all the Homer things

This is not the same Polydorus.

Have been working away steadily for the last week but not updating, because I have to give a paper on Oswald next week and haven't got time to work, teach, write the paper and update too.  I've got 8 more death scenes and about 16 similes to nail down.  Whenever I see a new simile my heart sinks because I know it will likely be hard to find where Oswald has transplanted it from.  On the other hand it's rewarding work.  She did something particularly cool with the death of Polydorus as his father Priam looks for him, which she juxtaposed with the simile of Ajax guarding Patroclus' body like a lion guarding its cubs.

Still, it really is time to stop researching and start actually putting it together as a paper.  But I'm so close to being done!  This is a mistake I always make mind you - I always think that once the research is done the paper will write itself, possibly overnight while I'm sleeping, if I leave out a bowl of milk for the fairies...

In fact once the research is done the paper will take every bit as long to write as the research took to do, something Mac Wallace told me (frequently; over and over; in the hope that someday I would take note), and something I tell my students all the time as well.

 I don't know if my students pay attention.  I know I never do because there's always this One! Last! Thing! I want to find out first ... which of course will lead to another interesting thing ... but I must stop now.  It's not as if I don't have enough material.

But I'm so close!

Home Again

English: Aerial view of the village of Passchendaele (north is to the right of the photo) before and after the Third Battle of Ypres, 1917. Français : Vue aerienne du village de Passendale, avant et après la troisième bataille d'Ypres, en 1917. Le nord est à droite sur les photos. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A CWGC cemetery from the First World War: Tyne Cot in the Ypres Salient (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

THE THIRD BATTLE OF YPRES The Battle of Pilckem Ridge : A British 18 pounder field gun battery taking up new positions close to a communication trench near Boesinghe, 31 July 1917. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Map of the Third Battle of Ypres (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

After a month away, I'm back in Victoria and have finally unpacked and got back to my desk.  Today, Kaletor, Lykophron and Kleitos have all been killed, "it goes on and on" as Oswald remarks, partly because the list of dead soldiers in the Iliad is so bloody long, but partly because those are a sequence of vengeance-deaths.  Ajax kills Kaletor; Hector, enraged at the death of his cousin (N.B. we've never been told that Hector had a cousin called Kaletor until this instant), tries to kill Ajax, misses, and nails Lykophron; Ajax, enraged that his good friend of the family Lykophron who lived with Ajax' family because he'd killed someone back home and whom Ajax honoured like his own father (and we've never been told any of that before either), calls up Teucer to avenge the death.  Teucer sends out a hail of arrows but misses Hector and gets Kleitos, who is just riding up into the thick of the battle to help Hector out.  "It goes on and on".

Oswald skips all the made-up-this-instant retconning Homer inserts to give these deaths some emotional resonance.  First Kaletor, then Lykophron, then Kleitos.  They don't, in Oswald, need some made-up reason for someone important (Ajax, Teucer, Hector) to care about them for their deaths to matter.  Their deaths already matter.

While we were in Belgium went to Ypres and Passchendaele, and the German and Tyne Cot World War 1 cemeteries.  I stood at Ypres, where young men had died by the thousands, mired to the waist in a bog of mud, and blood, and corpses, and ordinance, and mustard gas, and poison, and rain; and knew that I was certainly standing over bodies, or parts of bodies, of soldiers whose corpses had never been found. I thought about the Iliad, where at least the dead, or most of the dead, had names.

Related articles

• Play review: 'Iliad' a mesmerizing lament

Medon the donkey

Cover of How to Read a Poem

Oswald skips several Trojan deaths here, and then attaches the simile of the island town on fire from invaders, lighting beacon fires asking for help, which Homer uses of the light from Achilles' head when he terrifies the Trojans by his scream alone, to the deaths of Stichius and Arkesilaus; but instead of the light (of the beacon fires) being like the light from Achilles' head, it is the smoke from the fires Oswald uses as a comparison, that vanishes from the earth like Stichius and Arkesilaus.

Then Aeneas kills off Medon and Iasus, with a line of description for each of them; Oswald concentrates on Medon, bastard son of Oileus, who killed his stepmother's kinsman, fled to Phylace, and wound up (after Philoctetes was abandoned) leading the Phthians at Troy.  Oswald adds that he then went on to Troy, and died in the 9th year.  To him she attaches the simile Homer uses of Ajax attacked by a flock of Trojans, who can't be moved by them any more than a sluggish donkey who's gotten into a cornfield and just keeps eating until he's had his fill and decides to move on, utterly unresponsive to the blows of the boys trying to drive him out with clubs.   Only she attaches this to Medon. How? Medon stubbornly killed a man, fled, fled on to Troy, kept fighting until he'd decided in his own sweet time that he was ready to die?

