Who knows what dictators are up to behind closed doors (and iron curtains). For example, the Soviet Union mapped the world’s roads, typography, and, in some cases, the depth of rivers and density of forests: “Hundreds of symbols and colours decoded the landscapes: a thin blue line for rivers less than sixty metres wide; a thick blue line for bigger waterways; two crossed black anvils for a mine; pink shading for fire-resistant urban areas; specked green for wooded copses. As the authors of The Red Atlas, John Davies and Alexander J Kent, put it, it was ‘the most comprehensive global topographic project ever undertaken’.”
Speaking of the Soviet Union, let’s also remember the unique horror of the Soviet Gulag. The Nazis exterminated Jews, the Japanese massacred millions of Chinese. The Soviets killed their own: “The millions who died anonymously in the Gulag were not necessarily members of ethnic or religious minorities…The population of the camps largely corresponded to the population of the country.”
A short book on a single New York City block is surprisingly entertaining, Alexander Aciman writes. Daniel Wakin’s history of seven buildings between 105th and 106th street in Manhattan, and the lives of the people that built and lived in them, is “a living story rather than historical record”: “From a tycoon’s pied-à-terre to a bordello, these buildings give a sense of the way they existed through time and their importance. I feel the familiar warmth of the Upper West Side in Wakin’s descriptions of Duke Ellington’s Jazz salons. And just as poetic is the notion that years before Duke ever parked himself on 106th Street, a group of men with half a million dollars in cash and a wounded associate would look among themselves and think that this little corner of the world was their best shot.”
There has been a lot of praise of Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. Susan Kristol reviews it favorably in the latest issue of The Weekly Standard but also identifies a major flaw: It doesn’t reproduce the Homeric epithets. In his translation, Peter Green “reproduces the epithets and longer formulaic phrases fairly accurately…Wilson takes the opposite approach. She chooses to omit or vary these Homeric epithets according to her own poetic judgment, declaring the variation more appealing to modern readers. And so whereas Green consistently translates Homer’s famous formulaic line about dawn quite literally—‘When Dawn appeared, early risen and rosy-fingered’—Wilson avoids this repetition. Instead, she composes a set of variations: ‘When Dawn appeared, her fingers bright with flowers’; ‘Soon Dawn appeared and touched the sky with roses’; ‘Early the Dawn appeared, pink fingers blooming’; ‘When early Dawn revealed her rose-red hands’; ‘When newborn Dawn appeared with hands of flowers.’ These are attractive images and well-composed lines, but they are not what the Greek says. Wilson’s conceit that she is a better poet than the Homeric tradition deprives readers of the opportunity to confront the oddities as well as the beauties of the text on their own and experience it as millennia of listeners and readers have done. Epithets and formulas are a feature of Homeric epic, not a bug.”
Why are there so many mirrors in Victorian paintings? While they had become increasingly cheap and popular, they were also used by some painters to increase the depth and drama of their compositions.
Essay of the Day:
In The New Statesman, Leo Robson explains why Muriel Spark’s work will last:
“Martin Amis, displaying his customary terror of the first person singular, once described Graham Greene as the first serious writer ‘you came across’, the one ‘we happened to read” before ‘we read anybody else’. Greene, Amis wrote – stepping marginally closer to confessional territory – had served as ‘an awakener’, and what he awakened was a taste for Literature, a property that his writing embodied in a pleasing, plotty form.
“Assuming this role for later generations looks an immeasurably taller order. Greene, by cross-breeding the novel in its earnest and ethical mode with the devices of the thriller and the yarn, helped to create an appetite for the Catholic tradition as well as for godless existentialism, and for such heroic forebears as Conrad, James, and Dostoevsky. But who could prepare the budding reader in the 1980s or 1990s or today for such multifarious challenges as, say, the po-faced nouveau roman, the postmodern jeu d’esprit, the whodunit that shows its working, the medieval mystery with a semiotic treatise tucked inside?
“The leading and only obvious candidate is Muriel Spark, who was born in Edinburgh just over a hundred years ago, and who now more than ever looks like the standout British novelist of the later 20th century. Spark’s novels – 22 in all – are the product of a ruthlessly confident, even clairvoyant sensibility, and fuse an impossible range of tones and strengths. ‘For a soi-disant parable-writer, she is surprisingly social in her comedy,’ the novelist Ronald Frame writes in his superb introduction to The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), part of a complete reprinting of Spark’s novels by the Edinburgh-based publisher Polygon. Her prose is icily impudent and briskly profound, ‘cruel and lyrical at the same time’ – to borrow her own description of the Scots Border ballads that she read as a girl, which provided her earliest model in straddling other borders, such as being both dense and spare.”
Photo: Sion
Poem: Amit Majmudar, “The Pediatric Cardiothoracic Surgery Floor”
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