The Dilemma of the Networks
, Jeff Orlowski's documentary released by Netflix last month, contains a ton of disturbing testimonies from former senior officials of companies like Google or Facebook, but also the stiff recreation of the daily life of an American family.
In that parallel story, actress Kara Hayward (
Moonrise Kingdom, Paterson
) plays the eldest daughter, who, always with a book in her hands, warns of her younger brother's addiction to technology.
Hayward's character is called, of course, Cassandra, after the daughter of Priam, King of Troy, who prophesies the destruction of the city without anyone's belief.
The voices of the Greco-Latin classics disappear from the curricula while their echoes become omnipresent in the most unexpected areas.
In the same year that the author of a collection of poems such as
The Triumph of Achilles
(Louise Glück) and the Princess of Asturias
win the Nobel Prize,
another poet who presents herself as a "Greek teacher" (Anne Carson), the best-selling essay in Spain is
The Infinite in a Junco
(Siruela), a story about the invention of books in the ancient world signed by Irene Vallejo.
Meanwhile, the Cambridge professor who is an expert in antiquity, Mary Beard, becomes a mass phenomenon on Twitter (280,000 followers) and Jorge Javier Vázquez - a philologist by training and "tired of the fact that everyone considers his work on television frivolous" - continues. tour with
Desmontando a Seneca
, a theatrical show based on a famous apologue of the Hispano-Roman philosopher:
De la bredad de la vida
.
The publishing world is also experiencing its own rebirth.
“The classics have never been published so well and so well”, underlines Carlos García Gual, member of the RAE, translator of Homero and promoter of the Gredos Classical Library, which was born in 1977 to develop a work that in Europe had been in the works for 100 years. march: publish the complete Greco-Latin corpus.
To popular authors and those who are not.
There is all Plato, but also Elio Aristides or, with his 20 volumes, Plutarco, "an author hardly read today, but very popular in the 19th century."
García Gual has just published
Voces de largo ecos
(Ariel), a compilation of prologues, among which the one dedicated to Aristotle's scientific writings, whose influence went beyond the humanities, stands out.
enlarge photo The attack of the latrigones.
Calpurnio illustration for the 'Odyssey' edition published by Blackie Books.
"Until the 15th century", explains Professor Gual, "science was Greek science, Pliny, Euclid, Aristotle ... Then microscopes arrive and everything changes because it is a field that expires before philosophy or literature."
Even so, along with glaring errors - such as defending the superiority of the male over the female or of the right over the left - the discovery of the mammalian character of cetaceans or the description of the stomach of ruminants must be noted to the thinker's credit. and of the copulation of cephalopods, "a singular feature that was not rediscovered until the 19th century."
Beyond canonical and exhaustive collections such as that of Gredos or the Alma Mater of the CSIC, García Gual highlights another sign of vitality of a world that never expires: “The newsstands are full of books on myths and there are excellent pocket editions and new translations ”.
Indeed, labels such as Alianza, Cátedra or Akal could be added the bets of others, specialized or generalists, such as Guillermo Escolar, Mármara, Koan, Rhemata, Rinoceronte or Errata Naturae.
They have just been joined by Blackie Books, which premieres its collection Classics Freed with an
Odyssey
that already in pre-sale, before its departure, placed 5,000 copies in bookstores.
Genesis,
Don Quixote
,
Gargantua and Pantagruel
and the
Iliad
await their turn.
Illustrated by Calpurnio, Blackie's Odyssey is completed with recreations and subversions of the classic plot in a short novel by Margaret Atwood, a poem by Dorothy Parker, a fable by Augusto Monterroso and songs by Nick Cave and Javier Krahe.
From James Joyce to Derek Walcott, the history of literature is so full of odyssey that the original is no longer a book but a library.
The volume also carries a curious repertoire of notes that explain who Mentor (teacher of Telémaco) was before becoming a common name, at what moment the action of the work began (March 8, 1178 BC, according to what applies the NASA eclipse canon described in canto XX) or how many people are called Ulysses in Spain (2,274 according to the INE; none use the protagonist's Greek name: Odysseus).
enlarge photo Young woman with tablet and stiletto, known as Sappho, in a Pompeian fresco.
