Sure, you enjoyed hearing the way Ancient Greek music actually sounded last week, but what about the way Ancient Greek poetry actually sounded? We can find fewer finer or more recognizable examples of the stuff than Homer’s Iliad, and above you can hear a reading of a section of the Iliad (Book 23, Lines 62–107 ) in the original Ancient Greek language.
It comes from what may strike you as an unlikely source: Stanley Lombardo, a University of Kansas classicist (and also, as it happens, a Zen Buddhist) best known for his translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid into contemporary-sounding English. “Sounding less like aristocratic warriors than like American G.I.‘s, perhaps,” writes classics-steeped critic Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Times review of Lombardo’s Iliad, “his epic heroes ‘badmouth’ and ‘beat the daylights out of one another and witheringly call one another ‘trash’ and ‘pansy.’ ”
But Lombardo knows thoroughly the material he adapts. Even those of us who never learned Ancient Greek — if I may speak for this presumably large group of readers — can get a feel for Homer’s tale of the Trojan War and the soldiers’ long return home by listening to the professor’s delivery alone. Just above, you can see him give a reading from his English translation. It won’t surprise you to learn that he also reads the audio books. “We listened spellbound to the incantatory waves of Professor Stanley Lombardo’s voice telling the stories of Odysseus and his Odyssey and then those of the Trojan heroes of The Illiad,” writes Andrei Codrescu in an article on them for the Villager. “Professor Lombardo translated anew the immortal epics and immersed himself so deeply in their world his voice sounded as believable as the hills and valleys we crossed. His voice knows the tales and their enduring charms, and sounds for all the world like an ancient bard’s. Homer himself couldn’t have done better. In English no less, millennia later.”
Ah, the ancient art of rhetoric. There’s no escaping it. Variously defined as “the art of argumentation and discourse” or, by Aristotle in his fragmented treatise, as “the means of persuasion [that] could be found in the matter itself; and then stylistic arrangement,” rhetoric is complicated. Aristotle’s definition further breaks down into three distinct types, and he illustrates each with literary examples. And if you’ve ever picked up a rhetorical guide—ancient, medieval, or modern—you’ll be familiar with the lists of hundreds of unpronounceable Greek or Latin terms, each one corresponding to some quirky figure of speech.
Well, as usual, the internet provides us with an easier way in the form of the video above of 10 figures of speech “as illustrated by Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” one of the most literate of popular artifacts to ever appear on television. There’s “paradiastole,” the fancy term for euphemism, demonstrated by John Cleese’s overly decorous newscaster. There’s “epanorthosis,” or “immediate and emphatic self-correction, often following a slip of the tongue,” which Eric Idle overdoes in splendid fashion. Every possible poetic figure or grammatical tic seems to have been named and catalogued by those philosophically resourceful Greeks and Romans. And it’s likely that the Pythons have utilized them all. I await a follow-up video in lieu of reading any more rhetorical textbooks.
Last week we highlighted a feature from the excellent website Neglected Books detailing two articles that appeared in The New Republic in 1934 on “good books that almost nobody has read.” The articles were the product of a query the magazine’s editor, Malcolm Cowley, sent out to the literary community of his day, asking them to list their favorite unsung books. Such lists are bound fast to their historical context; fame is fleeting, and great works are forgotten and rediscovered in every generation. Some of the books named then—like Franz Kafka’s The Castle or Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts—have since gone on to notoriety. Most of them have not. This week, we thought we’d continue the theme with our own list of “neglected books.” I offer mine below, and I encourage readers to name your own in the comments. We’ll feature many of your suggestions in a follow-up post.
A few words about my by-no-means-definitive-and-certainly-incomplete list. These are not obscure works. And you’ll note that there are almost no recent works on it. This is due at least as much to my own lamentable ignorance of much contemporary literature as to a conviction that a work that isn’t widely read months after its publication is not, thereby, “neglected.” In the age of the internet, books can age well even after they’re remaindered, since instant communities of readers spring up overnight on fansites and places like Goodreads. Instead, my list consists of a few neglected classics and a book of poetry that I personally think should all be read by many more people than they are, and that I think are timely for one reason or another. Maybe some of these books have gotten their due in some small circles, and in some cases, their influence is much greater than sales figures can ever reflect. But they’re works more people should read, not simply read about, so I offer you below five titles I think are “neglected books.” You may interpret that phrase any way you like when you submit your own suggestions.
