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So, having read Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles at my students' urging, and then telling said students who recommended it, "Why bother: why not just read the Iliad," of course I realized I hadn't myself read the Iliad since college, more years ago than I care to consider, had only ever read it once, and certainly had never loved it and returned to it as I have the Odyssey, due, most assuredly, at least partly, to Joyce's fabulous homage, as well as to the other epic's singularity as not being mostly about war and conquest, things horrifically maligned for so many centuries of racist imperialism at this point that reading texts that lay bare the roots of those values in our Occidental culture is uncomfortable to say the very least.
Well, at my age (coming up on sixty in the fall), and with my pretty long experience now with literature, I was able to read the Iliad with a whole lot more pleasure now than I did when I was still of an age to be conscripted. An Italian friend put it well when he said that the characters of the Iliad are assuredly not soldiers, they are rather warriors. It's a slight linguistic game, to be sure, but an important distinction really. For besides the homicidal macho violence that both types of character perforce embody, the characters of the Iliad are men first and foremost, individuals endlessly negotiating the social customs that seem pretty newly coined as well as each others' proclivities, talents, egos, and quirks. Here there's none of the automatism of obeying orders or wearing uniforms, none of the racism inherent in modern nation state patriotism or imperialistic warfare, none of the war pigs, robber barons, war profiteers, coward politicians, or rabid armchair warriors who feast upon the deluded young man sent off to incinerate women and children in some third world enclave rich in microchip minerals or petroleum. here are individuals first and foremost, human beings caught up for the moment in a war, just taking each moment as it comes and fighting the vicissitudes of the changes in the engagements (at the will of the gods) as they come. There is a lot of dignity to that, all of which is mere empty speeches in today's war-for-profit academies.
Also, unlike our contemporary art (film, TV, and Cormac McCarthy novels), in which legions of faceless and nameless human beings are endlessly blown away as collateral damage for heroic superheroes, cops, or mafiosi anti-heroes, almost no one dies in the Iliad without your learning their name, their father's name, their place of origin, whether they had a family, and often some, perhaps epithetical ("Breaker of horses") fun fact about them. Whichever side they are on, when slaughtered by a greater hero, their death and, through it, their life is given credit, weight, and thus a kind of dignity that the gun goes a long way toward erasing.
Note I said whichever side they were on! Even if the troubles within the Greek camp are the primary focus here, especially when it comes to the battle scenes, I was pretty shocked to find that the Trojan characters are just as vivid and present as the Greeks. For, even in the endless post-Vietnam mea culpa movies of my teenage years, were all only really about the poor young American soldiers forced to incinerate Cambodian families and machine-gun young girls for trying to protect a hidden puppy. Even as our artists sought to make a political point about the horrors of our imperialistic wars, they still never quite arrived at the extremity of creating actual human beings out of those civilians or, God forbid, Vietcong snipers defending their homeland so valiantly against "our boys."
But the Homeric poet seems to know Troy as well as they know Mycenae, Argos, Olympus, and Ida, this voice, this storyteller, has the bird's eye view of the gods and yet, as the voice tells us the story of the mortal warriors, we are still--or I certainly was--engaged. This is an amazing art: to be able to remain so omniscient and all-knowing without ever losing the immediacy and engagement we have with the character we're hearing about right in this instant. On the downside, as per modern tastes, being oral poetry, there are repetitive formulae, we hear perhaps too much about so many characters being slaughtered in one battle or other that we grow fatigued. Yet, the dignity due every death is there, and I applaud that, despite the often annoying and clumsy repetitions.
I also had a thought that the Homeric poet is a master at the art of digression and detail. So many times I was stunned when, in the middle of some important-seeming narrative or event, we were treated to details we hardly needed to know, but which I often found delightful and tantalizing manipulations of my focus on the narrator's part. My favorite happened during the preparations for the night raid on the Trojan camp. Odysseus, we're told, interestingly, puts on a leather protective skull cap rather than his shining helmet with its brush-like plume. OK, nice deatail, sets the scene, is even perhaps of interest to archeologists and historians--there are different armors for different situations. Then we're told that the cap was made for so-and-so, who was killed in battle and the cap taken by his killer so-and-so-two, who took if from Anatolia into Mycenae and gave it to his son, who left it, in turn, to his son... And then, and this is what really got me, without connecting the cap all the way down to how Odysseus came by it, the digression just breaks off with, "But in this case Odysseus was wearing it." So, while I should have been enraged at having to waste my precious time over the history of a leather skull cap, I was rather so invested by this point in its story that I felt cheated out of knowing exactly how Odysseus came to own it, or if it was borrowed, or what. I felt a poet laughing at me across so many millennia, still saying "Got ya!"