Alamy
The edition, however, has a peculiarity that its managers know potentially controversial: the translation, by Miguel Temprano, has not been made from the Greek original, but from the version that Samuel Butler published in 1900, "the best" among the English according to Borges.
Homer's work, says the editorial note, “was written in hexameters, to be recited in public, with musical accompaniment, perhaps in the manner of current rap… That is, so far from our cultural references that, to make it reach us effectively , the language issue is probably the least of the problems ”.
Jan Martín, founder of Blackie Books, expands on those reasons: “We wanted it to flow like a novel.
More than risky, it was an unprejudiced decision ”.
For Alberto Manguel, author of the essay
El legado de Homero
(Debate), everything depends on what we mean by translation: “It can mean an inspired academic version and as faithful as possible to the original.
In that case, the translator has to know ancient Greek perfectly, because he will have to solve complex philological, historical and cultural problems.
You should also consider - as the editor of Blackie Books puts it - the fact that the best preserved Homeric text is only a part of the whole of Homer's work.
That is, recalls Manguel, the theory of the Hellenist Florence Dupont, among other researchers, who considers what we call the Homeric text as "equivalent to the libretto of an opera", that is, a fragment of the original work, without the music, the gestures and ritual that accompanied words in ancient Greece.
"If by translation we mean, as Borges wanted, one more draft of the original text, then a translation of Butler's translation is perfectly valid."
Irene Vallejo celebrates the philological taste for going to the original source, but admits that an indirect version - "and this one is very literary, agile" - can be a good introduction for any reader.
“Deep down there is no pure version.
The classics have so many adhesions from all eras that in the end they are a magma of which all the readings that have been made of them are a part ”.
Carlos García Gual is more reticent.
And more resounding: “I don't think it is a good idea.
Butler itself is old. "
Aurora Luque, poet and translator, adds a nuance along the same lines: “We live a fascination for the Anglo-Saxon, but in Spanish we have great translations from Greek.
Although of course we can savor a
retranslation
.
The important thing is to know that we are reading Butler, not Homer.
The same thing happens with Anne Carson and Safo ”.
The author of books such as
Gavieras
and
La siesta de Epicuro
(both in Visor) refers to the trilingual volume
Si no, el vern
o (Broken Glass), which has just hit bookstores with the Greek verses of the poet from Lesbos, the English version of the Canadian and his own translation into Spanish of the work of this.
Penelope.
Calpurnio's illustration for Margaret Atwood's 'Penelope's Version', included in the 'Odyssey' edition published by Blackie Books.
In addition to the Borgian blessing and narrative fluidity of Butler's version, there is another element behind the "heresy" - the term is from the editors - of translating the
Odyssey
from English.
Three years before putting it into his language, the British author published an essay in which he argues that the most influential literary work in history was written by a woman and not by the supposed blind bard, who, this time, would have written the bellicose Iliad.
The open-mindedness has, however, its limits.
Butler's theory, a clergyman by training, focuses less on the active role of Calypso, Circe or Penelope than on supposed mistakes that, according to him, “a woman could easily make, but never a man”.
Among others, think that a ship can have a rudder at each end (song IX) or that a falcon can tear its prey in mid-flight (song XV).
Alberto Manguel emphasizes that the specialists disdained Butler's theories as bizarre, but he recognizes a decisive merit: he inaugurated the particular relationship that 20th century literature has had with the classics.
They are no longer an unreachable peak but a plain that can be "traveled, inhabited, reorganized, recreated and rewritten."
This is what the German Christa Wolf did in
Cassandra
in 1983
and what Margaret Atwood also did in 2005 in
The Penelope's Version
(
The Penelopiad
), which imagines the return of Ulysses from the point of view of his wife and of the 12 maids who end up hanged for alleged treason.
