Before I start yakking away about The Iliad, I thought I'd take a moment to talk translation, and how important the translation is when reading an ancient work like this, and (not coincidentally) how I'm a total cheating arse.
The many different translations of Homer that abound in English mean that each new reader, if they bother to inform themselves, has a choice about what kind of Iliad they wish to read: the Richmond Lattimore translation is the most literal, taking as few liberties with the Greek as possible; the E.V. Rieu transforms poetry into prose; the Alexander Pope is apparently brilliant, but is more Pope's poem than Homer's; and so on, and on. How you respond to the work is obviously mostly to do with Homer, but in a situation where so many differing translations exist, your translator of choice will have an effect on your reading.
I own both The Iliad and The Odyssey, but both of them were books I picked up from the store for free (damaged Penguin books don't need to get sent back, so we get to take them if we want ... it's both a blessing and a curse, trust me), and I didn't pay any attention to whose translations I was shoving in my bag. I'd always intended, once the time came to read them, to do a bit of research, figure out which translations I wanted to read, and replace my copies if necessary. So, yes, I bought a book, which is technically cheating I suppose. But my copy of The Iliad turned out to be the first ever English translation, completed by George Chapman in around 1615. Reading a Shakespeare-era translation of a 3000 year old poem, which I'm already dreading reading anyway? Umm, no thanks.
I ended up going with Stephen Mitchell's recent translation, which seemed from the reviews to be doing its utmost to be accessible. A quick glance at page one confirmed my impressions.
Let's compare them. Here's the opening of the Chapman translation:
Achilles' baneful wrath - resound, O goddess - that impos'd
Infinite sorrows on the Greeks, and many brave souls loos'd
From breasts heroic; sent them far, to that invisible cave
That no light comforts; and their limbs to dogs and vultures gave:
To all which Jove's will gave effect; from whom first strife begun
Betwixt Atrides, king of men, and Thetis' godlike son.
And here's the same passage from Mitchell:
The rage of Achilles - sing it now, goddess, sing through me
the deadly rage that caused the Achaeans such grief
and hurled down to Hades the souls of so many fighters,
leaving their naked flesh to be eaten by dogs
and carrion birds, as the will of Zeus was accomplished.
Begin at the time when bitter words first divided
that king of men, Agamemnon, and godlike Achilles.
It's pretty remarkable that Chapman managed to fashion the entire Iliad (more than fifteen thousand lines of poetry) into rhyming couplets. But, being that this is the first toe I'm dipping into the waters of Classical Greek literature (okay, second toe: I was in a production of Lysistrata at school), I figured 'accessible' should be the quality that should carry the day. Having just finished, and adored, Stephen Mitchell's translation, I'm pretty sure I made the right choice. Now that my toe is thoroughly dipped, when the time comes for The Odyssey, I'll probably go with a translation that's a bit 'tougher'. I'm willing to let myself get there one toe at a time, though, know what I mean?
I'll have my proper review of The Iliad up in (hopefully) another day or two. In the meantime, here's the short version: it was great!
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite
books to go: 84
Okay, I totally cheated the other day. I bought a book. It wasn't a gift for somebody else or anything, it was for me.
I feel dirty.
But, like any lapsed addict (I'm keeping Brendan Fevola company in a Venn Diagram somewhere), I've got a reeeeeeeally good excuse, I swear I do.
There's this author named David Mitchell, who wrote a book called Cloud Atlas that I read and loved a couple of years ago. I've got another book of his called Ghostwritten sitting on my shelves, waiting to be read; it's one of the 111 books I've got left. Anyway, his most recent book, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, sounds really interesting to me: it's set in Japan during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when Japan was closed off to all foreigners. A Dutch clerk at a little trading post (the only contact Japan has with the outside world) falls in love with a Japanese girl, and I'm guessing that complications ensue.
Since it came out I've just kind of assumed that I'd buy it in a couple of years, after my read-everything-I-own challenge is done.
There's also the added benefit that it's a really beautiful book. Okay, I'm even sounding effete to my own ears here, but let's take it as a given that I'm the kind of person who gives a rat's arse about stuff like that. Because I do.
This picture doesn't really do it justice, but the three-tone palette of cream, black and a vivid cyan kinda thing ... it just works.
But recently, Thousand Autumns has come out in a new, smaller format. And they've changed the cover. And the new cover fucking blows.