Lastly, as for the Madeline Miller comparison,which I perforce have to make given the back-to-back readings... Well, you always hear that Achilles and Patroclos were lovers, so it just seemed a given to me all these years even if I didn't remember any sex scene or anything specifically calling them lovers in the epic itself. (And this is another reason why it's important to actually read books, because others' interpretations are always slipping in-between us and a text, especially the classics.) Well, lo and behold, the belief that the two companions were lovers comes not from the Iliad itself but from later readings, from a more decadent and cultured Greece actually, one which I imagine even later Romans and then Europeans and Americans were still enough in awe of to ever dare to contradict, even if the text itself is utterly mute on this point. My own rule of thumb on this, as a literary scholar, is that if the text is mute probably the thing in question doesn't matter to the text but rather more to the reader. If a passage is ambiguous, it's meant to be, and therefore arguing for one or the other interpretation is a fool's errand.
To be specific, there is one interior scene set in Achilles and Patroclos' tent, when the other Greek leaders come to beg A. to return to the battle. It is specifically mentioned in that scene that A. and P. are each in their separate beds with a slave girl each, women caught and awarded them from their raiding of the area surrounding Troy. By noting this detail I'm not in any way trying to argue against A. and P. being also lovers, but note that if the poet had wanted Achilles' anger later to be love sorrow, they could easily have put the two warriors in bed together here--but perhaps that would have been outre as the other elder heroes approached... But then why mention the sleeping arrangements at all? My conclusion is that the poem doesn't want to present them as lovers, whether they were or not is simply not part of the poem or this particular version of the story.
Also, interestingly, these same two slave girls later weep over Patroclos' corpse after he's killed by Hector. Now I'm not sure if people just saw the world so differently than we do now that they acted so differently and felt so differently about things that we are surprised by our own way of thinking and feeling, or if perhaps a male poet, in his ignorance and adherence to the standards of heroic verse simply has to imagine that women who saw their families slaughtered and were dragged off to bed and into service by those very slaughterers would come to love them and would weep at their deaths, I just dunno. Still, it's a fascinating detail. Stockholm syndrome? I dunno.
Ms. Miller, by re-figuring A. and P. as a regularized modern gay couple can get around this by having the men simply not interested in raping the women they capture, whose families they've slaughtered. And this is where I suppose I am ultimately in my comparison of the two texts. Yes, The Song of Achilles is a smoother, more familiar form to read, a pretty well-written modern novel--but in that, as well as in how it regularizes this ancient story to our own modern experience, dulls and flattens the material for me. The Iliad, on the other hand, is full of narrative and cultural surprises. Sure, it's awkward, too long, full of useless digression, would have been aggressively red penciled by any modern editor, never would have made it past an elevator pitch, would have been picked up by no agent in their right mind, is not even good enough for "young readers," would never have been approved by any Random House editor, but, hey--it invented Occidental literature in a single blow and the fact that it's nothing like our freshly ironed and super-formulaic novels of today is the best thing about it.
Well, at my age (coming up on sixty in the fall), and with my pretty long experience now with literature, I was able to read the Iliad with a whole lot more pleasure now than I did when I was still of an age to be conscripted. An Italian friend put it well when he said that the characters of the Iliad are assuredly not soldiers, they are rather warriors. It's a slight linguistic game, to be sure, but an important distinction really. For besides the homicidal macho violence that both types of character perforce embody, the characters of the Iliad are men first and foremost, individuals endlessly negotiating the social customs that seem pretty newly coined as well as each others' proclivities, talents, egos, and quirks. Here there's none of the automatism of obeying orders or wearing uniforms, none of the racism inherent in modern nation state patriotism or imperialistic warfare, none of the war pigs, robber barons, war profiteers, coward politicians, or rabid armchair warriors who feast upon the deluded young man sent off to incinerate women and children in some third world enclave rich in microchip minerals or petroleum. here are individuals first and foremost, human beings caught up for the moment in a war, just taking each moment as it comes and fighting the vicissitudes of the changes in the engagements (at the will of the gods) as they come. There is a lot of dignity to that, all of which is mere empty speeches in today's war-for-profit academies.
