This blog hereby acknowledges its stylistic indebtedness to Prof. Teufelsdrockh:
On the whole, Professor Teufelsdrockh is not a cultivated writer. Of his sentences perhaps not more than
nine-tenths stand straight on their legs; the remainder are in quite angular attitudes, buttressed up by props (of parentheses and dashes), and ever with this or the other tagrag hanging from them; a few even sprawl out helplessly on all sides, quite broken-backed and dismembered.
September 03, 2005
September 02, 2005
The Music of Chance
Last week I finally got around to buying an edition of Plutarch's Lives, something I'd been meaning to do for quite some time. I went for the Dryden translation, recently republished in two volumes by Random House under their Modern Library imprint. As far as I can tell, this is the only 'complete' edition of Plutarch available on the market.
I, like most reasonable people, shrink in terror from editions touted as 'abridgements', or, worse, 'selections'. But sadly, in the case of many classics, that is the only form in which they are available to a monoglot audience. Now, I know in the case of Plutarch, the 'Lives' included in the Dryden edition were never intended to be published as a single work, but...who cares? I just want a convenient edition for reading and reference. Montaigne came by one easily enough in the sixteenth century; so why is it so difficult for me to get my hands on one now?
Ah, but there's always the Loeb, I hear you say. Well, apart from the fact that I don't much like the look of those sickly green tomes on my bookshelf, and quite apart from the fact that I'm not after a parallel-text edition, deficient as I am in Greek, I wouldn't much relish the prospect of reading the whole shebang in LOEBESE (a strange language, existing only in written form, which some philologists have argued is a subdialect of the archaizing English spoken in University Classics departments around the turn of the century; others claim that it resembles no human language on record: the jury's still out). Even if I were after a parallel-text edition, and the greenness thing ceased to be an issue — as was the case some time ago when I was looking for a complete edition of Martial's epigrams (the red tomes of the Loeb's Latin editions sitting much more handsomely on the shelf), buying the however-many-volumes, at fifteen quid a pop, would prove prohibitively expensive. Speaking of Martial, it's worth noting that classics publishing seems to have descended to such a parlous state that it's impossible to buy a complete edition of Martial, even in Latin. What chance, then, of a complete unabridged edition in translation? Fat chance.
Admittedly, Martial has never attracted many translators, even in the modern era, partly because his punning style poses some insurmountable difficulties, and partly (probably mostly) because censorious Victorian attitudes to sexual humour never quite died off. But it isn't only Martial. So many classical works are available (if they are available at all in English) only in abridged editions. Try finding a complete edition of Seneca's letters — something, incidentally, that would have been easy to come by in the Renaissance. The worst is when the edition presents itself as a complete work and reserves the subtitle ~A Selection~ for the copyright page. Oxford World Classics, Penguin Classics, and especially the cheap and cheerful Wordsworth Classics — all are guilty of this charge.
Casting an eye outside of the sacred realm of 'the Classics' the situation gets immeasurably worse. Not only are English translations of complete works by early-Christian and Renaissance authors just as scarce, original language editions get to be like hens' teeth. Even the Loeb library hardly touches on these areas: Jerome's letters, for example, are available only under that dreaded rubric: ~Selections~. If a full edition of Jerome's letters, in English or in Latin, were cheaply available, I would snap it up like a shot. The closer we get to the great works of secular Renaissance authors the harder it is to find complete editions in English, let alone Latin (the Christian authors are probably better serviced by minor non-profit publishers run by Christian interest groups — Jesuits and the like). To some extent the tendency we observed in publications of the classics has been reversed: translations are more freely available than Latin editions. I found this out to my cost when I was after a complete edition of Erasmus's Colloquia: I could have had a complete multi-volume translation in German, or French, or even Flemish; but an edition in the original Latin: not a chance. And Eramsus is one of the better-serviced authors of that period. Still, at least there's the I Tatti Renaissance library...
Ahem. Please forgive the digression. What was I talking about? Oh yes, Plutarch. I was horrified to read in A. H. Clough's preface that most of this so-called Dryden translation was not in fact done by Dryden at all, but by jobbing ghost-translators, Dryden's name being slapped onto the front cover to sell more copies to a gullible seventeenth-century audience. What a con!
Actually, the thing that prompted me to start writing this entry was a coincidence. I find that in my life, for whatever reason (draw your own conclusions), the most striking coincidences happen more frequently in my reading than in the realm of action. This particular coincidence doesn't amount to much, but I found it satisfying on some level.
As the reader knows from previous entries, I have been reading Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet. Encountering in that book several references to Carlyle's Sartor resartus, and having heard intriguing things about this work in the past, I decided to give it a read. By the way, it's well worth a look, if you have a spare moment. A few chapters in (grâce à Project Gutenberg, naturellement), I came across a reference to Plutarch's life of Themistocles, an anecdote to the effect that the Athenian admiral, when asked what he knew of the Art of Memory, replied: I had rather you teach me the Art of Forgetting. I liked this quotation so much that I betook myself to my library (well, my bookshelf), and picked up my newly-purchased Plutarch (Vol 1). I spent an enjoyable half-hour reading though the life of Themistocles, but found no trace of the quote attributed by Plutarch to Themistocles on the attribution of Carlyle. Perhaps I overlooked it in my haste; perhaps Carlyle (and many subsequent authorities, as evidenced by Google) had been no less slapdash than Plutarch himself. In any case, in that 'Life', Plutarch gives an account of a dispute between Themistocles and the Spartan captain Eurybiades. Eurybiades, losing his temper, raised his staff to strike Themistocles. And Themistocles calmly said: 'Strike, if you will, but hear'. Keen readers will note that this is the title I gave to my last-but-one post on Schopenhauer.
Tout se tient.
I, like most reasonable people, shrink in terror from editions touted as 'abridgements', or, worse, 'selections'. But sadly, in the case of many classics, that is the only form in which they are available to a monoglot audience. Now, I know in the case of Plutarch, the 'Lives' included in the Dryden edition were never intended to be published as a single work, but...who cares? I just want a convenient edition for reading and reference. Montaigne came by one easily enough in the sixteenth century; so why is it so difficult for me to get my hands on one now?
Ah, but there's always the Loeb, I hear you say. Well, apart from the fact that I don't much like the look of those sickly green tomes on my bookshelf, and quite apart from the fact that I'm not after a parallel-text edition, deficient as I am in Greek, I wouldn't much relish the prospect of reading the whole shebang in LOEBESE (a strange language, existing only in written form, which some philologists have argued is a subdialect of the archaizing English spoken in University Classics departments around the turn of the century; others claim that it resembles no human language on record: the jury's still out). Even if I were after a parallel-text edition, and the greenness thing ceased to be an issue — as was the case some time ago when I was looking for a complete edition of Martial's epigrams (the red tomes of the Loeb's Latin editions sitting much more handsomely on the shelf), buying the however-many-volumes, at fifteen quid a pop, would prove prohibitively expensive. Speaking of Martial, it's worth noting that classics publishing seems to have descended to such a parlous state that it's impossible to buy a complete edition of Martial, even in Latin. What chance, then, of a complete unabridged edition in translation? Fat chance.
Admittedly, Martial has never attracted many translators, even in the modern era, partly because his punning style poses some insurmountable difficulties, and partly (probably mostly) because censorious Victorian attitudes to sexual humour never quite died off. But it isn't only Martial. So many classical works are available (if they are available at all in English) only in abridged editions. Try finding a complete edition of Seneca's letters — something, incidentally, that would have been easy to come by in the Renaissance. The worst is when the edition presents itself as a complete work and reserves the subtitle ~A Selection~ for the copyright page. Oxford World Classics, Penguin Classics, and especially the cheap and cheerful Wordsworth Classics — all are guilty of this charge.
Casting an eye outside of the sacred realm of 'the Classics' the situation gets immeasurably worse. Not only are English translations of complete works by early-Christian and Renaissance authors just as scarce, original language editions get to be like hens' teeth. Even the Loeb library hardly touches on these areas: Jerome's letters, for example, are available only under that dreaded rubric: ~Selections~. If a full edition of Jerome's letters, in English or in Latin, were cheaply available, I would snap it up like a shot. The closer we get to the great works of secular Renaissance authors the harder it is to find complete editions in English, let alone Latin (the Christian authors are probably better serviced by minor non-profit publishers run by Christian interest groups — Jesuits and the like). To some extent the tendency we observed in publications of the classics has been reversed: translations are more freely available than Latin editions. I found this out to my cost when I was after a complete edition of Erasmus's Colloquia: I could have had a complete multi-volume translation in German, or French, or even Flemish; but an edition in the original Latin: not a chance. And Eramsus is one of the better-serviced authors of that period. Still, at least there's the I Tatti Renaissance library...
Ahem. Please forgive the digression. What was I talking about? Oh yes, Plutarch. I was horrified to read in A. H. Clough's preface that most of this so-called Dryden translation was not in fact done by Dryden at all, but by jobbing ghost-translators, Dryden's name being slapped onto the front cover to sell more copies to a gullible seventeenth-century audience. What a con!
