Showing posts with label Virgil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Virgil. Show all posts

Friday, February 6, 2015

My hero / Virgil by Richard Jenkys


My hero: Virgil 
by Richard Jenkyns

Virgil is a hero for our times because he thought deeply about nation, community and identity – issues that puzzle us today

Richard Jenkyns
Friday 6 February 2015 16.30 GMT

TS Eliot called Virgil’s Aeneid the classic of all Europe, and maybe that accolade is now off-putting, as if the poem were a very large white monument blocking the view, like the Victor Emmanuel excrescence in Rome. But I love Virgil for his doubleness, for being paradoxical. Ingres’s painting shows him reading a passage to the emperor Augustus and his sister Octavia. The emperor wants to hear a panegyric of Rome and himself, but Octavia is breaking down as Virgil ends his parade of Roman heroes with a poignant coda about her young son Marcellus, dead before his time.
There’s the paradox: yes, Virgil endorses Rome’s imperial mission and has a whiggish hope for progress in history, but his poem is also suffused with the world’s sorrows. He is often seen as a “civilised”, literary, self-conscious author, but he is also intuitive and instinctive; he finds wonderful and mysterious places and penetrates the dark mysteries of the human spirit. His work wears that classic authority that Eliot admired, and yet no epic poem seems so personal. It conveys both a sense of struggle and a sense of sovereign mastery.
He is a hero for our times, too, because he thought deeply about nation, community and identity, those issues that puzzle us today. In his poem on agriculture, The Georgics, he studied overlapping loyalties: of Mantua in Cisalpine Gaul, where he was born, of Italy and of Rome. “We Italians,” says Evander in The Aeneid – but he is a Greek, an immigrant. Aeneas, the hero, is an immigrant, too, a Trojan who will eventually become a god of the Italian land. He is introduced as a man fated to exile “until he should found a city”. The poem is a quest for a secular salvation, which it finds through being rooted in habits and customs, land, buildings, shared experience. We can still learn from that.
• Richard Jenkyns’s Classical Literature is just out from Pelican.





2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016




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Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Madeline Miller / Top 10 Classical Books

Homero
by Philippe Laurent Roland

Madeline Miller

TOP 10 CLASSICAL BOOKS

From Aeschylus to Sophocles, the novelist celebrates the ancient stories that have inspired her debut novel

Madeline Miller
The Guardian
Wednesday 21 Septembre 2011


Sophocles
A statue of Sophocles, c.450 BC
Photograph by Hulton
Archive/Getty Images
Madeline Miller was born in Boston and grew up in New York and Philadelphia. For the last 10 years she has taught Latin and Ancient Greek to high school students. The Song of Achilles, published by Bloomsbury this month, is her first novel.
              "The classics are back, and with a vengeance. In the past few years there has been a Vesuvius-sized explosion of translations, adaptations and re-imaginings of the ancient works. For lovers of Latin and Greek literature, it has been hog heaven, a chance to revisit the thrilling adventures, beautiful poetry and unflinching psychological insights the ancient stories offer us.
            "The Greek myths have been close to my heart since childhood, particularly Homer's Iliad, yet I never would have considered telling one myself – I simply loved the originals too much. But something about Achilles and his beloved companion Patroclus's story took hold of my imagination and wouldn't let go. I wrote academic papers about the Iliad; I directed plays; it still wasn't enough. Then one day I found myself in front of my laptop, typing furiously. The words on the screen were Patroclus's, and 10 years later they became The Song of Achilles. In celebration of this Latin and Greek revival, here are ten of my favorite classical works."



1. The Metamorphoses by Ovid

Ranging from the farcical to the deeply moving, the Metamorphoses presents hundreds of myths of transformation, all in Ovid's witty and passionate style. Perhaps this is perverse of me, but I particularly enjoy some of Ovid's most disturbed heroines, like Myrrha, who falls in love with her father. Ovid manages the tricky manoeuvre of awakening our sympathy to the girl's desires without diminishing our sense of horror at her actions.


2. Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus

The kind, wise and thoughtful god Prometheus (his name literally means forethought) might be considered the first advocate of social justice. He defied Zeus's injunctions against aiding humans, daring to steal fire on our behalf, teach us the arts of civilisation and show us how to protect ourselves from the gods' greed. For this he was punished cruelly: chained to a cliff and condemned to have eagles tear out his liver every day for all eternity. Aeschylus's Prometheus is a figure of tremendous strength and dignity, who gladly suffers for the good he has done. Sadly, we only have the first of the trilogy that tells his story.


3. Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

Loosely inspired by the myth of Geryon and Heracles, this "novel in verse" conjures heart-stoppingly beautiful images on every page. Its deceptively simple language has a fiery, unearthly clarity and bone-deep wit: Carson's sentences ring out like bells. The story is moving, and its hero, Geryon, a little red boy with wings who falls in love with the wrong person, is unforgettable. There is no book I have read quite like it.


4. The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer

Is it cheating to include them both? The first is Homer's action-packed and psychologically acute paean to a single man's rage. The second is the tumultuous journey of a war veteran struggling to get home to his family. Both are bursting with incident, poetry and amazing characters that grab the attention. When I began writing my own novel, I found myself constantly having to rein in digressions trying to include them all.


When I was in college, a friend asked me to direct this "problem play" set during the Trojan war. I knew little about Shakespeare at the time, but fell quickly in love with this outstanding and challenging play. Its dark comedy and bitterly satiric portraits of Homeric heroes have a startlingly modern sensibility. Arguably its most famous figure is the scurrilous soldier Thersites, who comments with acid precision on the folly he sees around him: "Wars and lechery," he sneers. "Nothing else holds fashion."


6. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho translated by Anne Carson

Sappho's gorgeous, gem-like poems limn their subjects in gold. Whether the focus is a young woman, an apple on the highest branch or the narrator's jealousy, Sappho brings them all to life with sensual, visceral and breathtaking beauty. No wonder that Plato called her "the tenth muse".


7. The Bacchae by Euripides

I have loved this particular tragedy since I first read it as a teenager. Pentheus, prince of Thebes, refuses to worship the new god Dionysus, and the god takes bloody revenge. What makes the play so gripping is how eminently sympathetic Pentheus is: a stubborn, underdog rationalist who stands up to a bullying zealot. Haven't we all felt like drawing the line sometimes? In one memorable ancient production, Pentheus's head-on-a-spike was played by the real life head of Crassus, member of the first triumvirate with Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar.


8. Agamemnon by Aeschylus (The Oresteia Trilogy)

The story of the Greek general's disastrous return home after the Trojan war. I have never been a fan of Agamemnon, so I tend to cheer Clytemnestra on as she readies the murderous bathtub and axe. What does move me is Cassandra – the Trojan princess cursed to tell the truth and never be believed. Now Agamemnon's captive, she is doomed to knowledge of her own imminent death at Clytemnestra's hands. The famous opening scene, where fire beacons signal to Clytemnestra that her husband is returning, surely influenced JRR Tolkien's own use of fire beacons in The Return of the King.


9. The Aeneid by Virgil

Virgil's tale of arms and a man and so much more. A gorgeously crafted piece of poetry, a story of adventure, a moral examination of violence and a plea for mercy, Virgil's masterful Roman founding myth provokes and haunts long after you've finished. The characters are drawn with sympathy and sensitivity, and above all total humanity: Virgil never shies away from their faults as well as their virtues. I particularly love book two, the tale of Troy's fall; its brutal portrait of Achilles' son Pyrrhus inspired my own.


10. Philoctetes by Sophocles

The ageing hero Philoctetes, once a companion of Heracles, is bitten by a venomous snake on his way to join the Trojan war. The wound festers and the other Greeks, fearful of the bad omen, abandon him on an island. For 10 years, Philoctetes survives alone, embittered and in physical agony. I first read this play when my grandmother's health was failing, and I wept at Philoctetes' grief-stricken monologues. His pain at being forgotten by the world and despair at his body's weakness could have been my grandmother's own. But Sophocles chooses to close the play with hope: reconciliation, and a long-awaited end to the hero's suffering.





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