Musing's musings

ψυχή δ' Ἄϊδόσδε κατῆλθεν

To paraphrase his translation of the tagline from Homer that I've paraphrased for this post's title, "the soul of Robert Fagles has drifted down to the House of Death." (It's Iliad VII.330 if you want to check it; I've just changed the number of the noun from plural to singular, and changed the verb accordingly.)

Sadly, it is a little out of the ordinary that a classicist's passing gets mentioned in the national media. It's not like there are classics groupies or anything like that. Heck, most people aren't really clear on what it is classicists do in the first place.

But Fagles was different. As the Paper of Record noted, he is one of the few people to have attempted tackling the three biggest epic poems of classical antiquity: the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid. Not only did he tackle all three, but he produced bestsellers with his translations. And that is a singular accomplishment in this diminished age when reading itself is on the decline, and when the classics are no longer exactly flying off the shelves.

I'm not surprised at the success of his works, however. I haven't yet made the acquaintance of his Aeneid (but I'm putting it on my wishlist for birthday and/or Christmas gifts), but I've had the immense pleasure of devouring both his Iliad and his Odyssey. I've taught Homer in the original Greek, and I can attest from bitter personal experience that making sense out of his text is not always an easy thing. Making not only good poetry, but good poetry that is both readable and captures something of the flavors of the original, takes a translator with more on the ball than I've got. In addition to the originals, I have four (I think it's four) translations of each of Homer's epics on the shelf behind me in the office: the Classics Club's edition of Samuel Butler's translation, Robert Fitzgerald's poetic rendering, Richmond Lattimore's more-or-less word-for-word translation, and Fagles's.

The last two are the two I'm most likely to pull off the shelf, though for different reasons. The Butler is the one I cut my teeth on as a wee sprout in junior high. It's stilted, archaic, and prosy. (But even with all those faults, it was good enough to keep me turning the pages; I think I'd read both the Iliad and the Odyssey two or three times apiece before I hit high school.) The Fitzgerald I forget how I came by. It may have been a required text for one of my high school classes, or it may have been a Christmas or birthday gift from my folks. I know plenty of people who swear by Fitzgerald's translation, but it's always left me cold. He uses a very odd transliteration scheme for the common names, and while he keeps to a poetic form, I never felt it singing to me. The Lattimore was a college text, and it's the one I reach for if I want a fairly precise rendering in English. Lattimore was no slouch as a translator, but given his decision to stick closely to the original, it can be a little dense in places.

But Fagles's translation, on the other hand, not only sticks to at least a mostly six-beat line (echoing the epic hexameters of Homer's original) and fairly closely to the original text, but manages to make it sing. His is the translation I pull down when I want a reasonably accurate rendering with some oomph behind it.

Of course, that skill makes his passing at a reasonably young age (he was 74) all the more tragic. If we're ever going to get more people reading the good stuff from antiquity, we need people who can turn them into bestsellers. And thus I will lament his death with words from another classical author (the Bard this time) and paraphrase the beginning of a famous soliloquy pronounced by the leading character in a play connected with Scotland,* "[he] should have died hereafter."

*One does never speak the name of the Scottish Play!

Because it's pretty

And because I can:

nullam rem e nihilo gigni divinitus umquam.
quippe ita formido mortalis continet omnis,
quod multa in terris fieri caeloque tuentur,
quorum operum causas nulla ratione videre
possunt, ac fieri divino numine rentur.
quas ob res ubi viderimus nihil posse creari
de nihilo, tum quod sequimur iam rectius inde
perspiciemus, et unde queat res quaeque creari
et quo quaeque modo fiant opera sine divom.
nam si de nihilo fierent, ex omnibus rebus
omne genus nasci posset, nihil semine egeret.
e mare primum homines, e terra posset oriri
squamigerum genus et volucres erumpere caelo;
armenta atque aliae pecudes, genus omne ferarum,
incerto partu culta ac deserta tenerent;
nec fructus idem arboribus constare solerent
sed mutarentur; ferre omnes omnia possent.
quippe ubi non essent genitalia corpora cuique,
qui posset mater rebus consistere certa?
at nunc seminibus quia certis quaeque creantur,
inde enascitur atque oras in luminis exit,
materies ubi inest cuiusque et corpora prima.
atque hac re nequeunt ex omnibus omnia gigni,
quod certis in rebus inest secreta facultas.
praeterea cur vere rosam, frumenta calore,
vites autumno fundi suadente videmus,
si non, certa suo quia tempore semina rerum
cum confluxerunt, patefit quodcumque creatur,
dum tempestates adsunt et vivida tellus
tuto res teneras effert in luminis oras?

--De rerum natura, I, 150-179

In the context of one of the periodic Wars of (Ir)Religion over at Big Orange, I found myself in a philosophical argument with an atheist in the strange position of arguing that there need not necessarily be a particular cause for every thing or every event in the world. The foregoing is one of the things I quoted to him/her to refute that hypothesis. Since I know that not all of my legions of faithful readers are up to reading 1st century BCE Latin epic verse at sight, I'll translate below the fold.

In memoriam

It was 16 years ago today that I got the call. The one I knew was coming, but hadn't expected quite so soon. The call to say a dear friend had died. Of AIDS. Alone.

I was fortunate (if that's not a blasphemous thing to say), as a gay man in the '80s, to have been a late bloomer and to move in a restricted circle of gay friends. Because two AIDS funerals (one of which I couldn't even attend, being in graduate school half a continent away when it took place) is two too many to endure. For some in the tribe in those days, they were going to two memorials a week, if not two a day.

Which is one reason it disturbs me to see people acting as if AIDS were nothing worse than any other chronic but treatable disease. It is far, far worse, even in the days of the protease inhibitors and the multi-drug cocktails that were still only a sought-after dream in those dark days at the end of the '80s.

But that's not what I'm writing about tonight. I'm writing about the memory of a good friend, someone who was always there to listen when I was having problems, who literally maintained an open-door policy: If he was home, the door was open, and all anybody he knew had to do was knock, and they'd be invited in, at any time of the day or night. It meant a lot to me, as a recently out gay man, to have a friend who'd been around that block and knew where the pitfalls were, who would talk honestly about anything, and would spare your feelings if it were humanly possible--and smack you upside the head, verbally or physically, if you needed it.

I was fortunate to know him, and fortunate to be able to give him back some of what he gave me before his untimely passing. Still, I wish (as one always does) that I had been able to do more. So I'm doing a little more tonight. Below the fold, I've posted the text of the elegy I wrote for my friend just after his death. I'm not mentioning his name, because it's ultimately not important. He knows I wrote it for him, and so do his friends and family. But knowing there are other people out there going through the same kinds of things, I thought it might be helpful to post a few words that might give some comfort.