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Classics - Blog Posts
Also similar to this, but does anyone have any reading recs on isolation, loneliness and paranoia that stems from it? Anything similar to how isolation breeds a rather burdening imagination, paranoia, further distance. Fiction, non fiction, articles, essays, poems; I'll take anything
I was listening to the audiobook of The Secret History and realised something: Lafourge says that Richard would be isolated from everyone from the campus once he joins Julian's class, which Richard dismisses. Despite him going to college parties and being acquaintances with Judy, he truly has no one but the classics group. This becomes incredibly evident in the winter he spends in Hampden, having no one to go to for shelter—the result of him choosing to be with the greek class. His isolation takes form of the cold he endured during that time because there is no one he can go to. In the end, it is Henry who saves him, pulling him back into the caverns of the group, and his alienation.
I was listening to the audiobook of The Secret History and realised something: Lafourge says that Richard would be isolated from everyone from the campus once he joins Julian's class, which Richard dismisses. Despite him going to college parties and being acquaintances with Judy, he truly has no one but the classics group. This becomes incredibly evident in the winter he spends in Hampden, having no one to go to for shelter—the result of him choosing to be with the greek class. His isolation takes form of the cold he endured during that time because there is no one he can go to. In the end, it is Henry who saves him, pulling him back into the caverns of the group, and his alienation.
Classic novels from POC authors
The Analects, Confucius- a collection of his quotes, documented by his pupils shortly after his death.
Theologus Autodidactus, Ibn Al-Nafis- one of the first Arabic novels and considered an early example of sci-fi and a coming of age story
Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, Pu Songling- a collection of classical Chinese stories
The Heart of Hyacinth, Onoto Watanna- coming of age story about a Eurasian child raised by white parents
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
The Woman in the Dunes, Kōbō Abe- themes of myths and suspense wrapped into an existential novel
The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran- collection of poetic essays
Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup- memoir of a black man sold into slavery in America
Contending Forces, Pauline Hopkins- focuses on African American families in American society, post Civil War
Iola Leroy, Frances Harper- one of the first novels published by an African-American woman
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
On Love and Barley, Bashō Matsuo-
The Home and the World, Rabindranath Tagore- a love story mixed in with a political awakening
American Indian Stories, Zitkala-Sa-legends and tales from the authors life based on her childhood and the community
A Dark Night’s Passing, Naoya Shiga- a young mans trial through disturbing experiences
Cane, Jean Toomer- fiction based of black life in Harlem
Where There’s Love, There’s Hate, Silvina Ocampo and Adolfo Casares
In other words, Cassandra is not just a translator, she is also an embodiment of the very function of translation: her prophetic speech often appears to be suspended between languages, like Benjamin's translator who operates in the realm of 'pure language' that is beyond any single linguistic code. Cassandra takes and reformulates and incomprehensible message from the future and becomes incomprehensible in the process, (re)producing a message in such a way that it demands a second, or third or fourth translation. Sometimes she descends from a trance-like state of prophecy to initiate the next link in the chain of interpretations herself, reframing her own message in more prosaic language, only to find that this speech too is received with confusion. Her utterance is always both a target and source text at the same time. The proliferation of translation acts within her single body evokes a kind of never-ending self-translation; like the self-translator, Cassandra suffers a splitting of the self, one part of which is committed to the spirit of the original composition, while the other struggles to reframe it for a new audience that can never grasp the meaning of the original.
Emily Pillinger, Cassandra and the Poetics of Prophecy in Greek and Latin Literature
AND IF we’re talking about Ovid’s take on the Persephone myth anyway, and the other story Ovid inserted, the comparison between the boy being turned into a lizard for laughing at Demeter and the Demophon myth are so different in every single aspect that I cannot fathom what the use of the second one is to the Persephone myth, only to Ovid’s overall themes. While Demophon is a temporary stand-in for Persephone and perhaps even a tool Demeter uses to one-up her brothers, and is a cultic display of her matronly side as a goddess, the lizard tale just…provides comedy? Characterizes her as petty or fickle? It really is the most derailing story line in this part of the text, as Demeter is searching before it and after it. It only provides the mandatory metamorphosis, but so does Cyane? And the fun part is that the episode reflects the Homeric hymn in that Demeter is received as a guest and receives a specific type of food tied to her role as goddess of the grain, but here it has absolutely no payoff, nor any ambiguity to make us guess at more. It just…is.
Thinking about how, to let the myth of Persephone fit the themes of the Metamorphoses, Ovid had to insert two rather unknown/unpopular side stories about a river nymph turning into water/liquid in her own stream, and a nymph giving Demeter the news, and how this affects the myth
Like for one the Metamorphoses in essence is caught up with the gods’ violence against lesser beings, mostly nymphs, women and mortals in general, and deals with the utter helplessness and loss of control these beings experience when they are transformed, as punishment or to escape a worse fate or simply because their suffering becomes too great for any mortal to bear. And here’s Persephone, a goddess and a rather major one, who by all means experiences the same type and amount of suffering. Ovid literally calls her a goddess on par with the other gods, and reasons this is why the six-month rule comes about. Where do you take that myth? The outcome is set in stone, her cyclical seasons-bound fate is so integral to the ancient cosmos, and yet it falls flat in a story like the metamorphoses, where the Olympian gods are usually on the other side of the fence. But here we have these two nymphs, who both experienced the violence done to Persephone and either give it a voice or dissolve into nothing, have their body and being entirely taken away from them.
So I really think Cyane and Arethusa are almost stand-ins for Persephone, where the the former gets the metamorphosis that symbolizes the pain and suffering that the abduction causes, as she literally dissolves into tears and cannot speak anymore when she manifests again, and Arethusa’s story of her own nearly successful abduction and subsequent exile/displacement give us Persephone’s side of the story, but in a less repetitive way than in the Homeric hymn.
“Medea is very much concerned with the problem of woman’s place in human society […] Euripides is concerned in this play not with progress or reform but (as in the Hippolytus and the Bacchae) with the eruption in tragic violence of forces in human nature which have been repressed and scorned, which in their long-delayed breakout exact a monstrous revenge. The Medea is not about woman’s rights; it is about woman’s wrongs, those done to her and by her.”
— Knox, B. (1979). The Medea of Euripides, from Word and action: essays on the ancient theater. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp.295-322.
“The story of Hades and Persephone, frequently retold and referenced, became a motif for marrying death… In addition, wedding and funeral rites, in which women played a crucial role, had many similarities. The bride and corpse were washed, dressed, anointed, and either veiled (bride) or shrouded (corpse). Both journeyed to a new home, led by a procession of family and friends carrying torches, with song and dance, blessings, gifts, and a feast. Antigone makes those connections explicit in marrying Antigone to death in her last scene instead of to Kreon’s son, her betrothed.”
— Diane J. Rayor, excerpt from the “Introduction” to Antigone
