasy – induced by her death, which was an accident (it could have happened at any moment between 51 & 63, if she’d got physically low enough – just as it could happen to thousands who never show a symptom), and not at all essential to her poems – except as one latent factor in her mythology.

Of course, Hughes isn't more "right" than any other reader in his interpretation, and yes, he does have a personal investment in believing that Sylvia Plath could have survived and that her suicide was not inevitable, nor necessary by her poetry, but I still find his reading of her work for more layered than Greer's simple dismissal.


Still on a literary note, Twenty Things You Never Knew About Shakespeare, apropos Simon Callow's newest one man show. He and Jonathan Bate vote for Shakespeare as a Jack-Harkness-type omnisexual, though when I read Callow's "at parties he would certainly have gone home with the best-looking person in the room", I thought: What makes you think he'd have pulled? I mean, let's be realistic here. Greatest playwright of all time or not, Our Will wasn't exactly a stunner in looks with his premature baldness, hamster cheeks and sad moustache. Also, the best looking person in the room might have gone for the most affluent person in the room, which, unless we're talking his very last years in Stratford, certainly would not have been Shakespeare. Otoh, there's that anecdote about the the citizen's wife whom leading actor and head of the company Richard Burbage had his eye on and who went for Shakespeare instead ("tell Mr. Burbage William the Conqueror came before Richard III"), so who knows. Maybe Shakespeare had raw sex appeal in addition to genius which portraits and sketches rarely render. (This is also the only explanation for the women in Brecht's life. I mean, Brecht was ugly, Thomas Mann's secretary Hilde Kahn told me his personal hygiene was so appalling that you could smell him a mile wide, he stank so much, and he exploited the women who fell for him in every regard, sexually and work wise, and yet there they were, women galore.) However, I think Wells is kidding himself if he thinks finding a letter addressed to William Shakespeare from Stratford mentioning Anne & the children and Hamlet on the same page would shut upt the Oxfordians, Baconites and the various other people writing tirades since centuries about how Shakespeare can't have been Shakespeare, that it must have been *insert candidate of choice* instead.

...but you know, if we did have more data on William S., what might take the place of "it was really *candidate of choice* books? Fannish feuding between Marlovians and Shakespeareans. I mean, why not? It would fit the pattern. Marlowe, like Sylvia Plath - or John Lennon, for that matter - died young. (Which is why he's one of the outside candidates of who was really Shakespeare, the "he only faked his death" theory.) We could have people going on and on about how he was the true genius and that surviving hack Will was really second rate with way too much of an eye on the box office, and then there would be a backklash in some quarters where Marlowe would be declared a one note writer whose entire reputation rests upon being knifed in a tavern and really, aren't all those übervillains tiresome after a while? There's be a trashy tell-all biography, "The Lives of Kit Marlowe", but that would be so hysterically over the top that it would start an anti-backlash-backlash. Yes, that's how it would go.

Meanwhile, have some recs:

Merlin:

Love is a tired symphony: attempting to reconcile the Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot triangle of many Arthurian myths with the characters as currently characterized in Merlin the show is a bit of a challenge, and this story rises elegantly to it the occasion. My own intepretation would be somewhat different, but one of the characteristics of good fanfiction is that it can convince you for the duration of the reading. Also, I really love that the author does something all the other fanfic set in the future of Merlin hasn't (unless it's dark fic which this story is not): it doesn't automatically assume that once the magical reveal is over and done with and Arthur has revoked the laws against magic, he'll never ever be troubled with the attitudes Uther raised him with again. This version of Arthur still struggles with that - rationally accepting something doesn't mean the beliefs you were imprinted with for most of your life don't plague your subconscious anymore, after all. Which makes much sense to me.

