Quote of the Day (Alexander Pope, Uniquely Translating the Circe Episode in Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’)

“The goddess, rising, asks her guests to stay,
Who blindly follow where she leads the way.
Eurylochus alone of all the band,
Suspecting fraud, more prudently remain’d.
On thrones around with downy coverings graced,
With semblance fair, the unhappy men she placed.
Milk newly press’d, the sacred flour of wheat,
And honey fresh, and Pramnian wines the treat:
But venom’d was the bread, and mix’d the bowl,
With drugs of force to darken all the soul:
Soon in the luscious feast themselves they lost,
And drank oblivion of their native coast.
Instant her circling wand the goddess waves,
To hogs transforms them, and the sty receives.
No more was seen the human form divine;
Head, face, and members, bristle into swine:
Still cursed with sense, their minds remain alone,
And their own voice affrights them when they groan.
Meanwhile the goddess in disdain bestows
The mast and acorn, brutal food! and strows
The fruits and cornel, as their feast, around;
Now prone and grovelling on unsavoury ground.”—English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744), translation of Homer’s The Odyssey (1726)
 
I’ve had one inquiry so far about whether I’ve seen Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey and if so, what I thought of it. So, here goes:
 
Yes, I saw it over the weekend and don’t regret doing so. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 the highest, I gave it 7 1/2 to 8 stars. The visuals and special effects were superb, as was much of the acting.
 
But at least 30 minutes could have been cut, and much of the dialogue was muffled by the ambient noise in the environment around the characters. Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday was correct about all its deviations from the original.
 
Still, Hollywood has done far worse in adapting classics, and it wasn’t as painful for me to experience as Richmond Lattimore’s translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey in my college Literary Humanities course. (Achilles in his tent didn’t pout half so much as I at the prospect of enduring Homer’s endless repetitions, rendered by Lattimore with teeth-gnashing fidelity.)
 
With Hollywood’s latest attempt at Homer, the 2017 translation of The Odyssey by Emily Wilson has attracted the lion's share of attention, with retrospective respect given previous ones by Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles.
 
Virtually nobody has talked about Alexander Pope’s, published in five volumes in 1725 and 1726 (with the help of two collaborators), though it was celebrated as a literary masterpiece, and an improvement on prior translations) in its time. With the poet’s characteristic rhyming couplets, the cliché is that it’s far more Pope than Homer.
 
Though Lattimore’s translation is supposed to be extremely faithful to the original Greek, with its hexameter meter and repeated use of epithets, I found the passage from Pope of one of the most famous episodes from the book (and one of the most memorable scenes from the Nolan film) powerful—perhaps because the couplets exert tremendous compact force. 

It’s difficult to top, for instance, these lines about the sorceress Circe: “Instant her circling wand the goddess waves,/To hogs transforms them, and the sty receives.”
 
Pope’s Homer translations were not covered in the English Restoration literature class I took in college, nor in the university’s Literary Humanities curriculum. But based on the passage above, at least, they can still be read with great pleasure.
 
(The image accompanying this post shows Samantha Morton as Circe in Christopher Nolan’s film.)

Quote of the Day (Plutarch, on ‘Uneducated Generals and Leaders’)

“Uneducated generals and leaders are oftentimes tripped up and toppled over by their innate foolishness. For they establish their lofty power upon a pedestal that has not been leveled, and so it cannot stand upright. Moreover, just as a builder’s rule is first established straight and unbending, and then is used to correct the alignment of everything else through adjustments and juxtapositions with respect to it, in the very same way those who govern must first achieve governance of themselves, straighten out their souls, and set their character aright, and then they should assimilate their subjects to themselves. For the one who is tipping over cannot straighten up someone else, nor can the ignorant person teach, the disorderly establish order, the disorganized organize, the ungoverned govern.”— Greek historian, biographer, and essayist Plutarch (c. 46-120 AD), "To an Uneducated Leader," in How To Be a Leader: An Ancient Guide to Wise Leadership, translated by Jeffrey Beneker (2019)

Quote of the Day (Thucydides, on the Strong and the Weak)

“You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." ―The Athenians to the Melians, quoted in Thucydides (c. 460-c. 395 BC), History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 5, translated by Richard Crawley (1910)

Quote of the Day (Heraclitus, on Stupidity)

“Stupidity is better kept a secret than displayed.”— Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c. 535 BC–475 BC), Fragments

The attached image of Heraclitus was created by Dutch baroque painter Johannes Moreelse (1603-1634).

Quote of the Day (Nikos Kazantzakis, on ‘What a Strange Machine Man Is!’)

“What a strange machine man is! You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out come sighs, laughter, and dreams.”— Greek novelist, poet, playwright and philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957), Zorba the Greek (1946)

The image accompanying this post comes from the 1964 adaptation of Zorba the Greek, with Anthony Quinn in the title role.

(Thanks to my friend Holly for bringing this to my attention.)

Quote of the Day (Sophocles, on Love)

“One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.”—Ancient Greek playwright Sophocles (496 B.C.-406 B.C.), Oedipus at Colonus (401 B.C.)

The image accompanying this post, from John Ford’s classic 1956 western The Searchers, comes about as close as I can think of to embodying the power of that word “love.”

In the scenes just preceding this, John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards has come across, after five years of fruitless searching, the niece seized in a Comanche attack that has left the rest of her family dead. Edwards is so revolted by the thought that she has become one of the wives of the fierce Indian chief Scar--and, implicitly, of the possibility of miscegenation from that union--that he vows to kill her. Now, as he sweeps the smaller, powerless Debbie (played by Natalie Wood) up in his arms, he has his chance.

But, in the end, Edwards—a bitter, bigoted loner—can’t go through with the act. Family ties—love—overcome the vengefulness and growing madness of this frontier Ahab.

“Let's go home, Debbie,” he says softly and invitingly.

Is Ethan freed of “all the weight and pain of life”? As we see him step away from the doorway of the homestead and walk alone  into the distance, the answer is clearly no. But his reconciliation with his niece is a profoundly redemptive act, one that ensures the climax of his search will not be the kind of cascading family bloodshed at the heart of Sophocles and so many other Greek tragedians. 

At least partly for that reason, this moment is one of my favorites in the entire history of American film.

Quote of the Day (Pericles, on Heroes)

“Heroes have the whole earth for their tomb.”—Athenian statesman and general Pericles (494 BC-429 BC), “Pericles’ Funeral Oration,” in Thucydides (460 BC-395 BC), The History of the Peloponnesian War  

(The image accompanying this post, Pericles’ Funeral Oration, was created by German painter Philipp Foltz.)
Heroes

 

Quote of the Day (Plutarch, on the Power of Perseverance)

“Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.” — Greek historian, biographer, and essayist Plutarch (c. 46-120), Parallel Lives

Quote of the Day (Nikos Kazantzakis, on ‘What a Strange Machine Man Is’)

“What a strange machine man is! You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out comes sighs, laughter, and dreams.” —Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957), Zorba the Greek (1946)

(The image accompanying this post is not, I need hardly say, of the author, but of Anthony Quinn, the Oscar-nominated star of the 1964 film adaptation of Zorba the Greek.)