Also, unlike our contemporary art (film, TV, and Cormac McCarthy novels), in which legions of faceless and nameless human beings are endlessly blown away as collateral damage for heroic superheroes, cops, or mafiosi anti-heroes, almost no one dies in the Iliad without your learning their name, their father's name, their place of origin, whether they had a family, and often some, perhaps epithetical ("Breaker of horses") fun fact about them. Whichever side they are on, when slaughtered by a greater hero, their death and, through it, their life is given credit, weight, and thus a kind of dignity that the gun goes a long way toward erasing.
Note I said whichever side they were on! Even if the troubles within the Greek camp are the primary focus here, especially when it comes to the battle scenes, I was pretty shocked to find that the Trojan characters are just as vivid and present as the Greeks. For, even in the endless post-Vietnam mea culpa movies of my teenage years, were all only really about the poor young American soldiers forced to incinerate Cambodian families and machine-gun young girls for trying to protect a hidden puppy. Even as our artists sought to make a political point about the horrors of our imperialistic wars, they still never quite arrived at the extremity of creating actual human beings out of those civilians or, God forbid, Vietcong snipers defending their homeland so valiantly against "our boys."
But the Homeric poet seems to know Troy as well as they know Mycenae, Argos, Olympus, and Ida, this voice, this storyteller, has the bird's eye view of the gods and yet, as the voice tells us the story of the mortal warriors, we are still--or I certainly was--engaged. This is an amazing art: to be able to remain so omniscient and all-knowing without ever losing the immediacy and engagement we have with the character we're hearing about right in this instant. On the downside, as per modern tastes, being oral poetry, there are repetitive formulae, we hear perhaps too much about so many characters being slaughtered in one battle or other that we grow fatigued. Yet, the dignity due every death is there, and I applaud that, despite the often annoying and clumsy repetitions.
I also had a thought that the Homeric poet is a master at the art of digression and detail. So many times I was stunned when, in the middle of some important-seeming narrative or event, we were treated to details we hardly needed to know, but which I often found delightful and tantalizing manipulations of my focus on the narrator's part. My favorite happened during the preparations for the night raid on the Trojan camp. Odysseus, we're told, interestingly, puts on a leather protective skull cap rather than his shining helmet with its brush-like plume. OK, nice deatail, sets the scene, is even perhaps of interest to archeologists and historians--there are different armors for different situations. Then we're told that the cap was made for so-and-so, who was killed in battle and the cap taken by his killer so-and-so-two, who took if from Anatolia into Mycenae and gave it to his son, who left it, in turn, to his son... And then, and this is what really got me, without connecting the cap all the way down to how Odysseus came by it, the digression just breaks off with, "But in this case Odysseus was wearing it." So, while I should have been enraged at having to waste my precious time over the history of a leather skull cap, I was rather so invested by this point in its story that I felt cheated out of knowing exactly how Odysseus came to own it, or if it was borrowed, or what. I felt a poet laughing at me across so many millennia, still saying "Got ya!"
Lastly, as for the Madeline Miller comparison,which I perforce have to make given the back-to-back readings... Well, you always hear that Achilles and Patroclos were lovers, so it just seemed a given to me all these years even if I didn't remember any sex scene or anything specifically calling them lovers in the epic itself. (And this is another reason why it's important to actually read books, because others' interpretations are always slipping in-between us and a text, especially the classics.) Well, lo and behold, the belief that the two companions were lovers comes not from the Iliad itself but from later readings, from a more decadent and cultured Greece actually, one which I imagine even later Romans and then Europeans and Americans were still enough in awe of to ever dare to contradict, even if the text itself is utterly mute on this point. My own rule of thumb on this, as a literary scholar, is that if the text is mute probably the thing in question doesn't matter to the text but rather more to the reader. If a passage is ambiguous, it's meant to be, and therefore arguing for one or the other interpretation is a fool's errand.
To be specific, there is one interior scene set in Achilles and Patroclos' tent, when the other Greek leaders come to beg A. to return to the battle. It is specifically mentioned in that scene that A. and P. are each in their separate beds with a slave girl each, women caught and awarded them from their raiding of the area surrounding Troy. By noting this detail I'm not in any way trying to argue against A. and P. being also lovers, but note that if the poet had wanted Achilles' anger later to be love sorrow, they could easily have put the two warriors in bed together here--but perhaps that would have been outre as the other elder heroes approached... But then why mention the sleeping arrangements at all? My conclusion is that the poem doesn't want to present them as lovers, whether they were or not is simply not part of the poem or this particular version of the story.
