Glimpses and sightings of an epic

Dipping into the pages of a new poetry collection by David Ferry, "Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations" (University of Chicago Press), makes me feel as giddy as I do when I hear that a new trailer of Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit" is about to be released.

Why?

Ferry is an acclaimed poet in his own right -- check out "Of No Country I Know" -- but what I've eagerly followed over the years are his translations from Virgil.  His "Eclogues" and "Georgics" translations (both published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux), are beautiful songs of the Earth, of prophecy, of pragmatism and protest.  Reading them has always made me wonder, When is Ferry going to tackle the big one?  What about Virgil's "Aeneid"?

His new collection "Bewilderment" gives the answer: He's working on it.

Along with the sharp clarity of original lyrics "Coffee Lips" and "Street Scene," there are long passages from books II and VI of the Mantuan's masterpiece.  I'm more than giddy, however; I'm also humbled by it. Ferry's book is dedicated to his late wife, critic Anne Ferry, and near the end of this collection, his version of Aeneas' departure from Troy feels informed by Ferry's own grief.

After he evokes the image of Aeneas hoisting his lame-legged father onto his back:

I take up the tawny pelt of a lion and

Cover my neck and my broad shoulders with it,

And bowing down, I accept the weight of my father...

he then continues on with Aeneas' grief when he fails to find his wife at a reunion site before the fugitive Trojans escape from their burning city:

When all of us,

At last, had gotten there, we all were there,

But she had vanished and she wasn't there.

Gone from her people, gone from her child, and her husband.

That final line is searingly painful to read. Anyone who's lost a loved one knows what this is. Everyone is Aeneas in their grief.

Glimpses and sightings of Virgil's epic -- I feel a little like Palinurus with Carthage behind and the deep sea ahead.  Can't wait for the rest of Ferry's project.

 

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P.S. On Koslow's 'Slouching'

Ok, if this blog is supposed to be devoted to books about myth and lore, then why include a review of a book that looks at an aspect of contemporary America (Sally Koslow's "Slouching Toward Adulthood: Observations from the Not-so-empty Nest")? How does that fit in? Easy: The American dream is difficult to realize in today's economy -- for some people, in fact, it has more of the quality of a myth than a reality. So I think it does deserve a place here.

Reading for the candidates: Koslow's 'Slouching'

The National Center for Education Statistics estimates that about 1.7 million students graduated from U.S. colleges in June. While many have gone on to grad school or to start promising careers, a big percentage are back home with Mom and Dad—so much for the empty nest—and Sally Koslow wants to know more about them.

“Who are these people sandwiching a chunky stage between adolescence and adulthood, these individuals who resemble adults but aren’t, exactly?” she asks in “Slouching Toward Adulthood: Observations from the Not-so-Empty Nest” (Viking).

What happened? Why aren’t they out there in the world, fighting the good fight?

What’s changed—is it frustration, a different work ethic, a shrinking economy, or all of the above?

Koslow’s answer tends to embrace this entire spectrum. And she doles out plenty of humor—”twenty-eight is the new nineteen,” she says—in the course of this fascinating look at a group labeled as “adultescents.”

Take her own college grad son, for instance, a stubbly dude who’s living large and still sleeping in his childhood bedroom: “A weekly unemployment check was financing more late-night eating and drinking than my husband and I had done in the last two decades.”

But there is a far more serious point to her examination. The career path model that worked for so many people not long ago—even within the last decade—has fragmented for a variety of reasons. Some are technology-driven factors; others are market-driven as other parts of the world open up their work forces to employers eager to keep costs down

Koslow doesn’t hesitate to point blame in the mirror, at herself and older generations: “Perhaps the drifting we see is also a sensible response to contingencies our children can’t control. The big, bad real world we’ve helped to create for them in which to live as adults is a mess.”

In other words, if older generations created the problem, they can help create the solution, too.

That’s why I’d recommend this book to the two main candidates for U.S. president: There are plenty of new books that talk about the macro-condition of the economy, but Koslow focuses on a specific segment of young people who are suffering now.  If the youth are the future, as the saying goes, they deserve more attention than they've been getting.

Bach is back ... actually, he never left

  That's the point of Paul Elie's new book, "Reinventing Bach" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).  I thought the bookish highlight of my week was hearing Robert K. Massie talk about Catherine the Great -- wrong.  Elie gave a vivid, intimate lecture to an audience Thursday night at Claremont McKenna College - another of the Gould Center's offerings this fall, shepherded by Director Robert Faggen - that reminded us that Johann Sebastian is still among us.

You just have to listen closely to find him. And sometimes you don't.

"My faith in Bach's continuing relevance gets restored every year on Halloween," he said with a smile. "When someone needs some spooky gothic music, they usually turn to the Toccata."

Everyone laughed.

That's the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor - the deep rich organ blast that's been borrowed by everyone, from the Phantom of the Opera to Walt Disney.

Disney, in fact, is a player in "Reinventing Bach," and Elie spent part of his lecture  upon Bach's influence on Disney as well as Albert Schweitzer, Pablo Casals, Glenn Gould and Leopold Stokowski (who teamed with Disney to create "Fantasia"). Elie played snippets of recordings by Casals, Gould and Stokowski -- he also showed us the "Bach-like" musical progressions found in the music of the Beatles,  Procol Harem .... and, yes, even Spinal Tap.

(This one goes to eleven.)

"I wonder what Bach would think, if he were alive today, and found that all of his work was being illegally sampled!" he said with a grin.

Elie's lecture - like his book - shows what a thoughtful writer can accomplish when he is willing to take narrative risks. It's one thing to paint discrete portraits of great figures (Schweitzer, Casals, Stokowski, Gould), but it's something else when that writer can take these portraits and weave them into a single, unified context. That's what Elie has accomplished.