The translation, as always, is wonderful.  Oswald amplifies the mention of his father's wife (μητρυιῆς Ἐριώπιδος) to "grew up under the smile of a slim respectable stepmother", for example.  And the description of the donkey, who "thinking good I will wade and eat sideways/ ... does just that eats and eats sunk in a pond of corn".

I've begun reading Terry Eagleton "How to Read a Poem", since it's not something I've been trained in really (nor indeed something my teachers were trained in I think).  Eagleton identifies this problem in his students, that modern work tends to be content analysis which is largely oblivious to whether the "content" comes encased in a novel, a poem, or a real-life happening.  He says (instead of dealing with the 'literariness' of the work),

"... they treat the poem as though its author chose for some eccentric reason to write out his or her views on warfare or sexuality in lines which do not reach to the end of the page.  Maybe the computer got stuck." 

                                    (Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem; Blackwell, Oxford 2007: 3.) 

That, embarrassingly, would be me; but Memorial makes me want to really up my game, and be able to say precisely what's so cool about it, which isn't just content, or even just its relationship to Homer.

Related articles

• Terry Eagleton on close analysis of language | The Oxonian Review

  ---

Cassandra the deer

Ajax drags Cassandra from Palladium (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oswald p. 47:

Like a deer in the hills wounded

Keeps running in pain

There are dogs following her bloodprints

But she goes on and on escaping into loneliness

To the very breaking of her being

Until it happens in some shadowy wood on a hilltop

She gives up

And the dogs set about eating her

But at last at evening a lion appears

A huge angel wandering the hills laying claim to the dead

And the dogs scatter

This is Oswald's translation of the simile from book 11 when Odysseus is fighting desperately, on his own, surrounded by Trojans, until Ajax (the greater) gets there to save his bacon.  And it's a weird simile in Homer, because the wounded deer, in Homer, has run as far as it can, and died, and is being eaten by the jackals. The lion (sent by a god, says Homer) isn't there to save the deer, which is dead anyway. The lion scatters the jackals so it can devour the deer itself.  But the deer is Odysseus, the jackals are the Trojans he's fending off, and the lion, Ajax, arrives to save, not kill him; so Odysseus is not the victim at all, and may even be the lion.

Oswald makes two changes that shift everything.  One is the placement of the simile, which Oswald puts after the death of Othryoneus, who came to Troy and offered to drive off the Greeks in exchange for the hand of Cassandra, and went off to battle and died, "and everyone laughed and laughed, except Cassandra".  And second, Oswald makes the deer feminine; in Homer it's masculine.  So the deer is Cassandra, wounded and bleeding, attacked by jackals - Ajax the lesser - and finally made a meal of by the lion, Agamemnon, who scatters the other rapists and takes her home to the slaughter.  In fact Oswald didn't have to change this simile at all, in her usual fashion; all she had to do was re-point it, towards an actual victim.

Have a look at the Poem of the Week (below).  A more sympathetic look at Penelope than Atwood gave us, but that's not hard.

Related articles

• Your Brain Knows The Difference Between Metaphors and Similes, Even if You Don't

  ---

• Poem of the week: The Bed That Is a Tree by Kim Lasky

  ---

yet more Trojans die: Dorycles, Pandocus, Lysander, Pyrasus, Pylartes, Apisaon

In Homer, Ajax has just killed a whole whack of Trojans. Then a break in which Hector (we're told) kills a whole whack of Greeks, only we aren't given any of their names. Then one last Trojan, Apisaon, is killed by a friend of Ajax, and then the Greeks run hell for leather for the ships, pursued by ravening Trojans who don't, however, apparently manage to kill any of them. There will then be a break of a few hundred lines, well into the next book, while Nestor tells us at great length about how many Eleans he killed when he was a lad and how amazed everyone was, until finally someone else with a name dies (another Trojan). One can't help but notice that although Homer is at pains to tell us over and over either how even the battle is, or even that the Trojans are winning hands down, it's the Greeks who keep killing people with actual names.

Oswald just lists the names, doesn't tell us whether they're Greek or Trojan, or who killed them. This is only the second time she's used the same simile Homer does in the same place, of a river swollen with winter rains rushing down through the plains carrying all before it, trees, mud, everything, into the sea. She's fond of the torrent imagery; this is the 3rd or 4th such simile she's used. However Homer compares Ajax to the river in flood, carrying all before him (butchering - δαίζων, literally "cleaving" - horses and men alike in his charge across the field). (Just realised - this line must be the origin of the story that he responded to Achilles' armour being given to Odysseus at the end of the war by torturing and slaughtering a lot of sheep, under the impression they were the Greek high command; or, at least, the characterization harmonizes.  Who butchers horses?)

