TOP 100 BOOK SITES
| ||||
|
| ||||
| ||||
|
| ||||
| From the archive: Boris Pasternak, a man alone Originally publshed on 3 November 1958Boris Pasternak has been offered the chance to leave the Soviet Union and has refused it. This is a fine decision, worthy of the man and of the high drama in which he is playing the leading part.If he was the person his enemies say – a renegade, a "reactionary, hungry for all the delights of the capitalist paradise" – he could wish no better than for an open gate; on what his books would bring him he could live comfortably and securely in any Western country. He does not scorn their [western writers'] good opinion; the Nobel award gave him "a lonely joy", even though he has been induced now to reject it.Yet he refuses to go. He is a Russian.As he says in his letter to Mr Khrushchev: "I am linked to Russia by my birth, my life, and my work ... To leave my country would be for me the equivalent of death."Living still in Russia, he keeps the light of his vision alive there. As he says in his letter, in words proud but not arrogant, "I have done something for Soviet literature, and I can still be useful to it." Those are not words of grovelling recantation.It is, of course, characteristic of Communist intolerance that it should regard the award of a Nobel prize as insulting. And the Writers' Union has acted as if it was no better than a branch of the thought‑police.What has shocked them? Mainly, perhaps, Pasternak's treatment of the early years of the Revolution. Those have always been held as sacred, selfless, and heroic. Now Pasternak has shown the heroes of the revolutionary days as human beings, less than immaculate. In a harsher time Pasternak might have found himself banished to Siberia.That he should be offered freedom to go into exile (a chance which millions now behind the Iron Curtain would seize with both hands) is something new. So is the publication by Tass of Pasternak's letter to Khrushchev. It is always rash, with Communists, to believe that there is a touch of spring in the air.Yet Pasternak himself has looked beyond the present tyrannies. "I have a feeling," he wrote in a letter some time ago, "that a completely new era is beginning, with new tasks and new demands on the heart and on human dignity, a silent age which will never be proclaimed and allowed voice but will grow more real every day without our noticing it ..."That is why 'Dr Zhivago' is the most important piece of work I have been able to do so far in the whole of my life."RussiaNobel prize for literatureguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
National Book Awards: Conflict of Interest Question Arises in Young Readers' Category A blogger and former book review editor has questioned whether one of the judges on the panel that will select the award for Young People's Literature has a conflict of interest with one of the candidates for the award. feeds.nytimes.com |
Holiday Books: That Old Black Magic More than 1,200 items from the amazingly prolific Johnny Mercer. feeds.nytimes.com |
Design: Peter Miles Applies His Quirky, Simple Style to a Range of Platforms The English graphic designer Peter Miles, now living in New York, has used his spare approach with clients ranging from German arts publishers to indie magazines. feeds.nytimes.com |
Sappho: the great poet of the personal | Charlotte Higgins Hardly any of the Greek poet's work survives, but the fragments that remain are enough to make her immortalThis week is the inaugural meeting of my new poetry reading group, and muggins here has the job of introducing our first poet. Because I'm a classicist, I thought an ancient poet would be a good start. Because no one wanted to wade through an entire epic, we're doing Sappho, the 7th-century poet of the island of Lesbos.What will I be saying about her? Well, to me one of the most interesting things about Sappho is the way she's been read: the transmission of her works, and her reception. She was massively admired in antiquity, and her works were edited into nine books (ie papyrus rolls) in the great library at Alexandria. She was known variously as "the tenth muse" and "the female Homer". She was a huge influence on Roman lyric poets: Catullus famously translated a poem of hers, Horace wrote in her distinctive "Sapphic" stanzas, and Ovid in his Heroides (a collection of poems purporting to be love letters by jilted lovers to their ex-boyfriends) has one by Sappho to her certainly apocryphal lover, Phaon, on account of whom she was legendarily supposed to have killed herself.Now, hardly any of Sappho's work remains. There are only two complete poems. In Stanley Lombardo's excellent translation (which the reading group has tried and failed to get in time from Amazon, so be warned) he renders 73 fragments into English (out of 