Reviews and News:
Anthony Esolen reviews Peter Green’s new translation of Homer’s Iliad. The poem is neither “a pastiche of old and sometimes incompatible songs and traditions,” nor “a cartoon epic, full of long episodes of carnage, interjected with scenes of adolescent grouching and trash-talk. It is a profoundly philosophical and therefore human poem, asking great questions and venturing but tentative answers.”
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What’s it like to speak only Latin for two days? “The Conference Center at Fordham University Law School was humming with the unusual sound of more than 150 people greeting one another in Latin. Many were wearing black T-shirts bearing the words Dormitantium animorum excubitor (Waker of sleeping souls). One participant greeted another: ‘Salve Johannes! Quid ages? Age, egeo caffea statim!‘ (‘Hi John, how are you? C’mon, I need coffee now!’) Some spoke slowly, some rapid-fire. ‘Ecce Aemilia! Mehercule, videsne illos calceos fultos?’ That was John, commenting on Emily’s wicked red stilettos (literally, ‘propped-up shoes’). The Latin teachers and students gathered at the Manhattan campus this past February for the Paideia Institute’s annual ‘Living Latin in NYC’ convention—two days of lectures, classes and conversations, all in Latin.”
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An entertaining guide to fiction writing.
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Matthew Franck reviews Francis Beckwith’s defense of reasonable faith.
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The Nobel Prize winner who discovered the “language” of honeybees.
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The best books on the Battle of the Somme.
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Essay of the Day:
In this week’s Standard, Joseph Loconte examines how the Somme destroyed the myth of human progress and influenced the work of J. R. R. Tolkien:
“At 7 a.m. on July 1, 1916, the British Army unleashed a hellish assault against German positions on the Western Front in France, along the River Somme. The roar was so loud that it was heard in London, nearly 200 miles away. The barrage—about 3,500 shells a minute—was designed to obliterate the deepest dugouts and severely compromise German artillery and machine-gun power. Crossing No Man’s Land, that dreadful death zone stretching between opposing enemy trenches, would be a song.
“Thus, at 7:30 a.m., nearly a hundred thousand British troops—to the sound of whistles, drums, and bagpipes—climbed out of their trenches and attacked. Like other great battles, this one was supposed to break the back of the German Army and hasten the end of the war. But the Germans had endured the pounding and were waiting, guns poised, for the British infantry. ‘We didn’t have to aim,’ said a German machine-gunner. ‘We just fired into them.’ Before the day was over, 19,240 British soldiers lay dead, nearly twice that number wounded. Most were killed in the first hour of the attack, many within the first minutes.
“July 1, 1916, marks the deadliest single day in British military history. Sir Frank Fox, a regimental historian, summarized the scene this way: ‘In that field of fire nothing could live.’ The Battle of the Somme would rage on, inconclusively, until November 18, dragging over a million men into its vortex of suffering and death.
“Twenty-four-year-old J. R. R. Tolkien, a second lieutenant in the British Expeditionary Force, was among their number—an experience that would shape the course of his life and literary career. Tolkien spent nearly four months in the trenches of the Somme valley, often under intense enemy fire. As he recalled years later: ‘One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel its full oppression.’ A hundred years hence and the Somme offensive still casts its oppressive shadow across the landscape of the West. It symbolizes not only the human tragedy of an ill-conceived war but the fearsome cost of a mistaken idea: the notion of human perfectibility.”
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Image of the Day: Fire-breather
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Poem: David Yezzi, “Café Future”
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