It's like someone in the art department at the publisher had the bright idea that because, hey, there's a guy and a girl in it, they were going to go after the elusive middle-aged-woman demographic (I'm probably being unfair to middle-aged women) by giving it a totally nondescript, 'romance-y' cover.
Now it looks like a Memoirs of a Geisha knockoff, or something. Or like a fucking Paullina Simons book.
(Again, I feel like this photo isn't doing justice to the new version's ugliness. That grey is darker in real life and so much more ... grey. And UGLY!)
Anyway, that's my excuse. Once we got the new version in, we were going to send back all of our copies of the original, and I nabbed one before they got returned.
So now The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is sitting under my bed, where it will gather dust for another couple of years and make me feel extremely guilty every time I remember it's there.
Meanwhile, Anna Karenina is coming along. I'm roughly three-quarters of the way through it, and not hating it anywhere near as much as I feared I would. In fact, it's kind of great in a way. But more of that soon.
Also, once I finish the Tolstoy, I get to buy a book, but I already know what I'm gonna get, so I won't mess with you by asking for recommendations (hint: it's a big, dumb, epic fantasy sequel ... and I can't wait!).
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
books to go: 111
So, after all the hoopla of introducing myself and writing down the rules, I should probably confess to the wee little itty-bitty infractions that I've already been guilty of.
Just after I began this whole wacky project, Douglas Coupland released his latest novel, Generation A. Now, there are a few authors who are absolute heroes of mine, and before I die I'm going to read everything that they've ever written (Hmm ... idea for future blog post: discuss who these authors are, and why). And Douglas Coupland is absolutely one of them. So the instant the store had his new book, then I had to have it to. Even then, I might have stood strong, except one of my managers at The Avenue Bookstore, knowing I'm a Coupland fan, organised with our Random House rep to get me a free copy. She'd either forgotten about my pact, or else she's got a nasty streak I wasn't aware of.
It wasn't too much of a cheat, though: I was nearly at the end of a batch of ten books, so I just jumped the gun a bit on my new acquisition.
A far more egregious breach of the rules came more recently. Like, last week-type recently.
When I was a teenager I devoured the entire Tomorrow, When the War Began series. I was the right age, they hit me at the right time, and - for teen fiction - I thought they were pretty bloody good. I read a fair bit of bad teen fiction back in the day (though I suspect it's a section of the market that has matured a lot since then), so the good stuff was like a desert island to a drowning man.
With the movie coming out, and the trailer making it seem like it would be a steaming pile of shit (seriously, watch it online. It's ridiculous, right down to the whole 'guy diving away from an explosion in slow motion' cliche), I thought I should revisit the books before I saw it.
Not seeing it at all was, of course, never an option I remotely considered.
I'd intended only to read the first three books, which were always my favourites, but they blew me away all over again and I ended up scything through the whole series of seven in about five days. Whether it's that they really are great books or that I was reading through rose-tinted glasses, I couldn't say. What I can say is that it got me crying a couple of times, and I'm not much of a weeper. Books and movies can often get me blinking back tears, to the point that it's my fallback line when I want to suggest 'emotionality' in my writing ... and my writing partners mercilessly mock me for it. But to actually get those salty bastards out of my eyes and rolling down my cheeks? Not easy.
And the movie? Actually, it wasn't as bad as I'd feared. Most of the action was well-staged (a personal beef of mine is the utterly inept way that most contemporary action movies are filmed) and the actors did what they could to breathe life into the characters.
My main issue was that, when in doubt, it always reached for the easy answer, the cliche, the 'done' thing. A character who, in the books, smokes pot, writes poetry and is quiet and introspective gets turned by the movie into a comic-relief 'stoner', lighting up joints at inappropriate times and saying 'dude' a lot.
In the books they decide not to carry guns with them, in the hope that, if caught, they'll be incarcerated rather than executed. It makes perfect sense. In the movie, one guy's wandering around with a rocket launcher slung over his back. A fucking rocket launcher! A) Where'd he get it? B) Who taught him to use it? C) A fucking rocket launcher?
It's that kind of movie. I think Stuart Beattie, the writer-director, either didn't trust his actors enough to play any sort of complexity in their characters, or he didn't trust his audience to understand it. I know a film needs to be adapted from a book, and that of course some things will get lost along the way, but interesting characters should never have to be one of them.
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer
books to go: 125