BTVS/AtS:

Excellent meta about Cordelia. Again, I disagree in parts (to me, the problems with the writing of Cordelia start as early as Disharmony in s2, the s4 Jasmine retcon is actually a character salvation after what happened before, and I have severe problems with You're Welcome in s5 which prevent me from being as happy about it as most of fandom and the writer of this meta is), but it's so thoughtfully and eloquently put that it's just a pleasure to read.


And lastly, I found a Harry Potter/RPF crossover vignette in which the Beatles teach at Hogwarts. It's terribly cute and really charming, though I utterly disagree with the Houses chosen for John and Paul. George as Ravenclaw and Ringo as Hufflepuff are perfect, but you'll never convince me that John's a Slytherin and Paul a Gryffindor. Let's examine the agreed-upon character traits here, and with all the partisanship in many a biography, there are actually a lot of those. John Lennon: prone to acting before thinking ("impulsive" is putting is mildly), thought frays were for jumping into. By natural inclination lazy (both descriptions of mid-60s John and 70s John feature days spent in front of the tv without communicating) unless spurred to work first by Paul and then by Yoko. No patience. Not a long attention span. Very easy to con (ask Magic Alex, ask Allen Klein) and to fleece, though absolutely unforgiving and vengeful as hell once he did clue into that. Prone to a black and white view of the world, and absolutely willing to do anything to champion a cause no matter the cost once he's convinced that cause is good. In conclusion, definitely a Gryffindor. (If you think a talent for sarcasm, pranks or verbal cruelty is not Gryffindorian, check out Sirius Black or the Weasley Twins.) Paul McCartney: gets described by friend and foe alike as an ambitious workoholic from teenagedom onwards. (And a good thing, too, otherwise they'd never have become more than a garage band. It always cracks me how how those solely- in-for-a-laugh mates of John's in the Quarry Men mysteriously drop out one by one after Paul joins, and get replaced by George whom John first objected to on the grounds of him being too young but who actually could play which is why Paul insisted on bringing him in.) Depending on whether the biographer is friendly or hostile, was "diplomatic" or "manipulative" about reaching his goals, but either way, used tactics and people skills. Perfectionist prone to drive people crazy not by wandering off or not showing up (aka the Lennon variation) but by putting them through 40 takes just if two chords don't sound right. Is, however, able to compromise on things like image and looks if it makes success more likely. Likes to be in control, whether openly or behind the scenes. Definitely a friend of long-term planning. In conclusion: definitely Slytherin. (Yoko, too, by the way. And again, John was lucky they are. He probably would have drunk himself to death in Liverpool or overdosed on drugs in London or Los Angeles otherwise at respective points in time, thoroughly discontent with his life but unable to really do something about it.)

International Translation Day is celebrated every year on 30 September on the feast of St. Jerome, the Bible translator who is considered as the patron saint of translators.

Ah, translations, the not bablefish type. I wouldn't be familiar with a third of the novels, plays, movies I am without them, not to mention the non-fiction books essential for researching anything of interest. Last year several book awards were handed out at the Corine in Munich, to ten books, eight of which were translated, but did anyone mention the translator(s) in their praise? No. And they're getting paid lousy wages in general, too. So, let's hear it for translators once in a while.

Now, while matter-of-fact scientific translations are important, the absolutely best thing which can happen if we're talking about poetry or fictional prose is that the translator has poetic gifts of his/her own, and sometimes even manages to achieve a work of art of its own. (Classic famous examples: Catullus' version of Sappho's most famous poem. The Schlegel-Tieck-Translation of Shakespeare. Also Rilke translating Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as quoted here.

