Veterans Day
From 1923: “In this world-problem and world-task none are more deeply concerned than women. It is we who supremely suffer and mourn when wars rage and sudden death destroys our youth. But we are not without hope.”
Homer in four translations
In The New York Times, Emily Wilson, who has now translated both the Iliad and the Odyssey, writes about four translations of a speech by Hector from Iliad 6.
Astrud Gilberto (1940–2023)
I sometimes took the opportunity to play “The Girl from Ipanema” when teaching Odyssey 13, the episode in which Odysseus sees the princess Nausicaa frolicking on the beach with her maids. I played the album version, with no introduction, for greater mystery and, when the English lyrics kicked in, greater amusement.
Siren eyes
t’s worth pointing out that in the Odyssey, the seduction of the Sirens has little to do with sexual allure. What the Sirens promise is the full truth of the Trojan War. They claim to know “everything / that the Greeks and Trojans / Suffered in wide Troy.”
Digging Troy
I can think of one other heist film in which a criminal mastermind invokes Troy in his scheming.
A Homeric ring
Many students thought the memorizing would be daunting. But I never had a student who was unable to do it.
Sheesh
A senator misunderstands the Odyssey.
Today’s xkcd
“Directions from CITY OF TROY to ITHACA.”
Simone Weil on force
Force can take the form of a knee on a neck or a vehicle aimed at human beings in uniform. It can be directed against a person or a community. It can be the work of a lone wolf, as we now say, or a larger group, or the state. One need not be a believer to be thinking these thoughts on Good Friday.
Homer, revised
How best to end infighting among Democratic candidates? Have Athena step in, raising a shout that stops “all fighters in their tracks.”
Kirk Douglas (1916–2020)
Kirk Douglas as Ulysses, 1954.
The Idiod
Stephen Colbert: “In the end Trump may be defeated by his greatest weakness — his Achilles mouth. It's all detailed in the epic poem The Idiod. It’s The Idiod and The Oddity.”
Puzzled about nepenthe
How did nepenthe make its way into today’s Sunday Puzzle? My guess is that Will Shortz has many lists of words, searchable in many ways, and thus found this word.
Victor Davis Hanson on Ajax, Achilles, and Trump
Comparing Trump to Ajax or Achilles: bonkers. If Trump resembles anyone in the Iliad, it’s Agamemnon, the leader who is at a loss in a true crisis and claims Achilles’s prize of war (the enslaved Briseis) to assert his own greater authority. It’s the preening, self-aggrandizing Agamemnon who complains of fake news, dismissing the prophet Calchas’s explanation of a plague: “Not a single favorable omen ever!”
A poem with John Ashbery and Stanley Lombardo in it
In the latest New Yorker , a prose poem by Anne Carson: “Short Talk on Homer and John Ashbery.” And Stanley Lombardo is in there too.
Word of the day: aegis
The modern meanings of aegis always throw me for a moment, because when I see the word I think of Athena, whose aegis scares the bejeezus out of people.
We three kings
Donald Trump reminds me of three kings, or one king and two tyrants, really: Agamemnon, Oedipus, Creon.
A new Odyssey
“Now goddess, child of Zeus, / tell the old story for our modern times. / Find the beginning.”
The Odyssey and mentorship
At The Atlantic, Gregory Nagy, classicist, talks about Telemachus and mentorship and Homer’s Odyssey.
Dylan, Homer, and Cliff
CliffsNotes as a source for Dylan.
Dylan and Homer
“I just died, that’s all.”
Joubert on Homer
“If a superior intelligence wanted to give an account of human beings to the inhabitants of heaven and to give an exact idea of them, he would express himself like Homer.”
Odysseus in the North Atlantic
A startling bit of dialogue, from Action in the North Atlantic.
#TrumpBookReport
“And btw- I was AGAINST the war in Troy.“
Homer’s Odyssey, Joe Sachs’s translation
I’m not sure how I found my way to Joe Sachs’s translation of the Odyssey , a translation that seems to have met with widespread indifference. But two episodes in, I think I’ve found a new favorite to place alongside Robert Fitzgerald’s and Stanley Lombardo’s versions of the poem.
Positively Oslo
The language of the Academy’s brief Dylan biography suggests a preoccupation with celebrity and media culture: “Dylan has the status of an icon.” That’s about the dumbest thing one might say to characterize someone working in the realm of the imagination.
Word of the Day: lotusland
Lotusland is not a nice place to visit, precisely because to visit is to stay.
If Homer’s poems were television channels
Like it says.
Carlo Rotella on Muhammad Ali, Homer, and translation
The starting point for Rotella’s thinking is a boxer’s boast in Iliad 23: “I am the greatest.”
Domestic comedy
“‘. . . the wine-dark fleece.’”