  Oswald just lists the names of the dead, then gives us the simile without Ajax; the river is transformed into an impersonal force, the war that charges across the plain, carrying all before it, broken and tumbled, Greeks and Trojans alike.

I am struggling with a cold here and feeling uninspired.

Related articles

• Trojan Origins

  ---

a simile was left in place!

Statue of Teucer by Sir William Hamo Thornycroft (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oswald lists the 8 Trojans killed by Teucer in the same order Homer does, with rather less focus on Teucer and no mention of Ajax' name; then  moves to Gorgythion, and this is the first place where she uses a simile that Homer uses of the same person Homer uses it for.  But it is so perfect it's not surprising; and it is used of the sort of character that interests Oswald, that is, one who is never mentioned before or after.  Teucer is aiming at Hector, misses, and hits Gorgythion, "someone's darling son", in the breast.  Homer tells us his father was Priam and his mother Kastianeira, but Oswald doesn't follow her practice until now and record the mother's name.  She moves on to the simile:

8.306-308 μήκων δ’ ὡς ἑτέρωσε κάρη βάλεν, ἥ τ’ ἐνὶ κήπῳ
καρπῷ βριθομένη νοτίῃσί τε εἰαρινῇσιν,
ὣς ἑτέρωσ’ ἤμυσε κάρη πήληκι βαρυνθέν

As a poppy in bloom in a garden drops its head to one side, 

weighed down by the spring rain,

so his head sank down, weighed down by his helmet  

(my translation: Oswald's is much better).

Really one thing reading Oswald so carefully is doing for me is renewing my appreciation of Homer.  This passage can't be matched; it's perfect; and it's thrown away, in Homer, on a redshirt, on someone we will never hear of again.  In Oswald, that's the whole point; the similes are not thrown away, but pointedly attached to the redshirts, the ones that otherwise went unmourned.  But here she and Homer agree; Gorgythion should be remembered too.

The article I've linked below is thoughtful and interesting, and reminds me why I should stop reading only for historical and social context, as I tend to, because it's easy.

Related articles

• Reading through allegory and metaphor

Administration Day

Deutsch: Ursula Boese (als Jocaste) mit Igor Strawinsky nach der Premiere von "Oedipus Rex" in der Mailänder Scala, 12.06.1963 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Graded a set of exams, a set of papers, calculated grades for my large (235-person) class, submitted grades.  All this teaching is playing havoc with my research.

A colleague points out that in the weaving simile (yesterday's post), the weaving woman who 'stops' the scales the way Ajax 'stops' Acamas is, of course, a Fate.

Oh, and I ordered the Julie Taymor production of Stravinsky's "Oedipus" Oratorio, because it is utterly awesome.

The death of Acamas

Ajax and Hector exchange gifts, woodcut in Andreas Alciatus, Emblematum libellus, 1591. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oswald gives the death Acamas the Thracian (beginning of book 6) a few lines, saying Aias 'stopped' him.  She then uses the "weaver woman" simile that Homer uses in the battle at the ships (12.432ff).

The original simile is about the battle at the ships being evenly balanced between Trojans and Lycians,  the way a weaver woman holds the scales being careful to get the weight exactly right, get (payment for?) the last ounce of wool, to barely support her children; and at the same time, she's holding on against adversity, fighting her own battle against it the way the warriors are fighting with each other, and like them, she is barely holding the line, all but at at a standstill; her wages are pitiful, she is barely eking out a living.

  But Oswald focusses instead on the fact that you have to make the scales stop swaying back and forth to weigh something; weighing doesn't occur when the scales are still in motion, but when they stop.  So Aias stops Acamas the way the weaver stops weaving, after working all night (as Aias has been fighting all day?), and then stops the scales so they will give an accurate and final reading of her labour.

So the simile is no longer about holding the battle lines even the way the woman holds the scales even.  It's about Aias 'stopping' Acamas the way the hard-working woman "stops" spinning and "stops" the scales.  The "stop" is the moment of killing; her work as a spinner is made equal to his work as a warrior; she isn't like a god - like Zeus, holding the battle lines even - she's like a soldier, like Aias, fighting against want, and momentarily winning.

Related articles

• The most sensitive weight scale ever can weigh individual protons [Mad Science] (io9.com)
• "Reinterpreting the Simile of Homer Iliad 16.7-11: The Girl and Her Mother in Ancient Greek Warfare", Kathy L. Gaca AJP 2008 (129.2) 145-171.