All of these examples are, however, either translations from English into German or from Greek into Latin, not into English, the language I'm currently using, which is not my own. I am, however, familiar enough with it to appreciate the beauty of a great translation/version, and have previously written about two of my favourites:

Ovid as rendered by Ted Hughes

and

Seneca's Oedipus as rendered by Ted Hughes

Hughes' has a way of recreating the ancients in his own fierce poetry that enchants me every time I read one of his versions, which is why I do so more often than reading more accurate German translations of the same writers. Here are some quotes of the very last one he wrote, his version of Euripides' Alcestis. As Keith Sagar pointed out in an essay, Hughes never translated one of the most famous Ovidian tales, the one of Orpheus, the poet who tries to retrieve his dead wife from the underworld, but fails to. However, the story haunted him for obvious biographical reasons, and in his version of Alcestis - not the most popular of Euripides' plays, an odd choice to work at - or not, if you're dying, and the play is about a wife lost through your own fault but also returned again to life -, he inserts a sudden speech of Admetos about Orpheus which isn't there in the original (A glance. Think of it. Only a backward glance,/ And he had done what he should never have done/ At the crucial moment./ He lost her). Alcestis as rendered by Hughes is one long passionate argument with death (also with Death, who shows up as a character early on), loss, love and selfishness, and in it he comes up with lines like these:

A dead woman, a falling star
With a long train
Of burning and burned-out love.
Falling into non-life.
Into endless time, endlessly falling.

or:

You live now
Only because you let Death take her.
You killed her. Point-blank
She met the death that you dodged.(...)
You are the cannibal. Only you.
Thrive on that feast. Nobody else.
Think of it.
Every day you live she nourishes you
With her dead body.

Or:

We should never have married.
Men who have never married
Keep their nerves inside their own skin.
The nerves of the married man,
His very entrails, all his arteries
Are woven into the body of his wife -
And into the bodies of his children.

And then again:

Necessity could not frighten Alcestis,
We pray to Necessity to spare us,
But we pray to Alcestis
To give us courage to live - as if death
Were no more than the outline of life,
The outline of a shadow on a wall,
Maybe the shadow of a dancer, a reveller.

And in conclusion: read translations. Sometimes, they're absolutely magnificent.

As promised here in my report of the Frankfurt Book Fair, I've now collected the passages of Letters of Ted Hughes which for one reason or another struck me most.

( Cut for length )ETA: from kalypso_v: until Monday morning, you can listen to excerpts from the letters read by Richard Armitage here, which were broadcast by the BBC last Monday.

Firstly, I changed my default icon again, since twinkledru created such a beautiful one of my favourite pair of sisters. Secondly, fernwithy wrote an intriguing analysis of how BTVS and HP use monsters as metaphors, here. (I also admire the way she dealt with a troll.) Thirdly, penknife posted the next chapter of "Fear the Rest", her great work-in-progress about the way the enmity between the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Mutants developed from a common start, Erik and Jean Grey pov mostly. She linked the previous chapters, if you missed those. I shy away from WIPs normally, but this is just to die for.

***

Watch me vent my inner ancient authors/poetry fangirl. Or: Why fanfic writers ought to read Ovid. Well, not just him, of course. But the thing is, what both the Greeks and the Romans did (and then the rest of the world for 2000 years) was to take a basic stock of stories and characters and then to give them their own interpretation. Sounds familiar?

Ovid's Metamorphoses is probably one of the most well-known collection of myths, and writers continue to draw on him to this day. Whether you're watching Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream or Titus Andronicus, or reading Neil Gaiman's Sandman, notably the volumes Fables and Reflections and Brief Lives, you're seeing adaptions from the Metamorphoses.

There are several translations and collections (mostly a selection of the most famous myths, not the entire thing), but my favourite is Ted Hughes' Tales from Ovid, because it's really more than a translation. It's a poet responding to another poet with a recreation. While both Ovid and Hughes were fascinated by passion, they also were very different in other ways; Hughes lacked Ovid's urban elegeance, and I don't think he'd have been interested in translating the Ars Amatoria, for example. But he had a totally unsentimental and powerful take on the world of animals and myths, and the Metamorphoses were ideally suited for this.

An example of what Hughes does in Tales of Ovid in terms of bringing his own language to render Ovid's vision is this excerpt from the introductory tale of the four ages. I'll first quote Hughes and then a literal translation.

( Fierce Poetry )