summer reads 2018

I'm reading fiction again this summer. None of it's new. This batch is also not like those other currents I'm wading in like those of Francesco Filelfo or Friar Savonarola from the later and Italian fifteenth century. Nor is it like that I had finished  in the winter. Last summer's reads were indeed fun and varied but this year the stream goes off in several other directions.

The fattest conch of fiction for me last year was Jean-Marie Blas de Robles' Where Tigers Are At Home. A modern tale of foreign-feeling Brasil, that is also at times intimately suburban, at turns scholarly, observing both the romantic idealisms of the youth and the oft-demoralized poor, as well as their overweening, colonializing local rulers. The descent into actual jungle is self-reflexively set in scenes of imminent danger: sometimes soap-opera, sometimes action-movie, and almost always left unfinished.

This drumbeat of tension is instead punctuated by the life and times of Athanasius Kircher, famous Jesuit inventor from the seventeenth century, shown living and 'adventuring' in Italy. Sounds confusing but with a dozen major characters, and usually three or four separate threads of the story leading in different directions with three to six participants each at a time, the plot doesn't really kick into gear until after a few hundred pages. The large and frequent stretches from the fictive life of Kircher told here acts almost like a chorus or commentary on the activities of the rest of the characters, these moderns, in the real and hierarchic jungles of human enterprise.

So too, this year I have picked up and then immersed myself in another place and time. But this year, instead of fishing huts or ancient mysteries and telenovella scenes set beside riverboat excursions into the Amazonian jungle, there is instead the veldt of South Africa. There are the crude mud and thatch huts of white settlers and Hottentot helpers. There are the strict orders of Dutch Compagnie judgements (or later the English Black Circuit) and the uncompromised freewielding wilds of inland trekboers. African locals are respected in James A. Michener's The Covenant but they are barely known. Depicted as fully capable and too often forced into compromising, temporarily submissive positions, rarely do they get to shine. At least they are seen and sometimes given a voice. Often they are seen searching for peace and a basic livelihood.

After research in the 1970's Michener was still yoked to the idea of tackling the great issues of his day through historical fiction. Again and again he had made a name for himself (from the 1940's) educating Americans about the rest of the world and its people and customs through his form of sprawling novel. His exploration of the history of South Africa here would be his only such trek to the big continent. But as elsewhere, Michener does it cleanly with a journalist's eye for detail, a neutral position with regard to locals, colonizers, and their hangers-on, and an omniscient narrative that also manages to be arrestingly human.

The real story being told here is of people overcoming the odds and scraping together a life out of whatever happens to be there. And if it's not there, then these people move on to find another fertile valley. For centuries, the northerners from Holland or France or eventually England, saw this huge place of southern Africa as a waystation. Never a permanent destination. That came later, in the much more recent history.

At first, enough supplies had to be lain up for the few stragglers who could not go on to either Java or back to Europe after being shipwrecked along the rocky coast. The first ones could be pious Calvinists or unbelieving mercenaries, but once here they realized they had to make do and hold on to whatever article they could in order to remind them of their now far-off home. For the Dutch family it is a bible and a brown and tan crock to make bread pudding, for a Malay or Madagascan girl it was her own voice lifted in song, and the Hugenot had his Picardy vines and sense of architectural elegance which for him were made manifest by African hands. To a mixed African who makes himself dear friend and companion, a necklace of bone or a tattered handed-down uniform becomes a talisman of faded but resolute solidarity.

To tell their stories, to watch them grow familes that cross centuries, the pivotal moments of intersection between tribes or families or individuals become epochal. The hiding of a bible or the stealing of vines, the making of a cabinet with local African wood, or the rescue of books from a shipwreck, all can forge longlasting friendships. Random encounters also instill distrust. And along the way the reader learns how poisoned arrow tips are made, or how foundations are lain, how bread pudding, babootie, or brandy becomes basic through continual practice. Meanwhile in the 1700's,  the Xhosa and other locals remain far away to the east, left 'undiscovered' though prosperous and busy.

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At another tip of Africa, in Cairo, none other than Naguib Mahfouz wrote for a local audience reflecting their own more sedentary city dwellers. Between Europe's great twentieth century wars, the great city of Egypt carried on with its own ancient ways. Long adjusted to distant control by distant rulers, the people subsisted on their own practices and beliefs much as if time had stopped. Whether in the home or in the market, the open space of public opinion or along the side streets it is that of an older voice that Mahfouz seems to speak from. Surely the new ways of the British and the new technologies did creep in on the edges. Surely the youth and the women semed more rebellious than ever. Surely the old men and soothsayers seemed less principled than ever. Or maybe not. After all, it all must be how God wills it, as ever, and in all things. The joy in reading Mahfouz for me lies in how this author makes all this so plain, open and transparent.