Also, interestingly, these same two slave girls later weep over Patroclos' corpse after he's killed by Hector. Now I'm not sure if people just saw the world so differently than we do now that they acted so differently and felt so differently about things that we are surprised by our own way of thinking and feeling, or if perhaps a male poet, in his ignorance and adherence to the standards of heroic verse simply has to imagine that women who saw their families slaughtered and were dragged off to bed and into service by those very slaughterers would come to love them and would weep at their deaths, I just dunno. Still, it's a fascinating detail. Stockholm syndrome? I dunno.
Ms. Miller, by re-figuring A. and P. as a regularized modern gay couple can get around this by having the men simply not interested in raping the women they capture, whose families they've slaughtered. And this is where I suppose I am ultimately in my comparison of the two texts. Yes, The Song of Achilles is a smoother, more familiar form to read, a pretty well-written modern novel--but in that, as well as in how it regularizes this ancient story to our own modern experience, dulls and flattens the material for me. The Iliad, on the other hand, is full of narrative and cultural surprises. Sure, it's awkward, too long, full of useless digression, would have been aggressively red penciled by any modern editor, never would have made it past an elevator pitch, would have been picked up by no agent in their right mind, is not even good enough for "young readers," would never have been approved by any Random House editor, but, hey--it invented Occidental literature in a single blow and the fact that it's nothing like our freshly ironed and super-formulaic novels of today is the best thing about it.
adventurous
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
emotional
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
And so Achilles is left at the end to still be dying. He doesn't die, it seems, but is either dying or already dead.
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I thought Emily Wilson did a great job translating a book that, overall, I find much less interesting than the Odyssey. The 3.5 hour long intro and translators note were super interesting for gaining historical setting, and for understanding the choices that Wilson made in taking on the translation. I thought that the iambic pentameter worked very well overall, using a meter with a long history in English to bring the work to flowing life, evoking the poetical and song-like qualities of the original. That said, the Iliad is so much of this person killed that person and spilled his guts etc etc etc, that it was hard for me to get too attached to the story or the characters. I was also surprised by how many things that we think of as part of the Troy story that don't happen in The Iliad. I'm definitely going to read Wilson's Odyssey soon.
adventurous
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
emotional
hopeful
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
DNF at 66%
Shvatam da je ovo klasik i to stoji, ali Ilijada je sastavljena većinski od stvari kao što su borbe, rat, čast, borbe, ovaj je sin ovoga a on je sin onoga a taj je prijatelj ovoga, pa borbe, hrana, žrtve, borbe, klanje nedužnih, krađa, zarobljavanje žena i djece, borbe... Shvatate poentu.
Ovu fusnota - ''Čitavo deseto pjevanje stoji u posve labavoj svezi s pjevanjima koja su pred njim i s onima koja su za njim; ono bi se moglo izlučiti, i ne bi se opazilo da što u Ilijadi nedostaje.'' - bi vam trebala sve reći o tome kakva je ovo knjiga.
'Junaci' toliko pričaju da dok se govor završi, ja zaboravim koji je uopće junak pričao.
Nemamo u ovoj knjizi Trojanskog konja ali eto, imamo Ahileja i njegove komplekse.
Shvatam da je ovo klasik i to stoji, ali Ilijada je sastavljena većinski od stvari kao što su borbe, rat, čast, borbe, ovaj je sin ovoga a on je sin onoga a taj je prijatelj ovoga, pa borbe, hrana, žrtve, borbe, klanje nedužnih, krađa, zarobljavanje žena i djece, borbe... Shvatate poentu.
Ovu fusnota - ''Čitavo deseto pjevanje stoji u posve labavoj svezi s pjevanjima koja su pred njim i s onima koja su za njim; ono bi se moglo izlučiti, i ne bi se opazilo da što u Ilijadi nedostaje.'' - bi vam trebala sve reći o tome kakva je ovo knjiga.
'Junaci' toliko pričaju da dok se govor završi, ja zaboravim koji je uopće junak pričao.
Nemamo u ovoj knjizi Trojanskog konja ali eto, imamo Ahileja i njegove komplekse.