Jean Toomer’s Cane is well-known to students of the Harlem Renaissance, but it isn’t read much outside that academic context, I think, which is a shame because it is a beautiful book. Not a novel, but a collection of short stories, poems, and literary sketches inspired by Toomer’s stint as a substitute principal in Sparta, Georgia in 1921, Cane practically vibrates with the furious and fragile lives of a collection of characters in the Jim Crow South. Yet like all great books, it transcends its setting, elevating its subjects to archetypal status and immortalizing a time and place that seems to live only in caricature now. Read the first sketch, “Karintha,” and see what I mean.
Olive Schreiner is another writer who receives her due in scholarly circles but is little read outside the classroom. Schreiner was a white South African woman who turned her experiences of race, gender, and nation to literary fame with her novel The Story of an African Farm in 1883. The novel’s success at the time did not necessarily grant its author lasting fame, and while Schreiner has been lauded for transforming Victorian literature with her freethinking, feminist views, the book that once made her famous is an almost shockingly un-Victorian work. Short, stark, impressionistic, and very unsentimental, The Story of an African Farm may find purchase with scholars for historical or political reasons, but it should be read for its stunning prose descriptions and piercing dialogue.
Carpentier was a Cuban novelist, scholar, and musicologist who is not much read in the English-speaking world, and perhaps not much in Latin America. Although he coined the term “magical realism” (lo real maravilloso)—as part of his theory that Latin American history is so outlandish as to seem unreal—his literary fame in the States has never reached the degree of more fantastic practitioners of the style. Although perhaps best known, where he is known, for his harsh tale of Haiti’s first king, the brutal Henri Christophe, in The Kingdom of this World, Carpentier’s complex and mysterious 1953 The Lost Steps is a novel that justifies my calling him the Nabokov of Latin American letters.
Melville was certainly a neglected writer in his time. He is, it should go without saying, no more. But while everyone knows Moby Dick (if not many finish it), Billy Budd, and “Bartelby,” few people read his, yes difficult, novel The Confidence Man. Also called The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, this was Melville’s last published novel in his lifetime. It’s a darkly comic book that sometimes sounds a bit like Twain in its colorful vernacular and shifting registers, but grows stranger and more unsettling as it progresses, becoming almost a cacophony of disembodied voices in a state of moral panic. The central character, a nameless shape-shifting grifter on a steamboat called the Fidele, takes on a succession of American identities, all of them thoroughly persuasive and all of them thoroughly, calculatedly, false.
The only book of poetry on my list also happens to be the only book by a living writer. It also happens to be a book that makes me tremble each time I think of it. De Kok, a South African poet, takes as her inspiration for her 2002 Terrestrial Things the transcripts from her country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I’ll leave you with an excerpt from “The Sound Engineer,” a poem prefaced by the matter-of-fact statement that the “highest turnover” during the Commission, “was apparently among reporters editing sound for radio.”
Listen, cut; comma, cut;
stammer, cut;
edit, pain; connect, pain; broadcast, pain;
listen, cut; comma, cut.
Bind grammar to horror,
blood heating to the earphones,
beating the airwaves’ wings.
For truth’s sound bite,
tape the teeth, mouth, jaw,
put hesitation in, take it out:
maybe the breath too.
Take away the lips.
Even the tongue.
Leave just sound’s throat.
So there you have my list. I hope it has inspired you to go discover something new (or old). If not, I hope you will submit your own neglected books in the comments below and share your hidden literary treasures with our readers.
Public domain books listed above will be added to our collection of 500 Free eBooks.
Here’s a challenge: for every book recommended to you by Amazon, pick one from the site Neglected Books. No fancy algorithms here, just old-fashioned serendipity, and you’re unlikely to see much overlap. You will be rewarded with book after fascinating book that has slipped through the usual marketing channels and fallen into obscurity. Most of the authors come recommended by well-known names, making them writers’ writers—people whose writerly difficulty or peculiar subject matter can narrow their readership.
This is not entirely a fair assessment, and in many cases, the work that achieves literary notoriety does so by chance, not mass appeal, but it is undoubtedly the case that certain kinds of writers write for certain kinds of readers. The literary editor Malcolm Cowley, helming The New Republic in 1934, thought so, and lamented a system that prevented books from reaching their intended readers. In a call to “America’s leading novelists and critics,” Cowley asked for lists of such books—and in perhaps a retroactive vindication of the listicle—published them in two articles, “Good Books That Almost Nobody Has Read” and “More About Neglected Books.” Neglected Books, the website, quotes Cowley’s announcement:
Each year… a few good books get lost in the shuffle. It may not be the fault of the publisher, the critic, the bookseller, it may not be anybody’s fault except that of the general system by which too many books are distributed with an enormous lot of ballyhoo to not enough readers. Most of the good books are favorably reviewed, yet the fact remains that many of them never reach the people who would like and profit by them, the people for whom they are written.
Cowley asked his targets to suggest “two or three or four” names and “a few sentences identifying them.” He got lists from about a dozen writers, including lions like F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder and critic Edmund Wilson, who gets a mention in both Fitzgerald’s and Dos Passos’ lists. (Fitzgerald also offered three other titles Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West; Sing Before Breakfast by Vincent McHugh and Through the Wheat by Thomas Boyd.) Dos Passos, unlike most of the men, names a few women writers, including Agnes Smedley, now revealed to have been a triple agent for the Soviets, the Chinese, and Indian nationalists, “one of the most prolific female spies of the 20th century.” Dos Passos’ commentary on her autobiography Daughter of Earth—which he misremembers as Woman of Earth—is mostly understated: “An uneven but impressive I suppose autobiographical narrative of a young woman’s life in a Western mining camp and in New York.”
Libertarian journalist Susan La Follette, one of the few women writers surveyed, offers only one suggestion, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov’s 1931 comedic Russian novel The Golden Calf. The description alone in this L.A. Times review of a 2010 translation has me thinking this may indeed be an overlooked masterwork of totalitarian satire. La Follette said as much three years after its publication, writing of her disappointment, “I take this quite personally, because so few people even know about it that I rarely find anyone who can laugh over it with me.”
While The New Republic is well-known as a left-of-center publication, the meaning of the American Left in the thirties was much more inclusive, even of avowed Marxists like The New Masses editor Isidor Schneider, who names Imperialism, and The State and Revolution by Lenin and Leninism by Joseph Stalin. Next to the irony of naming two books that thousands have been coerced to read, Schneider contrarily names the The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, from the aesthetically radical, but earnestly religiously conservative Irish Jesuit poet. (The latter two suggestions did not make publication since Schneider’s list was already quite long.)
As interesting as the lists themselves is the selection of responses to the second article. William Saroyan writes in to recommend Grace Stone Coates’ Black Cherry as the “finest prose you ever saw.” And legendary publisher Alfred A. Knopf writes with a lengthy and detailed explanation of the books listed that he published. Of one book named, Franz Kafka’s The Castle, Knopf writes, “The Castle is one of my really inglorious failures. It is, as Conrad Aiken says, a masterpiece. But in the original edition it sold only 715 copies, and since January 3, 1933, we have been offering it at the reasonable price of $1 and only 120 copies have been purchased.”
Perhaps the most famous of all literary recluses, despite herself, Emily Dickinson left a posthumously discovered cache of poetry that did not receive a proper scholarly treatment until the publication of The Poems of Emily Dickinson by Thomas H. Johnson in 1955, which made available Dickinson’s complete body of 1,775 poems in their intended state of punctuation and capitalization. For the first time, readers outside the small Dickinson family circle could read the work she circulated privately in so-called “fascicles” as well as the hundreds of poems no one had seen during her lifetime. There is some question over whether Dickinson wished to publish for a wider audience. She shared her work only with family and friends, some of whom published ten of her poems in newspapers between 1850 and 1866, most likely without her knowledge or consent. Many urged Dickinson to publish. Author Helen Hunt Jackson wrote to her: “You are a great poet—and it is a wrong to the day you live in, that you will not sing aloud.” Nevertheless, Dickinson “hesitated,” an important word in her lexicon, expressive of her profound agnostic doubts about the value of fame, success, and immortality.
Possibly due to the lack of scholarly interest before Johnson’s collection, Dickinson’s trove of manuscript drafts has remained scattered across several archives, sending researchers hoofing it to several institutions to view the poet’s handiwork. As of today, that will no longer be necessary with the inauguration of the online Emily Dickinson Archive, “an open-access website for the manuscripts of Emily Dickinson” that brings together thousands of manuscripts held by Harvard, Amherst, the Boston Public Library, the Library of Congress, and four other collections. Though nothing can substitute for the almost mystical feeling of being in the physical presence of a favorite author’s artifacts, the site is an enormous boon to scholars and lay readers alike, since it is open to anyone, unlike most special collections in university libraries (although browsing the thousands of handwritten images can be exhausting unless one knows what to look for).