Innermost thoughts told with an omniscient voice, with the gentlest economy makes everything clear as day. Children that know how they should behave, squirming to get a way out. Wives and daughters, neighbors, maintaining every outward expression of propriety for honor, but inwardly crafting how to take the next set of measures required. The men doing much the same living up to the roles they choose for themselves, yet antagonized by any possible intrusions into what they see as their purview. In them I see little that's alien or dated. So familiar all Mahfouz's characters seem in both Midaq Alley and the beginning of his Cairo trilogy Palace Walk. I enjoy them quite a lot and am grateful that I stumbled on them and have been granted this opportunity to get to know them.

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Similarly but for entirely different reasons I have also picked up a couple French authors. Honore de Balzac deserves pride of place because of who he is. It was reading Piketty's Capital In The 21st Century that got me thinking about Balzac. Famed for his Humanitie Comedie he wrote prolificly about the many faces and customs across the breadth of French culture at a time when they were undergoing numerous changes from within. There are a number of collections of many short works I want to take in during the tour.

Earlier this year Eugenie Grandet managed to come to the top of the reading pile. She shows it's not always fun to be filthy rich, and her life screams of the interminable strictures of the life lived under the command of misers. She's not allowed options from the beginning which precludes from knowing anything about the world at large until first love appears before her. Stark lessons on what can and should be valued are set beside terrible choices based on lucky and unlucky circumstance, yet Balzac still finds a way to form a kind of almost acceptable justice by the end. She's heroic, ever-suffering and she saves her cousin - but she won't get to marry him. This is her dilemma. But also it is her stubbornness essentially that gets her enough of what's acceptable to her by tale's end.

The collection known in English as Droll Stories also was found at the corner bookshop. I'm nearly a third of the way through that. It was written according to Balzac as an homage to Francois Rabelais from the sixteenth century. There are ribaldic tales, and some lists of ridiculous nature, but mostly the stories revolve slowly about infidelity, so far.  Apparently he got a name for doing these in the 1830's.  I look here to get a feel for his early writing style in constructing narrative. Later as well there are the other numerous collections from Balzac that I will get to. I've noticed already that he shows his characters taking a keen interest in monetary conditions.
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For still more comparison I randomly acquired several Georges Simenon stories of detective Monsieur Maigret and so these will alternate with the Balzac as they all seem to run 150 pages or so at a time. This chief Supoerintendent detective runs all over France (like Balzac's settings will), but in the 20th century, also noting carefully his set of changes and remainders. I gather that some of the traits of Monsieur Maigret were models for the later TV character Colombo played adorably by Peter Falk in the US 1970's. Simenon's tales of Maigret are really easy reads but I like this author's sense of detail and the 20th century wrestle with psychological/emotional reveals. By reading these non-related French fiction authors from different periods, I hope to get some insight into their idea at least of what it is to be French. And so, how it used to be. Lucky for me there are so many of these tales and they can be picked up and plowed through in such quick and smooth doses. On a side note, I still don't like Gauloises and it's hard to find Cleopatra's here.

Polyneices and Jocasta Speak On Exile in Euripides' Phoenissae, ii

Mother Jocasta asks son Polyneikes after a long absence what she wants to learn first about his life. What does he say about exile? Is it such a bad thing? Here is Francesco Filelfo's interpretation of this (and here is more context for Filelfo's project), the dialogue in Filelfo's Latin text of this part of his excerpt from Euripides. This is followed by the last two lines of the section from Euripides, with barest translation.

Joc. Tandem rogo te scire quod primum velim: quid exilium ais, nate? Num magnum malum?
Pol. Quammaximum, maiusque re quam oris sono.
Joc. Quonam modo? Quae est exulibus acerbitas?
Pol. Quo durius nihil est, oportet exulem demittat ipse se, nec audeat loqui.
Joc. Servile puto nequire quod sentis loqui.
Pol. Ineptiasque principum ferat, est opus.
Joc. Et hoc grave est, aliorum ut ullus particeps amentiae fiat.
Pol. Lucrique gratia servire cogitur.
Joc. Sed, ut dici solet, spes exules pascunt.
Pol. At hae pulchris quidem luminibus aspiciunt, nimis at amant moras.

