Unpopular as the Washington Review of Books may be at present, the time will come, after the Managing Editors are dead, when the System of it in general must be adopted, with bitter Repentance that it was not heeded sooner.
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In our sister publication on the Emerald Isle, Peter Sirr on translating Sappho:
Jealousy is beside the point; the normal world of erotic responses is beside the point; praise is beside the point. It is a poem about the lover’s mind in the act of constructing desire for itself. Sappho’s subject is eros as it appears to her; she makes no claim beyond that. A single consciousness represents itself; one mental state is exposed to view.
The lover’s mind in the act of constructing desire for itself. Brilliant, I think: the taut drama from sixth century BC Lesbos continues to yield up its treasures, the arguments go on long into the night. Some even say we’ve got the first line wrong, that the phainetai moi (“it seems to me”) is a corruption, a false perspective shift, and that the actual sense is that the man seems godlike to himself to be in the sight of the beloved. I’m not qualified to enter that debate, and I won’t be mentioning it to anyone any time soon. Or indeed any of the other debates: was it a wedding song? Is the man the bridegroom? Are they brother and sister? Is the speaker the headmistress of a boarding school for girls, dedicated to Aphrodite, as the Edwardians liked to think? Does the man have the same function as the army in the opening of fragment 16—“some say an army of horsemen, others say foot soldiers, still others say a fleet”—introduced only to be dismissed in favor of the real point, the passion for what’s desired. Can we be sure of the gender of the addressee, given that the Greek text doesn’t specify it?
[When Catullus, in his adaptation of Sappho 31, talks about leisure destroying kings and blessed cities, the more romantic part of me has always thought of it in conjunction with all the works of Sappho that have been lost. —Steve]
In Poetry, Meghan O’Rourke on ambivalence:
For Keats, who had witnessed much loss, it is failed artists who are “incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.” Great artists allow for uncertainty and ambivalence—an idea that helped me adjust to living in a body that would always be in a state of uncertainty, a body about which I felt, well, ambivalent. Shakespeare was Shakespeare, Keats argues, because of the way his plays staged, and enacted, a variety of irreconcilable points of view. This, rather than poetry that has “a palpable design upon us,” is what true art is.
Ambivalence has its quicksand; we know that intuitively, hence our ambivalence about ambivalence. But ambivalence also speaks for the many selves we could be, if only. It is the voice of both our lives and our unled lives.
- on Romeo:
From the start, Romeo seeks death, however unconsciously. He is the origin of Hamlet. And that makes him a much darker figure than we often realize. As with Hamlet, the people who get too close to Romeo—Paris, Mercutio, Juliet—end up dead.
Self-obsessed like Hamlet, Romeo first appears talking of the “griefs of mine own”. He “lives dead” because of Rosaline’s rejection.
“Living dead” is a metaphor of unrequited love, a trope of courtly love poetry (which was popular in the sonnet-writing 1590s, when Romeo and Juliet was written) but it is also a darker image. The Friar later describes Juliet as a “living corpse” when she lies drugged in the Capulet tomb—a tragic contrast to the metaphorical “living death” of Romeo’s self-regard.
Hamlet:
Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise.
- on Romeo:
In The Yale Review, Elaine Scarry responds to Jonathan Kramnick’s approach to the craft of criticism:
In my memory, I had thought of Dante as outgrowing this process as he matures in the Divine Comedy. But actually he does exactly the same thing only more subtly. He tells us in canto 4 of the Inferno—that is, inside the poetic lines themselves—that we are entering “Circle One, which skirts the emptiness,” just as canto 5 opens, “And so from Circle One I now went down / deeper, to Circle Two, which bounds a lesser space /and therefore greater suffering.” This is more extreme than Vita Nuova. It is as though in that earlier work he did not simply tell you that a new part would begin at the sonnet’s fifth line; instead in the fifth line itself he said, “We are now entering the fifth line, and I’m here going to pronounce the word ‘LADY’ sarcastically.” In Vita Nuova the creative act and the literary critical act accompany one another but sound separable; in the Divine Comedy they are “melded” together, to use Kramnick’s word. Of course, this merging of literature and literary criticism is particularly easy to recognize in the modern period, when most literature seems metafictional. But it occurs in every century. Nicholas Dames, for instance, shows us the way chapter divisions in novels were even at the earliest moment metafictional.
[Behind the paywall: Steve on Willie Mays and Steely Dan, Julia on failure, ambiguity, and indifference, Waugh and Greene, myth, Charles Taylor, Lucrezia Borgia, Céline, James Brown, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]
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