As The New York Times describes it, the archives’ creation led to some dissention among participating institutions. For the past year, Amherst has maintained an online database of their Dickinson collection (including the manuscript of “The way Hope builds his house,” above). Harvard has been more reluctant to make its manuscripts available. Nevertheless, the project’s general editor, Leslie M. Morris, says that the aim of the archive “was to downplay the issue of ownership and focus on Emily Dickinson and her manuscripts.” No behind the scenes wrangling seems to have interfered with the website’s ease of use. Readers can search the text of manuscript images or browse images by library collection, first line, date, recipient (of letters), or edition. The site also includes a “Lexicon,” with definitions of the poet’s favorite words from her own dictionary, Webster’s 1844 American Dictionary of the English Language, and users can also search for poems by word. All in all it’s an impressive project made all the more so by its free availability.
Worth a quick note: The New York Review of Books has posted an intriguing interview with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who reflects on an important moment in his intellectual life — reading Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) for the very first time … in French. Decades ago, while “working as a legal intern at an American law firm in Paris,” Breyer needed to improve his French. Reading through all seven volumes of Proust’s monumental work seemed like a good way to do it. 3,500 pages and 1.5 million words later, Breyer finished. And then he re-read them again. The first volume of the long novel,Swann’s Way, was published 100 years ago, in 1913. Asked why he still cherishes Proust’s work so much, Breyer had this to say:
It’s all there in Proust—all mankind! Not only all the different character types, but also every emotion, every imaginable situation. Proust is a universal author: he can touch anyone, for different reasons; each of us can find some piece of himself in Proust, at different ages.… What is most extraordinary about Proust is his ability to capture the subtlest nuances of human emotions, the slightest variations of the mind and the soul. To me, Proust is the Shakespeare of the inner world.
You can read the full interview at NYRB, which gets into to some fascinating questions, like Why is literature crucial to a democracy? and Does reading the US Constitution having anything in common with reading a great literary work?
In 1948, Jack Kerouac first started talking about a “Beat Generation,” by which he meant a “swinging group of new American men intent on joy.” Ten years later, the term, now commonplace in America’s lexicon, was getting co-opted by the mainstream media, and not for the better. “Beat” had become a shorthand for “crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality” and more. In 1958, Kerouac delivered a speech at Hunter College where he tried to restore the true principles of the beat movement and sweep aside the fabricated misconceptions. You can listen to a 7 minute excerpt of that speech below, or hear the full speech here:
The next year, Playboy explicitly asked Kerouac to elaborate on the Hunter College speech. He agreed and gave them “The Origins of the Beat Generation,” which, too, you can read online: Page 1 — Page 2 — Page 3 — Page 4.
By ’59, Allen Ginsberg, the poet laureate of the Beats, knew there was little use in trying to reappropriate the term from the magazines and marketers. When asked to define the word, he effectively refused to play the game. But famed anthropologist Margaret Mead, a more neutral outside observer, was willing to take a shot. Listen below, or hear a slightly longer audio clip here:
In the mid-1930s, some beautiful, high-quality books were published by a company called Limited Editions Club, which, according to Antiques Roadshow appraiser Ken Sanders, was “famous for re-issuing classics of literature and commissioning contemporary living artists to illustrate 1500-copy signed limited editions.” One of those books—the 1934 Pablo Picasso-illustrated edition of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata—is, next to Henri Matisse’s 1935 edition of Joyce’s Ulysses, one of “the most sought after and desirable limited editions on the market today.”
The book’s rarity, of course, renders it more valuable on the market than a mass-produced object, but whether it was worth $5,000 or $50, I think I’d hold onto my copy if I had one (here’s one for $12,000 if you’re buying). While Aubrey Beardsley’s 1896 illustrations do full and stylish justice to the satirical Greek comedy’s bawdy nature, Picasso’s drawings render several scenes as tender, softly sensual tableaux. The almost childlike simplicity of these illustrations of a play about female power and the limits of patriarchy do not seem like the work of a rumored misogynist, but then again, neither do any of Picasso’s other domestic scenes in this spare, rounded style of his.
In Aristophanes’ play, the women of Greece refuse their husbands sex until the men agree to end the Peloponnesian War. The play makes much of the men’s mounting sexual frustration, with several humorous gestures toward its physical manifestations. Beardsley’s drawings offend Victorian eyes by making these scenes into exaggerated nudist farce. Picasso’s modernist sketches all but ignore the overt sexuality of the play, picturing two lovers (2nd from top) almost in the posture of mother and child, the pent up men (image above) as dejected and downcast gentle souls, and the reunion of the sexes (below) as a highly stylized, none too erotic, feast. These images are three of six signed proofs featured on the blog Book Graphics. See their site to view all six illustrations.
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