A friend of the Canadian writer, with whom he shares nationality, Manguel underlines in that episode the echoes of the massive rapes of women in Bosnia, Rwanda or Darfur, but expresses his objections from the literary point of view: “I confess that I do not think his most accomplished book.
In his effort to bring Penelope's nearly invisible and self-sacrificing maids to life, and to target the gender imbalance in Homer's Greece, some of Atwood's great storytelling ability is lost.
And one reads the text less as an illuminated recreation of the poem than as a fiery pamphlet using that episode from the Odyssey only as a starting point.
enlarge photo The Trojan horse.
Calpurnio illustration for the 'Odyssey' edition published by Blackie Books.
In 2018, the British Pat Barker gave voice to the slave Briseida to narrate from her point of view the argument of the Iliad in
The Silence of the Women
(Siruela).
That same year the BBC and Netflix released the series
Troya: the fall of a city
, which sparked controversy because the roles of Achilles and Zeus fell on two black actors: David Gyasi (
Interstellar
) and Hakeem Kae-Kazim (
Hotel Rwanda
).
Irene Vallejo, who strongly recommends Barker's novel, explains that all ages have read the classics from their own debates: “Romanticism and nationalism of the 19th century claimed Homer as the depository of the collective genius of a people in front of Virgilio, individual author of the
Aeneid
.
We also read our time through symbols that come from ancient times.
The Greeks themselves did.
Euripides, for example, amends Homer by saying that Helen was not in Troy.
For them everything was versions, stories that circulated and circulated.
There was no holy book ”.
Aurora Luque abounds in the same idea: "The nineteenth century made a reading of Safo decaffeinated, misogynistic, but current gender studies do not invent anything, rather they enrich and clarify aspects that were in the works and nobody had known how to see".
She, in fact, is now embarking on the translation of The Supplicants, a piece by Aeschylus that collects the story of a choir of women - the Danaids - who ask for asylum in Argos because they refuse to marry in Egypt.
“For centuries,” Luque explains, “it was considered a minor work.
Why?
Because neither political asylum nor the rejection of marriage were understood ”.
For Vallejo, the classics “are because they adapt to the drives of each era.
If not, they would have disappeared ”.
That is why he regrets that the popular interest in the Greco-Latin imaginary contrasts with the educational disdain for Latin and Greek.
"This is a self-fulfilling prophecy," he says.
"You start by saying that they are studies without a professional exit, then you put obstacles so that the students choose them, the best records go to other careers and those that remain do not find a way out."
The author of
El infinito en un junco
underlines the cultural benefit that the classics provide, but does not forget their economic potential.
And he sums it up in one name: Christopher Vogler.
A script analyst, Vogler discovered the admiration that filmmakers like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola have for Joseph Campbell's essays on mythology and his study of the patterns that are repeated in all heroic tales.
That is why he adapted the analyzes of the New York scholar in
The Writer's Journey
(Ma Non Troppo)
to film writing
, soon to become a world bestseller and "one of the manuals in common use in Hollywood."
The distance between the Trojan War and Star Wars is shorter than it seems.
Readings, voices and echoes
Odyssey
.
Homer.
Early Miguel translation of the English version of Samuel Butler Blackie Books
If not, winter. Fragments of Sappho.
Anne Carson.
Translation by Aurora Luque.
Broken glass
Economy of what is not lost. Reading Simonides of Ceos with Paul Celan.
Anne Carson.
Translation by Jeannette L. Clariond.
Broken glass
Prairies
.
Louise Glück.
Translation by Andrés Catalán.
Pre-Texts
The silence of women.
Pat Barker.
Translation by Carlos Jiménez Arribas.
Siruela
Voices of long echoes.
Carlos García Gual.
Ariel
Loyalty to Greece.
Emilio Lledo.
Taurus
An Odyssey. A father, a son, an epic.
Daniel Mendelsohn.
Translation by Ramón Buenaventura.
Seix Barral
The Writer's Journey.
Christopher Vogler.
Translation by Jorge Conde.
Ma Non Troppo