All tagged classical literature
Wow, Ursula Le Guin can seriously write classical women. Known as the iconic woman of sci-fi, Le Guin is perhaps less well known for some of her novels that sit outside that genre. In Lavinia, (2008) Le Guin gives Aeneas’s last wife, Lavinia of Latium a voice. Through Le Guin’s prose, Lavinia comes to life, a dynamic and pious woman of ancient Bronze Age Italy. In wildly clever ways Le Guin plays with Vergil’s Aeneid* bringing classical Italy to life for modern readers. One doesn’t need to reach the afterword of this novel to understand Le Guin’s deep reverence for Vergil’s poetry; Lavinia is an ode to the great Roman poet that develops the relatively undeveloped character of Lavinia in the Aeneid.
Maria Dahvana Headley’s new translation of the iconic Old English poem, Beowulf (2020) presents modern readers with a perfect blend of direct translations of Old English phrases and hyperbolically contemporary verbiage. Indeed, she translate kenning (the compound word phrases frequently used in Old English poems) after kenning alongside words like “bro,” “hashtag,” and, yes, “fuck” (although the later may well have been frequently used among the warrior class of individuals depicted in Beowulf). What Headley presents is not traditional high poetry like that championed by many medievalist of yesteryear (among them the likes of Tolkien), but it is lyrical, delightfully readable, and very accessible. What’s more, it is arguably representative of the original feel of Beowulf’s oral roots. Alliterations and lyrical turns of phrase collide with 21st-century slang in Headley’s entertaining and approachable new translation of this oldest of English poems.
Told from the first-person perspective of young Patroclus, Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2012) reanimates the classical story of famous Achilles for today’s reader.
Part memoir (as Gurdon shares her family’s favorite read alouds at various points in her children’s maturity), part science of reading, The Enchanted Hour (2019) proves that reading out loud connects humans in a way that few things can. And in the digital age of information, when we are so often distracted from the ones we hold most dear, that connection is paramount.
In the weeks leading up to Halloween 2018, my family headed east to Boston and coastal Massachusetts. In addition to the Boston downtown (and all its Freedom Trail historical glory), we visited both Salem and New Bedford, Massachusetts. In preparation for our trip I chose to read Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables and Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife: or, the Star Gazer (1999).
This is a beautiful re-weaving of Circe’s stories, in which Miller expertly adorns the many classical tales with plenty of her own invention.