Actually, the thing that prompted me to start writing this entry was a coincidence. I find that in my life, for whatever reason (draw your own conclusions), the most striking coincidences happen more frequently in my reading than in the realm of action. This particular coincidence doesn't amount to much, but I found it satisfying on some level.
As the reader knows from previous entries, I have been reading Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet. Encountering in that book several references to Carlyle's Sartor resartus, and having heard intriguing things about this work in the past, I decided to give it a read. By the way, it's well worth a look, if you have a spare moment. A few chapters in (grâce à Project Gutenberg, naturellement), I came across a reference to Plutarch's life of Themistocles, an anecdote to the effect that the Athenian admiral, when asked what he knew of the Art of Memory, replied: I had rather you teach me the Art of Forgetting. I liked this quotation so much that I betook myself to my library (well, my bookshelf), and picked up my newly-purchased Plutarch (Vol 1). I spent an enjoyable half-hour reading though the life of Themistocles, but found no trace of the quote attributed by Plutarch to Themistocles on the attribution of Carlyle. Perhaps I overlooked it in my haste; perhaps Carlyle (and many subsequent authorities, as evidenced by Google) had been no less slapdash than Plutarch himself. In any case, in that 'Life', Plutarch gives an account of a dispute between Themistocles and the Spartan captain Eurybiades. Eurybiades, losing his temper, raised his staff to strike Themistocles. And Themistocles calmly said: 'Strike, if you will, but hear'. Keen readers will note that this is the title I gave to my last-but-one post on Schopenhauer.
Tout se tient.
September 01, 2005
Death on the Staircase
I suppose I ought to preface the following with a spoiler warning.
I just finished watching this excellent documentary series, made by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade. The eight-part series followed the trial of a certain Michael Peterson, accused of having murdered his wife in North Carolina in December 2001. The bias of the film was unmistakably on the side of the defence: most of the screentime was devoted to the defence team as they framed their strategies for the trial, and from that point of view it was a fascinating insight into the way the US legal system really works.
I've been following this series off and on for the last couple of months on BBC2. I even caught an episode (in sequence, mind you) purely by chance when I was in France. Canal + are showing the series under the name Soupçons, which strikes me as a little more...prejudicial than the English title. Oh, well.
I suggested just now that this film provided an insight into the real workings of the American legal system. Did I mean that this sort of documentary offers us something different from the courtroom drama we see in the movies and on TV? I'm not sure. Is there really any difference? Legal trials are all artifice, performance. We already knew that, of course, whether our schooling in forensics came from the orations of Cicero or from the OJ Simpson circus. But this documentary really brought out that performance element. The slow release of crucial information throughout the series kept the dramatic tension high. The trial lawyers duly played their roles with aplomb: the chief defence attorney: good-looking, softly-spoken, in control; the DA: eminently hissable, and also slightly absurd with that exaggerated Carolina accent (I still refuse to believe anyone really talks like that). The very essence of the pantomime villainess.
The production values of the film itself only served to heighten the artifice of what we were being shown. The haunting score, played over shots of desolate countryside and blood-red sunsets, or else faces, running the whole gamut of emotion from concerned to distraught. I would hesitate to accuse the director of manipulative editing, however. This is a film that follows the efforts of the defence team to get their client acquitted of murder: it doesn't claim to give a balanced view of the case. It merely presents us with...what? The facts?
A confidence that the outcome would be positive was shared by defence attorney, defendant and viewer alike. It seemed utterly inevitable that Peterson would be acquitted. The drama might as well have been scripted: after a shaky couple of episodes, the defence had produced their ace in the hole at the last minute, with due deference to the exigencies of television drama: the poker the prosecution had claimed to be the murder weapon had been found intact and unbloodied and was introduced as evidence on the final day of the trial. The closing statement of the defence consisted of a three-hour enumeration of 'reasonable doubts', any one of which would have been enough to acquit. The viewer, having followed the eight episodes through exposition, plot development, shocking twists, and the rest of it now expected a comfortable resolution.
But the jury found Peterson guilty, and he was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.
Now I must admit, I didn't see that one coming.
Despite my surprise, I am certainly not willing to claim that a miscarriage of justice took place in Durham, NC in 2003. I could not possibly pretend to understand the events surrounding the death of Kathleen Peterson, nor to judge the actions and character of Michael Peterson.