200-odd in David Campbell's 1982 text for the Loeb edition) and it is a very slim volume indeed. Until the late-19th century the reason we knew about any of these fragments at all was because they had been quoted in other works – in ancient books on literary criticism, metre, etymology, etc. Often they are quoted not because they are regarded as particularly fine in themselves, but because they might illustrate an interesting use of the word "cushion" (say), or provide an example of a particular poetic metre, or grammatical oddity. Lombardo's fr 46, for example, is simply this: "a child, very soft, picking flowers". A lot of them are like that.In the late 19th-century and early 20th century, however, something extraordinary happened: excavations of a rubbish dump of the ancient town of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt turned up a number of papyri – more fragments and some almost-complete poems. In 1937, too, a poem was found written in pen-and-ink on a potsherd – easily attributable to Sappho because tiny chunks of it had been quoted elsewhere.Still, Sappho has a pretty astonishing reputation, given how little survives. As we read them today, her minute, often deeply resonant fragments, offer us questions: are we to regard them as poetic wholes, like tiny Emily Dickinson poems? What aesthetic value do they have? Are we to see them as analagous, somehow, to the irretrievably broken potsherd on which the hymn to Aphrodite was found? Ezra Pound had an answer, in his poem Papyrus (1916) which is as follows:Spring ...Too long ...Gongula ...Sappho's "afterlife" is a fascinating story in itself. Although the only "facts" that can be known about Sappho herself are in her poems – and it's important to bear in mind that it would be naive indeed to confuse the poetically constructed "I" of the poems with some objectively clear "real-life" Sappho – she has been the subject of some extraordinary fantasy over the years, the starting point for "biography", fiction and sheer titillation. Aside from anything, there has been the "was she, wasn't she?" question of sexuality. The Victorians seemed especially keen to preserve her from the charges of lesbianism. The great 19th-century German scholar Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff had her down as a sort of Prussian headmistress presiding over a boarding school of chastely virtuous schoolgirls. Gilbert Murray (1866-1957), the eminent professor of Greek at the university of Glasgow, wrote: "It is a little futile to discuss the private character of a woman who lived 2,500 years ago in a society of which we have almost no records." Fair enough, but then he continues: "It is clear that Sappho was a 'respectable person' in Lesbos; and there is no good early evidence to show that the Lesbian standard was low." Which, as Richard Jenkyns points out in his book Three Classical Poets, makes her sound like some Kelvingrove matron. On the other hand, Sappho was a poster-girl for the counterculture. Swinburne thought she was the best poet ever (better than Homer and Shakespeare). HD was also a big fan; and in the early years of the 20th century she was claimed by lesbians as, well, a lesbian.And yes, the poems contain words of deep and passionate love for other women; how far those relationships would have resembled homosexuality as it exists in today's culture is another matter. Sappho was admired in antiquity for the elegance and exquisiteness of her writing: that seems to me to be right. Other qualities worth admiring: her wit, teasing tone and, I think, the deeply personal nature of her poems. I love the intensely sensuous, pictorial, sometimes synaesthesic nature of her descriptions.Most of all, I am fascinated by the way she takes on Homer – andsubverts him. Look at the peripenultimate Lombardo translation in thisselection published in Jacket magazine. (The one starting "Some say an army on horseback".) The poem takes the values of the Iliad and turns them on their head. Helen (vilified at various points in the Iliad as the cause of the Trojan war) was right to leave her home, her parents, her children to go off to Troy, suggests the poem. There is no mention, let it be said, of Helen's parents or children in the Iliad – Sappho's poem personalises, intensifies and romanticises Helen's experiences. And it likens Helen's emotional world to that of the narrator: her longing for Anactoria, whom she'd rather see "than all the chariots/ and armed men in Lydia". It's the original "make love not war" poem, and it launched a thousand works of Roman lyric poetry (and beyond) that subversively prioritise the life of love and art above the military, civic, "establishment" values of the moral majority.PoetryClassicsHomerCharlotte Higginsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |