Dead Tomes

It has been a while now since I last read Homer, though he's often close in mind, and this without intentional effort. I'm always considering another reading of Homer. With Homer, as with the Holy Bible and a few other key works, distance and time between readings only further increases some natural arising within my soul that draws me inward and closer towards the essence of what these works embody. I can of course reach a point in my daily wanderings where I might admit to having lost all connection. There's no truth in that but there is an animal within that when dominant allows that kind of language to float through. The truth is these works soar down in the quietest of moments tearing from the heart the impurities and sullied accruals of daily living. I am drawn to the magisterial beauty of works that have a power to purify - it may be fleeting, and short lived in real time, it may even be imagined - we can allow that, it makes no difference. Always there is this cleansing aspect, this power-to-order that identifies them as more than books, wholly rare influences and unique. If, like Johnson you will agree books are mortal like men, these books are the Immortals. And yet, there are those who simply do not have a clue ... and there is no good reason, as I can see, for such rank idiocy. I recently came across Alessandro Baricco's translation of The Iliad. As Homerica goes I've never heard of him. I know nothing more of his achievements. What strikes me as shocking in Baricco's effort to rewrite Homer is that he has ditched the essence of Homer - the inhabitants of Olympus, the very representations of a divine society - and, doing so, created an obsequie for a society deranged with vanity and self-will. Not only is our media riddled with worms who crawl around on their bellies, jaws a-clatter declaring God to be an imaginary figure of our primitive minds, but there are hick scholars the equivalent of delinquent teenagers quite unable to value the treasures they hold. Satisfied that God has been erased from the conscience of man, even it would seem the pagan Gods, and in essence all forms of higher influence, so now it must be stripped from the literature. What hollow glories are these? Hectors religious solemnity suddenly means nothing, has no bearing or value, his whole relationship with Helen undermined. He may just as well make that wine-offering to Zeus with the blood dripping from his hands. Who cares? How are we to understand Achilles knowledge of death, his self-belief and confidence? And what value Apollo's warnings or Zeus' promises? How can we understand the sadness of Helen's great beauty without understanding her cursed fate as a victim of Aphrodite? Nor that her longing for death and deliverance are matched only by the grip of a goddess too strong for her to do anything but yield. It isn't just that a translation of this sort considerably alters the surface texture but that it bleeds the essence of the work, makes slaves of unwary readers and tells an artificial story, a lie - a real Trojan horse. Perhaps the essence of tragedy is retained but what a tragedy that there should be no Athene.