The burden of proof is on the prosecution: that is a fundamental principle of the US legal system. But there is another principle mixed up in all this. According to Plutarch, when Cicero was asked why he was better at prosecuting than defending, he replied: 'Because I prefer truth to eloquence'. Where, then, is the truth in all this?
Peterson himself cut an inscrutable figure. Nothing he said or did (or was subsequently revealed to have done) was in character. No way to get a read on him, no tells, to use the poker parlance. He wouldn't have made a good character in a film - he was just too inconsistent, too ill-defined. There was a certain blankness to his expression, even when he was convicted. For the habitual viewer of TV detective dramas, for the murder-mystery junky, there just wasn't enough to go on. The only 'truth' available to the jury in these circumstances was the truth of the movies and TV - the truth that we know a man's character by intuition; that character is destiny, despite all proof to the contrary, or absence of proof; the truth of the unexpected twist, the show-stopping finale.
I can only hope that I am never compelled to decide the fate of a fellow human being.
I just finished watching this excellent documentary series, made by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade. The eight-part series followed the trial of a certain Michael Peterson, accused of having murdered his wife in North Carolina in December 2001. The bias of the film was unmistakably on the side of the defence: most of the screentime was devoted to the defence team as they framed their strategies for the trial, and from that point of view it was a fascinating insight into the way the US legal system really works.
I've been following this series off and on for the last couple of months on BBC2. I even caught an episode (in sequence, mind you) purely by chance when I was in France. Canal + are showing the series under the name Soupçons, which strikes me as a little more...prejudicial than the English title. Oh, well.
I suggested just now that this film provided an insight into the real workings of the American legal system. Did I mean that this sort of documentary offers us something different from the courtroom drama we see in the movies and on TV? I'm not sure. Is there really any difference? Legal trials are all artifice, performance. We already knew that, of course, whether our schooling in forensics came from the orations of Cicero or from the OJ Simpson circus. But this documentary really brought out that performance element. The slow release of crucial information throughout the series kept the dramatic tension high. The trial lawyers duly played their roles with aplomb: the chief defence attorney: good-looking, softly-spoken, in control; the DA: eminently hissable, and also slightly absurd with that exaggerated Carolina accent (I still refuse to believe anyone really talks like that). The very essence of the pantomime villainess.
The production values of the film itself only served to heighten the artifice of what we were being shown. The haunting score, played over shots of desolate countryside and blood-red sunsets, or else faces, running the whole gamut of emotion from concerned to distraught. I would hesitate to accuse the director of manipulative editing, however. This is a film that follows the efforts of the defence team to get their client acquitted of murder: it doesn't claim to give a balanced view of the case. It merely presents us with...what? The facts?
A confidence that the outcome would be positive was shared by defence attorney, defendant and viewer alike. It seemed utterly inevitable that Peterson would be acquitted. The drama might as well have been scripted: after a shaky couple of episodes, the defence had produced their ace in the hole at the last minute, with due deference to the exigencies of television drama: the poker the prosecution had claimed to be the murder weapon had been found intact and unbloodied and was introduced as evidence on the final day of the trial. The closing statement of the defence consisted of a three-hour enumeration of 'reasonable doubts', any one of which would have been enough to acquit. The viewer, having followed the eight episodes through exposition, plot development, shocking twists, and the rest of it now expected a comfortable resolution.
But the jury found Peterson guilty, and he was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.
Now I must admit, I didn't see that one coming.
Despite my surprise, I am certainly not willing to claim that a miscarriage of justice took place in Durham, NC in 2003. I could not possibly pretend to understand the events surrounding the death of Kathleen Peterson, nor to judge the actions and character of Michael Peterson.
The burden of proof is on the prosecution: that is a fundamental principle of the US legal system. But there is another principle mixed up in all this. According to Plutarch, when Cicero was asked why he was better at prosecuting than defending, he replied: 'Because I prefer truth to eloquence'. Where, then, is the truth in all this?
Peterson himself cut an inscrutable figure. Nothing he said or did (or was subsequently revealed to have done) was in character. No way to get a read on him, no tells, to use the poker parlance. He wouldn't have made a good character in a film - he was just too inconsistent, too ill-defined. There was a certain blankness to his expression, even when he was convicted. For the habitual viewer of TV detective dramas, for the murder-mystery junky, there just wasn't enough to go on. The only 'truth' available to the jury in these circumstances was the truth of the movies and TV - the truth that we know a man's character by intuition; that character is destiny, despite all proof to the contrary, or absence of proof; the truth of the unexpected twist, the show-stopping finale.
I can only hope that I am never compelled to decide the fate of a fellow human being.
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