αἱ δ᾽ ἐλπίδες βόσκουσι φυγάδας, ὡς λόγος.
But hopes nourish exiles, so it's said.
καλοῖς βλέπουσαί γ᾽ ὄμμασιν, μέλλουσι δέ.

In the text from Filelfo, Jocasta says, "ut dici solet", - as it is said, - [that] "spes exules pascunt"- hope nourishes exiles.
And Polyneikes replies, 'looking on these things of beauty, with eyes, but loving too much delays'.

Here the idea has been stretched a bit. As prior in that section, Filelfo closely follows the Greek of Euripides, but this last line in Filelfo introduces the subtly different idea that instead, hope inclines us to a more ambiguous future,  'loving delays' rather than more certain, expected, or intended outcomes.

That is not found in Euripides' Greek. First, because hope, 'spes' in Latin, is a feminine noun, the next line in Polyneikes reply, in Filelfo, makes 'these things' - "hae pulchris" -  in reference to hope's products also feminine. These 'things of hope' which 'see with eyes, lights', may also simply be with looks or glances. They may also be the exiles themselves that see.

These things for Euripides, indeed, what see the beautiful things, are the eyes, and as intended. This line has an aphoristic quality, like an idea that is plain for anyone. For Filelfo however, hopes long after delays, not more directly, 'as they play out' or, 'as intended' in Euripides. But, the Greeks had a more permanent sense of fate, the 'will of the gods' that goes along well with the notion of 'what was intended'.

The equation seems the same in both at first. The hope nourishes exiles who sees beauty with eyes that see. But in Euripides that's as it should be, and with Filelfo, the delays are too much. The difference in sense, seems to be between hopes as intended - 'μέλλουσι δέ', and, hopes delayed - how Filelfo has Jocasta answer in a question about the god's vanity with 'longa'.

This subtle difference continues in comparing Filelfo with Euripides through this tight, back-and-forth dialogue between mother and son. But the expected, intended certainy which lies in the greek expression rather than the latin, as Filelfo altered it (for his character of Palla Strozzi and) for his fifteenth-century Italian audience, also leads to more further, and different, constructions. My wooden barest translations barely scratch the surface. Can you do better?

Joc. Neque longa vanas indicat dies eas?
οὐδ᾽ ὁ χρόνος αὐτὰς διεσάφησ᾽ οὔσας κενάς;

Doesn't time show these godly things as being empty?

Pol. Habent voluptatem malorum quampiam.
ἔχουσιν Ἀφροδίτην τιν᾽ ἡδεῖαν κακῶν.
They do keep at enjoying any delight badly.

Joc. Verum unde quaerebus cibum ante nuptias?
πόθεν δ᾽ ἐβόσκου, πρὶν γάμοις εὑρεῖν βίον;
And how did you prosper before you found life with marriage?

Pol. Modum diurnum habui, modo carui miser.
ποτὲ μὲν ἐπ᾽ ἦμαρ εἶχον, εἶτ᾽ οὐκ εἶχον ἄν.
I kept a daily practice,  and also if I might not keep it.

Joc. At patris amici et hospites nil proderant?
φίλοι δὲ πατρὸς καὶ ξένοι σ᾽ οὐκ ὠφέλουν;
But friends and guests of your father, didn't they help you?

Pol. Utere secundia. Nullum amicum miser habet.
εὖ πρᾶσσε: τὰ φίλων δ᾽ οὐδέν, ἤν τι δυστυχῇς.
Good on occasion: but not the things from friends, that was an unlucky thing.

Joc. Nec magnitudo sustulit generis boni?
οὐδ᾽ ηὑγένειά σ᾽ ἦρεν εἰς ὕψος μέγαν;

Pol. Malum est egere. Me genus aluit nihil.
κακὸν τὸ μὴ ἔχειν: τὸ γένος οὐκ ἔβοσκέ με.

Joc. Patria, ut videtur, est homini amicissimum?
ἡ πατρίς, ὡς ἔοικε, φίλτατον βροτοῖς.

Pol. Amicum ut est patria, loqui nequeam quidem.
οὐδ᾽ ὀνομάσαι δύναι᾽ ἂν ὡς ἐστὶν φίλον.

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from Filelfo, Francesco: On Exile,  Edited by Jeroen de Keyser and translated by W. Scott Blanchard, for The I Tatti Renaissance Library (ITRI); by The President and Fellows of Harvard College, USA 2013

and at the Tufts University site